The Food of Love (25 page)

crashes open. ‘Due cappuccini’ Tommaso’s voice calls triumphantly.

‘Heidi, I even persuaded the crazy old barman to

serve us cappuccino in the afternoon!’

The shower is turned off. The only noise now is the whirring of

the printer and the pounding in Laura’s own head. Tommaso

comes into the bedroom and sees her there, and for a moment

everything is suspended in time, like a film that has been frozen—

And then she pushes past him, desperate to get out of there

before the bathroom door opens, before the other girl comes out.

She spills the coffees and does not stop; runs down the stairs, out into the street, with Tommaso calling her name somewhere

behind her.

He catches her up but she won’t listen. He tries to talk to her as he walks alongside her, dodging cars and pedestrians while she

pushes forward, refusing to give way for anyone or anything.

‘Laura, listen, I didn’t mean for it to be like this, I wanted to break it to you gently—’

‘Get away from me,’ she hisses. ‘Leave me alone. Go back to

your cappuccino-drinking Heidi.’

‘It’s been fantastic, I’ll never forget you—’

She snorts. ‘That’s funny. Because I’m unlikely to forget this

either, Tommaso. Strangely enough, this is something that is

unlikely to slip my mind for a very long time.’

‘I tried to tell you I was fed up,’ he cries.

She searches for the most hurtful thing, the very worst thing

she can say to him, and she finds it. ‘You’re as bad as Bruno, you know that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your friend Bruno. Kissing me. Making me promise not to tell

you. Staring at me all the time. Making my skin crawl. You’re a

pair of perverts, both of you.’

She breaks into a run again, and this time he doesn’t try to

follow her.

When Bruno got back from II Cuoco it was after midnight.

Tommaso was waiting in the apartment, his face dark.

‘How’d it go?’ Bruno said gently.

Tommaso shrugged.

‘You seem pretty upset.’

‘Yes.’

“I hadn’t realised it was going to be so hard for you.’

‘It wasn’t.’ Tommaso said curtly. ‘Not that part, at any rate.’

Bruno realised that something was very wrong. ‘Tommaso,

what’s up?’

‘Laura told me you kissed her.’

Bruno froze. ‘Ah.’

Tommaso got to his feet. ‘How many times?’ he said threateningly.

‘Once,’

Bruno said. ‘Maybe twice. Three times. Tommaso, I’m

sorry. I told you how I felt about her—’

‘You said you’d done nothing wrong.’

‘Well, no, actually. You said that.’

‘You tried to steal her,’ Tommaso snarled. ‘You’re my friend supposed to be my friend - and you made a pass at my girl.’

‘It was just a kiss.’

‘Only because that’s all she’d let you do. If she’d been willing, would you have stopped there?’

Bruno couldn’t answer that.

‘If it was anyone else, I’d beat you to a pulp,’ Tommaso said.

‘As it is …’ He slammed his fist into his palm. ‘We’re not friends any more, Bruno.’

‘What about the restaurant?’ Bruno heard himself say.

‘Oh yes. The restaurant. Another great way to make a fool of

me. Well, I don’t give a shit about the restaurant. It was a stupid idea in the first place.’ He pointed to the door. ‘Now get out of here.’

Bruno stumbled out of the apartment, followed by Tommaso’s

shouts. A final ‘Vaffanculo\ accompanied by the ritual gesture of a clenched right fist, with the left hand simultaneously clapped to the right bicep, issued from the window above his head as he

staggered blindly down the little street.

He wasn’t surprised that Tommaso was angry. The knowledge

that another man has made a pass at your girlfriend would still, in some parts of Italy, be considered grounds for pulling a knife.

The fact that he had been on the verge of finishing with her was no excuse: if anything, it made it worse, since it could be construed as trying to take advantage of a vulnerable situation.

Bruno started running. He had to find Laura. Perhaps if he

could just explain how it had happened, how he had only gone

along with Tommaso’s crazy scheme as a favour to his friend …

At last he reached the Residencia Magdalena. There was an

entryphone, and he buzzed the bell marked Patterson until a voice answered.

‘ludith?’ he panted. “I need to speak to Laura.’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Bruno.’

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you. She won’t talk to either of

you. Just go away.’

‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Just get her to come to the intercom.’

‘She doesn’t—’

Then Laura’s voice, brittle and hoarse, interrupted her. ‘What

do you want, Bruno?’

“I can’t let you walk out of my life without telling you how I

feel about you,’ he said.

‘Oh, sure. You and Tommaso both. Why don’t you—’ Bruno

had to stand back to let a group of people into the building, and by the time he got back to the speaker she was just finishing, ‘—thought you were my friends. I actually liked hanging out with you both. What an idiot you must have thought I was. When I

was just another tourist to warm up your beds.’

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘Laura, listen to me. I love you. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone.’

There was a moment’s silence from the entryphone, and just

for a second he thought he might have got through to her, but

her voice, when she answered, was thick with tears and disgust.

‘Just get away from me, you creep. Don’t you know how repulsive

that is? Go away and leave me alone.’

When Gennaro came to open up the coffee bar the next morning,

he found Bruno slumped in the doorway.

“I need a favour,’ the young man said as he hauled himself to

his feet.

‘By the look of you, you need a coffee.’

‘That too. Look, Gennaro, you know that van of yours?’

‘You want to borrow that old rust bucket again? It’s in pretty

bad shape at the moment. I’m not sure how far you’ll get in it.’

“I was wondering if you’d sell it to me.’

‘Oh.’ Gennaro thought for a moment. ‘It’s a fine vehicle, structurally.

I mean, when I call it a rust bucket, that’s just my

affectionate name for it - for her. Cosmetically she may not be

much to look at, but her engine’s as sound as. a bell.’

‘I don’t have time for this,’ Bruno said wearily. ‘How much do

you want for it?’

Gennaro gave it some more thought. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘the

truth is that she may need a few minor mechanical upgrades. I’ve been cannibalising her, you see, for the coffee pump.’ He pointed proudly to where his Gaggia stood, now almost invisible inside an elaborate cage of auxiliary pipes, stopcocks, valves, conduits and fans. ‘So I’ll accept five hundred.’

“I have two hundred. But I’ll throw in these.’ Bruno pulled

something out of his jacket, a rolled-up bundle of cloth that he proceeded to open on the table.

‘ UanemaP Gennaro breathed. ‘These are your cooking knives,

aren’t they?’

‘They were. I don’t need them any more. What do you say?’

‘It’s a deal,’ Gennaro said, picking up one of the knives.

‘Can I have the keys then?’

‘No point,’ Gennaro said cheerfully. He pointed to where the

ignition lock of a Fiat van was now built into his Gaggia.

‘So how do I start it?’

‘Here.’ Gennaro handed him a spoon. ‘This should do it.’

‘Great.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the cafe owner said confidently. ‘No one will

steal that van. Not unless they’re completely off their heads.’

‘L’insalata is served invariably after the second course to signal the approaching end of the meal. It releases the palate from the grip of the cook’s fabrications, leading it to cool, fresh sensations …’

MARCKLi.A Hazan, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

The young woman seated across the room at table twelve is familiar to us. As the crowd of attentive waiters finally steps back,

leaving the couple to enjoy their persillades of wreck-caught

salmon, celcriac puree, jasmine sauce and roasted fennel, not to mention their glasses of chilled Puligny-Montraehet, we can see

that she is indeed Laura, though a rather different Laura from the one we left three months ago in Trastevere. For one thing, she

looks fantastic. Gone are the extra pounds she put on when

she was gorging herself on Bruno’s extravagant pasta and rich

desserts. Her newly sleek and almost muscular torso is a testament to the many hours she has put in at the gym, as well as the four kilometres she has been running every day. Her hair is different, too: shorter and tied back in a fetching little ponytail. We cannot see her eyes, because they are hidden behind a pair of elegant

dark glasses which reflect the image of her companion, who is

equally smartly dressed; for this is a special occasion.

‘Potatoes, madam?” the waiter enquires, his spoon hovering over the silver dish of vegetables.

‘Not for me.’

‘Sir?’

‘Just one, please.’ Kim Fellowes adds to Laura, as an aside:

‘The great thing about this kind of food is that the portions aren’t too big. I still have twenty grams of carbohydrate left.’

‘You’re going to stick to the diet today?’

‘Of course. Especially today. It isn’t a diet if you throw it out of the window every time you walk into a good restaurant. It’s places like this that separate those with self-control from the rest.’ He reaches for the wine, nestling in its silver cooler, and a waiter’s hand immediately completes the action for him, filling their glasses to the exact halfway mark. ‘A toast,’ Kim says, raising his own glass to his lips. ‘To us.’

Laura drinks. ‘To us.’ Dabbing her lips with a crisp white

napkin, she adds, ‘You know, I thought this place was going to be different.’

‘Why so?’

‘That guy I—’ She pauses, as if there is something in her throat, then continues: ‘That guy I went out with for a while worked

here. I thought it would be - well, more like the stuff he cooked.

You know, Italian food.’

‘Aren’t you glad it isn’t?’ He tastes his wreck-caught salmon,

one of Templi’s specialities. ‘One gets a bit fed up with pasta, to tell the truth. How’s your essay coming on?’

He is changing the subject, she notices; something he often

does when she tries to talk about Tommaso. It is almost as if her time with him was in Kim’s eyes a brief period of madness; a sort of going native, best now forgotten.

“Quite well, I think,’ she says dutifully. ‘I’m up to the Baroque.’

‘Then you’ve started on Titian? That’s good. He’s one of the

few real masters of colour, don’t you think?’

In another restaurant, just a few miles down the road, Tommaso

is cooking. The dish is a simple one but the presence of several cookery books, their pages liberally encrusted with scabs of dried meat-juice and calcified egg yolk, would suggest that he is having trouble. As he refers to his books one more time, a pan catches fire on the burner behind him and he spins round with a curse to deal with it.

‘Two saltimbocche, one tagliatelle, one insalataj Marie says,

coming into the kitchen with an order on her notepad.

Tommaso doesn’t reply.

‘Did you hear me? I said—’

The ne sbatto il cazzoj Tommaso fumes. ‘Can’t you see I’m

busy fucking up the orders I already have? Just leave it on the side, I’ll fuck that one up in a minute. Dio caneV He has pulled the

burning pan off the stove as he speaks and in the process slops

black oil all over the orders. ‘Now see what you’ve done.’

Marie knows when to retreat. She goes back into the dining

room, where only three tables are occupied. News of II Cuoco’s

rapid departure from its previous form has spread quickly.

Bruno, meanwhile, is standing by the side of an empty road in Le Marche, coaxing the engine of his old van back to life. His face wears an expression of rapt concentration, not dissimilar to the one he once wore when he cooked. Although his hands are black

with grease, rather than white with flour or slippery with raw egg, the process by which he intuits through his fingers what new

malady ails the ancient, half-cannibalised engine is not so very different from the methods he once used to conjure new depths of flavour from his recipes, though not nearly so successful.

When he left Rome he simply drove north. Quickly growing

tired of the autostrada, and unable in any case to tease more than sixty or seventy kilometres an hour out of the rickety vehicle, he had turned on to the smaller roads. Near Florence he camped for

the night in a tiny olive grove, next to a five-hundred-year-old tree as fat and short as a Tuscan grandmother. The next morning he

found a tiny stream, where he caught a small trout which he

cooked over a fire of fragrant olive wood. The trout would have

been delicious, he knew, but on this occasion it might as well

have been made of cardboard. He had completely lost his sense of taste.

The next evening he pulled in beside a roadside stall where

T-bone steaks were being cooked alia brace, over hot wood

charcoal. Again, he could taste nothing. Even when the owner

proudly anointed the steaks with a dribble of his own olive oil, so young and fresh it was still a vibrant green colour, Bruno could barely register it. He slathered his steak in salt, ate it quickly and got back in the van, mumbling his thanks to the affronted stallholder.

More

than once the van stopped, apparently exhausted by the

endless succession of hills and valleys, and had to be patched and cajoled with spare parts from roadside garages. One such garage