The Food of Love (31 page)

He had thought they were being discreet, but the next afternoon

he had a strange conversation with her mother.

It was the quiet part of the day, the siesta between lunch and

starting to prep dinner. Bruno was reading. He had asked

Benedetta if there were any local recipes written down and she had shown him where the family notebooks were kept - ancient, handwritten cookbooks, row upon row of them, going right back to

pre-unification days, the oldest on yellowing paper as fragile as tissue. The combinations of local ingredients were still relevant today, however, even if some of the raw materials - such as creste digallo, cock’s combs, or camoscio, wild goat - would be hard to come by now.

Just as practised musicians can read an orchestral score and

hear the music in their heads, Bruno could read a recipe and taste the result in his mind. He was turning the pages slowly, garnering ideas, when Gusta came into the room. She was holding a tiny jug.

‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘Benedetta said you were going

through the old books. Where have you got to?’

‘Goose stewed in red wine.’

‘Oh yes. Oca in potacchio - my grandmother’s recipe. You cut

the goose into pieces and stew it in peperoncini and wine, very

slowly. Then, just before you serve it, you add a little vinegar to offset the richness of the goose fat.’ She hesitated. ‘Actually, that reminds me. Have you got a moment? There’s something I’ve

been meaning to show you, upstairs in the attics.’

Intrigued, he followed her. He suspected that this had something to do with Benedetta, but although Gusta paused outside

his room, and seemed to glance meaningfully at the tousled bed,

she said nothing.

She led him up the stairs to the very top of the house.

Producing an old key the size of a spoon from her pocket, she

unlocked a dark wooden door and ushered him through.

The moment he smelled the air he knew what the attic contained.

The sight of a dozen or more wooden barrels, all of

different sizes, confirmed it. It was smaller than the acetaia he had visited in Modena, but the smell of balsamic vinegar was just as overwhelming.

‘Here.’ Gusta had crossed to the largest barrel and put down

her jug. ‘Look at this.’ She pointed to a date carved roughly into the wood.

Bruno crouched down next to her. ‘My God,’ he breathed.

‘1903.’

She nodded. ‘And it still isn’t empty. It was my great-grandmother’s dowry, the same one who wrote that recipe for goose.

This barrel was started by my great-great-grandfather when she

was just a baby.’ She tapped each of the barrels in turn with her fingers. ‘This one’s oak, but this small one is beech … and that’s juniper … and chestnut… and cherry. After the vinegar drips out of one barrel, it gets put into the next, and then the next, getting a little thicker every time, taking a little of the flavour of each different wood. Then some of it goes back into the first barrel, along

with a little new wine to keep it going.’

Around the bung there was a tiny ooze, as thick as toffee,

straining to fall into the bucket beneath. As Bruno watched, it fell, making hardly a ripple in the viscous liquid.

Gusta said softly, ‘When I married, this was my dowry too.

And when Benedetta marries, it will go with her.’ She was not

looking at him, her eyes carefully fastened on the barrel, but he felt her hand reaching for his, lifting it, pressing his finger into the thick, sticky liquid. ‘Go on, try it.’

He put his finger to his lips and felt his mouth flooded with the taste of it - old wine, and honey, and wood sap, and the almost

citrus sharpness of the vinegar itself, flowing like warmth through his stomach and chest. He gasped.

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ she said.

Unable to speak, Bruno nodded.

‘Do you know why they call it balsamico) They used to believe

it was a balm that was able to cure anything. Any illness you had.’

She reached to the smallest barrel and carefully opened the tap, allowing a tiny amount into the little jug. ‘Even a broken heart.’

-one-

Bruno didn’t tell Benedetta what her mother had said. Evidently

Gusta had a similar conversation with her daughter, though,

because Benedetta no longer confined their lovemaking to the

outdoors. Most nights she slept in his room now, and although

they never referred to it in her mother’s presence, it became, like so many things in Italian life, pubbliche bugie e verita private*; something that was accepted but never spoken of.

Even between the two of them they did not actually discuss the

implication behind Gusta’s tacit acceptance of the situation: that she approved of him as a prospective son-in-law. Perhaps if Bruno had been absolutely certain that he did not want to marry

Benedetta he would have said something. But the truth was that

he wasn’t so sure any more. I could be happy here, he found himself thinking as he trailed through the fields behind her, finding

mushrooms or salad leaves or fruit for the table, or watched her rolling pasta shapes with those deft fingers on the kitchen table.

‘A public lie and a private truth.’

I’ve never found anyone before who shares my gift, let alone a

woman. I’d be crazy not to marry her. Together we’d build up the osteria into a famous restaurant, one that people would come to from right across Italy, and we’d make love every day and have babies and do all the things that happy people do.

If only it was Laura.

If only it was Laura who was sharing her bed with him, who

was cooking with him, who was his friend and his lover and, yes, whose family owned a beautiful little restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Because no matter how wonderful a time he shared

with Benedetta, the truth was that his heart had already been

given to a girl with orange-red freckles on her shoulders. There was simply nothing he could do about it.

Then he’d sigh, and try to stop scratching the itch in his

mind.

He went to see Hanni the mechanic to find out how the van was

coming on. The answer was that it wasn’t. It was still up on

blocks, and Bruno was rather surprised to see that the wheels had disappeared.

‘That’s just because I was taking a look at the brake discs, and it was easier to get the wheels out of the way,’ Hanni explained.

‘Don’t worry, they’re around here somewhere.’

Bruno looked rather doubtfully at the heaps of rusting spare

parts that slopped up against the walls of Hanni’s barn like tidal debris on a beach. ‘They are?’

‘Of course. And look, don’t worry. I had some news of a possible set of spares the other day. I’m just waiting to hear.’

Bruno thanked him for being so persistent and made his way

back to the restaurant. On his way he passed a tractor which was sporting a windscreen and a pair of windscreen wipers that

looked remarkably like those on his van. He stopped. Now that

he thought about it, had there been any glass in his van? In the gloom of the barn, it had been hard to tell. He turned around

and went back to check, but Hanni had already disappeared and

the barn was now securely padlocked. It suddenly occurred to

him to wonder why Hanni had been fiddling with the brake

discs at all, since as far as Bruno knew the brakes were one of the few parts of his van that worked reasonably well. Presumably the mechanic had his reasons, but Bruno couldn’t imagine what

they were.

Tommaso’s restaurant was full again, though the clientele had

changed somewhat. The food might have the desired effect but it

tasted awful, and now the couples chewing their way with grim

determination through his saltimbocca or padellata di polio were the desperate or those who simply didn’t care - jaded Euro trash businessmen, dripping with jewellery and chest hair, lunching

their perma-tanned young mistresses, or groups of drunk students looking for the quickest route to another high. Even foreigners

had started turning up - a sure sign that II Cuoco had dropped off the culinary map.

What was more, he had failed to stem the financial haemorrhage.

The restaurant might be booked out, but he had been

forced to buy huge amounts of drugs through the restaurant mafia contact, Franco, and although the deliveries were as regular as

clockwork, the costs were ruinous.

“I can’t believe we’re losing so much money,’ Dr Ferrara

shouted at him when he saw the monthly audit.

‘Neither can I. Look, we’ve turned the corner,’ Tommaso said

desperately. ‘Just stick with it for a few more weeks. There’ll be more tourists then.’

‘I’ll have to go to the bank and arrange a bigger overdraft.

This is my pension on the line, you know.’

Tommaso paused. The last thing he wanted was to leave Dr

Ferrara penniless, but there was nothing else he could do. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he promised. ‘Just a few more weeks.’

Here is Laura, wandering contentedly around the picture gallery

of the staggeringly beautiful Palazzo Doria-Pamphili, hand-in

hand with her handsome lover. They are both listening to audio

guides, and though the guides are just a little out of sync they turn and nod to each other as each useful nugget of information about the treasures on display is revealed into their ears. They spend a long time in front of Caravaggio’s Repentant Magdalene, for

Laura is now writing her final essay of the year, a thesis-length dissertation on themes of redemption in the Roman Renaissance, and

this strangely tragic painting is one of her subjects. They note the tiny tear, all but invisible in reproductions, glistening on the side of the Magdalene’s nose, and the wine at which she seems to cast a longing glance, but which remains untouched, as if she must fast in perpetual atonement.

Here is Laura with her boyfriend in Castroni’s, the food store.

Her days of buying Skippy and Folger’s are long gone, for she is acclimatised now, and culinary homesickness is not among her

vices. She comes here just once a week to buy low-fat margarine

and skimmed milk, since these are never available in the street markets where, at Kim’s insistence, they do most of their shopping.

“just look at them,’ Kim murmurs, casting a dark glance at a

gaggle of tourists. ‘Don’t they realise that the real Italy is outsider’

He speaks in Italian, something he often does with her now,

although Laura has noticed that he is more likely to do it when

there are other Americans around.

Here is Laura with her boyfriend in bed. The city is swelteringly hot but the apartment is air-conditioned, and their bodies move

together with practised precision. There is just a tiny glitch when Kim’s headphones get caught in Laura’s hair; for her lover likes to listen to Puccini when making love, while Laura prefers silence.

But the entanglement is quickly resolved and they see-saw

smoothly on.

She does not speak to Carlotta so much now, what with being

so busy, but when she does her friend is surprised to note that

Laura sounds happy. She has lost some of her gauche otherworldliness and embraced something of the Italian notion of bella

figura - the art of looking elegant in public, of cultivating a

sophisticated detachment from the frustrations of daily life.

There was no option but to sack Marie. Tommaso was dreading it,

but he couldn’t think of an alternative.

She seemed to take it quite well, he thought. She listened to

him in silence, nodding occasionally as he explained that there was simply no other way for II Cuoco to survive. Only a foot, tapping dangerously, gave a hint of her feelings.

‘So what you’re saying is, there’s no money to pay me,’ she said when he had finished.

‘That’s it, in a nutshell.’

‘And you’re not paying yourself?’

‘No. I haven’t been for months.’

Marie seemed to make a decision. ‘Right then. I’ll work for

nothing too.’

‘You mean that?’ He stared at her.

“I said so, didn’t I? But there are two conditions.’

‘What are they?’

‘First, I want a share of the profits when we do make money.

And second, I want to go through the books to see why we’re

losing so much. I may want to make some changes. If I could keep this place going for all those years before you came, I can certainly keep it going now.’

August came to Le Marche like the opening of an oven door. It

had been hot before, but now people felt as though they were

being cooked. For a month no one walked fast, or ventured out in the afternoons; and the houses in the village closed up their shutters as if against a storm, conserving what little coolness lingered

^side their thick stone walls, until evening brought with it a welcome trickle of colder air.

The Galtenesi, always great meat-eaters, stopped eating lamb,

kid and pork and started eating the inferior summer meats asino

- donkey - and came di cavallo - horsemeat. There was

nothing much you could do with it - the donkey’s meat was

sometimes cured, as coglioni di asino, and the horsemeat was

stewed with juniper berries and other flavourings to tenderise it.

Bruno did his best, but one just had to accept that this was not the time of year for great meat dishes. Instead Bruno concentrated on introducing the villagers to the richly concentrated ice creams of his native Rome, and to granite, the flavoured ices from further south. There was some grumbling at first when he served as a

dessert a simple paper cup of crushed ice into which a shot of mocha had been poured, or a scoop of ice cream made from the peaches that now hung ripe in every garden, but the locals soon