A tavola non si invecchia
At the table, one does not age
Ignazio and I are a secret for a long time. What begins as a game, a joke, a fantasy, transforms into a real affair. He is my Botticelli angel – he is the most beautiful person I have ever known. Back in Via de’ Barbadori he squashes in beside me in my box-like bedroom; the following morning I wrap my arms around his waist as we putter off to work on his silver-blue Vespa. I take photographs of him naked, his dark-brown eyes like the liquid centres of the chocolates he is eating. It seems to me that I have captured on film the essence of sensuality.
We are discreet: I especially dread Gianfranco finding out, fearful of being laughed at in general. I am too old, he is too young – facts which, when we are together exploring minds and bodies, are of no interest or issue. Besides, this is no great passion like the Gianfranco affair. I am cosy, serene and secure with Ignazio, re-establishing vast tracts of self-confidence in my unfamiliar role as teacher.
Raimondo is the first to find out, dropping around unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon at the precise moment that Ignazio, shrouded in my bathrobe, is leaving the bedroom. He is shocked, of course, but adjusts with some amusement to the situation once the three of us are sitting at I’ Che C’è C’è eating fettuccine alla boscaiola over lots of celebratory wine. After a while, I cease to care about the opinions of others.
Fettuccine alla boscaiola
(Fettuccine of the forest)
Olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2–3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 cups finely sliced button mushrooms
White wine
400 g peeled and chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup water
Salt and pepper
1/2–1 cup cream
Parsley to garnish
Heat olive oil in pan and add onion and garlic, cooking over moderate heat until softened (about 8 to 10 minutes). Add mushrooms and cook on high heat, stirring frequently. When they have given up most of their liquid, slosh in about 1/3 cup wine and allow to evaporate. Throw in tomatoes and extra water, season and bring to the boil, then lower heat to simmer for about 40 minutes, topping up with water if reducing too much. Check seasoning. Allow about 2/3 cup sauce per serving and add cream according to taste, blending in well. Toss through cooked, drained pasta on high heat, then serve garnished with finely chopped parsley.
One day, urbane Lorenzo, owner of Antica Toscana and devoted family man, pokes his head through the kitchen window and calls me over. He tells me that he has a proposition to put to me, but it is private. Would we be able to meet to discuss it the following evening? I am intrigued, flattered, a little discomfited, but we agree to meet outside I’ Che C’è C’è at nine o’clock. I have always adored Lorenzo, his avuncular nature and his kind eyes behind thick glasses and his paternal fondness for Gianfranco. I was enchanted when he returned from a trip to Peru, bringing me back an exquisite alpaca jumper. What can he possibly be proposing to me, which is to be kept from Gianfranco and presumably the other partners of the restaurant? I am eternally grateful to him for having financially enabled me to join the partnership, even if I have no understanding of why they want me as a partner or of the formalities (the sitting through important meetings in the solemn offices of solicitors and accountants pretending to comprehend, placing my signature confidently at the bottom of indecipherable documents, with absolute faith that Gianfranco would always look after me). My final guess is that Lorenzo wishes to set up another restaurant, would like me to work there but wants to hear my thoughts before telling the others. Ignazio and I discuss this at great length, and the following evening we dine quite early at I’ Che C’è C’è before he heads back to the flat to await my return.
At nine o’clock, I step outside the restaurant and in a matter of minutes Lorenzo’s sleek car pulls up. We drive for a long time until we reach the outskirts of Florence, where Lorenzo parks outside a nondescript restaurant. I am a little bewildered by the hushed formality of the interior as we are led to a table. A trolley appears with a smoked salmon on it. One elderly waiter thinly slices it as another one dribbles spumante into two flutes. I am too embarrassed to tell Lorenzo that I have already dined, that I have no room to eat anything more. I eat and drink politely and slowly, and we talk about generalities. It is only towards the end of an hour that I summon the courage to ask Lorenzo what it is he wishes to propose to me. His eyes magnify behind his spectacles; he looks almost sad. He would like to take me away sometime soon, to Sardinia perhaps or down to Capri, just a weekend he can arrange off for me. Then he would like to find me a nice little apartment somewhere in central Florence where I can be my own person and not have to share with university students.
I am listening to this in a state of horror, which politeness prevents me from betraying. How can I have misunderstood a situation quite so spectacularly? Have I missed little signs that may have been leading to this? Suddenly his financial backing and the glorious alpaca jumper are no longer the well-meaning gestures of a kindly uncle figure at all. I murmur platitudes of gratitude, then explain, carefully, that I am involved with someone and therefore not in the position to accept his kind offers. The evening ends abruptly. We leave shortly afterwards, driving the long way back in shrieking silence, and when Lorenzo drops me by the Ponte Vecchio there is none of the urbane door-opening which prefixed our evening. I feel literally dropped off, and as his car spins off into the night I run as fast as I can over the bridge and up Via de’ Barbadori and into the lift and through the door of the apartment. In my bedroom, Ignazio lies asleep in the single bed. I sit down beside him and look at him. I seem to be looking at all the innocence, sweetness and uncorruptedness in the world, and when I touch the softness of his arm his long, spiky eyelashes separate and his beautiful brown eyes are looking at me with adoration. I have never loved him more.
Ignazio and I move into an apartment in Via Ghibellina, behind the Duomo and a few doors up from the Michelangelo Institute. That summer I climb up through the ceiling and onto the roof, where I spread a towel and sunbake in a landscape of shimmering spires and terracotta. Ignazio and I lie in bed eating Vivoli gelato out of big tubs; we play Scrabble in Italian and I teach him English. When the restaurant closes for renovations, we fly to Egypt for a holiday, sailing on feluccas, staying at the hotel in Aswan, where Death on the Nile was filmed, visiting tombs in the Valley of the Dead, buying perfumed oils in tiny stoppered bottles.
We began in Cairo with a slap-up night at the Nile Hilton. Before setting off to explore the city the following morning, flushed with the extravagance that characterises the beginnings of vacations, we order the Sultan’s Breakfast – a banquet wheeled in on a trolley.
Cairo is a cacophony of cars, donkeys and goats competing for space on illogical road systems. We visit the Museum of National Antiquities and later lurch off on camels through smoky sunshine on the city’s outskirts towards the Pyramids of Giza. The guide tells us that Napoleon calculated there would be enough stones in the three main pyramids alone to build a three-metre-high wall around the whole of France. I nearly faint on the narrow circular staircase winding up inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops, pressed sweatily between large German bottoms and vigorous American thighs. We gaze at the sprawling splendour of the Sphinx and purchase little scrolls of printed papyrus from the Papyrus Institute.
From Cairo we catch the train and follow the Nile down to Luxor, a village-city whose very name evokes dusty musky sensuousness. We visit the bewilderingly vast architecture of the Karnak temple complex and roam through the bleak and arid landscape of the Valley of the Kings; at night we eat carp and rice washed down by pink wine that tastes like turpentine. Aswan is our end of the Nile; we had hoped to travel as far down as the High Dam at Abu Simbel, but the minute we glimpse the Old Cataract Hotel we decide we are going to stay there for ever. We sit on the
cool verandahs of this enormous orangey-pink Moorish-style building sipping gin and tonics, staring at giant palms in gracious grounds and the Nile before us with its gently bobbing feluccas.
Of course, we know we cannot stay for ever at the Old Cataract – we must return to Rome and our ordinary lives, and we still have a week in which to explore the Red Sea. And so we catch the bus through a monotony of desert, Ignazio ashen-faced from the stomach cramps he has mysteriously incurred overnight. From there it is – and we should have read the signs – downhill all the way.
It is by the Red Sea that I throw away our return air tickets to Rome. More accurately, it is in the foyer of the Sheraton Hotel just outside the Egyptian deep-sea diving resort of Hurghada. Ignazio and I have been tipped into its muffled beige luxury from the taxi that rescues us from the bus stop. Ten hours of a bumpy journey across the Arabian Desert mostly standing up has left us fragile with exhaustion. Propped at the main desk of the Hurghada oasis attending to the necessary formalities, I plunge both hands into the pockets of my jacket and empty their contents into the nearest rubbish bin, as if ridding myself of the chaos and clutter of the past day.
We only discover about the airline tickets the following day when, refreshed from a good night’s sleep, we decide to organise ourselves for the home run to Cairo before flying back to Rome. When we stop panicking, we start to make phone calls: to both Italian and Australian embassies in Cairo, to Ignazio’s parents in Florence – and incomprehensibly not to the airline company.
Our holiday funds have almost disappeared; we move out of the Sheraton and into the shabby Shedwan Hotel, where loose wires droop out of holes in the peeling bedroom wall, and slink several days later onto a Cairo-bound bus. At least we have the assurance of new airline tickets furnished by Ignazio’s generous parents awaiting us at the airport. But meanwhile we have a day in Cairo, and so book into the Anglo Swiss Pension, a seedy hotel in a scruffy part of town. It is while we are sitting on the sagging bed biting into tomatoes and bread purchased earlier from a street stall that I have a sudden vision of the Sultan’s Breakfast a fortnight previously. I had taken a photo of Ignazio sitting semi-naked on the giant bed of the Nile Hilton, framed by a line of golden pharaohs on the dark, wooden bedhead behind him. The bedlinen is crisp and white, the table pulled up to the bed has a gold linen cloth folded neatly over it, and from it Ignazio is spooning sugar into a cup from a silver bowl. Filling the table are more silver bowls, glassware, my carelessly crumpled napkin.
At least we have the tickets home.
Scalda piu l’amore che mille fuochi
Love burns more than a thousand fires
Back in Florence, the days shorten and I find myself in the kitchen preparing food and feeling nauseated beyond belief. All I want to eat are hard-boiled eggs. A pregnancy test is positive. The abortion, which we both feel unreservedly is the best decision, is efficient and forgettable. That same day I am back home, where Ignazio waits on me with devotion. There is no sense of loss or grieving; on the contrary, I am struck by a feeling of weightlessness and freedom. Crisis averted, we resume our placid cosiness.
By the time I met Raimondo, and then later his wife, they had been together for many years. Raimondo tells me he met his sweetheart Annamaria on the Ponte Vecchio, where he had set himself up with easel and paints. Being a painter is one of many skills: pianist-accordionist, polyglot, bon vivant, gardener, waiter, singer, cook and drinker. He is ten years older than Annamaria and, like Gianfranco, a boy from a small Umbrian village. Annamaria, on the contrary, comes from a good Florentine family. She has waist-length hair, enormous sorrowful eyes behind thick glasses, and a wardrobe of sensible Ferragamo shoes with flat heels. He works and lives in Florence, while she is a teacher of English to foreigners at the University of Perugia and lives in a little flat like an eyrie in one of the steep, narrow streets that drop away from Corso Vannucci. She speaks calm and exquisite English with a trace of an American accent, legacy of the years she spent at Harvard University acquiring her second or third degree.
The day Raimondo brought Annamaria to the restaurant to meet me we loved each other immediately. After the healing, soothing time I spent in the country following the Gianfranco breakup it was to Perugia I headed, boarding a bus to stay with Annamaria. In the week that I was there, we both gained five kilos due to nightly sessions of wine and cheese while I poured out my sorrow, usually lapsing gratefully into English as the evening wore on. Annamaria and Raimondo are my solid rocks, the most romantic story I know, two people so extraordinarily unalike, whose love withstands long absences and little infidelities. Perhaps it is precisely because they are such an odd couple that they accept so unblinkingly the oddness that is Ignazio and me.
Change seems to know when to strike and, as much as I feel that I control my life and determine my destiny, I see how I am just being buffeted along, tricked into placidness in order, perhaps, to be better prepared for the next upheaval. Unlikely we may be, but twelve months into the relationship Ignazio and I are very settled.
Then Raimondo does what he has long talked of doing: he buys a restaurant. The restaurant is in Perugia, so he can finally be with Annamaria all the time, and he offers a share in the business to Ignazio, who accepts. Not without hours of dialogue, discussion and debate with me, the upshot being that I too agree to leave the restaurant, where I have no further to go, and move to Perugia as well to seek work. I am conscious that there is much at stake in this decision, and that what is about to happen will alter the nature of my relationship with Ignazio, with whom lately I feel bothered, obscurely, by a score of details. He has changed so dramatically from the beautiful child that I lured into my clutches to a self-confident young man, smoking too many Marlboros and experimenting with facial hair. He goes to Perugia to set up the restaurant with Raimondo and to find us a little apartment in Via Deliziosa – I feel I could only love a place in a street so named. After a month, I have formally extricated myself from the restaurant and packed up our apartment in Via Ghibellina, storing boxes of books and summer clothes at Ignazio’s parents’ place. Then I catch a train to join my beloved.
Non tutte le ciambelle escono con il buco
Not every doughnut has a hole
(or, things don’t always turn out as planned)
The steep, narrow streets in Perugia turn into tunnels for the wind and all the stone fortifying the town seems to contain and transmit the cold. Not quite as cold, however, as the previous winter, when the front page of La Nazione featured a photograph of nuns skiing through the streets of Rome, and when millions of hectares of precious grapes withered and died. Into Bar Sandri blow men in overcoats and women with scarves. Everyone is laughing and talking in high-pitched voices; the barista pours a stream of thick creamy milk into coffee cups lined along the bar. There is a complicated perfume of vanilla, hot pastries, grinding coffee and Fendi. Someone leaves with the wrong umbrella by mistake and rushes back in apologetically; everyone becomes suddenly involved in the incident and there are jocular cries to guard carefully one’s own umbrella. My cappuccino has a heart on it where the steamed milk has been carefully poured, and from behind the bar the glamorous middle-aged woman with extraordinary glasses passes me a jam-filled brioche wrapped in a tiny serviette.
Perugia: closed stone city of walls and silences, muted women murmuring through passageways, a sudden muffled flutter of pigeons. And then the gaudy warmth of the piazza, lit up and twinkling with the beautiful people strolling and gesticulating and embracing, scarves and jackets swinging, boots clipping and shoulder bags sailing through the crowd. Sudden little streets as narrow as alleys dropping away from the main beat, twisting into cheese shops, bakeries pungent with vanilla and a tiny yellow stationer’s cluttered with cards. The wood vendor is next door in his low-ceilinged garage with swarthy men who move soundlessly, piling wood into hessian bags. I climb the long, delirious streets until I reach Annamaria’s apartment, where the fire
in the kitchen is lit. We sit at her wooden table over wine, toasted slabs of bread with garlic and oil, creamy sheep’s cheese and salad, and finish off with strong, good coffee.
In Via Deliziosa, I sprawl on the double bed filling in pieces of a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, bored by too much sky. Ignazio bustles off early each morning and in the beginning returns mid-afternoon to spend several hours with me before heading back for the evening shift. I am half-heartedly looking for jobs, contemplating joining a gym, smoking thin joints of hashish in the evenings with introspective Talk Talk songs on the stereo. After a while, Ignazio begins to come home later and later in the afternoons. I am revisited by the Gianfranco experience – sick, lurching suspicion and jealousy – so one day I set off for the restaurant to look for him. Through the glass I see him sitting at one of the tables in the empty dining room, reading comics and stubbing out cigarettes. I creep back home and mention nothing.
All through that bleak isolated winter, I prickle with indecision. Despite the occasional company of Annamaria and Raimondo, I am not enjoying Perugia. I roam around the beautiful old town, drinking solitary proseccos in the lounges of fading elegant hotels, buying paper bags filled with assorted shortbreads from pastry shops, and writing long, introspective diary entries about my pointless life. I feel that I have taught Ignazio as much as I am capable. We make love uneventfully because I realise, too late, that in my challenge to educate him I have omitted to tell him how to best give me pleasure. I am reluctant to look for a job because of being so undecided. For the first time in four years, I begin to think seriously about returning to Australia; I change my mind every day.
Amore and Amaretti Page 6