The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (18 page)

‘He would cook for me every day, Niccolò would. I remember most a soup he'd make. He'd sit me down at the kitchen table, slide a small glass of white wine across the oilcloth to me.

‘“
Allora. Guardami bene
. Watch me carefully.” He'd skin and slice a pair of onions faster than the butter could melt in the sauté pan he'd placed on the burner behind him.

‘“
Sempre una fiamma bassa per la minestra
. Always a low flame for soup.” He'd leave the onions to melt into the butter while he gathered up the rest of what he needed: yesterday's bread, some milk, a few branches of dried wild thyme, the bottle of white wine. When the onions were soft and gold, he'd rub some rough salt between his hands and then sprinkle the onions with flour; he'd slip the thyme leaves off their branches and crush them between his fingertips over the pan. The stems in his shirt pocket to use later in the hearth. He'd give the mass a good stir, letting the flour and the butter bubble away for a minute; some milk, then some wine. I think about a cup of each. Maybe more wine than milk. When the soup had just begun to thicken, he'd take it from the flame, cover it, let the thyme do its work while he toasted thin slices of the old bread, brushed them with butter, laid them in two wide shallow bowls. He'd sit with me then and we'd drink another glass of wine. He would never set our places directly on the oilcloth even if we were sitting down only to soup or cheese and bread. He'd take out one of the fine embroidered cloths from the armoire, spread it smooth, knot the napkins on one end and, flicking his wrist, shake each one before laying it down, aligning the knot perfectly with the silverware. He'd light a candle even at noon. I think he made the wild thyme soup for me nearly every day for the first month or so. “
Curativo
,” he would say. “Healing.”

•

He must have known before I did that I was with child because when, all breathless and bridal, I ran to open the door to him one morning after I'd seen
Dottoressa
Ottaviano, Niccolò sat me down at the kitchen table and immediately began speaking of the
aspetto practico
, the practical aspect, of our situation.

‘“But Niccolò, there's time for all of that. Now we must celebrate, think about the wedding, about our child, about …”

‘“
Tesoro mio, ti voglio tanto bene ma io non mi sposarò mai. Mai
. My darling, I love you but I will never marry. Never. Oh, it's not that I don't like weddings. I would have been a bridegroom a hundred times over by now as long as I could have avoided being a husband. I will hold financial responsibility, be a figure in the child's life, sustain both of you in every way save that of living together as a family. We can even have a wedding if you want. But no marriage.”

‘He rose then, washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Pontius Pilate with a pipe. Taking a clean towel from the drawer in the cupboard, he slowly dried his hands. He began looking through the onions in the basket on the work table.

‘“I'll do the shopping,” he said, buttoning his jacket.

‘Heeding the old impulse to meekness, I sat quietly. When he returned sometime later, his market bag full, he found me where he'd left me. As though the news might be balm, he said he'd been to consult his attorney. Across the shiny red and yellow cloth on the table, Niccolò spread bank books, lists of goods and chattels, a copy of his testament. The pipe tight between his teeth, he droned out numbers while I unpacked the market bag, moving his papers to make room for white-skinned potatoes and tight little heads of red lettuce, two of purple garlic, the dried stems of them knotted together like castanets. I kept picking up each thing as though weighing it, then putting it down. I never said a word. He relit his pipe, signifying that his presentation was complete.

‘“
Ma, l'amore?
But what about love?” I wanted to know, my voice cracking as though I'd just awakened from a long sleep. As though I'd been weeping in my dreams.

‘Drying my face with the back of his hand, the stem of his pipe still between his teeth, he'd whispered, “
Povera cocca
, poor little one, it's duty that counts in life.
Amore. Amore
. Love. Love. Bread lasts longer than love. I want to offer you something better.”

‘The meekness in me thawed and boiled up like rage. Ripping his hands from my face, sending the documents and the onions flying from the table with a single sweep of my arm, I beat him about the chest that had been my refuge, clawed his cheeks, wrenched the grizzled black and brown pomp of his hair, tore the Brebbia from his mouth and smote it on the tiles. I bent to retrieve one of the bank books and, heaving it into the ashes of the hearth, I stood straight, laid a back-handed slap across his face and ran for the door. Flinging it wide and letting it bang against the wall, I remembered my coat, which he'd already gone to fetch. As he held it out for me, I snatched it from him, thinking of how many times I'd longed for that, for Niccolò to hold out my coat as he did for her. I walked away, shutting the door hard on his last words: “Lunch will be ready in an hour.”

‘My pace fast as my heartbeat, I traversed the few metres to the piazza. I turned back to see if he'd followed me, but there was only a small band of children from the kindergarten approaching in the bleak March light, harassing the pigeons while their teachers walked behind them, smoking hungrily. I sat down on the iron bench by the fountain, my grand revolt already on the wane, having exhausted itself on the truth that I had been Niccolò's seductress. If ever a woman offered herself to a man, I'd offered myself to him. A revelation. A plain truth. I wrapped my arms about my chest as if trying to find the repentance in me but there was none. I let one hand drop to lie on my stomach. On my womb. Big as a bean and not yet meat, a creature was ripening inside me and, while I'd been pining over a wedding dress, it had already shaken the kaleidoscope, rethrown the stones and the pattern they made was my future.

‘Would I go back to the house now and take up my submissiveness? Invite Niccolò to the role of loving tyrant only just vacated by my parents? Would I surrender my child, too, to Niccolò's dominion?
I will hold financial responsibility, be a figure in the child's life, sustain both of you in every way save that of living together as a family
. No. Thank you, but, no. No, to every part of your offer, Niccolò. No.

‘His back to me, he was slicing bread when I walked into the kitchen. Before he turned, I knew what I would see in those eyes and I longed to comfort him. I'd become someone more, someone less than who I'd been a scant hour before. Leaps of comprehension and self-trust, a capacity for empathy, if these deem to come in life, they come like lightning,
in un colpo
, in a flash. Unlike the sort of change that happens over time. Unlike change that is won by faithful pummelling – of one's self or of another. Nothing
fresh
about that kind of change. While I'd been sitting there by the fountain in the piazza in that bleak March light I'd vaulted the wall of the sanctuary. On my own, I was.

‘“Also I,
Nicò
. I will never marry. I will be a bride a hundred times over but I will never be a wife.” I'd meant him to laugh but as he turned, the bread knife poised, there was only desolation in his eyes. He looked at me.
Studied
me.

‘“
Hai fame?
Are you hungry?”

‘“
Si.”

‘“
Brava
.”

‘We sat and he poured wine. Not waiting for him to serve me as he always did, I took up the white fluted bowl of tiny purple artichokes and pushed some onto his plate. I took a few for myself.

‘“
Ma, domani, cucinerò io
,” I told him
. “
But tomorrow, I will cook.”

‘He stayed quiet. After a long time, he began a mild sort of protest but let it fall away.

‘“
Va bene.”
His voice was a whisper. He raised his glass to me. “Your eyes are black in this light. They're purple in the sun. Your eyes make a man think, Paolina. Only poetic men will love you. The others will try to change you. The others won't be able to look in your eyes. I wish I were a poet, Paolina.”

•

‘It was a Monday morning, a fews day after our joint “proclamations”: Niccolò's to me, mine to him. And my own to myself. I was sitting, dreaming, by the
salone
window when I saw them walking across the piazza on their way to me: the parish priest, his mother and his aunt. Don Umberto, Carolina and Luigia. Though the trio had been visiting me every Monday morning since my parents' death, I'd somehow not remembered on that particular Monday that it was their day. But there they were, the women in sedate frocks and elastic hose almost pink against their black lace-up shoes. Shawls, hats with veils and white cotton gloves, cloth-covered baskets hung from their wrists. As she was wont to do, Carolina minced ahead of the others, her head pitched slightly forward of her body, insistent as a lead goose. Apart from my parents and Niccolò, these three were as close to kin as I'd ever had. I went to put the kettle on, take off my apron.

‘“
Buongiorno, bella
,” they said in unison, commencing with the ritual unpacking of their gifts:
torte
, biscotti,
pane
. Jars of jam and little pots of savoury things to spread on bread. As though there'd been a flood or a war or some devastation that had emptied the shops which sat all along the piazza outside my door, they would replenish my supplies. The one constant provision was a thick green litre bottle of Marsala beaten with eggs and sugar.
Simpatia
, Carolina called it. Sympathy.

‘Having been assigned to the parish just after his ordination when he was something less than twenty-five, Umberto celebrated the high mass when my parents were married, cleansed me from original sin in a bath of holy water, put the body of Jesus on my devoutly extended tongue when I was seven, inflamed my quest to be confirmed a soldier of Christ when I was twelve. Umberto said the euology for both my parents. He never left my side when they were being lowered into the ground.

‘And Carolina. Unflinching, bold and yet refined, the kind of woman who would dress for dinner in the jungle, she'd fasten the fifty hooks on a boned corset before setting off on the twenty-metre trek from the parish house to the butcher. That was Carolina. When she was widowed at fifty, she departed Rome for San Severino to keep house for her son. Not to be abandoned in the family palazzo in the Parioli, Luigia – her elder and maiden sister – arrived days later at the station in Orvieto. “For a small month,” she'd said back then – thirteen years ago.

‘That morning, as she did always, Luigia made the tea while Carolina laid the table in the
salone
and Umberto and I, in a posture that had long become natural to us, sat leafing through one book or another. For the five years of my tenure in the
liceo classico
, Umberto had been my Latin tutor. But long before that he was drawn, I think, to the melancholy in me, mirroring his own as it did. Having himself been formed by the Jesuits, so would he form me, a bright, quiet lamb, black, among his flock. And so on that morning he commenced his usual imperatives: “It's time, Paolina, that you should be choosing a
facoltà
, a major course of study
.”
He spoke of enquiries he'd made to colleagues at the university in Perugia, said that he'd
alerted
one of them that I would need preparation for certain exams. “Were you to succeed in these, well, he would see to things. If you decide on Philosophy, I think we could manage to place you in that department.”

‘“I'm going to have a baby, Umberto.”

‘I said this without changing the tenor of my voice. I stood up from where I'd been sitting on the sofa next to him and said it again.

‘“You see, I'm going to have a baby.”

‘Carolina and Luigia, both of whom had been still fussing with the table, heard the repetition of my announcement. Both sat heavily on the nearest chairs. Luigia began to laugh.

‘“Of course you are.
Amore mio
, of course you'll have a baby someday and we'll all dance at your wedding and …”

‘“In September. I'm going to have a baby in September.”

‘“This September?” Carolina had risen from her chair and come to stand in front of me. “This one,” I told her.

‘I turned back to Umberto and then looked at Luigia, both of whom were gazing downward.

‘“My time will be up on the eighteenth. Dottoressa Ottaviano and I, we did the counting together. That is, I went to see her a few days ago and, well … I …”

‘They were silent. I wept.

‘“Niccolò?” Umberto looked at me, his eyes saying he hoped it
was
as much as he hoped it
wasn't
.

‘“Niccolò,” I said.

‘“I'll speak to him … I'm certain his intentions are …”

‘“Niccolò and I have already spoken. We're … we've decided not to marry.”

‘“
Inconcepibile
, inconceivable …”

‘I fear the
conceiving
has already been done, Umberto,” muttered Carolina.

‘“Both of us have decided. I will raise my baby. Niccolò will be a part in some way but not as my husband. Not as the child's father. Neither of those. I can't begin to tell you how dearly I want this.”

‘Forever the lead goose, Carolina had left the
salone
to rummage in the kitchen. I began to follow her there but she was already returning, shaking the green glass Marsala bottle as she came. The bottle still in hand, she went to the credenza where the finer things of the house were kept. As though suspending the drama that had unfolded behind her, Carolina mused, humming, among the wineglasses. Rather than one of them, she opted for a cut-crystal compote dish from my mother's precious Bohemian collection. Setting it down on the table, she began to pour in the creamy sugared wine. So long did she pour, she had time to look up at me and smile and look down again before she'd poured enough.