Lambrusco (7 page)

S
PRING
, 1924. Almost twenty years ago. That was when I knew about Ugo.

It was a Saturday evening at the
trattoria.
This was the second one, the bigger one. There were six long tables seating eight apiece, or even a dozen if people were willing to be squashed together, which they usually were. The smaller tables—prime seating—were by the windows.

Mariano Minzoni, stolen by Aldo from the Grand Hotel in Rimini, was already head of the kitchen, and even then, still youthful, he was cocky and arrogant, terrorizing everyone. Poor Gigi Solferino, having hoped for the position, was overwhelmed with depression, realizing that Mariano had it all over him; he'd been relegated to a life of second place. It never occurred to him, or to any of them, to quit working for Aldo. “Aldo Fantini,” they'd say, “is the devil himself in many ways, but no one pays better, and no one else shuts his eyes when you're squirreling from the larder for your family.”

Gigi was the one cook I felt sorry for. When he came to me, bashfully, to ask me to sing something special on the last Saturday of April, I agreed, even though I wasn't thrilled about the choice.

A certain woman, Gigi told me, would dine at Aldo's that Saturday, and he planned to ask her, at the end of his shift, to marry him. Her name was Bianca. She was originally from Turin, and worked as a seamstress in San Marino.

The piece he requested was
“Una furtiva lagrima”
from
L'Elisir d'amore,
in my opinion the worst, most drippingly sentimental song ever put into an opera by an Italian. The opening lines, with the “one secret tear,” always made me imagine that the young woman being sung about was a bizarre, Cyclops-like creature, with a giant, wet eye in the middle of her forehead. It was maudlin. Who ever cried just one tear in one eye?

Gigi, however, was within his rights to have made the request. Waiters and cooks were entitled to petition me for songs: for birthdays, anniversaries, births of children, confirmations, baptisms, deaths, all sorts of things. That winter, I'd done an all-Verdi evening for Franco Calderoni, who was leaving the next day for his new job in London; that was when everyone started calling him Nomad. The name stuck, although after he returned, six years later, he never went anywhere again.

And Nizarro had wanted some
Rigoletto
for his teenage daughter, who was mooning around for a handsome, son-of-corrupt-old-aristocrats boy, and was, Nizarro felt, on the road to a personal disaster. He'd thought it would be a good idea to bring her in for dinner and let her see what happened to girls like Rigoletto's daughter, Gilda. Seduced by a prince, thinking yourself in love with him, you end up dead in a big burlap bag, on your way to being heaved into a river.

It was always something. Sing this, sing that. I honored them all as a matter of course. The one-eye song was my first request from Gigi, as well as my own first performance for a marriage proposal. So I took it seriously.

The air was unusually chilly. It was fizzy with a cold rain. Fog had rolled in from the sea—not the gentle, wispy-white fog of most spring evenings, softening everything, but a gray, harsh cloud, as if the shoreline were burning.

People waiting for tables were supposed to stay outside in a queue, along with villagers who turned up to hear the singing. Around nine in the evening, just before I went on, they decided to come inside, some twenty of them, damp and shivering.

Aldo eyed the newcomers warily. Standees made him nervous, especially the ones who weren't spending any money. He sent me a signal: a smile, then an uplift of his right hand, with his thumb and index finger measuring about an inch of space, which meant, “Darling, keep it brief.”

My gown was beige silk, for a Leoncavallo-Donizetti program.

I hadn't sung from
Pagliacci
for a while, and it always went over big. I planned to open with Nedda-Columbina's dramatic
ballatella
from the first act, describing loud, cawing flocks of birds, shooting off into the sky like so many arrows, chased by wind and storms—a song about portents, dreams, and mysterious powers. Next would come the
“Vesti la giubba”
of Nedda's miserable actor-husband. Well, a soprano version of it.

Singing his song made me feel I wore clothes that belonged to someone else, in a fashion I'd never choose, but I was forced to make the best of it. I knew how to play it so that it seemed I'd stepped outside of myself, as though, personally, I was incapable of emotions such as malice, spite, possessiveness. Ha ha ha ha! Laugh and everyone will applaud! Laugh, Pagliaccio, about your shattered-to-pieces love! Laugh at the poisonous pain in your heart!

It was the only non-Rossini song that Beppi liked, but he was a teenager then.

L'Elisir d'amore
would follow it, with two brief parts-of-songs, preceding Gigi's special one. Where was Beppi anyway?

I hadn't spotted him. I saw Gigi by the kitchen door, beside Mariano, who must have found out about the girlfriend and the song. Mariano disliked it as much as I did, and he sent me a signal of his own. He put on an exaggerated frown and held a finger to the side of his face, languidly tracing the line of one tear down one cheek.

Which female diner was Bianca? It wasn't my custom to look around at the tables, but tonight was different. Was she the long-nosed girl with a group of other girls, all of them apparently single, looking merry and hopeful and a little bit tipsy? The one in a bright flowered dress nearby, seated with a family but very much alone, with pale skin and tired eyes, and hair pulled back so severely, it seemed that the tightness pained her?

Then there was Beppi at last, at the height of that phase: half boy, one-quarter man, one-quarter God knew what kind of creature, prickly and scowling and restless, at odds with himself and the world. He was coming out of the kitchen to stand at the back with the cooks. I was able to meet his eyes—our old habit—before positioning myself to start singing.

Then I saw Ugo Fantini.

There were often Fascists among the diners. That night there were three officers at a window-side table. They weren't local men. The standing crowd had gone nowhere near them, in the same way standees in a theater wouldn't approach the high-priced seats.

Their waiter was Nizarro. He didn't often wait tables, but he preferred to handle the big-time Blackshirts himself. He'd placed himself near the oldest-looking Fascist, as if he'd taken on the role of a soldier standing guard.

It seemed the fourth chair at that table was unoccupied. Nizarro wouldn't have been blocking it like that if someone were in it. But something had distracted him, had made him turn, just for an instant.

Why was Ugo sitting in that chair? Why was Nizarro concealing him?

Why was Ugo here in the first place? He was a temporary bachelor. Eliana had gone home to the Abruzzi, to the grim little mountaintop, perched-on-a-cliff village that was her home. I knew from photographs that the village looked like a raptor's nest. I knew from Marcellina that Eliana planned to visit a shrine on the mountain that was said to be helpful for women with her problem: she was almost forty, and still, to her sorrow, barren, not that anyone was using that word.

Ugo had a habit of staying at home when his wife was away. On Thursday, Marcellina had wanted to go to his house. She'd made a batch of
piadine
—which Ugo never could get enough of. No one, he felt, made it half as well as she did. And she'd bought cheese from the Malfadas to go with it, his favorite: the creamy, custardy, almost-sweet Emilia specialty called
squacquerone.

A simple thing like flatbread and cheese could send him into raptures, even when he knew Marcellina was trying to bribe him. In this case, the time had been drawing near for her annual checkup. She believed that if she buttered up Ugo in advance, she'd be much more likely to be told that nothing was wrong with her or, better, he'd tell her to skip the appointment altogether.

But Aldo had said not to bother. He and Beppi ate the bread and cheese themselves. Ugo, he explained, had decided to take advantage of his wife's absence. He'd gone to Bologna for a seminar at the medical institute, and to catch up with old friends of his. Political friends? No, no, Aldo said, not that; Ugo's not a Socialist anymore; he thinks of nothing but medicine, his patients. He was simply taking an impulsive, working vacation.

Which was something he'd never done before. When was the last time Ugo left Mengo overnight? No one could remember, but Aldo had sounded convincing.

Ugo at that table!

Nizarro resumed his secretive guard stance, and the room grew quieter, with that same old pre-performance background noise of throats being cleared, little coughs, tinkling silver, whispers, shufflings, chairs being turned this way or that, scraping against the floor.

The main lights dimmed. When the spotlight came on, I wouldn't be able to see anything—or anyone. Nizarro only needed to keep Ugo hidden in normal light.

I had seen the way he wasn't sitting up straight in that chair. I'd seen him sideways, slumped a little, his head low, as if he were staring at his own chest. I had the sense that his eyes weren't completely open, or he was struggling to stay alert, like a man who'd had too much to drink. Was he drunk?

No, of course not. He had a sensitive stomach: anything more, or stronger, than a couple of glasses of wine would only have made him sick. He'd have gone off by himself to the toilet. Then he'd go home. He wouldn't have chosen to let anyone see him weak or out of control.

The spotlight: pale silver-white, an expensive luxury. Aldo had had it rigged up from the ceiling, so it would look like I was standing in moonlight, the only one in the room the moon would choose to shine on. The trick was to not flinch or even blink when it came on, and I didn't.

The suit Ugo wore was his dark-brown one. The only brown suit he owned.

He'd been wearing it four days ago, in the middle of the morning, when he stopped by the house on his way to some patient. Aldo had asked him to listen to his heart. He'd felt an irregularity. He'd been scared. Beppi had been at school.

We were in the kitchen: me, Marcellina, Aldo, Ugo. The heart was listened to.

“If you were a car,” Ugo told him, “you'd have a couple thousand miles or so before you need an overhaul, so don't worry. You're rattling, but you're far from conking out.”

And that was that, and Marcellina started bustling around, and there'd been coffee and biscuits. Sitting at the table. Aldo in his chair, handing Ugo an ashtray. Marcellina telling Ugo he shouldn't smoke in front of me, as it was bad for my throat.

Ugo not lighting the cigarette in his hand. Putting the cigarette back into the flat silver case he carried everywhere—a gift from Aldo. Slipping the case into the pocket of the brown jacket. Picking up his cup of coffee. Looking at me. Yes, looking at me.

That look in his eyes. Quick, so quick. He was careful about it. He made it seem that all he cared about was the condition of my vocal cords. I hadn't imagined it.

“I'm only rattling! Hey! I've got miles and miles!” Aldo had been happy.

Now the light. Everyone had said that Mussolini's Fascists wouldn't pose any actual danger, not here. Why should they care about a place like Mengo? Wasn't it possible that when Blackshirts showed up, they were only instructors at the new youth camps? With their make-believe guns? Or they came for the sea air, just like anyone else?

In places like Rome and Milan they were going after journalists, intellectuals, professionals. Everyone had heard stories. A man here, a man there. A body turning up on the side of a road, another one on the steps of a newspaper office, another in the center of a square.

Terrible, alarming stories. But still, they seemed to have come from far away, from a different country—from another Italy, remote, unfamiliar, unreal. There was only one man in Mengo who'd fit a description of someone a Fascist would be nervous about.

I went shaky all over, as if a fright were coming. But the symptoms were different. Prickles all over my skin. A sense that a wet, chilly air had blown in. A bothersome irritation at the back of my mouth, as though a sob or a gasp were trying to get out, and could not.

Simple, physical things. All manageable. Anyone else in my situation would have felt the same anxiety, the same sensations. But this time it wasn't about singing. It wasn't a throatful of sand.

“It's real life,” I said to myself. “Fascists took Ugo four days ago, and no one told me and he hasn't been home to change his clothes, and Aldo lied to me so I wouldn't worry, and Beppi lied to me, too, by not telling me, and Aldo made Nizarro hide him, and everyone's bent on concealing real life from me, even Marcellina!”

These facts entered into my brain like the story of an opera I had just started learning. Aldo would have known I wouldn't sing if I were distracted. There must have been interrogations. What was Ugo up to? Why didn't I know what he'd been doing?