Amore and Amaretti (26 page)

It just happens. One minute I am forking the last of the chicken salad into my mouth, wiping oil from its corner, stretching along the length of bunched-up sheets and blankets on Alvaro's unmade bed, and the next Alvaro is crawling on top of me, breathing rapidly, his cigarette mouth covering mine. His hands are on my breasts, rippling down my thighs, and his tongue in my ear. I respond, the past month of feeling unloved and meaningless exploding into pleasure and the unfamiliarity of sex. I am not in love with this dear sweet man, yet our arms are fiercely claiming each other, returning me to a sense of my being the womanly, desirable self that I thought had gone: I love him for this. We wriggle around and kiss wetly, and then I manage to slow us both down, slide away, smile with sweet foolishness and button my jeans.

He lights a cigarette and watches me, amused, as I gather up my salad bowl and cutlery and empty wine glass and thank him ironically for having me and pad back to the room I inhabit down the hall. In the kitchen the following morning, I am relieved that it has changed little between us, that in the place of the self-consciousness I was fearing is, on the contrary, a lighter, freer air, and Alvaro's hands on my waist when he walks past me remain a fraction longer than usual.

Gianfranco is showing us the ancient Tuscan method of cooking
toscanelli
beans in an empty Chianti flask. He tips them in and adds water, garlic, salt, sage and a little olive oil, then seals the neck of the flask with cotton wool. The flask is then placed onto a cloth in a deep pot of boiling bubbling water, where it will continue to cook for about three hours. By this stage, he tells us, the beans will have absorbed all the water and be ready to eat. I am already imagining them alongside one of Pino's fat spicy sausages.

Hate and love swirl through the kitchen like waves of shimmering heat. Vito persists with his private war against me – my telling Gianfranco about it has not assisted at all – but in compensation there is Alvaro's wink across the stoves,
‘una bella trombatina'
– a great fuck – whispered in my ear, and only several more weeks before it is all over, anyway.

Alvaro and I have succumbed to panting, hungry sex several times, the television turned up loud to prevent sleeping Vito from hearing anything, and I am conscious of feeling luminous, that near-forgotten sense of being desired and desirable. Plump I may be, but Alvaro wants me. Rita has barely visited in this latter period and I am grateful; tangled up with the luminosity is the treachery of my behaviour. I am aware, as well, that it is not properly love, this feverish coming-together of Alvaro and me, and more a neediness and a loneliness, a companionable exchange of comfort and caress. I smile inanely at unexpected moments.

Even the baptisms and communion lunches are thinning out. Cinzia has been rarely with us, spending most of the time at Gianfranco's apartment in Florence being a mother. Gianfranco, who never explains his disappearances and appearances, keeps us all on guard but is increasingly absent. I transform minestrone into a lush, dense
ribollita
and spend dreamy half-hours up to my elbows in a vat of bright-red oily oxtail sauce, gently separating meat from bone. Gianfranco dollops a ladleful of it into another pot of simmering leek risotto, to create a masterpiece of a new dish. He chops up a box of green tomatoes, softens lots of onions in butter and bubbles the tomatoes until they become a jammy sauce, which we serve with fusilli, grating pecorino thickly over the top. He tosses Vin Santo and strawberry liqueur into the giant pan of roasting pork – the perfume is glorious – and then adds the fresh chestnuts we have all previously peeled laboriously.

On to my plate of evening spinach sautéed with lots of garlic and chilli, I drizzle some thick green olive oil, brand new, delivered that morning by Mauro. It is mid-November and nearly time for me to leave. Alvaro tells me that I seem remote, a little detached: I am not ‘there in the head' and I know exactly what he means, because I have already begun the process of removing myself, readying myself for the return to such a different existence, my little flat and the usual dreary cycle of a mostly ordinary life.

In a moment of mad impulse I decide that, before returning to Australia, I must dine at the Michelin-starred Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence and, furthermore, that I must dine there with Ignazio. I am aware that it is very expensive, but I am prepared to use my credit card: it is to be a combined birthday present to Ignazio, gesture of my affection and farewell treat to myself.

We meet as arranged in a little bar nearby. The restaurant is in the same street where we once shared an apartment, the same street where so briefly, another life ago, I had attended the Michelangelo Institute. Ignazio looks beautiful in a well-cut camel suit, his hair pomaded back, his eyes dark and dancing as he propels me through the giant iron gates and the grand, hushed entrance to the restaurant. We sit at a corner table in a room with chandeliers and stiff waiters. There is a rarefied air of luxury and
benessere
– well-being. The chairs pulled out for us by a waiter each are high-backed and solemn. There are fragrant flowers on a table busy with slender-stemmed crystal glassware arranged in neat rows and classical music murmurs.

It could almost be a scene from a play, and throughout the evening we speak in lowered tones. From the two different menus on heavy expensive paper we are handed, I whisper to Ignazio that we are obliged, for reasons of economy, to select the
menù turistico
, which offers a series of courses, without wines, for a mere 150,000 lire per head.

Entranced by everything, I feel as if every other diner there belongs to a privileged world that I have only read about and never encountered. The couple beside us who order off the standard menu and who barely speak to each other all night, he pouchy-eyed and she thin and taut, the silver teapot arriving to serve him tea with his main meal, which seems to exemplify the height of sophistication. The larger table of eight adults, whose features are chiselled and polished. The single elderly man, clearly a regular, judging by the familiarity with which he gestures to the waiter at his table, a nonchalance in the drape of the napkin, an air of bored refinement.

Each little course arriving at our table is more breathtaking than the one preceding it. We sip fizzy Müller Thurgau with the first few courses: a tumble of
alici
on
panzanella
and a dob of pesto; seared red mullet on fennel puree; potato
tortelli
with shaved white truffles. Then a soft Tignanello to accompany the pancetta-wrapped prawns on spelt; a fish soup; duck in a sticky balsamic sauce; more syrupy balsamic vinegar spooned delicately over a sublime chunk of Parmesan on a plate containing goat's cheese and poached pears; the delicate flaky apple tart with cinnamon ice cream.

We eat in a sort of trance, two waiters hovering throughout to minister to our every need, topping up wine and water, whisking away and replacing plates soundlessly, almost invisibly. With our coffee arrive two trays of unordered dessert wine and miniature pastries, biscuits and petits fours, which look like jewels, too pretty to eat, though of course we manage. The bill comes to about 500,000 lire (€260), which seems, after I have prepared myself for 600,000, to suddenly be almost ludicrously inexpensive for all we have experienced. It is easy to leave a 50,000 lire tip, the cost of a meal for two at La Cantinetta.

Afterwards, Ignazio drives me to a noisy bar on the outskirts of Florence, where we drink more and where I appal myself by eating an entire bowl of salted peanuts. Throughout the evening we have been comfortable and close, although I feel we never really talk about anything that matters. I tell him I will always love him when he eventually restores me to Spedaluzzo, before driving himself back to Scandicci.

It is my final day of work. It is cold and sunny and on my last walk the air is sharply wintry as I power along, fuelled by hurt and rage towards Alvaro, who promised to join me in my bedroom the night before, after we made fantastic love in his, and who never appeared. The complicated directions he had issued me to avoid Vito suspecting, and the trusting way I trotted off to wake alone at six o'clock, are too mortifying, too reminiscent, moreover, of Gianfranco's infidelities all those years ago. I am aware of how absurd I am being, and that the late little affair to which we robustly abandoned ourselves was as meaningless and as meaningful to both of us, but all I am feeling is that the emptiness after an affair gapes more widely than the emptiness that preceded it.

Alvaro is off to Umbria with Rita for a week; he erupts into the kitchen, where my last day is to be spent working alongside Gianfranco, and says goodbye to us, met by my wild, indifferent eyes. When he kisses me on both cheeks and says,
‘Intanto ci si vede il ventisette'
– meanwhile, we'll see each other on the twenty-seventh – I wonder if he sees the faint red mark on my neck where the previous night he had bitten me and which aches from time to time with the dull, wistful longing I so absurdly feel. Another selfish uncaring bastard, and I am missing him already and immediately, and planning to buy him Zucchero's latest CD (and myself a copy to cry over), with a little card on which I will thank him for his friendship if not his sincerity.

I am hit by a wave of wild joy, suddenly, regardless of Alvaro and Vito, regardless of the surly inapproachability of Gianfranco. I am at the end of this latest round of La Cantinetta. Everything I do is imbued with the significance of being its last time. My final snack of sublime Parmesan and glass of Chianti, that most divine of marriages. Watching over the cavolo nero, beans, sausage, garlic and chilli Gianfranco has left to simmer. Even my discussion about life after death, God and religion with doddery silly-in-his-denims Vito, whose sleazy malevolence is muffled today by the lovely side of him I always used to see.

No customers at 8 p.m. and I am feeling sentimental, a little hazed by Chianti. I am looking at the neighbour who has come to borrow fondue forks, at his comical cartoon face and his beautiful, silent teenage son. Gianfranco, still in his hunting khakis, gesticulates before him and I am captured again by the beauty of eyes and mouths, gestures and whimsicalities, cigarettes lit and left drooped from casual lips: this whole mad country and its exasperating people, including Alvaro, whom I find I am missing quite violently. I have a week after this in Perugia with my beloved Raimondo and Annamaria, before returning here for a farewell dinner, then catching a train to Rome, where I will spend a final night with Marie-Claire and fly back home. Back home!