Authors: Rachel Cusk
It is unclear to me whether Jim factored in the possibility of
improvement when he selected me as his victim. But I do improve: after all, I am hitting twice as many balls as anyone else, and many more than I have hit in my tennis career to date. I begin to evolve rapidly. I cease to be afraid when I hit. The ball comes flying towards me out of nothingness, and when I see it I increasingly feel the desire to impose myself on it, to create something, to manufacture some outcome. Its arrival no longer threatens me: it seems to come not out of a generalised fund of aggression but driven by needs of its own, the need to be shaped and directed, to be made articulate. It asks something of me, in its blind neediness. It wants to be possessed, turned around, sent out into the world again as my object. Jim begins to look a little surprised. All this time his eyes have watched me over the net, yellow and malevolent. Now I begin to see his face in profile, and once or twice even the back of his head as he runs to retrieve the ball from the back line. The invariable becomes the variable: he no longer always sends the ball to me. Once or twice he even winks when he places it at my feet after an absence.
We begin to win games, then sets. Once or twice Jim betrays annoyance when Amanda mishits the ball, and after that he leaves fewer to her, running to get them all himself. She doesn’t mind: for her the sport, the situation, is all, and of course the victory that is laid at her feet at the end of it, like the victim’s head laid at the feet of the watching empress. After that first time we don’t accept her offer of supper at the hotel again, for we retain sufficient memory of ourselves to know that it is not fitting, not what we have come for, to wallow in the murky tank of Englishness, feeding and drifting with our own kind in their glass prison. But one night we all go out to a restaurant in the hills, a place far up a winding road that stands in a clearing among scrubby patches of commercial forest, where the raw stubs of trees stand in amputated rows in the pink earth, next to unfelled stretches whose turn it is evident will shortly come. The restaurant is next door to a shooting range. There are men down there in visors and ear-muffs, firing rifles in the
last light of evening. They shoot at targets, or at clay discs hurled mechanically into the air. The loud bangs and reports resonate around the tables on the deserted terrace. We sit down. Roger is there. There are some swings in the restaurant’s garden and the children all gather there, playing in the indistinct light while the sound of guns rends the motionless air. Roger pours wine into everyone’s glasses, all except Amanda’s. Amanda does not drink alcohol. She is quiet, constrained, a little unhappy-looking. She has waited for her children to return and now they are here. She looks down to one side of her, like a Cimabue madonna, as though she were silently corresponding with a sense of destitution, of a shortfall; as though it is only in the presence of her whole family that she realises something is missing.
The next day we beat Jim and Amanda at tennis for the first time. Afterwards Jim is curt and withdrawn. He says he isn’t feeling well today. He says he has a headache. He says he is going back to his apartment to sleep it off. On the way home the children ask whether we can do something else tomorrow. They don’t want to go to the hotel any more. They want to go and look at paintings, like we did before. They want us all to be together, joined by a common interest, a common love.
I didn’t realise that they had these feelings. It isn’t only that the paintings are a medium of togetherness and the tennis is not. There is something else, some intrinsic value to art around which it becomes possible for the children to order their world. As for tennis, it is a game, and games extinguish their own moment for good. They are a way of killing time, and time, we now see, is our asset. We mean to invest it wisely. We mean to make it last.
When next we see Jim he is his familiar self, darkly diplomatic. He is glad we enjoyed the tennis, but he can see why we wanted to give it a rest. There’s not that much in it for the kids, he says, ruffling their hair. And after all, he supposes we can play tennis at home. He says this because he thinks that it is what we have concluded ourselves. But I can see that he is disappointed.
However: he is worried that Roger offended us, that evening up by the shooting range. We mustn’t be offended by Roger. Amanda would hate to think that we had been. He’s just a bit excessive sometimes. He finds it hard to contain himself. Jim tells us that when Roger and Amanda arrived here in Italy, Roger was enormously fat. He was massive, a mountain of flesh. He and Amanda seemed happy enough. But almost as soon as they arrived, Roger began to lose weight. Jim didn’t know why, but the pounds just fell off him. It was quite dramatic, happening almost in front of your eyes. That was when he started wanting to play tennis with Jim. His fat man’s frustration began to come out. The tennis made him lose weight even faster. And soon he was actually slim, for the first time in his life. The past didn’t fit him any more, like a fat man’s gargantuan clothes.
Jim says he has to be going: he was on his way to pick up a fare and thought he’d just drop by to check up on us. He raises a hand behind him as he walks down to where his taxi waits on the drive and then he is gone, leaving us with images of giant trousers, of shirts like tents, of a fat man’s jackets and jumpers, too big ever to be worn again.
In the drab grey folds of an English winter we speak of food. What will we eat in Italy? This is one of the details we consider, when we examine our voyage in its theoretical state. Human beings cannot proceed until their fear of hunger has been assuaged. We do not, of course, experience this fear: it is to celebrate its absence that we bring the subject up. There are countries you can go to where this is not the case. When I was a student, a girl I knew went to Russia for a term and came back grotesquely shrunken, with her clothes hanging round her in great vacant pleats. There had been nothing to eat, she said: nothing at all. Her teeth had turned black from lack of calcium. She had taken a two-day train journey in which the only thing she was offered was boiled chickens' feet.
From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to bend to its rigour, like the French. It is not rough and boisterous like the Spanish. It is soft and feminine and is adored in the highest circles, though it is not above a degree of prostitution too. But first and foremost it is kind to children. Consider the pizza: all around the world the pizza has come to represent the deepest forms of security known to the human palate. It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface. The pizza has nothing to hide, no dark interior, no subconscious fascination with its own viscera. That is why children like it. Indeed, it is the opposite of
haute
cuisine
, which seems to be predicated entirely on the tendency of children to experience disgust. To eat lungs and livers and
whole lengths of intestinal tubing is to declare yourself beyond revulsion and hence mature. As a child I was sent to stay with a French family, and watched in dismay as the mother opened a tin of chicken gizzards for lunch. No doubt I would have learned a valuable lesson in self-control if I'd eaten them. I'd have been as separate and contained as her own children were, instead of the lachrymose creature I remained, awash with emotion and homesickness.
Italian food has been widely taken up in modern times as a counter-ideology, to signal that such attitudes are in decline. Why should one be taught a lesson at supper time? Why should one be made to grow up? And why should one be inducted at all into the darkness of our carnivorous nature? To bathe the palate early on in blood, to harden the body by the ingestion of other bodies: it was to extinguish sentimentality that such practices were inflicted, along with the strap and the cane. But sentimentality, like the pizza, is suddenly all the rage. Let the child's mouth be filled with comforting Italian starch, with substances that are soft and white and melting, with dough as pliant and soothing as his mother's breast. Let him remain forever babied by his beautiful mother cuisine, and never want to leave her. The English have latched on to the Italian breast with a vengeance. There are children in England who view the pizza as a talismanic icon, by which they can ward off the advance of any other foodstuff. There are children who eat pasta strictly unsauced and inviolate, like an ascetic religious order. And there are English adults who seek to intellectualise the
spaghetti alla carbonara
in order to dignify their primal attachment to its farinaceous qualities.
All the same, there is a certain pretentiousness in the English conception of Italian food that I dislike the more for its infantilised origins. It seems unlikely to me, for example, that Italian magazines are quite so full of fetishistic images of their staple diet, of olive oil running in golden streams, of the red genital centre of a sliced tomato, of pasta in its rigid and its flaccid state. After all, these things are not exotic: to the Italians
they are as rudimentary as fish and chips. There is something a trifle pathetic in our English reverence for Parmesan cheese, our tittering fear of the aubergine, our belief that making fresh pasta is equivalent to building your own rocket and flying it to Mars. There is no particular need for us to be told again and again that cooking a risotto is as easy as standing on your head, but we want to hear it, and to hear it from the mouths not of Italian chefs but of native experts who understand that for the English the risotto itself is neither here nor there: it is merely the occasion, the transitional object that will facilitate our regression into infancy. We don't actually need to make the risotto to be healed by the philosophy that underpins it. It is merely the vehicle by which our childhood fears about food can be expressed. There are reasons why the English cookery expert does not approach us with the recipe for jugged hare (main ingredient: four tablespoons of blood): such things would only upset us. But in the innocent, sensory world of Italian food we can safely recall our primitive feelings of confusion and disgust for things outwith the body. The English cookery expert is the therapist who coaxes us through these labyrinths and rewards us with a spoonful of pappy rice, whether real or imaginary. He understands the repression of the English, a race reared for too long on kidneys and tongue. He understands our need to hear of the farinaceous south, where food is as milk from the mother's breast.
I, too, anticipate the Italian diet with feelings of relief, for I am not the omnivore I would like to be. There are whole continents I could never visit, so frightened am I by what I might be expected to eat. Even in France I exist in a state of constant suspicion and anxiety, rifling through my plate for signs of frogs or snails or songbirds, placed beyond the reach of self-consciousness or shame in my resolution to ask for everything
bien cuit
. A friend of mine describes how in a street market in China at night he bought something that was revealed by a streetlamp to be the jaw of a dog, but only after he'd eaten half of it. To China I will never go, nor to the territories of the Silk
Road, where the travel writer Colin Thubron describes the horror of eating and drinking in near-total darkness, only to be told afterwards what it is you have ingested. I will never go where they eat monkey brains or cats or guinea pigs, and though I love the literature of the past I would never go there either, to an England where larks and blackbirds lay beneath the pie crusts and something called headcheese was widely consumed. The English used to roast crows and eat them, and the idea of this funereal repast is worst of all. I am not proud of my revulsion. It is, I know, a form of stupidity. I do not wish to associate myself with the thoughtlessness of the modern palate, with its preference for deracinated flesh, for hamburgers and hot dogs and chickens crammed in cages. Better to eat a proud crow, with the sheen of life on its black feathers.
The Italian diet proceeds on the basis that isolation is the natural condition of a foodstuff. This is why it is so psychologically relieving. Nothing is hidden behind anything else. The tomato is one entity; the olive is another. The potato stands alone, and solitary is the asparagus in its sheaf of clones. To introduce one foodstuff to another represents a whole level of culinary attainment: it is a kind of marriage, inviolable, and hence requiring the utmost care to arrange. To form a group of three is an achievement even more significant. Often the third member of the group will be a herb, whose purpose is to enhance the attraction of the two principals. Sometimes the marriage will be so successful that the two food families will form a lasting alliance. A whole dynasty can spring from their union: tomato and mozzarella cheese, for example, together control an entire region of the national cuisine. It follows that to combine a large number of foodstuffs in a single dish would be tantamount to revolution. But every society needs its revolution, and Italy is no exception. That revolution occurred: its result was
ragu
. And
ragu
has given the Italian diet its manpower, its successful exports like
spaghetti alla bolognese
, the famous feat of engineering that is the
lasagne
.
But in food, as elsewhere in Italian life, the protection of
interests is all. The introduction of new ingredients does not occur. The country's portals are firmly closed to the spices of the East, to the hybrid notions of the Pacific Rim, to the
satay
and the
flambée
and the
jambalaya
. Everything that is eaten in Italy is grown in Italy. And within those boundaries there are no outcasts, no unwanted elements. The old bread has a soup specially designed for it, the leftover risotto becomes rice cakes, even the hag-ridden cold spaghetti can find a home. These codes of alimentary conduct are deeply engrained. There is only one way to do it and that is the way Mamma did, or better still Nonna, who after all taught Mamma everything she knew.
Tiziana's mother is a good cook. Every now and again she makes a rabbit stew for Jim, to shore up his commitment to the wooden hut. Rabbit stew is Jim's particular favourite. He is always calm and conciliated after he has eaten it, as though someone has injected him with a powerful tranquilliser. He doesn't cook much himself. He'll make a fry-up, or sometimes mince and tatties. He invites his English friends round for mince and tatties and ardently believes that they enjoy them as much as he does. When he goes home to Scotland he stocks up with tins of baked beans to bring back to Italy.
I ask Tiziana what the local specialities are and she shrugs.
Ragu
, she says, tossing her mane around proudly. I have noticed that the restaurants around the village all have precisely the same menus. What is the reason for this? Tiziana shrugs again. If I want something different, she says, I should go to Anghiari. They have different food there. Anghiari is a village eight kilometres away. One day we do go there, and what Tiziana says is true. We are given a kind of hot vegetable terrine called
sformata
, and a thick tomato soup we have not encountered before. Tiziana nods when we tell her. She knows about
sformata
. But nobody makes it here.
In our village there is a shop, known as Gianfranco's. It is a small supermarket whose giant white-haired proprietor roams the aisles in a stained white factory coat, bellowing and gesticulating with his spade-like hands. He is like a polar bear with
bespattered fur, roaming its enclosure at the zoo. His enormous body is a kind of spectacle, half-bathetic, for he is old and unfree: he doesn't sit in the shade of the cafe terrace like the other old men, so neat and combed and compact, nursing their tiny glasses of dark wine. Instead he paces the stacked aisles with his loping gait, or shuffles behind the refrigerated cabinets, dipping his giant hand into salvers of ground meat, paring red mottled discs from a length of salami that fall one after another from the spinning circular blade on to a sheaf of white waxed paper he holds in his palm. With the old women he has a tutelary air as he provisions them for the day ahead. With the young ones he is cheerful and avuncular. But the whole enterprise depends for its survival on the dominance of his personality, and so it is in the work of servicing his own myth that Gianfranco is the most assiduous. He laughs his giant, husky laugh; he bellows and roars, he sees things out of the corner of his eye that launch him into quixotic displays of chivalry. He pats the children on their heads and pinches the babies' cheeks. At the back of his shop there is a little bar, where certain customers are invited with great ceremony to partake of an espresso or a glass of Gianfranco's own wine, a profound, inky substance that drenches the blood with its indelible tannins. During these interludes Gianfranco's wife and daughter command the meat cabinet and the till: Gianfranco's surgeries at the bar are not to be interrupted. For ten minutes or more he is locked in deep consultation, like a minister with his aides. He leans over to rest his massive forearms on the dented chrome surface. The stained white coat presents its forbidding rear aspect to the shop. It is clear that interests are at stake. Advantages are being pursued, connections soldered. Customers are being reinforced in their commitment to Gianfranco's, which is smaller and more expensive than the supermarkets a few kilometres away in Sansepulcro. One day we ourselves are summoned to the political engine-room and offered coffee and wine. Afterwards we tell Jim, and he shakes his head. You must have been spending a pile of money, he
says, laughing. Gianfranco must be banking on you paying for his summer holidays. He gives us directions to the Pam in the industrial park outside Sansepulcro.
It is in Gianfranco's that we study the lexicon of Italian food. The more we consider it, the more bewildering the absence of complexity becomes. We cannot translate our appetites into this abbreviated tongue. We cannot create something from ingredients like a child's building blocks, sturdy and unfaceted, primary coloured. Up and down Gianfranco's aisles we walk in our stunted condition, searching for food. There is cheese. It is white. There is young cheese and middle-aged cheese and old cheese. The young cheese is soft. The old cheese is hard. There is meat. It is red. There are olives like beads on an abacus. There is bread as tough and plain as a shoe. There is oil that revives the dead things, like an infusion of pure oxygen, or like an explanation for something unknown. There is pasta, blank as an empty page. We gaze at these things, tongue-tied and inarticulate. Our mouths are full of whole sentences that strain to be uttered and yet can't be. What is it that we wish to say? What is it that we want? The first generation of people who came to England from the Indian subcontinent bought tinned baked beans in English supermarkets which they washed of their sauce in order to be able to cook their own dishes. I can imagine the blankness out of which their whole conception of food had to be redescribed, the same blankness that I feel when I try to express myself in Italian and cannot find the words to do it. Sometimes I find a word that is similar to the one I wanted and I use that instead. But it was not our intention to translate our English diet: we planned to abandon it outright. We are not scouring Gianfranco's for the means of making steak and kidney pie. It is Italian food we want to cook, but it seems that we must have more than Italian ingredients with which to do it.