The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (10 page)

‘“Ninuccia's polenta is hardly war food,” Miranda told Filiberto that evening, mortifying him as much with her gaze as with her words. It was the first time I'd ever heard her speak with pure contempt. Not the last, though. I think it was when she told us that story of the anchovies that I knew I loved Miranda. I think it was that night. In any case, Filiberto sought immediate reparation by rising from his place, coming to me, taking both my hands, kissing the palms. Once back in his chair, he looked at Miranda. After a moment or two he said:

Winter was the worst: being hungry and being cold, too. We had snow one year, an unusual amount. Surely it was the first snow of my own young life. Exciting as it was, it faded soon enough to tedium. We'd just kneel in front of the window watching it fall. One morning, a hungry morning, my father wrapped us in some sort of shawl or blanket, brought us to the door, opening it to a moaning wind. He said, ‘Look out there, do you see it? Do you see all that bread under the snow? Can't you see it? Close your eyes, imagine all that germination going on deep under the insulating snow. When it melts, even though the earth will still be brown and bare, there'll be bright shoots sticking their heads straight up to the sun. Acres of young wheat. Loaves and loaves of good crusty bread.' Of course it was a lie. Sometimes all we have are lies.

‘We others were not old enough to remember the war, some of us not yet born. We listened to the polenta stories and the bread-growing-under-the-snow as to fables but when the solemn moment passed the tribe sat, forks pointing north, waiting for what would next be brought to table. The first of my suppers were not a successs.

‘But Miranda had understood what I'd had in mind to make of Thursday nights and so she began to help me, to choose and cook dishes that, though they resonated less abundant times, had some chance at pleasing.

‘One time we begged lambs' innards from the butcher who bought stock from Filiberto, and brought them back to the rustico almost still pulsing. We set pancetta and salt pork to melt over a quiet flame with rosemary, onion, garlic and peperoncino and gilded it all until the smell it sent up set our mouths to watering. Meanwhile we chopped the innards almost to a pulp and added them to the pot, marrying them to the hot, perfumed fat. A little sea salt, a litre of red, tomato conserve, all of it distilling down to a delectable mash to spread on thick slabs of roasted bread. Miranda called it
soffritto di agnello
, said it was a piquant second cousin to the traditional Roman dish
coratella
(lamb innards stewed in white wine with fennel and sage) and even closer kin to the
lampredotto
of the Tuscans (veal stomach stewed with tomato, onion, celery and spooned onto trenchers of crusty bread).
Il soffritto
won a restrained sort of applause but, as before, the group sniffed about for what would come next and then next after that.

‘Once Miranda and I bartered with the Catanzarese in the market: eight dozen baby artichokes for two rounds of Filiberto's pecorino. The colour of violets and tiny as a baby's fist, 20 centimetres of leafy stem. All we did was light the wood oven, peel the stems, cut them in two and let them sit in lemon water for half an hour. Into three oiled terracotta dishes, we laid them down in a single layer, poured in white wine – only about half an inch – then dusted them with sea salt and bread crumbs, gave them a good dose of oil and let them roast slowly until their chokeless hearts were soft. Then we heaved on fistsful of grated pecorino, poured on another thread of oil and slid the dishes back into the oven until the cheese went bronze. The group poked at the tiny little crisped things, spooned one or two out to taste, all the while mumbling that no decent artichoke was roasted but braised in white wine with lemon and mint, this latter another dish that the Umbrians borrow from the Roman canons. Eight people devoured ninety-six artichokes, slid bread in the juices of the terracotta dish closest to them, moved brazenly to polish juices in the further territory of the other dishes. “
Buoni, buoni da vero, ma adesso?
Good, very good, but now?”

‘“
Le fritatte di bruscandoli
, wild asparagus omelettes,” I told them, proud as if the dishes I carried from behind the bedsheet curtain were set with truffle-stuffed songbirds. I was so excited to tell them about the gifts from the gods Miranda and I had found on the far hillside behind the sheepfold, a great patch of the skinny brown twig-like things, which make only a fleeting spring appearance but almost never in any but sparse quantity. A savour to which no cultivated asparagus could ever aspire, they taste like roasted hazelnuts. Delicate …'

•

‘You mean,
luppoli
, hops.
Bruscandoli
are wild hops and not asparagus at all but there is great controversy among the cognoscenti over this distinction. I would wait for them every May to arrive by boat from the island of Sant'Erasmo to the Rialto. For risotto. However many the foragers would bring to the markets, the chefs from Harry's Bar always got most of the bounty. But I managed. I'd begin my haunting of the marketeers for them around Easter time. I …'

Ninuccia will not tolerate interruption. This one of mine was made of words she hadn't heard. Before I finish speaking, she proceeds: ‘As you know, Miranda had – long before this beginning of the Thursday Nights – begun to offer supper three or four evenings a week to the truckers and the nearby farm families. And it was that uniquely Miranda sort of supper that they all expected on Thursday nights. The group wholly embraced the idea of sitting down to supper together in the rustico every Thursday but how and what I longed to feed them, they did not embrace at all.'

Having been looking down at her hands or perusing the room while she spoke, Ninuccia takes a breath, looks at me.

‘A grand part of why I bewailed the thought of you in the rustico kitchen was raised up from the unhealed part of my old resentment at having failed to please the others. If I couldn't, how could you? Of all people, why should it be a stranger who would cook for us? I remain distrustful, I want you to know that. Wary. I'm wary still but less so for two reasons: I know that Miranda will be hovering and that one of us will always be there to keep you in line, save you from committing foolishness. As I said, I wanted you to know all that.'

‘Good.' I smile at her. Having expected something of defence from me, she waits, lifts her gaze to mine before looking down again at her hands, perusing the room.

‘In any case, I stopped bringing my pots of soup or beans and Miranda pushed her sack of polenta to the back of the armoire. Every Tuesday we all brought what we had to her and every Thursday Miranda cooked for us.'

‘Every Thursday until …'

‘Until now. But how far I've wandered. From Cosima. From the mountains.'

‘You must be tired and …'

‘No, no. Not at all, not tired,' she says, raising a hand to cover her smile, an uncommonly girlish gesture for Ninuccia. ‘The truth is that I never wander very far from her. From Cosima. From the mountains. Never very far. I still compare them, you know. The Thursday Nights there, ours here. A foolish exercise.
Quei Meravigliosi Giovedì Sere
. Those Marvellous Thursday Nights with Cosima. Though the theme was the same as every other night –
cosa c'e, c'e–
what there is, there is – little fistsful of hoarded things would appear on the Thursday work tables. Cosima and the others would take stock and get to work. A favourite dish was one of long, slender sweet green capsicums stuffed with old bread softened in white wine, dried olives, raisins, pine nuts, capers, pecorino, bits of lamb if they had it, an egg, maybe two, and handfuls of wild greens if it was spring. Laid on a grate high over the slow fire they took turns roasting them, painting them with oil, gently turning them until they blistered, plumped, a tin underneath to catch their juices. There'd be a sauce ready to pour over the hot things, a smash of garlic, oil, lots of onion shaved thin, red wine vinegar added to the hot juices in the tin. How good they were. And we drank wine on Thursdays, shunning the water pitcher.

‘Cosima always baked her
anisella
. With a quarter-litre jar and a screw top in her pocket, she'd walk the two kilometres or so through the woods to the
bottiglieria
, the tiny wine dispensary, to fetch a dose of anisette. Eggs, oil, sugar, flour and anise seeds toasted in a hot pan, she'd pour the batter into a round tin, large and shallow, cover it with a pot lid, reversed and filled with hot embers, and settle the whole into the white hot ash of her hearth.

‘On Thursday Nights the women dressed as they might for mass had there been a priest to celebrate it. And if there
had
been a priest, I'd have wondered at the women's will to share their pagan affinities for an hour with he and Mother Church. The old goddesses were their confidantes, their undisputed authorities and, being so familiar with them, they'd call upon Hera and Hestia, Aphrodite, Artemis and Demeter, as they would neighbours from a village down the mountain. They knew too much, the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. They knew that the clans and the Church and the State were as united a family as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But there I go again, wandering.

‘In any case, the women's toilettes were enhanced on Thursdays, all of them primping in their way, patting
Borotalco
from a green and gold tin over freshly bathed bodies, braiding hair or twisting it into intricate knots, festooning themselves with bits of matriarchal jewels and a change of dress. The eldest was forty-eight, the youngest perhaps forty and it was she who, with a sharpened wedge of wood burnt to charcoal, would, always on a Thursday, draw black lines along the slant of her eyelids and I swear those two lines changed how she moved, how she spoke and smiled.

‘Oh, yes, does it surprise you how young they all were? Had you been conjuring a bevy of ancients? And have you been wondering about their children?

‘Well, those who'd mothered sons had seen them off to their labours by then, down the mountain or to a marriage with a girl from the cities, while their daughters had, likewise, followed their husbands' paths. Just as I'd done. For some, visits to or from their children were rare enough. Life in the mountains is often lived in epochs – clearly marked – one ending, the next beginning, in a succession natural as the seasons, children yearning sometimes to forget from whence they came, their parents, having loved them well, trusting their babies to the Fates, to the old goddesses. Now, all that about children, that wasn't what you'd call meandering, was it? Maybe just a little.'

•

By now I am captive to Ninuccia. I know nothing of the present. How long have we been sitting here at the long wooden table in the mill? Someone has lit candles in the lanterns, which hang from iron hooks here and there about the place. I know that Ninuccia has placed a string of those half-dried figs near to my hand, that she has pushed toward me the roasted bread that one of the cousins brought to the table. From the tail of my eye, I am aware of men and women who come and go, lugging sacks of olives, carrying away wooden boxes filled with two-litre bottles of new oil. I hear the sound of stones crushing the fruit, the gentle brays of the velvet-eyed she-ass. Ninuccia stops only to eat a fig.

•

‘Cosima. Cosima wore the same dress every Thursday. The colour was of a kind of pewter iridescence that shimmered gold when she moved in it, the heavy silk falling like warmed metal and sheathing the long, skinny frame of her. Her husband had brought it home on the night of her twenty-first birthday. She said she knew it had been thieved, that dress – a spoil from some larger plundering. She said she'd been sure his treachery was greater than that which would yield the humble haul of a pewter-coloured dress.

‘On a January dawn less than a month later, while she was still abed with two-year-old Pierangelo asleep beside her, Cosima heard the dull thud her husband's corpse made as it smite the lane outside the cottage door. She'd always expected it, she knew, she said. She pulled at the bed cover, wadded it up her arms and, barefoot, went to him, covering him, swaddling him, dragging and pushing and pulling him into the house. Not meaning to, she said, she lay down on top of him and rocked and wept until she noticed that Pierangelo, also rocking and weeping, had lain down next to her, next to his father. In that truculent way of hers, Cosima told me this and then never spoke of it again. When once I asked Pierangelo to tell me of his father's death, he looked at me, held my gaze so fast and hard it frightened me. When he looked away, he said, “I don't know. No one ever knows.”

‘When Cosima wore the dress on Thursday nights, she'd always say how she preferred her black one, that any other one felt like someone else's. Her heart-shaped lips compressed, nearly stretched into a smile, she'd touch the bodice, pat her hands cautiously here and there about the dress and wonder aloud if it truly
had
once been someone else's. And if it had, she wondered, too, who was that someone else? What was she like? And what had her husband known of her?

‘One evening while we sat out in the lane, she pulled the dress from her work sack, proceeded to cut off the sleeves, frayed and split as they were. Piecing together the remnants into one long length, she wrapped it about her head, securing the ends under her braids. She looked up at me, the metallic glint of the headdress dancing in her eyes like moonshine and, on the next Thursday when she wore it with the dress, I thought, at last, that Cosima had the right clothes for an enchantress. She never wore any other shoes, though, than the too-large black men's oxfords or, in winter, Pierangelo's discarded hunting boots. Had she manoeuvred things in another way, Cosima might have had more – more clothes, more comforts. Once when I asked her, “Wouldn't you like to have …” it was the only time I saw her veer toward anger. “
Non hai capito niente. L'abbondanza é pericolosa
. You've understood nothing. Abundance is perilous.”