Living in a Foreign Language (24 page)

“If the oven works, this could turn out to be a pretty good lasagna.”

“Yeah,” added JoJo. “We got this oven from Mariane and George when they did their kitchen over and it's a little dicey. It sort of cuts out when you try to heat it up.”

“Other than that, a perfect oven.”

JoJo poured red wine for everybody from a magnum-sized refillable bottle. It was a Primitivo they had bought in jugs on a trip down to Puglia the weekend before, and it was definitely a cut above the usual
vino della casa
. Even Jill, who wasn't much of a red wine drinker, held her glass out for more.

“It works very well as a doorstop,” JoJo said.

“Or a very big paperweight,” added Bruce.

“Sucks as an oven, though.”

Bruce was tightening the rollers on the pasta machine, and with each pass the sheets got thinner and thinner. When they were almost transparent, he dropped them in the boiling salted water, one at a time, and when each was done—in seconds—he transferred them to a waiting bowl of cold water.

“I have an oven method that I think is almost foolproof,” he said.

“Didn't work last time.”

His little smile again.

“Yes, but now I've perfected it.”

He took a large stainless steel spoon, opened the oven door and clanged the spoon three or four times against the heating element in the bottom of the oven. Then he lit the flame, holding in the dial for a few minutes. It looked to me like he had succeeded.

“Now let it go,” said JoJo, grimly.

He did, and the flame went out and the kitchen filled up with the smell of propane. Undaunted, he tried his method a few more times: banging it with the spoon, holding in the dial, releasing it—and filling the kitchen with gas. On the fifth try, the oven stayed lit.

“Now, here's the important part.”

He used the same spoon to prop open the oven door—just a few inches.

“Or it just goes out again.”

The sheets of pasta, now all partially cooked, were drying on towels. JoJo daubed at them gently with another dish towel to make sure they were completely dry. The two of them worked the kitchen nicely together, anticipating each other without ever making a show of it.

“Can we do anything?” I asked. “You're doing the work and I'm drinking all the wine.”

“You're doing a very good job,” said JoJo.

Bruce handed me a big chunk of nicely aged
parmigiano
and the microplane grater we had given them the last time we were here. We'd given one to Bruno and Mayes as well. And to Martin and Karen. It was perhaps the only real improvement we could offer the Italian kitchen.

“How much?” I asked.

“About half a cup.”

Not very much, I thought, for a whole lasagna.

Bruce ladled out a small amount of tomato sauce—with a metal spoon very much like the one stuck in the oven door—onto the bottom of a ceramic lasagna dish. Onto this he gently placed a few sheets of pasta, making the first layer. Then he spooned on some béchamel.

“At least we
have
an oven,” said JoJo. “The two months
we were in Mexico last winter, the house didn't have one. Nothing at all. We did all our cooking out on the barbecue.”

Here it comes. Mexico.

“So . . . what's the plan?” asked Jill, in a voice a little higher than the situation called for.

Bruce glanced at JoJo, and she shrugged. Over the béchamel layer, Bruce spooned some more tomato sauce, and over that he sprinkled the lightest dusting of
parmigiano
with his fingers.

“It depends on whether we can rent this house.”

“And what we can get for it. The idea is to have the rent we get for this place cover all our expenses for a whole year down there,” said Bruce.

“And that's it—a year!” blurted JoJo. “Then we'll be back.”

This time she poured the wine just for herself.

“It's not like we're leaving Umbria. One year, that's it.”

That made me really nervous. Why did she have to say it twice? Were they really thinking of leaving forever? They had just sent Miles, their one and only child, off to college in New York and were feeling that desolate kind of freedom that Jill and I went through when Max went off, never really to return. And Bruce was sick of his job. He had been teaching English to the Italian Army for the past ten years and he'd just got word that they were cutting back on the program. So he was about to make less money for a job that held no interest for him anymore.

In a funny way, I wanted them to go. They're the trail-blazers, the role models for starting new chapters, for keeping your life and your marriage energized and exciting. I didn't want to think of them as being stuck here just because wimps like us didn't think we could live without them. The
truth is we would never really take a full bite of Italy as long as they were here to catch us each time we slipped. Once they're off to Mexico, we'll
have
to learn Italian, I thought; we'll
have
to make the culture our own; we'll
have
to learn how to get inside.

“Taste this,” Bruce said, holding out a spoon to me. It was the freshest, most delicate of all tomato sauces.

“How'd you do this?” I asked.

Fresh tomatoes from the garden, carrot, celery, onion. A little salt. Don't sauté anything; just let them bubble up together in a pot. Maybe a little sugar. Then puree it.

“It's from Marcella's book,” said JoJo. “She's still the best.”

The amazing thing about the sauce was its softness. There was none of the acidity that you usually find with tomatoes, just a round, subtle softness.

Bruce made three or four more layers of the lasagna—the thin strips of pasta, the béchamel, the tomato sauce dusted with
parmigiano
. He carefully moved the stainless steel spoon aside, opened the oven and placed the lasagna inside. Then he expertly lodged the spoon back in place and rested the oven door against it. He had indeed perfected the method.

We cracked another bottle of the Primitivo and sat down in front of the fireplace in the dining room. As we waited for the lasagna to become itself in the oven, Bruce put a marinated butterflied pork loin on the grill over the fire, where he could watch its progress from the table.

He brought in the lasagna and carved perfect squares for each of us. I tasted it, and it filled me with an odd sense of longing. Then I took the next bite and realized that's what I had been longing for. Why was this the best lasagna I had
ever eaten? Ever dreamed of eating? Because its texture was like a fragrant, silky pillow that disappeared almost before I could fully enjoy it? Because its taste was a subtle blending of flavors so close to one another—eggy dough, sweet, soft tomato, nutty
parmigiano
, buttery béchamel; a pastiche of pastels, not vibrant oils? Because it teased my senses, flamed my desire, stirred the greedy, gluttonous beast that lies, licking it chops, just below the surface of my cheery, unimposing exterior? Or was it just that I knew—as I inhaled my second serving—that I would have to travel all the way to the fucking Yucatán if I ever wanted to taste it again?

T
HE MAIN PIAZZA IN OUR LITTLE TOWN
—the only piazza, actually—is not a postcard-worthy town square the likes of Trevi, Bevagna or Montefalco. Our town is not on the tourist trail. It's strictly for the locals, and I must say I prefer it that way. There are three bars, two butchers, two
alimentari
, a fruit and vegetable shop and a number of various other retailers—but if you didn't know they were there, you wouldn't be able to find any of them. We lived there a year and a half before we knew that the doorway next to the church—the one with the beads hanging down to keep the flies out—was Gloria's
orto-Jrutta
shop, the best and freshest local produce in the area. There's no sign, nothing. If Karen hadn't told us about it, we'd still be walking right past it without a clue. But once you know about it, you know. The same with Ugo's. There's no ad in the paper telling you that he makes the best prosciutto in the world. You just have to know.

The church on the piazza is a beauty—
Chiesa della Madonna della Bianca
, constructed in the sixteenth century and looking every bit her age. Her name translates literally as the Church of the Madonna of the White Woman—named after some memorable blond from way-back-when who did something miraculous, no doubt. The church is still very much in use, and we can hear her bells ringing all the way up the valley at the Rustico.

Our local bar

There's a little park across- from the church with playground equipment, a statue commemorating the war dead and, most significantly, benches fronting the square with some great-looking old guys who smile and wave to you when you pass by. If a postcard company wanted to feature our village on one of its cards, the old guys—
i vecchi
—are definitely the most photogenic shot in town.

Jill and I were strolling around the square, getting smiled at by the old guys, when we saw a poster on the bulletin
board next to the statue in the park. It advertised a drawing and painting class just starting up that would meet every Thursday afternoon at the local music school.

“You gonna do it?” I asked her.

She smiled as if to say that I was joking.

“No, really,” I urged. “Why not?” It wasn't that strange a suggestion—she had studied years before at the Art Students League in New York and returned to painting whenever her acting career slowed down.

“I don't. . . .”

“What?”

“A lot of things. I don't speak Italian well enough; I won't be here for the whole course—I'd miss the last two months of it; and I'm not comfortable enough yet with . . . with being a foreigner here and not knowing anybody, really.”

“That's why.”

Her look changed. I saw the hesitant Jill recede—the one who didn't want to enter any situation unless she was head and shoulders the best in the room—and be replaced by the adventurous Jill, Jill the Conqueror, who would take on any new challenge and suck all the perfection out of it until she
was
the best in the room.

“What do I do?”

“The
comune's
right over there I think.”

The municipal building is on the other side of Gloria's from the church. It's the same building—with a colonnade along the front—that houses one of the town's no-name bars. We asked the guy in the bar where the office was and he told us it was on the second floor. The entire municipal government building consists of two offices and a desk, so it didn't take us long to find what we were looking for. A very
nice lady gave us the info and told us that Jill had to pay for the course by buying some special stamps at the post office. At least that's what we thought she said. Our Italian was good enough to get most of it, but not all.

We went to the post office, but the door was closed because it was almost time for lunch. We had arrived at a ticklish time. If you walk into a shop—or even worse, a government office—at ten minutes to one, the people behind the counter get visibly nervous. Because if you want something that may be complicated to attend to—like if you have to try something on or ask a difficult question in fractured Italian—it might mean that they will be late getting to lunch. This is as low a thing as can happen to Italians; it can ruin a whole day. They will often protect themselves by locking their door at a quarter to one pretending they don't hear anybody knocking. Then, at one, they open the door, look at you with feigned surprise and go to lunch, which is way more important than business—especially at the post office, where it's not their business anyway.

It took Jill four days to figure out how to pay for the class, what she needed to bring and where exactly the music school was. And by Thursday afternoon, she was quivering with excitement. I offered to drive her down and pick her up three hours later so that she didn't have to stress about parking and everything. She was like one of our kids on the first day of school.

When I picked her up, she was late coming out of class, so I waited in the car. Ten minutes later she came out the door, calling
“Ciao”
and
“Buona sera”
over and over. Her face was flushed and her eyes were lit up—my favorite look—and I knew we had a hit on our hands. We went out to dinner at La Trattoria, a Slow-Food restaurant we like a lot
down on the Flaminia, and she debriefed me about her afternoon.

“Oh my God, it was sixteen local housewives . . . and me. And the teacher said she could speak English, but you couldn't prove it today. Not a word. Not one blessed word. But it was great. These women! They never shut up the whole three hours—yakeda, yakeda—I tried just to focus on the drawing, but it wasn't easy.”

“Did you talk to anybody?”

“Oh yeah, on the breaks; I talked to everybody. They were wonderful. I found out who's having a baby, who's going in to have a procedure at the clinic next week, whose husband is putting on weight. Next time I'll drive myself. There's plenty of parking.”