Chapter 70
MY LESSONS WITH FRANCESCA were a bright spot in my week, and I continued to go overboard preparing for them.
She was trying to teach me how to use the verb fare, which is irregular and also just hard for English speakers to grasp because it manages to mean to do and to make and sometimes even to have and to take.
We were sitting on the balcony, my notebooks spread out between us, and she was going over my homework.
In a paragraph about getting ready in the morning, I had written Prendo una doccia for I take a shower, but Francesca scratched it out.
“It’s Faccio una doccia because it is a personal activity having to do with your body. ”
“What does my body have to do with it again?” I asked for what must have been the tenth time.
Francesca was of the belief that Paul and I should be speaking Italian at home. “You are so lucky to have someone you can practice with!” she said. “You need to agree on a specific time when you’ll speak to each other only in Italian. Maybe when you are getting ready in the morning. Or at dinner.”
I laughed a little, trying to picture Paul asking me to pass him the salt and pepper in Italian. “I don’t think Paul will go for it,” I said, and because I didn’t want to make him sound bad, I added, “He’s been a little out of sorts lately.”
“Work?”
I couldn’t very well say me, so I said, “Yeah, probably.”
“Did you hear anything about a big group of American sailors being arrested out at Santo Stefano?” she asked out of nowhere.
“Like by the Carabinieri?”
“No, by your military police. As soon as their sub showed up.”
“What for?”
“That’s what Teo’s trying to figure out.”
“Is he in town?”
“For a few days. In fact, he’s coming to lunch.” Her face brightened. “Why don’t you stay?”
I knew Paul would expect me to decline the invitation, but I had nothing to do for the rest of the day. So I told Francesca I’d love to join them, and at eleven, when our lesson was over, I packed away my notebooks and helped her set the table.
She was making culurgiones, which are kind of like ravioli but filled with potato, pecorino cheese, and mint.
She put me in charge of peeling the potatoes—something she insisted I do after and not before they were boiled—then mashing them by hand.
It was a tedious job, but I was grateful for the distraction.
After we’d made the filling and set it aside, Francesca removed a ball of pasta dough from the fridge and showed me how to run chunks of it through her pasta machine.
When I cranked the handle, the machine spat out these paper-thin slabs of dough that we laid on a piece of butcher block.
Francesca gave me a cookie cutter and had me cut out a couple dozen circles the size of my palm, then told me to place a spoonful of the potato filling in the middle of each one.
I was delighted with the whole enterprise, especially when she showed me how to pinch the edges closed, using my fingernail to create a pretty crease.
“These things are works of art,” I told her when I’d assembled several that I deemed presentable.
“Wait until you taste them.”
Bernardo was the first to arrive at the apartment, and he and I stumbled over my bad Italian while Francesca made a tomato sauce that the culurgiones would sit in, like sailboats. “Bianca verrà?” he asked her as she chopped basil, but she told him in Italian that Bianca had to work.
“I understood everything you just said,” I told her, feeling very pleased with myself.
“Brava!” said Francesca, then she handed me a plate of cheese and told me to take it to the table.