Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  Last of all, Bajòn reached into a corner of his cart for two heaving clumps of feathers, a stout capon and a young rooster live and tied by their legs. He dropped them on our kitchen floor, where they desperately flapped their wings in a futile try for freedom. After upending a glass of sweet Albana with Papi, and a ritual exchange of buon natale (“happy Christmas”) wishes with all of us, Bajòn climbed onto his cart and turned back. Moto Guzzi must have been thinking of the supper that waited for him at the farm, because he set off at a sprightlier pace than we had thought him capable of.

  My grandfather, Nonno Riccardo, had died during the war, so there were five of us left that Christmas: Papi, Mother, Nonna Adele, Nonna Polini, and myself. The two nonne could not have been more dissimilar. My papi’s mother, Nonna Polini—which is what everyone but her son called her—was born and raised on a farm, had never been as much as twenty miles away from her birthplace, except for Lake Garda during the war, and spoke only Romagnolo, our local dialect. Ninety and going blind, she did not quite reach five feet, but she was quick-witted, impish, and earthy. Her customary dinner was a bowl of wine that she sopped up with bread. She never drank water. Water, she said, “fa infradicire i pali” (“will rot a fence post”). Like all the farm women, she wore only ankle-length dark dresses, preferably solid black. Her underpants were open at the crotch so that she could relieve herself without having to remove them.

  Nonna Adele, my mother’s mother, was fifteen years younger, a straitlaced patrician standing five feet ten. She had been brought up in Damascus and spoke not a dialect, but standard Italian, with the warmly accented, sonorous vowels common to the speech of Italians raised in the Middle East or in North Africa. Her eyes were large and kind but museful, as

  Papi’s mother, Nonna Polini, at ninety

  though fixed on matters at some remove from immediate circumstances. Nonna Polini and Nonna Adele’s zany exchanges, entirely in dialect on the part of the former and in Italian spiced with Arabic and French on the part of the latter, would tentatively embark on what appeared to be the same course, only to tack in separate directions before returning for a brief excursion along parallel lines.

  With Bajòn’s departure, the topic for discussion became the Christmas menu. We quickly came to an agreement on the first course, cappelletti in brodo, stuffed pasta dumplings in capon broth. Nonna Polini proposed we follow that with cotechino, a suggestion to which I gave my immediate support. There was nothing I loved more, and in all the years of the war we had had it only once. Nonna Adele, picking up the word cotechino, observed that when her husband was alive, that was what they had for New Year’s Day, together with lentils. “Lentils?” countered Nonna Polini. “We are going to have cotechino with mashed potatoes.” “Mashed potatoes on New Year’s Day? I have never heard of such a thing!” said Nonna Adele. Nonna Polini was nonplussed: “New Year’s Day? What has New Year’s Day got to do with it? We are talking about Christmas dinner.”

  Slipping into his head-of-the-house role, Papi settled it. Christmas dinner in Romagna meant cappelletti in capon broth for the first course, and the boiled capon itself for the second. Moreover, because a holiday meal allowed one to indulge in an additional second course, we would have pollo alla cacciatora, using the rooster and some of the preserved tomatoes that Bajòn had brought us. As for the cotechino, we would have that on New Year’s Day, together with lentils because they brought luck.

  We started the preparations on the twenty-fourth. Papi twisted the capon’s neck, and Nonna Polini, working deftly, if mostly by touch, plucked and singed it. To make the stuffing for the cappelletti, Mother sliced off a piece of the breast from the capon and sautéed it in a mixture of olive oil and strutto. Then she chopped it very fine, together with a fragrant piece of mortadella from Bologna that she struggled to keep me from pecking away at, and mixed it with fresh ricotta, eggs, grated Parmigiano, and nutmeg. According to the classic recipe, she should have included some veal, but we had none. Papi dipped his pinkie into the mixture and pronounced it perfect, save for an additional pinch of salt.

  There was no question that Nonna Polini would roll out the pasta, as she had been doing for all but the first twelve of her ninety years. The slender pasta pin was nearly as long as she was tall, and she had to stand on a crate in order to reach the table. In minutes, her hands, moving as fluidly as the arms of a prima ballerina, had rolled out a transparent sheet of pasta nearly as large as a bedspread. She cut the sheet into squares, Mother dotted the squares with a thimbleful of stuffing, and Nonna Adele, Papi, and I folded and twisted the squares into cappelletti—dumplings in the shape of soft, peaked caps—working quickly before the pasta became dry and brittle. We spread kitchen towels on the mattress of a spare cot and lined up the dozens of cappelletti on them in neat rows to dry, making sure none of them touched; otherwise, by the following day, they would have been stuck together and the pasta would have torn when pulled apart.

  The last thing to be prepared that day was dessert, Mother’s wonderful bread pudding, with raisins and rum. Actually, there was no rum to be had then, so she put in some of Papi’s homemade grappa.

  Christmas morning was a morning such as we had doubted, during the last dark years on the lake, we could ever know again. Everyone was up early to complete preparations for the meal that was to be the only present any one of us would get. Mother had a surprise for Papi, however. She rose earlier than anyone else to bake a ciambella, the ring-shaped breakfast cake Nonna Polini had once taught her to make. It was Papi’s, as it later became my husband’s, favorite thing to have with a large morning coffee. To complete the gift, Mother also made custard cream, which Papi enthusiastically slathered over his slice of ciambella.

  The capon was boiled with carrots, celery, onions, a potato, and two or three of the little tomatoes to produce the fragrant, ruddy broth for the cappelletti. Papi dispatched the rooster and Nonna Polini plucked and singed it as flawlessly as she had the capon. It went early into the pot so that it would have time to cook slowly through and through, until the meat came easily off the bone.

  We sat down at noon, a full hour before our customary midday mealtime, because the tempting thoughts of what we were about to eat could not be resisted longer. After dinner, it was Papi who had gifts for us. He brought out little packets of hazelnuts and almonds, dried apricots, dates, and figs. They were rarities then, and they must have cost him a notable part of his ready cash, but he knew that without them, Christmas dinner at home would have been incomplete. He poured tumblers full of his own still very young and slightly fizzy Albana, a lusciously sweet, golden wine.

  I listened to the elders reminisce about remarkable Christmases they had had. I listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed, it not having completely sunk in yet—and it took some years before I was capable of taking in the full sense of it—that I had just had the greatest Christmas I would ever know, the Christmas that had given me, through the recaptured flavors of our cooking, through the carefree sounds that had returned to my mother’s and Papi’s voices, through the comforting familiarity of the rooms I had grown up in, the one incomparable gift, the gift of life once imperiled and now regained.

  Out of the University, into Love and Marriage

  1949-1955

  “BOCCIATA!” (“Failed!”) said Professor D’Ancona. I was at the University of Padua, trying for the third time to pass the two-year oral exam in zoology. If I didn’t pass it, I could not submit the thesis for the laurea—a doctor’s degree—in natural sciences on which I had already begun to work. I had studied diligently, I felt prepared, and I had finished giving a commandingly thorough exposition of the characteristics of sea anemones, jellyfish, and other members of a group of marine animals known as coelenterates. The examining professor had listened quietly—and approvingly, I had assumed—for the more than thirty minutes that I had spoken. “Failed! Why?” I exclaimed. “You have told me all there is to say about coelenterates,” said D’Ancona. “Unfortunately, I had asked you to talk
about ctenophorans.” I had succumbed, overcome by nervousness, to a tendency to get names mixed up, a failing with which my husband, my friends, and my own students are well acquainted. “You bastard!” I wanted to cry. “Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you ask if I had understood the question?” Ctenophora is a simpler group of marine animals, and I could even have tossed it off backward, had I been given the chance. In Italy, however, it is safer to doubt the ancestry of the head of the government than to question your professor’s judgment. Had I remonstrated, it might have meant good-bye to any chance of getting a degree. So I rose; I said, “Grazie, professore, buongiorno”; and I held back the tears until I had left the room.

  Padua was my third and next-to-last stop in my travels through the university system. I had started at the University of Milan, when we were living in the farmhouse on Lake Garda, but once we had left the lake, it was too far for me to commute, and staying in Milan would have been too expensive. I had briefly attended the University of Bologna, in my native Emilia-Romagna, when Zia Margò, Mother’s sister, proposed that I go to stay with her in Venice and enroll in the University of Padua, a short train ride away. Her daughter Didi had just enrolled there and Margò was uneasy about her traveling alone. My parents urged me to accept, because had I stayed in Bologna, I would have had to find permanent lodgings in the city, which would have been a heavy load for their frail finances.

  For reasons that I found difficult to fathom, I was not blessed with my aunt’s esteem, and the welcome that I had expected to enjoy at her house became with time ever more reluctant. After my third disastrous attempt to pass the zoology exam, Margò opined that I might not be intellectually equal to the demands of university study, and that it might not be worth my while, or anyone else’s, for me to continue. I don’t back away from hard choices, and I have never been a quitter, but she got to me when my self-confidence had gone through the bottom. When I told my mother that I might abandon my studies, she dissuaded me, saying, “You know you have a good head, Marcella; ignore anyone who says otherwise. Put zoology out of your mind for a while, calm down, continue working on your thesis, prepare for some of the other exams you need to take, accumulate some good grades on your record, then get ready for zoology. You will do well, believe me.”

  The subject of my doctoral thesis had been suggested to me by a stimulating teacher, Professor Leonardi, whose course in paleontology I had taken and completed with an excellent grade. The purpose of the thesis was to determine whether a particular family of marine animals had existed on the slopes of a specific area in the Alps of Cadore, in the mountainous north of the Veneto, when, in an early geological age, those slopes had lain deep under the sea. To conduct my research, I had to climb nearly perpendicular rock walls and, wherever I found traces of fossils, knock off pieces of rock with a mallet and scalpel. I let the pieces drop to level ground, where, when I was finished, I would examine them, label them, and stow them in my knapsack. I was elated when I was able to collect enough suitable samples to make my sack bulge, but by the time I had walked with a sackful of rocks the three kilometers to the bus that would take me back where I was staying, elation had been replaced by aches in my legs and back. It is hard for me today, when a fifteen-minute stint on the treadmill leaves me gasping, to believe that once I could have been so agile and so strong.

  I was well along on my thesis when Professor Leonardi informed me that he was joining the faculty at the University of Ferrara. He proposed that I follow him and complete the thesis there. The alternative was to get my degree in Padua, where I would have to start over on a different thesis with a different professor. I didn’t waste even a minute thinking about doing that, but to transfer my credits to Ferrara I had to have the permission of Padua’s dean of the faculty of natural sciences. The dean happened to be the same ogre who had failed me three times in zoology, and he made the permission to transfer conditional upon my passing the zoology exam with him. At my fourth and final appearance for the exam, I was so careful and so well-prepared, and the grades in all my other courses were high enough, that even that spiteful man could not flunk me. It was his prerogative, however, to give me as low a passing grade as he deemed appropriate, and he gave me the lowest one possible. As I thanked him and got up to leave he said, “Um, I see that Leonardi has given you top marks in paleontology. He must have a crush on you.”

  I was happy at last in Ferrara. I turned my back on Padua and Venice, on the trauma of three failed zoology exams and on Zia Margò, to live alone and unvexed in a town of my native Emilia-Romagna. The sound of Emilian speech, with its broad vowels; the

  In Venice while I was living with Zia Margò, June 1948

  warm color of a familiar building material, brick; the homemade pasta; the incomparable salami: I was at home again, even though I had never before been to Ferrara. It is one of Italy’s handsomest towns, strung out on splendid streets and circled in part by miles of ancient walls where I could take long walks. Serenity is palpable in Ferrara. Five hundred years ago, it even brought some peace into the turbulent life of Lucrezia

  Borgia when she came there to be its duchess. I was loath to leave it. I had no sooner taken the laurea—the doctor’s degree in natural sciences—than I found I could apply most of those credits toward a degree in biology, which gave me a reason to continue working there. I produced a suitable thesis, and in 1954, with respect to Zia Margò, I was a dottore not once but twice.

  I lived in a rented room in Ferrara while I was working toward my first degree, but as soon as I had passed the final exam and my thesis had been accepted, I returned to Cesenatico to look for work. As a new graduate with no previous experience, there wasn’t very much available to me. I grabbed the first job I was offered, a position teaching mathematics and science at the magistrali, colleges that train students to become teachers at the elementary and high school levels. The school that had the opening was in Rimini, twelve miles south of Cesenatico. I had to take a train at seven thirty in the morning, which I boarded always at the last minute—more likely the last second—after a furious bicycle ride from home. There were mornings when I did not even stop to park and lock my bike. I just dropped it on the curb and flew to the train, knowing that my friend the stationmaster would pick it up and put it aside for me. It was so old and battered that there was little risk of anyone stealing it. My mother was convinced nearly every time that I couldn’t possibly make it, and she stood for a little while at the top of the steps of our house expecting me to round the corner on the way back home. I never once missed that train, although I was breathless as I collapsed into my seat at nearly the identical moment that the locomotive was pulling away from the station.

  Classes in Rimini broke at midday. I ate a panino on the train that took me to Ferrara, where I still had some laboratory workshops to take and where I was working on the thesis for my degree in biology. In the evening, I caught another train, wolfed down another panino, and returned to Cesenatico, bicycling home from the station. My mother often waited for me with something warm to eat. I was rarely in bed before midnight. It felt good to be taking the first steps toward the career for which I had been studying since my teens, but the days were long and overfull. I was relieved when summer brought a pause. Into this routine and into my life, one summer evening, all the way from America, came Victor, the man who in less than two years would be my husband.

  Victor was born in Cesena, a prosperous town eight miles inland from Cesenatico. The war had not yet started when his parents, who were Jewish, disposed of all their property and left for New York. It was the spring of 1939 and Victor was ten and a half. He had come back to Italy after fourteen years because, he said, he wanted to repair the torn connection to the places of his Italian childhood and stay in Italy to write.

  A cousin of his, with whom I was slightly acquainted, brought Victor over one evening after dinner. It was the briefest of introductions on the steps of the house, because I was on my way to join some friends. He was very sl
ight, with a mass of black, wavy hair, and in the dim light, he looked to me no older than fourteen. The following day, when, as we had arranged, we met in front of the hotel where he was staying, I was startled to find him wearing blue jeans and going barefoot. No one I knew wore jeans then, and no one went barefoot except on the beach. I took a closer look at him and added four more years to my earlier estimate of his age, but I was still seven years short.

  We went on the first of many long walks and had the first of many long talks. I spoke of my studies and of my plans for a teaching career in the sciences. He was not impressed. To my dismay, he was brusquely dismissive of anyone wasting time on science when they could be spending it on literature and art. Literature was what he had hoped to major in, but a long illness had interrupted a college career that he never returned to. He had gone to work for his father, who had a fur business in New York, but it was not what he wanted to do; he wanted to write, and he wanted to live in Italy. I had never known anyone who talked the way he did. Italians take an emphatic yet circuitous approach to conversation, spilling words in torrents, frequently changing direction, compensating for likely moments of inattention on the part of their listener by repeating everything three times, avoiding anything resembling a conclusion because it might bring the discourse to a premature end. Victor spoke quietly, deliberately, in spare but complete sentences that were often discomfiting in their directness.