The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (30 page)

‘Are you saying that the duck fat may be inside the carboard valise?'

‘It's in the shed. Must be there. Just be a moment.'

‘The duck fat or the cardboard valise?'

‘I wish you'd stop interrupting me.'

I place the fat in a small, heavy saucepan, add a spoonful of water and set the pan over a low flame on the gas ring that Gilda keeps on top of the Aga. Slowly and without stirring, the fat releases its oil until only crisp golden bits of it are left floating about in the rendered fat. I put the pan aside while I chop half a dozen peeled shallots with a few thick slices of lean pancetta to a coarse dice. I scrape the shallot/pancetta mixture into a large, heavy sauté pan – Gilda's one and only, in which she cooks everything she doesn't roast in the hearth. I add the rendered duck fat, the
ciccioli
– the crisp bits – and, still over a low flame, stir the mass about until the shallots go transparent and the pancetta is nicely coloured. I scrape the mass into a deep oval terracotta dish and set it aside while I get back to the sauté pan in which a bare film of fat remains. I heat the pan over a medium-low flame and slip in the dried, very well dried magret, skin side down. I turn up the flame to seal the skin, checking it after five minutes or so, waiting patiently for it to take on a deep mahogony colour. The wild thyme has perfumed the fat, the fat has perfumed the shallots and, already, they've raised up the heady, hot moist air of a good kitchen. I turn the magret, gild the flesh side to that same deep colour, then slip the breasts into the terracotta dish with the aromatics.

Gilda peers over my shoulder, resumes her pacing, her talking. ‘The aunt willed her legacy to this man, a grandnephew, her sister's grandson, a third or fourth cousin to me, he and I being all that remained of her kin. A monthly trust and all her worldly goods she'd left to the nephew. And me she left to him as well. There was a great deal of money, a great deal it must have seemed to the nephew who was poor but, with hindsight, I suppose it was a pittance. In the notarised letter to him from the aunt's attorneys, there was a caveat: the trust and the goods would be released to him only after he'd taken me from Sant' Eufemia, brought me to live with him, his wife and his two children. There would be legal controls, State visits from time to time to ensure my proper integration into his family. I was his
quid pro quo
, measure for measure.

‘Docile as a good convent girl must always be, I carried the valise, walked three paces behind the cousin through the streets of Rome to a waiting bus in the Largo Argentina. Watching our approach from the windows were grappa-soused farmers bound back to the hills after the morning market in Campo dei Fiori. I noticed the farmers watching. Me in my uniform, my perfect braids, my tiny gloves. I wore a straw hat. I was twelve, halfway to thirteen. The cousin was called Giulio. Giulio told me that he was twenty-five. He told me nothing more. During the hour it wanted for the bus to arrive at his village, he stayed silent. He looked at me, though, appraising my fancy convent clothes. I think my quietness he took to be
compiacenza
, complacency. As I'd learned to do during the priests' punishments, I shifted my gaze to the middle ground. And then to the far side of the window.

‘A kilometre or so beyond the village, somewhere on a yellow-dust road slashed through a sprawl of wheat fields, the bus stopped. Giulio and I descended the bus across the road from a low stone building, oilcloth curtains flapping on glass-less windows. We waited for the bus to pass. How hot it was. How desolate. Where is his family? Who is here to welcome us?

‘More a hut than a house, Giulio's home is a single room. Sitting upon shards of post-war linoleum laid over packed earth were various wooden chairs, a table, two beds, a stove. The hearth was large and deep. A
supalco
, a raised platform, ran above half the room, a flight of stairs, steep as a ladder, leading to it.

‘The cousin's wife was twenty-two and heavy with child. Isolda. His wife was called Isolda. They had two little daughters, Livia and Dafne, aged four and two. As though I had just been dispatched from an agency – still in hat and gloves, my valise in hand – Isolda informed me of the ways and means of the household, outlined my tasks: to tend the children while she and Giulio worked sun-up to last light in the fields, to prepare their evening meal, see to the washing and the general order of things in the house. Isolda told me they were subsistence farmers, as were most of the families who lived in the area. They worked a small parcel of rented land and sold the yield to pay the monthly land and house tarrifs. What remained in either produce or funds fed them. Having gleaned some gist of the discourse about the transfer of funds and goods between the nun and my cousin, I – brightly, consolingly – told Isolda that surely the old aunt's legacy will make life easier for them now. Arms embracing the roundness of her belly, rocking to and fro as though in pain, a kind of disdain flashing in her eyes, Isolda conceded only to say: “There are two goats, chickens and, when we can afford to feed it, there might be a pig.”

‘The first thing I did was to take off my hat and place it on the older girl's head. Livia. I crouched then to the littler one, to Dafne, pulled off my gloves and urged her baby hands into them. Dafne's lower lip jutted, the tiny gloved fists kneaded her eyes. She wept and it wasn't until later that I understood she'd been weeping for joy. Having silently witnessed this little pageant, Isolda, with a tilt of her chin, sent me up the stairs to the space under the eaves. Once a dovecote, this is where she'd meant me to sleep. The pigeons long gone, only the silver-white sheen of two centuries of their shit remained, embellishing the parched beams. There was no bed.

‘I remember very little about those first days except the silence. Giulio and Isolda barely spoke to one another, less to me and almost never to the little girls. I think it must have been the second night I was there that the children, dragging behind them the rags that served as their blankets, climbed the stairs to me. The next day, maybe it was even the same night, I folded the thin wool-stuffed pallet that was the little girls' mattress, pulled it up the stairs. We three never slept apart from that night.

Isolda and Giulio would bring home a portion of whatever they'd been harvesting on a given day and that would compose the family's supper. In summer we ate watermelon. Evening after evening, there was watermelon, bread and wine. When they harvested tomatoes or green beans or artichokes, these would be on the table. In late September Giulio began arriving with some great round tough-skinned squash in a sack, dumping it, wordlessly, onto the oilclothed table, and I would slice and roast it over the embers with a few drops of oil. Sea salt, big crystals of it. Always wine and bread. We managed.

‘A few pieces at a time, the contents of the apartment in Rome, the old aunt's
alta borghese
furnishings, were transported to the farmhouse in the neighbours' trucks where earlier in the day had been piled sacks of potatoes, cabbages, wire cages of chickens, hutches of rabbits to sell in Campo dei Fiori, each load further transforming the stone hut on the yellow-dust road into a shambled revisiting of the aunt's
salone
. Turkey rugs were laid over the linoleum and the packed-earth floor, sofas and chairs – maroon and green – and a walnut Lombardy bedstead were stacked against the walls. Wooden fruit crates packed with china. Tipped against a painting from the Macchiaioli school in a forty-centimetre gilt frame was a chandelier, its crystals tinkling as Isolda swiped it with her skirt every time she walked past it. Nothing was arranged in a way that it could be sat or lain or even looked upon; nor, as far as I knew, did the cousins ever try to sell off any of the goods. Half treasure trove, half hovel, that old stone house.

‘In the last of the truckloads from Rome sat the bed that was mine at the aunt's. Iron, painted white. I dismantled it, hauled the pieces up the stairs to the dovecote, used the head and foot as clothes' lines, the feather mattress to make a better bed for Livia, Dafne and me. It was months later when the old aunt's best gift to me was delivered to the farmhouse.

‘According to the aunt's instructions, her attorneys arranged for a trunk to be sent from Rome by train to the village and then, by cart, to the farmhouse. A grand trunk it was or so it must have seemed to the farmers who watched its progress from the station through the village and along the yellow dust road. Red leather banded in brass, green silk tassles hanging from its handles, it could only be the convent girl's dowry, the farmers agreed. Faces scrubbed raw, Sunday shirts boiled white, widowers, boys who would be men, men too poor to afford a wife, they queued at the cousins' door to beg my twelve-year-old hand. Guilio drank wine with the men, sent them back from whence they'd come, over the old yellow road.

‘As it turned out, inside the grand red trunk there
was
a kind of dowry, my convent girl's estate, my solace, all that remained of my heritage: an oval red and silver
amaretti
tin of grand dimensions, the sort that would be displayed in the window of a fancy caffé, its silk-lined depths crammed with
oubliettes
, symbols, letters, photos, music scores, libretti. Under the tin were two black dresses wrapped in tissue paper and one blue velvet one, Magdalena's wedding dress. Black satin shoes with velvet ribbons to tie about the ankle, various of Magdalena's nightdresses and frocks, a grey squirrel pelisse still scented in Cabochard, so familiar I'd thought it was the smell of my mother's skin. There were twelve leather-bound books: Manzoni, Verga, Calvino, Moravia … It was Giulio who carried the red trunk up to the space under the eaves, brushed the brass bands with the sleeve of his shirt. He stood back from it, almost smiling.

It was under the eaves where I read more often than I slept, where I sat sifting through Magdalena's things, the Cabochard-scented trove from which I might compose a life. Slipping into her dresses, winding the ribbons of her shoes about my ankles, draping the squirrel pelisse over one shoulder, I'd mince up and down the room as though it were the via Veneto. As though I was Magdalena. I know it wasn't a real ‘dowry' in the pretty red trunk but I don't know how I would have fared without it.

‘I suppose many childhoods are made of mischance and, at some point, a measure of humiliation. As was mine. What I mean is that I was not unprepared to live the tempered form of slavery into which I was established in the cousins' household. Then it was an almost universal role for older children in poor families. The cousins' abuse of me was benign enough, akin to how they parented their own daughters. Less cruel than they were diffident, they lived in the centre of themselves, in a fog of fatigue and hunger and what seemed their own private lust. Perhaps this indolence was, itself, a kind of cruelty.'

As though she is considering the potential cruelty of indolence, Gilda stays quiet, directs her beyond-the-window-pane gaze at me. I see that she is tired. ‘The Aga is taking a long time to heat, Gilda. We need it to reach one hundred and eighty,' I tell her.

I uncork a bottle of dubious white, unlabelled, its nose musty, its colour a turbulent yellow. I taste it, recork it, go to fetch the bottle I'd brought for us to drink later on. Trying to retrieve her from the indolence-cruelty question, I say, ‘If you ever cook this again, best to use classic sauvignon blanc: chalk, stone, new grass, distinct cat pee aromas.'

She laughs but I tell her it's true. I add about a third of the bottle to the casserole, just enough to float the breasts without drowning them; I place a piece of oven parchment directly over them, cover with a tight-fitting lid and place the casserole over a medium flame only until the wine begins to shimmer. The Aga still twenty degrees too cool, short of 180C, I put the casserole in anyway, leave it to braise.

‘At forty-minute intervals, dose the duck with additional wine, a quarter cup or less, each time turning the breasts to bathe them well in the wine and the rendered juices. Shall I write that down?'

‘No. Forty-minute intervals, a little more cat pee.
Ho capito
. I've understood.'

Wanting the person and the dish to succeed, I cannot help but become mildly pedantic if I'm trying to talk someone through a recipe. Hands on hips and with a bit more volume, I proceed: ‘Depending upon the age and quality of the duck, it will want three dosings and turnings until the flesh becomes velvety and falls to pieces with the slightest touch of a fork. Remove the casserole from the oven and allow the mass to thoroughly cool, uncovered. Then cover the casserole with plastic wrap and then with its lid. Transfer to the fridge for four to six hours or overnight. In your case, to the shed.'

‘
Jesumaria
, if I'd known how tortuous it would be just to cook a duck I would never …

‘If you think about it, nothing tortuous at all.
Long
, as I told you in the beginning, but very little
active
time. Mostly the beast rests in the shed or in the oven.'

•

‘Claudio was born in October, late in October. Having come back early from the fields, Isolda stayed prone on her bed all the afternoon, her silence interrupted every now and then by a brutal moan. The little girls hovered, fretted. The tea I set to her lips she waved away. “
Fuori qui
. Get out of here.” With the
levatrice
, the midwife, and another woman in tow, by the time Giulio arrived it was dark and Isolda's moans had become screeches from hell. Up under the eaves Livia trembled and keened and Dafne bent over the red trunk, searching for the little gloves, which had, by then, become the magic balm for her two-year-old's heartbreaks. I tried to help her but she pushed me aside, knowing already that she must manage the hardest things by herself. Finding the gloves, Dafne sat next to me on the feather bed, finally allowing herself to weep, gloved hands crossed in her lap.