The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi

Author:Marlena de Blasi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473505049
Publisher: Random House

PART IV

GILDA

‘GILDA AIDA MIMI-VIOLETTA ONOFRIO.’ GILDA SAYS THE name slowly, lingering on each vowel, rolling the r’s theatrically. She laughs, looks at me, repeats it. ‘I was fortunate that my mother didn’t deem to put ciocio-san in there somewhere.’

‘Madame Butterfly?’

‘The same. Mamma was a soprano. Promising, from what I understand. Understood.’

Gilda Aida Mimi-Violetta Onofrio. I try out the sound in my mind. For years she’s been simply Gilda. Not even a last name. I look at her now as she sits at the rustico work table in front of a four-kilo hill of fresh borlotti beans, her tiny white fingers flying over the pods, slitting them open with a thumbnail, turning out the red marbled beans into a large pot. Two of the dishes for tonight’s supper are being prepared by others, leaving little but the antipasto to Gilda and I. We’ll stew the beans with a faggot of rosemary and sage and a whole guanciale – dried pig cheek – cut into the finest dice and then smeared against the wooden table so it forms a rough paste. Once the beans are cooked we’ll pound the mass in a mortar with a pestle, adding drops of olive oil as we go. There are so many beans that we’ll each work on half the amount: Gilda with a wooden mortar and a marble pestle, I with a marble mortar and a wooden pestle. It’s the contrast between wood and stone that works best to smooth and crush. Some sea salt, a little more oil. The lush stuff is to be spread on potato focaccia, the dough for which I’ll mix now while Gilda finishes podding the beans. Cornmeal, rye and unbleached flours, mashed potato, white wine, a natural yeast made from grape and potato skins, which I’d left to ferment for a week or so. Sea salt and white wine. No water. My hands deep in the glutinous mass, I say Gilda’s name out loud now, repeat it in several tones and American accents. She likes it best when I say it with a Georgia twang. She tries saying it that way, too, but the sound she makes is more Smolensk than Atlanta.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ I say, without having decided I would.

Immediately I regret my request, innocent as it was and inspired by her own reference to her mother. By blood and temperament, Umbrians are often reticent. Umbrage, shade, shadow, darkness, ghost. An uninvited guest. A man – hombre. All these words and images are derived from the Latin, umbraticum. A half-nod, a quiet buongiorno, buona sera, the occasional, come va? It’s these that suffice as social repertoire. In Umbria, it’s hard to find a rhapsodist whereas, for instance, in Naples, it’s hard to fine one who is not. As I’ve learned, the Thursday women can be exceptions; garrulous, rambling if it suits them, each one deciding for herself what she’ll declare, what she’ll withhold, to whom, when and if. Perhaps I’d risked invasion because, since the evening

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