Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  and they kept him in the hospital another month, giving him morphine so that he could sleep. I put off the decision as long as I could, but it was obvious that I couldn’t continue working in the lab. My belly was getting between me and the microscope, Victor would be coming home to our third-floor walk-up needing a lot of attention, and I would have to stay home with the child, once it was born. Sadly, I quit my job.

  There was no more morphine for Victor at home, even though the pain was extreme. I had to bathe him and dress him, because his leg was still in a full cast. The sedatives and sleeping medicine that had been allowed him had little effect; he ate almost nothing; and for long periods, he was delirious. Fortunately, by the time my labor pains arrived, the first of December, he had regained his mental equilibrium. I called my doctor, who said, “Have Victor help you dress and collect your things. I’ll meet you at the hospital.” I can chuckle now when I recall those words. It was I who had to help Victor dress, because his leg was still stiff and he could not pull on his pants. And it was I who had to help him down the three flights of stairs on his crutches, stopping every few steps to wait for a pause in my contractions. When we got out of the taxi at the emergency room, Victor looked cadaveric, and a nurse came running over to him with a wheelchair. “Not for him,” I yelled. “For me!”

  When we brought our infant home, Victor felt strong enough to return to work. I was left alone at home with Giuliano, our baby boy. It was he now, instead of Victor, who interrupted my sleep. We bought a convertible double bed and took up sleeping in the living room, leaving our bedroom to Giuliano. We had the one really jolly moment of that terrible year when Mark Pratt, who had been Victor’s best friend since college, came to visit from Japan, where the foreign service had posted him. He brought us two beautiful eighteenth-century paintings of the Kano school and good-naturedly accepted sharing the bedroom with Giuliano. Mark needed a place to entertain some of the people he hadn’t seen since his last trip to the States, and we gladly let him have ours. He was an excellent cook and baked a delicious ham in our oven. An American baked ham is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful dishes of any cuisine. He had bought too much ice for the refreshments, and there was a large bag of it left after the party. We discussed how to dispose of it. “Easy,” said Mark. “I’ll flush it down the toilet.” We flushed and flushed, but the cubes massed together and we found ourselves with a small iceberg in the bowl. It was a long while before we could use the only toilet of our only bathroom. It seemed an eternity had passed since we had been able to laugh as we did that night.

  Giuliano was born on December first. We put up a small Christmas tree that I carried up the stairs, but Christmas Eve came before I had had time, or a calm enough head, to think of presents. “But I do have a great present for Victor,” I thought. After dinner, while he was in the bathroom, I took my baby out of the crib, wrapped a big red bow around him, and put him under the tree.

  With Giuliano’s arrival, our apartment became too small. We left our cozy walk-up on Sixty-fith Street for a large two-bedroom at 65 Central Park West. We left the first apartment that, in our married life, we could call our own, a bright apartment from which, on its sunny side, we observed the traffic of pedestrians and cars just below, and from the rear windows, the gardens of the brownstones on the block behind us. In our new place on the tenth floor, every window faced a dark, grimy, lifeless courtyard. We almost always had the lights on.

  When, earlier in my life, I thought that someday I might have a baby, I worried that because of my lame arm, I might hurt it when holding it or bathing it, or scratch it with the sharp, talon-like fingers of my crooked hand, or even drop it. Nothing like that ever happened. When he began to crawl, Giuliano once managed to open one of the lower cupboards of the kitchen where I kept a gallon can of olive oil. How he did it I cannot understand, but he upended the can, pouring oil all over himself and the floor. When I found him, he looked at me with the sly expression of someone having

  Giuliano at eleven months

  a wickedly good time. I managed to lift him, wriggling and slippery as he was; bathe him without letting him slide under and drown; dry him; dress him; and put him safely away in his crib before attending to the kitchen floor. Rare is the challenge a mother cannot rise to.

  Victor returned to a different fur business than the one he had left. While he was incapacitated, his father felt he could not continue alone to produce a separate couture line, and he cancelled the contract with Capucci. Victor once again began to chafe at doing work he described as insopportabile, insufferable. For my part, I found myself trapped in a dull apartment with my child. The spirit had gone out of our lives. One fall evening, three years after his accident, as we were having dinner, Victor said, “We have got to leave, we are going to go back to Italy.” My heart jumped, first with joy, then with terror. Of course I longed to be in Italy, to be close to my parents and friends again, to be able to speak my language, but then I gave way to dread. How were we to support ourselves? Victor was thirty-three and had had no other job but at his father’s, and he had no experience of working in Italy. Where would we live? Even if we could adapt to staying with my parents, in a house with no central heating, with only one bathroom and precious little hot water for it, where in Cesenatico would Victor find work, on the fishing boats?

  Unlike me, Victor seems to have no fears, and when he comes to a decision, he won’t be dissuaded, whatever the risks. He told his father that he would stay through the winter, to the end of the season, and that in the spring we would move to Italy. Early in June 1962, Victor, Giuliano, and I were on a plane to Milan.

  Back to the Old World

  1962-1967

  PAPI SENT A DRIVER to Malpensa, Milan’s international airport, to meet us and take us to Cesenatico. My parents moved into the room that had been Nonna Adele’s—she had died while I was in New York—and let us have the big bedroom. For Giuliano there was a small spare room next to ours. Cesenatico was both familiar and disquieting. What could have been more familiar than the house in which I had grown up and been married, than my parents’ voices and faces, than riding my old bicycle, than the friends I ran into on the street, than the foods in the market stalls, than the language everyone spoke? It was familiar, but it wasn’t reassuring. For the first time in my life, it troubled me to be there. We had almost no cash left. We have always lived to the full extent of our resources, and our modest savings account had vanished after we paid for packing and storing our furniture and books for their eventual shipment to an Italian port, and for our airfare. I inquired about a teaching position in the public school system, but I had lost seniority during the years I was in New York, and there was a long line of recent university graduates waiting for an opening. How would we ever manage? It would take a miracle. But lo, the miracle didn’t keep us waiting long.

  Every day I bought the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most respected newspaper, published in Milan, and the big city editions of our regional paper, Il Resto del Carlino. I read the classified ads, hoping to find something that could be suitable for Victor. He would get very upset. “Why are you trying to stick me in some job?” he asked. Whenever I tried to read to him one of the help-wanted ads that sounded vaguely possible, he brushed me off. I was puzzled that he seemed to show no interest in finding a way out of our predicament. On the other hand, all of the plausible offers of employment that I came across were from Italian companies that would have asked Victor for Italian work papers, which he did not have.

  While in New York, Victor had taken over and expanded his father’s advertising program. He collaborated with a small but well-thought-of agency, whose owner, Clarence Herrick, became a friend. Together they wrote and produced gorgeous brochures and ads for The New York Times, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Before leaving for Italy, Victor asked Clarence to give him a letter testifying to the years they had worked together and commending his creative skills, without specifying the narrow range of that experience. “How do yo
u expect to use it?” I asked him. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Outside of furs, advertising is the only thing I understand a little bit about, and I am certainly not going to look again for work in the fur business.”

  The summer had gone by and not a single job worth considering had yet turned up, when I saw an ad in the Corriere della Sera by an American advertising agency, BBD&O, which was seeking the services of an experienced copywriter for the position of copy chief in their Milan office. To my surprise and discouragement, Victor could think only of objections. “BBD&O is a major agency with major industrial clients, and I don’t know a thing about industry,” he said. “Copy chief is a big position. My only experience is in writing fashion ads for one furrier. I don’t even know most of the technical vocabulary they will expect me to use. I would have to learn it on the job, if they let me get away with it.” “That doesn’t sound like you,” I said. “You have never before been afraid of trying something. When can we ever expect to come across another opportunity like this? It seems made-to-order for you.” I felt desperate and I began to cry. “All right, all right, I’ll answer the ad,” said Victor. My mother’s twin brother, Zio Alberto, had a small travel agency in town, and that is where Victor went to type his letter to BBD&O. He wrote a very persuasive letter, which is something he knows how to do. At the end of it, he stated his salary requirements, which the ad had asked applicants to specify. When I saw it, I thought to myself, “Why bother wasting money on the stamps to mail it?” The salary Victor had asked for was American-scale. The cost of living was still very modest in Italy then, and no Italian would have dreamed of asking such a figure. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I am applying as an American who claims to have solid American advertising experience. The salary I am asking for is in line with the job they are offering. The claims I am making wouldn’t be credible if I asked for any less. Besides, I wouldn’t work for less.”

  I put BBD&O out of my mind. Victor and I needed a change of scenery, a release of tension, so we accepted an invitation from Zia Margò to spend a few days with them in Venice. Victor didn’t need to be cajoled. He had formed a passion for Venice even as a small boy when he had first visited it with his parents. We had spent only one night at Zia Margò’s when my mother called to say that she had just opened a telegram from BBD&O asking Victor to come to their offices the following morning at ten thirty for an interview. We caught the bus back to Cesenatico, where we had to solve a problem of logistics. There was no direct train connection between Cesenatico and Milan. There was bus service, but there was no autostrada then, no fast highway from the seashore to the north, and it took six hours, with many stops along the way. Whether by train or by bus, Victor would have had to travel into the night and present himself at the interview in less than mint condition. My dear old papi came to the rescue, digging deep into his pockets once again: Victor would leave early in the morning with a driver, who would wait for him and bring him back. “Don’t keep me in suspense,” I begged Victor as he got into the car. “Call me the moment you have news.” The telephone rang at half past twelve. “Where are you?” I asked. “On Via Montenapoleone.” (Montenapo, as the Milanese call it, is the city’s most famous street of smart shops.) “What are you doing on Via Montenapoleone?” “I have just bought you a silk shawl at Biki’s.” (Biki was the Prada of that time.) “A shawl? But what about the interview?” “Oh, the interview. It didn’t last too long. But it went well, I got the job.”

  BBD&O wanted their new copy chief to get started right away. They had a critical presentation to make to a major client. Their main source of billing at the time, a French gasoline company called Total, was taking over a chain of filling stations in Italy. We left Giuliano with my parents and went up to Milan, Victor to start work and I to look for an apartment. We had no idea where to stay while I was apartment-hunting. Victor remembered the name of a hotel where he had stayed with his father, when his father had come to Italy to dissuade us from getting married. It was called the Duomo, in the center of town and within a short walk to the BBD&O offices. It has since lost its luster, but it was then Milan’s most modern hotel and, as I soon discovered, extremely expensive. It is not considered good form in Italy, when you check in, for reception to announce the room rate unless you ask. And Victor has never asked the price of anything. Upstairs in the room, when I opened the closet door, I saw the figure on the rate card posted on its back. If we had continued staying there, all the money we had come to Milan with would have been gone in less than a week. The following morning, I put off apartment-hunting to look for a cheap hotel.

  Just one block down from the Duomo, I caught sight of a modest hotel sign down a narrow side street. I asked inside whether they had a double room with a bath available, and the man at the desk said yes, looking rather quizzical. I asked the price. It was a small fraction of the Duomo’s. “May I see the room?” I asked. It was one flight up, no elevator, very bare but reasonably clean. Its one window looked on the alley below. “Va benissimo, I’ll take it,” I said. “I’ll be right over with our bags.” Back at the Duomo, I packed and checked out. The doorman got me a cab and loaded the bags. “Dove deve andare, signora?” (“Where are you going?”) asked the driver. I pretended to check the address on a piece of paper, reading it to him. He gave me a look and drove the block and a half to the other hotel. “Eccoci qui!” (“Here we are!”) he said. “Oh, already?” said I. It’s not customary to tip taxi drivers in Italy, but I did so nonetheless. After carrying my own bags up to the room, I telephoned Victor to give him our new address. Back from dinner that evening, he was looking out the window when he turned to me and said, “Vieni, vieni a vedere” (“Come, come to see what goes on here”). From the window, I saw some flashy-looking women lounging near the hotel. From time to time, a man would approach, look them over, have a brief conversation with one of them, and enter our hotel with her. We couldn’t afford to go to the movies, but for a few evenings, we didn’t need entertainment. It was entertaining enough to observe the ladies and their clients, to try to anticipate, whenever a man appeared, whom he would choose, and speculate, according to the length or brevity of the couple’s stay, how they might have amused themselves.

  I went all over Milan looking to rent a furnished apartment that we could afford until Victor was settled in his new career and we had paid back all the money we had been borrowing. It had to be furnished because our things were still in storage in New York. There seemed to be none available, until one turned up in a new development very far from the center of town, a good walk past the last stop of the tram. It was so far from downtown Milan that when we opened the windows we could hear frogs croaking in the fields near us. The furnishings, of which the landlady was exceedingly proud, were exceedingly awful: rococoesque sofas and chairs upholstered in metallic brocades, with gold leaf—or was it paint?—laid on everywhere. Victor found one china vitrine and its contents so offensive that for the entire time we stayed there he kept it covered with a sheet.

  The furniture issues aside, it was a happy time for both of us. Giuliano was in Cesenatico with his grandparents, and I enjoyed cooking just for Victor and myself, as I did when we were first married. It was a working-class neighborhood and the markets were scaled to its means, yet I had vegetables that for variety and freshness outmatched anything that I had been able to buy in New York. There was a woman who sold at her stall red beets such as I have never tasted, before or since. They were as large as a large orange and had been baked in the embers of a slow-dying wood fire. We peeled them, sliced them, and had them with salt, wine vinegar, and olive oil, abandoning ourselves to their amazing sweetness. I had an artisan butcher who cut the meat himself from a carcass hanging in his shop. He would be shocked if he could see the butchers in my Florida supermarket use their knives mainly for slitting open the plastic bags their precut meats arrive in. There was a fishmonger’s stall offering inexpensive varieties of seafood so fresh they glistened.

  The distance from
his office notwithstanding, Victor managed to come home when they closed for lunch. He couldn’t call me because we didn’t have a telephone. It took weeks and a well-stuffed unmarked envelope to get one, but I knew his office hours, and I had everything ready to go to the table when he walked in. My cooking was very simple, usually guided by the vegetables that looked best to me that day. We might have pasta with zucchini or fresh tomatoes or cauliflower, or a frittata with asparagus or green beans or peppers and onion, sausages with fresh borlotti beans, veal stew with foraged mushrooms, or my mother’s veal roll-ups, of which Victor was so fond. From a trip to the fish market, I might have brought back sgombero, small mackerel that I cooked over the stove like a pan roast, in olive oil, garlic, and rosemary. Or a kilo or more of our tiny Adriatic clams, peppery and soft like butter, a small mountain of them, sautéed with lots of olive oil, garlic, and parsley, which we would eat with nearly their weight in marvelous crusty bread, sopping up their juices. Those noontimes together at home gave us such strength and encouragement. Ever since, except when we have traveled or had to defer to professional engagements, lunch for two at home has been the steady center of our lives.

  When my parents came to visit, I was feeling so confident of my culinary accomplishments that I wanted to cook something that I knew they had never tasted. In New York, I had learned to cook pompano fillets in a very un-Italian way, in butter. There is no pompano in Italy, but there is a highly prized and costly fish, orata—the French name is daurade—that I was sure would be delicious done that way. Buying and cooking fish had always been my father’s specialty, and when he saw me put butter in the pan, he stopped me. “You are going to cook that beautiful orata in butter? Please, go talk to your mother. I’ll take care of the fish.” And he did. He boiled it and served it lukewarm, pouring over it a little sauce of olive oil beaten with a clove of garlic chopped very fine and parsley. In time, my mother and father would look forward to having me cook for them, but that time had not come yet.