Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  The cuisines of Europe are said to have their foundations in Sicily. Whether or not this is true, Sicily has the broadest and richest collection of fish, the most extraordinary fruits and vegetables, ranging from the best figs in Italy to the nearly unimaginable variety of olives, from the best artichokes to the sun-dried tomatoes nobody in New York had heard of yet to the bergamotto, the wonderful lemony Calabrian citrus from which Angelo’s mother made the world’s best marmalade. To walk through the vucciria was to know, long before Angelo became fanatical about Sicilian food, that no actual pain would be involved in being limited to it. To sample the oranges and figs at one stand was to understand what America’s lust for standardization has done to the taste and texture of our fruits. To bite, when it grows just cool enough, into one of the fried artichokes the vendor has taken out of its hot oil and put in a napkin, is to wonder whether you must leave this place without eating all the others. Many cooked dishes are offered at the vucciria, including a range of fuori tavola, foods eaten away from the table, both breathtaking and inspirational in terms of my own cooking. (It was part of the charm of our restaurant, when we opened it, that we served fuori tavola to people waiting for tables and at the bar.) There are the olive vendors Angelo had written of. There are cheeses and walnuts, candies and pastries, dried fruit and fresh fruit, and a quality and variety of fish unimaginable even by people who shop in excellent American markets. Some can be bought only raw, others—swordfish, tuna, and sardines—can also be found cooked in a variety of ways.

  The vucciria left me subdued. Angelo and I had been married for a little over a year when we brought Olivia to Sicily. When he had complained about the quality of various ingredients obtainable in Florence, I’d heard him with the ears of someone who has found more and better ingredients there than she’d known to have existed. Now I understood that in Sicily there were foods richer and better than any I’d dreamed of. It did not occur to me then or for some years to question whether he might have remained there without working for the Mafia, or, if he had to leave, why he spent so little time there. The first answer, which I refused to believe until it was forced on me, was that he spent more time there than I knew. That from the early days of our marriage, there was no time when he didn’t have a Sicilian mistress. That his lengthier trips often involved a visit to Sicily. And that when Olivia was toilet-trained and he took her with him, it was at one woman’s house, or another’s, that they stayed.

  I wasn’t immune, during our early years, to the dreaded What-Have-I-Done? disease. I was not only inexperienced at marriage, but still unwilling to acknowledge the extent of our cultural differences. I remember my confusion at the moment during that visit when Angelo’s distance from me came to seem like a virtual blockade.

  We’d had our last meal in Palermo at the home of his youngest sister. We’d drunk a lot of the red wine made by the brother with his own grapes and now we were drinking coffee with tiny cannoli from the market. Everyone was teasing me about my excitement over the vucciria, my desire to go back that morning when we’d spent much of the previous day there. Someone told a joke about a man who married a girl when she lived so close to the vucciria that he was intoxicated by its smells, then wanted to give her back when they moved away. We were laughing and I didn’t hear Livvy fretting in her car bed just the other side of the kitchen. She might have been crying for a few minutes by the time Angelo heard her, went to get her, and brought her back to the kitchen, handing her to me because she had a load in her diaper, though he changed her as often as I did at home.

  Half-tipsy, I took her from him. She wore only a long-sleeved undershirt and a diaper. Her arms and legs waved jerkily, her torso tensed with each outraged cry, her face was so red it was nearly purple.

  I giggled, thinking of the purple olives at the marketplace. “Okay, Olivia. Oliva mia. Mia piccola oliva purpura.”

  I began singing the best-known aria from Il Barbiere de Siviglia, substituting “piccola purpura” for “Figaro, Figaro,” dissolved into giggles, looked at Angelo to find a sign that he thought this as funny as I did, was startled to see that he was angry.

  “What happened?” I asked, I think in English. I knew I wasn’t supposed to call Olivia Livvy in front of his family, but I didn’t think I’d done so. Livvy wouldn’t even have led to my little oliva joke. I looked at the others; some were amused, some were too much aware of Angelo’s reaction to have their own.

  He took Livvy from me, resolutely went to the changing table, took care of the diaper himself, as though I’d proved myself unfit to touch his child, then put a drop of wine and a lot of water in a glass and sat down at the table, feeding it to her. The women and older girls were by this time clearing the table and washing dishes. Even the ones who’d been friendliest to me were reluctant to meet my eyes. I was afraid to lift a dish, lest I drop it. Angelo, his eyes steadily on his precious daughter as though to ascertain that she hadn’t been irrevocably damaged by my joke, although he wouldn’t discuss it with me, then or ever, signaled to me to pack up. Within twenty minutes we had said our good-byes.

  While Anna was with us, Angelo’s remoteness from me and from family concerns other than Livvy was tolerable. But when she was not yet sixty-five years old and Livvy was two, Anna died of a heart attack. Not only was her death a devastating loss, but before we were even out of the mourning period, it became clear that she had been the hub that allowed the spokes of our family’s wheel to turn together. Now Anthony and Genevra had increasingly serious arguments with Angelo about management and expenditures. Walter, from the sidelines of his engineering job and against Delfina’s wishes, sided with Anthony as they turned against Angelo and forced us out of the restaurant. Although I held none of what had happened against her, once it was done, Delfina felt she couldn’t be my friend.

  It was a ghastly time. Angelo was enraged and away from home a great deal as he tried to find a new job. In the meantime, he earned what he could bartending and selling to restaurants and liquor stores for a couple of vintners. I was depressed. I’d been deprived not simply of work but of my best friend in Florence. Of a life. And with this deprivation had come my first more-than-momentary unhappiness over the distance between my husband and me.

  On nights when Angelo disappeared, I had told myself he was this macho Italian male who couldn’t be questioned, never dwelling on the matter of what it was he couldn’t be questioned about. Days and nights, watching his tenderness with Olivia, I had asked myself why he’d not touched me tenderly, lover-like, since we’d been married. But I hadn’t allowed myself even to question the nature of this trait, whether, for example, it belonged to a group or an individual, and even if I’d had the courage to dwell on such matters, this was hardly the time to raise them with Angelo.

  Olivia, accustomed to too many people and too much activity, and finding herself mostly alone with a depressed mother who talked to her at length about matters she couldn’t comprehend, grew cranky and difficult. When Angelo was away, she went around looking for “Nanna” all the time, Nanna being Anna, while at some point during those months she ceased to call me Mamma and began calling me Cara, for Caroline, as Angelo and the others did.

  Angelo decided to seek financing for his own restaurant. One evening, in a foul mood, he informed me that it was because of my youth that no bank would finance him.

  “Dear, dear,” I said, with a rage I’d seldom felt and he’d never seen in me before, “it’s hard to see what my age would have to do with your restaurant. Is it possible you told them I was the cook? And they think the cook’s the most important person in the place?”

  Angelo raised his hand as though he were going to strike me but held it there, above his head, no doubt because Livvy was watching. After a very long time, he lowered the hand and walked out of the house. Livvy called to him. When he didn’t return, she began crying that she wanted Nanna. At first, staring at the door, I just ignored her.

  But finally, in a voice she’d never heard, I shouted, “No
more Nanna! Nanna’s dead! Gone! No more Nanna!”

  She stopped in her tracks and stared at me for what seemed a long time, after which misery turned to hysteria.

  She did not ask for Nanna again and resisted my efforts to talk with her about Anna in a more loving way.

  I wrote my parents a real letter—as opposed to five minutes’ worth of birthday or Christmas merde—and included a snapshot of Livvy and a promise that I was trying to prepare myself for a visit. I told them that if they’d suspected I knew I was pregnant when we married, they were, of course, correct. I said I hadn’t felt I could handle their seeing me because I knew too well what they would think of my life, although some aspects of it were, or had been, just right. I told them of Anna’s death and of our subsequent difficulties, and of how Livvy had adored Anna and missed her almost as much as I did. I said that the loss of my adopted family had forced me to feel more keenly than before the absence of my real one. Now I could only hope they would forgive me and come to see us as soon as possible.

  They called to say they’d booked air passage for their Christmas vacation, but were having trouble finding a hotel room in Florence. Did we know of a place? It didn’t have to be elegant. They were so eager to see us! I asked around but had no luck, and finally enlisted Angelo’s help. A week earlier I would have been afraid even to ask him, but something had happened to alter his mood.

  Angelo had created a résumé for me that said I was thirty-five (I was twenty-three) and had managed two restaurants in New York. With this résumé, and I don’t know what else, he’d been able to get financing from a group of businessmen eager to reopen a once-great trattoria on the Via dei Greci in Rome. He’d told me, as though I should be purely and simply grateful, that we would be moving to that city, where I knew no one, and which, whatever its virtues, was huge, and foreign to me. My reward for making no protest was that within hours of my asking him, he’d arranged for my parents to stay with a woman named Helena D’Agni whose husband had once been Angelo’s boss in the wine business, and who had turned her home into a boarding house after his death.

  How would I look to them? I had gained about ten pounds in Florence, then lost it during my depression. And I had acquired, almost against my will, the sense of fashion that comes close to being universal among Florentine (and Roman) women. I swept up my hair in the artful fashion shown me by Delfina, used makeup as she’d taught me (I’d never even owned a lipstick in the States), and away from the restaurant, dressed in the bright reds and oranges, the deep greens and browns that became me, with my fair skin and light-brown hair. I’d picked up clever tricks with scarves and clips from women on the street. During my most depressed days I’d moped around the house in my robe, but when I went out, I’d still used makeup and worn decent clothes. I’d done it automatically, but now I wondered whether my parents would notice, and, if so, whether they would like the change.

  I need not have worried. Once we’d hugged and kissed, they barely looked at me. Gus and his wife showed no inclination to have children; Beatrice and her husband had not begun trying. Olivia, now two-and-a-half, was their first grandchild. It was immediately clear to them that she was the most wonderful child ever born. They were thrilled to meet her father, who’d brought us to the airport, delighted to find her a blend of our best qualities. She had the biggest, most beautiful eyes and the shiniest black hair they’d ever seen aside from her father’s. And so on. They didn’t bother to enumerate her points of resemblance to me; for all their excitement, they knew what they were doing as well as they always had when they wrote grant applications.

  In the car, as we drove toward the city, Livvy clung to me. When we reached Helena D’Agni’s, Angelo helped us in with their suitcases, then left for Rome to negotiate with the contractor over some work on the new restaurant. Livvy and I would remain with my parents as long as we wished, then walk the three blocks back to our apartment. (The family was allowing us to remain there until Angelo had a job and we found a new place.) We’d hook up with my parents again when they were settled in.

  It was eight-thirty A.M. by now, and a few of Helena’s guests were at the long table in the dining room. My parents, who’d had only juice on the plane, were eager to eat, and as soon as their bags were deposited in the small but pretty room, we came downstairs. Helena invited Livvy and me to join them in the dining room.

  The four people at the long table, which was set as for a formal dinner, were Italian tourists. While they were there, even when we were talking among ourselves, my parents and I spoke Italian. Livvy sat quietly on my lap. Every once in a while, one of my parents would ask her a question she’d answer (When are you going to start school? Don’t know. Who’s your best friend? Papa. What’s your favorite color? Red. Now, what do you think of that? We just happened to bring you a red sweater! and so on), always, of course, in Italian. But when the others had left, Helena brought out a few of the lovely rice cakes that were her specialty. My parents adored those cakes and hadn’t had them in years. In their excitement they began to speak, in English, about where they’d last savored them.

  Livvy came to a different kind of attention. She had seldom heard English spoken outside of the restaurant. Angelo had told her that the people speaking it were Americans. (The English hadn’t entered his frame of reference.) I’d explained to her on the way to the airport that my parents, who were coming to visit, were American, as I was, or once had been, but I don’t think the idea of them had been solid enough for details to stick.

  “Are they from the restaurant?” she asked me now.

  My parents stared at her as though she’d just recited the rice cake recipe. Backward. In Cyrillic.

  “You are wonderful,” my father told her.

  “Magnificent,” my mother chimed in.

  “Do your parents tell you how wonderful you are?”

  Livvy smiled shyly.

  They explained, alternating in their eagerness to connect with her, that they came from a place even farther away than Sicily, and it was called America, but the language was called English. Et cetera. If much of it was beyond her, it didn’t matter. She liked the fact that they wanted to explain, was delighted when they offered to teach her some “American” words. They told her she could call them Grandma and Grandpa, repeating both words and definitions several times, explaining how they were Mommy’s mommy and daddy, and so on. They told her that Livvy was sort of an American name, which made her thoughtful.

  As we stood to leave, Livvy slid down me to the floor, went to my mother, who had stretched and was smoothing her hair (I noticed, for the first time, a couple of gray ones), and took her hand. Then she turned to my father and reached for his. “Grandpa,” she said with a shy smile. “Nanna.”

  Tears came to everyone’s eyes. (Perhaps I need to explain that Nonno and Nanna are Italian for Grandma and Grandpa.)

  I said, “Anna was Grandma to her.”

  My mother kneeled and held out her arms to Livvy, who came into them.

  From that moment on, they couldn’t be torn away from one another. I thought my parents might want to change and rest. All three thought there was no reason this couldn’t be done with Livvy in the room. I asked if they remembered how small it was, but I was thinking that there was room for three, but not for four. We went back upstairs, my father carrying Livvy. I saw my mother look around. Floral wallpaper, a white bedspread, and a cherry wardrobe, with two bottom drawers, which left a foot or so of visible carpet space around the bed. Pretty, but really tiny.

  “It was the best we could do,” I said, “and I figured better—”

  “Talk in American,” Livvy ordered me in Italian.

  They stared at her in wonder.

  “She’s incredible,” my mother said. “Please don’t worry about the room. It’s beautiful. And the breakfast was perfect.”

  It was agreed that I would do some errands and Livvy would remain with them for a while, then I would come back and pick her up so they could nap. The probl
em was, I had no errands. I’d assumed I would have to make dinner at our apartment, that there was no way to keep my parents from seeing the somewhat dark and dingy apartment where I lived, but they were in no hurry to see it. Maybe they knew what it was like. I stood at the bottom of the steps in Helena D’Agni’s, forlorn. Unwanted. Nothing had changed in all the years since those childhood mornings when Gus and Beatrice and my parents all had things to do and places to go—schools, museums, libraries, whatever—and I had only to pass the time, trailing the housekeeper around the apartment until she finally went to the kitchen.

  Helena D’Agni was clearing the last dishes from the dining table.

  I asked if I could help.

  She was startled.

  I smiled, said that the grandparents and their grandchild were keeping one another busy, picked up the butter and jam from the table, followed her into the small but neat kitchen, joked about what would happen if I ever dared to put butter on our table, expecting she would ask why.

  She nodded. “He’s a real Sicilian.” She stopped herself. And blushed brightly, furiously, red.

  Ah.

  So that was how Angelo had found a lovely room a couple of weeks before Christmas.

  “So you know Angelo’s Sicilian,” I said lightly, and rattled on, it doesn’t matter about what, as though I were in the kitchen and had set something on fire and made it flambé without thinking twice. Helena D’Agni, an attractive but not pretty, lively, heavyset widow somewhere in her fifties, feared that if she knew Angelo was “a real Sicilian,” she must know other things about him that there was no obvious reason for her to know. Including what he was like in bed.

  I knew now. Just because of the extraordinary blush. I knew what he was like with women he was married to and women he wasn’t married to. I also knew, or thought I knew, who my competition was. I was less upset than I might have been, maybe because Helena was maternal rather than glamorous, perhaps because my absorption in the grandparents-grandchild love affair was keeping this romance from penetrating deeply. Or maybe I was just in shock.