Lambrusco (11 page)

I tried to lift my head to look at Ugo. An astonishing tremor of pain went through me, as if I'd just been hit hard in the face, but I was able to not cry out.

How still Ugo was, sitting there like that! He reminded me of the time Buddhist monks had appeared one evening at the second
trattoria
—four or five of them, Asian-faced and nearly bald, in colorful, sunset-colored robes, like an old Roman senator's. They spoke no Italian. They had wooden bowls in their hands and chopsticks in pouches that hung from their belts. They'd been going about the countryside, looking at things, requesting food along the way. When they knocked at the kitchen door, the one who answered was Beppi.

He was thrilled with them. He made Aldo invite them inside, to be seated at one of the best tables, which they'd refused. So Aldo and Beppi set up a table for them in the yard.

It was the first time, maybe the only time, I sang without Beppi in front of my eyes. Where was Beppi, where was Beppi? The spotlight was about to go on, where
was
he?

One of the Triumvirate—Cenzo—had come to my rescue. He knew what I was feeling. He maneuvered himself to the front of the room and whispered to me, “Your son is with monks. That's not a joke, or wishful thinking. Those Buddhist monks are on the patio. They are eating with chopsticks. Your son's eyes are popping out of his head. He's overjoyed, and Aldo says leave him out there, because this is the first time he did actual work around here. He's waiting on them. I'm sorry to tell you, your performance tonight, as far as he's concerned, has been trumped.”

To annoy Beppi, I sang from
Cenerentola,
in spite of an all-Puccini program. And afterward, it was all we heard about. He wanted to study meditation, he wanted a crimson robe, a pouch, a bowl, his head shaved. “I'll still use a fork when I eat, though,” he'd said. “I'm too Italian not to.”

At home, he plunked himself down on the floor in the front hall every morning, sometimes cross-legged, sometimes sitting back, half kneeling. He'd be absolutely still for as much as half an hour at a time. Marcellina had worried about it a great deal. “He's turning himself into a doorstop! He's going to convert, and leave us! He'll run away to the Orient!” At work, the cooks and waiters told him if he wanted to sit around underfoot, like a fresh head of cabbage, they'd pick him up and throw him into the soup.

That was what Ugo reminded me of. I'd had to lie back again—the pain wouldn't let me do anything else—and I knew I had better keep quiet. Keep quiet, and hide all feeling.

My heart, my heart, under the sand like a clam.

Nothing. That wasn't a song, either. On the day of Aldo's funeral, Beppi had said to Ugo, “You have to be my substitute father now, and don't tell me I'm too old to need one.”

Another, lesser man might have shuffled in his shoes with anxiety and discomfort, or made a joke of it, thinking Beppi too sentimental, a big baby. Ugo had held out his hand to seal the deal, solemnly.

“Please give her something to drink. God help me for having nothing else to suggest.” It was Ugo who'd spoken, but if my eyes were closed, I never would have guessed it. What was the matter with him? He sounded too flat and despairing to blame it on his lost, blown-up car, or his missing medical kit.

Zoli crouched down beside me. He had a canteen of water. “I'm sorry we haven't got any glasses,” he said.

I could not lift my head; it was simply too heavy. When he pressed the spout to my lips, I couldn't bear it.

“Where's your mother, Zoli?” I said. “Marcellina thought she'd be hiding in the cave with everyone else, because San Guarino is her hometown.”

“Mama,” he said, “is at home with my wife and the kids. They're probably hiding in the cellar.”

“Marcellina's not speaking to her. Her old best friend.”

“I know. It's all right. It gives them more pleasure to hate each other than to behave with any affection.”

“How many children do you have, Zoli? It's so hard to keep track.”

“Seven, but I'm still working on it. I want to beat out Mauro, even without the advantage of all those twins. I want to have ten altogether. Please, will you drink a little water?”

“I can't.”

Poor Zoli, he looked as if I'd made him want to cry. At the restaurant he was the second most popular waiter, after Mauro. He was a born coaxer, a real artist at it. Whenever the cooks ran short of one type of provision, invariably with a surplus of something else, they prevailed upon Zoli to go out and sell the something else to Aldo's customers. Often he went through a whole shift without waiting on tables of his own. He'd take on the role of kitchen spokesman and hobnob with the diners, suavely and effectively.

He'd inquire how everything was. He'd make suggestions, in an insider's way. “You should consider changing your order for the veal. Confidentially, I tasted it myself. It pains me to say this, at the risk of my job, but for me, all that matters is the satisfaction of my customers. The veal may have come from an inferior breeding line, or an unscrupulous dealer, who, believe me, if that's the case, we will never use again,” he'd say silkily, on an evening when the veal had run out. “But the calamari's spectacular tonight, and so is the grilled
sogliola,
not to mention the heights they've risen to with the crabs, which, if that's what you want to order, I'll have to rush to the kitchen to make sure there's any left. You know how it is when a cook has spontaneously created a masterpiece. Word gets out and there's a rush on it, because everyone wants to talk the next day about how they were among the lucky few to have had it.”

There wouldn't be squid; there wouldn't be grilled sole. There'd only be crabs, dozens of them, scrambling and fighting in the sinks, and in buckets all over the kitchen.

“She doesn't want water,” said that not-Ugo's voice. He didn't even sound like a doctor prescribing something. He just sounded so terribly
flat.

“Get out my way, Zoli, before I trip on you. The doctor's right. I've got something better.”

Cesare's silver-white head came level with mine. He was a large, tall man; it must have taken a lot of effort for him to get down on the ground. I felt as if a big shaggy creature—a tame, oddly colored lion—had decided to lie down beside me.

I felt a special tenderness for him.

One morning, Aldo sat up beside me in our bed, tapped my shoulder, and told me he didn't feel well. His face had an ashen pallor; his eyes looked terrified. It turned out to be the first of his heart attacks, and I refused to leave him, even though Ugo had come and promised to stay. I didn't care that a large English tour group from Oxford University, or maybe it was Cambridge, had booked the restaurant for a private party, paying extra to hear the singing.

Aldo did that. He never let tour groups know it was free.

We decided to enlist Cesare to take my place. “We're giving you a splendid baritone, who so far is only famous in Italy, but the whole world is panting to receive him,” the waiters said. “Wait until you hear his Verdi! He will heat you so deeply, you'll retain the warmth, long after you're home, in spite of your damp and frigid climate. You'll hear some of your Shakespeare as well. We feel you can't possibly appreciate him until you've heard him in Italian, the language of his soul.”

Aldo had been hoping anyway to get Cesare to expand his horizons as a singer, and not just give his voice to people he already knew, and to God. He'd never sung in a professional capacity, but Aldo had felt that, given the chance, he would soar, he'd be a sensation. This had not happened.

Around nine on the evening of his performance, when the spotlight should have been just turned on, with Cesare in it, I looked up from my chair at Aldo's side to see Nizarro in the doorway—not coming to see how Aldo was, or to speak to Ugo about his prognosis, which was, “Don't worry, the engine only stalled, and he's a long way from dead.”

Nizarro had come to beg me to get dressed and rush to the restaurant and sing some
Otello
and
Aida,
because Aldo wasn't the only one who'd had an attack. Cesare had panicked. It was completely hysterical, with no basis in anything physical, but all the same, his throat closed up like a fist.

It had not been possible for me to leave that room, not with Aldo so frightened, not with Ugo right there.

There'd nearly been an English riot of protest in the restaurant, but Beppi refunded their money and gave them free wine. He ordered Nomad into the spotlight, after lathering him up with
grappa,
to tell jokes in English and sing the drinking songs he'd learned as a waiter in his London hotel. The professors and their wives had enjoyed it.

And then Beppi came home to cheer up his father with an enthusiastic bellowing of a song he'd memorized immediately, about the interest of famous philosophers in getting drunk. “Aristotle, Aristotle, was a lover of the bottle,” it went. And, “I drink, therefore I am.”

When Aldo was on his feet again, I went to Cesare's house, a thing I'd never done before with a waiter. I grasped his hands. I told him I knew how he felt. I told him that if he wanted to stick to weddings and hymns, he should do so. I told him that if he attempted to stop singing because of one small misstep—that was what I called it, a misstep, not a failure—I'd stop as well, I'd never sing another note, and Aldo would hold it against him, and fire him, and make sure no other restaurant would have him, end of discussion. He'd wanted to know if I had ever walked out on an audience without performing, and I told him the truth. “Almost, but there's no comparison, because you're not the one who has to go home with Aldo.”

Cesare trusted me. He deserved the same in return.

He didn't ask me to try to move any part of myself. It occurred to me to wonder what I looked like. “Cesare,” I whispered, “what do I look like?”

“Like yourself.”

“I think I have bruises. My face—how is my face?”

“As lovely as always, Lucia.”

He had removed the hard crust from a small piece of bread. He'd soaked it with wine. “Look, Lucia, pink bread. Taste it. I think it will go down easy.”

I didn't want to taste anything. “What's the matter with Ugo, Cesare?”

“He's despondent because he hasn't got his instruments and medicines, and also—much worse—he's got it into his head that, any second now, you are going to die. I'm begging you to help me cheer him up.”

“Die from what?”

“From starvation, thirst, and a very big headache, Lucia. So we're taking care of everything at once.”

I allowed Cesare to feed me a bit of the pinkened bread, then more of it, then all of it.

Lambrusco! I'd never had it in this manner before, but the taste was the same, light and slightly fruity, but minus the little fizzy sparkle, which the bread had absorbed.

“It was Cenzo's idea to fix it like this for you,” said Zoli, who was just behind Cesare.

And there was Cenzo, peering down at me from over Zoli's shoulder, narrow-eyed, worried, without his usual, I'm-about-to-start-growling expression.

I'd often wondered if Cenzo's wife's chickens were terrified of him, as if, in their eyes, he looked like a fuming, enormous, mythological god who might raise his foot and kick them at any moment or crush them to feathery bits. But with his daughter, Pia, he was said to be angelic, doting on her, never letting on to her how rotten he felt about her condition. A deaf-mute for a child! It was unimaginable to me.

There had never been requests for special songs from him. Unlike all the other waiters and cooks, he'd never spoken to me about the way my singing made him feel. He'd never congratulated me for a successful program. Maybe he'd taken a psychological stance against music and all beautiful sounds in general, in alliance with Pia, in much the same way that Cesare would not eat nuts; one of his children was allergic to them.

Cenzo's specialty at the restaurant was to spare his bosses from direct interaction with troublemakers.

Every night it was something, some problem. He'd taken over as cop because Nizarro, lording it up as headwaiter, turned out to be, as Aldo had put it, overly energetic in his tactics. One night Nizarro broke an expensive Etto Renzetti chair by rushing out to the parking lot and slamming it against the hood of a car that was about to be driven away by a man who had not paid his bill. When the man flew to Aldo to insist that the restaurant foot the bill for repairs to his car, Nizarro took a swing at him with the part of the chair he still had left in his hand, and they'd had to call in Ugo to stop the blood, and everyone heard about it; it was a full-blown scandal, and the only thing Nizarro would say by way of accounting for his behavior was, “At least I took the time to make sure that he wasn't a high-placed Fascist, or some political bigwig, before I sprang into action.”

Cenzo had some subtlety, which took customers by surprise. He'd unnerve a problem maker by not acting like the thug he seemed to be. Valuing discretion, he'd be thoughtful and sparing of words, which might have come from his experience as a father. He'd created a hand-signal system so he could talk to his daughter at home, like a one-of-a-kind, daily-life mime show, which had delighted Beppi so much when he found out about it, he'd had to learn some signals himself.

It was just like what had happened with the Buddhists—that same fascination. He drove the staff wild by screaming at them with his mouth shut tight. He'd frantically wiggle his fingers and wave his arms, and let his hands flop about in the air, as if he suffered from fits, which he'd found absolutely delightful.

Cenzo's face looked softer than I'd ever seen it before. The cypress trees seemed to have moved their shadowy branches a bit closer together. I had the sense of being safe, in the protection of a soft, dark-green wall.