Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  Suallen’s grandparents had been slaves, her parents farmers on a small piece of Georgia land where they raised chickens, a few pigs, and as many vegetables as space would allow. My parents had tasted a Suallen meal at the home of friends who could no longer afford a live-in housekeeper, and had hired her on the spot without knowing that she’d left school to help on the farm before she had learned to read. With instruction from my father and help from me, she was reading cookbooks as well as The New York Times within a year. In 1961 she was awarded a B.S. in Education by Teachers College and returned to Georgia to teach. In the meantime, I’d learned to cook what had been called soul food by Suallen’s family long before the notion that collard greens were edible and sweet potatoes good for more than Thanksgiving hit the cooking pages of the Times. (Chitterlings, the wonderful, crackly pigs’ intestines, became a favorite in our house and remained one until my parents started reading about cholesterol.)

  If I don’t recall precisely when announcements about a dish I’d mastered began to be greeted with queries about whether I’d done my homework, I do remember the evening when I came to understand the strength to my parents’ disapproval of the reality that food continued to draw me more powerfully than academia did.

  Our housekeeper was Anna Cherubini, whom my parents had found in Florence the summer after Suallen left. Anna’s family ran a trattoria in Florence, for which she had been the sole chef until her husband died two years earlier, and was still the mainstay now that her sons ran it. But for reasons having to do with one son’s wife, she had become unhappy there. She had consented to come to the States to work for my parents “for a few months,” tending the apartment and, of course, preparing her lovely meals. The few months had stretched into a few years because her talents, unlike mine, were appreciated unequivocally by my parents, and because she and I developed a strong attachment to each other as I learned Italian from her, and she picked up English from me.

  Anna was a Sicilian who’d married a Florentine whose mother was from Genoa and who was comfortable with a variety of cuisines. Anna did tripe in the style of Bologna, Genoa, or Rome, liver Veneziana, or as cooked in Trieste or Tuscany, fish soup as made in Sicily, Rome, or any of the more than a dozen regions with their own fish and vegetable favorites. Within months of coming to us, and with translation and marketing assistance from me, she could also do a divine brown sauce, a perfect tarte tatin, and various other dishes my parents adored.

  During my last term of high school, Anna got a call from her son Anthony, who said she was needed desperately at the restaurant. Subito. The call came on Wednesday morning. She left Thursday night, promising that as soon as she was resettled, I could visit.

  I was far more disconsolate than I’d have been if my mother had left. I was scheduled to begin Barnard in the autumn. I made a couple of stabs at persuading my parents to let me apply to a good French cooking school, but they were convinced that in college I’d find an academic subject, an appropriate subject, that interested me more than cooking did. In the meantime, observing my continued depression over the loss of Anna, they said that if I would cook as they asked, and as my school schedule allowed, they would give up their live-in housekeeper and provide me with something between an allowance and a salary.

  Which is how I came to make dinner one Friday night for their friends, the painters Jason and Eleanora Steinpark, who owned a home in Gaiole, about half an hour outside of Florence. When Jason learned that the meal (canederli—dumplings stuffed with prosciutto, because in those days I couldn’t get the proper ham even at Zabar’s or in East Harlem; a burridda, the one with two d’s, made with squid and lotte; Parmigiano-Reggiano with an endive and walnut salad) was my work, he congratulated me in Italian. I answered in kind and we got into a conversation about food. He was startled by my knowledgeability.

  “I must say, Caroline doesn’t sound like a student with a nice hobby,” he told my parents at some point, laughing benignly. “She sounds like a professional.”

  “I’m going to be,” I assured him, although I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. “I’m going to be a chef.”

  Silence. It was 1972, the height of the era that would later be called The Sixties. Women were more worried about pregnancy and overweight than about contracting sexual diseases, and if many parents would have been grateful for an eighteen-year-old who was so discreet about her sex-and-dope life that they didn’t have to know it existed, mine were of a different mindset. Dope was no scarier to them than anything else that might keep one of their children from earning a Ph.D. Julia Child was splendid, as was Catherine Deneuve’s prostitute in Belle du Jour, but you didn’t expect your own children to make a living the way either of them did. (In my senior year I had become promiscuous, a word nobody would have used then and which I use now to describe a young woman who went to bed with almost any boy she kissed.)

  My parents laughed uneasily. Jason needed help but he wasn’t getting any. Eleanora wasn’t attending to the conversation; she never did when it wasn’t about her.

  “Well,” he finally said, “I think you’re very sensible to be going for a degree. You can . . . sort of . . . have your academic cake and eat it, too.” He laughed uncomfortably.

  My parents joined him, a tiny bit less apprehensive than they’d have been if I had challenged his words.

  But I was as restless at Barnard College as I’d been at Stuyvesant High School, where I’d done fine on the entrance exam, but then just scraped by in the endless math and science classes that were of no interest to me. If language still came easily, there was no Anna waiting at home to joke with about fancy folks’ talk, as opposed to the good, idiomatic Italian she’d taught me. I was taking college French, but it was more fun learning Spanish from a Cuban friend at Barnard with whom I ate often at one of the good Cuban-Chinese restaurants that had opened along Broadway.

  I was trying to figure out how to persuade my parents to subsidize one year’s attendance at cooking school (delaying my second year at Barnard), when the Steinparks, apparently with their consent, asked if I’d like to work as their mother’s helper in Gaiole that summer. I would prepare lunch and dinner for the family as well as breakfast for their eight-year-old son, Evan. I would be responsible for Evan six days a week as well as those evenings when his parents wished to go out, and I would make a serious attempt to get him to learn some Italian, which he’d resisted until now. Eleanora would be working particularly hard, and she and Jason would be eating at home more than they normally did, because she was preparing for her first major show. They would pay on the high side for that sort of job.

  The summer worked well. Gaiole was hot but very beautiful, and there was a pool on the substantial plot of land in back of the house. The Steinparks also owned a vineyard that lay across the dirt road that passed their home. The dirt road led to a paved one, which, in turn, led to the autostrada to Florence. Most often Jason, Evan, and I drove to Florence, since Eleanora was under so much pressure. It was understood that Jason was not under similar pressure, but unless I’m mistaken, there was always some reason for life’s being run around Eleanora.

  In Florence we usually had lunch at the Trattoria Cherubini. The food was as good as one would have expected, I met Anna’s sons and their families, and even if Anna was too busy to spend much time with me, I enjoyed seeing her briefly and knowing she was always nearby. A highlight of my summer occurred one afternoon when Genevra, the difficult daughter-in-law, who was also the better cook, wasn’t around. Anna cut her finger badly and I was able, with Jason’s consent, to take over. Anna stood next to me, holding clean cloths around her finger and directing me during what remained of the lunch hour.

  My absorption in the matter of everyday life made it easier than it might have been to get along with Eleanora. When challenged about food (or almost anything), I became involved in finding the physical solution, whether it was learning why she adored osso buco only in Milan (the Milanese use no tomatoes in the sauce), or trying to d
uplicate the tiramisu from the restaurant in Florence that had nothing else of interest (it was their brandy). This also worked with Evan, who got hooked into kitchen matters and began to learn Italian from me very much as I had learned it from Anna.

  Finally, I was fascinated by the operation of the Steinpark vineyard, run by Angelo Ferrante, who managed theirs and several others owned by nonresidents. This fascination led me into an affair with Angelo, an attractive-homely Sicilian of thirty-one who, before we ever sat down together on the grass, told me he had a wife and four children in Palermo.

  Angelo was casually flirtatious from the beginning. I flattered myself that this was because I spoke a nontouristy Italian he could readily understand. He had English but wouldn’t use it, and was given to pronouncements like “All American girls are spoiled.” It is easier for me to quote such lines than to admit the corresponding truth, that I enjoyed, and later married, an outline and a cliché. Angelo was the dark, sexy peasant, as smart as he was uneducated, as strong as he was foreign to me. If he was tender only when aroused, this had to do with custom, and if he refused to absorb knowledge of other (American) ways of doing things, this was because rich Americans like the Steinparks always had an upper hand supported by wealth. Ordinary Italians couldn’t compete, and so were left with no recourse but to fight domination. Surely there is some grain of truth to this argument, which, like most such arguments, takes no notice of broad variation in individuals, or explains why I hooked up with this particular person.

  Our affair began less than two weeks after I’d arrived in June, but our friendship began on the day I told Angelo he should not judge all American women by the bitch I worked for. (He dealt only with Jason.) From then on, I saw him, or so I assumed, whenever he was in or near Gaiole. He taught me all the Italian words Anna didn’t know or wouldn’t use, often in the course of unburdening himself about Eleanora. As he complained and I sympathized, we grew closer and closer. But if Angelo ever fell in love with me, I would have to say that it wasn’t my sympathies or the set of my mind, any more than it was my eyes, breasts, or any part—or the whole—of me he fell for, but, rather, it was my caponata.

  Caponata is a dish that originated in Sicily and there are important regional differences in its preparation. As Angelo grew up with it, and as I had already mostly prepared it on the fateful afternoon when the Steinparks decided to take Evan someplace for an overnight visit, it contains not only eggplant, celery, olives, and so on, but sometimes bits of lobster, shrimp, or tuna—and here is the point where the tongues of true Sicilians separate them from others—unsweetened cocoa and slivers of toasted almond tossed on at the last minute.

  I told Angelo that the Steinparks were away until the next morning and that I’d already made a caponata, which we might as well eat. Then, if he wished, he could stay with me in the house durante la notte.

  When he arrived without having eaten, he usually asked for some bread and cheese. If I offered him a meal, he always said he’d eaten too much for lunch. Now he was sure he wanted to stay over, less certain he wanted to eat the meal I’d cooked. He said he’d take me out to dinner. I told him he should go out if he wanted to, and if he did, he should stay out.

  He got it.

  I can still hear his heavy step as he came to the table, picture his sudden alertness as he saw the Sicilian bread Evan and I had baked that rainy morning (made with semolina flour, it was heavily sprinkled with the poppy seeds Evan adored), his look of near disbelief when I began to ladle the caponata into the big, flat-bottomed bowls, being careful to leave some of the almond slivers on top.

  I sat down facing him at one end of the long wooden table in the kitchen. He sliced some bread, bit into it, looked at the slice as he chewed, looked back at me. He moved the bread to his left hand, lifted the fork with his right, prodded various pieces of the caponata, raised the sauce-coated fork to his nose, sniffed it, carefully skewered a piece of fish and an olive, pushed the fork gently through the sauce, then, staring at the loaf of bread in front of him, lifted the fork, opened his mouth, and set in the food as though it were a bomb that still might explode. He chewed slowly.

  I had become absorbed in the process and wasn’t eating, but just watching him. The momentous nature of the occasion dawned on me only as his eyes, more softly focused than I had ever seen them and slightly moist as well, moved to meet mine for the first time. Still looking at me, he speared some more fish and vegetables, mopped up a little sauce, ate.

  “Who taught you this?” he finally asked, a hush to his voice.

  “I told you I could cook,” I pointed out. “You should’ve . . . Anna,” I finally said. “She was a Sicilian. Is a Sicilian.” Anna hadn’t added the cocoa and almonds at my parents’, but she’d mentioned them, and I’d since found them in a Sicilian cookbook. Angelo had never talked much about his life, and I knew little more than that he’d grown up near Palermo and his wife and children were still there. Certainly he’d never mentioned preferring Sicilian food to all other. I’d thought of myself as taking a chance, preparing the caponata in that style. “She’s the one I told you about, with the restaurant in Florence.”

  He nodded. The kitchen’s atmosphere had grown close to a church’s.

  “Next week, we go there,” he said. “In the meantime, you eat.”

  In the meantime, I ate. But our relationship had altered. I don’t know if Angelo was in love with me, I know that I wasn’t with him, but he couldn’t keep his hands off me, became affectionate at times when there was no chance of getting me to bed—or to the blanket he took from his pickup truck and spread on the grass. And he came to the vineyard more frequently. During August he was around much more often than he’d been in July. I assumed this had to do with the ripening grapes until one day Jason winked and said they must have me to thank for the fact that Angelo was tending their vines more closely than in previous years.

  Now Angelo and I invariably went into town on Thursdays, my day and night off. I’d introduced him to Anna, with whom he was at once filial and courtly, telling her, after our first meal at the trattoria, that if he hadn’t anything else to be grateful to me for, he would always thank me for bringing him to her. He went to the men’s room and Anna whispered to me that I should be careful about what Angelo had to be grateful for.

  I giggled.

  She shook her head, said she was serious, that he was a damerino if she’d ever seen one.

  I hadn’t known the word for ladies’ man but could understand what she was saying and wanted to reassure (and deceive) her (and myself).

  “Don’t worry, we’re just pals,” I told her. “He has a wife and kids in Sicily.”

  “All the more reason,” she said, “to watch yourself. He’s a charmer.” (lncantatore. Anna hadn’t spoken a word of English since her return to Italy.)

  At the beginning of my last week in Gaiole, as Angelo and I lay together one night on a tarp spread over hay in the back of his truck, I made a teasing remark about how long it would take him to find another girl for times when he was away from his wife.

  “I don’t have a wife,” he said. “I tell them I’m married so they won’t disturb my bachelorhood.”

  I was not nearly so startled as I should have been. Nor did it occur to me to question his use of the feminine plural they—esse—to describe people who might have disturbed him.

  “I don’t believe you,” I exclaimed. “No wonder Anna told me to watch out for you!”

  He rolled back on top of me, looked at me seriously from a distance of a few inches, and asked whether I would prefer him to be married.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I guess it doesn’t make much difference.”

  He rolled off me and remained quiet during our brief remaining time that evening, then was alternately loving and withdrawn during my last week in Gaiole. If he hoped I’d remain when the Steinparks went home, this didn’t enter my mind as a serious possibility. In New York I often suffered from the feeling that I was the
only member of my family who hadn’t a life to call her own. But Angelo seemed even less finished than I. Much too restless to be the sort of man with whom one could imagine settling into a life.

  Would that I had allowed this impression to remain with me! Would that I had believed what I sensed, that the person between the outlining cultural dots was foreign to me, specifics all too easily misperceived or misunderstood. Back in New York, whenever school was going badly or I had no boyfriend or one I didn’t much like, I’d yearn to be with Anna. And Angelo.

  In fact, Angelo and I began a correspondence that subtly altered their order of importance, so that at some point it became Angelo, and then Anna, I wanted to see again. If my letters were mostly complaints about school, with discussions of movies I’d seen and an occasional anecdote about a friend or relative, his were rich in details of his past, some of which I later ascertained to be true. He did have eight brothers and sisters, all of whom lived, with their families, in Sicily, between Castellemare del Golfo and Palermo. His father and one of his brothers had olive orchards. The other brothers were fishermen, his sisters all had children. There were wonderful letters in which he described the harvesting of the olives in November and December, the green ones before they were fully ripe, the purple when just ripe, and the black when overripe. All were cleaned and rinsed in cold water, crushed in stone mortars or under granite millstones, then kneaded and crushed again for the first pressing. He wrote lovingly of the way the beautiful flowers turned into berries; the first time he’d eaten an untreated olive he’d been horrified by the taste. He told me how he inhaled with greater pleasure than any food or wine the first pressed oil, and described the tables at the vucciria, the marketplace in Palermo, where there was an olive vendor with a differently prepared olive every time you took a step. I wrote back that his description of eating an untreated olive had reminded me of the first time I hid in the bathroom with a stolen cigarette and choked on the smoke. (Angelo had always smelled strongly of cigarettes, and his dark skin had been tough and discolored on his cigarette-holding fingers, but he’d never smoked in my presence.) I asked what had made him leave Sicily, when it was so beautiful. He wrote that he didn’t even like to talk about this, but his family’s lands were Mafia-owned and he couldn’t abide the thought of being controlled by the brotherhood. (The Godfather was already as well known in Italy as it was in the States, everyone knew Americans were infatuated with it, and I think he assumed, correctly, that this explanation would appeal to me. If there was some truth in his stories, it probably lay in his inability to get along for any length of time with anyone who had power over him.) He described how, as a boy of nine, he’d left Castellemare for Palermo, where he worked the cigarette table in the vucciria. The table would hold a pack of each kind of cigarette—Marlboro, Winston, and so on. Customers would pay the man attending it for a carton of whichever they wanted and moments later a small boy—Angelo, or one of his brothers or cousins or neighbors—would be tugging at a leg of his pants, giving him the carton. More difficult was the fisherman’s job of swimming out to collect the cigarette cartons in the harbor, in plastic bags thrown overboard from boats that were part of a chain set up to avoid the Guardia di Finanza, the finance guard whose job it was to collect the heavy cigarette taxes. Later the same chain would be used for drugs. Later he had worked for a large landholder near Castellemare, but there’d been trouble. The guy didn’t want to pay the tribute, il pizzo, extorted by the Mafia to do business. Il pizzo meant the beak of a bird. They always wanted to dip their beak in your business. This was the life he had run from when he was twelve, moving to Naples, where he had been taken in by a woman who knew the owner of the restaurant where he’d gotten a job washing dishes, though he was always looking to get back to the wine. It took a long time.