Then Ignazio receives notice of his impending military service and everything is suddenly simplified. He will be away for one year – away from the restaurant, away from Perugia and, most importantly, away from me. This offers me the perfect reason to go back home, and from that vast objective distance sort out whether or not we have a future together. I buy a return ticket valid for twelve months and fly out of Rome several days before Valentine’s Day. In the drawer where Ignazio keeps his underclothes, neatly folded, I have left a large chocolate heart and a note of love.
L’amore del soldato non dura un’ora: dov’ egli va, trova la sua signora
A soldier’s love doesn’t last an hour: wherever he goes he finds his woman
For six months, Ignazio misses me terribly and loves me madly. Postcards arrive periodically – from Livorno, Piombino, Cecina – written in neat upper case and providing descriptions of typical soldier-days, noting how many months of military service remain. He mentions his fidelity often, invariably accompanied by comments regarding the extreme difficulty men have with the issue. Plans shift and alter; he has decided not to return to Perugia, which is a cold and boring town; Gianfranco is contemplating buying I’ Che C’è C’è and would like Ignazio as a partner; he will join me in Australia.
In Sydney, I am selling advertising space for the Italian newspaper La Fiamma. I drive a turquoise Datsun 120Y between Leichhardt, where I work, and Balmain, where I inhabit a small flat. I am fat, gloomy and confused about what to do when the year is up; my letters to Ignazio become as rare as his are to me. There is a very large space where we have ceased communicating and then I hurl off a letter discussing my proposed return to Italy and expressing need for reassurance. I am so ambivalent about going back that it comes almost as a relief when Ignazio’s breaking-off letter arrives. He acknowledges that he loves me still – the letter being, he comforts me, as difficult to write as it is to receive – but that at twenty years of age and on the verge of finishing his military service he realises his whole life spills before him. He no longer knows what he wants – he is ambitious, greedy, curious – and he has no desire any longer to settle down and raise a family with me, because what would happen in two or three years’ time if he changed his mind and became tired of our relationship?
The letter is a relief because it puts an end to my confusion and decides the short term for me. I am utterly crushed by it at the same time. I fold it carefully back into its envelope, stunned by a sort of emptiness.
Book Two
1994
Spedaluzzo, near Florence
Se ne vanno gli amori, restano i dolori
Love departs, pain remains
Eight years pass. One day Gianfranco phones me. He and Ignazio have bought a restaurant in the Chianti district, thirty minutes out of Florence. It is opening in March. They would like me to come and work in the kitchen alongside Gianfranco as assistant chef, like the old days. Am I available?
How could I resist such symmetry? I am nearly forty years old, unmarried and childless. I am good at my job selling advertising space – now for a larger publication – and made reasonably satisfied by it. I teach Italian cooking at community colleges all over Sydney, live alone in a fashionable expensive suburb, have a wide circle of friends and spend most of my salary giving ambitious dinner parties. Occasional affairs peter out quickly. My monotonous, repetitive diaries maunder along under the fug of anxiety that I am becoming vacuous and inconsequential.
And so I decide on a six-month stint, spread over the European summer. I resign from my job and pack my life neatly into cardboard cartons and heavy-duty garbage bags, except for the overweight suitcase that accompanies me to the international airport. My accommodation will consist of rooms above the restaurant in the big, old building at the top of a hill where all of us will live. There will be Gianfranco (now divorced from Marie-Claire after producing two children) with his new younger woman, Cinzia, as well as Ignazio, a middle-aged kitchen hand called Vera… and me. Gianfranco, over several phone calls, is characteristically enthusiastic, positive and vague about details, and, while I am aware how once again I go leaping into darkness, I know he will keep me safe.
Quandu si las ’a vecchia p’a nova, sabe che lasa ma non sabe che trova
When you leave the old for the new, you know what you are leaving but not what you will find
Pino the butcher meets me at the railway station and drives me to the crossroads outside Florence where Gianfranco leans against a new Land Cruiser with his arms folded. We are heady and clumsy with excitement as we embrace. We talk the whole journey through countryside both familiar and strange, until we reach La Cantinetta. I am too high-pitched to sleep off the day and a half of travel; instead I familiarise myself with the restaurant’s kitchen and throw together a cheesecake. Ignazio is badly shaven, pink-eyed and beautifully Ignazio – all grown up into a small man with the gentle beginnings of a paunch. Gianfranco’s second wife, Cinzia, is vibrantly exotic and warmly gracious; Gianfranco is heavier and tamer. Much later, sitting over dinner, I look around at my new family, in particular at the shy, middle-aged woman called Vera with whom I am to initially share sleeping quarters. This I had not expected, although Gianfranco assures me the arrangement is temporary and within a week he will have knocked down more walls, erected cupboards and screens to create private rooms for both of us. For now we are piled higgledy-piggledy into large, cold rooms whose minimal furniture is either extraordinarily ugly or broken. There are flagged floors, wooden beamed ceilings from which naked light bulbs suspend in a lacy mesh of cobwebs, and doors that don’t shut properly, preventing privacy. The restaurant has been officially open for several weeks, but business is sparse. Word has yet to spread that Gianfranco is now operating outside of Florence and, besides, it is the lingering tail end of winter.
I am unprepared for the sudden flurry of snow on my third afternoon. Sitting on my single bed opposite Vera, I look out of the window at flakes floating past and hear a crying wind that echoes my desolation. Before I fall into the habit of easily sleeping away the several hours between the day and evening shifts, and before I have reclaimed the luxury of a room to myself, I spend unsettled afternoons lying in bed pretending to be asleep in order to avoid conversation with the incessantly prattling Vera.
Vera sits upright on her bed, which is closest to the window, and stares out all afternoon at the opposite driveway and the cypress trees. Her husband is in hospital with lung cancer and her two married daughters have families of their own. She has come to work and live among complete strangers. She also has no idea that her chief function is washing up, instead of the cooking she was hoping to do, with which the blonde foreigner – whose back is turned so eloquently in her direction – has been bequeathed.
Gianfranco has made wooden chopping boards in various sizes upon which to serve our house speciality of tagliata. The result is spectacular. A slab of beef (the size depends on the number of people it must feed) is quickly cooked on the grill, then transferred to a chopping board, whereupon it is adorned with a series of diagonal slashes and topped with either rocket and shaved Parmesan, grilled garlicky ovals of zucchini, black truffles from Norcia or, in season, grilled whole porcini mushrooms. A drizzle of dressing, and out to the table it goes! The meat is sublime Chianina, rich red and meltingly tender.
I love La Cantinetta’s menu and its blend of rustic fashionability. One of the most popular dishes that summer is grigliata mista di verdura, consisting of grilled capsicum, red onions, zucchini, aubergine, radicchio and tomatoes dressed with finely chopped parsley and garlic. The combination of colours glistening with golden oil is gorgeous. Then there is the battered-and-fried chicken with vegetables, which are served in a cone of stiff butcher’s paper: golden nuggets of moist chicken and chunks of fennel, cauliflower, broccoli, artichokes and cardoons in a crisp light casing, spilling out onto a platter piled with potato chips.
Minestraia
(pasta chef) once again, I am taught new and challenging sauces: duck to serve with fresh tagliatelle; wild boar with potato gnocchi; mutton with rigatoni; oxtail with fettuccine. Gianfranco shows me how to hold the duck over a gas flame until all the hairs are singed off, then to dismember it neatly with the cleaver. Even when it is the season of the boar we use wild boar that comes vacuum-packed from Hungary, local boar being invariably riddled with parasites.
Gianfranco, who considers the creation of desserts and cakes beneath him, had been whipping up batches of chocolate mousse from a packaged mix and experimenting with strawberry tiramisu. Briskly I take charge as he hoped I would and begin to bake in earnest. Within several days of arriving, however, I have one of my most important culinary lessons, which is the making of potato gnocchi.
Everyone has a version. Vera and I cluster around the two marble chopping boards. The potatoes, newly drained from their cooking water, are the gently steaming centrepiece. Neighbours, friends, suppliers and waiters, all talking at the same time, are forming the audience. Potatoes peeled before cooking, potatoes peeled after cooking, no eggs, yolks only, three eggs for every two kilograms of potatoes, fork prints obligatory – these are the vehement variations flying around the room.
Gianfranco, however, is the master, and his way will be The Way. He stands between us, his small knife briskly peeling the hot cooked potatoes, explaining that for minimal penetration of water great care must be taken when piercing the flesh to test for done-ness. Everything must be performed quickly. When all the potatoes are denuded, the area must be completely cleaned of all debris before stage two – the ricing – can begin. The potatoes are packed into a utensil resembling a giant garlic press and forced through the small holes; they become a mountain of snowy sieved potatoes. Flour is scattered onto the mountain and now Gianfranco’s hands work the flour in, bit by bit, adding more as he goes. No eggs, absolutely no eggs at all, he dictates to the onlookers, eggs make the mixture stiff, the texture rubbery. He creates a smooth pillow of dough and urges us all to touch its firm silkiness. It is rolled out into sausage lengths; quickly his knife chops along the lengths at two-centimetre intervals, forming perfect little dumplings. These he drops into a pot of boiling salted water and cooks until they rise to the surface. The whole procedure looks fiddly but possible, and I had no idea then how many months of daily gnocchi-making it would take me to get them right, and for the tips of my fingers to become heat resistant.
It is fortunate that the first six weeks at the restaurant are so quiet. Before summer commences and before we are ‘discovered’, we all need time to shuffle into our respective roles and to turn this long-unused barn into a restaurant, and a destination worth the journey. We are not really in the middle of nowhere. There is a little village at the base of the hill whose bar I frequent for coffee at the end of my walks. The humming town of Greve is ten minutes away by car, and every ocular angle throws up vineyards, olive groves, blackberry bushes, forests and castles and monasteries and crumbling stone walls. In those first two grim, adjusting months, the enchantment of our surroundings is only caught in snatches and glimpses: shadows cast by poplars striping the white dirt track over the road, the spindly pencil pines in serried ranks out the window as the bus passes the Ugolino golf course.
I am mainly absorbed by the laying down of small new routines and the living with other people. After the first week, Gianfranco has set up a bedroom for Vera through the archway that leads from my room into the vast storage area. The poverty of her possessions makes me feel sad – the clutter of cosmetics, the paperback novel and a spectacles case on the wobbly chair beside her bed. At least we each have our own privacy, and begin to shyly eat meals together.
Ignazio has a girlfriend, a first-year university student with buck teeth and large breasts, who leans palely against the kitchen wall, too terrified to talk. He and I are not always easy together; there seems to be an entire universe around which we carefully step, although I often manage to leap across it with the sort of comment or joke I know he will respond to, and our eyes meet with brief warmth.
Until May, what diners we attract occupy the several small rooms inside the restaurant. Solid furniture, stiff floral linen with white over-cloths, lines of vintage Chiantis around the walls: Gianfranco and Ignazio have paid attention to every detail. In one of these rooms Vera and I sit eating grilled garlicky sausage with salad and the springy spongy bread I never manage to find in Australia, and cautiously permit each other peeks into our respective lives. Vera, like most Italian women, drinks little alcohol, although often – presumably under my pernicious influence, or perhaps in the spirit of our increasing intimacy – forgets to top up her wine glass with water and tosses back the contents with a sort of liberated recklessness, her white neck stretching. She is very discreet, and speaks of her husband, whom she visits at the hospital on her day off, in respectful though detached terms; more and more often I hear mentioned the name of her landlord, whom she refers to simply as ‘Il Signore’, referring vaguely to his many acts of kindness.
Behind the restaurant the two dining areas are being finished. The upper level consists of a roof upheld by pillars at whose bases lean terracotta pots of flowers, while tables look out across gently curving hills and vineyards and the small white dots of villages. A path leads away from this area, past an ancient stone olive press and towards another roofed enclosure filled with tables, chairs and hanging lampshades, and a bar-in-progress up one end into which Ignazio is pouring his builder’s energies to a background of exuberantly thumping Brazilian music. Beyond the three-tiered fountain with the headless girl in green stone is Gianfranco’s vegetable garden, flanked by fig trees. In the slowly thawing reluctant spring, there is little sign of the abundance to come.
My birthday coincides with a bicycle race, which is to finish at Chiocchio, the village at the bottom of the hill. We at the top of the hill expect to be busy, and prepare vast quantities of food, but are still overwhelmed by a day which pours in endless groups of people, on and on into the night, so that I keep forgetting that I have just turned the milestone of forty. At eleven o’clock that night, we finally draw breath; Gianfranco opens spumante and we sink gratefully into chairs. There are presents for me: a long, thin, wooden rolling pin inscribed with the signatures of Gianfranco, Cinzia and Ignazio, and a chopping knife.
That day signals the change we have been waiting for. It is May, and when I walk my early mornings are lighter and milder; we begin to acquire some regular customers. Signore Argento, the industrialist, telephones from his office several times a week to inform us that in half an hour’s time he will be arriving with three guests for lunch. A bird of a man with a big moustache and expensive suits, he is invariably accompanied by glamorous Asian women. They all drink lots of mineral water and eat lightly, mostly salads or, the height of fashion that season, carpaccio. Over the phone Argento often requests uno spaghettino in a simple tomato sauce boosted by lots of chilli, which means I must put the water on the boil immediately to ensure that by the time he arrives there is no waiting. Carpaccio of beef is raw beef sliced paper-thin, but Argento begins to ask Gianfranco to sear the slices on the grill before sending them out to him with the simplicity of a cut lemon. The Asian women eat carpaccio of zucchini, carpaccio of tomato, carpaccio of mushroom – whatever thinly sliced vegetable Gianfranco has dreamed up and dressed evocatively, but they especially love the mixed grill of vegetables, which, unlike the Italians, they eat unaccompanied by bread. I catch myself gazing out the kitchen window at them, divining in that graceful wine-abstaining vegetarian asceticism the elegance of success.
La prova migliore dell’amore è la fiducia
The best proof of love is fidelity
Friends occasionally ring from Australia. One of them asks me, ‘Are you happy? Are those boys looking after you?’ And all I can reply is that, yes, in a mad sort of way I am happy and Gianfranco and Ignazio are sort of looking after me. The happines
s mostly comes in brief flashes, and mostly in the early mornings on my walks, when the splendour of my surroundings spreads like a gift before me and I ask God to forgive my excesses and weaknesses.
Grigliata mista di verdura
(Grilled vegetables)
2 aubergines
6 medium zucchini
2 red capsicum
4–6 small Spanish onions
3 radicchi
8 medium field mushrooms
6 Roma tomatoes
(Optional extras: asparagus, fennel, sweet potato)
1 bunch Continental parsley
2 fat cloves garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Wash all vegetables. Slice aubergines thinly. Slice zucchini thinly on the diagonal and cut deseeded capsicum into wedges. Peel and halve onions. Halve radicchi. Trim stalks from mushrooms and halve tomatoes lengthwise. Heat a ridged grill to moderate high, then grill all vegetables, brushing them with olive oil and seasoning as you go. Chop the parsley and garlic finely, mix, then stir in sufficient olive oil to form a loose paste. When all the vegetables are cooked, arrange on a large platter, drizzling over the garlic/parsley dressing while still warm.
Amore and Amaretti Page 7