The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (31 page)

‘“Call the girl down here. Best she sees this.” It was the midwife's voice. “Gilda!
Subito
. Quickly.”

‘The neighbour woman pushed me to stand next to the midwife, centimetres from Isolda, a woman like Isolda but this one made of wax, yellow, melting, eyes empty holes. The only light was a candle. “Bend down. When I tell you, hold out your hands. I'll help you, I'll help you.”

‘Claudio was born into my arms. I remember only that I held him tight against me, struggled to keep him there as the midwife, laughing, pried him away, tied the umbilicus in two places, swiped a pocket knife through the candle flame, handed it to me, held the cord taut. “Cut it. Go ahead, cut it between the knots. Now.”

‘Livia and Dafne, hearing the different sounds, came scrambling down the stairs, went to stand by the kitchen table where, having lain him there, the midwife was washing a wailing Claudio. Taking off her gloves, Dafne then set to the work of gently fitting them to her brother's hands. “Don't cry, baby. I'm here. Shhhh.”

‘More wet nurse than mother, Isolda fed her son, offering him one breast then the other, she smoking through the ordeal then handing him back to me. As were her daughters, her son was more mine than hers. When he cried in the night I would carry Claudio down to Isolda, lay him on her breast, take him away when he was sated. Never having fully awakened, Isolda would curl back into the embrace of her husband. Though I tried to hate her, all the sentiment I could muster for Isolda was pity. For her torpor, her always being
elsewhere
. As I cared for the baby, especially him, I would think almost constantly of Magdalena, imagine her with my newborn self with myself at Dafne's age, at Livia's. Magdalena, also, had been not so much present as she was
elsewhere
.'

•

With only brief respites back to the present, Gilda has been telling her story through the first and second forty-minute interval between wine dosings, during which time we've variously sat by the fire, stood in the kitchen, stepped outside to feed the chickens, brought in from the garden three pumpkins, which we've peeled and cut into chunks, set to boil on top of the Aga, she intending to caramelise them to fill cornmeal-crusted tarts for the next Thursday. Gilda performs the last dosing and turning of the breasts, heaves the casserole back into the oven, heading directly to the nest of pillows against the head of her bed. She's already back into her narration when I stop her, ask for a piece of paper, a pen.

‘Business first. You're on your own from here so I'll write out what's next.'

‘Next? Next I take the braised duck out of the oven, let it cool, cover it and let it rest for a day. Then I can finally eat the damned …'

‘No, you can't. After a day's rest, take the casserole in from the shed and scrape away all the fine yellow fat that has risen to the top, reserve the fat, transfer the breasts to a bowl and set them aside while you finish the sauce.'

‘But the sauce is already there, three doses of cat pee and all.'

‘That's only the sauce base. A piece of paper, please a …'

‘You say it, I'll write it.'

So I dictate: ‘The better part of a bottle of good red wine, one and a half tablespoons of butter, two teaspoons all-purpose flour, a tablespoon dark brown sugar, a quarter cup red currant jelly (better, red currant preserves), four whole cloves crushed to a paste, two teaspoons genuine
aceto balsamico di Spilamberto
. Place the casserole over a low flame to warm the braising juices. With a slotted spoon, take out the bits of pancetta and shallot that have not already melted during the braise;
do not discard these bits
.'

‘I discard nothing, least of all bits of pancetta and shallot.'

‘If there is any remaining white wine used in the braising, add it to the casserole. Add two cups of red. Keep about a half cup for the final sauce refreshment just before the dish is served, and reduce the sauce by one-third. While the sauce is reducing, work the flour into the softened butter until the two are well amalgamated into a smooth paste. Set the
beurre manie
aside. Add another cup or so of the red and reduce again, this time by one-fourth. Add the dark brown sugar, the red currant jelly and the cloves, stirring well. Taste and correct for salt. With the sauce still at a simmer, begin adding bits of the butter-flour paste, stirring constantly until the paste melts; continue adding the paste, bit by bit, until you've used it all. You will find that the sauce is nicely reduced, slightly thickened and glossed. Off the flame, add the balsamico and stir. Reacquaint the magret with its sauce, then allow the mass to cool, and cover and refrigerate as usual. Have you got all that? Read it back to me.'

‘Here's my synopsis: I take out the now properly rested duck, skim its fat, save it. To the casserole, I add red wine, a little black sugar, a few more cloves, boil it down, meanwhile manipulating some butter with some flour then adding that to the pot. When the sauce is thick and shiny, I turn off the heat, add some balsamic vinegar which I don't have and won't buy. Ditto for red currant jelly, whatever the hell that is. Reduce, amalgamate, manipulate, reacquaint, refresh, gloss, correct – I'm truly desperate to be finished with this wretched duck.'

•

‘Through the winter Isolda and Giulio worked in the landowners' villas or in the barns repairing tools or shoring up the outbuildings and I would bring Claudio to wherever Isolda might be, sometimes kilometres distant from the farmhouse, the girls trailing along, chattering with the hope that their mother would be scrubbing in someone's kitchen that day where the cook would invite them to sit by the fire. “There you go. Such big girls you're getting to be. A bowl of broth? A slice of cake smeared with jam?” Into the pockets of my sweater and my skirt, a half kilo of polenta, a few potatoes, figs dried and threaded on a string. Back then people who cooked in other people's kitchens often did so because they were hungry. They knew what it felt like, that corroding grief, not of having nothing but of never having enough.

‘I learned to wring the necks of Sunday chickens and to milk the goats, though it was Isolda who would go out to the shed twice a week or sometimes three, cook the goats' milk, pour it into small baskets woven from grapevine and lined with wild grasses, set the molds to drip in a chest with wire-mesh shelves and doors. Isolda never took her cheeses to market but brought them with her in the mornings, sold or traded them to the other workers, to the villa housekeepers. I don't know what she did with her earnings save that they never showed up on the table. By January Isolda was again with child. And by March, I'd secured myself a job.

‘Mornings I'd tramp into the village with the children and, depending on what funds Giulio had left for me, I'd shop for the day, often having lira enough only for bread. Tullia was always at the head of the line at the
alimentari
even before the truck arrived from the
forno
in Genzano, the bread still warm. “Two
pagnotte di mezzo kilo
,” she'd call out, her voice too loud for a noble though she looked like one. The daughter of sharecroppers,
una lavandaia ambulante
, a travelling washerwoman, Tullia was seventeen, long-limbed, pale, blonde.

‘One morning, as she turned to leave with her bread, she stopped where I was waiting in line with the children. “Come to work with me, Gilda,” was the gist of what she said.

‘Having weaned Claudio from Isolda's to the goats' milk, I'd get us all packed up and ready by seven and we'd strike out to meet Tullia the washerwoman as though heading for a day at the fair.

‘A copper tub set on an iron grid attached to a tricycle of sorts, Tullia rode the contraption along the yellow dust roads to the farmhouses where she'd been hired. Fetching water from a well or a pump, lighting a fire under the tub, heating the water, adding wood ash, we'd boil every shred of cloth the family owned, pull it through the wringers attached to the tub, spread it over rosemary bushes or festoon it on the lower branches of the olives. While we waited for the wash water to heat or the clothes to soak, I'd feed Claudio, set the girls to some task, bask in being away from the droning purgatory of the farmhouse.

‘Sooner or later, Tullia would run off. “I'm going to forage,” she'd say, though I knew it was on some barn or fallow field she was bent rather than the meadows. Boys, often a man, they were what Tullia was off to forage for. For the price of a pack of cigarettes, a man could have a few private moments with Tullia. Never gone long, she'd come running back, hair flying, fingers jingling the lire in her apron pocket. “Not a leaf of wild thyme. The
puntarelle
all pulled.
Chè miseria
,” she'd say smoothing back her hair. “Is the water hot?”

‘While the wash was cooking in the copper tub, I'd set to cooking whatever the woman of the house had put out for the evening meal, a chore not officially Tullia's and surely not mine but one that helped to pass the time and ensured I could feed the children. People who cook in other people's kitchens often do so in order to pinch bits to feed their own kin, themselves. Potatoes, rice, polenta, a heft of dried pig cheek if times were good. A basket of the morning's ricotta dripping in the stone sink. Hung from iron hooks over the stove were faggots of wild oregano, marjoram, little braids of garlic and onions. Sometimes there would be veal bones for soup. Almost always there were tomatoes, fresh and sun-split or a dense basil-scented paste of them. I'd sit the girls down in front of a good lunch and stand by the stove, eating a few spoonsful myself, Claudio on my shoulder. I loved those times watching the babies eat. I suppose it was stealing, my feeding us from other people's stores. I'd scrub the kitchen floor, set wildflowers in the window. I comforted myself saying I'd left more than I'd taken.

‘Tullia would set off then on some other of her business while the clothes dried and, my part done for the day, the children and I would head back to the farmhouse. Tullia would return in time to heat the irons, smoothing and folding the sun-dried, leaf-embossed things, leaving them stacked all neatly on the kitchen table. Wait for her pay. Two hundred lire. Fifty cents. “Half for you, Gilda.”

‘All this glory happened 70 kilometres up the road from the centre of the world, the caffés in the via Veneto, the Pope and his league supping on songbirds, matrons in the Parioli stuffing Pucci into Gucci, a weekend in Taormina. Historically cheek by jowl in the southern regions of the Italy of the mid '60s, the haves and the have-nots existed in an especially contiguous formation. And always more contiguous the further south one went.

‘In any case, Tullia was a fine instructress. Apart from foraging for men, she knew every wild grass and leaf and how to turn them into virtuous drenches or, when there was an egg, luscious little
fritatte
. Bitter weeds she'd fry in oil with garlic buds and raisins soaked in wine. I learned about food from Tullia. I learned about thieving, too, and begging in the markets. Bending into a bushel of his onions, Tullia would beguile a farmer while I slid great, long-stemmed purple artichokes, one by one, from his table into my sack. Once or twice a week we'd loot the markets, stash our haul here and there under our skirts or leave our ‘purchases' for half an hour with the few farmers whom we didn't pilfer while we went off to the
bancarelle
of used clothes. Pressing some unattainable treasure against one another, I remember laughing, the sound of it strange to my ear.
Is that me?
Not even so often with the children, it was only with Tullia that I laughed.

•

‘“I know what you do when you go away. I know about it.”

‘“Do you?”

‘“How can you? I mean, how can you let them?”

‘“Let them? My father was first. I never let him. He would push me down wherever we were, whenever there was no one else … whenever he could contrive to be alone with me, one great rough hand pushing himself into me, the other hand flat, crushing my face. I couldn't breathe, couldn't scream. He'd roll off me, call me
puttana
. The way he'd look at me when we were all at supper. My mother knew. Why didn't she stop him?”

‘I'd thought, once I was free of priests, I'd be safe from the punishments. I began to think I might have been lucky that Pepucci went to Switzerland. Tullia said grandfathers, uncles, brothers often did the same but priests were second only to fathers in their lechery. Tullia said she'd yet to know a man who was not prone to punishments. Tullia's mother had often confirmed this. “So why not get paid?” Tullia had said. “My boys are more polite. Mostly, they are. Certainly more polite than my father.”

•

‘Each day when we returned from assisting Tullia, I'd begin all over again, seeing to our own washing, to the supper if there was anything to cook. The girls would help me to bathe Claudio and put him to rest so I could bathe them, if in some less than thorough fashion, fix their hair, tumble them into their nightclothes. Awaiting the entry of the wooden couple, I'd feed them a pap of bread and goats' milk with a little sugar. I'd sing Puccini.

‘Isolda and Giulio would stop first in the shed to peel away their sweat-soaked clothes, decoration for the dirt floor until I'd gather them up the next day. They'd wash, dress, come into the house; she going first to fill a pitcher from the demijohn, he to place on the table whatever food he'd brought. Isolda was always centre stage, all of us watching her, waiting for her to set the tone of the next hour or so. Would she speak? Would she grant the half smile that had the power to pierce a breathing hole in the shroud her silence stuck to our faces? I would make some instinctive, protective gesture to the girls, a tug on their braids, a quick kiss between their shoulderblades – Dafne's more tensed than Livia's – all the while keeping my gaze on Isolda.