It’s exactly the same when I tell people that I am married to an Italian.
“An Italian! Oh, from Italy? An Italian Italian!” and they are agog.
“Does he cook with you at the restaurant?”
And I laugh. “No, he’s a doctor.”
Well then they are just about levitating.
Even I am seduced by the idea of it. An Italian doctor! Three weeks in Italy!
The images I conjure when I hear myself or anyone say three-week vacation in Italy are probably the same as theirs: I imagine hiking the trails of the Cinque Terre, cooled by the clean fresh wind from the crystal sea, stopping for fish and wine—so local that you’ve been tripping over the vines all afternoon on your hike—from that very hillside.
I imagine inhaling truffles in Piemonte.
Going to a wild boar festival in Umbria.
Sitting in Campo de Fiore sipping a perfect negroni—one solid ice cube, the glass poured only two-thirds full in the true aperitivo correctness.
Having a tight espresso in the late afternoon at St. Eustachio looking up at the antlered deer and cross atop the church.
I imagine my Italian husband in a deep orange summer cashmere sweater playing off his tan, his good wristwatch strapped to his left wrist with a dark leather strap, showing me, why not, some spontaneous and deeply felt affection and warmth.
But my actual Italian Italian is in an untucked T-shirt with the Apple computer logo and a pair of khaki shorts from The Gap hanging down mid-calf like frat boys wear. He’s got three days of razor stubble, having decided not to shave but twice a week, since during the academic year when he is teaching he must scrape that Gillette twin blade over his face every damn morning. He is resisting, with his black eyes in a pained face, to take us down to show our kids the Fontana di Trevi because, he complains, it’s so hot, and because we will have to take a public bus, and because there will be tourists. When the Puglia nighttime sky is lousy with stars, and I fantasize lying down on our backs on the terrace—the stone still hot from the day’s long hours of sun—to let them rain down over us, I find Michele sitting on the terrace hunched in his chair, glowing in his wireless connection, and he’s Google-mapping on his laptop computer the very constellations he could just, by tilting his head back and looking up, practically inhale. Alone on the terrace looking up at the stars I would not feel lonely. With him glued to the screen, I feel gutted, as I lay on my back by myself in awe of the sky. But it sounds better when I say, “Yes! The month of July in Italy with my Italian Italian husband!”
Because I like the watercolor image better than the reality, and because I can’t stand to be the kind of difficult person—the one unimaginable hag on the planet who is capable of not totally enjoying a month in Italy and who could not be totally levitated by the idea of her doctor Italian Italian husband—I just sit in the hairdresser’s chair and say: “Yup. Italy. We go every year. My husband is Italian.”
With this ambivalence, our flight is announced and we head to the gate.
Michele’s brother, Giovanni, meets us at Fiumicino airport at nine a.m. It is already hot and the punishing white light of day assaults our bleary eyes. Michele and I are exhausted from a long sardine-packed transatlantic flight with a fussy pair of kids who couldn’t settle properly in spite of the Benadryl we popped them. We have hissed at each other, each criticizing the other’s strategy for taming the two- and four-year-old beasts. We have never agreed about pacifying the kids. Michele, in his excitement to be home, bolts quickly ahead toward the line of Italian people waiting to meet their arriving relatives while I straggle and struggle along behind hauling the little one and trying to push the heavy cart with all of our luggage. One of the wheels is malfunctioning, making me slow and hobbled. Michele does not look back. He has Marco on his shoulders. I have Leone and a mountain of luggage. Giovanni emerges from the line, ducking under the barrier and runs to help me. Michele says to his brother: “She doesn’t want help.” And I can’t imagine how I’ve been so misunderstood all of these years. Yes. I want help.
I kiss Giovanni lightly on both cheeks, left cheek first with the Italians, I’ve finally learned. He has let his hair grow out; salt-and-pepper gray almost to his shoulders, and his eyebrows seem equally as long and ungroomed. Michele greets him by teasing him unkindly about his haircut or lack of one and laughs high and long. Ando, their sister’s teenage son, has also come to greet us and to help us, and this year he has become fully a man, with every ounce of testosterone he’s been allotted in full surge. He has real shoulders, a deep voice, he even reeks of the cigarette he just finished. At seventeen, he has definitely had sex. Michele greets him also by insulting him about his poor grades at school and his failure to pass two of his subjects. Long high-pitched laughter. I live in close proximity to this man all year long and I am accustomed to this backhanded, reverse psychology, this way of actually saying: I am so happy to see you. I am so glad to be home. My family and country mean so much to me.
But I am always taken aback in the first few minutes of arriving into the fold of the Fuortes family that no one protests or bursts into tears. I would and do fall apart with such starvation for genuine affection and sincerity, for one crumb of the true contents of this man’s heart and mind. Yet no one but me winces.
For the past few years, I drive the car into Rome from the airport. Michele is better at handling the kids in the back of the car and I am better at driving, or at least this is what we have learned to cheerfully and constructively say to each other. It is a Saturday morning and the autostrada is relatively empty. As are the streets of Rome. The city has clusters of tourists, like overripe grapes, at every crosswalk, but the plague of wasps—the Romans on their Vespas—feels thin and hardly mortifying. I shift, accelerate, switch lanes, and take the corners as if I lived here year round. We pass ruins of aqueduct, Colosseum, and then wind down the hill around the fountain and the statues. Some of the tourists already have sunburn on their sleeveless shoulders though it is not yet eleven in the morning. This is, seven years later with two kids, no nighttime tour through Rome on the back of a lover’s motorcycle but even so, hands down, this is the most beautiful city on earth, even in broad daylight with a remote husband who’s actually considering buying a new iPhone. I love Rome.
We pull up in front of the large gate to the apartment and park under the tree out of the intense sun. Every single year we do this. The neighborhood is quiet, sleepy, intensely residential, and lately, too too civilized for me. Not one soul smokes on a balcony, suns themselves on a terrace, or reads a paper on a front stoop. The shutters are all closed but for a few windows of a few scattered apartments all around the adjoining and neighboring buildings. There is no music emanating from any apartment. No blare of a television. There are no children.
Michele’s sister Manuela and his mother greet us from the balcony overhead. They look just exactly the same as last year, and for a moment it seems as if the reports from Rome all winter about Alda’s failing health and failing memory have been exaggerated. It seems as if they haven’t moved from the very spot where we waved good-bye last summer at the end of our vacation. I feel genuinely happy to see them both. I really love them.
In our hug, Alda always says to me, “Come sei brava, Gabrielle. Proprio brava!” “Che coraggio!” And I always well up in this shower of her kindness. She is forever complimenting me on what courage and strength I have to haul the two kids across the ocean and deliver them to her doorstep. She herself has a magnificent fear of flying. Manuela, always maternal and sympathetic, says, “Stancissima sei.” Then she repeats “You must be very tired” in English, which she speaks perfectly.
The apartment in Rome where we spend the first couple and last few days—the bookends—of our annual vacation, is the whole ground floor of a large good-looking building that has been separated into two apartments. Manuela lives with her son Ando in one half—a beautiful sparse but tasteful apartment of four rooms with a hallway so lined with books in
English and Italian and French that they reach the ceiling. And Alda in the other half, with Giulio, an elegant, massive apartment with three bedrooms and two large living rooms that is so packed with family mementos and heirloom silver and sepia photographs and centuries-old heavy furniture and wardrobes stuffed with exquisite linens and lace table covers passed down from great-great-great-grand ancestors that your shoe heel doesn’t even click on the marble floors. Echo is immediately absorbed. The tall French doors open onto a huge terrace and front yard where orange trees and concord grapes grow over a pergola. Orange blossom grows in cascades over the stone railings of the terrace, the fragrance hitting you right in the kisser as soon as you enter. I could fall down drunk from that fresh perfume and lulled by the bubble of the fountain every time we enter through that gate, which clicks heavily behind us as we all go inside.
Bud, the golden retriever, has dug holes all over the modest patch of front yard and there’s shit in so many places that have not been cleaned up that I am thinking twice about whether or not I want the kids running around in there with no shoes and no pants, and they always seem to get buck naked within six minutes of arriving anywhere, so I will have to decide quickly. The yard is no longer as charming as it was when I was first here, sitting under the pergola of grapes with Michele, having wine, intoxicated by the scent of honeysuckle, oranges, uva fregola, and each other. We hug and kiss Manuela and Alda hello while Michele’s youngest brother Giulio stands at the periphery of the group, waiting to greet us. He leans forward and offers his cheek to be kissed but not to actually be kissed. This I have also finally learned.
The dining room table is set exactly as always with fresh mozzarella, boiled small zucchini, prosciutto, and melon, cruets of her olive oil and red wine vinegar. There is a pot of pasta water boiling on the old propane stove in the kitchen where Manuela is readying to cook some spaghetti. Bud is running around from room to room and out onto the terrace then back in again, running in and around and over the children, barking with great excitement. Michele yells at Bud and Manuela yells at Michele and within minutes the two of them are fighting about how to discipline the dog. It is one of Michele’s habits to conduct himself as if he is the head of the household in spite of his lack of contribution to it or participation in it year-round. The dog is not his, this house is not his, the daily chores of caring for Giulio as well as caring for Alda who is now eighty-four and starting to fail is not his, and yet within fifteen minutes of entering the house he is scolding the dog and giving Manuela instruction on how to live. This also, is the same as every year. Giovanni, meanwhile, has methodically carried every piece of our heavy luggage from the car up the marble steps and into the foyer of the apartment. He has thrown the ball to Bud a few times, had a small avuncular conversation with Ando, whom Manuela raises alone, and now is seated at the dining room table next to Alda, across from me and the kids, sorting out and portioning her many lunchtime pills.
Oddly, this is where my full isolation sets in: at the dinner table, surrounded by family and good food. Here in the very place and the very moment of the grail I’ve been seeking to recover since my own family evaporated, thirty years ago. Everyone is speaking Italian, which I don’t really speak. My kids are dislocated and shy and so clingy it is impossible to sit at the table for longer than a moment before one or the other or both drag me away from the strange people, the language they don’t quite recognize, the loud and animated quality of the room. Because Michele is deep into reunion with his family, I will be the one who gets up from the table, leaving my plate of food, to attend to the children. The image of the Italian family, dining al fresco around a large table, the children running around in the grape vines or the olive trees, is the most seductive image in the world—a moment that exists in Robert Mondavi vineyard publicity shots in glossy magazines. You are welcome for a plate of spaghetti and a glass of wine—but it is not yours, and it will never belong to you and you will never belong to it.
I spend a lot of time on the terrace with the kids while everyone is inside having lunch and conversation. I, too, have just been through a long and difficult plane ride, am also sleep deprived, have exerted myself strenuously in the few days just before leaving in order to ready the family for our vacation, and I, too, long for my vacation to start with a fat plate of Alda’s zucchini and a glass of cold white wine from the Alto Adige and a boisterous catch-up session with my family around the table. That is my image of vacation in Italy. It is my image of being married to an Italian Italian. It is my fantasy of recovering that fireside night, snug in a sleeping bag surrounded by my brilliant siblings and speaking our own, made-up language. But I am reliably alone for the first few days babysitting on the terrace while my glass of wine warms on the dining room table where my seat remains empty. My hunger feeds my exhaustion. My exhaustion fuels my sadness. Five thousand dollars’ worth of plane tickets to wind up alone on the terrace, feeling like the nanny.
Later in the afternoon, with the kids zombied out in front of Italian cartoons on the television, I get a chance to speak with Manuela in the kitchen.
“Michele has told me that you aren’t coming with us to Leuca?” I ask, disappointed.
“I will stay here, if you don’t mind,” she says, always this polite with me. As if she were asking my permission to stay in Rome during the hot weeks of July while we go down to the house in Leuca with the whole family, including Alda, who has waited eagerly for our arrival so that we can head south together.
“Of course I don’t mind but I will miss you. Can’t I persuade you with the promise of mojitos?”
I know that Manuela likes my cooking and she has liked some of the little cocktails I make during the summer for aperitivo. When I have been able to get my hands on mint and limes—not easy in that small town in Puglia—I have made mojitos and she has loved them. She shows genuine delight at the idea but she must stay in Rome she says. “Ando must take summer classes and I must stay here to be with him.”
“So would it be good if I cook for the family this year, is that okay?” I ask. I had tried to discuss this with Michele before we left New York. I had insisted that we could not possibly arrive as a family of four and expect his mother to cook for us as usual, even with the help of Rosaria. But I was afraid of cooking for his mother and especially tentative about cooking so much pasta, which the family requires, a skill at which I am not very accomplished. Michele understood and agreed but answered only with his vague grunt and had not come up with a plan. So I had decided, maybe even on the plane ride over, that I would just take on the responsibility. But still I needed to check with Manuela. To assume that I might, for a few measly weeks of the summer, take over the kitchen of an Italian family who has lived under the matriarchy of their beloved and revered Alda Fuortes de Nitto, “Mamma,” for eighty-four years, seemed extremely delicate to me.
“But do you think it will be okay with Alda?” I ask Manuela. “I will need to rearrange some of the furniture in that kitchen.”
“Yes, I think she will love it. She will want to do some but not all. She wants to cook but can’t cook all of those meals. It’s too much: breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for the whole family and then again all over the next day. It’s too much for her. She has stopped, even, cooking Sunday lunch.”
“Okay, I understand. I will cook then. But what about Giulio?”
Manuela assures me that he will find the new things to eat exciting and interesting.
“Alda has stopped cooking Sunday lunch?” I repeat, having missed a few sentences of our conversation.
“When will you drive to Leuca?” Manuela asks.
“Wait! There’s no more Sunday lunch?”
Manuela nods sadly. “It’s too much for her now.”
For seven years there has been Sunday lunch. For something more like sixty-five years there has been Sunday lunch, but I mean for me there has been Sunday lunch for seven years. In spite of my isolation, my sadness, my long horrible winters with Michele, I live
for Sunday lunch. It’s four-fifths of my fantasy life about vacation in Italy each year. Even though I know perfectly well that it is not my Sunday lunch, even though I know that I spend Sunday lunch on the terrace with the kids feeling lonely, even though I barely get a sip of the wine poured at Sunday lunch, I love Sunday lunch. I love the image of the whole family sitting down at the table and even the arguing and the yelling at the dog seems exquisite in Italian.
I say to Manuela, “I will cook Sunday lunch tomorrow. The family and all should come as usual. And on Monday morning we will all drive to the south. How does that sound?”
“Brava,” Manuela says. “Va bene.”
I cook, easily:
Sepia with green beans and fennel and broken vinaigrette.
Shell beans with onions and tomatoes and herbs.
Fried zucchini agrodolce with fresh mint and hot chili flakes.
Cauliflower with salami and parsley and bread crumbs.
Smoked eggplant with garlic and lemon and olive oil.
There is plenty at the market in Rome. It is my first day of cooking and I am full of ideas about what to cook and how to cook. I will use all of their customary ingredients and bend them just toward my style, so that everything will be familiar but new simultaneously. To pull off lunch for these twelve people or so feels surprisingly fine. I cook alone in Manuela’s kitchen, undisturbed. She has only three pots and I use them all in heavy rotation. And luckily, my kids have slept through the morning on a jet-lag schedule, affording the quietude and privacy and distractionless morning to accomplish my task just in time. I am just stepping out of the shower as my kids wake up and everyone arrives for lunch at two.
Blood, Bones & Butter Page 29