The Food of Love (7 page)

a few minutes, missing his company, Laura decided she’d go and

help. She piled up the dirty plates and carried them towards the kitchen. ‘Tommaso? I’ll wash these while you’re doing that.’

She pushed the door, which didn’t open. ‘Sorry,’ Tommaso

called from within. ‘It’s, uh, stuck. It does that sometimes.’

She rattled the door handle. ‘Want me to push it from this

side?’

‘No, I’ll sort it in a minute.’

For a confused moment Laura thought she heard voices murmuring

behind the door, but it was only Tommaso breaking into

song as he cooked.

At last the door opened and Tommaso came out, holding a

platter from which emanated the most amazing aroma. ‘Fixed it.

Tell you what, why don’t you take this to the table?’

A few minutes later they were eating the asparagus. It was

breathtakingly good. The stalks, nestled in their foamy sauce of beaten egg yolk and wine, were so tender at the tip that she could almost suck the plump heads off, but got progressively firmer as she chewed down towards the crisp base.

‘Tommaso,’ she said rapturously, “I have to tell you—’

“I know,’ he said, smiling at her, and she felt her whole body

bathed in a languorous, sensual glow.

In the kitchen, Bruno carried the pans over to the sink and carefully, so that they wouldn’t make any sound, lowered them into

the water.

‘So what are you doing in Rome?’ he heard Tommaso say.

“I wrote an essay on art history for a competition,’ a girl

answered. ‘The winner got to come to Rome for a whole year. It’s sort of like a scholarship.’ There was something about her voice that made Bruno think of dolci, of meringues and sweet zabaione and peaches bubbling as they poached in wine. Unable to help himself, he listened for just a moment longer.

‘But you can have some fun as well?’

‘Are you kidding? Art history is fun.’ Bruno, imagining

Tommaso’s expression, smiled. ‘No, really,’ the girl was saying. “I mean, I guess you’re used to it. You can go and look at a

Caravaggio every day if you want to, but for me it’s the chance of a lifetime.’

‘Caravaggio?’

‘You don’t know Caravaggio?’ The girl sounded surprised.

Tomasso said quickly, ‘Si. Of course. All Romans know

Caravaggio. Which is your favourite?’

‘Well, it’s hard to choose one—’

‘Of course.’

‘—but if I absolutely had to, it would probably be The Fortune

Teller, in the Musei Capitolini.’

Hands in the sink, Bruno nodded. It was his favourite, too.

Tommaso’s girl had taste.

‘If I were a painter,’ Tomasso said reverently, ‘I would only

paint you, Laura. Then all my pictures would be beautiful.’

Bruno’s smile broadened. When it came to the art of seduction

there was no one to match Tommaso. Drying his hands, he tiptoed

to the door that led out of the apartment.

Eventually even the ricotta lay in crumbs on its plate. Tommaso

carried the biscotti and vin santo to the battered old sofa.

I’ve drunk so much already,’ Laura murmured.

In Rome we have a saying: l”Anni, amori e bicchieri di vino, nun se contano mai?”

‘Years, lovers and glasses of wine; these things must not be

counted,”’ she translated.

‘Exactly.’ He dipped one of the biscuits in the golden liquid

and held it gently to her lips. She hesitated, then opened her

mouth. The sweet, raisiny taste suffused her tastebuds. She closed her eyes ecstatically. ‘My God, that’s beautiful.’

lSei bellissima,” he murmured. ‘Like you, Laura.’ Now he

dipped two of his own fingers in the wine. Again, she hesitated for just a moment, then allowed him to slide them into her mouth.

She licked the sticky, honeyed wine off him until every morsel of sweetness was gone. A few drops fell on her neck and he kissed

them off greedily even while she was still sucking his fingers.

He unwrapped her slowly, peeling off her clothes as if he were

pulling the leaves off an artichoke, kissing her between each layer. This is exactly what I hoped for, she thought. Who would have believed it? Carlotta, of course. Carlotta was right all along.

He was untying the red basque now, pulling at the little bows

that fastened it. She felt it loosen and arched her back, waiting for him to finish. He was pulling at one particular tie with a frown of concentration. Then he tugged at it.

‘Wait,’ she murmured. ‘You’ll tighten it.’

‘I’ll get a knife,’ he said impatiently.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said quickly. As she undid the ties Tommaso fell to his knees in front of her, clasping his hands in prayer and muttering in Italian.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m saying grace,’ he said wolfishly.

Q/eco-n^/a

‘When there has been time to relish and consume the first

course, to salute its passing with wine and to regroup the taste buds, the second course comes to the table. If one is ordering

in a restaurant - one that caters to Italians, not to tourists - the choice of a second course is made after the first course has been eaten. This doesn’t mean that one has made no plans, but that

one waits to confirm them, to make sure that original intentions and current inclinations coincide …’

Marcella Hazan, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

The next morning, Vincent, Sisto and the other early customers at Gennaro’s were greatly entertained to see Tommaso running

across the road towards the bar, still wet from the shower and

naked except for a towel around his waist.

‘Due cappuccini, Gennaro, presto per favore,’ he shouted. From

Tommaso’s broad grin it was clear that he had a good reason to be in a hurry, and his friends knew what it was likely to be. They

greeted him with a round of applause.

Pausing only to grab a couple of cornetti, Tommaso bore the

two cups of coffee back across the street, dodging traffic. A Fiat van hooted at him, but although he shouted a ritual Roman insult back - ‘Go and hoot up your wife’s legs, dickhead, there’s more

traffic up there!’ - his mind was already on other things.

Laura came back into the bedroom from the shower, wrapped in

a towel, her skin wet and glistening in the early morning sunlight and her hair plastered back across her head.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Tommaso said sincerely. LSei bellissima,

Laura.’ He picked up a little digital camera from a table. ‘Smile?’

She smiled and he pressed the button. ‘Now, come back to bed.’

He patted the space beside him, where the tray of breakfast waited invitingly.

She got back into bed and put her arms around him. He took

a little froth from his cappuccino and flicked it on to the end of her adorable nose. She laughed, so he took her cup from her and, placing it carefully on the floor, turned to kiss her. After a

moment’s hesitation she wriggled into his arms, kissing him

urgently, pushing back at him along the length of her body.

Laura had to run to get to her first lecture, but she managed to find time to phone Carlotta on the way. The first question her

friend asked, of course, was: ‘So?’

‘Uh - I probably went a little further than I’d intended,’ Laura admitted.

Carlotta’s second question: ‘And? What did he cook?’ She was,

after all, an Italian, and while any two chiavati are pretty much the same, no two meals ever are.

As Laura described the menu, item by item, and tried to do justice to the taste and flavour of each, there was a series of gasps and hisses at the other end of the phone.

‘White asparagus? From Brenta? With zabaione) My God,

Laura, that’s a fantastic dish. I’ve only had it once, and I still remember it.’

‘That was the high point,’ Laura admitted.

‘Cam, I’m so jealous. Maybe I’ll have to come down and visit.

What’s he cooking next time?’

‘He didn’t say. Anyway, I’ve got to go. I’m at my lecture and

I’m late.’

The college campus was housed in a Renaissance villa set in a

garden of pine trees and fountains on the Janiculum Hill. As Laura had guessed, the lecture she was meant to be at had already

started, and she took a seat next to Judith in the seminar room as unobtrusively as possible.

‘So,’ Kim Fellowes, the lecturer, was saying, ‘the High

Renaissance. A period of just thirty years, between 1490 and the sack of Rome in 1520, during which the patronage of a Pope and

the talents of just a few dozen artists created the greatest flowering of genius the world has ever seen. Good morning, Laura. You

look as if you’ve come hotfoot from a Bramante chapel or a

Bernini fountain, so you can be the first to tell us what you have seen of the High Renaissance so far.’

Laura thought quickly as she sorted out her books. ‘Well,’ she

said, ‘I’ve been to the Sistine chapel, obviously, and seen the

Raphaels in the Vatican, and some of Michelangelo’s architecture—’

‘Momento. Who is this Michael Angelo, please?’ Kim interrupted.

‘Oh. Er, sorry.’ In her haste she had pronounced it the

American way. “I meant Michelangelo.” This time she pronounced

it as he did, in Italian. But her teacher was still not satisfied.

‘In this room,’ he announced, ‘we won’t speak of

Michelangelo, or Titian, or Raphael, any more than we would

call Shakespeare Will, or Beethoven Ludwig. We are not yet on

first name terms with these great men, nor will we presume to be until we have studied their works for many years. We will call

them, therefore, by their proper appellations: Michelangelo

Buonarroti, Tiziano Vecellio and Raffaello Sanzio. Please,’ he gestured at Laura, ‘proceed.’

Kim Fellowes was an American, but he had lived in Rome for so

long that he was, as he said, almost a native: the staff at the

University referred to him simply as il dottore. It was to be regretted, he told the students, that his book on the Renaissance - the

same book Laura had been consulting during her futile hunt for

the church of Santa Cecilia - had had to be written in English

rather than Italian, thanks to the dictates of a publisher eager for a commercial bestseller. And a bestseller it had inevitably become: he kept the reviews, carefully laminated to protect them from

greasy fingerprints, on his desk for the students to examine. It had been acclaimed as that rare thing: a work that combined the erudition of a scholar with the sensitivity of a true artist. Everything

about Kim proclaimed his perfect taste, from the gorgeous linen

shirts he wore - Laura liked to play a kind of mental game which consisted of trying to find the right word to describe their colours: she usually resorted to words like cornflower, cranberry, or aquamarine - to his pale seersucker jacket, and the straw Panama that

kept the fierce Italian sun off his finely featured face when outdoors.

Some of her fellow students found him a hard taskmaster.

Laura was overawed by his sensitivity and intelligence, and did

everything she could to impress him.

‘So you saw the Sistine Chapel?’ he was saying. ‘And what did

you think of it?’

She hesitated. But she couldn’t bear not to tell him what she

had really thought. “I thought it was a barn.’

The other students laughed. ‘A barn?’ Kim Fellowes repeated

questioningly, knitting his fingers together and placing them on his knee.

‘Yes. I mean, it’s beautifully painted and everything, but the

paintings are so high that you have to look upwards all the time, and the room is so big and rectangular …’ She trailed off, certain she was about to be ridiculed. To her surprise, though, Kim was

nodding approvingly.

‘Laura is absolutely right. The Sistine Chapel,’ he said, looking round at the students to make sure they all understood him, ‘is

considered by many experts, including myself, to be the embodiment of all the worst excesses of the Renaissance. The colours are

gaudy, the design overpowering and the conception unharmonious.

It was commissioned purely as a status symbol by a

nouveau-riche philistine who destroyed some rather fine

Peruginos in the process. Buonarroti himself didn’t want to touch it, which is why we will be studying his drawings instead. Now

then, who can tell me what contraposto is?’

‘That man is such an asshole,’ grumbled one of Laura’s fellow students as they packed up their books after the seminar.

‘He knows what he’s talking about,’ Laura retorted. She was

feeling a little guilty: for the first time she had found her attention wandering during Kim’s seminar, remembering the feel of

Tommaso’s kisses, his body pressed up against hers as they’d

shared the last of the vin santo on his battered sofa.

‘As he keeps reminding us,’ the other student said sourly.

‘Anyone want pizza?’

‘Where?’ Judith asked.

‘The mortuary?’ This was their name for the marble-lined

pizzeria down the road. ‘One o’clock?’

‘OK. See you there. Laura?’

‘Uh - yes. I guess so.’

Laura had been surprised by her fellow students. For her, coming to Rome had been the chance of a lifetime, an adventure made

even more attractive by her mother’s insistence that it was (a)

academically a waste of time and (b) perilously unhygienic, a consequence of the Italians’ notorious inability to wash their hands

after visiting the bathroom.

She had landed at Fiumicino airport just a few days before the

first semester began. In her excitement she already felt a gulf

between herself and all the package tourists getting off the plane: they were here to visit, but she was here to live. Accompanying her were a backpack crammed with art books and two small suitcases,