Blood, Bones & Butter

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  When we stopped for gas outside of Bari, Michele phoned ahead and had cold rosé wine waiting for us at the house when we arrived.

  His mother had taken the train. She arrived from Rome at the train station in Lecce and was met by Giovanni, her second oldest son. Alda packs very little for herself. She has one old worn leather satchel that has her few housedresses—that uniform of widowed women all over Europe who wear the same simple smock dress every day, and all of those women, every widow in Europe, has one drying on the clothesline under the oleander trees while the other is on her body. Beyond that, Alda packs not much more than a comb and her toothbrush and a few photos of her decades-deceased husband, Tommaso Fuortes, who died in 1970, at fifty-eight years old, from complications due to malaria he’d contracted when he was a kid. The rest of Alda’s luggage—an arsenal of crumpled plastic bags leftover from grocery shopping and tied at the neck with twine and rubber bands—are bulging with things she “needs” that she shuffles back and forth between the house in Rome and the house in Leuca: her pressure cooker, some jars of jam, a kind of biscuit that she likes, and the whole set of good silverware, rolled up in chamois sacks and polished for so many years that it looks white more than silver.

  Giovanni, with his quiet, patient, and unflappable demeanor, is waiting for her at the station and carries all the bags to the car. She walks faster than he does, in spite of her pronounced limp from her hip surgery, and her eighty years, forty of them spent keeping afloat a family with six children without a husband. Giovanni drives her to the house, and no sooner has she set her handbag down on the soft, almost powdery stone floors, than she is noticing every detail of the condition of it.

  She pulls the yellow leaves from a plant and sticks her finger without shyness deep in the soil to check its moisture. She peers into the waist-high green glass canteens of olive oil, props open the creaky door to inventory the storeroom where the plum tomatoes are stacked in crates next to the laundry machine amid the drying heads and necks of garlic and the clean empty bottles for tomato sauce, and by dinner time has already, with Rosaria’s help, put fried eggplant and boiled beans and boiled zucchini and giuncata cheese on the table.

  The house is truly impressive. When Michele and I pulled up to the gate at the end of the driveway, I just shook my head. Unbelievable. There before us sat a Pompeiian villa, with a large room smack in the center of the house that has no ceiling. It’s called an impluvium, meaning where the rain is gathered, and I have often noticed that my son Marco gets as excited about this room as I do when we get to the house every year. What could be more fun, more impractical, more romantic than walking in your pajamas through the room in the center of the house which has no ceiling, and looking up at the sun, sky, stars, or even—as we experienced last year in the middle of the night as we were frantically moving the dinner table and the chairs and the reading lamps—warlike lightning, thunder, and extraordinary wet winds?

  Though completely different from the house that I grew up in, I nonetheless also grew up in an impressive house, and so I was immediately comfortable and felt an odd and unexpected familiarity as soon as we arrived. While it is in every respect a true villa, with frescoes and bas relief and tiled mosaic in the entryway and the soft stone floors called “pelle d’uovo,” which describes perfectly the feel of the floors on your bare feet—like the “skin of the egg,” that thin film of skin that lines the eggshell, I can’t help but say “villa” every time out loud with quotation marks around it and as if it had four “Ls.” Because it’s just so crazy and over the top that this guy with whom I was casually starting an affair would have given me nocturnal, glittery motorcycle tours of Rome and then delivered me to his “villa” in the south where his loving mother had prepared a simple, beautiful meal of mostly vegetables for our arrival. The only way the story could get more enviable is if I embellished and described Michele as tall, with bee-stung lips and a thick head of dark hair. Or if I said that we slept outside by a fire in dew-soaked sleeping bags.

  Even though we were in this villa facing the sea, with a wide terrace for watching the sunset, and rooms with twenty-five-foot-high domed ceilings surrounding the room with no ceiling, I was seduced only by the meal Alda had prepared. The dense, almost purple beans I’d never seen before. The fresh bone-white cheese with undeniably herbal flavor. I couldn’t wait to cook with her. I wanted to work side by side with her in her kitchen. At first I needed Michele nearby to translate, but very shortly it became obvious that cooking itself was a way of if not exactly speaking, at least a way of being together in a room doing something that felt comfortable and interactive. Like hunting mushrooms on damp opportune mornings with your own mother. We both soon grasped that we had that as a “language,” and I could understand everything she was doing and she could understand me, too. And for all of the years since, we have cooked together in place of talking.

  That first morning of my first visit to the summer house, I walked into the big open airy kitchen to have coffee and Alda was at the table, already up for hours, shouting into the telephone—only because the phones are weak and because her hearing is going—arranging her affairs for the day. She checked on the bank, the lawyer, the gardener, the wheat, the olive oil, the hairdresser. Shouting in Leccese dialect into the phone the whole time, often the same question over and over, while Michele leisurely showered and shaved meticulously on the other side of the house, she arranged for more oil to arrive, for the trees to be pruned, for a haircut from her favorite girl in the nearby town of Giuliano.

  “Twice as good and half as expensive as the girl in Rome!” She laughs, delighted.

  A woman arrived on her motorino, a bicycle with a small motor the size of a hairdryer you have to pedal to ignite, and pulled from the handlebar’s basket giuncata and mozzarella cheese, still warm, that she had made herself using seawater, though no one could explain if this was from a parsimony—too poor to buy salt—or an aesthetic impulse to create the perfect balance of salination in the cheese using water she collected from the sea each morning.

  In the beginning that first year, I felt awkward and tried to feign an appearance of relaxed casualness, as if I were just sipping my morning coffee in the room with this guy’s mother with whom I could not share one word in the same language, like it was the most fluid, easily metabolized thing in my entire day. Really, I was hoping for her to stay on the phone. To receive another food-bearing visitor. To make another call quickly, because even the pause between phone conversations was awkward as she sat there at the table with me, both of us unable to make conversation, she squinting heavily at her handwritten phone/address book trying to make the numbers come into focus so she could dial another piece of her business. Me, bluffing my way through a relaxed contemplative morning coffee.

  But then she opened the old refrigerator that rarely cooled below fifty degrees and threw a plastic shopping bag in front of me, opening it up and showing me what she had bought early that morning at the market while Michele and I were still in the hand-tatted, lace-trimmed, heavy white linen sheets, barely awake, listening to the Mediterranean breeze flap the flags and cables of the sailboats anchored right out front in the harbor, with a hypnotic thin clank clank clank, and the occasional wasp’s angry hum of a passing Vespa under our shuttered window. In the bag were half a dozen wild, unruly heads of Italian puntarelle, a kind of bitter dandelion green different in so many ways from our dandelion here. The stalks were hollow and satiny white, and the tops looked like juicy marijuana buds. And suddenly, with this one bag of humble dandelion—weeds—she and I started “talking.”

  I held the puntarelle and looked at her questioningly. It was not like what I had seen and known sold as puntarelle in the States. She started snapping the buds off the tops where they break naturally, exactly like you would do with an asparagus spear that will naturally snap where the wood ends and the succulent part begins. I understood what she was doing and started to do the same with the other heads in front of me until we had cl
eaned the entire bag. She got up and soaked the puntarelle “buds” in water and then dumped a few cubes of ice in there as well to really crisp it up. I made a very fatty vinaigrette, like I would have for a dandelion salad at home—with both anchovy and pancetta and hard-boiled eggs and lots of garlic, and I fried some bread cubes in her olive oil. And together, wordlessly, we made lunch. I understand only later, years later, that she will do this almost every morning of every summer vacation we take to see her. She will toss me an ingredient she found at that morning’s market in Tricase and look at me, expecting me to know what to do with it: a whole fish, an octopus, a piece of hard-to-find meat. Hard-dried land snails, lumache. Whole wheat grains. Pickled lily bulbs, lampascioni, a rhizome that looks a great deal like pearl onions. She is always doing this. She tosses an ingredient at me and asks what we should do with it. I am honored that she thinks I am familiar with all of these ingredients but even on the few occasions that I am, I am dying to learn what she does with them.

  The next morning I arrived in my robe for coffee and she and her daughter Manuela were separating the wheat grains at the kitchen table, like two women playing a quiet, thoughtful game of Scrabble might do. The two women sat at the table in their housedresses, Manuela with her eyeglasses down at the end of her nose, a pile of grains in front of each of them, and quietly, speaking only occasionally, they sat there and separated the husks from the grains. I understood the task immediately—I’d done this in Turkey when I was “politely disappearing”—and so took my coffee and joined them. Quietly, I insinuated myself into their silent “conversation” around wheat—now we all three were sharing an experience. It’s not dramatic or significant. It’s just a way of communicating. But for me it is everything. I’m trying to show them that I am a worker. That I wash dishes. That I can help clean the wheat. That I am not some useless burden of a houseguest. And it stands in amazingly well for language that we just don’t have. Manuela reads and writes and speaks English perfectly, but hesitates, and will do so only when my struggle for a word or to communicate an idea becomes too great, and then she bails me out. And this is how I have come to know Alda, my future mother-in-law, for the first weeks, and then subsequent years of my relationship with her son.

  And then we went to a family dinner. As if the motorcycle tours and the villa and the incredible mother weren’t enough, I met strangers who came up to me and hugged me, who gave me kisses on both cheeks—but real kisses with actual cheek-to-lip contact as if they truly meant it. I met sisters and cousins and wives and best friends who smiled at me as warmly as if I were a cherished daughter. I met old medical school friends of Michele’s whose eyes lit up with unmistakable joy and pleasure when meeting me. It was immediately obvious how much these people cared about Michele, and how the Italian idea of hospitality is automatically and unconditionally extended to anyone someone they already love loves. Alberto and Rosie, within twenty minutes of meeting me, said, “We love you as we love Michele.” It’s from Rosie, years later, that I learned to put a peeled potato in the pasta cooking water for extra starch. Meanwhile, the olive trees swayed in the gentle breeze, and handmade orecchiette were passed around, and the wine flowed, and someone handed me my first sgropino—that lively dessert drink of prosecco and vodka and lemon ice cream which is so named because it describes the sneezelike sound a horse makes when she’s shaking the flies from her nostrils. Because it makes you shudder just like that.

  And that’s just how it felt to be introduced to Michele’s family.

  At some extra-low point, some years after we were married, Michele and I went to a marriage counselor in New York and we sat down on the couch in her nice office on our first visit and we introduced ourselves. As soon as Michele started speaking, as soon as she heard his voice, the therapist lit up and smiled and said: “Oh. You’re Italian! Are you Italian? I LOVE Italians!” And I slouched down on the couch a little—watching the therapist’s face aglow with her own memories of orecchiette and sgropino and olive oil—and I thought: Oh no you don’t honey; you love Italy.

  What did I love? The man? The country? I loved folding myself into Michele’s family and loved how much time they could all spend together, happily it seemed, without running out of conversation. We could have been with the cousins and sisters and husbands all day at the pool or the beach, gone home for showers, aperitivi and a costume change, but then at eight forty-five, when we have all reconvened around the dinner table at one or another’s house or the local restaurant dining al fresco, everybody—everybody—is talking a mile a minute and gesticulating animatedly as if we hadn’t just seen each other over the five long, hot languorous afternoon hours in the shade of the umbrella poolside. As if we had just arrived from the airport fifteen minutes before for the first time since last year. At least that is how it appears to me as a non-Italian speaker. It’s possible, even likely, that nobody is saying anything but bullshit, but it can feel very satisfying, like a good sneeze, to be enveloped by it.

  IT WAS A FEELING that I wished would continue year-round but that we—Michele and I—never managed to get a long run on once back in New York. There was something about being in Italy that made it so possible, and I feasted on it in those early years. The scenery was first-rate—a villa by the sea, a constant blue sky, a countryside dotted with white trulli. Michele’s whole family effortlessly received us exactly as we presented ourselves, and we were never inconvenienced by any reference to or inquiry about how we had managed to pass each year’s preceding eleven, often difficult months of our strange and ill-founded marriage, and so it was almost possible to forget them.

  When we decided to have Leone, I realized that I no longer wanted to be some girl passing through on the back of Michele’s motorcycle, married as a performance art prank. Now I wanted to stay, to be the mother of many children, to be a member of a family, the Fuortes family. And I wanted it year-round, not just for this wonderful but heartbreakingly ephemeral month after which I would not see or speak with or hear from any of the Italians—including Michele, in a way—for the next eleven months. My ambivalent relationship to Michele had not changed with the arrival of Leone, but my attachment to family had. I thought a great deal of that empty house that my parents had left Simon and me alone in, and understood that no matter what disappointment I felt in Michele, I would never, ever, leave.

  But for now, at this time, I am still only a guest. A familiar July visitor, who happens to bring with her every time she comes a new baby with the Fuortes surname, but a guest, nonetheless, for just the month in Puglia. And I was wide awake, prepared even, for the fact. I got my shit together. I knew that we would need cash, sandwiches for the trip, cold rosé at the house when we arrived. I arranged for those things myself even. I bought the plane tickets. I rented the station wagon and remembered to ask for a rear-facing infant seat and a forward facing child’s booster seat. I knew that the Lire was out and the Euro was in. I got Leone a passport two weeks after he was born and signed it for him, writing Mother in parentheses. I took Italian lessons. And as we were packing the leased station wagon for that trip from Rome to Leuca, with our double stroller and our diaper bag filled with diapers in two sizes, and the bottles, and the wipes, I laughed to Michele, “Look at us now, Mr. Motorcycle!”

  We arrived in Leuca after dark and, uncharacteristically, a day ahead of Alda. Her train from Rome was scheduled to arrive the following evening. Before we’d left Rome, she pressed the small heavy sack of keys in my hand, the keys to the house in Puglia, and laughed, kindly.

  “Now I’m the guest!” she said, smiling.

  I carefully packed the keys in my bag and felt an uneasy buzz of responsibility the whole eight-hour drive to the south. We passed the same remnants of aqueduct, and the tall skinny cypress trees, and the huge windmills at Tavoliere and the trucks heading north filled with just-harvested tomatoes, but now I was inside an air-conditioned diesel station wagon reading Green Eggs and Ham to Marco and nursing Leone the whole time, taking advantage of
their naps to eke out any daydreamy thoughts about paths not taken and lives not lived. Still, Michele and I have nothing much to say to each other and the long drive passes almost wordlessly between us.

  We drove Michele’s customary quick circle of the lighthouse that looks down upon the whole port before continuing to the house on Via Tommaso Fuortes. I fished out the sack of keys and opened the tall, heavy door, and Michele put all of our things inside, piling up our luggage in the center of the impluvium. Marco said, in two-year-old talk, “Hey! Where’s the ceiling?” And we laughed. I turned on the lights in the kitchen and in the storeroom off the kitchen and checked to see what there was: tomatoes, oil, garlic, melon, eggplant. Exactly as it was every year. Rosaria had been there earlier and kindly left us a meal under dish towels in the cabinet, per Alda’s phoned-ahead instructions, surely. Michele opened his suitcases and within five minutes exploded like a dandelion gone to seed, his shit floating all over the house and landing wherever it may, wherever he drops it. His eyeglasses, shoes, wallet, keys, camera, a glass of iced tea with a sticky ring left on the desk next to the computer, his cell phone, his newspapers and magazines all over the kitchen table. I got in bed and nursed Leone to sleep and heard Michele in the next room with Marco, having a bedtime story.

  “Owa doze ay dinosaurrrrrr saya good night?” And I fell asleep at “Doze ee thrrrrow eez teddee barrrre,” noticing how impossibly thick his already thick accent gets as soon as we get to Italy every year.