Amore and Amaretti (13 page)

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 happiness 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.

I walk for an hour every morning, letting myself out of the building quietly and crossing the road before plunging downhill. Via Chiantigiana is the main highway between the two important towns of Florence and Siena but is just a narrow twisting road between vineyards and fields; I often have to leap into a field when two cars pass each other. (There is another occasional walk I do, through a silent, isolated forest studded with signs warning, ‘Beware Vipers!') All summer Via Chiantigiana is busy with incessant traffic, but in spring it is largely empty and often shrouded in mists. I charge past naked vines and olive trees and the pretty little church of San Tommaso, almost concealed by creepers with its statuary and terracotta urns and peacocks. I greet farmers tending fields and scarved women hanging clothes on lines, and finally turn to retrace my steps at a little bridge before ending up at the Chiocchio bar for a cappuccino.

The household still sleeps as I let myself in and prepare for the day. Down in the silent kitchen I turn on lights, gas and oven and fill the huge pasta pot with water. Ignazio appears shortly afterwards, terse, bleary and hung over. Gianfranco is rarely seen before ten in the morning, when he blasts through the kitchen, makes himself an espresso, then retires to the outside toilet with the pink
Gazzetta dello Sport
. Vera silently unloads the dishwasher in her floral blouse and stretch slacks, with the smoke from the day's first cigarette coiling into her perm.

Towards the end of spring, the dining areas outside are completed and we have been discovered. One Thursday evening a group of Florentine professionals, friends of friends of Cinzia's parents, drive out, four couples as sleek and shiny as the cars in which they arrive. It is still too cool at night for outside dining, so they occupy one of the little rooms inside.

Whenever a good impression needs to be made, Gianfranco becomes short-tempered and pedantic; he crashes around the kitchen barking at everyone. He has already asked me to run up batches of tiny savoury shortbreads, twists of puff pastry baked with anchovies to be served with the pre-dinner drinks, and cocoa-dusted chocolate truffles to accompany coffee. Gianfranco bends over platters of antipasti, his forehead tight with concentration, his fingers softly arranging. The Florentine women all have dyed-blonde hair and hard, beautiful faces; they smoke endlessly and eat little. Baritone laughter bursts sporadically from their private dining room. We are to see these people and ever-increasing numbers of their glittery golden friends throughout the summer. Every time they come, there is the same frenzy of production in the kitchen, which is merely expected and never acknowledged. Over summer their suntanned limbs and breasts spill out of whites, creams and linens – they all holiday in Sardinia, the Isle of Giglio or, more exotically, the Maldives and Bali.

Six weeks seems to be the time it takes for a group of people to assume their own peculiar dynamic, and to shift into their own formation. Six weeks, too, for activities to be repeated enough times to turn into habits: the foundation of familiarity.

And so it is with our little group, pivoting, of course, around the central core, Gianfranco. Vera and I companionably arrange hard-boiled eggs and capers onto chunks of bread for our 11.00 a.m.
merenda
. Cinzia and I engage in long discussions about literature and, specifically, as Cinzia is an educated girl, English literature. Ignazio alternates between terse and flirtatious behaviour with me. As for Gianfranco, he and I have slipped back into being comfortable as we work silently together in the kitchen before service, or when we stand side by side at the stoves. Sometimes – and, as we become busier, these times increase – we move with such synchronicity that we are as graceful and as fluid as ballet dancers, dipping and weaving around each other without ever colliding. And yet his moodiness and volatility have not diminished with age – for the most part, at least, not directed at me, but at poor long-suffering Cinzia.
‘Mi prende un nervoso,'
he barks.
‘E poi m'incazz
.
'
– ‘You make me irritable and then I get pissed off.'