Amore and Amaretti (33 page)

Later on that first day I shower and dress and walk to the restaurant. Raimondo seats me at a table near the entrance, brings me wine, urges me to help myself to anything off the menu, sits with me and drinks. There are not many customers and Natasha is orchestrating everything smoothly, with occasional darting glances towards our table.

I love Raimondo's restaurant. If ever I were mad enough to consider a return to the ruthless, unforgiving world of restaurants, I could do it in this one. Its intimate smallness, the radio audible from the kitchen where glamorous, plump Franca reigns, Franca whose lips are carefully outlined with dark lipliner. Eight green-clothed tables, each with little vases of fresh flowers. There are the photographs in frames around the walls of Raimondo: Raimondo and his boxer friend Gian Carlo, Raimondo on national television, Raimondo arms around smiling customers. And the refrigerated cabinet with its little pots of tiramisu and glass bowl of fresh strawberries in a glaze of sugar and lemon. The antipasto table with vegetables prepared ten different ways, half a sweet pecorino cheese, fresh fruit salad. The prosciutto stand with its haunch of moist rosy ham, the bread board, a litter of crumbs and chunks of irresistible chewy breads.

Raimondo tells me about the ulcer he has nursed for much of his adult life with periodic abstention from alcohol and drinking lots of milk. He had doubled the dose of his tablets for my visit in order that he and I can be as excessive as we generally are together. At six o'clock every morning, he is saying, he is prowling around his vegetable garden with a beer, gathering the produce to bring to the restaurant. Tough peasant stock has produced this extraordinary man who, well into his sixties, is now discussing the inexhaustible sex that he and Natasha enjoy; privately, I worry for him.

I walk, eat and drink. Lunchtimes, I am usually in the restaurant eating salad from Raimondo's garden, well dressed and accompanied by springy, crunchy bread and several glasses of house white wine diluted with sparkling mineral water, and then it's back out into the sunshine, the shops and piazzas and people-watching, the cafés and steep-stepped streets leading to cool cul-de-sacs, Etruscan ruins, the sudden dizzy panorama of fields folding and falling away below. Back, eventually, ordering dinner. Franca sends out bowls of eggy tagliatelle with fat creamy broad beans and pancetta; or thick tubular
stringozzi
glistening with butter and black truffles; or a plate of garlicky artichoke hearts swimming in oil. I am not caring any more about weight and greed. This sort of gorgeous, big-flavoured food will only ever taste this way here, and I want to trap the memory of it somehow.

Franca and I have been discussing men, middle age, sex, love and death, standing in the tiny kitchen where she keeps half an eye on the simmering sauces. I have had to leave my table to tell her how extraordinary the rabbit
cacciatore
was. How does she manage the intensity of flavours – that jammy, sticky, herbaceous sauce? Talking with passion about food leads us everywhere else, and inevitably to her familiar refrain about long, hard and often thankless hours and the desirability of retirement.

Standing opposite her I am conscious of the urge to grab a wooden spoon to stir or a knife to chop. I have, above all, a wild desire to take over the kitchen, to stay for ever in Italy, to cook and live simply.

Three and a half weeks is all it has taken to diminish my Australian life to an insignificance I am suddenly prepared to abandon. How could I have stayed away from Italy for so long? How could I leave this country again? It is as if the food is just a symbol, an expression of everything that inspires, animates and activates a part of me that ceases to exist when I leave. As if I am two people, or simply a more complete woman. An outer layering, perhaps, which thickens and enriches my entire being, turning me into something else again – the same, though better. It is a sensation encountered whenever I am re-immersed in Italy but which only now I am capable of articulating and understanding. ‘Retire', I feel like saying to Franca, ‘and your kitchen will be safe in my capable hands.'

When Natasha is convinced that I have no designs on Raimondo – assisted by a little lecture he later tells me he delivered to her – her iciness drops away. We are just two foreign women in Italy, and she is as eager to take me shopping as Silvana had been. Yet, whereas my expeditions with Silvana whirled me through emporia whose flimsy fantasy garments I could only ever dream of affording, Natasha's take me to bargain basements and cut-price boutiques for teenage girls with thumping stereos and tables piled high with cheap, bright clothing. This is a side of elegant Perugia I never knew and, while she selects garments for a twenty-three-year-old daughter she never sees, I am trying on endless pairs of jeans and shirts whose prices are laughable.

We browse through a dreary downmarket department store, where, bored, I wait for Natasha to finish a long conversation in Russian with another couple, then attempt to persuade me to buy kitschy knick-knacks as coming-home gifts for my family and friends. We end up in one of the town's more beautiful pastry shops, where Natasha orders a spectacularly fattening cream cake. She tells me she will soon be starting a regime of strict exercise. How I love women!

Back at the restaurant, I see how invaluable Natasha is to my beloved crazy Raimondo, and how much of the business she takes care of. She sets up the theatre for his performances, enabling him to flourish in his various alter egos, to slip away and do the round of Perugia bars in quieter moments, to drink too much and sing too loudly to his customers.

I have always understood Raimondo. Incomprehensible to me is how I have managed to listen to his mix of Umbrian, Romagnol and alcohol, and understand nearly everything he is saying. If I believed in past lives I would say that he and I belonged as siblings to some other time. I remain his
sorellina
, the little sister he takes on his prowls around town, one arm through mine. Wherever we go we are greeted with enthusiasm. Raimondo is a celebrity, a character more colourful than most others, and I am proud to be with him.

At the sumptuously elegant Caffè del Perugia he is conversing with the maître d'. We balance Campari cocktails and I am spellbound by the food. All along the S-shaped bar and on tabletops are platters of antipasti, tiny little
pizzette
, sandwiches, marinated vegetables, cheeses, dips and terrines and meats, miniature stuffed rolls, olives, crostini and bruschetta, bowls of pistachios and almonds and peanuts, and the exquisitely dressed crowd of Perugians is helping itself with that unselfconscious, graceful indifference Italians display when they eat.

An elderly man in a creased cream linen suit has joined our little group and Raimondo introduces him as the owner, explaining simultaneously that I am a famous Australian journalist. Raimondo's expansion of the truth is one of his hallmarks and I play along, allowing myself to be swept into a lift and whisked up to the next level of the building, where there is a formal restaurant under a vaulted ceiling of chandeliers. I ask intelligent questions, admire the open kitchen where a file of beautiful chefs in blinding white troops out to meet me, run my hands over the marble and terracotta, study menus, gush with suitable rapture. My heart turns with sadness in the lift going down, when I notice the hearing aids in the owner's ears, which he adjusts from time to time. I thank him graciously and go to find Raimondo.

As we walk back to his restaurant he tells me about his son, his greatest sorrow. He fears that Riccardo has been involved in drugs. Whatever happened has resulted in behaviour bizarre and antisocial, a boy in his room all day, screaming arguments between father and son, and a need for professional intervention. During one fight, which became physical, Raimondo relates, he pretended that Riccardo had knocked him out and he lay on the ground as if dead. He let Riccardo's mortification drag on for as long as he could before ‘coming to', as if to discover whether his son really loved him.

Riccardo would have been thirteen when Annamaria died, and I still remember how close they were to each other in that special way I have observed in older mothers and their only sons. How did a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking restaurateur manage, then, on his own? I am utterly sad to hear Raimondo's story, and helpless in my attempts at advice, yet privately unsurprised. We have arrived at Vecchia Perusia and Raimondo's brief moment of tears is replaced by the rousing welcome in three languages he bellows as we enter. Natasha's smile is pure relief.

Questa è la vita e qui il gioire, un'ora di abbracci e poi moire

This is life and this is joy, an hour of embracing and then to die

I have pressed as much as possible into my suitcases. Languid rain drips from my umbrella as I clip up the steep cobbled streets leading to Vecchia Perusia for my last night in Perugia. An early train will bear me away to Rome in the morning and the long haul back to Australia. Only two tables are occupied in the restaurant. It is a Sunday and Raimondo has planned to take me for a final drink. I eat my last solemn supper of tiny Brussels sprouts, fennel, artichoke and chargrilled zucchini in a pool of fragrant oil I blot up with bread, then a wedge of Franca's gorgeous ricotta tart with its buttery short pastry and chunks of chocolate and mysterious indefinable spices. I take photos of her framed by the window, of Natasha putting her hands up in horror or modesty, of Raimondo standing before the antipasti table, then of Raimondo and Natasha and the strawberry cheesecake I made the previous afternoon.

Then he and I are wheeling arm in arm out into the damp, soft night. An African materialises with roses and Raimondo buys me one. Then a car slowly passes and its owner winds down the window to invite us to a party in a nearby restaurant. First, we clatter down steps and through a low-roofed doorway into a noisy trattoria where glasses of limoncello are poured for us at the bar, then into another bar for cocktails, surrounded by waiters who joke with Raimondo and recount anecdotes. The party we eventually reach is, apparently, for a visiting American, to whom I am briefly introduced, the room full of fashionable, expensive people who are sitting around a long table.

Flutes of champagne are poured for Raimondo and me and I am transfixed, as usual, by the display of food, entire smoked salmons and a glittering jewel-like array of antipasti and baskets of breads and rolls and whole cheeses. Wishing I were hungry, wishing I were never leaving. Wishing I were one of these glamorous, beautiful Perugians for whom such opulence is casual and regular. Feeling so proud of Raimondo, feeling scruffily, ploddingly Australian, for all my newly discovered layers.

I had encircled Raimondo's neck from behind, rested my head briefly on top of his and said a casual goodnight, leaving him at the table with Natasha as I climbed up to bed. This was the only farewell he would accept from me. And so the following morning it is Natasha who is waiting for the taxi with me at the bottom of the street. Perugia is still sleeping and a mist of fine white cloud hangs over folds of fields beyond the town's fortifications. I have slept little and badly, mentally rehearsing the taxi to the station, the train to Rome, then the train to the airport, the checking-in followed by the long flight home.

It seems easier to stay – and yet I am suddenly anxious to be gone, to be occupying that strange, surreal, limbo-like state of travel in order to absorb the past weeks. When the train rolls smoothly out of Perugia, I feel fragile with emotion, but I am also beginning to consider what lies ahead: a job I enjoy, a beautiful place to live, a man who makes me happy. I am seeing how all the disparate elements and adventures of my past have brought me there and somehow enmeshed to form the richly textured medium in which I move, and the person I now am.