What Makes a Child Lucky by Gioia Timpanelli

Author:Gioia Timpanelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

Nothing came or went from there that the gang didn’t know about. How did they come across the mountain farm? Was Gino a son come home? How did they know so much about our town? The bandits did not live with us at the farmhouse; I now began looking for their hideout. At first I just went out for an hour each day, and then I went out for longer, and then a little longer. The fields and the mountains became my real home. Whenever I wasn’t fixing things or cooking, I was out walking. Even at siesta, which we call l’otta di lu chaudu, the time of heat, I didn’t go back to the house but slept against trees, once in a while my familiar chestnut tree. The neutral trees, beautiful and indifferent to my fate, gave me another life. It was with them that I lived in the great world without humans and their miserable problems. I felt reverent in the presence of that old chestnut.

Don’t get me wrong, I also loved being at the farmhouse, which held my past and future. It was there I helped ’Mmaculata prepare meals, which were always at erratic times.

“You’re a crazy army,” she would say to Gino when they showed up. And he always answered, “So you’re ready to leave on a forced march with us?”

“I’m not going anywhere just yet.”

Then she would look at what they brought us to cook, and she’d tell me what was needed to start our cooking. They were a hungry group, and never in my whole life, not before or after, have I ever eaten as much as I did in those months. ’Mmaculata loved to cook, and by helping her I learned something new every day. We had our own bread oven, which I had not recognized when I first saw the stone heap. We baked bread a few times a week and grilled all kinds of roasted meats on the usual charcoal stove outside the lean-to. Each meal was a surprise. I ate things I had never eaten before: cheeses that were tastier than anything imaginable, like ricotta salata with oranges and walnuts, and I got to be able to judge good provolone, which we ate with onion bread and little tasty black olives. Since before this I had hardly eaten any meat, all the meat roasts were firsts for me, but ’Mmaculata and I thought the men’s taste for meat was exaggerated. They ate it all the time. We even ate fish regularly, and it was not a penny’s barter of tuna under oil or the ubiquitous dry cod. But even the dry cod ’Mmaculata prepared in many delicious ways. I had never liked baccalà before this. She could make a dish out of anything that was around.

“Where do they get fresh fish up here?” I asked one evening.

“Stop asking so many questions, just look and learn. And if or when you are out of here, do the opposite in some things and the same in others.

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