The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (23 page)

‘And then there was my fear about wanting a man more than he would want me. We do seem to want them more than they want us, don't you think? Over the years one can't help but witness, here and there, how women are wont to chase after love, to beg for it, to try and
earn
it. I preferred to stay aloof. To keep love a stranger. But what I feared even more than begging a man to love me was that
I might hurt a man I loved
. Causing the beloved pain is the precursor to hating him, hate being easier to bear than guilt. That's what happened between my mother and father. I'm sure of it. Then the process of discarding the beloved begins. The casting aside.'

Paolina says this last phrase in English.
The casting aside
. She repeats it in a faraway voice.

‘I love that English verb – to cast. I learned it a long time ago when … when a friend, a friend of Umberto's … when he was teaching Domenica to fish for mullet in the lake of Bolsena. He – this friend – had learned English in Boston. Boston College, I think that was where he studied.'

‘A fine Jesuit school,' I say, implying a connection to Umberto's seminarists. She concedes the innuendo but only halfway. I get up to fetch a candle, light it from a hearth flame.

‘Yes, this friend was, indeed, a Jesuit. In any case, he decided that Domenica should learn to speak English while he was learning to fish. “And now, Domenica, watch the movement of my arm as I cast my line.” To cast. To cast aside. To cast away. I remember sitting there a bit behind where the two of them were standing. I would repeat the English words so that I could help Domenica to remember them later. From “to cast”, it was an easy jump back to Italian –
castigo
. Punishment. Yes, one punishes the beloved – casts him aside – because one has wronged him. And when one is free of him, one strives to begin the process again with the next “beloved”. Love, pain, hate, the casting aside. No, I would stay
aloof
.'

‘I take it back. You're not a Fransiscan. Pure Jesuit you are, Paolina. Rationale, suspicion, theory, not even a Jesuit can apply logic to love, though. I don't believe it's you who's kept love a stranger. Love goes where it will. It may yet come to call on you.'

Paolina laughs, if without mirth, and I look at her, begin speaking in a sing-song parody of her voice:
No, I would stay aloof. I preferred to keep love a stranger …
She begins to really laugh then and I continue, mercilessly, to mimic her until we're both supine and breathless.

‘Haughty Jesuit,' I say, sitting up to stir the fire.

‘Haughty Jesuit,' she repeats as though the allegation intrigues her. As though she's never considered herself a ‘pure' Jesuit, complete with rationale and suspicion and theory.

‘So it's not too late, then. I mean, for me to …'

‘Who knows, Paolina?'

Her laugh is dreamy. Pulling the elastic from her hair, she rebinds it, repeats the two steps.

‘It's been half a lifetime since I've even tried to imagine what it would be like not to be alone …'

‘Who ever said that love staves off aloneless? You might very well be in love and be still alone. Many of us are. I don't necessarily disagree any more than I agree with all your
Jesuitness
regarding love. I am only suggesting it's moot until love decides to have its way with you.
Basta
. Now what I want to know is, how did you come to be Umberto's cook?'

‘That's easy. My little Beppa.'

‘Beppa?'

•

‘From the first day when I settled into the small red room, I dearly wished to earn my keep in the parish house. I wanted to work in the kitchen,' Paolina says. ‘I opened the subject with Carolina. Before I'd even finished presenting my case, she was already bent on distracting me.'

‘“
Ma tesoro
, wouldn't it be lovelier to work in the gardens?” she said. “Once the baby is born we could set its cradle under the olives or in the saddle of one of the oaks.”

‘I said I would prefer to set his cradle on the work table where we could see one another while I mixed the bread or …

Cringing, she said, “I'll speak to Beppa.”

‘“Maria-Giuseppa, ‘Beppa', a widow past seventy, her old weeds faded from black to bronze, her hair so red it showed purple in the sunlight, Beppa walked into town from a neighbouring commune every morning to cook for Umberto and had done so since he'd come to live there. Her devotion to Umberto's supper was the fundamental substance of Beppa's life. And when Carolina arrived and then Luigia, Beppa dug her stick deeper into the lines around her dominion. The parish house kitchen was hers.

‘Her body frail, her grit titanic, Beppa was famous for ravaging the shops, steering her wheeled plastic cart, string bags flapping on her wrists, negotiating with the merchants for every banana and stalk of parsley. Fierce as a scavenging bird, she would swoop upon the wilted, the withered, the perishing, demanding them for a pittance. Only meat and fish must be of exquisite quality and worthy of Umberto's lire. Trusting to no one for eggs, she brought them each morning, warm from her own hens, wrapped in newspaper. She baked bread every other day. These elements gave Beppa a certain culinary independence so that, with a few wild herbs from the imperishable stash in her pockets, the barrel of good oil in the pantry, the little jars and bottles of things she'd conserved in the summer, Beppa could perform a daily rendering of Loaves and Fishes. Thus, in the shops she could be ruthless, repeating ad infinitum to the merchants that the food she was gathering was to nourish God's own disciple and weren't they ashamed to take profit from the pocket of God himself. With equal repetition the merchants would roll their eyes, saying if only they could eat and drink with the abandon of the clergy: ‘“
Magari
,
fosse vero
, if only it were true.”

‘Beppa's loyalty to her cause was unshakeable. Even before she would unpack her cart, she would march – her pigeon-toed step bouncing in jubilation – into Umberto's study. Under his desk lamp, she would tuck the morning's receipts wrapped around his change, patting flat the edges of the paper, smoothing the doily over it, her gestures as tender as Umberto's when he anointed a baby with chrism. Only then would she set to work.

‘First Beppa would take stock of what she called her
caveau
. Her safe. A shelf in the refrigerator, forbidden to the householders, it was where she stashed her treasures: a precious half a litre of reduced broth; a cup or two of cooked white beans; pasta, cooked and undressed; dripping caught from roasting meat; a few spoonsful of one sauce or another; a heel of bread; the crusts from an aged cheese. In part, Beppa's menu was always based on the menu from the day before. An expression of frugality, her ritual saving was a kind of insurance stringing the house meals together, each supper promising there would be another one tomorrow.

‘Not unlike a French cook who dips daily into a cassoulet that has sat on the back burner for twenty years or more, replenishing her withdrawals with fresh elements and mixing them together with the old so that her pot never empties,' I say. So did Beppa operate her kitchen.

‘Whether cooking for two or fifty, Beppa's culinary battery was as scarce as it was sacrosanct: one knife, a great heavy pot, a sauté pan, a medium saucepan, three or four terracotta dishes for the oven, a slab of polished olivewood for a cutting board, one of marble for rolling pasta with a litre-size wine bottle, two ladles and a stoneware pitcher full of wooden spoons, all her exclusive property. And she liked to be alone in her kitchen, Beppa did. When Carolina told her of my desired “apprenticeship”, suggested that, henceforth, I would be there to
help
her for a part of each morning, Beppa had turned from the pot she'd been stirring, ripped off her pinafore, started in weeping and howling. “
Ringraziamento
, gratitude,” she'd sobbed over and over until Umberto came running in to quiet her.

‘“
Beppina, amore mio, you are not being disenthroned but honoured. Don't you see that? Paolina wants to learn from you
.”

‘Neither Carolina nor Umberto would prevail. Beppa dug her stick deeper yet into the dirt. I decided to try devices of my own.

‘Next morning when she arrived, she found me in front of the burners frying sweet rice fritters.

‘“
Sorpresa
. Surprise,” I said and pulled out a chair for her at the kitchen table. “
Facciamo colazione insieme
, let's have breakfast together,” I chirped as though the fritters and I would be welcome gifts.

‘Saying not a word, Beppa allowed me to ease her into a chair, to pour her caffé. Sliding the sugar bowl to her, I said, “There was some cooked rice in the fridge and an egg and … well, I thought I'd just mix up a dose of batter and …”

‘“One doesn't make sweet fritters with rice cooked in water. It must be cooked in milk.”

‘“Of course, well, I … I guess I didn't know that but, well …”

‘I pulled a tiny pyramid of fritters from the oven where I'd been keeping them warm, set the plate before her and went back to the business of frying the rest. I kept my back to her. When finally I turned around, she was daintily snaffling the second from the last one.

‘“Sono buone. They're good. A suspicion of cinnamon would have helped. If you'd thinned the batter with half a glass of white wine they might have almost been right. If there's milk, I'll cook some rice before I leave. We'll make fritelle together tomorrow. And never use that saucepan for frying.
Mai più
. Never again.”

‘“Never. Never, Beppa.”

‘I ran out into the garden and, prancing in raptures among the flowers, my arms tight around my belly, I kept thinking back to that day with Niccolò's tomatoes. And now, with
Beppina …
how much more I would learn.

‘A brooder who rarely spoke save to mock and torment the merchants, Beppa was. But almost from the beginning of my tenure in her kitchen, she barely took a breath from her stories: memories, affirmations, revelations, mostly culinary.

‘I think my favourite was the one about her birth. Beppa said she was born lucky. A sixteen-year-old sharecropper, her mother had been digging potatoes when a colossal pain rent her back, kidney to kidney. But, digging potatoes, one always had pain, her mother thought. And, anyway, the baby wasn't due for a month or more. And so Beppa was birthed in a potato field directly onto the rich black soil of Umbria. She and her mother were carried then to lie in the shade of an umbrella pine while the other women wet aprons and kerchiefs in the cool white wine from their lunch baskets and washed mother and child. They set Beppa to suck. The women fed her mother a pap of bread and wine and wild sage and sat with she and Beppa in a circle under the tree. Beppa's mother said the women sang and passed bread and onions and cheese to one another and drank their wine and told their own stories about birthing. They said the potatoes could wait until sunset, until Beppa and her mother had rested and the men came in from the farther fields with a wagon to take them home.

‘Beppa would go quiet then, allowing herself to see the scene as her mother had described it. And then she'd get around to talking about the soup, the potion, the countrywomen fed to her mother: “Millennial elixir of the country people, as good for dying as it is for birthing, for healing heartache, nourishing joy, for calming pain. I'm happy when I'm bending in the meadows to gather herbs, to carry the fine-smelling things home in my pockets, to tear them then into a pot of good fresh water and let them heat and steep before I crumble in a heft of yesterday's bread. It's another kind of mass, the ceremony of ladling the broth into a bowl over a new-laid egg. The broth warms the egg, poaches it to a soft tremor and then, with a big spoon, one breaks the yolk, stirs it once or twice. Consoling. Yes, the little soup tastes of consolation. Don't you think mine was the most beautiful way for a baby to come into the world?”

‘Each time Beppa told the story, she would end it with the same question: “Could anything be better, Paolina? Don't you think mine was the most beautiful way for a baby to come into the world?” And then, answering it herself, she would say: “Oh, it was, Paolina. That it was.”

‘I'm certain that the story of her birth shaped Beppa, that it formed her security, her self-worth, that it shaped everything about her, from how she cooked to how she made love to how she raised her children. Life to Beppa was the opportunity to take her turn in the ancient pageant of Umbrian tradition, abiding the spoken and silent ways and means her forebears had abided. Never wanting more than her portion nor would Beppa have accepted less than it. Beppa was born
Umbrian
.

‘Also you were born, Umbrian,' I say to Paolina.

‘I was. But my family – mostly my mother, I think – had been robbed of Beppa's sense of primal contentment with life. Like others of their generation, my parents were driven by other notions. The epic rural family with its miseries and its comforts perished with the end of the Second World War. Most of the sharecroppers escaped from the countryside to the fresh torments of urban factories. Happiness is, very often, a new set of problems. But even for those who stayed to work the land in the fifties and sixties, rural life was never quite the same. The greater world had chinked away at, and corrupted, the farmers' devotion to heritage and ritual. Beppina was one of the last of the tribe of genuine traditionalists. Miranda is another one. Gilda and Ninuccia, too, if in other expressions than Miranda's and Beppa's. I'm not of their ilk, though I wish I were and try to be. I think of Beppa's stories so often it's almost as though they're my own. She would like that. I know she would. As long as I knew Beppina – and that was for nineteen years, until the day she died – her fortune never ceased to astonish her. I have always sought to be astonished by my own.'