I rose early the following morning, quickly dressed, and went out on my own, with Leone, just three months old, strapped into the pouch. I stopped for an espresso and a cold apricot juice at the nearby bar on my way up to the market in the square. I used my accumulated Italian gathered during these now half-dozen consecutive years of summer visits, and I had money in the right currency in my wallet gotten from the local ATM machine.
In the square, I found my ideal kind of man. Missing most of his teeth, with his zipper gaping open, he was selling zucchini blossoms under the shade of a large tree. Guys like this are getting hard to come by anymore, even here in this little Italian town. He pulled back the burlap that covered the wagon of his three-wheeled motor cart and showed me, with shaking arthritic hands, his fresh black-eyed peas in the shell, his dark purple green beans, his zucchini flowers. He had a little crate of imperfect prune plums and small dark green watermelons no bigger than a regulation softball. I take some of everything he’s got. I know that when he dies he’s the last, and this—this—the pants held up with a piece of twine, his work shoes dusty and curling up at the toes, and the simple way he has tossed his wares into the bed of the wagon next to the jug of gasoline and the coil of thin rope and the cracked plastic pails, covering them with a light sheet of burlap—a grain sack split open to make a sheet—this all goes when he goes.
When I asked him how much for the zucchini flowers he said, “One euro the handful” and began filling a crumpled up recycled plastic bag that he dug out of the front seat of his little ape, the three-wheeled motor scooter made by the same company that invented the Vespa. Called the ape—bee—because it makes that noise with its fifty cubic centimeter lawnmower engine. He ended up giving me handfuls as big as we would call armfuls of the bright yellow-orange blossoms with powdery dark amber centers.
There are no more donkeys with wooden saddles, no more community ovens where all the women in the village bring their breads and casseroles, no more tinkling of goat bells in the oregano-scented breeze from a small herd and their herder coming down the mountain—him carrying a tall stick and smoking a filterless cigarette, looking like he’s in his eighties. They are all but gone, these kinds of people who make and grow food. Here in this average daily market that sets up each morning in the square next to the bocce courts and the permanent butcher and fish monger, my vecchio boyfriend here with his fly gaping open and his posture bent in half is unique. His companions are here in state-of-the-art mobile stalls—clean, electrified dromedaries that carry their own source of running water. Traveling stores whose windows pop open on the sides and “eccola!” there you are having your cured meats sliced on the spot, imported from Germany, or even if imported from Emiglia-Romana it’s all the same because we are not in Emiglia-Romana, we are in Puglia. There is smoked scamorza and bread from the hard durum wheat, salted capers in three sizes from the size of a lentil to the size of a fat green English pea. And there are big bouquets of dried oregano, alongside vats of brined things, mostly olives. But the vendors themselves are intermediaries, just merchants. The produce guy wears a T-shirt emblazoned with a currently hip rock band and a huge pair of counterfeit Gucci sunglasses with white, diamond-crusted frames. His teeth are gleaming, his ass is packed into his stonewashed jeans. His hands are clean. He didn’t grow it, pick it, water it, or even pack it.
It’s the toothless vecchio who makes my pants pound, not Alfonso over here with the hair gel. He has his American counterparts, Mr. Gucci sunglasses does. The “chicks” and “dudes” who drove me from the farmer’s market years ago. I love the vegetables but I can’t go near the place. There’s always the girl with the bicycle, wandering along from stall to stall with two apples, a bouquet of lavender, and one bell pepper in the basket of her bicycle. A teeming throng of New Yorkers tries to push past her to get to the vegetables for sale, but she shifts her ass from side to side, admiring the way her purchases are artfully arranged for all to see in the basket of her bike, and she holds up the whole process. And I struggle, as well, with the self-referential new kind of farmer, aglow with his own righteousness, setting up his cute booth at the market each morning, with a bouquet of wildflowers and a few artfully stacked boxes of honeycomb and a fifteen-dollar jar of bee pollen. And from what I’ve seen, that guy behind the table, with his checkered tablecloth and his boutique line of pickled artichoke hearts in their jar with their prissy label packed just so, he wants to talk to Miss Bicycle, to Miss I’ve-spent-four-hours-here-this-morning-to-buy-these-three-cucumbers. He gets off on it. I stopped going to the farmer’s market years ago when some hipster chick in sparkly barrettes and perfectly styled “farmer” clothes came screeching at me “DON’T TOUCH THE PEAS!” After that, we just ordered directly from the farm and had it delivered to the restaurant. Of course, I’m in love with the toothless guy with the gaping trousers. He’s everything I grew up with, he’s the end of an era, he’s the last of what it was like to just be a good eater and a good grower. A time when we just grew it and cooked it and ate it and didn’t talk so much about it. When we didn’t crow all over town about our artisanal, local, organic fwa fwa. We just went to the farm and bought the milk. I bought everything I could from that old guy.
There was a dinner party planned, at the Masseria, where the whole summer congregation of family would assemble, and I realized I could put everything—puntarelle, beans, black-eyed peas, all of it—to use for that meal. None of it would be wasted.
At these incredible family dinners, there can be up to forty-six immediate cousins, uncles and brothers, aunts, wives, and kids. Everybody brings a dish and usually the host supplies the wine. I’ve tried ardently to get Michele to agree to host one over the years, and every time we start to do the count—what about cousin Mercedes? And Beppe? And don’t forget Massimo and Antonella!—he falls apart when we get into the high forties and in danger of breaking the fifty mark. “Massimo and Antonella are friends not family,” he’ll argue, vainly trying to get the numbers down, knowing full well without my even having to say it in my impatient and frustrated tone, that they are as close and cherished as any cousin or blood relative.
The Italians even have a way of counting that works perfectly for these kinds of family dinners that I wish we had in English. If you ask how many we are expecting for dinner this evening, they’ll answer “un trentina”—a little thirty—or “una quarantina”—a little forty. It’s like saying “roughly twenty,” so we know that we can expect anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five when someone answers “una quarantina.” I want this vague yet perfectly precise way of counting in so many contexts of my life. I always want to say everything was twenty years ago. Or you cook it for twenty minutes. Or I’ve been a cook for twenty years. Or I haven’t spoken to my mother in twenty years. But exactly twenty? Not for an Italian minute. Exactly a “ventina.”
I am built for this kind of dinner party. It’s in my blood—all those childhood lamb roasts for hundreds. It’s in my bones—those decades of catering sit-down dinners for 1,500, 250, 900. I really ache to host one, a real one, where no one has to “bring a dish.” It’s possible that everybody, just like that marriage counselor, thinks that everything, once translated into Italian, is just simply better, even a potluck dinner. And, in some ways it is. The food at an Italian potluck is probably a little better than the food at an average American potluck. But there are no two more heartbreaking, soul-deadening words to me in any language than “pot” and “luck” put together. The idea of seven variations on a lentil salad and one bottle of lemon-lime seltzer sinks me. And even the one guest who was thoughtful enough to prepare something expensive and complex and warm—like curried shrimp—even that person has no idea how to cook for a potluck, and so eighteen people stand around the little quart container of the only dish that has any protein and any flavor and try to get a tablespoonful before it’s all gone.
I dream, with fervor, all summer long of putting that villa to work. I secretly write menus in my journal that I would p
repare if I was allowed to have a party there. And then I even write out the prep lists, the equipment and ingredient lists. I draw little sketches on paper towels. I lie awake in bed at night in a mosquito coil haze visualizing the dinners I would host there—the concrete order and the watercolor image—the way I would bring that house to life. How I would rake the property of all the dead oleander leaves that have fallen, and trim back the trees themselves so that fifty guests could stand on the terrace and actually see, and not just hear, all the boats anchored right there in the harbor with their twinkly little lights winking, and the shimmering rings of gold that surround each boat in the black nighttime sea it floats in. I long to put a perfect crimson negroni with a half moon of orange into the hand of each and every one of those cinquantina. Wondering if it might not go totally unnoticed that the color of the aperitivo echoes, ever so subtly, the color of the sunset.
I long to clean out the broken bicycles and abandoned bedsprings and sagging towers of twine-bound mildewed newspapers and women’s magazines that now clutter the “summer kitchen”—that warren of outrageously handsome whitewashed cool rooms underneath the house where meals used to be prepared in the summer months to avoid the punishing heat. I wish I could store all the tomatoes, figs, melons, and eggplants down there, and hang some homemade sausages from the rafters, and tie some bunches of the wild garlic to dry from the big rings that still remain from where people used to tie their horses so many lifetimes ago. I wish I could pull out every piece of Alda’s old Salentino pottery and wash it and use it and rescue it from its dark hibernation in the heavy wooden credenza. I want to wash all of her charming old crystal glasses and drink from them, instead of admiring them every year as I do, shuttered up in their beveled-glass cabinet. I want to throw away the harsh lamp with the over-bright bare bulb in the impluvium that Giovanni has been repairing for thirty years with more and more, and then more, black electrician’s tape and let the open sky above us have less to compete with. I want to gather all the trim from the olive trees and burn an immense fire outside over whose coals I would grill forty whole fish stuffed with wild fennel fronds picked from the surrounding fields. And dress those fish with the olive oil from the olives of the branches that fueled the fire. And I want to set out lanterns all over the property, so that people could wander after dinner. I want to replace the ripped and sagging hammock with a fresh, softly woven one in which people could canoodle if the negroni and the grilled fish and the fresh figs happened to inspire them to want to go lie in a hammock and get tangled up in the soft arms of their amore.
But as soon as I start to paint that little picture for Michele, before I’ve even dipped my brush into the can of scenic paint even, all I have to say is, “Could we please host one of the dinners this year?” and Michele gets his black dark face, his pinched eyes, his wrinkled forehead like I’ve just told him he has incurable blood cancer instead of that I want to feed people delicious food and pour delicious wine and fry dozens of the local eggs in brown butter and sit outside all summer night long and have utter pleasure. Every year he tells me it would be too much for his mother. And that is the conversation ender, every time. If there’s anyone I totally respect and don’t want to burden or tax or upset in any way; it’s Donna Alda, Nonna to my kids, suocera mia, Senora Alda Fuortes de Nitto.
But even when I swear to Michele that I will do all the work myself, or get help from Chiara and Giuliano—who have been known to shove sausages they’ve made up their own chimney to air dry and who, I am sure, would help me host a big dinner out in gli olivi or sta villa Fuortes—he doesn’t yield. On a small excursion in his wooden boat, cousin Giuliano once packed in a small woven chest the twice-baked hard biscuits of the region, a few tomatoes, some chili flakes, and a few basil leaves from their garden. And Chiara taught me to hold the biscuit over the edge of the boat and soak it in the seawater for one “Ave Maria” to soften and season it slightly. And then onto the biscuit we put the tomato, warm from the sun, and the leaves of basil and ate an impromptu lunch with vaguely cold beers right there in our bathing suits. They would certainly help me with a party, I am sure of it. Michele stands between me and everything he has introduced me to, everything I now want, all of it sprawled out in plain delectable view just behind him. All of it unattainable without him, and oddly, impossible with him. He Will. Not. Budge. We will not be hosting a dinner party.
“What about a nice Sunday lunch?” I suggested one year, thinking that if I switched up the hour of the day I would sneak one past him. But I believe he knows exactly what to say no to to be sure he is breaking the very heart that has never quite convincingly felt him all these years. He’s nothing if not smart, Mr. M.D./Ph.D. Without him, I don’t get the family. Without the party, without the building of the fire, the lighting of the candles, the rushed and hectic preparation all day of the food, without the hiss hiss hiss of the blood hitting hot coals, I will never find consolation.
Alda arrived in Lecce the following evening and was retrieved from the train station by Gloria, her third oldest child. Gloria is a radiant beauty who dresses in flowing colorful fabrics and long dangly jewelry and kind of floats through the house with a perpetual beatific smile on her lips and a bemused twinkle in her eye. Gloria seems unburdened, happy, and physically healthy. She is quick to light up with laughter, and while I have never once seen the family “darkness” shadow her eyes, turning them black and impenetrable as I have seen in the other siblings and even in Alda, she does kind of fabulously wilt in the heat and dramatically heads off for “rests” and afternoon repose like Blanche DuBois. She arrived with Alda and helped her into the house. Alda immediately, even at eight o’clock at night, went from room to room—the clack of her heel on the floor from her uneven gait from the hip surgery and her staccato little exhale echoing in the twenty-five-foot ceilings in all of the rooms as she passed through them—checking on the olive oil, the tomatoes, the potted plants, the bedding. Gloria cooed at the babies and her pleasure in seeing them permeated the house. Yet another Italian woman perfect with children. Alda pressed a large tray of homemade biscotti wrapped in paper on to Gloria to take with her back to her house and a disproportionately wild frenzy ensued, in part I understand, because Italians do it this way—even the most simple transactions have to become wildly gesticulated and vociferously argued. And in this family particularly so. How many cookies should Gloria take with her?! Not all of the cookies, Mamma!! Take the cookies, amore mio!! Gesticulations! Raised voices! Overlapping shouting!
The decision? Leave us a few and take the rest. We all at last said good night and amid much Italian gesticulating and urgent tones, confirmed that we would all reconvene the next evening at the Masseria for a family dinner with everybody.
It’s true, when we had the family dinner at the Masseria that year—the renovated farmhouse in the olive orchards where Carlo lives in the summer with his family—Alda did run out of steam—sort of validating Michele’s resistance to a party of our own—but honestly, not until the very end of the race and not more than a yard short, frankly. And certainly, it had been my fault.
Alda, rising early the next morning, before the heat of the day had taken its rank, had cooked all morning with Rosaria, and when she had finished her mozzarella pizza and her eggplant parmigiana with hard-boiled eggs, she went to take her little late-morning nap. With the kitchen now free, I started prepping the treasures from my old farmer man.
Nursing an infant, in the first few months, really sucks up the day. I never get over and am always totally taken aback by the amount of time in a day it takes to nurse a baby. When you are all and solely what they eat in the beginning of their lives, which I am in the habit of being for about the first year—Marco a little longer, Leone a little less—it could be, if you were a less driven and energetic person than myself, about the only thing you accomplished in a day. Certainly in a vacation day. But I imagine the total sensory pleasure for the kid—to pass out at the tap, belly full of that rich, sweet good stuff
, and then he is in a little incomparable sleep coma with his cheeks still smashed up against the warm boob firmly and securely held in the arms of his mother—and so I tend to give my kids their twenty minutes of nursing and then their twenty minutes of post-hookup nap, undisturbed, in the very position they fell into it in, regardless of my own discomfort, arm cramps or list of shit to do that day. If you do the math of that, in pure forty-minute increments, factoring that an infant needs to be fed every couple of hours … well, an eight-hour day can really fly by, and what I used to accomplish in that time gets reduced to a maddening fraction. A whisper more than zilch.
And on this day I aimed to cook four separate dishes—the puntarelle, the Leccese beans, the black-eyed peas, the zucchini flowers—each to feed twenty-five people. I cooked all day, all afternoon, in between lunch and siesta, after siesta, even during the siesta in that still, empty, depressing part of the day when everything is closed and no one is outdoors and the houses are shuttered, and I cooked in between a half-dozen nursing bouts with Leone until I was still assembling the platters at the last minute, right up until we were leaving for the party at eight o’clock that night.
Alda, in spite of doing her own cooking for the party in the early morning, had helped me all day. After her nap, she sat at that kitchen table, trooping through with me, corroborating my ambition. She cleaned the puntarelle, shelled the black-eyed peas, tipped the green beans. She’d held the fussy baby, entertained Marco, made me a coffee!—as if I were a guest!—and I’d had this feeling all day that we were working together toward the very same end, that my mother-in-law and I were busily and mutually engaged in our goal: generating enough delicious food for our contribution to the large dinner party we would be going to later that evening, where we would finally sit in the cool comfort of the olive trees, drinking excellent wine, watching the kids run around, being enveloped by the comforting din of Italian bullshit.
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