The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (5 page)

No, I won't let you go. How I miss you. And, yes, how I love you.

•

Later that same day, Miranda and I meet at the rustico. The once cracked and sagging floor tiles have been torn up to reveal a foundation of packed earth and stones, which Miranda's nephews have covered, in part, with paint-dripped tarps and plastic sheeting and decorated, strategically, with buckets to catch the almost daily autumn rains that seep through the newly completed roof repairs. The cosy wreckage that was the rustico seems a desolate, ravaged place as we high-step through the tiny precinct, intent on conserving a windfall of pears from Ninuccia's trees.

‘We'll put everything right, you'll see,' Miranda chirps at me over her shoulder as I go about lighting fires in the hearth and the iron stove.

Having stripe-peeled and poached four bushels of brown-skinned Boscs and bathed them in spiced red, Miranda and I are wiping down one-litre jars of the rubied fruit, stacking them on the shelves along with the fifty or so jars of other fruits and vegetables already saved for winter and spring Thursday suppers. Smoothing her pinafore, patting the pearly sweat from her forehead, she moves from the pantry back into the kitchen, and takes up a cleaver. She says, ‘Let's get to the
violenza
.'

In a basket on the work table there are perhaps a dozen heads of garlic, the purple colour of the cloves bright beneath papery skins. Slapping head after head with the flat of the cleaver, she scrapes the smashed, unpeeled cloves into a five-litre jug of new oil in which she'd earlier stuffed leaves of wild sage, wild fennel flowers, rosemary, a fistful of crushed, very hot chillies. She is building one of her famous potions. Violence, she calls it. She uses it to gloss vegetables before tumbling them into the roasting pan, to massage loins of pork and the breasts and thighs of her own fat chickens, to drizzle over burning hot charcoaled beef and veal.

‘It's good for everything but lamb and wild birds and the aches and pains of most men; though, more than once, I've rubbed it into a cut or a scrape, disinfecting the wound better than straight alcohol could and leaving a much more pleasing perfume on the skin.'

‘The aches and pains of most men? The ones they inflict or the ones they suffer?'

‘I guess I was thinking more about the ones they inflict.'

‘Is that why you've never married again?'

Anticipating that Miranda would resume her talk of Barlozzo, I am prepared. I play offence. Her eyes cast downward, she tears the leaves off a branch of sage, pushes them through the neck of the bottle. I try again.

‘Is it? Is that why you've never married again?'

‘Could be.'

‘Have you even considered it?'

‘Are you about to punish me for my ranting at you about Barlozzo? Is that …'

‘Punish? Hardly.'

‘Good, because … because I feel it's my
right
, age has rights, in our case, a kind of
mother's right …
'

‘Mostly, I saw Barlozzo as my child. Sometimes you see me as
your
child … we're all trying to save someone when the most – no, the best – we can do might be to cook a good supper for each other and let life shape itself. I think that you were talking to yourself when you told me to “let him go”. I think there's someone you've yet to
let go
. And like a mother, yes,
like a mother
, you don't want what's happened to you to happen to me. But I don't need saving, Miranda, really I don't.'

‘Less do I. I'm Umbrian, you'll recall. Umbrian women are as choice of pain as we are of pleasure. Who would Job be without his burden? In any case, I shall answer your question. The truth is that I have considered marrying again. The greater truth is that I never would. It's either too late or not late enough, I can't decide which.'

‘But if some day you were to feel it was neither too late nor too soon, which one would you choose? Of all the men you know, if you could choose, which one would it be?'

‘None of them.'

‘Not even Filiberto?'

‘Not even him. I'm still working on the ending of my first marriage.'

‘A very long ending.'

Miranda has never spoken more than in passing about her husband. I know that he died young, suddenly. A very long time ago. She sits down, absently wiping down the sides of the oil bottle with a corner of her apron, corking it. She wraps her arms around the great jug, leans her kitchen towel turbaned head against it. As though against a tree. Or the chest of a lover. She looks at me.

‘He was a great beast of a man, my husband, kind as a baby deer, worked and laughed and slept and ate and drank passionately. His cousin was my neighbour in Castelpietro and when she married, Nilo came from Grosseto to the wedding. A Tuscan, Nilo Bracciolini was. We were married three months later. Or was it two? The foreman in a brick-making factory in Grosseto, that was Nilo's job and, being such a good one, he wouldn't hear of leaving it to come live in Castelpietro. Nor would I hear of leaving my parents, my sister and her children, my own work, my village. I couldn't imagine crossing that border from Umbria into Toscana, save to visit. But we'd talked of all that before we married.
Ci arrangeremo
, we'd said; we'll arrange things. He'd go off on Monday morning with four days' worth of suppers packed in the boot of his Fiat 600; pots and bowls, a two-kilo loaf. A demijohn when he needed it. Empty pots and bundles of laundry in tow, Nilo would come home early on Friday and I'd be waiting for him. He'd bathe and we'd rest together and then he'd take me to supper at
la Palomba
. Every Friday. I'd go with him to Grosseto once a month, sometimes twice; I'd scour his apartment from floor to ceiling, stock his pantry, do what needed doing. I'd always fill the place with flowers and Nilo liked that. I could never stay more than a night or two because of my own job and so he'd put me on a bus back to Orvieto and from there I'd get myself to Castelpietro. To wait for Friday. For years and years that was our life. A good one. A good life. Nilo held me up like a china doll. Sometimes I still believe that's what he did.'

I'm lost. I stay quiet, waiting for her to show me the way.

‘Nilo's dying was made of two swords falling. How was it that a man could go off one Monday morning, big and sweet and crushing my lips with his coffee-wet moustache, telling me he loved me just as he always told me, how could it be that he never came back? That he could be counting stacks of bricks, sending them down a line to be wrapped, readied for shipping, all the while talking to the man working next to him and, in the time it took for that man to turn around and talk to the person next to him on the line, then turn back to Nilo, Nilo was already dead. Slumped in a heap on the spot where he'd been standing and laughing two minutes before. That was sword number one.

‘The second sword came after the mass, the funeral mass. The coffin had been carried out to the hearse and I should have followed it but, instead, I'd wanted to stay a while alone. Giorgia wouldn't leave me, though, my sister, Giorgia. Shadowing me, insisting I was too weak to kneel another time. So I just stood there, my back to the altar, facing the main aisle, remembering how I'd minced along its length on my father's arm and in my mother's ivory satin, never minding how the dress strangled me about my bosoms or that it barely reached my ankles rather than sweeping the floor as it was meant to. When I arrived beside him, the first thing Nilo whispered was, “
Amore mio, sei in attesa di un diluvio?
Were you expecting a flood, my love?” That always made me laugh, him saying that, and so I stood there playing the scene over and over, willing it to paint over the fresh red hole where my life once was.

‘And then I noticed a child. A small, thin boy striding toward me from the main door of the church. He was pallid, weeping, maybe ten years old, maybe less. Even from a distance his eyes shackled mine. I waited for him. When we were toe to toe, I thought I must be dreaming, for it was Nilo. There before me was my husband as a boy. Skin so white I could see his veins, deep black pools, the eyes. Even his mouth, the point of his chin, it was Nilo. I stayed silent and the boy, save trying to stave his weeping, he was quiet, too. And then I felt it, like something falling away. From my eyes, from my throat, my body, some kind of veneer shattering. Glass, ice. Something that had been gently suffocating me for so long that I'd learned to breathe through it. All of it gone. I knew it before he told me. Sober as Abraham, that little boy, I knew it was true before he could say it:
Sono figlio di Nilo
. I am Nilo's son.

‘I think the boy neither expected me to speak nor wished me to, it being enough for him to say the words aloud. Out of the dark, revealed. By then it was I who was keeping Giorgia upright, bending to soothe her, telling her I was fine, and when I looked back at the boy, there stood behind him a girl.
Another one
, I thought.
Two children. Jesus help me
. The girl stepped closer. “
Io sono l'altra
. I'm the other one,” she said. “Of course you are,” I whispered. White-skinned, red-haired, just like the boy. But not like the boy. Not like Nilo. In the yellow light of the church she might have been a statue, sculpted, serene. “
Io sono l'altra
,” she said again. “
L'altra
, the other one,” she repeated and, though I tried to make her eyes slide off mine, she held them there until she was sure I'd understood.
The other woman
. The second sword. I never said a word.

‘There was nothing to do but take her by the hand, the boy with my other hand, walk down the aisle and out the door, down the steps where all the mourners were lined up on either side, waiting to console the widow.
We were both widows
, I kept thinking that. We just kept walking. I could hear Giorgia muttering behind me. Someone folded us into the long black funeral car, smelling of lilies. Even now, lilies bring me to a faint, a frenzy. I don't recall much after that. The boy's weeping, I remember that. And that we never did let go of one another's hands all morning long. The girl, she never cried or spoke; taut as a palace guard, she stayed. They let go first, mother and son, they let go of my hands when it was over. Half a nod, they turned, began walking away. I called after them, they who'd become my comfort, if you can believe that. In the arc of an hour, they'd gone from being the embodiment of my mortification to becoming, somehow, just
mine
. How strange. How …'

‘Not strange. Not for you. Not strange at all.'

‘Perhaps not. We tried to be a kind of family but that failed. Instead we slipped into twice- or thrice-yearly visits made more of duty than pleasure. I tried then to forge a friendship with them. I had more than they did, more than I needed. As soon as it was comfortable for the tenants to vacate it, I signed over the deed to Nilo's family property up here in Umbria. It was the place where we'd planned to retire some day. A fine stretch of land, a small house, in Civitella del Lago. They moved there, mother and son, and she worked in the village. I think it might have been two, maybe three years later when she sold everything. They went back to Grosseto. Nilo's son is married, I think it was four or five years ago. The friendship didn't work, either. After all this time, I'm still not certain if it was more her pain or mine that kept us from it. I expect one day that he'll come to see me, Nilo's son. That he'll bring his children. Another grandmother, I would like to be that for them. I wait for it but I would never ask for it. I do think that Nilo must have spoken well and often to his son of me, maybe not as his wife but as a good person. A good woman, something of the sort. Wishful thinking? Is my notion made of only that?

‘Nilo's betrayal did not leave me in despair. I never sat and rocked, imagining him kissing her or tangling his legs around hers in the candlelight, his feeling her belly when the baby quickened, I never did. All of that belonged to him and to her. It wasn't the betrayal but Nilo's treachery in not owning up to it. The dupe. That's what left me stammering, inarticulate. It left me defenceless. And profiting from my teetering state, fear took over. Set up to stay. I was and remain victorious over despair, but fear is still with me. I cover it up with my prancing and joking, with my cooking. Once again, to answer your question, I would choose none of them.'

‘But you and Filiberto …'

‘Filiberto and I. An unlived love. Which is not the same as love denied or undeclared. It's a love with distance between the lovers. A mostly private, mostly silent love, which – by its nature – avoids every kind of injury. Not even love can staunch a wound, Chou. Or if it can, while it's doing its work on the old wound, the new love is equally busy wounding one in another place. If not in the same place.'

Miranda smiles, looks up at me as if for sympathy, for accord but, so lost am I in my own story of wounds, both vintage and of recent harvest, I say nothing. She squints her eyes then, as though the old light by which she tries to look at the past has grown dim. When she looks at me again, she returns to the discourse about her shepherd lover.

‘So, yes, Filiberto and I … there is this distance between us. As though there was a stand of ancient elms we must traverse in order to get to one another. And so we wander through the trees and that's enough for us and has been for twenty years. It's enough that I feel wiser and lovelier when he's near, which doesn't mean I can't manage when he's not. It's Filiberto I run to on the morning when I see the olives have budded. I need to tell him about beautiful things. Him, exactly him. One must put a face to love. One must know who to run to.'

‘Quaint. Charming enough. Perhaps even
ideal
. But …'

‘Not
real
?' Miranda smiles.

‘It would be like living on sweets. I would miss the salt. Half a love.'