‘And so what is it that Gilda does? That’s where I came in and you’ve still to tell me.’ She looks to me, then back to Miranda, stands, hands on hips. Softly she says, ‘It’s Iacovo. All this is about Iacovo, isn’t it? I didn’t understand until …’
‘Which Iacovo? Our Iacovo?
As though I am sitting in the upper tiers behind Goliath in a top hat trying to follow a Chekov play recited in Portuguese, I’m lost. Neither notice me or the question.
Miranda is saying, ‘He’ll be here again this evening, I don’t know whether you knew that or not. I mean … Gilda, he’s …’
‘Why should it matter if I knew or didn’t know that Iacovo would be here … We’re a group and all are welcome without official announcements or warnings.’
‘Perhaps he misinterpreted your expressions of affection.’
‘And which misinterpreted expressions were those?’
‘When he brought the wood. The invitation to …’
‘It was raining and cold last Saturday and nearly one when he finished unloading and stacking and so I did the normal thing, inviting him to lunch.
‘You will remember Gilda that he’s been grieving for half a decade. Iacovo’s social machinery has always been somewhat antiquated, but since Fabiana’s death it’s been shut down. You’re the first person – no, the first woman – who seems to … to interest him. You’re both still young and …’
‘I see. We’re both still young, both without partners and so what else is there to do but to take up with one another? That’s the thinking, is it?’
‘You’re afraid.’
‘Of?’
‘Being abandoned. Again. You won’t risk it.’
‘You insist on that word, Miranda. You insist so fiercely that one might begin to think it’s you who aches with it.’
‘Aches with what?’
‘Abandonment.’ Gilda’s voice is soft, her thrust delicate. Deliberate.
‘Of course, it’s my ache, too. Pacifico. Fundamental. The undisputed and grand commonality of which I was trying to convince you a few moments ago. Otherwise known as broken trust. You know my story well enough … Better, I think sometimes, than I know yours.’
Gilda rises, busies herself with the table settings, moving things this way and that a centimetre or two and then back to where they were. She begins to say something but Miranda speaks over her.
‘I am loathe to think of you alone in that burrow you call a house …’
The two are back on safe ground, the parrying strong and equal again.
‘And would you name this place a palazzo?’
‘This is my play house.’
‘You’re making me out to be pitiful and …’
‘Not pitiful. Not that. Niggardly, I’d call it. Concocting supper from roots and berries and wandering among the oaks like some druid. When was the last time you dined in a restaurant, bought a new hat, went to the cinema? Put gasoline in your car? I know why you left your quaking old thing at Ninuccia’s this evening. Empty, its tank dry. Your gauge acting up again. And while I’ve got your attention, what’s happened to your will to work?’
‘I’ve worked all my life.’
‘You worked until you were fifty, which is not all your life.’
‘And what do you call those four or five hours a day I spend at Bernandino’s?’
‘You should be doing other than scrubbing that gargoyle’s noble bathrooms.’
‘Miranda, that’s unfair. You know very well that I work in the gardens and sometimes help with the housekeeping. I bake for them. I do what there is to be done, it’s …’
‘I can’t abide the sight of him roaming the markets in his red velvet slippers and that tweed coat draped about his shoulders, deigning to sniff at a farmer’s tomatoes but not to wish him good day. I know he canes his dog and most likely that addled wife of his. How can you, Gilda, when …’
Miranda stops herself, looks at me, says, ‘Gilda cooked in the scuola materna in Orvieto for years, one of her many incarnations.’
‘Eighteen years. It was the incarnation I loved best.’
‘Gilda and … How many others?’
‘Three.’
‘She and three other women, they cooked divinely for those children. A hundred or so of them …’
‘Eighty, sometimes a few less. Never more than eighty.’
‘Giorgia and I would go to help once or twice a week …’
‘Not in the kitchen. They would help serve and wash up.’
‘No, we were never permitted in the kitchen but we sat with the children, ate with them. Some of the best meals of my life were in that cold, awful basement room of the elementary school. Like no other school lunch I’d ever known, they served handmade pasta and cakes and pastries. Lumachelle with pecorino and prosciutto, tiny ones to fit in their little hands; how they loved those.’
‘The soft anise cookies were their favourites. I’d go from table to table, helping the children cut their food, spooning it up to the few reluctant ones, cajoling, applauding clean plates, measuring muscles. I sang Puccini to them,’ Gilda says. ‘When State funds were diminished and we could no longer shop locally for the kitchen, we were sent boxes of frozen chicken and fish, already fried, powdered eggs and milk, even our bread was frozen, baked who knows when in some commissary kitchen and trucked down the peninsula. Animal feed. I left, took to the woods.’
‘Which brings us back to the present, to …’ Miranda says, but Gilda is heading backwards.
‘Do you really think that my life is, what did you call it, niggardly? No, don’t answer that. Try this: do you really think that the consequence of a life – it’s significance – can be measured by what I wear or how I eat? If I had a new hat and went to dinner, would my life take on more greatness? Would I need a vintage Bentley? Would that do it for you? Or a man? Ah, have I got to the crux, have I …’
Miranda steps in. ‘Iacovo is bright and kind and when he swings his axe to the wood, he could be Ares himself. Wraparound eyes, long as a Greek’s. A man less likely to break a trust I’ve yet to meet. And if he did betray you, well … there’d be another layer of memories to fill up your tin.’
‘Ares, himself.’ Clucking her tongue at Miranda as though to shame her, Gilda aims her gaze at the window pane again, this time prowling after some canker on the scrupulous man with the wraparound eyes. Her fingers tremble as she picks at the knots on the laces of her shoes. She unties the laces, re-ties them with a vengeance. She presses a middle finger to the bridge of her nose. Then, her voice feeble with defeat, she ventures, ‘Iacovo doesn’t even bathe.’
‘Would you truly set up honest sweat as an impediment to getting to know a good man? Draw him a bath some evening, Gilda. Pour him a glass of wine and leave it on the rim of the tub with a slice of soap and one of your clove-smelling candles, why don’t you?’
Miranda’s mordant solution to Iacovo’s presumed antipathy to soap and water causes Gilda to flush from her décolleté to her downcast eyes. To hide the now greater trembling of her fingers she reaches up to push a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hand lights on the old fedora she is still wearing and she removes it, hangs it on the back of her chair, makes an elaborate business of smoothing her hair, a device that enrages her already hot red cheeks. Still not looking at Miranda, Gilda says, ‘He’s younger than I am.’
Miranda throws up her arms, rises clumsily from her chair, adjusts her balance and heads toward the kitchen. She turns back, says, ‘You’re hopeless, Gilda, perverse as a cow who will kick over a full pail of her milk because the milker is wearing mismatched socks. You’re, you’re …’
‘Miranda, wait. What you refuse to understand is that, for me, there’s a … I don’t really know how to explain it … For me there’s a kind of thrill in being alone. In loneliness. Why would you have me risk that? For what, for whom?’
‘I would have you risk it for your own sake, Gilda. I would have you interrupt the daily ravaging of your wounds.
But if you truly find loneliness thrilling, then slam shut the door and draw that tawdry old hank of stuff you call a curtain and take to your bed. I’ll be long gone when you’re finally moved to answer an urgent banging on that door to see that Accident, Destiny and Chance have come to set up in your garden, that they’ve come to taunt and whisper, You’re almost out of time, Gilda … What will you do then?’
‘Sei cattiva,’ she says. ‘You’re evil, Miranda. Why can’t you just let me be?’
Miranda moves to stand very close to where Gilda sits, bends to run her hands down the length of the heavy lanks of her hair, pulls at it and smiles. She bends to kiss a lank of Gilda’s hair. She tells her, ‘It’s that ineffable habit I spoke of a while ago. That I have long loved you as my own.’
Wandering into the kitchen, Miranda pulls the bedsheet curtain across the rod, a sign that she will stay apart for a while. Neither speaking nor looking at one another, Gilda and I stay where we sit. We hear Miranda setting about her evening’s ablutions out in the garden behind the kitchen door where Filiberto has constructed a primitive shower of bits and pieces, loot from his habitual moonlit pillages of reconstruction sites along the deserted private roads. Thick oak planks form its walls, these faced on the inside with marble – black, white and grey. A square of prestigious Verona green marble is the base and a plate-sized showerhead, attached to a rather grand gold-coloured hose, sends down a drenching and never more than lukewarm rain upon the lavish form of the goddess of Buonrespiro. Filiberto has planted blue hollyhocks around the bathing place and painted the same on the outside walls. A brass Moor’s-head knocker, meant for the door of some Englishman’s villa, he’s driven into the stone wall of the rustico to hold her towel. We hear Miranda priming the pump, muttering just loud enough so that her oaths against the lunacy of ‘youth’ reach us. When the water stops, Gilda shouts to Miranda, ‘What did he say that causes you to think he has interest?’
‘What did who say?’ Miranda asks in sing-song.
‘Tell me.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Tell me, Miranda. Please. What did he say?’
Out of the shower now we hear her moving about in the kitchen.
‘Please, Miranda, I …’
Flinging back the bedsheet curtain in a move so brusque it falls half off its hooks, an impudent Victory wrapped in the curtain’s companion sheet stands before us, dripping lavender water onto the stones of the kitchen floor. Plaits loosed, the white skin of her shoulders gleaming from olive oil soap, the blue-black eyes gloating, Miranda says, ‘I want her to have the most beautiful peaches. If you must know, that’s what Iacovo said.’
‘What? Peaches? And for that you think he is …’
‘Think about it, Gilda,’ Miranda says, heaving the wounded curtain back across its rod.
Gilda laughs, calls Miranda daft. She stands up, scrunches the brim of the fedora with both hands, pulls a face. She goes silent then, rips off the hat, letting it fall where it may. She’s flushed again, this time a deeper shade of red.
‘Jesumaria. He was twelve. I was fifteen.
•
As the others begin to arrive, it is a Gilda less demure than usual who steps forward to fuss over them, relieving them of coats and offerings, pouring wine, lighting candles. The colour stays high in her cheeks; the memory of a peach? Her beauty is heightened.
Ninuccia notices. ‘Gilda, you’re lustrous. If I didn’t know better I’d say you were post-coital. Who did you meet on the creek road?’
Wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt, it’s full pleated sleeves and narrow waist trademarks of Crivelli-the-shirtmaker in Viterbo, Iacovo looks up from stacking wood near the hearth. Fastening a fresh blue pinafore over her flowery market dress, tucking her rewoven plaits under a kitchen towel, Miranda goes to sit by the fire where Iacovo is still at work with the wood. Accepting a glass of wine from Gilda, Miranda’s laugh – usually robust – is a thin jet of water splashing in a fountain below a half-opened window.
•
‘I want to know how you cooked that duck. Every step. I even want you to shop with me and then to show me what to do.’
‘Which duck?’ My still-sleepy mind thinks Gilda refers to a specific bird rather than a recipe. It’s very early the next morning and Gilda has telephoned me. Having always left our communications to chance or to Thursdays, it is the first time Gilda has resorted to this urgent form of intercourse.
‘Last night’s duck. I ate it with a spoon it was so tender and …’
‘You don’t need me, Gilda. Just remember how it tasted and then …’
‘No, no, the flavours were too complicated, too …’
‘Complex but not complicated. And the method is long, nothing we can start and finish in a day. It can’t be rushed, that’s the idea of the dish, that it wants nine days and that one’s appetite for it grows and … I’ll write it all out, I’ll …’
‘No. Come here and tell it to me. It will be better if you tell me …’
So unlike Gilda, first a telephone call, then this persistence about a duck. Iacovo. All this must have something to do with him. I begin to laugh.
‘Can I ask you to tell me something in return?’ I say.
She’s laughing, too, knowing where I’m leading her.
‘Not if the something is about Iacovo.’
‘It’s about peaches. And about Iacovo. I’m curious about the peaches. You’re curious about the duck.’
‘Don’t bargain with me. We’ll see. Just meet me at the market, high noon tomorrow, and plan on coming home with me.’
‘Go to Cotigni for Moulard breasts and have some thyme ready. I’ll meet you at your place after lunch.’
•
‘From Cotigni?’
‘Of course. Moulard breasts, just like you said.’
Gilda and I are standing in the single room where Gilda lives. Once a village wash house, it is long but narrow with soaring smoke-blackened beams and a slate floor cracked in places so that little weeds grow up between the stones. There are the remains of a sort of balcony where the clothes were once hung to dry in the winter but mostly the space is all open like a loft. The kitchen end of the room is crowded with an Aga, pre–Second World War, two deep stone sinks and a magnificent oak table recovered from a monastery chapel in Viterbo, a piece that Gilda insists was a mourning table, a bier on which the dead were displayed to their brothers. Miranda says this is another of Gilda’s fantasies, but I wonder. Twelve chairs are placed around the table even though, according to Miranda, Gilda has only three plates. I have never dined in Gilda’s home.
‘Rinsed and dried, the skins scored. Brava. I’ll need a knife to trim this excess,’ I tell her, tearing at the nuggets of yellow fat adhering to the inside of the duck breasts.
‘It’s in the drawer near the stove, right behind you,’ she tells me. In the drawer I find a wooden spoon and a ten-inch Wusthof. ‘Something smaller?’
‘Only my clasp knife,’ she says.
‘This will do.’
I remove the fat, ask Gilda to save it carefully, tell her we’ll need to render it later.
‘Now, where’s the thyme?’
‘Take your choice,’ she says, ‘dried from the hillsides of Amiata, still on its branches, or the meadow kind, which is milder.’ She holds out a basketful of the herb.
‘A little of both.’
I slip the thyme leaves from their branches directly over the skin side of the duck breasts, rub coarse salt over the thyme, blending them together over and into the score marks. I turn the breasts flesh side up and do the same. I grind white peppercorns with whole allspice and repeat the double massage until not a millimetre of the skin and flesh escapes the cure. I place the breasts back in the white china bowl and look about for plastic wrap, which, of course, Gilda does not have. I find a plate of the right diameter to fit tightly inside the bowl and ask Gilda to set it out in the shed where three hens roost and her wood is stacked. When she returns I’m washing
my hands.
‘That’s it for seven days,’ I tell her.
‘What?’
‘I told you it wanted time rather than trouble. All you have to do now is, once a day for seven days, massage in a few more crumbles of thyme – very little – and another pinch of the white pepper–allspice mix. Once a day for seven days. I’ll be back next Saturday and we’ll do the next step. Meanwhile, now it’s your turn. Tell me about the peaches.’
‘Why didn’t you just write that down and …’
‘Because it was you who said, “No. Come here and tell it to me. It will be better if you tell me …”’
‘I suppose I did.’
‘Peaches, Gilda,’ I say, going to fetch the bottle of Terra Vineate I’d earlier placed in her refrigerator, a machine half the size of a hotel bar refrigerator in which I’ve never seen anything but water. ‘Peaches and Iacovo when he was twelve,’ I tell her merrily, but when I turn to her, she flinches, looks at me almost solemnly. Her stare bruises the moment, maybe it humiliates me because all I can think is: these damned Umbrians. I’m forever stepping into their traps. Silent as stones they are until they want to talk. And when they say they want to talk, I settle in, believing they do while they’ve already begun pitching daggers at me for the sin of forced entry into their souls. I fire a solemn stare back at her.
‘Gilda, let’s just drink some wine and, well, it’s hardly necessary that you …’
‘No, no, it’s not that I don’t want to … it’s not that.’ From a wall shelf she takes a Camparisoda tumbler and a lovely cut-crystal goblet, her entire stock of glassware. She sets them on the table.
‘But I can’t tell you about the peaches until … until I tell you of other things. Until I tell you about the farm.’
‘The farm?’
‘If you’re going to interrupt me, I won’t be able to keep things straight. Just listen. Be patient. A story can’t be rushed any more than a duck can. It may want nine days to tell you.’
‘Touché.’
I open the wine and follow Gilda to the other end of the room. To her salotto. As opposed to the bare stone walls of the kitchen end, here she has papered over the stones, bouquets of blown yellow roses tied in red ribbons, the paper peeling, water-stained, smoke-blackened like the beams. A wrought-iron chandelier with three tiers of handmade brownish candles hangs over a single bed, its iron head and foot shaped like a sleigh. Two, maybe three paces from the bed there sits a clawfoot bathtub raised up half a metre on a kind of wooden platform from which extends a thick elbow pipe and a long, thin pipe that trails all the way to the kitchen end of the room, exiting somewhere under the sinks. A wonder of plumbing conceived and executed by Filiberto. There is a wing-backed chair and a hassock. On a square gilt baroque table there is a candlestick lamp with a red shade, a teapot and a cup, and an untidy stack of leather-bound books. Against the small hearth, its fire nearly spent, Gilda has leant a black marble mantle. Over the mantle, hung from a tasselled cord, is a Dutch-school portrait of a man in a red velvet Garibaldi cap. A length of unsewn yellow velvet she’s flung over a butcher’s hook to the side of a many-paned door; both the door and the marble mantle, Gilda once said, are spoils from Filiberto’s Robin-Hood-ish expeditions. Filiberto, shepherd-craftsman-pirate. From a second butcher’s hook near the open door, a haunch of prosciutto swings in the mild December breeze. Every time I have been here, there is always this unexpected ornament, sometimes carved to the bone, other times a fresh, fat one, yet to be cut.
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Page 21
