The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (33 page)

‘Two lengths of rope I fastened to my belt, the other ends of the ropes I tied into loops to slip over each girl's wrist, thus leaving my own hands free to carry two cardboard valises packed with the children's clothes and my own wreckage. I unwrapped Claudio, slung a large cloth purse across my chest, retied the baby. I banked the fire, and closed the door.

‘Small knots of bathhouse women waited along the edge of the yellow dust road and, as our little party reached them, they joined in, walking in a body to the village where the autobus would stop. The women sang, wept, stopped to press kisses upon the children, to stuff the girls' pockets with pistachios. In a woven basket that Tullia slipped over Livia's free arm, there were thick cuts of Genzano bread, a paper-wrapped package of mortadella, a heft of pecorino, biscotti filled with marzipan. The autobus would deliver us to Stazioni Termini in Rome from whence we would ride the train to Orvieto.

•

‘I saw her on the platform, Giorgia. Her own two boys hanging on her skirt, the first thing she said to me was, “
Jesumaria
, you're so tiny, so blonde. I'd been expecting Magda. All this while I'd been imagining Magda. Welcome home, darling Gilda. And who would be these little beauties?”

‘Slipping her wrist from the loop of rope tied about my waist and likewise freeing Dafne, Livia reached out for Giorgia's hand while, Dafne, leaving no doubt of her dominance, flicked her fingers, palms inward, at Giorgia's five-year-old twins. Taking the little boys' hands, Dafne settled herself between them, swung their arms high, pulled them along in a triumphant march. While holding tight to Livia, Giorgia nuzzled Claudio, took my arm and, in tight formation, we seven walked out of the station. Though none of us could know it then, save Giorgia, we were already a family.

‘Not as forlorn creatures but as cherished kin, Giorgia embraced us. No less did her husband. You know Flavio. Had I written horrid things about the conditions of our life with Isolda and Giulio? No. What sentiments I'd let fall between the lines of my letter which Giorgia was able to interpret, I'm not certain. I'd asked if the children and I could stay with them until I could find us a place, until I could find work. I'd told her that I had funds, never mentioning a sum. What with my savings plus the envelope thick with lire that I'd found in the trunk, my name written on it in the old aunt's shaky hand, I'd thought I was flush. Significant enough back then, today all those beautiful lire notes the size of a dinner napkin would total thirty euros.

‘Giorgia and Flavio baked bread for a living. Situated on the ground level of a narrow three-storey
palazzo
off Piazza della Repubblica, their
forno
perfumed the
vicolo
, the steamy frangrance of it reaching into the marketplace, and I wanted to sleep on its flour-dusted floor. I remember thinking that. They lived upstairs and, above, in the attic, a seamstress had her atelier. I don't think she ever paid rent but traded mending and sewing for Giorgia and her sons and then for us. They lived well, if hand to mouth.

‘“Do you need help in the bakery? May I put up a sign offering myself as a washerwoman? There are so many shops that surely I can find …”

‘“It's the school you'll be off to find,
amore mio,”
Giorgia said. “Two years you've been away from the nuns, time to catch up.”

‘“But the little ones …”

‘“Soon enough the twins and Livia will also go to school and then I'll have Dafne and Claudio all to myself; though I expect Dafne will soon enough be running the bakery if not the neighbourhood.”

‘Rules, chores, manners, expectations. New bread, a laden table, baths and fresh towels, embroidered linens and goose-down quilts, soap and toothbrushes and doctors' visits and never a word from Isolda, from Giulio. Livia asked me once if her parents were coming to live with Giorgia as well. Before I could respond, Dafne, her black eyes wide and round, “If they do, they'll have to sleep on the floor.”

‘Even amidst a paradise, old habits die hard. I suppose I found it difficult to trust that my fortune would last. Someone would come to take us back to the farm or me back to the convent, and the children, who knows where? I began to hoard bits and pieces from the table, mostly bread, cheese, sometimes a few potatoes from the sack in the pantry. I took candles, soap, bars of chocolate. Strolling the markets with Miranda and Giorgia, I would long for an hour's plundering with Tullia. Such richness there. Soon enough Giorgia sent me to shop on my own and it was then, that first Saturday in the markets by myself, when I stole the peaches.

‘Theirs was the most beautiful table in the market, the one belonging to Iacovo's father and his uncles. Peaches piled in pyramids and rolling out of baskets and strewn across a length of red brocade, scenes awaiting an artist. I would approach the
banco
, step away, gaze at it from afar, put myself in the queue only to step away when my turn came. Giorgia's list did not include peaches. And then I saw my chance. The three men who'd been selling motioned to a young boy. The men went off toward the caffé, leaving the boy in charge. I waited for other shoppers and when the boy was serving them I struck: three peaches on a branch. Just as Tullia had taught me to do, I smiled, kept my eyes on the the people around me, even spoke a word or two to no one in particular, never looking down, letting my hands do their work. Into my sack. Three heavy peaches on a floppy, leafy branch. Wandering slowly away, looking this way and that, not a care in the world and then I heard someone calling, “
Signorina, signorina, aspettami, ti prego
. Wait for me, wait, please.”

‘I turned to see it was the young boy shouting, running toward me. Too mortified to notice the newspaper-wrapped parcel he carried, too mortified to notice that he was smiling, I stayed where I stood. “
Per voi, signorina
. Queste sono i più belle. For you, miss. These are the most beautiful. Posso? May I?” he asked, opening my sack, taking out the branch, placing the parcel inside, then replacing the branch on top. “There, now we're in good order.
Buongiorno, signorina. Buongiorno. A presto
.”

•

On the next Thursday Night, Gilda Aida Mimi-Violetta Onofrio wore Magdalena's necklace, a triple string of baroque pearls clasped in the hollow of her throat with an unpolished ruby. On the Thursday after that, she left the pearls behind but wore the blue velvet dress that she'd worn before only on a Christmas. On the last Thursday Night of that November, Gilda wore the pearls and the blue velvet dress. There was about Iacovo on that same Thursday Night the unmistakeable pungency of cloves.

•

Early in December Gilda, Ninuccia, Paolina, Miranda and I meet to plan the supper for the Thursday before Christmas. There would be no other Thursday Night Suppers in December before that one, honouring a traditional, seasonal hiatus. Rather than meeting at the rustico, Gilda – surprising us all – suggested that we gather at her place. Usually at these planning sessions one brings along some little morsel to share. Gilda said we shouldn't.

When we arrive at one o'clock she leads us to the kitchen end, the windowless part of the room where candles are lit, the table set with branches of mistletoe thick as a wrist, paper plates, cups, napkins, these last raising a snuffle from Ninuccia. We talk about the December supper, argue, compromise, drink the red wine, which Gilda tells us is Iacovo's own. There is no sign of food. Still snuffling, Ninuccia asks if she might stir the white embers of the fire. ‘At least we can be warm if not fed.'

‘Not just yet. Not until the potatoes are cooked,' Gilda says. Ninuccia brightens. From the wall shelf Gilda retrieves a dish of grey sea salt and one of dried wild fennel flowers. Ninuccia pours more wine all around. ‘I'll just be a moment,' Gilda says.

Bending into the hearth, Gilda digs in the embers to uncover a chestnut pan of potatoes the size of plump grapes, fifty or sixty of them, their skins bronze, oil-shined. Carrying the pan to the table, Gilda walks it around, helping to scoop ten or twelve of the little things onto each plate … We know what to do with the salt and the fennel. We eat the potatoes out of hand, popping them whole, scorching fingers and mouths. No further snuffling from Ninuccia.

‘I'll just be a moment,' Gilda says again and we sit like children waiting for a birthday cake, watching her excavate deeper into the embers for the second pan. She repeats the ceremony of serving them.

Sated and a little ‘in our cups', the others say
buona sera
and go off together in Ninuccia's truck. I laugh when I realise how foolish I sound as I ask Gilda if I can help her with the washing up. We throw the paper things into the hearth, sit in our usual positions for a moment before I, too, prepare to leave.

Save to say that we were drinking his wine, Gilda – to the dismay of the others who'd been hoping for a Christmas engagement, some sort of open recognition of a romance – never spoke of Iacovo. Tempted to ask her about him, I don't. I find my shawl. Then Gilda says, ‘It's twilight out there, almost the shortest day of the year. Let's walk, just for a few minutes.'

We light one another's cigars, link arms, head a few metres down the creek road toward the pine woods. Withered leaves twisting in a low-slung breeze make a taffeta rustle under our boots. We fold down a patch of high grasses near the creek and sit. The mist rises pink and wet like smoke from just-crushed grapes seething in the tubs, silvering the weeds all around us and the pines and the ancient oak leaning across from the far side of the water. Nodding at the oak, Gilda says, ‘In its hollow, that's where the mistletoe grows. Has for centuries. It's because of the oak and the mistletoe that Miranda calls me druid. Oak woods were their sanctuaries, mistletoe sacred, a curative. Magical.'

She turns to look at me, smiling, and I tell her, ‘How love has changed you …'

‘
Pian, piano
, Chou. Slowly. Whatever you're seeing or sensing in me, let's not give it up to something fickle as
love
. Iacovo the Brave has not awakened the aging druid to eternal bliss but to a lesser aloneness. More, he's chinked away at my arrogance.'

‘You, arrogant?'

‘My feeling wronged, as Miranda calls it, has bred a kind of arrogance in me, which I hide behind timidity.
Poor little Gilda
. An effective device, generally compelling though not upon Iacovo. Nor has it been upon you, I understand that now.'

‘Now? Effective as it might often be, your masquerade has never convinced me. This feeling
wronged
, it's a bygone thing by now, long past due for repeal.'

‘Time heals all wounds?'

‘With our permission. Do you think about her?'

‘Her?'

‘Your mother.'

‘Do I
think
about her? I'm obsessed by her.'

‘No, not about your mother in relation to you or to what she did and didn't do for you. Just her. Magdalena the woman. Before you, after you. Do you think about
her?
'

‘I hardly remember her.'

‘Could you hazard empathy? Can you even begin to see her and the other absent culprits of your life with any sort of form other than the one you've already drawn of them? Having lived with Isolda and Giulio, having seen another kind of abandonment, one which must have been more hideous than the sort Magdalena visited upon you, can you not muster some generosity, some reprieve? I would have thought your own injury would have dissolved in your sympathy for Livia and Dafne, for Claudio.'

‘It did. For years it distracted me. The rasp was always there but, like the bathhouse women, I had other things to occupy me. And now I have less.'

‘More time for angst.'

‘What do I do with my string of culprits? Magdalena, Pepucci, the aunt, the nuns, the priests, the cousins.'

‘
A string of culprits …
I guess you could cut the string, let the culprits fall away. Beads of a broken necklace, bouncing, rolling, scattering. All of them lost.'

‘Wouldst it could be so simple.'

‘Not simple.'

‘And then? What comes next? Some piercing grief for those I accused? Do I line them all up in my mind, brushed and combed, smelling of rosewater, my censure having taken on a tinge of affectionate grace?'

‘Maybe for Magdalena.'

‘Never for the priests, all of whom I hope have long ago suffocated themselves on their own lasciviousness.'

‘Never for the priests.'

‘Priests, culprits, beads, broken strings, I'm still lost, Chou. I live in a half-painted picture, always looking for myself but …'

‘Paint
yourself
in it, Gilda. Mist the edges if you must. Draw and erase and redraw until your likeness suits you. You won't be any less real than the rest of us.'

‘Is that what you did?'

‘Do. Still drawing and erasing.'

‘Do you remember when Miranda asked me:
Who would you be as a mother
? It haunted me, that question. I tried a thousand times to imagine myself a mother and, harder still, to imagine how my child would perceive me. I couldn't do it. Not honestly. Not wholly. I couldn't get a single thorn to stick to my self-portrait as a mother. I began painting myself a Madonna, frantically scrubbing out any notion of a flaw, just as another one would appear. The exercise was a firebolt: as sure as I would pass on my blood and bones would I pass on my weaknesses, adding mine to those I'd assigned to Magdalena. Families bequeath ancestral pain. I began to laugh, scrub all the harder.
Not me, never, not me. I would be different. I would be better
.'

‘Mothers do wrong. They must, perforce.'

‘Miranda always says that.'

‘Miranda does.'

‘The closest I've ever gotten to motherhood was to be a kind of passing saviour to Livia and Dafne. Claudio was too small to remember me as that. It was Giorgia who raised them, though. And Giorgia and Miranda raised me. I got to be the girls' heroine, their idol in a way, I could do no wrong.
Mothers do wrong, perforce
.'