The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

by Marlena de Blasi

  ‘Less do I. I’m Umbrian, you’ll recall. Umbrian women are as choice of pain as we are of pleasure. Who would Job be without his burden? In any case, I shall answer your question. The truth is that I have considered marrying again. The greater truth is that I never would. It’s either too late or not late enough, I can’t decide which.’

  ‘But if some day you were to feel it was neither too late nor too soon, which one would you choose? Of all the men you know, if you could choose, which one would it be?’

  ‘None of them.’

  ‘Not even Filiberto?’

  ‘Not even him. I’m still working on the ending of my first marriage.’

  ‘A very long ending.’

  Miranda has never spoken more than in passing about her husband. I know that he died young, suddenly. A very long time ago. She sits down, absently wiping down the sides of the oil bottle with a corner of her apron, corking it. She wraps her arms around the great jug, leans her kitchen towel turbaned head against it. As though against a tree. Or the chest of a lover. She looks at me.

  ‘He was a great beast of a man, my husband, kind as a baby deer, worked and laughed and slept and ate and drank passionately. His cousin was my neighbour in Castelpietro and when she married, Nilo came from Grosseto to the wedding. A Tuscan, Nilo Bracciolini was. We were married three months later. Or was it two? The foreman in a brick-making factory in Grosseto, that was Nilo’s job and, being such a good one, he wouldn’t hear of leaving it to come live in Castelpietro. Nor would I hear of leaving my parents, my sister and her children, my own work, my village. I couldn’t imagine crossing that border from Umbria into Toscana, save to visit. But we’d talked of all that before we married. Ci arrangeremo, we’d said; we’ll arrange things. He’d go off on Monday morning with four days’ worth of suppers packed in the boot of his Fiat 600; pots and bowls, a two-kilo loaf. A demijohn when he needed it. Empty pots and bundles of laundry in tow, Nilo would come home early on Friday and I’d be waiting for him. He’d bathe and we’d rest together and then he’d take me to supper at la Palomba. Every Friday. I’d go with him to Grosseto once a month, sometimes twice; I’d scour his apartment from floor to ceiling, stock his pantry, do what needed doing. I’d always fill the place with flowers and Nilo liked that. I could never stay more than a night or two because of my own job and so he’d put me on a bus back to Orvieto and from there I’d get myself to Castelpietro. To wait for Friday. For years and years that was our life. A good one. A good life. Nilo held me up like a china doll. Sometimes I still believe that’s what he did.’

  I’m lost. I stay quiet, waiting for her to show me the way.

  ‘Nilo’s dying was made of two swords falling. How was it that a man could go off one Monday morning, big and sweet and crushing my lips with his coffee-wet moustache, telling me he loved me just as he always told me, how could it be that he never came back? That he could be counting stacks of bricks, sending them down a line to be wrapped, readied for shipping, all the while talking to the man working next to him and, in the time it took for that man to turn around and talk to the person next to him on the line, then turn back to Nilo, Nilo was already dead. Slumped in a heap on the spot where he’d been standing and laughing two minutes before. That was sword number one.

  ‘The second sword came after the mass, the funeral mass. The coffin had been carried out to the hearse and I should have followed it but, instead, I’d wanted to stay a while alone. Giorgia wouldn’t leave me, though, my sister, Giorgia. Shadowing me, insisting I was too weak to kneel another time. So I just stood there, my back to the altar, facing the main aisle, remembering how I’d minced along its length on my father’s arm and in my mother’s ivory satin, never minding how the dress strangled me about my bosoms or that it barely reached my ankles rather than sweeping the floor as it was meant to. When I arrived beside him, the first thing Nilo whispered was, “Amore mio, sei in attesa di un diluvio? Were you expecting a flood, my love?” That always made me laugh, him saying that, and so I stood there playing the scene over and over, willing it to paint over the fresh red hole where my life once was.

  ‘And then I noticed a child. A small, thin boy striding toward me from the main door of the church. He was pallid, weeping, maybe ten years old, maybe less. Even from a distance his eyes shackled mine. I waited for him. When we were toe to toe, I thought I must be dreaming, for it was Nilo. There before me was my husband as a boy. Skin so white I could see his veins, deep black pools, the eyes. Even his mouth, the point of his chin, it was Nilo. I stayed silent and the boy, save trying to stave his weeping, he was quiet, too. And then I felt it, like something falling away. From my eyes, from my throat, my body, some kind of veneer shattering. Glass, ice. Something that had been gently suffocating me for so long that I’d learned to breathe through it. All of it gone. I knew it before he told me. Sober as Abraham, that little boy, I knew it was true before he could say it: Sono figlio di Nilo. I am Nilo’s son.

  ‘I think the boy neither expected me to speak nor wished me to, it being enough for him to say the words aloud. Out of the dark, revealed. By then it was I who was keeping Giorgia upright, bending to soothe her, telling her I was fine, and when I looked back at the boy, there stood behind him a girl. Another one, I thought. Two children. Jesus help me. The girl stepped closer. “Io sono l’altra. I’m the other one,” she said. “Of course you are,” I whispered. White-skinned, red-haired, just like the boy. But not like the boy. Not like Nilo. In the yellow light of the church she might have been a statue, sculpted, serene. “Io sono l’altra,” she said again. “L’altra, the other one,” she repeated and, though I tried to make her eyes slide off mine, she held them there until she was sure I’d understood. The other woman. The second sword. I never said a word.

  ‘There was nothing to do but take her by the hand, the boy with my other hand, walk down the aisle and out the door, down the steps where all the mourners were lined up on either side, waiting to console the widow. We were both widows, I kept thinking that. We just kept walking. I could hear Giorgia muttering behind me. Someone folded us into the long black funeral car, smelling of lilies. Even now, lilies bring me to a faint, a frenzy. I don’t recall much after that. The boy’s weeping, I remember that. And that we never did let go of one another’s hands all morning long. The girl, she never cried or spoke; taut as a palace guard, she stayed. They let go first, mother and son, they let go of my hands when it was over. Half a nod, they turned, began walking away. I called after them, they who’d become my comfort, if you can believe that. In the arc of an hour, they’d gone from being the embodiment of my mortification to becoming, somehow, just mine. How strange. How …’

  ‘Not strange. Not for you. Not strange at all.’

  ‘Perhaps not. We tried to be a kind of family but that failed. Instead we slipped into twice- or thrice-yearly visits made more of duty than pleasure. I tried then to forge a friendship with them. I had more than they did, more than I needed. As soon as it was comfortable for the tenants to vacate it, I signed over the deed to Nilo’s family property up here in Umbria. It was the place where we’d planned to retire some day. A fine stretch of land, a small house, in Civitella del Lago. They moved there, mother and son, and she worked in the village. I think it might have been two, maybe three years later when she sold everything. They went back to Grosseto. Nilo’s son is married, I think it was four or five years ago. The friendship didn’t work, either. After all this time, I’m still not certain if it was more her pain or mine that kept us from it. I expect one day that he’ll come to see me, Nilo’s son. That he’ll bring his children. Another grandmother, I would like to be that for them. I wait for it but I would never ask for it. I do think that Nilo must have spoken well and often to his son of me, maybe not as his wife but as a good person. A good woman, something of the sort. Wishful thinking? Is my notion made of only that?

  ‘Nilo’s betrayal did not leave me in despair. I never sat and rocked, imagining him kissing her or tangling his legs aroun
d hers in the candlelight, his feeling her belly when the baby quickened, I never did. All of that belonged to him and to her. It wasn’t the betrayal but Nilo’s treachery in not owning up to it. The dupe. That’s what left me stammering, inarticulate. It left me defenceless. And profiting from my teetering state, fear took over. Set up to stay. I was and remain victorious over despair, but fear is still with me. I cover it up with my prancing and joking, with my cooking. Once again, to answer your question, I would choose none of them.’

  ‘But you and Filiberto …’

  ‘Filiberto and I. An unlived love. Which is not the same as love denied or undeclared. It’s a love with distance between the lovers. A mostly private, mostly silent love, which – by its nature – avoids every kind of injury. Not even love can staunch a wound, Chou. Or if it can, while it’s doing its work on the old wound, the new love is equally busy wounding one in another place. If not in the same place.’

  Miranda smiles, looks up at me as if for sympathy, for accord but, so lost am I in my own story of wounds, both vintage and of recent harvest, I say nothing. She squints her eyes then, as though the old light by which she tries to look at the past has grown dim. When she looks at me again, she returns to the discourse about her shepherd lover.

  ‘So, yes, Filiberto and I … there is this distance between us. As though there was a stand of ancient elms we must traverse in order to get to one another. And so we wander through the trees and that’s enough for us and has been for twenty years. It’s enough that I feel wiser and lovelier when he’s near, which doesn’t mean I can’t manage when he’s not. It’s Filiberto I run to on the morning when I see the olives have budded. I need to tell him about beautiful things. Him, exactly him. One must put a face to love. One must know who to run to.’

  ‘Quaint. Charming enough. Perhaps even ideal. But …’

  ‘Not real?’ Miranda smiles.

  ‘It would be like living on sweets. I would miss the salt. Half a love.’

  ‘The good half,’ she tells me.

  ‘You said it: I’m still working on the ending of my first marriage. Not a stand of fine old elms, it’s Nilo who is the distance between you and Filiberto.’

  ‘And what if he is?’

  ‘Then he is. I just think it’s good that you know it’s Nilo and not the trees.’

  ‘Doesn’t change anything, does it? What name I give it?’

  ‘No. No, it doesn’t change. But don’t you wonder if …’

  ‘I thought we were telling truths here. Hard ones. Or are we only telling mine?’

  I stay quiet.

  ‘Fine. Then I’ll tell one of yours. The old duke was your unlived love.’

  ‘Not a truth of mine. A detour from yours.’

  For all this time that we’ve been talking, I’ve been settled on the edge of the work table while Miranda has been sitting on a stool in front of it, every now and then wiping down the great jug of violenza with a damp cloth, polishing it with a corner of her apron, wiping it down again. She rises now, lifts the jug, walks to the armoire with it, sets it on an empty shelf. As though she spots an errant smudge, she rubs the jug again with her apron, slams her palm down on the already tight cork. She closes the armoire doors and, still facing them, she says, ‘What are you reaching for, Chou? I think it’s guilt you want to know about, isn’t it? You want to know if I once thought or still think that I failed Nilo somehow and thus sent him racing off for succour somewhere else … Do I wonder if he’d have gone to her if I hadn’t chosen to stay in Castelpietro? Would he have wanted her if I’d been better or kinder or more beautiful? If I’d been a more faithful panderer?’

  ‘Panderer?’

  ‘Si, ruffiana. Panderer. Men need a daily dose of fawning. As we would coax a contrary child with bread and sugar so must men be coaxed. We must enoble them. The most gentle critique is censure to a man. He retreats. Even when he fights back, he is retreating, saving up small, sharp pieces of his displeasure, a bag of sticks and stones for whenever he might feel strong enough to fight. Maybe I allowed Nilo’s bag to get too full and, rather than heaving stones at me, he left. Essentially, he did leave me. With neither the will nor the talent to pander, I made the fatal error of being sincere. I was indeed guilty. Guilty even though I knew that fable, what’s it called? The one in which the courtiers compliment the king on his new suit while he prances naked before them. Those people knew he needed the compliment more than he needed the truth. What’s that story called?’

  ‘“The Emperor’s New Clothes” in English. I don’t know the title in Italian. Virginia Woolf said it better, though. Do you know of Virginia Woolf?’

  ‘Do I know of la lupacchiotta? That’s what Signora Giacomini called Virginia. The she-wolf.’

  ‘Who is Signora Giacomini?’

  ‘Was. The matriarch of the clan Giacomini – four generations of them all living in the same palazzo. It’s where I was cook and housekeeper until I married Nilo. La signora loved English novels – in translation, of course – and she being nearly blind when I was there, it fell to me to read aloud to her after lunch. The she-wolf was her favourite and she knew by heart every line of two or three of her books so that when I’d try to skip a page or even a phrase, she’d reach out to pinch my arm, keen and mumble until I’d go back to where I’d left off. It was her lullabye, my reading, the only way she could have her afternoon sleep. Yes, I know about Virginia.’

  ‘Sotto voce,’ I quote ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice his natural size.’

  ‘Non capisco. What did the she-wolf say?’

  ‘From A Room of One’s Own: Women have served all these …’

  ‘Never mind. The last thing I need right now is a dose of pontification from la lupacchiotta. She’s a big stick that women use to beat men over the head with, and I say there’s nothing wrong with men that isn’t likewise wrong with us.’

  I know her dethroning of Woolf is burlesque but still it irks me and I let her know by refusing to parry. Miranda rises, comes to me, takes my face in her hands, shakes it back and forth as she might to a loved child. In a tired, gravelly whisper, she says, ‘We were talking about Nilo Bracciolini and Miranda Filippeschi and I could give a damn at this moment about Virginia Woolf.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I concede and she returns to her chair.

  ‘It wasn’t our living apart four days a week. ‘I’ve never believed it was that which provoked Nilo’s betrayal. Out of sight, out of mind signifies something less than love. Our story was likely finished long before he ever held the other one in his arms. Our story ended when we struck a truce, when we stopped trying to finesse one another, when we quit the game of convincing and beguiling. Beware of tolerance between lovers. We are obliging only of those we don’t love. The more obliging we are, the less we love the one obliged. Love and tolerance are antagonists. No, they are mortal enemies. Nilo and I, at some point in time, we became tolerant of one another. Believing we’d earned it, I saw nothing of peril in the long, unbroken peace we lived and I called it happiness. I named it happiness, the good-natured dance we did, adagio, adagio, around the carcass of a long-dead love.’

  She stands upright, unties her kitchen-towel turban, rewraps it around her braids, pats it into place, goes then to fetch two baskets from where they hang by the back door, slips them over one arm. She tells me she’s going to see what vegetables the others have left in the shed. Weary of groping in that darkish past, I think it’s the present Miranda’s gone to retrieve as much as the vegetables. No sooner out the door, she comes back in.

  ‘In case you’re also wondering if I miss him, I will tell you that I don’t. I don’t miss Nilo, not he, himself.’ She heads out the door, turns back once again. ‘Ah, but how I long for the man I thought he was.’

  For the man I thought he was. I don’t know how much time passes before I hear her shouting, half laughing, from the shed. ‘Come and help me wi
th the wine, will you, Chou?’

  Some of the mischief back in her gaze, she nods to a demijohn and we begin rolling it the few metres between the shed and the back door into the kitchen.

  ‘And as for la lupacchiotta, the she-wolf, everything I’ve read of hers sounds as though her nostrils quiver when she speaks. Puzzo sotto il naso – a stink under the nose.’

  Seeking relief in sarcasm, Miranda is pleased with her lampoon and begins to launch another one, but I’m already telling her about the time I tried to speak of Proust to Barlozzo.

  ‘All I did was to ask him if he’d ever read Proust,’ I tell Miranda as we position the barrel near the supper table, both of us already laughing.

  ‘And he said, “For pity’s sake, an epicene Frenchman rhapsodising over a cake damped in tea, no less. At the least he might have poured himself a thimbleful of vin santo. I can’t imagine what he might have written had there been a tin of cornmeal biscotti thick with pine nuts and white raisins near to hand … Better yet, spaghetti carbonara, the pancetta crisp, a whole hill of pecorino on top, a lovely glass of red … I could understand a man getting misty over the taste of that.”’

  Miranda laughs with only half a heart, the rest of her lingering among the ancient elms with Nilo and the costumeless emperor. Perhaps she’s still in the church with l’altra. I feel desolate with wanting to bring Miranda back. I try another dose of folly. I tell her about little Biagio. My darling Biagio, an eighty-something farmer from western Tuscany who has long been my friend. Another in the anti-Proust league, he’d start ranting and snorting every time I’d paraphrase Proustian text about twilight: When the trees are black and the sky is still light …

  ‘Look, Biagio, it’s Proust light,’ I’d tell him.

  ‘Who the hell is Proust?’

  ‘You know very well who is Proust.’

  ‘And what did he know about light? My grandfather would call all of us out into the vineyard just before twilight. He’d already be there, the legs of his wooden chair stuck into the earth between the vines, his head thrown back, studying the sky. He said he could smell the twilight before it fell. I wonder if Proust ever smelled the twilight. Every damn farmer who’s ever ploughed a field at sunset could have told you more and told you better than a body who sat squinting at things from a window.’