The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

by Marlena de Blasi

  ‘“Listen with your soul’s ear,” she’d tell us. “It can hear the things that those foolish ones sticking out of your head can’t hear at all.”

  ‘“When the polenta was crisp and gold and beginning to burn at its edges, she’d offer each one of us a slice from the tip of her toasting fork, so hot we’d burn our hands and then our lips and our tongues and she’d keep talking while spearing the next slices. We gorged on them. On the story. As much on the story, I think. She made cooks of all of us you know. Every one.”

  ‘“She died soon after the war ended. I remember helping my mother to wrap my grandmother’s kitchen things in newspaper. Almost everything fitted into two small boxes; a meagre store of pots, the mortars in which she pounded her herbs, two etched blue goblets from her wedding feast, the shallow white bowls in which she served almost everything, mismatched table silver, all of it dainty and fine and gifted to her – a spoon and fork at a time – from the legacies of aunts and cousins. By comparison, my father left a noble’s ransom to me, an estate which I’ve since managed to enrich. And yet I will never have as much to leave as she.”’

  •

  ‘When Niccolò was with me it was good, and when he wasn’t it was another kind of good: a wider good, better lit. I began to feel a quiet relief that he and I would not be repeating the ménage à trois I’d lived with my parents: mother, father and child, smooth as three paving stones carved and keyed to lock together. No. Not that for us. Having swerved easily enough away from thinking to be in love with him, my passions seemed inclined toward liberty. How I waited for the evenings when Niccolò would be off to the other side of his life, to his friends. To his mystery. Possessive of my solitude, nothing and no one would distract me from the wonder I was feeling about the child inside me. I would read or knit, take some small supper of broth and bread but mostly I would just sit and caress the place where the baby was. Niccolò’s affection for me was a comfort that I brushed against but never leant upon. Even then, though, I’d understood that this liberty – this solitude – I was chasing would sometimes feel like aloneness and that the abyss between solitude and aloneness would be deep and dark. And so I wondered about love. About that absorbing kind of love. You and me against the world. Did I fear that? Did I believe in it? And if one risked such a thing, could even love save one from aloneness? I thought not. I think not.

  ‘As I was then made of that fragile sort of thinness, more bone than flesh, and still wore mourning, the child growing in me had become quickly evident. Black dresses with padded shoulders and belted waists, the skirts falling to the calf, tea-length we called them. Oxfords with high thick heels, black cotton stockings. Even in summer. No more than I sought to display my baby did I try to hide him.

  ‘As respectful to me in public as he was in private, Niccolò and I moved through some of each day as a couple might. We’d take breakfast standing at the bar in Ducchi, queue at the butcher’s and at the post office, make the struscio – the evening stroll, up and down the corso, sit in the caffés for aperitivi, look in the shops. We were serene while the town clucked and wagered and watched, planting and harvesting rumours like so much wheat.

  ‘Surely, the San Severese factored my tragic losses into the gauge of their censure. If some sewed me a scarlet letter, they pinned it to my turned shoulders and never to my breast. Carolina was my champion, after all. Her undisguised benediction of me – and Umberto’s reserved acquiescence – suffocated the gossip, if not always to its death.

  ‘Unmarried and with child in a small rural Umbrian town in the last years of the 1960s, I might well have scorched with shame at every social encounter and yet I never did. I suppose some of the locals thought Niccolò would eventually marry me or that I would surrender my child to the nuns or have the decency to remove myself to another town apart from their genteel sensibilities. Unreflected considerations, all of those. I shall never know how it was that, at the age of eighteen, I’d managed to grasp onto the truth that what others would say or think of me mattered less than what I thought of myself. I felt no mortification for my indiscretion with Niccolò, the shame in me being already engaged elsewhere.

  •

  ‘Stasia Lazzari. Even her name was lovely. Wherever she went, my mother brought all the light and took up all the air. Under the convincing pretence of devotion, my mother’s every gesture was provoked by vanity, a superiority complex she wrapped in an often slavish humility. She accentuated her beauty by understatement. A natural actress, her long-standing and preferred role was Victim. The beleaguered mother. She’d buy her dresses from the used pile in the markets while mine were hand-smocked by a sarta in Florence. That escaped tendril, that fallen shoulder strap, were her at-home costume while my father’s cast-off sweater and slippers with ankle socks, even in the rain, made up her public masquerade. La Piccola Fiammiferaia. The Little Match Girl. This one with green eyes iridescent as the neck of a pheasant. Stasia Lazzari was irresistible.

  ‘Even those daily ten-metre trips to fetch my pastries were performances. She’d never simply stand in line to wait for them but groan and shake her head, reciting at studied intervals the same lament: “Per la figlia, beata lei che è ancora a letto. Intanto la mamma fa tutto. For my blessed daughter who is still in bed. Meanwhile her mother does everything.”

  ‘Her friends and my friends would tell me of this repeated scene, ask me how I could permit my poor mother to do my bidding. “I’ve asked, begged. A million times. Ti prego, mamma. I beg you. Don’t bring me pastries. I prefer to have breakfast in the bar with my friends.” How I hated those croissants. But should I leave them untouched, she would announce my ingratitude that afternoon in the shops, grist for the evening’s supper table in who knows how many households. I took to leaving a few crumbs on the plate and hiding the rest in my knapsack to later tear up for the birds in the schoolyard. Unimportant in itself, this years-long pastry farce that Stasia and I practised was, though, a symbol of our unrelatedness. I was invisible to her save as an opportunity for the display of her virtue. The bleached-white, sugar-starched emblem of her excellence.

  ‘As a small girl I’d been Stasia’s devotee, shadowing her as she kneaded bread, ironed sheets. And when, before church or a supper out with my father, she’d perform a half-hearted toilette, I’d sit in the middle of her bed to watch: face powder from a gold tin she’d pat on with a pink puff and then, using a small brush which she’d wet on her tongue and rub across what looked like shoe polish in a tiny glass jar, she’d stroke her eyelashes – blonde and thick as a pony’s – quickly, savagely, until they were black and curled against the green slant of her eyes. From the sack of her trinkets, I would choose her earrings. Sometimes a necklace. I remember only two dresses in her armoire, both of dark silk in more or less the same chaste form. Now that I think about it, there was another dress, black and made of some heavy fabric, perhaps faille. Straight and plain as a pencil from the front, she seemed so tall in that dress and when she turned there was a bustle, a small drape which fell from her waist to sit just above the curve of her derrierè. Not a proper Victim’s dress. I think she must have worn it only on the occasions when she and my father would drive into Rome.

  ‘I don’t remember Stasia touching me, save when she dressed or washed me. Pulling, tugging, scrubbing, her affection utilitarian, purposeful. A good-night buss on the cheek, though not always. Nothing I could count on. When she sat to shell peas or tail beans or to talk on the telephone, I would sidle up next to her, rest my leg against hers, put my shoulder to her arm. I’d loop a finger possessively inside the hem of her skirt and just sit there, preening. Even then, when I was little, I’d always felt I was somehow older than Stasia, that I was the mother.

  ‘Over time, my enchantment frayed, as it was bound to. She began to exhaust me and I consoled myself with finespun designs of wickedness against her. Among my most treacherous reveries, though, none were so extravagant as those that she and the Fates designed: the Match Girl flawlessness of her illnes
s, her death. So you see, my shame back then, it was all used up on my mother.

  ‘How did Stasia become herself? I still wonder about that. Do we become or are we begotten? What chance do we have? What was my mother’s story? Did she mother me as she, herself, had been mothered? Is that what we do? Please God, no daughter for me. I fear that one evening my little girl would be sitting on my bed, humming over my jewels, and the next she’d be plotting revenge. I’d be doomed to make a daughter suffer. Who am I to think I wouldn’t? Please God, no daughter.

  •

  ‘Allora. I spent that summer knitting and sewing, roaming the markets and cooking for Niccolò, talking and singing to my baby. But it was also during those weeks that, guided by a coverless and tattered illustrated volume Niccolò found in a vintage bookstall in Florence, I discovered the alchemy of cooking sweets. The Traditional Convent Pastries of Sicily. Transforming the kitchen into a laboratory, for the beating of creams and icings and the tempering of chocolate, I pummelled kilos of almonds with sugar into marzipan and crystallised gorgeous summer fruits and flowers in almond-perfumed sugar syrup. I tinted biscuit dough in the palest pink and pushed balls of it around in bowls of pine nuts or sesame seeds or roasted bitter almonds. Candied fruit and liqueurs I mixed with ewe’s-milk ricotta and sugar and, after spreading the paste between rum-soaked layers of sponge cake, I covered the whole with a sheet of almond paste, glazed it with a thin pistachio-green icing and decorated the gorgeous mess with sugared violets. A fairly authentic reading of la Cassata. Loyal and willing beneficiaries, Carolina and Luigia would, at any given sitting, dispatch a dozen pastries, a tin of cookies, sugaring their heaving bosoms as they nibbled, crusting their lips with bits of pistachio.

  ‘When I would go to supper at the parish house, I’d fill a kilo-weight tin with the day’s lovely things and, resting it on the great mound of my stomach, make my way across the piazza. On one of those evenings, Luigia had gone with Umberto to an event in Perugia and Carolina and I were to dine alone.

  ‘I remember how distracted she was, Carolina. We sat so long in the front garden with a glass of wine that I’d thought there’d be no supper at all until she finally hurried me inside and into the dining room, set down plates of soup. I remember it was a puree of green beans and basil and it tasted so good to me. Then there were thin slices of a veal galantine with a wine jelly that sparkled. Rifreddo, she called it. “One of Beppa’s masterpieces made with bits picked from a Sunday roast,” she’d said somewhat distractedly. Beppa was the parish-house cook. I was starving and so kept slipping another piece and another onto my plate, tipping a silver pitcher of sharp, vinegary sauce and skating crusts of bread through it. There was a blue-and-white-footed bowl heaped with tiny pickles. Carolina didn’t touch the food. She would begin to say something, interrupt herself, look at me as though for help, as though I should know what she wanted to say. After a while I left her sitting there. I cleared the table, brought plates into the kitchen. I brewed espresso, carried in the tray and set it down before her. Still as stone, she sat.

  ‘“Carolina? What is it, Carolina? Can you tell me?”

  ‘Fluttering back from where she’d been, she laughed. Her skin rosy in the candle gleams, she seemed a Carolina more mysterious. I sat, poured out the espresso. Rising from her place across from me, she picked up her cup and came to sit next to me. With the artless sort of candour one might use to reveal one’s self to a lone seatmate on a night train – unheated, unlit and speeding through a tundra – Carolina began to talk.

  ‘“I don’t want to be or become one who paints the past, rubs it to a glimmer so it bears no resemblance to the half-ruin every one of us makes of life. I want to do a good job with what’s left of my time so that I won’t have to do some kind of fancy mental restoration later on.”

  ‘She drained her tiny cup in a single sip, held it a moment longer in front of her mouth, looked at me over the rim, recognising that she’d already lost me.

  ‘“I … can you tell me what it is that you …?” I asked her.

  ‘“Let me begin again. You, knowing me as you do – or as you think you do – how would you describe me to someone? What would you say?”

  ‘“That you’re maddening, that you’re sweet … I don’t know, I guess I’d say that you’re audacious. Vivid. I’d say you were vivid.”

  ‘“Would you say that I was a hopeful person?”

  ‘“Of course. Hopeful, yes …”

  ‘“I’ve always thought so. But what I’m discovering is that most people who think they live in hope are really desperate while those who admit to despair are quietly operating under hope. Case in point, I present myself an optimist, a sanguine, and yet what I truly am is a desperate person in convincing disguise. Most Pollyannas are, of course. Truth is skittish as quicksilver and I, for one, hardly know what was or is my own truth. Or if I have one and if I do, will it still be true in an hour? That was until this afternoon.”

  ‘“This afternoon?”

  ‘“Umberto, he proposed something to me. An idea which, well … a possibility which … were it to become … well, it would change everything. I’m old, Paolina, and I trust there’s time for me to grow yet older. Yet older or younger, I can’t say which, though my sense, as of this afternoon, is the latter. In any case, there’s something I’d like to do. And my knowing what it is I’d like to do makes me fortunate. Pollyanna is nowhere in sight, Paolina, it’s only me sitting here saying all of this to you. And I’m telling the truth.”

  ‘“But what is it that you’re sitting here telling me … I still don’t …”

  ‘Carolina began laughing again and I – still not understanding and nearly past caring about her night-train confessions – laughed with her, bending forward in my chair, my arms twined about my stomach. I stayed like that, rocking my baby, and a moment passed before I realised it was only my own laugh that I heard. Carolina was suddenly grave.

  ‘“Paolina, from the deepest part of my heart I would like to invite you and your baby to come and live here with Umberto and Luigia and me. You know, to be a family with us. For always, Paolina. For always until, well, until you decide you’d like to live somewhere else …”

  ‘I didn’t say a word. I only looked at her. Searching now for clues from what she’d just been saying and not saying. What was it that Carolina “knew” she wanted? Was it to give me charity? To provide herself with diversion? Were my child and I to be some sort of mission to soothe her uneventful dotage? I felt suddenly disconnected from her and when she reached for me, I pulled away too brusquely.

  ‘“Umberto said you might respond this way.”

  ‘“Umberto? Do you mean to say that he knows about this …”

  ‘“I’ve already told you, Paolina. It was his idea. I’m sorry to admit it wasn’t mine.”

  ‘“Have you left off telling the truth already? Umberto, he hardly looks at me, he …”

  ‘“Paolina, Umberto is a Jesuit. Jesuits interpret, elucidate. Manipulate. A Jesuit believes in nothing so he is free to believe in everything and what you’re perceiving as his … his diffidence, well, it’s not that at all. What’s at work is his Jesuitness.”

  ‘“Does he think I won’t take proper care of my child, that I need …”

  ‘“No. No, Paolina. It’s we who need you. You’re Umberto’s canto libero. His magnum opus. He’s been your teacher since you were learning to read. He adores you as he would a little sister. It’s magis. More. You know Latin better than I. It’s his Jesuit’s need – no, his Jesuit’s obsession – to be more, to do more. He paces the four-hundred square metres of this old palazzo in agony for its emptiness. He’s begun scheming his remedies, though; among them is a program for seminarians in their final phase of study who, one or two at a time, would live and work here. All the better to understand the life of a parish priest in a small isolated town. He’s in Perugia this evening to beg funds from the Curia to transform two of the saloni downstairs into a nido for infants now that mothe
rs are beginning to work outside the home. He has already found licensed teachers and nurses to oversee it and …”

  ‘“And so am I to be one of Umberto’s remedies for the squandered space? Is that …”

  ‘“How much reassurance do you need, Paolina? When he speaks of you, he speaks of grace … He says that you will grace our lives. And that we must strive to grace yours. An honourable intent, Paolina.”

  ‘“Yes, honourable, but …”

  ‘“Is it that you don’t wish to live here with us? Is it that? If so, I’ll simply tell Umberto and …”

  ‘“It’s not that. I don’t think it’s that. But it’s all so, so fraught. I guess that’s a good-enough word. I’d be expecting Vatican guards to storm the palazzo in the night … The idea is preposterous. My coming to live here with my fatherless child … it would be flying in the face of Mother Church, of Rome. Of the Curia. Of the San Severese.”

  ‘“Umberto is neither taking a wife nor entering, flagrantly, into sin. His behaviour is, well, I suppose I would call it Jesus-like. He’s opening the parish-house doors to what he considers to be his extended family. Every family has some eccentricity. Some anomaly …”

  ‘“Anomaly. A Jesuit’s word if ever I’ve heard one.”

  ‘We look at one another, taking turns shaking our heads, speaking only with our eyes until I say, “Carolina, I can’t think beyond the bishop and all those monsigneurs and …”