‘Not just yet. Not until the potatoes are cooked,’ Gilda says. Ninuccia brightens. From the wall shelf Gilda retrieves a dish of grey sea salt and one of dried wild fennel flowers. Ninuccia pours more wine all around. ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Gilda says.
Bending into the hearth, Gilda digs in the embers to uncover a chestnut pan of potatoes the size of plump grapes, fifty or sixty of them, their skins bronze, oil-shined. Carrying the pan to the table, Gilda walks it around, helping to scoop ten or twelve of the little things onto each plate … We know what to do with the salt and the fennel. We eat the potatoes out of hand, popping them whole, scorching fingers and mouths. No further snuffling from Ninuccia.
‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Gilda says again and we sit like children waiting for a birthday cake, watching her excavate deeper into the embers for the second pan. She repeats the ceremony of serving them.
Sated and a little ‘in our cups’, the others say buona sera and go off together in Ninuccia’s truck. I laugh when I realise how foolish I sound as I ask Gilda if I can help her with the washing up. We throw the paper things into the hearth, sit in our usual positions for a moment before I, too, prepare to leave.
Save to say that we were drinking his wine, Gilda – to the dismay of the others who’d been hoping for a Christmas engagement, some sort of open recognition of a romance – never spoke of Iacovo. Tempted to ask her about him, I don’t. I find my shawl. Then Gilda says, ‘It’s twilight out there, almost the shortest day of the year. Let’s walk, just for a few minutes.’
We light one another’s cigars, link arms, head a few metres down the creek road toward the pine woods. Withered leaves twisting in a low-slung breeze make a taffeta rustle under our boots. We fold down a patch of high grasses near the creek and sit. The mist rises pink and wet like smoke from just-crushed grapes seething in the tubs, silvering the weeds all around us and the pines and the ancient oak leaning across from the far side of the water. Nodding at the oak, Gilda says, ‘In its hollow, that’s where the mistletoe grows. Has for centuries. It’s because of the oak and the mistletoe that Miranda calls me druid. Oak woods were their sanctuaries, mistletoe sacred, a curative. Magical.’
She turns to look at me, smiling, and I tell her, ‘How love has changed you …’
‘Pian, piano, Chou. Slowly. Whatever you’re seeing or sensing in me, let’s not give it up to something fickle as love. Iacovo the Brave has not awakened the aging druid to eternal bliss but to a lesser aloneness. More, he’s chinked away at my arrogance.’
‘You, arrogant?’
‘My feeling wronged, as Miranda calls it, has bred a kind of arrogance in me, which I hide behind timidity. Poor little Gilda. An effective device, generally compelling though not upon Iacovo. Nor has it been upon you, I understand that now.’
‘Now? Effective as it might often be, your masquerade has never convinced me. This feeling wronged, it’s a bygone thing by now, long past due for repeal.’
‘Time heals all wounds?’
‘With our permission. Do you think about her?’
‘Her?’
‘Your mother.’
‘Do I think about her? I’m obsessed by her.’
‘No, not about your mother in relation to you or to what she did and didn’t do for you. Just her. Magdalena the woman. Before you, after you. Do you think about her?’
‘I hardly remember her.’
‘Could you hazard empathy? Can you even begin to see her and the other absent culprits of your life with any sort of form other than the one you’ve already drawn of them? Having lived with Isolda and Giulio, having seen another kind of abandonment, one which must have been more hideous than the sort Magdalena visited upon you, can you not muster some generosity, some reprieve? I would have thought your own injury would have dissolved in your sympathy for Livia and Dafne, for Claudio.’
‘It did. For years it distracted me. The rasp was always there but, like the bathhouse women, I had other things to occupy me. And now I have less.’
‘More time for angst.’
‘What do I do with my string of culprits? Magdalena, Pepucci, the aunt, the nuns, the priests, the cousins.’
‘A string of culprits … I guess you could cut the string, let the culprits fall away. Beads of a broken necklace, bouncing, rolling, scattering. All of them lost.’
‘Wouldst it could be so simple.’
‘Not simple.’
‘And then? What comes next? Some piercing grief for those I accused? Do I line them all up in my mind, brushed and combed, smelling of rosewater, my censure having taken on a tinge of affectionate grace?’
‘Maybe for Magdalena.’
‘Never for the priests, all of whom I hope have long ago suffocated themselves on their own lasciviousness.’
‘Never for the priests.’
‘Priests, culprits, beads, broken strings, I’m still lost, Chou. I live in a half-painted picture, always looking for myself but …’
‘Paint yourself in it, Gilda. Mist the edges if you must. Draw and erase and redraw until your likeness suits you. You won’t be any less real than the rest of us.’
‘Is that what you did?’
‘Do. Still drawing and erasing.’
‘Do you remember when Miranda asked me: Who would you be as a mother? It haunted me, that question. I tried a thousand times to imagine myself a mother and, harder still, to imagine how my child would perceive me. I couldn’t do it. Not honestly. Not wholly. I couldn’t get a single thorn to stick to my self-portrait as a mother. I began painting myself a Madonna, frantically scrubbing out any notion of a flaw, just as another one would appear. The exercise was a firebolt: as sure as I would pass on my blood and bones would I pass on my weaknesses, adding mine to those I’d assigned to Magdalena. Families bequeath ancestral pain. I began to laugh, scrub all the harder. Not me, never, not me. I would be different. I would be better.’
‘Mothers do wrong. They must, perforce.’
‘Miranda always says that.’
‘Miranda does.’
‘The closest I’ve ever gotten to motherhood was to be a kind of passing saviour to Livia and Dafne. Claudio was too small to remember me as that. It was Giorgia who raised them, though. And Giorgia and Miranda raised me. I got to be the girls’ heroine, their idol in a way, I could do no wrong. Mothers do wrong, perforce.’
‘What happened to them, to the children?’
‘Have you never met Claudio?’
‘I guess I’m just this moment putting him together with your Claudio. I’d always known him as Miranda’s nephew, Giorgia’s son.’
‘Isolda and Giulio’s son.’
‘And the girls?’
‘Have you ever seen me on a Sunday? You never will unless you come to Rome with me. I go to my little Dafne. She restores frescoes, removes crystalline accretions from water seepage, smoky deposits, repairs structural cracks. Sometimes she applies the paint, only red. Dafne works in red; other members of her team work in the other colours. She’s forty-three. She’s lived in the Monti with Jan for nearly eleven years by now. Jan Sobieski. A Pole with a king’s name, he is nearing sixty. A sculptor, Jan Sobieski. They are always more in love.’
‘Livia?’
‘You must have met Livia a dozen times or more. Olivia, she calls herself, having added the “O” at some time during her adolescence.’
‘Olivia, Giorgia’s housekeeper?’
‘Same.’
‘Isolda. Did she … Did the children …’
‘Not until Livia was sixteen. A decade passed from when we left the farm to when Livia decided to make contact with her parents. Giorgia and I helped her.’ Giorgia went with her.
‘And?’
‘All Livia ever said about the visit was: “I have two brothers. They were in the fields with my father. Only she was there. She poured wine, sliced bread. Her hands were shaking.” They live alone in Genzano now, Isolda and Giulio, both in their sixties,’
‘Did you ever
manage to hate her? Isolda?’
‘I must have back then. I don’t any longer. It was years after I’d left the farm when Tullia, making her yearly trek up here to visit, told me about Isolda, what she’d learned about her from those who knew her family, who knew about her childhood. Isolda was seven when she watched as her father beat to death her nine-year-old brother. Being hungry, her brother had stolen from the markets, brought bread home to share with his sister. Their mother watched, too. I think Isolda died that day and it was the ghost of her who remained, a ghost full of dread for her children. If provoked, what might she do to them? And so she chose the passive way to kill them. I think that’s what happened to Isolda.’
Gilda has been looking out over the water and when she turns to me, she says, ‘My stories have made you sad. I’m sorry. Then again you’re always that way, just this side of wistful, especially when you’re laughing, making us laugh. Miranda says you think in a minor key.’ In a quieter voice, Gilda wants to know, ‘Why do you never speak about yourself? To me, to Miranda. The others. Apart from your funny little stories about meeting Fernando, your early Venetian days at the Rialto tipping down ombretti with the fishmongers, the marketeers, it’s as though you didn’t have a life before Fernando.’
‘Oh, but I did. A life lovely in its way. Always good work and mostly without my having to seek it, one thing steering me to the next. And good people, some of them superb, passionate, generous. More than my share, I would say, of good people. Less than my share of tormentors. And here I am, landed in the Umbrian wilderness, still not quite knowing how, but again surrounded by good people.’
‘A watery distillation. La nostra Giaconda, Miranda has named you. Our own Giaconda.’
‘You, as well. That makes you la Giaconda, tight as morning glory at twilight.’
‘I think you hide inside your czarina clothes.’
‘And you behind Poor Little Gilda. We all hide. Congenital self-preservation. My camouflage is more apparent.’
‘I, we were all surprised, not particularly in a happy way, when Miranda invited you to join Thursdays. We wondered why we needed, you know, a stranger among us.’
‘I knew that. I’d been, for a year or so, declining her invitation for that reason but she finally …’
‘Miranda recognised you at first sight. Over and over again on Thursdays, she would tell us about that evening when she met you and Fernando at the sagra, your marching, uninvited, without introducing yourself, into the communal kitchen, buona sera, buona sera, and how you just began doing what needed to be done as though you belonged. She says you’re Mother Russia, never carrying a purse, never having a euro to your name, always with a corkscrew in your pocket, rosemary in the other one, always out to feed someone.’
‘Cardomom pods and anise seeds. In my pocket.’
‘The funny thing is that we’re all becoming little czarinas. Those two dresses you gave to Paolina, they’re all she wears now. And she’s taken on your walk, have you noticed that? And on that last Thursday when we were together in November, Miranda changed her eternal gold hoops for those amethysts and pearls that swing like little chandeliers. Where did those come from?’
‘Giorgia. They belonged to their mother and their grandmother. She says they’ve passed them back and forth over the years.’
‘Paolina wears mascara now, Ninuccia, too. And not only on Thursdays. Miranda wants mascara in her Christmas stocking.’
‘As long as she hasn’t asked for a tube of Russian Red.’
‘No. Not that, not yet.’
‘And you? Any czarina desires?’
‘I’ve decided to look about for some plates, maybe a whole set. Rosalba has some in the window, flowers on the rims, probably English, blue, green, pink. There was another set for dolce. I’ll need wineglasses. And I want to tell you something else, something wonderful …’
‘So it’s true then, what we’ve all been wondering about …’
‘I’ll be starting a new job, not a job, really. Soon after the New Year, I’ll be riding the train into Rome three days a week to cook and serve and wash up in a mensa in the Monti rione. A Caritas project for pre-schoolers, Dafne and Jan put me on to it. I’ll take the 17:57 back to Orvieto, be home for supper. Iacovo says he’ll cook for me on those nights. I’ll always be home on Thursdays. There’ll be three- and four-year-old Romanians, Moldovans, Ukranians, Kazakhistani, North Africans, and I’ll sing Puccini to them. I’ll sing Puccini to Magdalena.’
•
‘Gilda, before I forget. About the duck.’ It’s late, very late on that Saturday evening but, just the same, I telephone her.
‘Not another word about the …’
‘After all that business of reducing and glossing, you’ll need to let the whole thing rest again. Another day or so. Splash in a half cup of dry Marsala secco, then. Never sweet. Give it a good stir, cover it and heat it in a quiet oven. The Marsala exults the richness of the sauce, connects the flavours. A smoky, musky liaison. L’ultimo trucco, the last trick.’
‘And then do I get to eat it?’
‘Well, that’s what I was just about to say. It’ll taste all the better if you let it rest one last time. Even half a day.’
‘Jesumaria, will I never be rid of this narcoleptic beast?’
‘Not beast. Bird. Parts of several birds. Not narcoleptic. Delicate.’
‘Ciao, Chou.’
‘Notte, Gilda.’
EPILOGUE
FLAILING HER TOASTING FORK, SHE BOSSES US INTO OUR places at table, stoops down then to the small hearth on the wall behind it to turn the thick spluttering slabs of pancetta crisping on a grate over olivewood embers and branches of wild sage. As she moves about the ceremonial rites of a Thursday supper there is a lustre about Miranda-of-the-Bosoms on this evening in February 2008. The goddess of Buonrespiro in her prime, it is her birthday, her seventy-sixth. The eighth, perhaps the ninth or tenth, anniversary of her seventy-sixth. Her one wish? That only the women be present in the rustico on this Thursday.
Without having planned it so or told one another we would, we are dressed astonishingly alike, our sartorial kinship making us laugh, symbol of other less conspicuous affinities. Long skirts, boots, some form of a men’s-wear jacket, our hair braided or caught in a chignon. Earrings, long, gaudy. As we set the table, Gilda whispers, ‘Vedi? See? Czarinas, all of us.’
My gift to Miranda is her own tube of Russian Red, fresh from it’s little black MAC box. In the past, I’d given her tubes worn down, ones she’d seen me using and asked to try. There is no mirror in the rustico but she wants to wear the lipstick now.
‘You do it for me, Chou.’
I take a tissue from my sack, blot her lips dry, draw the red along the edges of her mouth, fill in with more colour. Pushing the tissue against her mouth, I then rub a corner of it all over her lips, wiping away most of the colour I have just applied, leaving her mouth more stained than painted. As though she’s just bitten into a cracked pomegranate. Ninuccia and Paolina, their lips already Russian Red, do the same with a tissue, wiping off most of the colour. They admire one another. Only Gilda refrains until Paolina pushes her down onto a chair, does the same business on her that I’ve just done on Miranda. Gilda touches her lips, smiles, says lipstick makes her feel taller. Czarinas, all of us.
We serve and pour for each other, dine slowly, luxuriously, on the simple things Miranda loves best: pancetta, sausages, potatoes roasted with rosemary, our own thick-crusted, wood-baked bread, our own oil, our own wine.
Tilting back on the hind legs of her chair, Miranda looks at us in turn as she is wont to do more often these days.
‘I wish life could end all even, like a supper when there’s that last little roasted potato with a single needle of rosemary clinging to its crust and the end of a sausage, charred to a crunch, a heel of bread, the last long pull of wine. Even. Everything in harmony. I have always preferred the last bite of my supper to the first, the beginning being frought with hunger, the l
ast with serenity. As life should be. Every supper can be a whole life.’
‘Supper ending, life ending. Sated, quiet.’ This is Ninuccia. ‘I suppose it’s the nearness of death that graces life. Endlessness would be a kind of horror.’
She waits, we all wait, and then she looks at Miranda, asks, ‘Do you think dying is easier than being born?’
‘I think it may be. The lonely journey down that narrow road from the womb into the light, I think being born is the hardest thing life asks of us. Which is why we’re born old and, if we work things well enough, why we grow young.’ Miranda looks somewhere beyond as she speaks.
‘But what does that really mean? If we work things well enough. No one’s born a white canvas awaiting a brush, the Fates having long before seen to a creature’s portion.’ This is Ninuccia again.
‘Penchants, proclivities, capacities, birthday gifts from Destiny. From Clothos,’ I say.
‘True. We hit the light uniquely ourselves, as we’ll be always, save the effects, mostly tame, of what we bring down upon ourselves. Wise or not, our choices are mostly powerless over the original design.’ Miranda has taken up her goddess voice.
‘Powerless. Mostly that.’ Gilda seems unsure.
‘I worry about my lasting as long as life does, what with all the walking dead, waiting-room lives. Nec spe, nec metù. No hope, no fear. No regrets. A coward’s closing down. A passive suicide.’ Paolina looks to Miranda for accord but it’s Ninuccia who speaks.
‘How smug a life would be without regrets. As though one proceeded sure-footed. A goat climbing a hill. As for fear, it’s the sentiment we’re best at hiding, avoiding.’
Still looking far away, Miranda smiles, tries for her goddess voice, which cracks into softness.
‘Fear. Of being alone, of being together. Of love, of no love. We fear joy because we know it won’t last, we fear abundance because emptiness always lurks. Certainly we fear life at least as violently as we do death.’
‘So fear is good.’ This is Gilda.
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Page 25