The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (9 page)

‘
Aspromonte
, bitter mountain. My husband had, at length and most candidly, spoken of the village where he was born and had always lived, enumerating on the fingers of both his hands the perils, the hardships, the dissimilarities between the modest idyll of my Umbrian life and the one I would meet in Acquapendente di Sopra, a village of sixty-three souls, “if no one's died or been born since Christmas when I was last there”. Sixty-three souls, some of them damned, he said. Shaking my head, muffling his warning speeches with my hand or my mouth, all I wanted was him. But he would persist: “Many of the men stay down in the seaside villages to fish, selling their catch to the restaurants, only wandering back up to the mountains once a week for conjugal visits, to leave a wad of bills, often thin. When called upon they perform simple favours for the clans. Or more complex ones, as I did with the banker. But that's over now. I'll invent something else. No, of course not. Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that's dangerous.” As we withdrew that afternoon further into the wilderness, I began to feel a kind of qualm, mild enough at first before building to a tease, to a menace and causing my chatter to sound tinny, far away. Someone else's noise. I would look at my husband who looked only ahead, the muscles in his face rippling under flesh gone white.
Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that's dangerous
.

‘Hung from a mountain spur two thousand metres above the sea, the village seemed a pile of Iron Age stones relieved here and there by a ruin from the epochs of the Greeks and the Romans. Though people were about the narrow lanes in front of and between the houses, so pure was the silence that I'd thought to have lost the capacity to hear. Later Pierangelo would explain to me that it wasn't silence I heard but the great, incessant noise of streams and torrents and waterfalls that surrounded the place.
Aquapendente
, falling waters. It was the raucous crashing of water that I took for silence.

‘Pierangelo stopped the auto in a curve of the unpaved road in front of a long, narrow stone building that would have seemed abandoned were it not for wisps of woodsmoke rising from four chimneys and window curtains of bright-coloured cloth swelling in the breeze. Four separate dwellings were suggested by as many wooden doors, one of them opened to reveal a room not two metres high, a bed and a chair filling its whole space. A small flock of scraggy, brownish sheep were being rallied through the lanes by two despotic dogs and I remember waiting until the parade passed before opening the auto door. And then I saw Cosima. She'd come, unnoticed by me, to within a metre or so of us and there she stood, arms crossed over her chest, weeping and smiling. In a shapeless black dress and men's shoes too large, she was a romantic figure, a kind of timid enchantress from whom someone had stolen her real clothes. I waited for Pierangelo to go to her but he sat quietly in his seat. I stepped out and Cosima stepped closer – another kind of love at first sight. Gathering me to her, saying a few words of welcome, our sympathies were immediate, reciprocal, tender. All that I loved about my husband was
authenticated
in her. His cautionary tales he needn't have told but rather he should have trusted his mother to be also mine, and to know that both would be my shelter.

‘Cosima's house was the most spacious of the four in the low stone dwelling with its blue shale roof and paint-peeled doors. The walls she whitewashed every Easter and Christmas and the packed-earth floor had so long been swept and trod upon that it had the texture and the sheen of stone. In the sitting room there were white-painted iron sconces on the walls, only occasionally stuck with light bulbs, hand-hewn chairs also painted white, a kind of sofa strewn in a length of salvaged boat sail from the seaside markets and a woodpile laid neat and even. In the kitchen there were four more chairs about a small square wooden table scrubbed nearly to splintering and a pile of plates in a basket by the hearth. Three pots hung from the stones above the hearth shelf, though two were for show since Cosima always reached for the same one no matter what she was about to cook. In the sleeping room there was a small white bed and a trunk larger than it on which stood two tall silver candlesticks, almost garish in that setting, about which she never spoke. Only a sheaf of evergreen or a bottle stuck with wildflowers intruded upon the shades of white in Cosima's house and the dark figure of her moving about against the pale light there made a
quadro vivente
, primitive, calming.

‘The sail-clothed sofa became Cosima's bed and there was never a word of bickering among us about her will to relinquish the sleeping room: “The sofa had been Pierangelo's and now it will be mine. The bed had been mine and now it will be yours.” Cosima had a wondrous way of weeding her discourse, plunging as she did to the marrow of a thing. And her talk reflected her resolve, her ideas slow-ripening as mountain fruit. She seemed free of dilemma. Hers was a road straight, cleared of obstacles, immutable. Divine in its way. Even her wrath she managed with serenity. No bile, no hackles, never demurring from her path, she could unburden rage as genteelly as she could embrace peace. “Lament is futile. Scorn makes bitterness. Vendetta soothes,” she would say.

‘Pierangelo soon slipped back into the life he'd led before his sojourn to Umbria. Before us. Setting out with his former mates to fish for tuna, he'd stay away for three or four days, return for one or two, before going off again. I knew it wasn't always to the sea where Pierangelo went. Normal as raising sheep or fishing the seas, working a job now and then for the clans. “We all do it. Nothing dangerous. I told you, nothing dangerous at all.”

‘Meanwhile I learned more about my mother-in-law. Unsought, unacknowledged by her, Cosima had long ago been assigned to the province of myth by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra, she having ministered to two generations of them since she was in her early adolescence. In her men's black shoes and her shapeless black dress, loping over the fields or between the lanes, she'd be bent on birthing babies, washing the dead, keeping vigil over the sick. Pulling an anise cake from her basket, the perfumed thing still warm from her hearth, she could light up gloom by walking through the door. But her more constant sympathies Cosima reserved for the seven women who lived within her nearest reach in the three houses attached to hers.

‘Save when they slept or on the occasions when their husbands or sons were at home, the seven and Cosima were together. In summer they cooked in the spare kitchen of the deconsecrated church's cellar where it was cool. In winter when the cellar was cheered only by a small hearth by which hermit monks once warmed themselves, they cooked together there as well, neither knowing how to nor desiring to live separately from one another. Bringing shaped and risen loaves covered with cloths to the communal oven, which sat in a clearing of oak scrub just outside the village, they'd settle themselves on stones or among the weeds with their knitting while their bread baked. On Mondays, they mounted their washing in baskets on their heads and walked to one or another of the nearby streams, whichever one was rushing good and fast. At noon they ate bread and cheese from their pockets and, at sunset, laid supper on a table in the front lane when it was fair or piled together in one of their houses or back in the church cellar when it was cold. The table cleared away, their kitchen chairs in a half circle in the lane, they'd once again pick up their needles and yarn and talk and work and sing.
Santo cielo
, sainted heaven, how they could sing. Not an alto among them, they raised their seven soprano voices in a blaze of plainsong or chanted and keened as women before them had chanted and keened in those mountains for thousands of years, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.

‘And so I went about my days as they did theirs, blithe as well-loved children. Their almost breezy sanguinuity sprang, it seemed, from their abiding concern for one another, each one trusting the others to be thinking of her while she was thinking of them. Though those who were widows – Cosima and two others – were pensioned by the State and the others supported, more or less, by their husbands, their economic lives were mostly operated collectively. Whoever had, shared. Cosima was their purser. They worked an
orto
, kept hens and raised rabbits, and bartered lamb and cheese from the shepherds. They decided upon things by “committee”: who was to get her boots repaired, her knives sharpened, her teeth fixed, how much wood was to be cut, which mattresses were to be restuffed. What they didn't grow in their
orto
or forage in the meadows and the woods, they bought from the
fruttivendolo ambulante
, the travelling fruit and vegetable wagon, on Saturday. And to supplement mean times – their own or, more often, those of their neighbours – they sold their handiwork: prized by the fancy women of Reggio and Catanzaro were the table covers and bedspreads of vast dimension and heirloom design, which were crocheted by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra from white cotton string, tea-dyed to a pallid amber brown. And what they didn't knit or sew, they would fetch in the markets, riding down the mountain to Reggio in the Thursday or the Saturday bus several times a year. You will recall that it was 1969 when I arrived in Acquapendente di Sopra. That these women lived then in that cloistered self-sufficiency seems an imponderable truth. Having so little, they were free to have everything.'

•

Never asking me if I'd wanted another caffé, Ninuccia has been up and down, slapping the wet grains from the Bialetti into the sink, rinsing all its parts, spooning out more ground espresso, packing it into place, filling the pot with water. Never breaking the stride of her story, she lights the burner, sits down. We avoid one another's gaze. I don't want to hear more of this story. I don't want this Cosima to be relegated to fable. I want to know her. I am wishing that I
was
her. At the least, I want to be there with her, with all of them. I belong there. I'm certain of this. How can it be that I am feeling the loss of a woman I never knew, would never know? I think of their soprano voices in the evening, under the mountains.

My throat tightens, tears threaten. I think how absurd is this response of mine to the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. I will drink this fresh caffé and then explain to Ninuccia that I really must go. First I will steer our talk to the present. To the less remote past.

‘I never knew it was you who began the Thursday Night Suppers. I mean, with Miranda.'

‘Those Marvellous Thursday Nights, that's what Cosima called them. Yes, yes, it was me who carried the idea home to Miranda years ago when I returned from Calabria. Missing life with Cosima and the women as I did, I'd hoped to feed my nostalgia for those nights in the mountains by raising up some kinship here in Umbria. Of course, it was not at all the same. I should never have expected it to be. What they had and who they were in Calabria and what we have and who we are here … was
unequal
. Discordant. How could I expect to satisfy them with what had delighted Cosima's tribe?'

‘I would cook a pot of beans, not so different from that one over there, and call it Thursday Night Supper. There were more of us back then, sometimes as many as twenty squeezed into the rustico. I'd ladle out beans or some thick soup of barley and spelt scented with whatever herbs were near. Bread, wine. Of course, there was always cheese. Once I made
la polenta in catene –
cornmeal in chains – thin cornmeal mixed with stewed white beans spooned into deep bowls over bread. Filiberto called it war food. He remembered his father hanging a sardine from a string tied to the light above the kitchen table; the oil dripping from the little fish was the only condiment for his family's nightly polenta during the meanest years. His father never changed the sardine for another until only bones swung from the string.

‘“We'd cut a piece of the flat, yellow pudding, swipe it across the sardine, trying to wet it with the little fish's salty oil,” Filiberto told us. “There was watered wine until that ran out. Nothing of bread.”

‘Filiberto's stories led to Miranda's,' Ninuccia says.

‘Not only at your table,' she said, trying for Miranda's voice. My family fared better than most of our ilk, I having begun working as maid and kitchen apprentice for the Giacomini when I was sixteen. I'm not telling you that their stores allowed the usual five-course lunch and the thick soups and cheeses and dry sausages and six or seven
conserva di frutta
, which composed their light supper of an evening. Deep pockets, the black market, they ‘arranged' things. Everyday Cook sent me home with almost enough to feed my family. Six of us and my mother – my father already gone by that time. Cook and also Signora Giacomini, I think, knew I supplemented their gifts with my own mild thieving – mostly soap and flour. A kilo of flour consoled my mother. Soap, too. At least her children would be clean, would have bread. My brothers were apprentices of a sort, too, running and fetching for the Partigiani even though the youngest was ten when things went bad. Sometimes one of them would come home with a sack of eggs, as many as five or six, and I think it was those eggs that saved us as much as anything. I've always thought it was the eggs. I took to bringing Giorgia, then nine or ten, with me to the Giacomini each morning, knowing that Cook would sit her down, fill a bowl with some sort of pap – sometimes a piece of bread with sugar. Can you imagine sugar during the war? The grace of the Giacomini gave way, though, when I trooped in with two cousins, the daughters of my mother's sister, who was faring less well than we. They were kind about drawing the line but draw it they did. Years afterward I remember my aunt telling how they survived for weeks and months on a prized two-kilo tin of salted Spanish anchovies. I remember that tin – wedged between the more usual goods – in the kitchen armoire. It had been there for years, maybe as many as ten, as though my aunt knew to save it. Red and blue and
foreign
-looking. Sometimes I would pull it forward on the shelf, finger all the writing on it that I couldn't read. A gift from someone who'd travelled to Spain. I don't remember who. When there was nothing left but sacks of polenta, my aunt opened the tin, her two tiny girls standing on chairs to watch her. The story goes that, without bothering to rinse away their preserving salt, she mashed a few of the fish to a paste, mixed in whatever broth she'd brewed that morning from wild herbs and then spread the mess thinly over their nightly polenta.