Lambrusco
Authors: Ellen Cooney
CONTENTS
To my son, Michael
with thanks and appreciation to my mother,
Viola Garofoli Cooney
and to Gabriella Ambrosioni and Antonio Selvatici
who believed in this book before
I ever wrote a word of it.
Glittering air, the sun so clear
you seek flowering apricot trees
and hawthorn, for that bitter scent of the heart.
But the trees are dry, and the stiff plants
undercut calmness. The sky is empty.
Under your pounding feet, it seems the land is hollow.
A hush, all around.
Only, in the rising wind, faraway songsâ¦
âGiovanni Pascoli
Every love is a shield against sadness,
a silent step in the dark.
âSalvatore Quasimodo
C
AST OF
C
HARACTERS
Lucia Fantini, soprano
Aldo Fantini, her late husband, founder of Aldo's Restaurant
Giuseppe (Beppi, Beppino) Fantini, their son, manager of Aldo's, founder of partisan squad
Marcellina Galeffi, their housekeeper
Ugo Fantini, physician, Aldo's cousin
Annmarie Malone, professional golfer, member of U.S. Army Intelligence
Vito Nizarro, headwaiter at Aldo's, partisan
Mauro Pattuelli, waiter, partisan
Carmella Pattuelli, partisan radio operator, his wife
Marco, Francesca, Mario, Sandro, Rudino, Antonella, Alda, Lucianna, Giuseppina, their children
Cesare Morigi, waiter, amateur baritone, partisan
Ermanno Vizioli (Zoli), waiter, partisan
Cenzo Ballardini, waiter, partisan
Assunta Ballardini, egg dealer, his wife
Pia Ballardini, their daughter, a deaf-mute
Lido (Cherubino, Bino) Linari, waiter, partisan
Geppo Ravaglia, waiter, amateur archaeologist, partisan
Tito Roncuzzi, butcher, partisan
Tom Tully (Tullio Tomasini), Annmarie's fiancé, U.S. Army Intelligence officer
Etto Renzetti, factory owner, partisan
Frank Lamb, American soldier, truck driver
Peewee Wilkins, American soldier, jockey
Annunziata Galimberti, eldest member of the Galimberti family
Pippo & Giorgio, her great-nephews, thieves, partisans
Ignazio Innamorato (Polpo), fisherman
Giuseppe Verdi, composer
Giacomo Puccini, composer
Gioacchino Rossini, composer
Enrico Caruso, tenor
Eliana Fantini, Ugo's wife; Don Enzo Malfada, priest; Franco Calderoni (Nomad), waiter, partisan; Galto Saponi, Carmella's father, fisherman, partisan; Mariano Minzoni, head of the kitchen at Aldo's; Gigi Solferino, Fausto Fabbi, Romano Buffardi, cooks; Ferro Pincelli, waiter, former soldier, partisan; Rico, his brother, apprentice cook; Teo Batarra, pharmacist, partisan; Emilio, his brother, tobacco shop owner, partisan; Berto Venturoli, his son Adriano, Nico, Lolo, Fusi, Toto, Braccini & Cardella, farmers, partisans; Valentina Roncuzzi, the butcher's teenage daughter; Brunella Vizioli, Zoli's mother, enemy of Marcellina
O
N THE TRAIN
the whole world was the train.
No noise from the corridor. The other passengers had settled in. The door of my compartment was closed. The conductor had already been through. I was only traveling locally, going home, but nothing was normal; every journey was complicated.
No police, no soldiers. It was almost easy to forget that if it weren't for soldiers and police, the trains would not be running.
My papers were in order. Lucia Fantini of Mengo. Age fifty-five. Born a Sicilian. The lady with the voice at Aldo's. Widow of Aldo, mother of Beppi.
No problems: just a couple of brief confrontations. The usual. I knew how to raise my guard graciously, so the barriers didn't show. To make it seem I'd said yes, when saying no.
“Excuse me, Signora Fantini, it's a great piece of luck we've run into you. As hurried as you are, could you pause two minutes to sing something complimentary? Tomorrow's our wedding anniversary, ten years. My husband was with the army in Africa. He doesn't like to talk about it, in fact he doesn't talk at all. It's the same as if they cut out his tongue. But look, his ears are wide open. Just one short song, something lively?”
“Signora, pardon me, one night I heard you sing at your husband's place which became your son's, I'm sorry the Fascists took it, the bastards. In the company of my in-laws who were paying, as I'd never afford it myself, I thought only of an expensive dinner. No one warned me that Aldo's had singing from the operas of our country. Sitting there unaware, I was destroyed for any voice except your own, and don't bother thanking me for a compliment. It's a fact. May the soul of your husband rest in peace, although truthfully, one doubts that it can, if he knows what's going on. But I trust that one day soon, your splendid restaurant will come back to your family.”
The anxiety of departure was over. No mechanical trouble, no schedule changes, no last-minute boardings, no unexplained delay.
My two shopping bags were from a fashionable dress shop in Bologna, but they were heavy; they contained two sacks of flour. There was still black market flour to be bought. Buried inside, one to each sack, were German gunsâLugers, which my son called “useful, no-fuss bang-bangs, courtesy of our invaders.”
I minded the strain of making it seem that all I carried were tissue-wrapped dresses. In my purse were sturdy little cardboard boxes from a well-known confectioner's, as if I planned to stuff myself with candy. The boxes were packed with ammunition.
I was too hot in my good wool coat. I should have worn something lighter, but the wool had the biggest pockets, for a pair of Berettas, as simple and small as two toys. One was wrapped in my blue and orange silk scarf, an end of which streamed from the pocket elegantly, like a fashion statement. The other was covered by a pair of gloves and some balled-up handkerchiefs.
Our bank accounts were frozen. I had paid the gun-and-flour merchant with a pair of Aldo's gold cuff links. We were running out of jewelry. I no longer wore my wedding ring, but refused to give it up.
I wore no makeup. Sweat, and the possibility of tears, would have ruined it. I hated going out of the house like this, in this particular nakedness, and I was careful to avoid all mirrors. My throat was dry, and so were my lips and mouth, but not because I was thirsty. It was stage fright, the same old symptoms. Sometimes in the spotlight at Aldo's, I'd feel I had swallowed a handful of sand.
But here I was, doing this again, pulling it off again: a lady out shopping, oh, there's nowhere to go to dress up for, and I shouldn't be spending what little money I have, but it came to me this morning that I should spit in the eyes of the war and buy myself something niceâand anyway, I was fed up with how the only other women going into good shops were women of
nazifascisti.
The curtain on the compartment window, tattered and grimy, had been lifted, tucked back by some other passenger. I left it that way.
The train progressed slowly past narrow country roads, wide fields, closed-up houses, trees, Nazi trucks, Nazi tanks, Nazi soldiers in casual groups, smoking cigarettes, their helmets tipped back as if they were working on suntans.
It had rained heavily the day before, but now it was dry and shiny and clear. A perfect November morning, 1943. Every few miles, a small, fluffy pillow of a cloud came into view, framed by the window like a painting.
I thought only of home. This was Aldo's birthday, his seventy-fifth. Just because he wasn't alive was no reason not to acknowledge it.
Three-fourths of a century. A milestone.
I'd made up my mind to be festive about it, and not to let it bother me that Beppi's reason for sneaking to the house later on would be simply to pick up the guns. There was no electricityâit had gone off a month ago. We were nearly out of candles. There wasn't any meat, fish, or bread.
But tonight there'd be a real meal, although the pasta wouldn't take the form of
tagliatelle,
the egg-and-flour noodles Aldo had loved, like all Romagnans. There weren't eggs.
Marcellina Galeffi, our live-in housekeeper, had already cut up leeks for soup. There were tomatoes, chestnuts, artichokes, mushrooms, a few ends of cheese, a little oil, wine, basil, rosemary, and garlic.
Marcellina would do most of the cooking. She was right now at daily Mass in the village, safe with the priest, Don Enzo. “One of the good ones,” she called him. She was crazy about him: a bookish, mild-tempered man, the same age as Beppiâthey'd been at school togetherâbut his opposite in every way.
Enzo would come for the dinner. His family, the Malfadas, were cheese people; they'd supplied the restaurant almost exclusively. Aldo, then Beppi, let Enzo eat for free whenever he wanted, which had been pretty much daily. He had a private table near the back. He used it as an extension of the little stone rectory where he lived, and the church as well.
Just yesterday he'd told Marcellina, as a matter of faith, it was reasonable to expect that, any day now, someone would stick a pin in the German Army, and also all the
fascisti,
plus Mussolini himself, and also Hitler. Pop-pop-pop-pop, and this nightmare would end, with four deflations, and finally his stomach would operate again at full steam.
God bless him, he'd touched Marcellina, no easy thing at her age; she was seventy-one. It was all she'd talk about: balloons, Enzo's belly, poppings. He'd made her feel tender, even though it only lasted one second.
I imagined the dinner preparations. I pictured my smooth old wood table.
In the center, a high mound of flour, volcano-shaped. At the top of the mound, an opening, exactly where lava would erupt.
It was always like this. I was born in a house facing Etna. I'd had plenty of time for my eyes to make imprints of the smooth Romagna hills, which never moved and never would, but still, if something was available to be formed in a moundâlaundry, nuts, bittersweet greens from the garden, sticks for a fire, clams from the beach we couldn't go to anymore because of the warâmy hands made that shape, sometimes pointed, and sometimes with the top leveled off. Even those fleshy spots at Aldo's hips were this way, another lifetime ago, the little mountains he called “the places where you like to hold on to me, not that either of them is where something important could burst from, heh heh heh.”
As if that were the reason he'd grown so stout. To give me something to hold on to. He had died nearly four years ago, at home.
Not a surprise. His cousin Ugo, the only physician he'd let anywhere near him, had been saying for ages that if Aldo's chest were the hood of a car, he'd open it up to let everyone see that the engine was cracked and decrepit; the hoses were clogged beyond repair, and the whole thing was so dysfunctional, the only place it was headed was a junk heap. That was how he had put it. “Good thing you're not a car, Aldo.”
At the moment of his heart attack, the fourth, the one that killed him, he was sitting at the table for lunch, drawing breath to blow on his soup, a fish broth made by Marcellina. He often had his midday meal at home before leaving for the restaurant. The soup was too hot; he'd been running late.
When the bowl crashed to the floor, it took Marcellina a moment to turn around from the stove to see what had happened. She thought he'd thrown it down on purpose. She was waiting for him to shout at her.
Now every time the wind blew hard against the kitchen shutters, she announced with a sigh, “There's Aldo again, blowing. I'll go out and tell him to be quiet. He knows what the Black-shirts have done, but he's got to be patient, which maybe he'll manage in death, having failed at it in life.”
Would Marcellina find milk in the village, to be mixed with water for the dough? She had taken some black market salt to be traded. There would have to be milk. Water into flour without eggs could be done, but water without milk?
I pictured a jug of milk and a saucepan of water heating up. Lacing the water with the milk. Not letting it come to a boil. Taking the pan off the stove. Bringing it to the flour. Tipping it over the mound, dead center. Pouring slowly: an eruption in reverse.
Marcellina would step in for the rough work: bending over the table, mixing and kneading, grunting from the effort, cursing. Until the last of the dough had been cut, she'd raise her creaky old voiceâhuge and a little raspyâagainst God, the Fantini family, her lot as a servant, her age, the hills, the farms, flour itself, Mengo, all Romagna, the Adriatic coast, and all of doomed, hapless, incompetent Italy. Against Germans and Fascists, she never spoke a word in the kitchen. She believed that if she did, the food would be poisoned.
Sunlight. Flour dust. A faint smell in the air of the sea. Mushrooms by the sink, waiting to be washed, with stems in the shape of bullets. Artichokes on the counter like a hill of spiny grenades.
A party to look forward to. No one in Aldo's chair. No one else ever sat there.
Beppi hadn't said what time he'd arrive, but surely he'd wait until evening. What if he showed up with the whole squad? There would not be enough food. They'd get five or six noodles apiece and start squabbling like children. Would Beppi be that impulsive, slinking down from the hills past the Germans with all of them?
They'd made up a song, a merry little tune, easy to whistle or hum.
Oh you ask me.
The group didn't have a proper name. They called themselves “the Mengo squad, mostly composed of waiters.”
Oh you ask me why I closed up my shop, why I brought up my boat to dry land, why I walked away from that restaurantâ¦
Deep within the rhythm of locomotion, that song was with me.
Beppi had a version of his own, which he felt he deserved; he was the leader of the squad. He used to pace around the house in a frenzy, muttering his own lines roughly.
It wasn't really singing; he had no voice. He tapped out the rhythm on the back of his father's chair, or on the top of his own head where, to his horror, at thirty-four, he was balding: I'm a partisan because I want my lights back on, I want fish from my beach, I want gas for my car, I want them out of my restaurant. I want to be back there myself, doing what I learned from my father, which is overcharging my customers, making money, chasing women whom I don't want to marry, hearing my mother sing, and exploiting my lazy waiters and cooks with all my heart.
There were many more lines, some of which he cut short if I entered the room, but I didn't have to hear them to know what they were: I'm a partisan the way two good ears would put up a fight to not be deaf, because the sound of my mother not singing is like looking up at a tower, waiting for the ring of the bell, waiting and waiting, although they told me the clapper was muffled, it was useless, it was wrapped in some kind of shroud.
“I'm going on strike.” I'd announced it like a vow. No discussion.
One day early last spring a young Fascist showed up. He was barely twenty; his chubby cheeks were as smooth as apples. I knew him. His father, a longtime widower, not a Fascist, was with the railway. His mother had died of pneumonia when he was small. An aunt of hisâthe mother's sister-in-law, whom he kept no ties toâused to be a work-at-home baker for Aldo's: a cake woman.
A couple of high-ranked officers had paid the aunt a call, demanding her services, as in, “Here is a list of the types of cakes you will make for us, starting immediately.” She showed them the scars and blisters all over her handsâugly things, beet-red and almost leprous. She couldn't wrap them in bandages for fear of gangrene, and it wasn't from burning herself. It was worse; it was a horrible disease, perhaps contagious. The officers hurried away.
I was the one to apply the makeup to those hands. After all my years in the spotlight, I knew a few things about cosmetics.
The young Fascist wasn't in uniform. He wore an ordinary jersey, as if he were headed for a game of soccer. But he also had his boots on, newly polished. A revolver was on his hip. He kept touching it nervously, as if it itched, and he couldn't not scratch it.