As friendship grew and affection developed, I was bewildered to find that what Victor most wanted to talk about was food. Aside from our obsessive concern with food during the war, or perhaps because of it, I never gave it any thought. I accepted the pleasure that mealtimes at home always brought as a naturally recurring part of daily life. And if circumstances obliged me to have a panino stuffed with mortadella or prosciutto as my lunch or dinner, I didn’t feel the least bit deprived. Victor, on the other hand, would add to an appreciative description of everything he’d just had for lunch anticipations of what might be available at dinner and declarations on what he’d like to have for lunch the following day. He was powerfully drawn to the seafood of the Romagna coast, whose flavors, during the years he was growing up in America, had survived as a haunting taste memory of his childhood in Italy. He loved the lobsterlike scampi; he adored the small, nutty soles; he smacked his lips over the magnificent flesh of our rombo, turbot; he doted on coda di rospo, monkfish; he learned to eat the spratlike saraghine col bacio, pursing his lips as with a kiss; but what he really lost his head over were the sweet and tender calamaretti fritti, fried whole fresh squid, no bigger than a child’s pinkie from the end of the tentacles to the tip of the sac.
It was through calamaretti that Victor revealed an aspect of his
Summer 1952. In Cesenatico with Victor shortly after we had met
My first evening out with Victor, at Cesenatico’s Grand Hotel, 1952
singular style. One afternoon, we had been sitting on the rocks of the pier at the mouth of Cesenatico’s harbor canal, watching the fishing boats coming in after their night at sea. The sight of the men pulling up fish from the hold to load it into crates for the market, and the spiced scent of the freshly caught fish, stirred in Victor an irresistible longing, notwithstanding it hadn’t been more than two hours since he’d had a substantial lunch. “I have to have a plate of fried calamaretti,” he said. “Now?” “Yes, now, adesso, right away,” he answered. “But,” I pointed out, “it’s the middle of the afternoon, the restaurant isn’t even open, this is Italy, they don’t start serving until eight.” “Oh, there is always someone in the kitchen,” he said. We walked back to his hotel and sat in the empty dining room until a shirt-sleeved waiter, who was setting up tables for that evening’s dinner, came over to ask what we wanted. “Some calamaretti fritti, please,” said Victor sweetly. The man had just enough self-possession not to let his mouth drop open, but his eyebrows rose and his eyes widened. He said that he would find out what could be done and shuffled off to the kitchen. In not too long, a steaming platter of freshly fried calamaretti was on the table.
Many similar exploits, not necessarily limited to restaurants, have taken place throughout our lives, wherever we have been throughout the world. It is not through pushiness, or flattery, or cajolery, or guile that Victor is so successful at pursuing the seemingly unobtainable. What works the spell is that open, candid, direct gaze of his, a disarming smile, and the solid conviction that what he is asking for cannot possibly be a problem for others to give. I passed on to him one of my grandfather Riccardo’s favorite sayings, which Victor has since made his own: “Do you know why frogs don’t have a tail? Because they didn’t ask for it.”
Victor imagines himself to be an innocent, but he is not above a little slyness. He was leaving to go to Venice as the guest of someone he had met on the Andrea Doria, the ill-fated Italian liner on which he had sailed to Europe. On its return across the Atlantic, the beautiful new ship would collide with a freighter and sink off the Long Island coast. “I am going to my room to pack,” Victor said. “Would you like to come and help me?” I went, expecting indeed to be helpful. When I saw how neatly he was folding his shirts, so immaculately that they could have just come out of the shop, and packing a miscellaneous assortment of personal articles, both small and big, thin and bulky, long and short, soft and hard, transforming them into deftly organized flat layers, leaving no hollows, no gaping spaces, I understood that what he wanted me there for was not help, but admiration. It was a seemingly insignificant episode, but one that opened a window into the character of a man who had begun to fascinate me. I learned how important it was for him to be appreciated, although, as I kept learning, he never called attention to his work or his skills, never advertised his accomplishments, never indulged in the slightest bit of self-praise. It was, moreover, my first opportunity to discover how agile his hands were, as agile as his mind.
When Victor left Venice he came back to Cesenatico, returning to me, I was happy to feel. The problem of his finances had since grown large. He had not yet negotiated an allowance from his parents, who were distressed that he hadn’t returned. Fortunately, Italy was astonishingly cheap at the time, and Victor still had some of the money he had saved for the trip, as well as the money he had gotten by cashing in his return trip ticket to the States. There wasn’t enough, however, for him to continue staying at Pino, the restaurant-hotel where he had been boarding. Our house had three small apartments that we rented out for the summer. Summer was over, the apartments were empty, and my mother suggested that Victor could stay there at no cost until he found a solution that allowed him to live in Italy. He would, in any event, have to leave as soon as it grew colder, because the apartment had no heat.
It became a very pleasant, however temporary, arrangement. Victor was extraordinarily kind and thoughtful toward my parents. He loved my mother’s cooking. One of his favorites was a veal dish of hers that she called messicani. They were little veal roll-ups, stuffed with pancetta and grated Parmigiano, sautéed and served with a fresh, light tomato sauce. He also loved Papi’s wines, his Sangiovese and particularly his Albana. Albana is a delicately sweet wine, which anyone reading this might think is not appropriate to drink with food. Yet, not so far back in history, all wine was sweet, and discriminating palates found it quite congenial with all manner of food. So did Victor. He found it so congenial, in fact, that one time, having drunk a pitcherful of it, he rose abruptly from the table after lunch and said he had to take a walk to clear his head. When he didn’t return after a few hours, I went to look for him. I was walking along the pier of the main canal where the fishing boats dock when one of the fishermen called to me. “Signorina? If you are looking for the American, he is sleeping right there.” He had climbed onto the deck of one of the anchored boats and was sleeping off the Albana, curled over a pile of nets.
Victor’s parents had been hoping he would change his mind and come back to New York, but he persuaded them that he was serious about staying in Italy to write. He obtained a small allowance from them and began to look for a cheap place to live. Old friends of his parents from before the war, the Lippas, who lived in Bologna, had a wine farm on a beautiful hill called Bertinoro. It was near enough to Cesenatico that from its peak, looking east on a very clear day, you could detect a deep blue line at the horizon’s edge, a slice of the Adriatic sea. Mrs. Lippa told Victor that there was an extra room at her farm in the caretaker’s house, and he could stay there indefinitely. She cautioned him, however, that the facilities were primitive. There was no electricity, only kerosene lamps; no running water—it had to be pumped up ice-cold from the well; and no heat, just wood-burning terra-cotta stoves. Victor was delighted. “I always wanted to live in the eighteenth century,” he said.
He never did get to do any writing in Bertinoro. He slipped immediately into the leisurely life of the country squire, walking in the woods, reading, observing the winemaking operation that was taking place that fall, and consuming the excellent meals that the caretaker’s wife cooked. He was also moved to try his own hand at cooking. He bought a copy of Ada Boni’s Il Talismano della Felicità, the cookbook that became my first reference when, shortly after we were married, we moved to New York and I began to cook. Like many novices, he was drawn to intricate productions, which he invited me up to Bertinoro to try.
Having seen large snails in the vineyard, he was inspired to try an Ada Boni recipe
for them, Snails Roman Style with Anchovies and Tomatoes. The first step, once you have collected the snails, requires you to starve the poor animals; in the second, you must persuade them to abandon the protection of their shells by heating them up in a pan of water; several other elaborate rinsing and cooking procedures follow. They may well have been delicious, but I can’t really remember the taste and I have never had them that way again.
Another of Victor’s elaborate productions out of his Ada Boni was Sweetbreads with Fresh Wild Mushrooms. Following instructions, he first soaked the sweetbreads in several changes of lukewarm water to bleed them white; he then blanched them for a few minutes in simmering water so that he could subsequently more easily peel away the membrane that enclosed them; he sautéed them with butter, chopped onions, and prosciutto, and simmered them in broth that he had made with veal bones and meat scraps the butcher had given him; when they were done, he removed and sliced the sweetbreads, boiled down the remaining broth, deglazed the pan with Marsala, and poured the pan juices over the meat. The fresh porcini mushrooms he made separately, cooked in olive oil with garlic and parsley. It took longer than he had surmised, turning into something between a very late lunch and an early dinner, but it was worth waiting for, a delectable concoction that I would love to make myself today, if only I could find fresh sweetbreads in my Florida markets.
Victor came frequently down the hill to Cesenatico. Once he climbed out of a taxi that overflowed with dahlias. He explained that he had found a woman selling them by the roadside and he had bought all she had. We took lovely walks in the boulevards of Cesenatico, which in the off-season we had all to ourselves. He held me close to him and would frequently stop to kiss me, a very unconventional thing to do then in a provincial Italian town, and illegal to boot. The newspapers would publish reports of kissing couples being stopped and fined. But it felt wonderful, and I didn’t care.
A letter came from New York. “Your father is sick,” his mother wrote. “Please come home.” His father had pneumonia. Victor packed and left, promising he would be back. I had hoped we would have our first Christmas together that year, but I spent it instead pushing ahead on the work for my second degree, the one in biology. In the spring, when Victor returned, he went to Florence. He had visited there the previous year and thought it would be the most promising place to settle down and write. He traveled by train from Paris, carrying with him in the compartment six boxes of books and a tall painting, a nude self-portrait that a woman friend had brought to the boat for him when he sailed from New York. When the train crossed the border into Italy, the customs inspector asked Victor what he was carrying in those boxes. “Books,” he said. “Books? Please let me see them.” The inspector pulled some out at random and began carefully riffling the pages, finding it hard to believe that they were not concealing contraband. Why else would someone travel in a crowded railway compartment with six heavy boxes of books?
He had found an unfurnished apartment in a villa that had once been part of a princely estate. Most of the land had been sold off and several apartments had been carved out of the villa. The glory of its position, however, remained undimmed; it was ensconced on a hill bristling with olive trees from whose height Victor enjoyed an unobstructed, if distant, view of Florence and its silvery river, the Arno. Victor settled in, hoping for an indefinite stay. This was the first place of his own, the first time he could indulge his penchant for interior design. Prophetically, he focused most of his attention on the kitchen. It was a large and handsome but naked space, equipped only with a raised fireplace for cooking and heating. Victor created a pantry by closing off a corner of the room with an L-shaped wooden partition, the upper half of it mostly glass. He had had the raw wood stained a deep chestnut color, to match the old wooden beams overhead. Happily for Victor, labor and materials were inexpensive then in Italy. Inside the pantry he put an icebox he had bought, and he had craggy-looking wooden shelves made for open storage. He hung his pots, battered secondhand copper that he’d had retinned, on one wall. In the summer he had bought a couple of bushels of small, round tomatoes on the vine for making sauce, and he had hung them from the beams, giving the pantry an immensely cheerful look and providing, moreover, a ready supply of tomatoes well into the winter. For the dining table, Victor took a thick, old door he had found and had his accommodating, if startled, carpenter make legs from four narrow tree trunks that Victor left gnarled and unfinished. They were set at diverging angles in the center, forming a pedestal that went right through four holes made in the tabletop. Wood putty and glue filled in the gaps, and the ends of the trunks were planed flush with the top. At that time in Florence, one could buy unfinished, rustic wood chairs with straw seats that looked as though they had been lifted out of a van Gogh painting. Victor made the similarity even more striking by painting them yellow.
The villa’s impoverished owners had a housekeeper, Assunta, a tall, hungry-looking, perpetually black-frocked woman with glowing, dark eyes and the largest feet I have ever seen on man or woman. When Victor asked her if she had time to look after the apartment for him, her face shone as though she had just been awakened from a long bad dream by the handsome young prince. It turned out she was rarely paid and infrequently fed. In exchange for a small regular monthly stipend and an occasional shirt she stole for her husband, Pasquale, Assunta did everything for Victor: cook, wash, iron, gather firewood for the kitchen fireplace and the terra-cotta stoves that heated the apartment, and in season, bring in for breakfast every morning fresh, ripe figs from the few trees remaining in the orchard. And she made wonderful beans.
Unlike many Tuscan cooks, Assunta didn’t cook the beans in a fiasco, the traditional glass. She had an old cast-iron pot into which she dropped several handfuls of fresh cannellini beans, which she covered with olive oil and water, adding salt, pepper, garlic, and sage. She laid a thick, damp cloth over the pot, put a lid on it, and cooked the beans for two hours or more over hot embers from a wood fire.
Victor didn’t get to do any writing in Florence either. He slipped into the country squire mode again, hiking the woods with Assunta’s husband, Pasquale, a small, hard-muscled, sun-blackened man, the skin of whose hands looked like bruised and twisted cowhide. Together they foraged for mushrooms and thin, wild asparagus. In the fall, Pasquale introduced Victor to the ancient practice of crushing grapes with the feet, the softest of all grape-crushing methods. It was the Sangiovese grape that Pasquale made into a wine that, if commercially bottled today, might be labeled Chianti, but it had a fresher wine taste than any Chianti that you are likely to buy. It was the only wine that Victor had on the table then. When he and I speak of our meals at the villa, and recall that pure purple wine, our palates stir to the memory of its bracing quickness, of its sweet scent of iris, of its ripe taste of plums and cherries.
It was no longer so simple to see each other as it had been when Victor was staying in Bertinoro. It was a laborious journey from that Florentine hilltop to Cesenatico. To reach Vicchio, the nearest hamlet, where he could hop on a tram for Florence, Victor had to walk a mile down a very steep road, so steep that taxis refused to drive up to the villa. In Florence, he took a bus that crossed the mountains separating Tuscany from Romagna and that stopped, after a four-hour journey, in Cesenatico. On weekdays, I was still teaching in Rimini in the morning and taking the train to Ferrara in the afternoon. Occasionally, Victor joined me in Rimini on a Friday, keeping me company on the train to Ferrara and then back to Cesenatico, where he stayed with us for the weekend before returning to Florence. The distance to Ferrara could not have been more than fifty or sixty miles, but the only train that negotiated that route was a local one that stopped at every little station, so we spent at least three hours traveling each way.
My mother allowed me to visit Victor, a rather broad-minded concession for those times. He would come to meet me in Florence, where we sometimes stopped for dinner, and then we’d share the tram ride and the steep walk up to the villa. It was there that
we had our first Christmas together. It was also the first Christmas tree for either of us, the first of the fifty-three consecutive ones that followed. Victor’s parents were observant Jews who did not celebrate Christmas. My Catholic family did, but in Italy then, the tree was not a traditional part of the holiday. Nor did children expect gifts from that Protestant gentleman, Santa Claus. If they had been good, they got theirs on Epiphany, the gift-bearing day of the three wise men, the sixth of January. With Pasquale’s help, Victor brought in a tree that he had cut down in the woods. He could get the ornaments for it in Florence because there were customers for them among English and American residents. It was on Christmas Eve that, for the first time in my life, I drank enough wine to get pickled. I remember how hilarious we thought it was that the coffee pot we had forgotten on the fire overheated and flew across the room with a resounding clap.
Shortly before the Christmas break, I was in Ferrara to present the thesis for my biology degree. There were printed copies, of course, but I had to present it orally, discussing it with a panel of professors who looked as glum as that dull December morning. When I had finished my presentation and had replied to all the questions they had posed to me, they asked me to step out into the hall and wait to be called back into the room after they had come to a decision. I left the exam room, but I didn’t wander too far from the door, because I didn’t want to miss the call when it came. Other students, who were there waiting for their turn, crowded around me to ask what the examining panel was like. If all went well, this was to be my last day at the university, and my heart was pounding from the excitement. Down at the end of the hall I spied Victor standing still with a huge bouquet of roses in his hand, which gave my heart an additional flutter. I was about to wave to him when I was called into the examination room. The head of the panel addressed me as “Dottore in Scienze Biologiche,” which meant they had accepted my thesis, to which they awarded an excellent grade.
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