Amore and Amaretti (21 page)

She barely glances my way anyway, even when introduced, and breaks into peals of unexpected, unexplained laughter as Alvaro and I exchange looks. For all his gossipy confidences about her over the weeks, I see that he, too, is prey to some crazed sort of charm she possesses; he is agreeing to go on a snail-gathering expedition with her. They organise buckets and raincoats and the kitchen is suddenly neat and calm without them.

Donatella: the on-again, off-again relationship, perplexes me. I find myself hunting for clues in Ignazio's bedroom about the sort of man he has become. Underneath the bed, drawers reveal little of interest: comic books and magazines, empty cigarette packets and wine labels. There are no tied-up bundles of letters from me and no other evidence that I ever existed for him. Why should there be, after twelve years? And yet I am conscious of obscure disappointment. For all their obvious fondness for me, I have learned how strangely unsentimental both Gianfranco and Ignazio are – their relationship towards me is brotherly, a little dry. It is as if once our affairs of the heart ceased there was no residue of the former passion, nor any great sense that we had made an impact on each other's lives. I wonder if I merely imagine this or if it is I, the strange one, who goes on loving ex-lovers beyond the affair, and can never properly be around them without mentally flickering, periodically, back to images of how great we once were together. I have no desire for either – although there persists something about Ignazio, the shards of remaining sexual tensions, perhaps, which makes me care about other women in his life, and be bothered by them.

Alvaro is cooking the snails that Donatella and he have gathered. First, he laboriously washes them, and then tips them into a pot of cold water. This he places on a low heat to bring to the boil. The snails, at first, are climbing out of the water and up the sides of the pot, but by the time I have rushed upstairs for my camera they have begun to flail and flounder feebly in water too hot for survival, water which is slowly and mercilessly killing them. Of course, as Alvaro points out, it is no crueller than killing lobsters, but my heart has gone out to all those brave little fleshy palpitating bodies struggling from their carapaces up the sides of the pot, only to flop back down again.

The surface of the water is now milky foamy scum, the shells suspended like seashells left by a receding tide, shiny and devoid of their life force. When they have been boiled, they are rinsed and boiled again – the water must be perfectly clear before being added to a separate pot of
odori
: Alvaro's finely chopped celery, carrots, garlic, onion, chilli and wild fennel, which he has softened in olive oil, then with its liquid brought to a simmer before toppling in the snails. He splashes in white wine and, when it has evaporated, adds peeled tomatoes, then leaves the lot to simmer for about half an hour. Over at my chopping board the gentle rattling of shells against the sides of the pot makes me want to cry.

Business is established and steady. Periodically there are functions, which may mean working up to twelve hours with barely a break. Two weddings on one day mean a formal lunch followed by a
merenda
– afternoon tea – for forty people, and when the chaos from that is cleared away we must then set up for the standard evening's à la carte. At least the functions, being immaculately organised, are easy: group food is infinitely less trouble than individual service, with everything arranged and then sent out on platters, the edges wiped briskly clean. Alvaro and I work well together and I find his immeasurable patience, good humour and even temper refreshingly different from the unpredictability and tyranny of Gianfranco.

Occasionally, however, we have the great man back in the kitchen with us. He has been to the markets and brought back a box of artichokes, which Vito is now cleaning, peeling away the outer leaves, cutting sharply across the tops and trimming the bases: artichoke risotto, Gianfranco calls out to Cinzia, is to be one of the daily specials. When he is in the kitchen, I feel as if Alvaro and I unconsciously shrink into the smallness of the space so that no damage can be done and no blame laid. There is Gianfranco at his most magnificent, sloshing olive oil into a wide pan, chopping quickly through the artichokes so they emerge like wafer-thin petals, all his movements firm and economical. In a good mood he instructs us, invites us to dip our fingers into the simmering substance, leaves it on a low heat at a safe stage and disappears, his workstation spotless.

There is an old wood-fired oven out the back, behind the lower function area. I am still a little awed every time I escape the kitchen and step into the beautiful outside world with its two levels of dining, the statuary, the vision of the vineyards beyond the stone walls. Today we are roasting a whole piglet in the oven. Yesterday evening it was stuffed with
frattaglie
(the liver and intestines) tossed with garlic and rosemary, and then stitched neatly up. Bunches of sticks from the vines and cypress branches were fed into the oven to get it going and the fire has now been burning for hours. Vito explains to me how you know when a wood-fired oven is sufficiently hot: the entrance turns white, a condition called
a pane.
The little pig is turning a glorious golden brown and looks as if it is sleeping.

Later in the kitchen, we hear a news report on the radio about someone who has died from eating tiramisu – a particular brand of mascarpone was apparently the culprit. ‘I won't be eating it again,' says Vito, who is biting into his snack of a prosciutto-filled panino, warm from the oven, with a glass of Chianti.

Several days later, two policemen appear asking to check our mascarpone – fortunately, the brand we carry is not the one they are looking for, so they are shortly on their way. I continue to serenely whip up batches of the luscious cream, which I flavour with grated orange rind and layer in individual glass cups with coffee-dunked biscuits and cocoa.

Meglio un giorno da leone che cento da pecora

Better one day as a lion than a hundred as a sheep

Vito initially reminds me of Annunzio from Robespierre, the restaurant where I worked on the Isle of Elba, but then I begin to see how little alike they really are. Vito's cosy grandfatherly quality reveals itself, I come to perceive, as a bitter provincial pettiness. He gossips nastily about the people in his life who have let him down, and lacks any genuine sympathetic interest in the lives of others. Annunzio, for all his history of failures, disappointments and wrong choices, had still offered the solidity of his patient listening, his homespun wisdom and advice, whereas there is an insistent whine threading through everything Vito says and a shiftiness in his eyes, which rarely hold your own for very long.

But for now our friendship flowers in the inevitable way that close working relationships do; more often than not it is, after all, just the three of us in the kitchen, Vito, Alvaro and la Veeky, muddling along easily enough together and often sharing meals, linked by the common bond of being staff versus principals. The cubby hole which was once Vera's, and is now Vito's, bedroom is even more spartan – the narrow bed neatly made up with an extra blanket folded at its foot seems all the private space he possesses, stark and impersonal as a motel room. He rarely speaks about another life, a past, a youth, a family; phone calls and visitors and groups of noisy animated diners never come for him. He darkly addresses the sink of frying pans and pots with a vigorous scrubbing in which violence seems grudgingly suppressed. Within weeks, all my chocolate-lacquered, dough-encrusted equipment has ceased to amuse him and, now betrayed by heavy sighing, merely exasperates.