Amore and Amaretti (27 page)

I frutti proibiti sono i più dolci

Forbidden fruit is sweetest

The dinner was not planned as a farewell for me, though coinciding with my departure as it does I decide to make it so. It is in the little castle nearby where the La Cantinetta mob gathers in a huge cold room and sits, banquet-style, in a square. I manage to find a seat near Ignazio and Alvaro and Rita, deciding I want to have fun away from the sanctity of authority and grown-up disapproval that seems to cling to Gianfranco until he has abandoned himself to drink.

Across the room I see Donatella, who has brought a female friend. They are dressed too provocatively, laugh too bawdily, but I am feeling glamorous, my hair newly bobbed and blonded by a good Perugia hairdresser, my plumpness pressed into the safety of a smart black pantsuit, my lips red. It is a lovely last night, the excellent food and wine flowing and the mood ebullient, and so it comes as an additional treat when back at La Cantinetta and preparing for bed I am interrupted by a knock on my door. It is Alvaro who has somehow managed to dispose of Rita, Alvaro who has chosen me over Rita, and immediately I dismiss all the dark thoughts I had let torture me over the previous week.

The following morning I am on the train from Florence to Rome, a compartment to myself, sliding smoothly away through bands of sunshine, Florence slipping past. I am remembering the send-off. Outside La Cantinetta, the blue SITA bus had stopped for me to clumsily negotiate my suitcase aboard and find a window seat. There they were standing in a line to wave me off, my three men – my two ex-lovers and my lover. I felt a delicious, mischievous joy at them, wanting to shout out, ‘If you only knew', but waved and waved instead, until they were no longer visible.

Marie-Claire's apartment in the Trastevere has semi-restored paintings leaning against its hallway walls with dark, brooding religious scenes, centuries old. The last time I saw her was two years previously, when at the beginning of my Cantinetta stint she had brought her two children to visit their father. She reminds them who I am now. I am struck again by the resemblance of her son to Gianfranco and the beauty of her daughter, but mostly by Marie-Claire. She is dressed exquisitely, a glamorous art restorer managing, seemingly effortlessly, to combine a busy career with single motherhood, pedalling her way through the streets of Rome, dining out regularly with an assortment of boyfriends.

She takes me to a tiny
osteria
nearby, where from a generous table of antipasti we select our dishes. I notice how slowly and how little she eats – mostly vegetables and salad – and how the bread basket is emptied by me. I long to be Marie-Claire with every pore. Meanwhile, I am regaling her with La Cantinetta stories and we are cruelly laughing, about Cinzia and Ignazio and the moodiness of Gianfranco, and I have even turned the torrid Vito business into an amusing anecdote. We drink a lot and plunge into discussions on love and sex and weight, dreams and fears. When Marie-Claire asks me why I tend to get fat when I come to Italy, I describe boredom and loneliness and lack of confidence, some great need to fill the wells of emptiness within me. I see how limp an explanation it really is, that what I essentially lack is self-discipline, resolve and inner resources; that there she is orchestrating a complicated life with two young children, a failed marriage and deep wells of her own. That maybe there is no secret after all to a successful life other than hard work and self-denial. That I am simply greedy.

I am so vastly cheered by Marie-Claire's company, so restored to my usual irreverent, humorous self, that I am already regarding the past three and a half months and the demi-monde of Spedaluzzo with affection. Melting away is the middle period of gloom and self-doubt and all I am feeling now is a sense of being loved and, after all this time, a little belonging. Still being shaped, changed and challenged by Italy, endlessly enriched and maddened by it, I am, however, now ready to go home.

Back home, my flat reclaimed, it is job searching all over again, but this time around I strike it lucky. An admiring owner of a spacious deli is so anxious that I work for her that she pays for a daily taxi to pick me up and convey me to Circular Quay, whereupon I catch the ferry across the sparkling early morning water. In the tiny kitchen at the back of the shop I toil away happily enough, working alongside women who become friends, returning in the evenings to my single life and its inevitable doses of social activity. Dinner parties and diets, restaurants and the gym: a middle-aged woman with a university degree in languages who chops up capsicums for a living.

Then two things happen. First, an old friend purchases a café and poaches me from the deli to be her chef. After three intense years beavering away there, I start hearing regularly again from my old friend William. He has moved up the coast and bought himself a house in an area I have never even visited, and he wants me to move up there as well.

‘You'll love it here, Victoria,' he repeats, every single night. ‘It's full of single middle-aged people like us.'

And so I do – that is the second thing. Immediately meeting his younger cousin, a beautiful artist, and falling in love.

It still takes two years of chopping up capsicums in assorted cafés and delis before realising that, as a cook in Australia, I am never going to shine, despite the Italian food I cook which everyone loves, despite the Italian cooking classes that I resume teaching to great acclaim. When the position for advertising salesperson with the local newspaper appears, I apply immediately, and am accepted. I am offered my own weekly food column shortly afterwards. Life is coming together.

Book Four

2004

San Casciano, Florence, Spedaluzzo, Perugia

La tavola e il letto mantengono l'affetto

The table and the bed keep love alive

There is a neat row of fashionable shoes – mainly pointy-toed boots – lining the hall wall of Gianfranco's bachelor flat in San Casciano. This is what I first see when I step across the threshold, although that familiar blend of just-brewed coffee, cleaning products and mustiness has already jogged me out of my jet-lagged trance. Italian apartments: the wooden shutters, the cool marble staircase, the private little arrangements of pot plants and umbrella stands outside each door, the door to unimagined spaciousness.

I am breathing it all in, standing beside my suitcase and cabin bag, and Gianfranco is already whisking ahead into his spartan kitchen to put on coffee, offer peach-flavoured iced tea and describe sleeping arrangements. Behind me is William, back in Italy after thirty years; the mere nine that have lapsed since I was here last seem, both in comparison and in reality, like weeks, puncturing the stupor of my tiredness with memories, associations and recollections.

It was Cinzia who had collected us from Rome airport some hours before. She had insisted on doing the journey from Spedaluzzo, even if it meant coming into fleeting contact at a pre-arranged meeting point with Gianfranco in order to hand us over. In her new four-wheel drive she belted out of Rome and along the autostrada at 140 kilometres per hour, mostly connected to her mobile phone, the radio roaring. Out of Lazio, up through Umbria and into the familiarity of Tuscany she sped us, while spilling forth with the Gianfranco saga. She had thrown him out two years ago, worn down by his infidelities, his impossibility. Now she lives only for their son, Tonino, a nine-year-old, whom his father rarely sees. ‘He doesn't have a father,' she mutters darkly at one point. She tells us how Gianfranco sends no money for him and helps in no way, how she has carved out a brisk, cheerful life for herself running La Cantinetta on her own with a team of only women. (‘Only women!' triumphantly.) Business is good and she is happy. She has given up cigarettes and is chubby in her tight white trousers and pointy high heels – otherwise, nine years have done little to alter her.

The constant phone calls intrigue me, but I try not to tune in. I ask about various other people I know and it appears she has very little contact with any of them. She is a superwoman, she tells me several times, as she balances obsessive single motherhood with running a restaurant. I am already worn out by approving, admiring and sympathising, but put it down to jet lag – I had ended up growing fond of Cinzia all those years ago and I cannot allow her bitter view of Gianfranco, my host, my mentor, my dear friend, and my ex-boyfriend, to turn me against her. Surely…

At a layby near a roundabout, she pulls up. Some distance away I spot Gianfranco smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke out the open door of his car. Without even glancing his way, Cinzia spills us out, luggage and all, embraces us warmly, then squeals away. Gianfranco welcomes us with a hug and drives us to his apartment.

Gianfranco is exactly the same. A little stouter, a little greyer, but otherwise unchanged. He is navigating a difficult conversation in broken English and Italian with William, as I slip gratefully under the handheld shower, flooding the bathroom floor in clumsy dopey eagerness to lather the twenty-four-hour flight off me. From the liquid soap's foamy richness floats another forgotten, achingly memorable scent of my past Italian lives, beginning to unknot something that has been closed for years and years.

When I emerge, the scene is almost cosy: two middle-aged men smoking cigarettes over a confusion of pidgin English and pidgin Italian. They look relieved at being rescued by my scrubbed and gleaming entrance. Now fifty-two, Gianfranco still dresses in faded jeans and untucked denim shirts with the easy casual sexiness which first attracted me. He is telling me about the villa where he runs the kitchen of the restaurant, and has for two years since Cinzia threw him out of La Cantinetta. He and three partners took over the restaurant management of the fourteenth-century villa, which for years had been non-operational. They were slowly building it up, restoring its reputation as a venue for weddings and communions, as well as for fine dining. Gianfranco is as enthusiastic about this latest project as he has been about all the others, and yet I sense that, after the joyous autonomy of running his own restaurants, this latest one may be felt as a downhill slide.

Gianfranco wants to take us for coffee, so he is bustling us out the door into what is apparently the first sunny day in weeks and weeks. We have clearly conveyed the fine weather all the way from Australia. We drive into the centre of San Casciano. This little town I remember from a long ago visit to Paolo the dentist for some perfunctory work; Paolo, in fact, is one of Gianfranco's partners. Another partner runs the Bar Centrale, where we are ordering coffees – this is the third I have had since touching Italian soil and yet I feel I need all the caffeine I can get. We sit outside at one of the sunny little tables and presently the owner comes out to be introduced. I had forgotten Gianfranco's inability to settle for long unless late at night over wine and cigarettes, and he is already restless, issuing us rapid, complicated instructions on how to find our way back to the apartment and asking us to wake him around seven o'clock in order that we can all go out to dinner together. We are left.

William is to be with me for the first week only of this three-week stay in Italy before heading off to America. Half of me is happy to have a dear old friend to share Italy with me, and especially to be there on the day I turn fifty, but the other half is anxious. I have only ever been in Italy on my own; there is something almost sacred and deeply personal about my connection with the country and the people which I cannot explain and which I feel unable to share. Or, more honestly, which I do not want to share. The selfishness and small-mindedness of the realisation shocks me. Complete re-immersion is what I am planning in this snatched return, because I have come with the hope of making sense of it all. I need confirmation that over the years I have not embroidered and embellished, invented and fabricated, forgotten or exaggerated: I need to find out if it was real.

Esse nufesso chi dice male di macaruni

He who speaks badly of macaroni is a fool

That first night Gianfranco takes us to dinner at Nello restaurant. We are joined by Paolo the dentist and his wife. I am enchanted by the company, despite being a little worried that in my jet-lagged state, and after so many years away, my Italian will be rough, if accessible at all. I always loved Paolo and Silvana, a couple intriguingly contrasted; Paolo a short, fierce-eyed man with a limp alongside tall, black, beautiful Silvana. We move into the busy restaurant, where the celebrity treatment, which always seems to accompany dining out with Gianfranco, begins immediately. Within minutes, food and wine have arrived on the table, platters of
bresaola
and moist lush prosciutto, salamis and mortadellas, crostini with assorted toppings, baskets of bread, the Chianti poured.

William, at the end of the table, is eating too much of everything and tossing back wine, and as the evening progresses, somehow dredging up half-forgotten Italian and managing more or less to keep pace. I am flushed, excited, tongue loosened, too, by the wine and talking nonstop, then remembering to eat. Food continues to arrive in the form of garlicky roast green tomatoes, rare roast beef slices so tender they barely require cutting, a multi-flavoured
spezzatino
or casserole, whole porcini mushrooms roasted with herbs and garlic. Gianfranco sits at the head becoming progressively louder and more entertaining.

William, a hyperbolic man under normal circumstances, is proclaiming it the best meal he has ever eaten in his life and I observe with relief that his excessive behaviour is striking just the right note with everyone else at the table. When cigarettes are lit with flagrant disregard of the various no-smoking signs around the dining room, I can see how beautifully he is fitting in and that I do not need to worry about him. And, to be sure, it is William who is still drinking liqueurs back at the apartment of Paolo and Silvana where we retreat after dinner, carrying on semi-coherent conversations with Gianfranco and Paolo as I feel myself slipping further and further down my chair. There is nothing to worry about with William.

Back at Gianfranco's I leave the two of them, William and Gianfranco, still engaged in animated conversation as I wash my face and clean my teeth. Periodically William calls out, ‘What's the word for energy?' or ‘How do you say “spiritual”?' to which I am too tired, too full and too drunk to reply. We have twin beds in a spare bedroom belonging to Gianfranco's teenage children, when they come from Paris to stay with him. Earlier Gianfranco had drawn me aside and asked if I was happy with this arrangement. Because, if I wasn't, he went on, I could sleep in his room. There was nothing lascivious in the offer and yet it made me wonder what he would have expected had I agreed. The last two times I saw Gianfranco there was a noticeable absence of sexual frisson between us; rather, there was a sense of something deeper and richer and better, and I have been aware of this same solidity since we arrived. He was just being, I imagine, his thoughtful and considerate self.

After the sunny May day when we arrive, the weather returns to unseasonable awfulness: it rains constantly, it is windy and cold, and one night it hails so heavily that on my morning walk the following day I crunch through brittle white ice like snow. This, combined with the several days it seems to take to recover from jet lag, shifts my focus from lofty thoughts to feeling comfortable.