The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (29 page)

•

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.

In every corner of Gilda's house, there is the lush, titillating scent of cloves. Oranges stuck with cloves are piled in deep baskets here and there on the flags, more are lined up on the mantle shelf while a mortar full of bruised cloves she keeps by her bed. The candles and the long loaves of soap she makes are clove-scented. Essential oil of cloves is Gilda's only body perfume.

While Gilda pours the wine and stirs the fire, I look out from the door into the yard where the hens peck among the rows of a kitchen garden, harvested save a few pumpkins lurking under withered leaves. We touch glasses, sip the wine and Gilda beckons me into the chair while she settles herself against the head of her bed.

‘I've never really known very many men. I don't mean in the
carnal
way, though I've never known one in that way, either. A fifty-three-year-old virgin, does that shock you? My tribe is small but not yet extinct.'

She pauses only to smile. ‘
Allora
. Men. Gastone Pepucci. My father. He was
absent
. The priests with their punishments, they were the only males I knew until the cousin came to take me from Sant' Eufemia.

‘Cousin?'

‘Chou, I don't have a text for my story. Nothing to read from, nothing in a straight line. Just give me a chance. I'll try to make sense.'

‘Gilda, it was only the peaches I'd wondered about. Since Miranda had … But this, what shall I call it, this
excavation
of your past, it's not what I … that was not my aim, not what I meant to …

I stand up, look about for where I've left my jacket.

‘Don't be put off. Please. Wait, I'll go with you. Let's walk. I'd had a mind to search for pine boughs today and to cut some
vischio
, mistletoe, from the oak by the creek. Will you walk with me?'

‘I'd best be going. I'd only meant to stay a short while in any case. Fernando and I are taking the 17:10 into Rome, staying the night. We can catch up on Thursday. I'll be at the rustico by …'

‘Who's cooking with you this week?'

‘Actually, I never know. Mostly everyone shows up at some point or another during the morning. Miranda is always the first one there, up to her elbows in one dish or another. So much for her retirement from Thursdays.'

‘I'll be there this week with the last of my pumpkins. What shall we do with them?'

‘Maybe roast them, caramelise the flesh for tarts.'

Gilda walks me to the door, out to my auto, her Camparisoda glass still in hand.

As I drive away, she shouts, ‘Don't forget our date … The next episode of the duck …'

•

It is the next Saturday. After their week-long thyme cure, Gilda had brought the duck breasts in from the shed to warm a bit while she and I gathered up what I'd need to proceed.

‘Now, about the peaches,' she'd said, tilting her head to one side, presenting the unqualified spectacle of the whisky-coloured eyes. ‘Okay, the famous peaches … but, meanwhile, we have these lovely breasts …'

Without reserve, Gilda began to talk. As I moved from one task to another, the tattoo of the knife on the board, the quiet sizzle of fat in a hot pan, the familiar backdrop seemed to comfort her. Pacing up and back upon the stones of her long, narrow house, she would break stride each time she arrived at the kitchen end, alighted long enough to smile, nod perfunctorily, perform the ritual Umbrian swivelling of her index finger into her cheek – the gesture signifying
deliziozo
– resume her pacing, her talking.

‘This cousin, he just appeared one Sunday at the convent. He came with a letter from the old aunt who had only recently died. Smooth black hair caught in a strip of leather on the nape of his neck. Dark clothes. I remember that everything about him seemed dark. I remember thinking that his teeth were beautiful. He remained standing, silent while one of the nuns sat with me there in the reception room, quietly explaining that this man, this relative of mine, had come to take me to live with him and his family. A farm up in the Castelli, in the hills above Rome. Though she sat so close to me, the nun's voice seemed to come from far away. I remember looking at her as she spoke, trying to fathom her words. “How lovely it will be for you, Gilda, to live in the countryside.” I tried to grasp that the old
zia
was truly gone, she, my one link to even the most tepid of familial affection. Dead. Standing over there, that man with smooth hair, the beautiful teeth, now he was my family. Questions about Magdalena, Pepucci, about life before the convent, who would answer them …? Who knew the truth or even pieces of it? I stood, walked toward the cousin, stopped close to him, looked up at him as though he were inanimate. I gazed at the cousin until the nun, taking my arm, led me, still looking back at him, up the stairs to the dormitory. I watched as she packed my belongings in a cardboard valise, deep like a doctor's case. I still have it somewhere, that valise. I remember how warm it was that day.'

‘The thing to do at this point, Gilda, is to render the duck fat you've saved. Would you fetch it for me, please.'

‘Yes. Yes, of course. The fat. I'll go to … where is it?'

Clearly still back with the cousin, Gilda searches in the tiny fridge, opens the pantry door, stands in front of it for a long time, then turns to me, ‘I know I still have that cardboard valise somewhere. I'd never have parted with it.'