The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

by Marlena de Blasi

  There’s a fine old grey stone crock I’ve filled with a mousse of goat cheese, butter, Cognac and unshy turns of the pepper mill, and which I’d set to ripen in the back of my armoire at home several days ago. We’ll roast walnuts at the last moment and warm the walnut-cornmeal focaccie I baked this morning. I’ve cooked the duck at home. Slow-braised duck. Very slowly braised duck. This we will rewarm over the fire along with a pan of potatoes roasted with butter and thyme. There’s another bread for that dish, one enriched with a few spoonsful of the duck pan juices, which render the crumb tender and moist, as though it’s already been smeared with fine savoury fat. Even tonight’s dolce will have benefited from its day or so of rest: a cornmeal cake made with white wine and olive oil. And just before we serve the duck, we’ll set to warm by the hearth a bowl of blood oranges sautéed in salted caramel dark as molasses, the red flesh of the oranges and their juices, the nearly burnt-sugar intensity of the caramel saved from cloy by the tenuous crunch of salt. ‘Una cena ricca,’ Miranda says; a rich supper. Nearly every dish made with butter. There is amnesty from the tribe’s butter rancour since once a year, maybe twice and only when the weather is turning cold, one of the farm wives brings butter to the Saturday market, kilo loaves of it tied in kitchen towels and piled in a bushel basket lined with asphodel leaves.

  We take stock of what’s done, what is still to be done. We set the table. Gilda says she’ll go home to bathe and change and be back at half-past six. I want to do the same but I can tell that Miranda would like company and so I content myself with a quick hands-and-face wash in the kitchen sink. A swipe of Russian Red across my lips, I brush bitter chocolate on my eyelids and draw a thin black Cleopatra line close to my lashes and out toward my temples. I unbraid my hair, gather all the tight waves the plaits have made into a chignon. I go to sit by the fire where Miranda waits.

  •

  ‘You two are so much alike. Deadpan as la Gioconda, both of you. Skin white as the dying Camille’s, your faces with those jutting bones, chins square as a warrior queen’s, I wouldn’t do battle with either one of you despite those voices all whispery. Your mouths are different though, yours a full-blown peony, hers a rose, just come into bud.’ It’s clear that Miranda much prefers the rose just come into bud to the peony. ‘Ninuccia wears the guise of harpy but she’s all butter inside. Paolina is pure butter. You and Gilda could be sisters.’ Miranda nods to the glass of wine she’s poured for me and left on the hearth stone.

  ‘I suppose. Sometimes even we notice what’s alike about us, tell one another so. Still, our lives, some things in common but … more contrast than sameness, Gilda and I.’

  ‘I think it’s only the trappings that are contrasted. Time and place. A few circumstances, maybe. No matter, though, the two of you are built of the same stuff. Even the way you dress. Your long skirts and your old-lady shoes, boots made more for combat than for walking the meads. Gilda mostly does her own sewing, though. One dress or one skirt for each season; I’ve never known her to have more. She even sews her underthings, freshwater pearls smaller than grains of carnaroli edging her nightdresses. She makes one for me on my birthday every year. Wide as a tent but still feminine. ‘How long have you known her?’

  ‘She was fifteen when she came to live in Orvieto. She was born in 1953, so forty-one years have passed since the day she appeared at the back door of my sister’s forno. Giorgia and Flavio used to bake for a living, did you know that?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘It’s one thing for a fifteen-year-old to set off alone, to escape from dire straits, real or perceived. Real, in Gilda’s case. It’s quite another to bolt with three children in tow, essentially abducted ones. There she was, toting one baby on her chest, the others secured by their wrists to ropes she’d looped onto her belt, a cardboard suitcase in either hand. I repeat, she was fifteen, Gilda was.

  ‘It’s a hundred times I’ve heard my sister tell the story of Gilda’s unexpected arrival: “Signora Giorgia? I’m, I’m … It’s me. I’m Gilda.” Giorgia telephoned to tell me that I’d best come to town, she said there was a surprise, four surprises. I wept that day for all the times I’d kept myself from weeping. I wept for those babies, for Gilda, how beautiful was Gilda that day. I wept for Nilo. I wept for his son, I wept for l’altra, the other one. I wanted to scoop up all the babies in the world that day. I wanted to rock them and feed them. Jesumaria, era un pianto atavaco. A barbaric weeping. Ancestral, primal.’

  I place my hand on Miranda’s wet face, one cheek, then the other. I pat her tears onto my face.

  ‘An Etruscan rite. They having believed tears to be the blood of the soul. Never to be wasted.’

  ‘The Etruscans used to wear tiny bottles around their necks, catch the tears in them.’

  ‘Yes, well, since I didn’t happen to have a tear bottle … Gilda has told me the story. Pieces of it. I would never ask about the parts I don’t understand, the ones she passes over.’

  ‘That’s what I mean when I say the two of you are alike. At ease with shadows. Me, I want to know everything. Or tell me nothing at all.’

  ‘What about … Well, you don’t know so much about me.’

  ‘You being foreign, well, you must, perforce, remain in the realm of the exotic and I’m content for you to stay there. Besides, I may not know so much about you, yet I know you – yourself – very well.’

  I think she does but I don’t say so.

  Miranda continues, ‘But Gilda, she’s tight as a morning glory at twilight.’

  ‘It’s because even she doesn’t know. About herself, I mean. Her mother was called Magdalena. Did you know her?’

  ‘I did. She and Giorgia and I were together from the scuola materna straight through until Magdalena went to live with her aunt in Rome. She was, maybe, fourteen. Lovely. Tall, smooth dark hair like an Indian, prettier than us and timid as a lamb until she began to sing. Lord, what a voice.’

  ‘Puccini. Ciocio-san. Gilda says when her mother wasn’t singing from Madam Butterfly, Callas was. Either the mother or the phonograph.’

  ‘From what I understand, more did Gilda grow up hearing her mother’s weeping. Gilda still suffers from her mother having loved a man more than she loved her.’

  ‘You mean, Gastone. Her father.’

  ‘Maybe he was. It’s just as likely he wasn’t.’

  ‘Is that a conjecture Gilda shares with you?’

  ‘As you said, Gilda knows less of the story of her parents than most of us do. Or think we do. All she’s had to go on is a gathering of trifles.’

  I sip my wine, stand up to poke at the fire. I won’t let Miranda see my eyes. She doesn’t need to, though. Very softly she says, ‘Now I’ve gone and struck that tender chord of yours again, haven’t I? I’m a clumsy old thing, Chou … I wasn’t thinking about …’

  I turn to her then, bend to put my arms about her. My gesture is awkward, embarrassing both of us. I go again to stand by the fire.

  After a while she says, “Leering like a chorus of shades”, we all have questions. Save small hard evidences, all any of us know is what others let us know. And so we’re wont to shape our stories to suit ourselves, pass them down as history. Over time, inventions become memories. And we tack our own onto the invented memories of those who came before us.’

  Comforted by her use of the collective, I say, ‘I sometimes feel a kind of nostalgia for the little scenes I’ve invented over the years, little fablesque vignettes to play in the dark. Short delicious scenes in which I’m the heroine or …’

  ‘We all do that. But Gilda … her apocrypha she keeps stashed in a biscuit tin. The heirlooms that furnish that rattrap of a house of hers she’s bought or bartered in the markets or the antichità. The portrait of Gastone that hangs in her saloncino, for instance.’

  ‘And those books with the green leather covers that were her mother’s?’

  ‘Maybe so. And her Christmas dress. That blue velvet thing. That was supposed to have been Magdalena’s wedding
dress, though I know better who’s dress it once was. And there’s the gold pocket watch that she bought in a shop in Sorano because it’s engraved with her own initials, which she says were also the initials of her maternal grandfather. A sepia portrait of him in a gold frame, wholly dissonant with her otherwise frugal decor, hangs over her hearth. She got herself a father, a grandfather, gave herself a past. The chasm that separates lies from invention is vast. Gilda escapes, fantasises; she does not lie.’

  Shifting her gaze from the fire to me, she says, ‘What does it matter? The portraits, the books, the dress, the biscuit tin full of husks. They may be as much Gilda’s history as someone else’s. Who can say? As one wanders toward the end, time dwindling always faster, I can tell you that not much of what was or wasn’t, who was there or who fled or … Jesumaria, it all becomes a smudge. Only children never forget. I am loath to see Gilda using up her days in grieving for interludes she can’t fill up with gospel.’

  ‘I’ve never thought her dreaminess to be a kind of grieving,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it is. Romantic. Gilda is a romantic. Byronic. She trusts pain more than joy. Doesn’t she say that all the time? Pain is more loyal than joy. It lasts longer, stays close forever.’

  ‘Yes, always close, pain is, but no less close than delight, both always nuzzling nearby. But we’re apt to give more attention to pain, as though we were partial to it. Like being partial to a wayward child, never minding the one who’s good as bread and whom you haven’t given a thought to since the day before yesterday.’ Miranda closes her eyes, shakes her head, pinches her upper lip, her preferred gesture of dismay. Her eyes still closed, she says, ‘Girded, expectant, I suppose we tend to steel ourselves for tragedy. I worry that Gilda …’

  ‘I have never known a person less girded for tragedy than Gilda. She wears pain like skin and yet all she sees is beauty. All she lets in under that skin of pain is beauty. And, like a child, she’s roused by whim …’

  Miranda opens her eyes, laughs softly, repeating: whim, whim. She looks at me, says, ‘I’ll tell you about one of Gilda’s whims. It happened about a year ago by now. She gave a five-hundred-euro note to a violinist who’d set up on the corso in the rain. The whole of her earnings for a month, that five hundred euros. He played Paganini.’

  ‘Well, yes, there’s proof that she … How do you know? About the violinist and the …’

  ‘He was a student at Santa Cecilia. I forget his name now, his first name, but he’s a Baraldo, kin to Giacinta Baraldo …’

  ‘The egg lady in the market?’

  ‘The very one. This young man had come to Orvieto for a cousin’s funeral. He busks all the time in Rome; most of the students do. Not so many of them are their daddy’s spoiled little boys. That day he ran straight to Giacinta, showed her the note, said it was a woman, blonde, wearing a fedora. Giacinta understood which blonde, which fedora. The boy tried to give the note to Giacinta but she, knowing Gilda as she does, assured him that the note was meant to be his, told him that he’d given the lady in the fedora the greater gift. Of course Giacinta was right.’

  ‘Only beauty matters to Gilda. She chases it, she …’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Gilda does.’

  ‘What does Gilda do?’

  ‘Ah, sei qui? You’re here?’ Miranda rises to take a bottle Gilda proffers as she steps from behind the bedsheet curtain of the kitchen.

  ‘A private aperitivo for the cooks to while away the time before supper,’ Gilda tells her merrily. ‘I stopped by to see Ninuccia and found Paolina there, the two of them working on persimmon jam. I caught a lovely whiff of quince from the cantina kitchen.’

  ‘Cotognata. Quince paste. Our dolce for next Thursday, no doubt,’ Miranda says, fetching a corkscrew from a pocket in her apron, another treasure living there with The Gypsy Kings among the herbs and weeds.

  ‘They’ll wait until eight-thirty for Pierangelo to return from wherever he went. Rome, I think. If he’s later than that, they’ll come along without him. The evening being wonderful, I decided to leave my car at Ninuccia’s and walk up the creek road. That’s why I came in through the back doorway … I apologise if I seemed stealthy …’

  This evening Gilda’s costume is a black wool, ankle-length dress, the lace-up, thick, high-heeled shoes we call le Francesine, a long silk scarf, which she also uses as a shawl. She’s pulled the battered grey fedora so low on her brow it flaunts the whisky eyes, and her hair, still damp from its washing and, as much, from her hike along the creek road, curls against the high flush of her cheeks. Sometimes she wears a choker of baroque pearls but tonight her neck is bare. When she wears the necklace, she touches it, adjusts it, pats it, calls attention to it, always finding a moment to slip in a word about her mother. Magdalena’s pearls. Gilda doesn’t need jewels. ‘I didn’t mean to …’ Gilda’s voice trails off as I shake my head, smiling at her, pulling a chair from the table near to the fire for her. Gilda sits, tucks one foot under her, letting the other dangle, holds out both her hands to the calice of red, which Miranda brings to her. There is a single thin crystal wineglass in Miranda’s armoire, remnant from some other era. It’s only Gilda who drinks from it. Beauty matters to Gilda.

  Gilda takes a long quaff of the wine, asks, ‘And so what is it that Gilda does?’

  ‘I was telling Chou what I’ve already told you …’

  ‘That I’m closed tight as a morning glory at twilight?’

  ‘That and …’

  ‘I’ve always loved that image. It pleases me as much as it suits me. It’s rather pretty, don’t you agree?’ Gilda looks at me. Willing me, I think, to join her in deflecting Miranda from a harangue.

  ‘It’s lovely. And maybe apt once in a while but …’

  Gilda cuts me off, says, ‘Yes, once in a while or often or even always … It’s who I am.’

  Now she looks at Miranda who says, ‘I’m taking a mother’s liberties, aren’t I, Gilda? Fretting over you. An ineffable habit by now since, for a grand part of my life, I’ve loved you as my own. As has Giorgia. We still quarrel over you, over who is closest to you, who has more rights to you. Over which one of us you love best.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Not so difficult to glean. When I was young I would profit from your rivalry, nimbly provoke it, but, by now … Jesumaria, Miranda, it’s as though we’ve all arrived at more or less the same age and … well, I just wish that you … that you would fret less. Un’anima solitaria, a lone soul, a rogue woman. More than I’m some furled flower, maybe that’s who I am.’

  ‘Could be that. More, I think, that you’ve worked hard and long at contriving solitariness. How perfectly splendid a job you’ve done, Gilda. Your raw materials were formidable, I admit. Let’s see … You must not have been a loveable child or else your mother and father would not have abandoned you. Horrid word, abandon. Even the sound it makes is hollow. Surely it was your fault that they went away. And if a child is not loveable to her own, how can she be loveable to anyone else? A pariah. A scrawny little creature not even the nuns wanted. Time passes, pages flutter and our Gilda is always more persuaded to this reality. It hurts so deeply, this reality does, that Gilda invents others. Though these invented realities comfort her, that other one – that truth which she’s buried under the inventions – is the one that haunts her, scrapes its claws across her heart at three in the morning. And so our Gilda stays mostly separate from the world, wandering forth only guardedly. Suspiciously. Running back to sit by her fire, riffling through a tin box of memories.’

  Gilda rises, takes up the bottle of wine and refills her glass, a metal glitter in her eyes, now more gold than whisky. She turns to Miranda.

  ‘And you would have me do otherwise? Miranda, do you understand that I hardly know who I am? Who was this Pepucci, this father of mine? Was he my father? If so, did he wonder about me? Does he? As I do about him. And she, Magdalena, I never knelt beside her, never said goodbye. What I mean is that I never saw her dead.
I’m certain of that. No funeral, no people who came to mourn or to comfort. No grave to visit. Why did the aunt tell me this story about my mother having gone to live with the angels? Why did she lie to me or did she lie to me? Was it that Magdalena was no longer able to tolerate life without Pepucci and so she ran away to find him? But why didn’t she take me with her? And did she find him? If she did, why didn’t they send for me? If she didn’t find him, why didn’t she come back? Because I wasn’t his? Sometimes I think I may not even have been hers. The truth, what is it?’

  ‘A shifting thing. A liar. Even truth lies,’ Miranda says, her voice hushed.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, there is no whole truth and if there was, one would never tell it. Not the all of it. Still …’

  Now, close to shouting, Miranda says, ‘You want – no, you demand – precisely what you can never have: a flower-strewn, starlit road to your past. Here’s a truth for you, Gilda: your case is hardly a particular one yet the whole of your sympathy you keep for yourself, checking your wounds, poking at them like stigmata, just to be certain they’re still there. What do you know about Magdalena’s past? Maybe she couldn’t leave a path flowered and lit for you because she, herself, never had one. So many of us never have.’

  Miranda becomes quiet then, pats her upper lip with the ends of her apron, closes her eyes, presses the apron on her tears. The apron still in her hands, her face contorted, she says, ‘Have you ever thought how you would fare as a mother?’

  ‘No. Why would I?’

  ‘Empathy. I suppose that would be a reason …’

  ‘So I could shift my pity to Magdalena, away from myself?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’m not so generous.’

  ‘Not a question of generosity but of fear. You fear you’d fare no less well than any other mother. Mothers do wrong. They must, perforce.’

  Gilda rises, goes to Miranda, crouches before her, rests her head sideways on Miranda’s knees, still wearing her fedora. Miranda pulls off the hat, covers Gilda’s face with it. A stick in the wheels of the discourse. Gilda sits up then, smashes the fedora down low on her brow.