The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (22 page)

‘“Umberto, don't you dare to leave me alone with her; you take a turn now while I rest. Keep her moving. She'll follow you.
Forza, forza
. Go, go.”

“Neither had Umberto danced in his life yet there he was, facing me, his feet apart as though to steady himself. Tall as a cypress and pitifully thin, lank blond hair falling in his eyes – blue and wide with terror behind his wire-rimmed spectacles – Umberto took me in his arms.

‘Heedless of the rhythm of
Guantanamera
, holding me in the formal stiff position of a waltz, his lower torso arched slightly backward to accommodate my belly, I danced barefoot with Umberto the Jesuit in the small red room under the black-beamed vault, the breeze from the open balcony door ruffling his Nordic hair, shivering the hem of my nightdress. No genius with a chisel and a stone could have carved such a moment.

‘
Carmine
. Khar'-meen-eh. A beautiful word, don't you think? My son was born on Sunday morning.
Carmine Domenica
. Carmine Sunday. All my sons were born in that red room and I named all of them Carmine.
Carmine Mezzanotte
, Carmine Midnight.
Carmine Pioviggine
, Carmine Rain. And my last, my baby, he's
Carmine Rovescio
. Born feet first, he's Carmine Backwards.

‘But I've gone too far ahead, haven't I? Back to that Saturday, that Sunday morning.

‘The midwife and Carolina having seen to my delivery, Doctor Ottaviano arrived in time to inspect my son and to congratulate me. I recall nothing save the dancing and the moment when Carolina laid my baby across my chest.

‘Later that morning it was Umberto who came softly into the red room, asked me if I might sit up a moment. There was something I should see out the long window he said. I did better than that. With Carmine asleep in my arms, I walked to the balcony door to see that twenty San Severese, perhaps more than that, were walking in a free-form procession from the piazza up the hill toward the parish house. Every one carried flowers or some sort of parcel. Ferrucci had his arms around a great paper sack of bread.

‘“Carmine's first visitors,” Umberto said quietly.

‘Through the gates they came and gathered in the front garden under my balcony, waving, shouting, “
Evviva Carmine Domenica
. Long live Carmine Domenica.”

‘In both my hands I raised the baby above my head, held him there for all to see and the shouting mounted. Carmine slept. Carolina came huffing into the room and escorted us back to bed, saying that weeping and laughing as I was would sour my milk and leave my son to wail in agony. Umberto went to meet the delegation and returned with his arms full of flowers. Luigia brought in the bread and what looked like a small sack of sea salt.

‘“There's a note,” Umberto said. “Shall I read it to you?”

Life is a search for beauty and so we bring flowers
.

And what would a life be without tears? And so we bring salt
.

And so he will never be hungry, we bring bread to your son, great loaves for him to share
.

•

‘No one acknowledged Niccolò as Carmine's father and neither did any one deny that he was. Discreetly and with grace, Niccolò came and went as a visitor to the parish house. Claiming no special rights and no one offering him such, his was a mostly behind-the-scenes presence. Still, Niccolò's attendance rankled Umberto. Though not once – not then, not ever – did either of them openly indict the other, Niccolò and Umberto clenched jaws and crossed swords back then. And for the next thirty years – until Umberto died – they sustained those postures. I know, I'm going too fast again.

‘Carolina, Luigia, Umberto, Carmine and I lived well together, as though we had lived well together always. There was screaming and shouting and laughing and tenderness in what felt like just doses. Emotions expressed, offences pardoned, kindnesses repaid in spades, all of it a revelation to me who, to avoid Stasia's dismay, had grown up so nimble a ghost.

‘An eternal tragicomic opera, the household never numbered fewer than ten at table, what with the comings and goings of Umberto's colleagues from Rome and the outlying parishes and the two or three live-in seminarians whose tenures rotated once a year. Catechism classes, pre-nuptial courses, child-care programs and thrice-weekly medical clinics provided the house chorus. The darling protagonist was Carmine Domenica, and Carolina, Luigia and I were his devout concubines. Though he reserved his fondest attentions for me, he did not withold affection from the others. As soon as he could tumble himself from his crib in the night or the early morning, he would go to one or another of us in our beds, tuck himself into our arms. At breakfast time, the victor in whose bed he had slept would carry the sleepy-eyed Carmine triumphantly into the kitchen. Of course, Carmine was only the first of my sons.

‘There was a certain symmetry over the next nine years between the various residencies of the seminarians and my birthing three more babies. Coincidence. Chance. Providence. People still speculate and I am still Delphic. Opaque. Save to Carolina, I've never felt the need to speak of who fathered my sons any more than I felt the need to marry him. Them. Anyone. Whenever I faltered, Carolina could tell. She would say, “It won't matter in the end. What will matter is that you've wanted these babies with your whole soul.”

‘Yes. My whole soul. But would that suffice? Would that compensate for the affliction I am imposing on my children? And even if my love – the love of all of us – is enough for them, how would they manage outside that door? The candied faces of the adults, the open torment of their mates …

‘“Remember what Umberto said at the beginning … always some anomaly … always a secret. A rune too old to read. We all get a cross, Paolina. Your children will have this one.”

‘“A mother who is known as
la virginetta di San Severino
.”

‘“They say it endearingly. You must know that.”

‘“I do. I do but …”

‘“What you're really worried about is whether they will love you? Whether they will forgive you? Whether your sons will forgive you. It's that, isn't it?”

‘I couldn't answer her for the tightness in my chest. I nodded, yes.

‘“They may neither love nor forgive you. Be clear about that risk. Of course, they may neither love nor forgive you no matter what you do or don't do. Be clear about that risk as well. Love them, Paolina. And not for the sake of the love they might return. Parental love, by its nature, is one-sided. Unusual as you are and as are your choices, your risk of love not returned may be greater. But as I think about it, because you and your choices are unusual, you may very well be easier to love, easier to forgive. Who knows? In any case, it has a nice ring, don't you think?
La virginetta di San Severino
.”

•

‘All through the years that followed, the story of
la virginetta
remained the pungent stuff of local folklore. Even so, the prattle it caused was mostly confined to a small, tireless cabal whose disdain seemed made more of envy than of righteousness. I think it was sexual titillation that must have fed the men who gossiped. I'd never been a beauty. There was no prettiness about me to fade. And yet my femininity, my
femaleness
, grew more potent over time, that particular manner of moving and speaking and gesturing, of thinking and operating which is hardly generic among women and has not a thing to do with mincing or sashaying or the batting of eyelashes. I was strong and whole and peaceful and without any need of them and thus I was seductive. I bewitched them with indifference. Politely spurning their overtures – both subtle and not – I caused their hostility, their umbrage.

‘The women's malice was made of another kind of envy. Unlike many of theirs, my life was never cluttered with angst over marital fidelity. I was never beaten or threatened or – most beautiful of all to contemplate – I was never lied to. There was, unfailingly, the little leather purse, fat with lire for the week's expenses, waiting on the kitchen table on Friday morning. A white envelope, often with a flower or a branch of herbs tucked inside it along with a generous sum of
argent de poche
, was slipped under the door of the little red room on the twenty-seventh of each month. Who knows how such a personal event could have made it to the
piazza
? And who knows how many other personal events, less real than that, also made it to the
piazza
?

‘In winter I went to mass in a brown felt cloche with black velvet roses sewn along one side of it and wore a brown serge dress and matching coat. If it was cold, I wore a short silver fox cape. In summer my dress was of navy silk, a wisp of a thing no heavier than a handkerchief. My cloche was straw. When Umberto had business in Orvieto or Terni or Rome, my sons and I would ride along in his black Giulietta; I in front next to Umberto, the boys in back. As I've said, we all lived well together. More like a family or less like one, I can hardly tell you which it was.

‘With the shelter – and, I suppose, the prestige – of life in the parish house, my sons managed their crosses and my mystery. Not always but often enough, they managed. There were even times when I believed they thrived on the unconventional circumstances of their childhood. In a way, they set a new standard by their living with the local priest, the priest's mother, the priest's aunt. And by their sitting at lunch and supper every day with seminarians who taught them Greek and Latin from the time they could speak and coached them in soccer and sang the Georgics to them before they slept and accompanied them across the piazza to and from school, their long black soutanes a uniform more majestic than a father's brown corduroy suit, my sons were elevated from their mates, their pain and embarrassment camouflaged so that their lives looked and, I think,
felt
ordinary. Ordinariness being the state for which children long more than all others.

‘They look like me, my sons do. Tawny skin and hair black as a raven's, snub noses and good teeth. But their eyes are my mother's: slanted, green, iridescent as the neck of a pheasant. Never a day goes by without my thinking of her, she being there in my sons' eyes. Have I told you? Three are farmers who work the same land my father did. Niccolò's farms. Carmine Domenica is a paediatrician. They are all married and they are all fathers. They are the loves of my life. And who am I to them?'

Paolina is quiet now, sits up, pulls her shawl tighter, knots it, takes the cigarette tin from her pocket but doesn't open it.

‘I would like to eat something. To drink some wine. Let's go back. Always something to rummage in the rustico.'

‘The chocolate in my auto, it will stave off … I mean, until
aperitivi
. It must be …'

‘The light's still greenish, not yet four, I'd say.'

Lithe as a geisha, Paolina shifts her weight to one knee then rises,
grows up
, tall and straight, from the weeds. She pulls me to my feet.

‘I want more than chocolate.'

‘I know. Bread and wine and oil.'

She lights the fire while I put back in place the things she'd moved before scrubbing the floor. Washing our hands at the kitchen sink with a slice of Miranda's private stash of clove-scented soap, which Gilda makes, Paolina says, ‘How could I know, my sons, what they really think and feel? Do they talk to one another about … about the
uniqueness
of our lives? About me? Niccolò and Umberto were the men, constant, in their lives. As less than fathers, more than fathers, each one gave the boys what the other one couldn't. Umberto – bashful, studious, tender, wise, teaching, talking, endlessly talking to them, trusting them, even as tiny boys, with pieces of his own conundrums about right and wrong, good and evil. Niccolò was, remains their
vigor
, their laughter. As Miranda says of him, Nicò is an old oak. Tenacious, immutable. How strange, though, that the four are mine, resemble me, one another, Stasia. As though the others didn't.'

‘Be careful or Miranda will accuse you of being prone to visions,
la virginetta di San Severino
.'

With a jar of Miranda's preserved pears on the floor between us, we sit by the fire, pull the fruit from its syrup, each with her knife, slice the fruit, wet the slices in tumblers of red.

‘Great, deep lacunae you've left, Paolina. Did you mean to do that?'

‘Have I? I suppose. I … I went to the end, or almost to the end, as though you should know or remember what happened in between. As though surely I must have already told you. I think I have if only in my thoughts. Come to think of it, I've never even told myself the all of it. I don't know if I could.'

She looks away, then down, making a long, awkward show of slicing another pear. ‘Is it about the men I've known? Are those the empty spaces you're wondering about?'

‘Some of them.'

‘Some of which? The men or the spaces?'

Questions that want no answer, I drink my wine. Screw the lid back onto the jar of pears. ‘Shall I get us a candle?'

As though she hasn't heard me, Paolina says, ‘Save his seed, I never needed anything a man might give to me. Or it might have been that I never needed anything more than what had already been mine with a man. With men. You see, I dreaded love more than I coveted it. It seemed enough to me to know that love existed. I lived my loves in scenes brief, perfect, unstained. With Niccolò. With others. Like when I danced with Umberto. Those were enough. I don't think I could have managed a cup any fuller. No, I don't think I ever wanted more than what was in mine.'

‘You sound like a Franciscan.'

‘The Franciscan impulse is purity. Mine was foreboding. I feared ruining a love by wanting it to be more than it was, more than it
could
be. Love seemed a devouring thing that must, perforce, grope its way always deeper into the beloved, finally throttling him, her. Niccolò believed that and, hence, all those years ago he refused the risk of
exclusivity
. And so avoided the death of love.