The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (14 page)

‘How many of you wear or carry the little horn?' Paolina asks, pulling a chain out from under her black T-shirt as she speaks. A tiny gold horn hangs from it. Amulets in the shape of a horn are believed to stave off the evil eye.

Pierangelo takes a five centimetre-long red ceramic horn from his pocket and lays it on the table. Reaching under her sweater into the space between her breasts, Ninuccia pulls out her own red horn and holds it in her open palm. Miranda works her hand to the same place on her own body and holds up a tiny golden ring encircled with six horns. One by one, everyone owns up. Only Fernando and I are wandering through life without protection from the evil eye.

Everyone laughs at Paolina's cunning, some saying that carrying the horn is tradition more than belief, others likening it to wearing a crucifix or a blessed medal. The horn
and
a crucifix together, a double buttress. Paolina insists that some seminary students she once knew carried horns in the pockets of their soutanes. Filiberto says that old Don Piervito still does. Even those insisting that the evil eye does not exist say, ‘Why take a chance?'

‘Miranda, have you been the object of
malocchio
?' Once again, this is Paolina.

‘My darling girl, I don't think I really know. I carry the horns because my mother did and, I suppose, everyone I've ever known did, does. I have never felt menaced by a person or an event. Certainly not by something that felt like
stregoneria
, witchcraft. Destiny has had her way with me but that's another thing. Or is it?'

‘I think there is
only
destiny.' I say this more to myself than to the others.

‘Witchcraft is primordial. Witches who harm, witches who heal,' says Pierangelo, son of the south, son of Cosima.

‘Very little call for witches these days, white or black, at least as far as I know,' Miranda tells him.

‘The call is still very much present. Secrecy, covertness more finely honed. How
appalled
you would be, Miranda …' Pierangelo goes quiet, picks up his amulet, holds it in his hand for a moment, returns it to his pocket.

‘Are we talking about the devil?' This is the first time that Fernando speaks.

‘Does such a force exist?' Miranda asks, looking up and around the table.

‘I don't think we've established that, but …' Filiberto says before Paolina speaks over him.

‘Are we all part devil? I mean, isn't there some impulse to vendetta lurking in each of us? Even the most innocent sort? If there is an innocent sort …'

‘I think we've shifted now from vendetta to pure fiendishness. The evil eye and the devil are not related,' says Fernando.

‘So you are all in accord:
il diavolo
exists,' Miranda says, the barest hint of question in the last three words.

‘Miranda, not even of you could I believe such ingenuousness? Think back to the gods and their various authorities, savage and benign …' Pierangelo is prepared to proceed but an imperious Miranda flutters the back of her hand in dismissal.

‘Mythology.'

‘Yes, myth … myth drawn from reality. From the forces of nature but also from human actions witnessed, lived …' Pierangelo tries again. ‘Maybe those who have more lately practised depravity will someday be relegated to myth. A god called Hitler in league with the one called Lucifer …' Filiberto is bent on taking us back to less incendiary ground. The others mutter, feud sotto voce until there is quiet again.

Without deciding I will, I say aloud what I'm thinking. ‘Destiny. Rife with charm and cruelty, if in unequal portions, there is only destiny. It's another word for God, for fate. Maybe it's another word for devil. The stones are thrown before we hit the light and what we do with the choices we're allowed, now and then, might cause destiny to rethrow a stone or two. Apart from that …'

‘Chou,
sei noiosa stasera
, you are annoying this evening,' Miranda tells me in the tone of a weary mother. ‘Why do you insist on piling every human mystery into destiny's arms? Try this one. Was Jesus God, incarnate?'

Sotto voce murmurings begin again.

‘I don't know. I know He existed, that He wandered the earth, spoke of sublime ethics, which must have been the last thoughts on the minds of the Romans and even the Jews, ethics that most of us have yet to pursue. Was he the son of God? I don't know. How could I know that when I don't know who is God? Jesus is a figure I can
conceive
. God is … less
substantial
in my mind.'

‘Less
substantial
, yes, of course, so why not just add Him to Destiny's already heavy load?' Miranda shakes me between her teeth and I lose my way. I look at her but she doesn't look at me. The wind harp whines.

‘Nor do I know who Jesus was,' she says, the despot in her spent. ‘Maybe he was the son of the Hebrew God who created the universe, the God who has always been and will always be, whether or not He be
substantial
in our minds. Maybe Jesus was just a lovely Jewish boy, born of a mother prone to visions. Maybe the Nazarene carpenter – humble, submissive – absolved the beautiful Maria of her annunciation story and married her anyway. Loved her baby boy as his own.' As she says this, she turns to me, gently sets me down, almost unharmed.

‘A universal God, his son, the prophets, the teachers, the miracle workers, witches, the devil, all of them newcomers if one thinks to the legions of dieties who managed us in antiquity. A god for every need. A goddess. Far fewer unanswerable questions back then. We knew what was what, who was who, where to go and what to do, what would happen should we stray,' Paolina says.

‘Back to mythology, is it? I thought you'd lived long enough among the Jesuits to …' Miranda girds for one more round but Paolina is faster.

‘Miranda, everything we think we know may well be
myth
.'

‘
Già
. Indeed.' Miranda consents.

‘
I Moirai
, the Fates, they were at work even before the gods,' Ninuccia says and she – along with Paolina – begins to tell the story, the two spelling one another, line after line.

‘Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos.'

‘To gods and mortals, they give each one a portion of good and evil.'

‘Clotho spins the thread of life.'

‘Lachesis decides the length of the thread.'

‘It's Atropos who cuts the thread.'

I love this myth and want a part in its telling but gather the sense to stay silent. Conjuring them as grisly ancients, hearing the story of the goddesses frightened me more than any gory fairytale when I was six or maybe seven; Clotho bending over her wheel spinning life-threads, Lachesis scrutinising a just-birthed baby, awarding it the length of it's life-thread, and the dread Atropos brandishing scissors like a battle axe. Herself a grisly ancient, it was a Sister called Odile who instructed us in Mythology and it was only
after
she'd read to us of the goddesses that she passed about a print of three diaphanously-upholstered seraphs, explaining that mythology was story-telling rather than truth, that we need only be good girls, good little convent girls.

‘You use the present tense,' Miranda notes, her gaze shifting from Ninuccia to Paolina. ‘Who's to say they're not still at their jobs?' I ask her.

‘Which brings us neatly back to destiny,' she says, smiling and saying
l'Americana
just above a whisper. ‘I'm not sure if it's the smoking torches or the beauty of all this, the goodness of our sitting up here under the stars and beside our pretty beans winding up those stakes. No, I'm not sure if it's smoke or beauty that's stinging my eyes, causing me to weep a little and my heart to break. I'd like to think that if Jesus happened upon us just now, we'd make room for him at the table. He'd rest a while with us, I suspect, he still loving bread and wine as he once did. In any case, shall we drink to the dullness of Atropos's scissors?'

•

It is the last Thursday in this October. Fernando has left me here at the rustico while he heads to San Casciano to hunt
galletti
, wild mushrooms, with old friends from our life there, Stefania and Marco. It was Stefania who telephoned last evening, predicting a night of soft rain and saying, ‘Let's hunt wild mushrooms tomorrow morning.'

Some seasons rare others profuse,
i galletti
– little hens – are
chanterelle
in France. I tell Stefania that I won't be able to come but Fernando promises to be there by seven.

‘It will be too late. Come to sleep here and we can begin at sunrise,' she cajoles, reminds me it's been weeks since we've visited, promises Marco's luscious
galetti
sauce for the
pici
, thick ropes of pasta that he and Grazia, one of their cooks, will roll one by one. I love my friends, I love
galetti
, I love Marco's cooking but nothing, no one, seduces me from Thursday Nights.

Since we have only one auto, Fernando will leave me at the rustico on his way to San Casciano, hours in advance of my usual time to begin cooking.

‘They'll have been in the woods for hours by the time you arrive,' I tell Fernando as we drive up to the rustico. He'd asked Stefania to wake us at five and, though she did, we chose to stay longer in bed.

‘I know where to find them,' he tells me.

‘I know, too. In the bar, sipping grappa and telling
galetti
stories.'

‘More likely they'll have taken a flask with them. I'll stay for lunch but I'll be back here long before supper. With two kilos of
galetti
for the tribe.'

‘Such a greedy forager. Half a kilo would do.'

I watch him manoeuvre the old BMW back onto the Montefiescone road and almost begin to wave him back. I've never been alone in the rustico for more than an hour or so but this morning the tiny woodsmoked refuge is all mine. I open the never-locked door, touch things here and there as I walk through, crouch to shovel ashes from the hearth, push aside the bedsheet curtain, carry the full pail out to the ash barrel behind the rustico. On the work table Miranda has made a still-life of the elements of supper: masses of gnarled rosemary branches; long, leafy arms of wine grapes freshly cut from the vines; a great pyramid of green and black figs layered with their leaves; a sack of red and brown-skinned pears; and paper packets and tiny cloth bags of spices. A haunch of her home-cured prosciutto hangs above the table and a demijohn of new wine sits by the door.

Only Paolina and I will be cooking for tonight, others still involved in some stage of the
vendemmia
, the harvesting of the grapes. Fernando and I have been cutting grapes these last six mornings with Ninuccia and Pierangelo and their small army of workers, while Miranda and neighbouring farm wives went about the task of feeding all of us. Miranda will be there with them again today. Perhaps Gilda will decide to join Paolina and I. One never knows about Gilda.

I don't expect Paolina until eleven or so. I look about for something to do, take up cloths and set about cleaning the already clean tables and benches and chairs. A futile task, I sweep the floor, still a mosaic of broken, half-sunken terracotta tiles, scraps of linoleum, lengths of wood fitted in here and there like puzzle pieces. That famous truckload of antique tiles with which Miranda's nephews were, two years ago, to have laid a new floor in the rustico, they sold at a grandiose price to an outlander whose villa they were restructuring. Thanks to the nephews, though, the beams slouch less and in places where the stones of the walls had shifted, they've stuccoed, and washed the patches with a sponge in a tint more rose than apricot.

Miranda conceded to a length of ruined water-green brocade, which Paolina, Gilda and I found on the Neopolitan's used-clothing table in the market one Saturday. Gilda clutched the stuff, burnt to crumbling rags along its hem, against her chest: ‘An enraged man must have heaved a lit candelabra across the room, smashing the window, setting afire the curtains while a woman screamed and wept. We have to have this.'

When Paolina asked its price, the Neopolitan gently took it from Gilda, folded it carefully as he would the shroud of Turin. ‘I think you must be right. About the man and the candelabra and the woman. I'm sure of it,' he told her, handing it to her with his compliments.

An Umbrian merchant would never have fallen so utterly for Gilda's figment. Neopolitans, as intrinsically susceptible to romance as they are to villainy, might well have lifted her purse with one hand while offering the brocade with the other. The piece falls now from the iron hook where we once hung herbs to dry, and is draped over the top and down one side of the single window, as though it's always been there.

I feel at odds with this uncommon, undesigned time. I walk about, look again at the work table, adjust things that don't need adjusting. I go outside, open the bread oven, give it a good sweeping, take logs from Iacovo's wood pile, place them in a square, add kindling on top, another layer of wood, more kindling, a third layer of wood, more kindling in the centre. I light a faggot of twigs and throw them, flaming, into the centre of the square. A single match does it. No bellows, no fanning. I pull the iron door almost closed, and go back inside to get the woodstove started. A surprise for Paolina, I will make a small batch of
tortucce
for our lunch. No room on the work table, I take up the oilcloth on the supper table, scoop out flour straight onto the scrubbed wood, build up the sides to make a well, pour in yeast softened in warmed white wine, sea salt, a piece of butter from my private stash in the cheese hut, a few drops of oil, crushed fennel seeds. The mass feels good under my hands and I knead it with a rhythmic thud. Waves slapping on sand. Miranda says kneading bread is like a Gregorian chant, both taking on the cadence of the kneader's or chanter's heartbeat. I desire to believe this, so I do. Into a bowl, covered with a kitchen towel, I set the dough on a chair pulled close to the warming stove. I pour oil into a pot but won't begin to warm it until Paolina is here.