La Cucina

by Lily Prior

  I watched the door in a halfhearted way for l’Inglese, although I knew he would not come. I imagined how it would be if one day he sauntered through the ward in his come-to-bed shoes, his eyes sparkling with mischief, their blue the only color in my gray world. He would hold me in his arms and everything would be all right; I would come to life again and we would be happy and live and laugh and love and cook as we had that long hot summer not so long ago. And yet in my heart I knew I would never see him again.

  One night, some time after the Bandieras’ visit, Nonna Frolla failed to wake me with her cries for the pug; she did not snore or chatter in her sleep, and the system of levers and pulleys holding her leg in traction did not creak and strain with her every movement. There was a strange silence hanging heavy on the sterile ether of the ward.

  “Nonna, are you all right?” I whispered, my voice sounding curiously loud in the darkness.

  There was no reply.

  “Nonna…? Nonna…?”

  I dragged myself over the side of my bed and rested my feet on the floor; I tested my legs for strength: they held up, just about. Since the night of the fire I had not walked anywhere unaided. I felt like a rag doll walking on its wadding legs.

  “Nonna?” I asked again, drawing back the white curtain between our two beds.

  Nonna lay peaceful and still and dead. Her little sharp-featured face was still for the first time in 111 years.

  Soon the sisters had removed Nonna from the ward, and within minutes no one would have known that she had ever been there. The sepia photograph of the pug and the vase of flowers were taken away, as were her other few belongings: her reading glasses, her library book, her spare nightgowns and toiletries. The little bed was remade with starched white sheets, and when the other patients woke in the morning no trace of Nonna remained.

  When Nonno Frolla came for his early morning visit, bearing the customary rose in his gnarled hand, he found the bed empty. The sisters led him away to the day room to explain that his partner of eighty years had left without him. Then they sent him away with her few things in a brown paper bag.

  I insisted on attending the funeral. I was wheeled there in an old bath chair that had been in the attic of the infirmary for decades.

  The service took place at the Chiesa di Santa Maria Magdalena, where Nonna was baptized, confirmed, and married all those years ago. Her shrunken form lay in the open casket surrounded by clouds of white organza and rose petals. She was dressed in her little wedding gown of ivory satin. The embalmers had enjoyed complete freedom, taking advantage of Nonno Frolla’s age and apparent imbecility, and had endowed Nonna with cupid bow lips of a fierce scarlet, rouged cheeks, baby blue eyelids, and a head full of kiss curls. The overall impression was obscene.

  I wept for the first time when I saw what a travesty death and the mischievous youths of the Serenita Funeral Parlor had made of Nonna. The tears led to a fit of coughing, and the nuns piloting the bath chair saw fit to remove me from the church and propel me back to the infirmary before the proceedings had even begun.

  The day after the funeral I lay dozing. It was much quieter now that Nonna had gone; far fewer visitors came to the ward. The regulars from the Frollas’ grocery store stayed away, all except Quinto Cavallo, who continued to bring me thumbed copies of fashion magazines and sometimes pastries. He had grown used to coming to the infirmary, and was unable to give it up. Signor Rivoli, too, continued to come. He now took the liberty of sitting in the vinyl armchair next to my bed, which emitted embarrassing squeaks at every movement. I chose to ignore him, and would often close my eyes when I saw him trotting up the ward and feigned sleep through his entire visit. Sometimes he would go away again after an hour or even two without a single word having been exchanged between us. Simply being there was enough for him.

  Still, as I lay on my little white bed that afternoon, I heard in my slumbering consciousness a sound I recognized instinctively, a call from the distant past that immediately commanded my attention. Something long ago and far away stirred within me and responded to the call. It was the sound of footsteps, but not regular footsteps. It was the sound of a three-legged gait, a sound unlike any other, a step, a slight drag of a foot, a step and then another step quickly following it. I opened my eyes to see middle-aged male Siamese twins coming toward me along the ward. Although I had not seen them in over twenty-five years, I recognized them immediately as my brothers Guerra and Pace.

  Oh my beloved boys! Could it really be them? Despite our long years of separation I had never stopped thinking about them. And here they were, all grown up, and standing right before me at the hospital. I took a long look at them, scarcely believing they were those same little creatures I had looked after as a girl.

  They were now well upholstered, and wore a beautifully tailored costume: brown, double-breasted, with a wide pinstripe.

  “Boys,” I gasped, overcome with astonishment, “can it really be you?”

  “There are few like us in this world, sister,” was their simultaneous reply.

  Tears streamed down my face as we embraced, surrounded by the nuns crossing themselves and fainting, and the other patients on the ward rubbing their eyes in disbelief and imagining themselves to be dreaming. It felt so good to have them hold me in their two strong arms. I made them squeeze me tight to prove I wasn’t having one of my daydreams.

  “Look at you!” I said again and again, holding them at arm’s length and studying them for evidence of those little wily creatures that had been transformed into such strapping full-grown men. I couldn’t stop myself crying. It was all too much for one in my weakened state.

  We all talked at the same time, we were so excited and so full of questions. We talked for hours, about everything that had happened since that day so long ago when I embarked on my journey to the big city. They had evidently done well for themselves since the old days at Castiglione; they looked comfortable in their matching homburgs, sleek haircuts, and beautiful, hand-crafted shoes. In fact, they were now the wealthiest men in town, and had bought the finest house, which had once been home to the duke. They had set up home with a pockmarked whore called Biancamaria Ossobucco, who serviced the needs of them both simultaneously in an enormous feather bed.

  Not a single person or event in the whole history of Castiglione went undiscussed that afternoon in the infirmary. I was more animated that afternoon than I had been since the accident happened. I was almost like my old self. At last, as night began to fall, and the shadows gathered, the twins said simultaneously:

  “We’ve come to take you home, Rosa.”

  I did not argue. I realized that the time had come for me to return to Castiglione. The nuns got me dressed in the few things that had been brought in for me by various well-intentioned neighbors; all of my belongings had been ruined by the fire. Then the twins helped me outside, where there was an automobile waiting for us in the street. It was their own, a new model, shipped over specially from the States, with a driver who was to drive us back home. I had never been in an automobile before: I felt so grand, sinking back into the leather seats while the driver covered me in a traveling rug. The motor purred and we drove along through the darkness. I slipped in and out of sleep; I was warm and comfortable and never wanted the journey to end.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was morning when we reached the fattoria. The trees along the Randazzo road were already golden and had begun to lose their leaves; the grapes had long been gathered and the vines were being cut back. The land had given up its bounty of wheat and vegetables and late oranges and bore the look of a plate after a hearty diner had had his fill.

  As we approached, I saw a tiny figure making its way toward us along the lane. News travels fast in a small town. I knew while she was still merely a speck in the distance that it was Mama. As we drew closer, sure enough the tiny dot turned into Madre Calabrese. Always tiny even in youth, she had by now shrunk to the size of a pumpkin on legs. Her walk, ever brisk, was rickety. Her hair, pre
viously black streaked with gray, was white.

  It was now hard to imagine her as the feisty woman who had ruled the fattoria and its community like a dictator. This was the same woman who had shot her second husband, Antonino Calabrese, up the arse with a shotgun, the woman who would not scruple to whip the farmhands if she thought they were slacking off or cheating her.

  The car stopped and I climbed out into my mother’s arms.

  “Rosa, figlia mia,” cried Mama, embracing me as tears poured down her wrinkled cheeks.

  I too cried; I cried my heart out. I cried all the tears I had not been able to cry in the past months since l’Inglese disappeared, since the accident, since I lost my health, my home, my purpose. The twins too cried and embraced Mother and me. Then from crying we all turned to laughing, wiping away our tears with the backs of our hands, before starting to cry again.

  As we stood in the road embracing and crying and laughing, from the pastures, still bearing pitchforks and hoes, came my other brothers, Leonardo, Mario, Giuliano, Giuseppe, Salvatore, and the daft farmhand Rosario. The cycle of crying, laughing, and hugging continued. Isabella Calabrese was not too old to deliver a sharp slap to the cheeks of the daft Rosario when he made so bold a gesture as to embrace me. Not while Mama was alive was one of her farmhands to take liberties with her only daughter.

  Helped along by my brothers, I found myself back at the fattoria.

  The odor of the dark passage made me a child again; the old, slightly musty smell of the house was bound up with being small and having spindly legs and grazed knees that tasted salty when you sucked them. Through all the years it had stayed with me in the remote corners of my memory, and sometimes it had come back to me in my imagination, at night when I was lying awake in my tiny apartment in the Via Vicolo Brugno. But then I could only capture it imperfectly. Now, the smell of cool dark corners, of age-browned plaster, greeted me, remembered me, and told me I was home.

  La cucina, at the end of the passage, was unchanged. The past twenty-five years had not made the slightest dent in its appearance. I hoped to find it exactly as I had left it that day when I took the cage of my parrot, Celeste, from the hook by the window and simply walked away. I feared finding anything different. Immediately I registered a few minor changes: the new cushion on the settle, though even that was no longer new; a chair leg that had always been broken was now mended, but reassuringly everything else was the same. It felt as though I had never been away.

  I could feel the spirits of my forebears the Fiores all around me. My father was now among them. He sat in his chair smoking a pipe. He was still wearing his beloved mountain cap.

  “So you’ve decided to come back home at last, have you, my girl?” he said between sucks on his pipe.

  Nonna Fiore was there too, baking some pies, and Nonno too. You will remember that it was Nonno Fiore whom, according to legend, I had tried to bring back to life with a dish of panelle when I was about four. Other shadows were there too; ghosts had always lived in the cucina of the Fiores.

  I wandered around the kitchen, touching the luster of the table, the gleaming pans lined up along the wall, assuring myself that my homecoming was real. Everything was just as it had always been, even the tea that Mama handed me, made with the iron-colored well water and tasting like no other tea on earth.

  Soon breakfast was ready and I sat down with my brothers and the rest of the farmhands. The heavenly aroma of Mama’s homemade bread fresh from the oven made me feel hunger for the first time in weeks.

  When Mama was satisfied there were no dirty hands at her table, she ladled out steaming bowls of thick bean soup, and heaped the table with prosciutto, eggs, goat’s cheese, olives, and strong black coffee.

  After breakfast the twins left to attend to their business affairs, and the farm workers went back to the fields, leaving my mother and me alone in the kitchen. I went out in the yard with the scraps and leftovers and scraped them into the trough for the dogs. It was a beautiful morning, crisp and clear and still. The dogs were the descendants of the dogs that I had known and fussed over and fed in the past. They hung back from this stranger giving them their breakfast and only came forward to eat when I had gone back inside.

  Then, over a fresh pot of brackish tea, Mama and I sat down to talk about everything that had happened since our separation.

  “And so Mother, what exactly happened with Antonino Calabrese?” I asked, tracing patterns on the glossy wooden surface of the table as I had always done since I was tiny.

  Mama paused before answering.

  “It happened so long ago now, daughter, that I hardly even remember it. Let me see now. Well, of course he wasn’t from farming stock. The ways of the farm didn’t suit him. He didn’t like the work, and I wouldn’t keep a man who didn’t work his way. Anyway things gradually soured between us. We started to argue more and more, and he started to stay out late at nights in the tavern in the town; he took to drinking hard, and the more he drank, the more we quarreled, and so on. It must be twenty years ago now, when the final straw came.

  “One Tuesday it was, I remember it quite well now, although I thought I couldn’t remember any of it. On a Tuesday afternoon I went into the dairy to check on the butter; three pans of butter there were, and two of cheese. That strumpet of a dairymaid Balbina Burgondofara was nowhere to be seen. She left my butter and cheeses unattended, and disappeared somewhere, probably for a quick embrace with one of the farmhands. I’ll have her, I thought to myself, leaving my butters to turn rancid and my cheeses to curdle. I’ll give her a sound whipping, I thought, and her beau too. Quietly I crept into the cowshed, the one where you had stored all those barrels of ricotta, and sure enough, beyond the stalls, in the mound of fresh straw at the far end, I came upon our young lovers. He with his pink ass stuck up in the air was not one of the farmhands. No. The pink ass belonged to my own husband, Antonino Calabrese.

  “I murmured not a word, despite my fury. Resisting the very strong temptation to launch an attack on them there and then, I let not a single sound betray my presence. I crept, quietly as an angel, out of the cowshed and back into the house to get Father’s shotgun. I always kept it fully loaded at the side of the bed, just in case I should ever need it to fend off the bandits. I also supplied myself with a good strong whip from the tack room.

  “Once again I tiptoed into the cowshed, this time armed and ready. Our lovers were still going at it hammer and tongs. With one lunge I thrust the barrel of the shotgun between Antonino Calabrese’s buttocks and pulled the trigger. It took that stupid girl Balbina Burgondofara some time to catch on, so transported was she by the prowess of my husband. The look of horror on her face when she finally realized was wonderful to see. I whipped her within an inch of her life, and then some more for her impudence.

  “Your brothers took the corpse and buried it among the trees in the upper pasture. We didn’t want the carabinieri nosing around. We just let it be known around the town that he had gone back to the mainland, and no one ever asked any questions. So that was the end of that. Since then, of course, I’ve had other friends, but I like to have the bed to myself now that I’m older.”

  Mama’s black eyes were fiery again with the recollection of her story.

  “Tell me, Rosa,” she said, pouring another cup of tea. “What happened with that Inglese, the one that Luigi wired me about?”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that, Mama. What I want to know is: how did Luigi know about him?”

  “He never said.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “Only what I wrote you. Wait, I’ve got the telegram here somewhere.”

  I held my breath as she scrabbled about in Nonna Calzino’s enormous silver teapot, where she kept her odds and ends. Perhaps the wire would provide the answers to all my questions. I was about to burst with impatience as she pored over torn scraps of photographs, keys to unknown locks, and decayed memorabilia and the associated stories I could see she was struggling to remember. There didn
’t appear to be a telegram in the pile she had tipped out onto the table.

  “Mama, the wire?” I reminded her. She was certainly more forgetful now than she had been.

  “Oh, the wire,” she said absentmindedly, surfacing from the shadowy world of her memories. “It’s not here. I must have used it for lighting the fire.”

  I wanted to scream. The telegram could have provided a clue to the mystery that was constantly turning over in my mind. What did Luigi know about l’Inglese? How did he know? Was there some connection between them? Was Luigi involved in l’Inglese’s disappearance? Did Luigi know what had happened to him?

  “Wait!” said Mama, seeing the despair in my face. “I can remember what was in the wire. Wait a minute. Let me think.” She closed her eyes, summoning up the power of her fading memory.

  “I remember it now,” she said triumphantly after a pause, “It said: ‘Mama. Palermo says Rosa acting the puttana with Inglese. Dishonoring the family. Stop her. I send you $500. Lui.’”

  “Was that all he said? Are you sure that was all?”

  “I may be old now,” said Mama, narrowing her black eyes at me, “but my yarn is not yet unraveled. That is all he said.”

  This was no more than I knew already. It didn’t give me anything new to go on. Perhaps I was reading too much into Luigi’s telegram. Perhaps he had just heard some gossip about his sister. Maybe there was no connection with l’Inglese. Maybe I had got it wrong. I didn’t know what to think anymore. All those weeks in the hospital it had been running endlessly through my mind. I was so tired of thinking.

  “So what happened to him? The Inglese?” asked Mama.

  “He disappeared. Just like Papa. I went to his house to meet him and he had gone, leaving all of his things behind. I searched and searched but there was no trace of him anywhere. I just knew he had gone for good.”