Chapter 2 #7
Perhaps it was Nimali’s special magic with the mortar (she stood watching us, hands on her hips like one of our employer’s amphorae) or indeed the provenance of the basil, but the dish was utterly unlike what I had tried before and certainly more than the sum of its humble ingredients (plant, pasta, potato).
Layered with the last of the old olive oil, it was spicy as a North African market, somehow tasting both of roots in deep earth and leaves in the sun, the sauce sliding down the coils of pasta.
I was beginning to understand. Everything I had tasted in America, everything Italian, was a distant memory of the old country.
Like a spell written down but never heard. Of course some enchantment was lost.
“Not only can you not have pesto outside of Liguria,” Oscar informed me at lunch, “but it used to be you could not have it out of season. You will notice this of everything. Artichokes are upon us! So we will eat artichokes as often as we can.”
I said that while I loved artichokes, I did not relish the idea of having them at every meal.
“Ah!” he said, raising a finger. “In Venice, there is a tiny crab in the lagoon called the moeca, and it molts only twice a year. And only for a few days. When it is time, nobody eats anything but moeche. And then it is over.”
“But it will come again.”
“But maybe not you and I. We won’t be back, as our friend likes to say.”
I tried, though I was unused to this particular monogamy with food.
And yet—the constant variety I found all through the autumn!
Chestnuts, which Nimali boiled and pureed for use in lasagnas with various squashes; the carrots she roasted alongside rabbits or boar and which raised an eyebrow from the Baronessa; the pale green, slightly prickly cardoons, gratinati with bread crumbs and Parmigiano; the alien germinating chicory, with its spiky puntarelle, which Nimali somehow knew how to slice into ice water, where they curled into rococo shapes, later to be dressed in anchovy and garlic.
(“More anchovy next time,” the Baronessa would state.
“I have never in my life had enough anchovy.”) And then the artichokes now in season: stuffed with bread and olives and mint and baked; narrow and spiked from Sardegna, laboriously cleaned and eaten raw; globular romanesco, sliced with Parmigiano in a salad.
While the idea of days of eating artichokes, no matter how varied or ingeniously prepared, would previously have struck my American palate as a forestate of the afterlife’s grim tedium, I understood these autumn days would end.
And so I stuffed myself with artichokes.
And puntarelle and cardi and chestnuts and boar.
During that time, I believe some part of me was lost, like the broad pelvis of ancient humanoids that kept us tree-bound or the third eyelid we now no longer need, so that I might achieve one simple aim: become less American.
Throughout lunch, the Baronessa was brimming with delight with her Oscar.
Much of the conversation was in Italian (I began to suspect this was purposefully to thwart me), and it seemed he had come with great news that was not shared with me.
Then my employer began a long discourse that Oscar had to stop, saying, “Let the boy hear this! She is talking about her trip to Brazil.” My employer said I had promised to learn Italian, that the ultimate test was to translate the Signora Guicciardini.
That made the table laugh, but Oscar said the signora had great wisdom to impart.
Then he persuaded the Baronessa to let me hear the story in English.
To my surprise, it was the very story we had tried to pry from her the other day.
I assumed it would be full of the great wisdom Oscar had told me about:
“I was very much in need of a bathroom!” the Baronessa began.
Giacomo sat back and smiled at me. “It was along the Rio Negro. I was in Bogotá and I decided to see the . I wanted to see the pink dolphins. I heard they could become people and walk around town with a cane, always wearing white clothes.”
“Excuse me? Could become people?” I asked. She pretended not to hear me, but I could tell she was pleased, at last, to have an audience.
“I rented a boat with a small crew,” she went on.
“I was the only passenger, and a woman, and they took excellent care of me. They liked to pull giant alligator-like things out of the water to show me, and piranhas. I kept saying I wanted to see the pink dolphins, but no, my sailors wouldn’t find me one.
I slept aboard very well, and every morning tiny little monkeys would sit on my shoulder, tiny like a mouse. But I was not talking about monkeys…”
Giacomo leaned in: “No no no, go on.”
“The bathroom! Well, it was on our return, when I had left the boat and was staying in a little village. Air?o! That was the name. Air?o. I was in what they called a hotel and decided to go out for a walk and suddenly…I suppose it was something I ate…suddenly I had need of a toilet. Desperate need. I have never felt such a desire in my life, I wanted it more than a diamond or a man—”
“More than a diamond?” Oscar asked with amusement.
My employer ignored him: “I began to yell to people on the street, who pointed toward the water, but that was not possible for me. And yet I did find it, beside the water, a shabby little hotel where the man behind the desk pointed to a back room. The kitchen, it turned out. So there I was, rushing through the kitchen in Air?o, and on the kitchen table…were a man and a woman making love.”
“Cousin!” Giacomo said in mock outrage.
She ignored him. “I apologized in Portuguese, but they did not cease. The woman raised her arm and pointed to a door as if this happened all the time. My desire had to be satisfied. And, Giovedì, since you like a happy ending, SO IT WAS!”
“I am so relieved,” I said.
“Not more than I! But even better, after I left the bathroom, the couple, still in flagrante, waved me goodbye. I saw they had left their clothing in a pile on the floor. All white. And a cane in the corner. Do you see? I had wanted to see pink dolphins! AND SO I DID!”
She made the gesture for Nimali to serve us the next course—and this time, it was the full flourish.
I caught Oscar’s eye; he seemed to be beaming.
And my employer: I saw a delight now in her face, and something more to her story, this woman seated in the fourteenth row of history.
A bawdy travel tale, of course. But also: a resolution that the world not lose its magic.
What began as one of the charms of “country living” ended, of course, in monotony, especially for the Italians who had suffered the olive harvest annually.
And yet Giacomo refused to complain, as much as his arms grew tired.
“We must have the olive oil,” he said to me when we were at lunch and I brought up my sore arms. “And so what else is there to do?” I mentioned that some, in the wide world, purchase their olive oil, and have fine autumn days free to do as they choose.
The withering glance he gave me implied he regretted sharing a bed with a barbarian who bought his oil.
We finished the harvest—but the storm never arrived.
Instead, a fog appeared, and it seemed the countryside wore a blanket “in the goatherd style.” I had my coffee and morning lesson in Italian (“Andiamo avanti”—we must go on) and stood outside the great wall of ivy, staring at the cloak of fog; so dense from afar, of course up close it resolved into tiny floating droplets, like old newspaper photographs made from a thousand dots.
Eventually, from this fog appeared a little dark green vehicle—Estelle, come to visit the household now that her own harvest was done and fermenting.
Vinsanda told us to carry the crates of olives to the garage in case the storm should still arrive, while he gathered up the nets and rakes to be put in storage until the following year. We moved in the wet fog like ghosts.
That evening, the crates of olives were piled into Vinsanda’s vehicle and all of us made our way, at midnight, to the frantoio.
Only Oscar and the Baronessa stayed behind; it was far too late in the evening for them both, she said, and I understood that what she wanted to do was watch her television shows.
Oscar whispered he was going to sneak a nip of gin, and not to tell his friend.
I wondered if this was wise. I brought Pushkin and Gorky to her bed and bid her good night, and Giacomo and I crammed ourselves, with Estelle, into her little three-wheeled truck.