by Pat Conroy
“Then let me turn it starboard. I’m too near civilians again. I’m not going to let you kill any civilians on my watch.”
“Turn it starboard, Colonel. No civilians die.”
“I want to die on land,” he said. “I never wanted to dump a bird in water. I know a place. A tomato field. I’ll take her in there.”
“Take her in there, Dad.”
He took her in, and we both fell back exhausted in our chairs. I thought I knew every story of my father’s, and I had hated every one of them. He was the worst father I had ever seen, and I have not been shy about proclaiming that. But, until that day, I had no idea I was being raised by one of the goddamnest fighter pilots in the history of the Marine Corps. My father and I looked at each other, and I believe we both realized we had just completed our first great day as father and son. There would be many, many more, but this was the day my father took me into his life as a Marine Corps aviator and did me the high honor of asking me to be his wingman, at last.
“Let me take you to the Colonnade for dinner,” I said, mentioning my father’s favorite restaurant. “You earned it, Colonel.”
“I need to take a shower,” he said. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and so was mine.
My father had just delivered me of the last chapters of my new novel by offering me a great story. I could reward him with food, because it is my most religious belief that a recipe is just a story that ends with a good meal.
“Tell about Italy,” my wife says, her voice sugared with her deep Alabama accent. “Tell me what you loved the most.”
I tell her two stories: In the house I once rented on the Via dei Foraggi in Rome, my landlord stood beneath a painting of St. Sebastian.
I asked the man, “This house I’m renting, is it very old?” “No, no, no, no,” he said quickly. “You Americans love the old things, but this house is not even five hundred years.”
Stunned, I said, “It was built before Columbus set sail.”
“Yes,” my landlord said. “But you don’t understand. In Rome, she is a baby.”
That is how Italy taught me about time.
Then I tell my wife of the morning I left Rome to return to the South to help my mother fight the cancer that would soon kill her. I walked to the small piazza where my family did its shopping to say goodbye. My infant daughter, Susannah, was radiant in her stroller, and everyone in the piazza knew la famiglia americana was leaving their city forever. When I rolled Susannah to the center of the piazza, all the shopkeepers boiled out onto the cobblestones. One woman scooped Susannah into her arms and cried out, “You cannot take Susannah tutta panna from us. She was born here. She is a romanina. She belongs to Rome!”
The women passed the baby back and forth, smothering her with tearful kisses. Adele, the vegetable lady, in a mournful, ancient voice, said through tears, “We did not do our jobs. We did not love your family enough. If we had done our jobs better, you could never leave us. You would be Romans forever.”
Then the wine man handed me a bottle of Frascati for the journey and the cheese lady cut off an enormous wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Sausages and loaves of bread, pizza bianca, fragrant mozzarella, bunches of grapes and olives: every shopkeeper in that piazza came forward bearing gifts, generous as the Magi.
I always compare this completely unexpected scene with the time I was moving to Rome and shopped in Atlanta’s Kroger for the last time. For ten years I had shopped there and nowhere else in my hometown. I did not know the name or face of a single sourpuss employee in that store, and not one knew mine.
That is how Italy taught me about being alive.
After I told my wife these two stories, she said, “A honeymoon in Italy. It has a ring to it, Southern boy.”
Since I met Cassandra King of Pinckard, Alabama, daughter of a peanut farmer who once walked from Alabama to Miami looking for work during the Depression, I am finally living the life I think I was meant to live. I had no idea that a man in his fifties could fall in love with a woman in her fifties and that they could teach each other things about love and ecstasy and wonder, things I have tried to infuse in the secret corners of my novels but have rarely encountered in real life. Because our nation is stupid and Hollywood is coarse, there is no one to tell us of the deep and extraordinary beauty of older women. I now see them all around me and am filled with a fierce joy that one of them has come to live in my house.
The president of the College of Charleston, Alex Sanders, married us in the gardens surrounding his lovely eighteenth-century mansion, where John James Audubon once taught a class in ornithology. My father had just died, and our children from various marriages over the course of our sloppily lived lives were visiting our island house for their summertime breaks. There was no time even to think about a honeymoon. Our lives were busy, disjointed, American. No one told my generation that none of our children would ever grow up, that they would be forever discontented, underemployed, and woebegone. We share seven children and six grandchildren between us, and our hands are constantly full. Still, Sandra deserved a honeymoon, and we began a long dialogue about where it should be.
It amazed me that she had never seen the Pacific Ocean and, though she had traveled to London twice, had never drifted over to continental Europe, where our language is put out to pasture. Not to have traveled widely seemed unlucky to me, but not to have seen Italy was heartbreaking. My own heart has been shaped like a boot since I lived in the city of Rome for three years in the faraway eighties. If you cannot find happiness in Italy, I told Sandra, then I do not think you can find it in Eden.
We plan our honeymoon in Umbria, a part of Italy where I have never spent a night, and on the flight over, I fear I have erred greatly, perhaps tragically. I tell my new wife I should have taken her to Venice, that gondola-blessed city that looks as if it were carved by swans from ice. If not Venice, then immovable, Tiber-cut Rome, which I could walk through blindfolded; I know those beloved and noisy streets so well. Then there is the incomparable Amalfi coast. And how could I leave out Florence or unknowable Siena or the Alpine majesty of Lake Como? Then I relax and put my trust in the simple mystery that Italy has never let me down, never refused to lay its dazzling treasures at my feet.
You go to Tuscany because you must; you go to Umbria because you can. It is the province in Italy you travel to when you want the country itself to enter the pores of your skin after you have grown weary with sites and endless churches and surly crowds moving through the taut, sovereign air of museums. Umbria is Italy turned inward, its prayer to itself.
We stay at the Palazzo Terranova, a sublime eighteenth-century restoration, recently opened, that looks like the castle you always hoped Cinderella got to live in with the prince. A British couple, Sarah and Johnny Townsend, run the palazzo, which I predict will soon be famous all over the world. Above the hotel, a footpath cut into the crest of the mountain by the Etruscans themselves winds its way to a small hill town three miles away. The walk is breathtaking. Sandra and I tell each other we are in the best place in the world to be on a honeymoon.
The view from our room, which looks down on time-shaped olive groves, three lakes nestled like freshwater pearls in the landscape, and a ruin that makes the vineyards near the village of Ronti seem noble and necessary, appears as an untroubled dream that one mountain had of many others, as though time itself could come to rest in these valleys.
Since Sandra has never seen an olive tree, we walk the precipitous road that winds its way from the palazzo to the village. Halfway down the mountain, we hear a car coming from behind at warp speed. I turn to Sandra and say, “I haven’t told you about Italian drivers yet, have I?”
“Better do it quick,” she says, and suddenly the small car is over the blind ridge that separates us. Sandra and I hug an outcropping of rock. The driver sees us and squeals to a dramatic stop. The woman who brought our breakfast that morning, Piera Menardi, leaps out of the car: “Oh, Mister Johnny and Miss Sarah will not like that I have killed t
wo of our guests. This is for sure.”
Earlier that morning, I observed a scene that made me fall madly in love with the richly good-humored Piera. To get a recalcitrant worker to help her with some heavy lifting, she pulled out a picture of herself in a bikini on an Adriatic beach in 1967. She showed him the picture. It is almost a pleasure to be run off the road by such a woman thirty-two years later, her beauty still a pleasant, inmost thing.
Piera drives off, imperiling every living creature she encounters, and we descend toward the olive groves and approach a marvelous ruin of a farming village where remnants of tobacco-curing sheds remind us both of our own roots in the Deep South. I gaze at olive trees hundreds of years old, loving the silver-headed shimmer of their wind-tossed branches, and think, What is more beautiful or useful than an olive tree? What is prettier than a bowl of green olives or the molten green of the first pressing of extra virgin olive oil looking, in cut-glass cruets, like liquid jade? For a souvenir of our honeymoon, we take a single small branch as both memento and pledge to each other, then walk back to the hotel, perched above us like a bird of prey the color of fire.
The next day, the hotel’s chef, Patrizio Cesarini, offers to give us a tour of his hometown, Città di Castello. As we board the chef’s little Fiat, I tell Sandra that she is lucky she has relatives who are native to Talladega, Alabama, where one of the most famous NASCAR racetracks is located, for she is about to feel like a NASCAR racer herself.
Then Patrizio is off, careening down the mountain at such a precipitous rate it makes Piera look like a high school driving instructor. We travel at cheetahlike speeds even through small medieval alleyways. When he hits the autostrada, it simply feels like space travel. When we reach Patrizio’s hometown, Sandra, ashen and shaken, says that she thinks she has never traveled at such speed, even in an airplane. I say, “He was slow. Wait until we ride with a Calabrian. They get faster as you move south in Italy.”
Patrizio now walks us languorously through the ancient, hidden-away parts of his town, leading the way in a happy bracelet of “cíaos,” for he knows almost everyone he passes. When I ask him to tell us the differences, if there are any, between Umbrians and Tuscans, he answers cheerfully, “It is very easy. We are the best. They are the worst,” admirably summing up why we are at the tail end of the bloodiest, most chillingly fratricidal century in the history of mankind.
Once we reach the market, Patrizio moves through it like a perfumer gathering wildflowers in a bee-struck field. Sandra moves through it with the astonished, mouthwatering appreciation of a rookie in the folkways of Italy.
At an outdoor salumeria, Patrizio orders prosciutto for the meal that night. “See the motion,” he tells us as a young man cuts razor-thin slices from the top of the cured ham. “That is called ‘playing the violin.’ It is very difficult to master. I have mastered it.” The young man lifts a piece of meat in the air to let us see the sunlight flow through it like some odd and flawless merger of paper and flesh.
We wander from stall to stall, the food so fresh that the smell of the earth itself is the strongest, most assertive odor in the marketplace until we pass the store that specializes in the sale of local white truffles. The odor of truffles is as distinctive as the giveaway scent of marijuana. It enlarges the air around itself and gives you some idea of what a tree must smell like to itself. I have never quite forgiven American forests for their shameless inability to produce truffles. When I see Patrizio enter the shop and purchase a small, knobby truffle for that night’s pasta, I want to kiss him on the lips but hesitate for fear the gesture may be misinterpreted.
It is a pleasure to watch a Southern farm girl wander about an Italian food market, surrounded by the abundance taken from the countryside. I follow as Patrizio and Sandra inspect great albino-faced cauliflowers, eggplant displays that look like a rack of bowling balls, porcini mushrooms the size of kittens, the cool anise-smelling fennels that always look like failed cacti to me, and the mounds of huge, brilliantly yellow peppers that make their space look like the entrance to a gold mine. Blood oranges from Sicily are sliced open to reveal exactly what shade of dripping scarlet is inside. When I reach to taste a sprig of mint, a fierce old Italian woman, who probably was part of the crowd that murdered Mussolini, slaps my hand firmly and wags a gnarled finger at me. Her finger looks truffly which somehow pleases me.
Sandra tastes grapes, arugula, oregano, spring onions, plum tomatoes, each time turning to me and shaking her head. I do not have to ask what she is thinking. It is this: Food tastes better in Italy than anywhere else in the world.
As we leave this deep-throated market, its musk a nosegay of aromas, we pause at the fishmonger’s, where Patrizio studies a tank of slithering freshwater eels netted that same morning from Lake Trasimeno. More amazing still, the woman behind the counter prods one of the oceangoing crustaceans that the Italians call canocchie, tasty creatures that appear to be a cross between a shrimp and a praying mantis. She prods it again, and it moves—in landlocked Umbria, it moves. Among Italians, the love of freshness is a form of both spontaneity and discipline.
But bold Patrizio is in a hurry now, and he marches us past an ancient tower that is made of stacked stone with no cement at all. It is called the Torre Rotonda and is the pride of Città di Castello. Patrizio tells me that he feels as if he owns the tower. He does now, but Sandra and I know that the Torre Rotonda will wait him out and one day reclaim its title from Patrizio. We “ciao” our way back through the old city, then rocket our way back into the green hills of Umbria for what will be a fantastic meal. My wife, in utter terror, does not open her eyes a single time on the trip back to the hotel.
Over the next few days, Sandra and I drift through hill towns we had never heard of. In the lentil-happy town of Monterchi, Italy reaches up, striking quick as an adder, and grabs us by the throat. In what looks like a minor chapel serving a monastery across the street, we encounter Piero della Francesca’s breathtaking painting Madonna del Parto, the famous “Pregnant Madonna.” I had read about it in art history books but could not believe such a masterpiece had not been relocated to one of the grander Italian cities. It is the most serene portrait of Mary I have ever seen, granting new meaning to the very idea of serenity. Its discovery, in the tomb of a nobleman a long time after its rendering, has brought pride and joy and many art lovers to this town. Six hundred years later, the painting still shimmers with the genius of the artist. As I stand before it, I think of what it must have been like to be a man of genius, godstruck in his native Umbria, painting a portrait of the woman he considered the mother of God, carrying that God inside her. This is what art should be.
“This,” I say to my wife, “is your honeymoon gift.”
From our hotel, we walk along the Etruscan ridge to an exquisite hill town called Monte Santa Maria Tiberina and try to put the unstressed, unpurchasable beauty of this place into words. Both of us are novelists and believe that words can do anything. The stones from which the town’s houses are built have had their color bled out from them by time itself. Sandra says that the town is so lovely, its residents should be allowed to make only music boxes or perfume bottles. When it begins to rain, we seek shelter in Oscari, the only bar or store in town. Oscari himself, a man of grace and elegance, serves us cappuccino. Preparing it, he looks like a priest at Mass. There are pictures of his son, a soccer star, on the walls; the taste of that cappuccino—perfetto. That taste is Italy in a cup, my honeymoon in a cup, at Oscari in a hill town in the rain.
We have come to our last hill town, and our honeymoon nears its end in a piazza in the gemlike town of Citerna. We have said the things to each other that we needed to say, made all the promises we needed to make. But we stand overlooking a valley with farmhouses and palazzi of infinite age staring coldly back at us. This town seems conceived by waterless Venetians driven out of their city and forced to seek refuge in the hills. The colors of the stones puzzle because age has formed them and we have no equivalent in our American voca
bulary to name them, our culture is still so new and shiny. These stones are the color of bruised fruit, I start to say, or the shade of some rough white wine. But another house is darker, an amber bracelet perhaps, and others are the shade of palominos or horseshoe crabs. I catch myself writing in my head again instead of living in the moment of sunset in the Umbrian hills on the last day of the first honeymoon I have ever taken.
In that piazza in Citerna, our honeymoon ended, and our accidental life together had its Umbrian beginning.
FAVA BEANS AND PECORINO • SERVES 4
2 pounds fresh unshelled fava beans (as young as possible) Olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon (or 1 Roasted Lemon, page 51)
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
8 ounces Pecorino, cut into small pieces (approximately the size of the favas)
1. Shell the beans; you should have about 2 cups. Blanch the beans in a pot of boiling water to loosen their skins, about 1 minute. Drain in a colander. The beans should slip right out of their skins.
2. Transfer the beans to a mixing bowl and drizzle with a little olive oil. Add the lemon juice and toss with salt and pepper to taste. Fold the Pecorino cheese into the fava beans and serve.
PORK AND ROSEMARY RAGÙ My passion for all things Italian began with my two Italian roommates my sophomore year at The Citadel, Bo Marks and Mike Devito. The name Marks inspires no special vision of Italy, but Bo’s immigrant grandparents carried the surname Miercovincici (“mark of the winemakers”) to the gatekeepers on Ellis Island. They entered into Manhattan with the Americanized moniker Marks. Mike Devito considered that this capitulation to the authorities brought great shame to Bo’s family, who should have insisted on the right to keep their Italian name. Through them I would find myself immersed in the lives of two Italian-American families. Bo-Pig and Mike-Swine had learned that none of the other freshmen in “R” company wanted to room with me, so they came to my room after exams to invite me to room with them our sophomore year. They embraced me and called me “paisan.” I had no idea what a paisan was, but I knew I wanted to be one. Of course, Mike-Swine and Bo-Pig were the models for Mark Santoro and Pig Pignetti in my novel The Lords of Discipline.
