The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (28 page)

‘And you would have me do otherwise? Miranda, do you understand that I hardly know who I am? Who was this Pepucci, this father of mine?
Was he my father?
If so, did he wonder about me? Does he? As I do about him. And she, Magdalena, I never knelt beside her, never said goodbye. What I mean is that
I never saw her dead
. I'm certain of that. No funeral, no people who came to mourn or to comfort. No grave to visit. Why did the aunt tell me this story about my mother having gone to live with the angels? Why did she lie to me or
did
she lie to me? Was it that Magdalena was no longer able to tolerate life without Pepucci and so she ran away to find him? But why didn't she take me with her? And did she find him? If she did, why didn't they send for me? If she didn't find him, why didn't she come back? Because I wasn't his? Sometimes I think I may not even have been
hers
. The truth, what is it?'

‘A shifting thing. A liar. Even truth lies,' Miranda says, her voice hushed.

‘Yes, yes, of course, there is no whole truth and if there was, one would never tell it. Not the all of it. Still …'

Now, close to shouting, Miranda says, ‘You want – no, you demand – precisely what you can never have: a flower-strewn, starlit road to your past. Here's a truth for you, Gilda: your case is hardly a particular one yet the whole of your sympathy you keep for yourself, checking your wounds, poking at them like stigmata, just to be certain they're still there. What do you know about Magdalena's past? Maybe she couldn't leave a path flowered and lit for you because she, herself, never had one. So many of us never have.'

Miranda becomes quiet then, pats her upper lip with the ends of her apron, closes her eyes, presses the apron on her tears. The apron still in her hands, her face contorted, she says, ‘Have you ever thought how you would fare as a mother?'

‘No. Why would I?'

‘Empathy. I suppose that would be a reason …'

‘So I could shift my pity to Magdalena, away from myself?'

‘Something like that.'

‘I'm not so generous.'

‘Not a question of generosity but of fear. You fear you'd fare no less well than any other mother. Mothers do wrong. They must, perforce.'

Gilda rises, goes to Miranda, crouches before her, rests her head sideways on Miranda's knees, still wearing her fedora. Miranda pulls off the hat, covers Gilda's face with it. A stick in the wheels of the discourse. Gilda sits up then, smashes the fedora down low on her brow.

‘And so
what is it that Gilda does
? That's where I came in and you've still to tell me.' She looks to me, then back to Miranda, stands, hands on hips. Softly she says, ‘It's Iacovo. All this is about Iacovo, isn't it? I didn't understand until …'

‘Which Iacovo?
Our Iacovo
?

As though I am sitting in the upper tiers behind Goliath in a top hat trying to follow a Chekov play recited in Portuguese, I'm lost. Neither notice me or the question.

Miranda is saying, ‘He'll be here again this evening, I don't know whether you knew that or not. I mean … Gilda, he's …'

‘Why should it matter if I knew or didn't know that Iacovo would be here … We're a group and all are welcome without official announcements or warnings.'

‘Perhaps he misinterpreted your expressions of affection.'

‘And which misinterpreted expressions were those?'

‘When he brought the wood. The invitation to …'

‘It was raining and cold last Saturday and nearly one when he finished unloading and stacking and so I did the normal thing, inviting him to lunch.

‘You will remember Gilda that he's been grieving for half a decade. Iacovo's social machinery has always been somewhat antiquated, but since Fabiana's death it's been shut down. You're the first person – no, the first woman – who seems to … to
interest
him. You're both still young and …'

‘I see. We're both still young, both without partners and so what else is there to do but to take up with one another? That's the thinking, is it?'

‘You're afraid.'

‘Of?'

‘Being abandoned. Again. You won't risk it.'

‘You insist on that word, Miranda. You insist so fiercely that one might begin to think it's you who aches with it.'

‘Aches with what?'

‘Abandonment.' Gilda's voice is soft, her thrust delicate. Deliberate.

‘Of course, it's my ache, too.
Pacifico
. Fundamental. The undisputed and grand commonality of which I was trying to convince you a few moments ago. Otherwise known as broken trust. You know my story well enough … Better, I think sometimes, than I know yours.'

Gilda rises, busies herself with the table settings, moving things this way and that a centimetre or two and then back to where they were. She begins to say something but Miranda speaks over her.

‘I am loathe to think of you alone in that burrow you call a house …'

The two are back on safe ground, the parrying strong and equal again.

‘And would you name this place a palazzo?'

‘This is my play house.'

‘You're making me out to be pitiful and …'

‘Not pitiful. Not that. Niggardly, I'd call it. Concocting supper from roots and berries and wandering among the oaks like some druid. When was the last time you dined in a restaurant, bought a new hat, went to the cinema? Put gasoline in your car? I know why you left your quaking old thing at Ninuccia's this evening. Empty, its tank dry. Your
gauge
acting up again. And while I've got your attention, what's happened to your will to work?'

‘I've worked all my life.'

‘You worked until you were fifty, which is not
all your life.
'

‘And what do you call those four or five hours a day I spend at Bernandino's?'

‘You should be doing other than scrubbing that gargoyle's noble bathrooms.'

‘Miranda, that's unfair. You know very well that I work in the gardens and sometimes help with the housekeeping. I bake for them. I do what there is to be done, it's …'

‘I can't abide the sight of him roaming the markets in his red velvet slippers and that tweed coat draped about his shoulders, deigning to sniff at a farmer's tomatoes but not to wish him good day. I know he canes his dog and most likely that addled wife of his. How can you, Gilda, when …'

Miranda stops herself, looks at me, says, ‘Gilda cooked in the
scuola materna
in Orvieto for years, one of her many incarnations.'

‘Eighteen years. It was the incarnation I loved best.'

‘Gilda and … How many others?'

‘Three.'

‘She and three other women, they cooked divinely for those children. A hundred or so of them …'

‘Eighty, sometimes a few less. Never more than eighty.'

‘Giorgia and I would go to help once or twice a week …'

‘Not in the kitchen. They would help serve and wash up.'

‘No, we were never
permitted
in the kitchen but we sat with the children, ate with them. Some of the best meals of my life were in that cold, awful basement room of the elementary school. Like no other school lunch I'd ever known, they served handmade pasta and cakes and pastries.
Lumachelle
with pecorino and prosciutto, tiny ones to fit in their little hands; how they loved those.'

‘The soft anise cookies were their favourites. I'd go from table to table, helping the children cut their food, spooning it up to the few reluctant ones, cajoling, applauding clean plates, measuring muscles. I sang Puccini to them,' Gilda says. ‘When State funds were diminished and we could no longer shop locally for the kitchen, we were sent boxes of frozen chicken and fish, already fried, powdered eggs and milk, even our bread was frozen, baked who knows when in some commissary kitchen and trucked down the peninsula. Animal feed. I left, took to the woods.'

‘Which brings us back to the present, to …' Miranda says, but Gilda is heading backwards.

‘Do you really think that my life is, what did you call it,
niggardly
? No, don't answer that. Try this: do you really think that the
consequence
of a life – it's significance – can be measured by what I wear or how I eat? If I had a new hat and went to dinner, would my life take on more greatness? Would I need a vintage Bentley? Would that do it for you? Or a man? Ah, have I got to the crux, have I …'

Miranda steps in. ‘Iacovo is bright and kind and when he swings his axe to the wood, he could be Ares himself. Wraparound eyes, long as a Greek's. A man less likely to break a trust I've yet to meet. And if he did betray you, well … there'd be another layer of memories to fill up your tin.'

‘Ares, himself.' Clucking her tongue at Miranda as though to shame her, Gilda aims her gaze at the window pane again, this time prowling after some canker on the scrupulous man with the wraparound eyes. Her fingers tremble as she picks at the knots on the laces of her shoes. She unties the laces, re-ties them with a vengeance. She presses a middle finger to the bridge of her nose. Then, her voice feeble with defeat, she ventures, ‘Iacovo doesn't even bathe.'

‘Would you truly set up honest sweat as an impediment to getting to know a good man? Draw him a bath some evening, Gilda. Pour him a glass of wine and leave it on the rim of the tub with a slice of soap and one of your clove-smelling candles, why don't you?'

Miranda's mordant solution to Iacovo's presumed antipathy to soap and water causes Gilda to flush from her décolleté to her downcast eyes. To hide the now greater trembling of her fingers she reaches up to push a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hand lights on the old fedora she is still wearing and she removes it, hangs it on the back of her chair, makes an elaborate business of smoothing her hair, a device that enrages her already hot red cheeks. Still not looking at Miranda, Gilda says, ‘He's younger than I am.'

Miranda throws up her arms, rises clumsily from her chair, adjusts her balance and heads toward the kitchen. She turns back, says, ‘You're hopeless, Gilda, perverse as a cow who will kick over a full pail of her milk because the milker is wearing mismatched socks. You're, you're …'

‘Miranda, wait. What you refuse to understand is that, for me, there's a … I don't really know how to explain it … For me there's a kind of
thrill
in being alone. In loneliness. Why would you have me risk that? For what, for whom?'

‘I would have you risk it for your own sake, Gilda. I would have you interrupt the daily ravaging of your wounds. But if you truly find loneliness thrilling, then slam shut the door and draw that tawdry old hank of stuff you call a curtain and take to your bed. I'll be long gone when you're finally moved to answer an urgent banging on that door to see that Accident, Destiny and Chance have come to set up in your garden, that they've come to taunt and whisper,
You're almost out of time, Gilda
… What will you do then?'

‘
Sei cattiva
,' she says. ‘You're evil, Miranda. Why can't you just let me be?'

Miranda moves to stand very close to where Gilda sits, bends to run her hands down the length of the heavy lanks of her hair, pulls at it and smiles. She bends to kiss a lank of Gilda's hair. She tells her, ‘It's that ineffable habit I spoke of a while ago. That I have long loved you as my own.'

Wandering into the kitchen, Miranda pulls the bedsheet curtain across the rod, a sign that she will stay apart for a while. Neither speaking nor looking at one another, Gilda and I stay where we sit. We hear Miranda setting about her evening's ablutions out in the garden behind the kitchen door where Filiberto has constructed a primitive shower of bits and pieces, loot from his habitual moonlit pillages of reconstruction sites along the deserted private roads. Thick oak planks form its walls, these faced on the inside with marble – black, white and grey. A square of prestigious Verona green marble is the base and a plate-sized showerhead, attached to a rather grand gold-coloured hose, sends down a drenching and never more than lukewarm rain upon the lavish form of the goddess of Buonrespiro. Filiberto has planted blue hollyhocks around the bathing place and painted the same on the outside walls. A brass Moor's-head knocker, meant for the door of some Englishman's villa, he's driven into the stone wall of the rustico to hold her towel. We hear Miranda priming the pump, muttering just loud enough so that her oaths against the lunacy of ‘youth' reach us. When the water stops, Gilda shouts to Miranda, ‘What did he say that causes you to think he has
interest
?'

‘What did who say?' Miranda asks in sing-song.

‘Tell me.'

‘No, I won't.'

‘Tell me, Miranda. Please. What did he say?'

Out of the shower now we hear her moving about in the kitchen.

‘Please, Miranda, I …'

Flinging back the bedsheet curtain in a move so brusque it falls half off its hooks, an impudent Victory wrapped in the curtain's companion sheet stands before us, dripping lavender water onto the stones of the kitchen floor. Plaits loosed, the white skin of her shoulders gleaming from olive oil soap, the blue-black eyes gloating, Miranda says, ‘
I want her to have the most beautiful peaches
. If you must know, that's what Iacovo said.'

‘What?
Peaches?
And for that you think he is …'

‘Think about it, Gilda,' Miranda says, heaving the wounded curtain back across its rod.

Gilda laughs, calls Miranda daft. She stands up, scrunches the brim of the fedora with both hands, pulls a face. She goes silent then, rips off the hat, letting it fall where it may. She's flushed again, this time a deeper shade of red.

‘
Jesumaria
. He was twelve. I was fifteen.