The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (13 page)

‘
A tavola, a tavola
. To the table, to the table,' Miranda claps her hands and it's Ninuccia and Gilda who hold out the deep warmed plates into which I ladle the pasta – twenty-two plates to be precise. It's Paolina who carries the plates to the table, four at a time, two plates resting on each of her inner arms. As she takes the last four plates, I take a small, sharp knife from a drawer, unwrap my 99 per cent chocolate and, one by one, I stop by each place, shaving the chocolate over the hot, hot pasta so that it melts on contact. I think most of the people don't know it's chocolate but perhaps some strange truffle or a sort of exotic cheese. Miranda sees what I'm doing, asks Settimio for his clasp-knife and, cracking off a large piece of the chocolate in my hand for herself, begins on the other side of the table. Finally Miranda and I sit in front of our own plates, she shaving chocolate over mine, I over hers. No one speaks. The soft noises of slurping, chomping, of grinding mandibles and clacking dentures fill the room. Then a voice.

‘
E favolosa, questa pasta.
' I don't know the name of this man who names the pasta fabulous, still I want to kiss him. Instead, Miranda gets up, does just that. They are asking for more but there is none. I drink deeply of my wine, watch Ninuccia watching me.

Sated, everyone seems content to sit a while. Very softly then, as though only to herself, Ninuccia begins to sing. Not sing, really, but chant in what must be the minor-key wail of the women in the mountains. Never before have I heard these sounds from an Umbrian yet others join her, only two, maybe three. I try to echo the sounds Ninuccia makes. I realise this is what the others are also doing. Now there are more of us. Ninuccia always leading, her eyes closed, her voice grows stronger and so do ours. The men begin to sing. Fernando is singing and I'm singing and weeping and Miranda is weeping. I think to Cosima in her Thursday Night dress: shimmering like gold when she moved in it … to her tribe chanting and keening, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.

Ninuccia's voice goes silent and the others, perhaps a note or two later, quieten, too. I feel Ninuccia looking at me again and raise my head to see it's so. What is it in those great grey eyes? She knows I've been thinking of Cosima. Is there also some small apology in that gaze? For having set me up for this impromptu lunch for two to which she'd invited twenty? A test?

Still no one has moved from the table. Communion has been taken but the mass has not ended. Why have they sung someone else's song, these Umbrians who are mostly very old? As though water and mountains and time have never separated one tribe from another.

It's Settimio who speaks first. ‘That … that song with no words, it was the one my mother sang to us. Four of us. One bed, my mother rocking in her chair, I swear it was that song she sang.'

A murmur of compliance. An aunt, a mother, another mother, also they sang that song. It can't be so, not that very song, and yet Ninuccia's voice has comforted them as did long-ago voices raised in the melancholoy of a lullabye, a night song, a sonata in B flat minor. In the mountains, in Cosima's mountains, the chanting was another kind of comfort, the sound of the tribe's own angelus signalling rebellion. A prelude to vendetta.

‘Shall we make a pact, here and now? Every year when the wine and the oil are new, we'll meet at this same table for this same meal?' This is Ninuccia.

Miranda looks at me and I know she is telling me,
Do you understand? This is how it happens … The way rituals are born
. As Fernando said I was, Miranda is also telling me,
you are of us
.

One of Ninuccia's cousins, a woman with the same Titian hair as hers, asks the man who sits across from her, ‘Enrico, didn't you like the pasta? Why aren't you happy?'

‘
Certo, certo
, certainly I liked it. And of course I'm happy.'

‘Then why aren't you crying?'

IT IS LATE IN OCTOBER OF 2006, TWO YEARS AFTER
Miranda's fraudulently professed withdrawal from Thursday Night cooking. Not only has Miranda been constantly at the Thursday burners, but all four of we others have been there with her. Ten-handed Ravel we've been playing. We spar and tiff, we quarrel and laugh and sometimes we sing.

Having chipped at icons early on in our sessions together, we began to allow nostalgia a grander role in what we cooked, honouring traditions but divining them down to more familial ways. One of the women might say, ‘I know that
agnello stufato
, braised lamb, is made without tomatoes but my grandmother used tomatoes. Let's use tomatoes.' And so we used tomatoes with the lamb or beat up a frying batter with white wine rather than beer or left a suckling lamb to braise overnight in nothing but butter and sea salt in a terracotta pot – its lid sealed shut with a paste of flour and water – in the waning heat of the wood oven. We began to expand the Thursday Night repertoire of dishes and stories by retreating even farther back into the women's individual and collective pasts. I've always thought it was Miranda's brandy-drenched boar that emboldened them.

As for their resistance to
l'Americana
, it abides. As I knew it would. That long-ago day at the mill, my standing on a stool to stir three kilos of wine-plumped pasta in that witch's cauldron, shifted me into their folkloric history if not their unguarded confidence about things culinary. Trust in that camp having never been the animus of my desire to be among them, I am not troubled by the continuing absence of it. It is only Ninuccia's sometimes acidic expressions of resistance – as much to me as to how I think and work with food – that burn.
Pazienza
. Patience.

I have learned to quench all reference to the gastronomy of France, my own first and eternal love. All Gallic regions and their glories are begrudged; carrots, onions and celery sautéed in butter – butter, by now, a pardoned sacrilege – I call
soffrito
, never breathing,
mirepoix
. If I crust beef in the fat from crisped pancetta with shallots and wild thyme, braise it in red wine, add the dried zest of an orange and Niçoise olives – the olives contraband along with wines and cheeses, Armagnac and Alsatian framboise carried home from visits over the border into the territory of the profane – I say
da medioevo
, from the medieval, and they are appeased as they would never be should I have called it what it is: a little stew from Provence.

Far more than the small French dalliances that I have enacted upon them have they enriched me. From study and research and observation during my journalist life, I'd learned of Umbria's culinary traditions, mine a scholarly knowledge, only somewhat fortified, tested in my early Orvieto years by listening to Miranda, chopping and stirring for her. Never once in these two years having written a recipe or even a method, the women
talk
to me,
show
me as did their mothers and grandmothers to them. Or, in Miranda's case, as did the ancient and revered cook to the noble family for whom she began to work when she was sixteen. When they battle among themselves about which reading of a dish is the
authentic
one, I step aside. I follow the consensus.

The composition of Thursday suppers they have, for all this time, left to me. I write the menus and all of us cook. They have grown to like and expect the
filo conduttore
approach to all the parts of a supper, the conducting thread technique in which Miranda believed but often failed to execute. I can do it well, string the dishes together –
antipasto
through
dolce
– with the barely discernable, subtle, or bold use of a single herb, a spice, a fruit, the dishes building in intensity as wines should, were we ever to drink any but our own local red. This I do while respecting their rules and that pleases them. It has sometimes become their game at table to identify the supper's
filo conduttore
.

And when I cook a dish alone and perpetrate some exotic fillip, they accept it as a specimen from the old tomes. Or pretend to. By now Filiberto has begun to say, at first taste,
da medioevo
, thus avoiding further comment from the tribe. Still, when I work at the dishes that belong to them, they watch me, if with a guise of nonchalance.
No matter how long I stay, I will always be just passing through
.

We grow and forage and barter just as Miranda had always done. We save bits and pieces of one supper and build upon them for the next. Our needs having outgrown the garden outside the rustico – a plot too sheltered by a stand of old oaks – a half hectare of fine black earth we've rented from a farmer outside Porano, the village that sits, as the crow flies, two kilometres across a valley from Orvieto. We have planted an
orto
on this land, which we and our men tend and harvest. And it's there, right at the edge of the
orto
, where, sometimes in late spring and summer and into early autumn, we set up for Thursday suppers. Everyone who has an auto carts up to the site one or two tables from the rustico, a bench or some excuse for a chair. And our bread and wine. We shell just-picked peas or marbled red beans or skinned favas directly into a pot of water boiling upon a tripod fire and roast sausages and bulbs of fennel or tiny eggplant or just-dug baby onions or fat bull's-eye tomatoes over the white-hot ash of another fire, which Filiberto has set in a pit he'd dug and lined with river stones.

As the light pales to lilac, we begin pouring out one another's wine, take up our chairs and turn them to the improbable beauty of the town, which has sat upon its great volcanic plateau since Iron Age Villanovan tribes settled there a thousand years before Christ. Barely breathing, no one speaks. Perched on the edge of her chair, inclining herself toward the sun, her hands flat upon her aproned thighs, Miranda closes her eyes. All the better to feel the light. She waits. A low-slung breeze thrums the sheets of metal that protect the woodpile behind us, makes a wind harp of them, and she waits half a beat longer, taunting Apollo, her eyes wide open now, goading him on his way through reddish clouds thin as tulle. And then she whispers, ‘
Ecco la torta
, behold the cake.'

Ornamented, bejewelled, its scars and sins blurred, Orvieto at sunset is a glittering wedding cake awaiting a bride, the long train of her silver-mesh dress scraping across the old stones. Gold-rose gleams splash upon the gothic face of the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, dazzling the red-roofed
palazzi
that enfold her, lighting up the meadows flung out over the green silk valley below the town, spangling wild iris tangled in the high grasses and yellow corn strutting across the fields. And the vines, everywhere the vines.

The torches we've pummelled into the earth we light now, take our places at the strange many-clothed, many-levelled table, take one another's hand, the breeze trembling the flames of the torches, making the wind harp moan. We say, ‘
Vivi per sempre
. Live forever.'

Unlike Thursdays in the rustico where the dishes are brought out one by one, here we take our supper as we will, all the pans and bowls within reach upon the table. Helping one another to each thing, one tears at the bread, passes the piece to the one nearest, then passes on the loaf so that the next one can do the same. Tear, pass, pass.

Tourists who drive by on the road to and from Porano often stop, sometimes to a screeching halt. Tumbling out of their autos, cameras at the ready, they fix the scene as they would a monument, a vista. Standing in a row gaping at what must seem a spectral pageant, they say nothing. Nor, often, do we. When Italians, local or not, stop to look, they shout from their windows, ‘
Siete pronti per un macchiaiolo
or
siete proprio Felliniani
. You are ready to be painted. You are Fellini characters.' If one of Miranda's truckers passes by, he whistles, takes both hands off the steering wheel, blows kisses to her, yells ‘
Amore mio
' into the darkening.

Stars and moon and the light of the torches rouse discourse at the table by the
orto
unlike the one under the slouching beams of the rustico. Out here our talk tends to mystery.

‘
Voi credete nel malocchio?
Do you believe in the evil eye?' This is Ninuccia, her enquiry meant for all of us.

‘Not at all,' Filiberto answers her.

‘Nor do I,' says Iacovo, standing up to take a turn pouring our wine. ‘But it's power is absolute.'

‘
It does not exist but it's power is absolute
. Both are true. What is not made of at least two truths?' Adjusting her braids, Miranda looks around the table. One hunger sated, now she has appetite for provocation.

‘Have you been victim of the evil eye?' This is Paolina asking Miranda.

But Ninuccia, Pierangelo and Iacovo speak at once and so Miranda does not answer Paolina, waits while the three tell of instances, undisputed they say, of tragedies caused by the power of the evil eye. Injuries, reverses of fortune, malaise, unexplained deaths, a well gone dry in a biblical rainstorm. Ninuccia is naming upon her fingers the races in which some form of the evil eye is believed, practised, respected: Greeks, Arabs, Spaniards, Jews, Russians, Turks among them. Save Miranda, Paolina, Fernando and I, the others have joined in to agree or dispute. Paolina tries repeatedly to be heard but it's only when Miranda calls forcefully for
santa calma
, holy calm, that the others turn to her and wait for her to speak.