The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (6 page)

‘The good half,' she tells me.

‘You said it:
I'm still working on the ending of my first marriage
. Not a stand of fine old elms, it's Nilo who is the distance between you and Filiberto.'

‘And what if he is?'

‘Then he is. I just think it's good that you
know
it's Nilo and not the trees.'

‘Doesn't change anything, does it? What name I give it?'

‘No. No, it doesn't change. But don't you wonder if …'

‘I thought we were telling truths here. Hard ones. Or are we only telling mine?'

I stay quiet.

‘Fine. Then I'll tell one of yours. The old duke was
your unlived love
.'

‘Not a truth of mine. A detour from yours.'

For all this time that we've been talking, I've been settled on the edge of the work table while Miranda has been sitting on a stool in front of it, every now and then wiping down the great jug of
violenza
with a damp cloth, polishing it with a corner of her apron, wiping it down again. She rises now, lifts the jug, walks to the armoire with it, sets it on an empty shelf. As though she spots an errant smudge, she rubs the jug again with her apron, slams her palm down on the already tight cork. She closes the armoire doors and, still facing them, she says, ‘What are you reaching for, Chou? I think it's guilt you want to know about, isn't it? You want to know if I once thought or still think that I failed Nilo somehow and thus sent him racing off for succour somewhere else … Do I wonder if he'd have gone to her if I hadn't chosen to stay in Castelpietro? Would he have wanted her if I'd been better or kinder or more beautiful? If I'd been a more faithful panderer?'

‘Panderer?'

‘
Si, ruffiana
. Panderer. Men need a daily dose of fawning. As we would coax a contrary child with bread and sugar so must men be coaxed. We must enoble them. The most gentle critique is censure to a man. He retreats. Even when he fights back, he is retreating, saving up small, sharp pieces of his displeasure, a bag of sticks and stones for whenever he might feel strong enough to fight. Maybe I allowed Nilo's bag to get too full and, rather than heaving stones at me, he left. Essentially, he did
leave
me. With neither the will nor the talent to pander, I made the fatal error of being sincere. I was indeed guilty. Guilty even though I knew that fable, what's it called? The one in which the courtiers compliment the king on his new suit while he prances naked before them. Those people knew he needed the compliment more than he needed the truth. What's that story called?'

‘“The Emperor's New Clothes” in English. I don't know the title in Italian. Virginia Woolf said it better, though. Do you know of Virginia Woolf?'

‘Do I know of
la lupacchiotta
? That's what Signora Giacomini called Virginia. The she-wolf.'

‘Who is Signora Giacomini?'

‘Was. The matriarch of the clan Giacomini – four generations of them all living in the same palazzo. It's where I was cook and housekeeper until I married Nilo.
La signora
loved English novels – in translation, of course – and she being nearly blind when I was there, it fell to me to read aloud to her after lunch. The she-wolf was her favourite and she knew by heart every line of two or three of her books so that when I'd try to skip a page or even a phrase, she'd reach out to pinch my arm, keen and mumble until I'd go back to where I'd left off. It was her lullabye, my reading, the only way she could have her afternoon sleep. Yes, I know about Virginia.'

‘Sotto voce,' I quote ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice his natural size.'

‘
Non capisco
. What did the she-wolf say?'

‘From
A Room of One's Own
: Women have served all these …'

‘Never mind. The last thing I need right now is a dose of pontification from
la lupacchiotta
. She's a big stick that women use to beat men over the head with, and I say there's nothing wrong with men that isn't likewise wrong with us.'

I know her dethroning of Woolf is burlesque but still it irks me and I let her know by refusing to parry. Miranda rises, comes to me, takes my face in her hands, shakes it back and forth as she might to a loved child. In a tired, gravelly whisper, she says, ‘We were talking about Nilo Bracciolini and Miranda Filippeschi and I could give a damn at this moment about Virginia Woolf.'

‘Fair enough,' I concede and she returns to her chair.

‘It wasn't our living apart four days a week. ‘I've never believed it was that which provoked Nilo's betrayal. Out of sight, out of mind signifies something less than love. Our story was likely finished long before he ever held the other one in his arms. Our story ended when we struck a truce, when we stopped trying to finesse one another, when we quit the game of convincing and beguiling. Beware of tolerance between lovers. We are obliging only of those we don't love. The more obliging we are, the less we love the one obliged. Love and tolerance are antagonists. No, they are mortal enemies. Nilo and I, at some point in time, we became
tolerant
of one another. Believing we'd earned it, I saw nothing of peril in the long, unbroken peace we lived and I called it happiness. I named it happiness, the good-natured dance we did,
adagio, adagio
, around the carcass of a long-dead love.'

She stands upright, unties her kitchen-towel turban, rewraps it around her braids, pats it into place, goes then to fetch two baskets from where they hang by the back door, slips them over one arm. She tells me she's going to see what vegetables the others have left in the shed. Weary of groping in that darkish past, I think it's the present Miranda's gone to retrieve as much as the vegetables. No sooner out the door, she comes back in.

‘In case you're also wondering if I miss him, I will tell you that I don't. I don't miss Nilo, not he, himself.' She heads out the door, turns back once again. ‘Ah, but how I long for the man I thought he was.'

For the man I thought he was
. I don't know how much time passes before I hear her shouting, half laughing, from the shed. ‘Come and help me with the wine, will you, Chou?'

Some of the mischief back in her gaze, she nods to a demijohn and we begin rolling it the few metres between the shed and the back door into the kitchen.

‘And as for
la lupacchiotta
, the she-wolf, everything I've read of hers sounds as though her nostrils quiver when she speaks.
Puzzo sotto il naso
– a stink under the nose.'

Seeking relief in sarcasm, Miranda is pleased with her lampoon and begins to launch another one, but I'm already telling her about the time I tried to speak of Proust to Barlozzo.

‘All I did was to ask him if he'd ever read Proust,' I tell Miranda as we position the barrel near the supper table, both of us already laughing.

‘And he said, “For pity's sake, an epicene Frenchman rhapsodising over a cake damped in tea, no less. At the least he might have poured himself a thimbleful of
vin santo
. I can't imagine what he might have written had there been a tin of cornmeal biscotti thick with pine nuts and white raisins near to hand … Better yet, spaghetti carbonara, the pancetta crisp, a whole hill of pecorino on top, a lovely glass of red … I could understand a man getting misty over the taste of that.”'

Miranda laughs with only half a heart, the rest of her lingering among the ancient elms with Nilo and the costumeless emperor. Perhaps she's still in the church with
l'altra
. I feel desolate with wanting to bring Miranda back. I try another dose of folly. I tell her about little Biagio. My darling Biagio, an eighty-something farmer from western Tuscany who has long been my friend. Another in the anti-Proust league, he'd start ranting and snorting every time I'd paraphrase Proustian text about twilight:
When the trees are black and the sky is still light …

‘Look, Biagio, it's Proust light,' I'd tell him.

‘Who the hell is Proust?'

‘You know very well who is Proust.'

‘And what did he know about light? My grandfather would call all of us out into the vineyard just before twilight. He'd already be there, the legs of his wooden chair stuck into the earth between the vines, his head thrown back, studying the sky. He said he could smell the twilight before it fell. I wonder if Proust ever smelled the twilight. Every damn farmer who's ever ploughed a field at sunset could have told you more and told you better than a body who sat squinting at things from a window.'

‘End of that discussion,' I say, knowing it's the end of another one. We are quiet too long before we remember to laugh. But our laughter now has no music and so dies quickly, the foolish repartee impotent against the past where Miranda's eyes still search. She adjusts her headdress, pinches her upper lip between thumb and forefinger, tilts her head to look at me.

‘Life's a bungled hobble over thin ice, my love.'

‘Always thin, the ice?'

‘Mostly thin. Such a foolish sight we must be from some other vantage than our own as we leap, floe to floe, our gathered trifles – mostly worldly – weighing us down and causing much of the bungling.'

As though she can see herself now – a lifetime of leaping, gathering, bungling – Miranda's laugh is raucous, contagious and then my own parade of storms and passions marches before me and, through the strange broken old place on the verges of the Montefiescone Road, my laughing echoes hers.

At last, gasping for air, Miranda says, ‘I say we should heed Orazio and prune back hopes for anything more than tonight's supper. And you?'

She's on her feet and out the door to the gravel drive before I can shout, ‘Where are you going?'

‘To light the lantern. Miranda's back in business for the evening and my truckers need to know. And to hell with the buckets and the rodent holes and will you please go to see what creatures might be hanging in the cheese hut and bring them here so we can get to work? But first, go to Bazzica and use the phone, get Fernando here.'

‘We'd already agreed that he would be here at seven so …'

‘Wonderful. And Filiberto … He'll see the lantern lit and come to find out why, but you must still go to Bazzica to telephone Ninuccia. Tell her to bring her supper here and to call the others. They'll all know what to do. ‘
Vai, vai
, go, go,' she says, first hugging me close then heaving me away as she begins to topple down the tables stacked up along the walls by the nephews. Flapping her great lovely form about the place, she stops only to press the hem of her apron to the weepy midnight blue of her eyes, pulls down another table and another one, lining them up, wiping them down with a kitchen towel dipped in a rainwater bucket and I think that Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of Buonrespiro, is a queen bee in connubial frenzy. She stops in mid flight, looks at me, ‘How I miss him, Chou. I miss Filiberto who is real and I am decidedly not longing for the man I thought was Nilo and I'm thinking that the ice is good and hard this evening and that I'm hungry in my belly and my soul and how dearly I wish Orazio was here. And Barlozzo. Tell Ninuccia to bring a pack of
Toscanelli
.'

‘Is that all?'

‘
Per ora
, for now.'

‘
AFTER ALL, I'LL BE SEVENTY-SIX IN FEBRUARY, GOOD ENOUGH
reason for me to stay out of the trees, wouldn't you say?'

It's a late afternoon in the first week of December and, having neither seen nor heard from her in a few days, I've telephoned Miranda, asked her if she would join us – the Thursday tribe – tomorrow morning while we work at harvesting olives on a farm belonging to Ninuccia's cousins.

‘I wasn't suggesting that you pick but just that you be there with us. We've missed you during these days of the
raccolta …
and besides, what has your being seventy-six to do with anything. You've been seventy-six for as long as I've known you.'

‘Have I? And for how long has that been?'

‘Six years.'

‘Do I understand that you are accusing me of approaching my eighty-second birthday?'

‘Based on what you, yourself, have told me of your anagraphic history, I am only suggesting that …'

‘You needn't bother accusing or
suggesting
since it's my life and I like being seventy-six and so I'll just carry on being seventy-six until I feel like being seventy-five. Besides, no one has yet to take me even for sixty-six. Not to my face.'

‘All I was trying to tell you is that this is the first year we haven't harvested together in one grove or another …'

‘Have you been working with Ninuccia?'