The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (32 page)

‘Tall, taller than Giulio, she was thin like a dancer is thin. Unbound adolescent breasts, dark almonds for eyes, two beauty marks, one under her left eye, one just to the right of a corner of her mouth, I could never tell if the marks were painted on each morning or were moles, birthmarks. I was never close enough to her to see for sure save on the night she birthed Claudio and then I didn't notice. Flat, velvety beauty marks, perfectly placed, her makeup. Those and her disdain. No matter that she'd bathed, still she stank of old sweat and even that seemed only to add to her allure. I don't think Isolda did anything without first being certain of her audience. Whoever was near would have eyes only for her. Once, from the stairway to the dovecote, I'd watched her, unaware I'd thought, as she combed her hair. But she knew I was there and, as much to the air as to me, she said, ‘My hair was cut on the day of my First Communion. I was eight. Never since.' She wore it in a single plait, thick as an oak branch, and it flicked like a reptile's tail across her derrière as she walked. I have always hated how I look because I don't look like Isolda.

‘Some cursory touch Giulio would give to the girls. Never returning it, they continued to speak to me as though the others were not present, save when Dafne, in her best rendition of an adult voice, would say, “
Buonasera, Giulio.”
Despite himself, this never failed to turn the corners of his mouth into a stifled smile. She never missed a thing, which was, of course, why Dafne continued to say it; her clandestine greeting and her father's more clandestine response composing the whole of their relationship.

‘Only much later would I understand it had been Isolda's own vividly absent sense of parenthood that had kept Giulio from his. His wife's price was dear. She would have all of him and he would pay it.

‘Though he rarely spoke to me, Giulio would look at me, maybe say something with his eyes. I used to believe he tried to talk to me that way. It helped; it was enough. I'd get to work on the supper or, had I cooked earlier, I'd serve he and Isolda, the girls preferring more of the sugary pap to a bowl of green beans or cabbage. Never eating with them, I always stood, Claudio on my shoulder. No matter how much sugar I'd stir into that pap, though, the house was still purgatory.

‘I would tell myself that I stayed on the farm because of the children. I loved them and they loved me. We were the family; Isolda and Giulio, the outsiders. Were it not for the children, I'd have found my way somewhere else, though I never did let myself think where that other place might be. Another of my voices would defy, entreat:
Just go; the children are not yours. Their parents managed to keep them alive before you came; they'll do it after you go. You're using the children as a shield for your fear. That's it, isn't it, Gilda? You're afraid to be alone
.

‘The strand of truth in that voice was a bane, a rift in the purity of my motives. The other voice won, though:
The children will be better off with you than with Isolda and Giulio
. So into the amaretti tin I stowed my washerwoman's pay.

‘My plans were humble, no dawn flight on a swift horse. I was too hungry, too tired. The first step to freedom would be prosciutto, a whole haunch of it swinging from the dove-shit-shined rafters over our shared bed. I dreamed of that haunch. In the dream I kept a long thin-bladed knife in the sleeve of my nightdress, pulling it out at will, reaching up to carve a slice of the rosy, salty flesh, or a slice from the cheek of a man bent on punishments.

The girls, each curved into one side of me, Claudio on my chest, they were the shape of my life. Still, Tullia's words chilled me: “Let them? My father was first. I never
let
him.” As I said, an instructress, Tullia. Her words framed half an epiphany:
Stay far away from men
. The other half I'd already heard from inside me:
Feed hungry children
.

‘I worked with Tullia through that spring and into the early summer, the lire growing in a thick pile at the bottom of the amaretti tin. We were happy enough, the children and I, our time with Tullia diminishing the nightly anguishes of purgatory. But as Isolda grew big with the next child, so did fresh agonies begin to ripen in me. I was fifteen, an ancient fifteen, and I knew that if I didn't escape the farm before that baby was born, I never would. Or worse, perhaps worse, when I did find a way to leave, I'd take this next one with me, too.

Tullia and I spoke endlessly of my flight, she always in a froth over a new plot: her kin in Puglia would take us in until I found work; I should go to the hostels in Rome for homeless mothers and their children; or to a refugee program established post-war and still in operation in the north where her mother's cousins had cousins. Dedicated as a
partigiana
aiding a refugee to the safety of the other side of a mountain, Tullia entangled others in her mission. She'd speak openly of it in the markets, in the village, in the public bathing house, which served as a kind of club for the farm women.

Even for those few who had their own in-house plumbing, Saturday night at the baths was ritual. Soaped and dripping upon the rotting boards of the bathhouse floor, fleshy matrons, nubile daughters,
le nonne, le zie
, all of them championed Gilda, shouting through the gushing water of their own dreams of somewhere else. Someone else.

To dine in a ristorante
.

On a terrace overlooking the sea, to dance in a blue satin dress with a Corsican prince whose hair smells like oranges
.

Yes, he must be a prince
.

No, no. He need only be a man, not just male but a man, one of that rare species of human
.

Yes, a man who wouldn't beat me
.

A man who would make love to me rather than to take me in all the ways he pleased then leave me while he farts and burps and snores through the night
.

A man who wouldn't endlessly keep me with child and then go off to the taberna on the nights when one of them died
.

I could better tolerate the taberna than the brothel. Before Marcello's machinery broke down, the brothel was his sanctuary
:
Fortunate you were, knowing where he was. It was only after I'd planted Giangiacomo that I knew his whereabouts
.

All men, their concentration is singular, constant. The next opportunity. Where and how and with whom The where and the how and the with whom being less urgent than the when. Of course, most men make do with fantasy and use the one handiest on which to play it out. I think I was Luca's fantasy for a night or two. Not much longer than that before I began to feel, you know, disembodied. A device. Useful only from the neck down
.

I know that feeling. There was always something false about Marcuccio, false or indifferent. Maybe that was it … I used to feel as though all of him was never there … and, more, that it wasn't me he was with but it …

Fabio never kisses me. A graze in passing once in a while but …

A wrapped-in-his-arms-wanton-hungry kiss? Never. First I was the unassailable Madonna and soon after I became the shrew. A wife is relegated to these two states
.

It's true but it hardly matters. We have so much more than they do: children, family, friendships, house, Church. If we work things right, a lover or two. Most of a man is his sex. Think how tragic then for a man when his chassis begins to break down. It's his tyranny, a man's sex
.

So little awaits him beyond his lust. I used to feel so sad for Gianni when he first found himself on the wane. He was so like a boy who'd lost his mate, a child whose favourite toy was broken. And there was all that apologia, the self-acquittal. It was me, it was me who'd broken his toy for I was aggressive, I was passive, I was fat, I was cruel. When he tired of castigating me, he turned to the gods, to the fates who'd put the harvest at risk, soured the wine, let his beloved dog die. And my impulse to soothe him he spurned bitterly. I withdrew. I waited. He seemed to pass over the lurid phase common to aging men although pornography and an intensified kind of ogling took him over from time to time. I can say, though, that he never deteriorated into the pathetic, the whoring, the desperate lechery. However cunning he may be, a woman knows the signs that mark a man with these
.

Amen
.

It wanted two years, closer to three, until Gianni moved from the brutal phase back into a kind of humility, which, when he directed it at me, sometimes felt like tenderness. He found himself amazed when, if only now and then, his chassis would rally to a flickering renaissance. Otherwise I think he was mostly content having made a kind of peace with that wilful thing between his legs. An ancestral relic, nostalgic, outworn, precious. How fortunate we are that our sex doesn't age the way theirs do. When it feels like an autumn leaf down there rather than a juicy fig, olive oil is all it wants
. Ecco. Siamo apposto.
All is in order
.

Amen
.

Verissimo.
There is no parallel for us, that disastrous diminishing for a man. When our own ‘impotency' sets in, we are mostly ready for it, for the ending of fertility and all that it signifies
. Anzi, hallelujah.
How strange the difference between us: he remains fertile but can't perform, we can't conceive but our desire and our satisfaction are spurred with a caress. Our own or someone else's. Wouldn't it be grand if a smear of fine oil could do that for a man? For all the good it would do him down there, better he should use his oil on his beans
.

There's one thing more uniquely ours: mystery. That's not to say men are not grand liars, skillful betrayers. But rarely are they mysterious. Her mystery, it's really all a woman can keep safe from time. Mystery and olive oil
.

Yes, Gilda, go. For all of us, go and find yourself a young one, a charmer, an …

An enchanter
.

‘The women in the bathing house couldn't have known how uninhabited by charmers and enchanters were my dreams, though I suspect their own were as well, all that reproach made mostly of bombast. What with hunger and dying babies and endless fields to bend to, their countrywomen's notions kept them safe from the peril of romanticising a man, less themselves.

‘As the children slept and my eyes would no longer let me read, I'd sit to rifle one more time through Magdalena's things. I'd read all her letters a hundred times and then I'd read them again. There were many from a girl called Giorgia, my mother's classmate in Orvieto. Giorgia Filippeschi. Our own. Miranda's own. It seems that, after years of silence, my mother – during her epoch of desperation after I was born, after Pepucci had wandered off – had taken up correspondence with Giorgia. Tied with a length of string, there were twenty letters, at least twenty from Giorgia. Tucked in among the clothes, one letter was loose, dated after my mother
went to live with the angels
. In this one, Giorgia pleaded with Magdalena:
Come to Orvieto for a visit, Magda, you and your little girl. Stay with us for a while. Let me take care of you
. One night as I read that letter, the last two lines leapt from the page:
I'm here waiting for you. My arms are always around you
.

‘I took up a pen and wrote a letter of my own:

Cara signora Giorgia,

Though we've never met, I feel that I know you and that you will be pleased to hear from me. I am Magdalena's daughter. I am Gilda. Among my mother's things I found your letters …

•

‘Just before dawn, the August day already hot and dry, Isolda was preparing to leave for the fields when I hurried down the dovecote stairs, scrubbed and braided, my out-grown boots pinching, Tullia's brown poplin dress hanging from my thin white shoulders. Swaddled to my chest with a shawl, Claudio was sleeping. I moved, stood between Isolda and the door. A cheeky move, to confront the princess.

‘“I will be leaving the farm today,” I said, holding out my hand to her, offering a piece of paper on which I'd written Giorgia's address. Here's where we'll be living, for the time being. That is, if you should want to contact us.”

‘“Us?” Isolda looked at me then quickly shifted her eyes to some point beyond me. A crack in the wooden princess, a snag in her breath, aural. Still looking away from me, Isolda waved her hand toward the baby, toward my chest, which was already tight with pain.

‘“I will be taking Claudio with me. The girls, too.”

‘Composure regained, Isolda had no questions. Not a single muffled regret. She took the piece of paper and, looking away still, let it flutter in the direction of the oilclothed table behind her. A nod, her farewell, Isolda stepped beyond me and her son. Out the door, her stride was long and sure.

‘I would have stayed, you know, that's the strange part,' Gilda says to me, her tone pleading, trying to convince me of what I already knew.

‘Until that last moment, part of me longed for Isolda's intercession. Two words of entreaty and I would have continued on as before. That's how dearly I wanted to belong somewhere,
anywhere
. A prisoner pardoned, lingering in his cell.'

‘I know. We are wont to give prisons, almost any prison, the shape of refuge. The only way we can endure them.'

‘I … yes, I suppose. Prison, refuge. A small twist of will or vision and one can become the other.'

‘
Già
'.

‘Chou, you should have seen Livia and Dafne on that morning. Six and four they were by then, resplendent in pinafores of white organdy, white stockings and shoes gifted by one of the bathhouse women from her now grown-up daughters' stores. Wide white ribbons I'd tied around their heads, bows flopping just above their eyebrows. Perhaps not understanding the import of their journey, perhaps having understood it indeed, both were nearly faint with giggling anticipation for it.