The Pat Conroy Cookbook (22 page)

In Italy, the usual order of business is salt, a carefully chosen extra virgin olive oil, and a good red wine vinegar. As far as I can tell, the use of balsamic vinegar in salads is an American fad. Maybe it is used in Modena, where the vinegar is born, but I never got to Modena. The Italians are resolute and athletic when it comes to tossing their salads, and they insist that all ingredients merge. In Italy, the oil is king, queen, and everything when the subject is
insalata mista
.

BRUSCHETTA
Bruschetta is Italian comfort food of a high order, but now that I think about it, the entire cuisine of Italy is based on comfort food. The toasted rustic bread sandpapers the garlic into small, fragrant bits when you rub the bread as it comes out of the oven. I’ve made bruschetta with fresh mozzarella and homemade tapenade, also with arugula, and with great passion when Beaufort’s summer tomatoes come into season.       
•
SERVES 4

BUCATINI ALL’AMATRICIANA
In my travels around the world, I have never seen the word “amatriciana” without its being introduced first by its brother pasta, the thick, tube-shaped bucatini. This is a fast, delicious meal that is both easy to make and sexy. The two small red chiles provide the heat that gathers all the flavors of this dish in its arms. Like pasta carbonara, this recipe is claimed by the Romans, its provenance being the Roman town of Amatrice.     
•
SERVES 4

INSALATA MISTA (MIXED LETTUCES AND GREENS)

•
SERVES 4 AS A FIRST COURSE

W
hen I moved to Rome, Italy, in 1981, I did not expect to meet the large number of American Southerners who had ventured to Rome in their youth and never gone back to their homeland. They popped up everywhere and in strange contexts. The word “expatriate” took on a dark, smoky luster that it had never had before for me. To find the courage to give up everything that had made your childhood either immemorial or unbearable was a vanity of freedom I had never encountered. As an adult, I found myself so haunted by my parents and my geography that I have spent a lifetime trying to write my way out of my addiction to their memory. The American expatriate I had expected to meet in Italy, certainly; the Southerner, never. I thought all unhappy Southerners migrated to New York. Never did it occur to me that for some of them, New York was just a stop-off point where they made their flight connections to distant points on the globe.

During the whole first year in Rome many of those disaffected Southerners I met said, “What a shame you missed Eugene Walter. A magnificent Southerner. More like a Renaissance man than a sad-sack Alabamian. A novelist. A poet. An actor. He was in Fellini’s
8
½, you know.
A songwriter. A translator. An Air Force cryptographer living in the Aleutians during the war. A famed gardener. And the best cook in Rome.”

That I had missed the best cook in Rome caused me great anguish and keen regret. What was remarkable was that I rarely met a single American who had not known Eugene Walter and could not share a tale about this garrulous and perfectly whimsical enchanter. Rome had soured for him when the Red Brigades began to set off bombs in his neighborhood and to kidnap policemen he knew by name who were guarding the headquarters of the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats, both of which were a block from his garden apartment. As for timing, my family and I passed Eugene almost in midair over the Atlantic. As we began our first day in Rome, he ended his last. Eugene returned to his roots in Mobile, Alabama, where he would live out the rest of his artful and over-achieving life. Because I listened so ardently to the plainsong of his nearly inconsolable friends, I always felt that I had missed one of the great opportunities of my life by not getting to sit at the feet of Eugene Walter.

“The food you missed,” Alfred de Rocca, the composer, would say, shaking his head sadly. “The meals were simply magnificent, spread out like works of art.”

The great artist Zev, whose artworks seemed painted with peacock tails and the dreams of preoccupied children, told me, “Eugene Walter was a walking civilization. He could do anything and knew everything. The conversation you missed! He didn’t just
talk
. It was never just
talk
. It was grand opera.”

I could not pass a restaurant without being told by some new friends that they had dined on
that
terrace with Eugene or walked along the path of
that
park or sat in the shadows of
that
ruin talking to Eugene Walter about Camus or Sartre or Genet, all of whom Eugene Walter had known and entertained and fed. I met more Italians who were in love with the whole state of Alabama just because Eugene Walter had sprung so fully formed and elegant from that Deep South state. Many Italians were fully prepared to like me because they knew my native state of Georgia was contiguous to the one that had produced the incomparable Eugene Walter. His footsteps were numerous and broad and just by tracing them
through his abandoned Rome, I realized the part expatriates play in defining the American spirit to their host countries. More than all the diplomats I met abroad, Eugene spread the joy and honor and wonder of being American and represented the essence of our finest selves as he told his incomparable stories and wove his tantalizing web during his Roman years.

I never saw Eugene Walter in Rome, but I felt his presence keenly. When my family returned to America after two years in Italy, I placed a call to him in Mobile and sent pleasant greetings and a hundred
“ciaos”
from a diverse and fervent group of friends from Trastevere to Parioli.

“You must come to meet me at once,” Eugene said, after I had delivered the message from his Roman life. “There’s friendship waiting here for you in Mobile. Time is swift and glorious friendship is one of the few condiments that makes life both sweet and sour. What sign are you?”

“Scorpio,” I answered.

“How dreadful. But it cannot be helped. I’ll do the best I can to like you. Though I can’t promise a thing. You are a large man with a weak voice, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Your family is not much, I would guess. Good solid peasant stock, but nothing to write home about.”

“Exactly.”

“Call your travel agent this moment,” Eugene Walter said to me. “I know destiny when I hear her precious heartbeat.”

I followed the call of destiny’s precious heartbeat the following summer and found myself embracing Eugene Walter as though we had known each other for many years. He walked me through the dining room of a very fine restaurant where he was well-known. Every eye was on him. He was wild-haired and fixed you with dark, piercing eyes. His voice was honeyed and piping and his pronunciation was precise as befitted the actor and the linguist he was. He sounded like Nero with lines written by Truman Capote.

“Let us get something straight between us,” Eugene said as we took our seats and the busboy filled our water glasses. “Your mother misnamed
you. She was a frittery, vain woman who did not take the trouble to get your name right. You have never been a Pat and never will. It’s a name for other people of no consequence. I will think of a name for you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“No need to thank me. That’ll come due when I find the exactly right name for you. Naming is one of the most important things. Ah! It’s coming to me. I’ve got it. It’s perfect. Do you want to hear what you should’ve been called all your life?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“Lyon,” Eugene said. “L-Y-O-N. You are Lyon and will always remain Lyon to me.”

And so I did. Each time I called to check in with him in Mobile from that day on, Eugene Walter would say, “Greetings, Lyon. You evade me because you know you should be here in Mobile, living across the street from me, sitting at my knee and writing down every word I utter. It troubles you, Lyon. You could be my Boswell. Instead you are vegetating in a perfectly empty and licentious life in Atlanta, the whore of Georgia. Do you know the oldest thing I’ve ever seen in Atlanta is a traffic light or maybe a half pound of rat-trap cheese? You belong to the ancient places, Lyon. You are an Etruscan and that is both your honorific and your tragedy.”

In the restaurant that night, Eugene took the pepper shaker, unscrewed the cap, and poured the pepper into an ashtray on our table. When the waiter appeared, Eugene said, “Take this and flush it down the toilet of the men’s room. It is dead dust and has no relationship to the sacred pods of real black pepper. This has the taste of talcum or black sand formed on volcanic beaches. Freshly ground pepper has volatile, tempestuous oils which only last about an hour after grinding. This oil is an aid to digestion. It also cleanses the blood, like garlic or cognac. Rid us of this sawdust, good man. What sign are you?”