Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

In 1996, when I wrote the Italian cookbook Fresh! Market people and their food, it was inspired by my childhood friend Mary de Costello. I had come to deeply appreciate her Italian heritage and the amazing food her mother prepared, even though Mary shunned it, wanting to be Australian and to fit in. Years later, I feared that for Mary’s generation – the children of immigrants who were so eager to assimilate, to be part of their new home – the ways of living and family recipes would be lost.

  So I decided to document them. I took my tape recorder to Adelaide’s many markets and talked to people who were like Mary’s parents – first-generation migrants – asking them about their traditional cuisine and recipes. Mainly I chose people who had their own gardens, who grew their own produce.

  My father helped me. He loved markets and he loved the Italian people from whom he and Becky bought their weekly supplies at the outdoor, dockside farmers’ market. We often went together to do my interviews. Then he helped me compile the book, sitting in the sunshine in the backyard at Henley, inserting the photos I’d taken along with their corresponding stories and recipes. My friend Marisa Raniolo Wilkins, the best Italian cook I know, helped with the recipes and explained many of the traditions behind them. It was a joyful project that I’m still proud of.

  So to be in Italy, the ocean lapping on the pebbled shore directly outside my hotel room, was deeply affecting. Hotel Lo Scoglio is a family-owned hotel where I ate three meals a day. Each was superb. For breakfast there were figs bursting out of their skin, which I ate with the ocean rolling in on the pebbly beach at my feet.

  The father of the family, Peppino, could sense my culinary interest. One day, he explained in a combination of Italian, simple English and many descriptive hand gestures that everything served in the restaurant came from a series of family farms situated at varying altitudes up the mountain that towered above the shoreline. He asked if I’d like to see the gardens and the next day we took off in his little Fiat, up the winding roads.

  There were three separate oases filled with different fruits and vegetables. In the first garden, where the bay of Sorrento sparkled below, we wandered under canopies of vines laden with fruit that intertwined with threads of red and yellow cherry tomatoes. I kept picking things along the way and every time he saw what I was doing, he inspected what I had in my hand, said ‘no good’, took it from me and threw it to the ground. Then he found me better samples, which he handed over with his thick leathery fingers.

  In the second garden, Peppino picked a fig, broke it in half and gave it to me. He cracked a fresh walnut and carefully peeled off the brown skin, handing me the sweet white heart. He broke off celery sticks and showed me long rows of eggplants and chillies. He collected fallen apples and then threw them to two enormous stinking pigs in their pen. We walked into a beautiful dense lemon grove that felt like a sacred place, a church to lemons.

  Everything was organic. ‘No chemicals,’ he said. There were a number of cats lying about. ‘They are for catching the Mickey Mice,’ he told me as he stamped his foot to scatter the cats. Before we got back in the car, he walked along the neat rows of radicchio, bending over to snap off three red, round balls, which he said he would serve me for lunch.

  He still wanted to pick wild rocket and show me the church that sits on the highest peak of the three mountains that hug the secluded bay. I could see the church high above my balcony and had wondered how worshippers made it all the way up there from the village. From the beach, the church seemed perched close enough to kiss the heavens.

  We sped through tiny streets and he beeped the horn whenever he saw a friend. He slowed the car to shake people’s hands through the open window and to have a few words. Their beautiful faces were lined by sun and cigarettes. Old and weathered. We spun down one street that was so narrow I thought he’d scrape the sides of the car. There was a four-way intersection in the tiny alleyway that would have had a stop sign in any other place. Peppino didn’t slow, just gave a little beep and sped straight through. He said he was driving slowly because I was in the car. ‘If I go, I will go happy,’ I thought.

  We drove up and up. Before we left the hotel I’d explained to Peppino’s daughter, Antonia, that I had a bad leg so she could let him know that I wasn’t going to be good for long trekking.

  ‘Do you want to go up?’ he asked when we got to the base of the long path to the church. ‘We can try. It’s up to you. If it’s no good,’ he slapped his leg, ‘we come back.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, thinking I’d never make it all the way.

  ‘We’ll go piano, piano,’ he said, which seemed like one of the most beautiful sentences anyone had ever said to me.

  We did indeed walk piano, piano, stopping every now and then for Peppino to pick wild mint, which he crushed in his fingers and placed under my nose. The scent was sweet, and stronger than the tiny sprig suggested. I suspect Peppino stopped for wild offerings along the way as a thoughtful way of allowing me to rest.

  When we arrived at the top of the path, we looked back over Capri, out to the blue edge of the world. As we turned to walk to the other side of the peak, a British tourist with two long hiking sticks told us the cathedral was closed.

  ‘Nothing is closed up here,’ I said to Peppino with a sweep of my arm. ‘I don’t need to be inside. This is the cathedral.’ The smile he gave made me certain that he understood exactly what I had said.

  We got back to the hotel and he disappeared into the kitchen to deliver a bag of his pickings to his son, Tomasso, who was the chef. Antonia came out to report her father was taking care of my lunch.

  She showed me to a table far out on the deck and brought me a glass of local wine, then a salad of cherry tomatoes, the radicchio from the garden and the wild rocket her father had just picked on our way down the mountain. The salad was followed by a whole grilled sea bass expertly filleted at my table, then drizzled in olive oil and fresh lemon juice from the grove we’d just walked through.

  All the while, the sea pounded on the pebbled shore and the sun’s rays danced on the water. I thought about what Philip had said the day I crawled up the road by his house on my hands and knees. It’s here and it’s now.

  This had been a truly memorable morning. The sound of the waves lapping against the wooden posts underneath reminded me of hot days, sitting on the pier next to my brother, our lines cast out, my skinny legs hanging out over the edge, waiting for a fish to bite. I sat on the deck relishing the sunshine, as my father always had, with my eyes set on the horizon.

  Picture Section

  As improbable as it was – my father in a wheelchair, my mother caring for all three of us – my parents opened a gallery in order to make a living. Despite many other challenges, it meant my brother Hugh and I grew up surrounded by art and artists.

  Kids can make mischief out of any circumstance. Here I am strapped into my father’s wheelchair, ready for Hugh to push me down our steep driveway and send me flying into suburban traffic, one of his favourite games.

  Life at home wasn’t easy, so I loved my bike; it gave me some sense of control.

  The dark rings under my eyes and the look on my face say it all.

  My father as a young sailor, before he was struck down by polio.

  My father was determined to live a full life, but that was only possible with a lot of behind-the-scenes contraptions. He had this photo taken to show his employer what it took for him to get to work each day.

  After my parents’ divorce, my father built a new life with Becky, including opening a gallery of their own, in North Adelaide. Here they are at her family home in Tucson.

  My father in the pool in Tucson, with Becky and two of her brothers. Bringing him into the pool was an act of love and faith.

  This photo was taken after a long estrangement from my father. I was nervous and wanted him to like me.

  My father loved being on his deck. At times it was almost like he was back in his favourite place: out at sea.

  My son, Jack, the driving fo
rce in my life and my constant joy. Moving to New York without him, when he was a teenager, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  My boss, Salman Rushdie, at my last PEN World Voices Festival in New York in 2010. I had been diagnosed with MS the year before. (Photo courtesy Beowulf Sheehan)

  Accompanying my close friend Philip Roth on the ‘Philip Roth’s Newark’ bus tour. His support and guidance during my treatment were invaluable. (Photo courtesy Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger)

  Delivering the opening remarks at an event at the 92Y, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. (Photo courtesy Beowulf Sheehan)

  After running a literary festival in Paris, I came to Marina del Cantone in Italy. Climbing these steps seemed impossible, but it felt vital, and I made it to the top. I may not have found peace with MS as quickly or gracefully as my father did with polio, but his enduring influence has given me the strength to put the pieces of a beautiful life back together.

  Afterword

  For the sake of my father’s four children and numerous grandchildren – some of whom he’d yet to meet – on 16 March 2004, as part of his preparation for death, my father began a series of tape recordings in which he was interviewed by Susan Lang, an artist he’d first exhibited in the early seventies, when she was about twenty-one.

  My father bought the very first painting she ever sold, so he’d had some significance in her life, and she was delighted to see the painting still hanging in the house when she arrived to begin the interviews. Susan and my father had not particularly kept up in the intervening three decades, but she sat with him over eleven days, prompting him with questions and occasionally asking for clarification or more information, as he told the story of his life.

  I have not been able to bring myself to listen to the nine tapes they made in that time, but I have made extensive use of the transcript of those interviews, which ended on 27 March, just two months before his death on 24 May 2004.

  Acknowledgements

  Diving into Glass had a very long gestation. Over its fifteen years of development, the book had numerous titles, changes in focus and was, for a while, even presented as a work of fiction. So it is no surprise that there is a long list of people who have helped me throughout this journey.

  I would like to sincerely thank Sophia Beckett, Lisa Swanson, Jill Brack, Christina Mahle, Elizabeth Brack, Kris McIntyre, Beowulf Sheehan, Sam Douglas, Jane Rosenman, Dorothy Blackmun, Peter Kayafas, Amanda Stead, Jane Allen, Rhonda Sherman, Peter Pearce, Gretel Killeen, Trudy Armstrong, Jodie Bennett, Jane Palfreyman, Irene Skolnick, Ben Ball, Vyvian and Peter Wilson, Edwina Johnson, Judy Cotton, Bob Evans, Marisa Raniolo Wilkins, and Antonia, Peppino, Santina, Mario, Tommaso and everyone at Lo Scoglio, Marina del Cantone.

  I am grateful to my friends at Narrative 4 who first listened to my story atop a mountain in Colorado and gave me the courage to tell it more broadly: Colum McCann, Lisa Consiglio, Tobias Wolff, Firoozeh Dumas, Andrew Sean Greer, Terry Tempest Williams, Assaf Gavron, Ron Rash, Gregory Khalil, William Loizeaux, Terry Cooper, Luís Alberto Urrea, Cindy Urrea, Darrell Bourque, David Wroblewski, Reza Aslan, Ishmael Beah, Rob Spillman and Randall Kenan.

  I am indebted to my agent, Gregory Messina, who has stuck with me through thick and thin long after it was reasonably fair to ask him to do so.

  Importantly, I would like to thank Nikki Christer, Meredith Curnow, Louisa Maggio, Bella Arnott-Hoare and Johannes Jakob at Penguin Random House for their guidance, great care, kindness and faith. Johannes, special thanks for your editorial prowess and smarts – I could not have done this on my own and working through these pages with you has been a privilege.

  Lastly, but most importantly, I would like to thank my family.

  Crowdfunding Donors

  In 2015, inspired by Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter, which is all about enlisting a team to battle life’s big fights, I decided to call on the support of my friends. I was wrestling with the book and what I wanted to say and knew I needed an editor to help me make sense of the story I was trying to write. What happened when my work colleagues – Jill Brack and Esra Ar – encouraged and helped me launch my fundraising campaign was one of the most humbling and life-affirming experiences to witness. The incredible generosity and spirit with which each of the remarkable human beings listed below – some of whom I didn’t know, others who I had lost contact with and hadn’t been in touch with for decades – enabled me to enlist the services of the editor, Sam Douglas, who helped me find my way again. I am eternally grateful to each of you.

  Bec Allen; Jane Allen; Esra Ar; Lotte Beckett; Simeon Beckett; Sophia Beckett; Dorothy Blackmun; Jessica Block; Jill and Regi Brack; Liz Brack; Giovanna Calvino; Kevin Chong; Lisa Consiglio; Brigid Costello; Pip Cummings; Laura Dalrymple; Humberto de Andrade Soares; Petrina Dorrington; Jo Duffy; Anne-Louise Falson; Neil Gaiman; Steven Galloway; Assaf Gavron; Kathleen Gilbert; Jacqui, Mark and Oscar; Sebastian Job; Edwina Johnson; Peter Kayafas; Gregory Khalil; Gretel Killeen; Tricia And Jonathan Koff; Rob Kovell; John Laxon; Frankie Lee; Lisa, Trevi and Thomas; Jane Lydon; Christina Mahle and Peter DiCaprio; Daina McDonald; Kris McIntyre; Katie McMurray; Rosemary Milsom; Charlotte Morgan; Epiphany Morgan; Ezekiel ‘Zeke’ Morgan; Sam Mostyn; Laszlo Jakab Orsos; Fiona Pak-Poy; Fiona Pearce; Peter Pearce; Rich & Kate; Elissa Schappell; Sheila Shaver and Jeremy Beckett; Juliet Sheen; Rob Spillman; Lisa Swanson; Peter and Vyvian Wilson; Wolfe family; Lila Azam Zanganeh.

  About the Author

  Caro Llewellyn is the author of three previous works of nonfiction. She is the former director of several large-scale literary festivals and cultural events. She has hosted writers from every corner of the globe, including a number of Nobel Prize winners, and presented events at the Sydney Opera House, London’s Southbank, the Louvre, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Town Hall, 92Y and historic Cooper Union. She is currently a director at Museums Victoria. Diving into Glass is her first work of autobiography.

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  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2019

  Text copyright © Caro Llewellyn, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.

  Quoted lines from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Cover design by Louisa Maggio © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Cover photograph courtesy Shutterstock

  ISBN 9781760144517

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