Amore and Amaretti (4 page)

I love her food and the way it always ends up a feast. I love the way she rolls taut ripe tomatoes onto the table, and carves the bread, resting the loaf on her chest – one sharp cut, with her weathered finger pressing down on the blade of the utility knife. She salts everything lavishly, and throws nothing away. Her basic tomato sauce floods the kitchen with a rich sweet perfume as her small sturdy hands prod, test and stir the disintegrating fruit.

I love the way she looks at Gianfranco, her youngest boy, made good in the city, with his high-heeled boots and his jewellery and his bewildering foreign girlfriends. I am frustrated by my inability to express this love, and so I carry plates out to the kitchen, and smile and smile.

Then there is the world of the restaurant, where sixty hours of my week are spent. We are a
birreria-ristorant
e, which means there is an enormous selection of local and imported beers available to accompany the meals. Our menu is eclectic and international, thereby ensuring that we are popular with both the fashionable young Florentines who arrive clutching their car radios (to prevent the incessant thefts) and the busloads of tourists; we have something to please all palates. There are the traditional Tuscan offerings – the pastas (including my favourite, the nutmeggy, creamy spinach and ricotta) and Florentine (porterhouse) steaks and anchovy sauces and
crespelle
– alongside a range of hamburgers, pronounced ‘umborgers', to go with the beers, and mayonnaise for the French fries. Gianfranco has negotiated special deals for the tourists via a travel agency, and I am often struck by the beautiful irony, as I ladle lemon sauce over 140 veal
scaloppine
before sending them out of the kitchen on platters, that groups of Australian tourists are heartily tucking into a meal in a Florentine restaurant that has been cooked by an Australian. In the enormous kitchen, two young girls assist me, while a series of dishwashers come and go. We wear pale-blue uniforms like nurses, and in quieter moments invent potent cocktails and bake batches of biscotti. By 11.30 p.m. the kitchen is packed up, gleaming, and I am dining either with my beloved or at the apartment wondering what time he will come home.

Our flat is just two rooms, tiny and purpose-built for restaurateurs who never cook at home, who work, live and eat at restaurants. Provision for the stove-top coffee maker and Gianfranco's collection of fancy liqueurs constitute the kitchen space. The other room is occupied exclusively by the double bed, above which presides a large television set, as if all a bedroom's purposes consist of sleeping, having sex and watching television – which, apart from the long nights I lie waiting for him to come home, is essentially all the entire flat is for.

My sister, who came here to be with me, often feels further away than if she were back in Australia. I know she is working as a sales assistant at a gold shop in Piazza Santa Croce and that she has put on twelve kilograms, but my self-absorption has blinded me to anything beyond that. Occasionally she comes in the car with us on day trips to the ocean; she sits in the back popping M&Ms into her mouth while Gianfranco teases her about her weight.

Subservience sits uneasily on me and I start to resent the fact that, after long, gruelling days running the restaurant, Gianfranco chooses the companionship of other men with a pack of cards and whisky, while I am relegated to trophy status. When in a positive frame of mind, I manage to be philosophical about the hours I am left alone, in Florence or in his village, while he hooks up with old friends, attends to a business matter, or simply disappears. I am aware that I made the choice of both man and lifestyle, and of the privileges offered.

Yet, increasingly I find myself wading through impotence and incomprehension, like those dreams where your legs are clinging to a soaked and heavy garment and are struggling through the mud. I am so seriously in love that I have thrown out my contraceptive pills and I have had my blonde hair permed into a frizz to match Gianfranco's new hairdo. I am ironing his T-shirts. I suffer the interminable conversations, which swirl around me, about people and places I do not know. I am docile and stoic. I lie in our double bed in Via Osteria del Guanto waiting to hear the sound of Gianfranco's
motorino
as it turns into our narrow street. But the night deepens and empties, and still Gianfranco does not come home. I torment myself with imaginings and suspicions; I rewind details of the day as I try to trace back to where I may have given offence or let him down. There must have been something I did or said to make him value me less, to pretend I was not there, to exclude me, to stare through me, not answering my questions… when every fibre I possess shivers with the force of my adoring. I feel I have become another person.

The winter before he met me, Gianfranco had learned to ski. A new girlfriend is not going to impede this recently discovered passion, and he tells me that I, too, will learn to ski. We head to one of Florence's smarter sports stores to fit me out. Because I have never skied in my life – nor been remotely tempted to do so – I have no idea what is required, but with his usual authority Gianfranco selects stretchy pants, zipped polo necks, a padded jacket so lovely I could weep, soft leather gloves and a cosy woollen hat, ski boots and shiny handsome skis. I try on this fancy costume, and in the shop mirror see a woman I do not recognise. Gianfranco pays for it all and I never find out if he subtracts the vast cost from my monthly
stipendio
. (That salary always seems inordinately large to me – two million lire! – and therefore somehow unreal. And because Gianfranco pays for everything, money is something I seem not to really need.)

And so commence the Wednesday trips to Abetone. The winter ski resort for Florentines, this village sits high in the Apennine Mountains above Pistoia, a ninety-minute drive from Florence. Four valleys link up to create ski slopes and cross-country runs through forests of firs, larches and pines. Figures fly past on skis and it is so beautiful that even before setting foot on the snow I am convinced I will love it.

Of course, the reality is quite different. Gianfranco teaches me the rudiments before sailing gracefully away, swallowed up in the frigid landscape. That first day I never stop falling over. I am appalled at my clumsiness and lack of coordination – I, who studied ballet for ten years, shone in aerobics classes and can still do the splits! Collapsed ignominiously in the snow, I feel discouragement seep into me. The warm spicy wine at the
rifugio
where I later meet up with Gianfranco restores my humour somewhat, and by the time the following Wednesday has come around I am prepared to publicly humiliate myself all over again.

Having only one day a week in order to learn a difficult sport like skiing at the reasonably seasoned age of twenty-eight means that progress is slow, painfully slow. In fact, every Wednesday I spend most of the day falling over, lolling abjectly in the snow longing for the whole ghastly ordeal to be over. Gianfranco finds it, and me, vastly entertaining. We always start out together and he is patient until I begin to sulk, at which point separation seems the most sensible idea, and off he sails.

And then, on the very last day we visit – winter on its way out and the snow patchier and thinner – something seems to snap into place. I have chosen a cross-country path through the trees, worn out by the steep slopes down which I mostly roll, flailing. Sun dances and dazzles and I have a clear, smooth passage ahead of me. I set off cautiously, increasing in confidence and speed, threading efficiently through the trees, my hips obeying – and suddenly I am flying, all fluid rhythm and calm, clear grace. It is one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.