Amore and Amaretti (5 page)

Val più la pratica che la grammatica

Experience is more important than theory

My Italian slowly improves, and yet, impeded by limited vocabulary, I remain frustrated by the inability to express my character and voice my opinions. For that first year I am perceived as quiet and acquiescent. I often feel like screaming out that I am really a strong, bubbly, opinionated, articulate and independent woman, and that in Australia most women are not required to sit for hours on end doing nothing while their partners are out hunting or playing cards or drinking with friends.

Gianfranco's closest friend is a waiter from Vecchia Toscana, married to a Russian woman. We go to their apartment for lunches, and when the business of eating is out of the way, the television is switched on for an afternoon's viewing of soccer, Formula 1 car racing or the sacred
calcio
– association football. Dulled by post-lunch liqueurs I slump in the darkened living room while cars roar around circuits and the air thickens with cigarette smoke. Olga, whose air of submission is probably as misinterpreted as mine, does not engage me in a female chat; we all stare at the screen.

Walrus-moustachioed Raimondo has left Antica Toscana, and has come to work at our restaurant. He is my ally. And so it is Raimondo to whom I turn after slicing my finger open, not to the man with whom I share my life who is up to day three in his silent treatment towards me. Our freshly laundered white aprons require perforated holes in the fabric for threading the ties. Generally, these perforations are effected with a knife. My little paring knife, newly sharpened, slips smoothly through first the starched fabric, then my finger. Blood shoots out. I have barely felt any pain and yet within seconds there is a heavy throbbing sensation, which I try to stem with a makeshift bandage. I find Raimondo, who takes charge immediately, organising our absence from the restaurant for the following hour while he drives me to the nearest hospital.

It is just before lunchtime and Gianfranco is at a table with the other partners discussing the specials of the day. I stand in front of him with my throbbing finger and tell him what has happened and where I am about to be taken. I stand in front of him willing him to put his arms around me, to forgive me for whatever sexual transgression he believes I have committed, to remember he loves me. Instead, his eyes examine me like tiny black stones and I realise what has just happened has alienated him from me even further – that the inconvenience of my accident, indubitably an act of carelessness or stupidity, is merely adding to his contempt. He says not a word. Raimondo leads me gently away.

Inevitably, when I start to make sense of this world, the relationship begins to fall apart. This takes place painfully over many months, during which Gianfranco decides that I am being unfaithful to him. Unfaithful! I am so fiercely in love with him that the concept is almost laughable, except that his punishment is so severe. My sister has returned to Australia, and he is now the one I must rely on.

One afternoon he comes back to our apartment and does not greet me. He fails to respond to my concerned questions and looks right through me with hard, cold eyes. We go off to work together, and I am ignored for the evening. I am desperate with incomprehension and unhappiness. Back home, I wait and wait and wait, then eventually fall asleep, to awake at three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning to an empty bed. Days later, in his jeans pocket I find cards for out-of-town hotels that we have never been to together. The very fact that I am spying on him, not trusting him, searching for clues, appals me, and yet I cannot stop.

It is during one of these bouts of ostracism that I receive a rare phone call from Australia. At the sound of my mother's voice all I long to do is to pour out my sadness and my vulnerability, to hear her sensible voice and her unconditional love. But she is telling me about Tony, and how he had contacted her some weeks before, wanting my address in Florence. His plan was to travel to Europe via Bali – except he never got beyond Bali, because he drowned. He had gone out to one of the islands and somehow this former champion swimmer had drowned. Hearing about this good and gentle man whom I had discarded in my selfish urge for a larger, brighter life – hearing about it, furthermore, in the midst of yet another romantic crisis with the man who took his place – ushers in a bleakness as deep as it is lonely. I cannot even confide my grief in Gianfranco, because, at that time, I no more exist for him than Tony now does for me. I just fold it inside me.

Grande amore, grande dolore

Great love, great pain

Then one day he speaks to me; the wall of silence lifts. He accuses me of making love to the greengrocer in the mornings on my way to work. He is sick with jealousy, he tells me, and his excuse is that he is made that way.
‘Io sono fatto così'
I hear a million times throughout that turbulent, glorious relationship, as if by saying those words he is giving himself permission to be as difficult, as cruel and as irrational as he likes.

Making up is so passionate that for a long time afterwards we are more in love than ever. My relief at being permitted to once more exist drowns out the utter absurdity of his accusations, and the danger of his paranoia. It turns into a pattern that is only broken after fifteen months, coinciding with both my beginning to dream in Italian, and, most significantly, finally turning back into myself. We break up just in time for my thirtieth birthday. Gianfranco drives me, the delicate invalid, out to Strada-in-Chianti outside Florence, to the sprawling country home belonging to our friends Vincenzo and Claudia to convalesce.

And so for several weeks all I do is sleep and read and help in the domestic kitchen. I go for long walks and eat a lot and dip Claudia's home-made almond biscotti into Vin Santo until late at night in the company of this infinitely kind couple who feel like my grandparents. They have known Gianfranco for many years and are not surprised it has turned out this way. Then one day I feel ready to re-enter the real world of work and relationships. I have no desire to follow my sister back to Australia. Florence has become home, and it is time to look for a job and a place to live.