La Cucina Read online

  One morning I discovered the severed head of one of the sheepdogs outside the back door with a note attached advising me to cease production of tomato sauce if I did not wish to damage the sender’s business and risk his displeasure. I recognized this as a warning from the Mafia, and yet it did not worry me; I was beyond worrying about manmade threats at this stage. And so I threw the dog’s head in the fire and turned my attention to preserving instead.

  For two months I bottled oranges and apricots, peaches and pears, raspberries and nectarines, plums and figs in a rich sugar syrup laced with lemon zest.

  I pickled olives and cucumbers in brine, and packed mushrooms, pepperoni, artichokes, and asparagus in jars with olive oil.

  I made jams and preserves of berries and fruits, which then lined the shelves on the walls in the cellar, each one labeled in my own hand and bearing the date of my agony.

  Once the supply of fresh fruit and vegetables had become exhausted, I turned my attention to Mama’s home-reared livestock.

  First I slaughtered the pigs, even my pet, Miele, which looked up at me with tiny, doleful eyes, clearly doubting that I had it in me to end his life with my cleaver. He was wrong; I was beyond compassion now. As I wielded my knife I felt, albeit temporarily, my anger slipping away, and for a few brief moments I was calm.

  I slit the throats of each pig and collected the blood in buckets to make into sausages, which would later be served with a garnish of fennel seeds.

  Next I cured bacon and hams, which hung on hooks in the cool larder, and then I made pies and meatballs, ragù, rich pâtés and succulent roasts. My hands were, I recall, for a period of some weeks streaked with blood, as was sometimes my face, and I would wear a blood-soaked apron in the manner of a macellaio. It pleased me to go about like this: somewhat wild and dangerous, and bearing on my body the sign of the blood that was weeping from my heart.

  When I was done with the pigs, I wrung the necks of the chickens, so that none remained to lay any eggs, and Luigi was urgently dispatched to the market at Randazzo to buy a box of chicks together with three or four mature hens to provide uovi for Antonino Calabrese’s breakfast.

  The pollo alla Messinese, a sumptuous dish of chicken smothered in a tuna-flavored mayonnaise that I produced, would have fed three hundred guests at a wedding. Unfortunately there was to be no wedding.

  Following the chicken incident, Mama banned me from slaughtering any more animals, so I turned to the dairy instead.

  I made salty ricotta by boiling sheep’s milk with salt and skimming the whey with a bunch of twigs in the old tradition, just as Nonna Fiore had taught me. The ricotta too I made in great quantities, storing it in barrels in the roof of the cowshed.

  Eventually Mama came to the end of her patience. The farm could not produce harvests to keep pace with my cooking; pasta and bread were going to waste, for no one could be found to eat them and the farmhands had grown fat and lazy through overeating; not a single fruit or vegetable remained in store, the oil and vinegar barrels were empty, only the sheep were left, for the pigs had all been slaughtered, together with the chickens, in what seemed to Mama like a killing frenzy. The discovery of Boli the sheepdog’s carcass decomposed in a ditch seemed even more sinister. The dripping of ricotta from the roof of the cowshed was equally upsetting, and the more superstitious of the farmhands suspected the presence of the devil and refused to go inside.

  Mama gathered her family around her: my brothers Luigi, Leonardo, Mario, Giuliano, Giuseppe, and Salvatore, the twins, Guerra and Pace, and her young husband, Antonino Calabrese. Luigi was sent to summon me into the parlor, but I refused to leave the kitchen.

  “Mama, she won’t come,” I heard Lui reporting back to the gathering in the parlor. “She says she is too busy making dolci, the cassata, cannoli, and torta di ricotta.”

  Undeterred, Mama led her little procession along the passage and into the kitchen.

  “Rosa,” Mama began, “this cannot go on. You must cease this unending cucina.”

  I said nothing, but that same day I packed my few things in my suitcase, and taking from the hook on the wall the cage containing my parrot, Celeste, I left Castiglione for Palermo.

  My family fed upon my heartache for many, many years. During the war, when food was in short supply, my grief insured that ours was the only family in the region that did not experience some hunger.

  What had at first seemed to Mama a curse had become a blessing, and she thanked the good Lord for it at High Mass every Sunday.

  The hams were served at the celebrations to mark Luigi’s wedding to the barmaid from Linguaglossa, which was more years than I can remember after the death of Bartolomeo and my departure. As my brothers’ children were growing up, it was not unusual to see them feasting on apricots or artichokes from a barrel or bottle they had found, dating from the time of their Aunt Rosa’s tragedy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Having prepared my lunch of pasta alla Norma, I left my little apartment for my job at the Biblioteca Nationale in the city center. As I climbed the steps circling the central interior I looked around the building where I had sold the last twenty-five years of my life. I was due to receive my commemorative plate this year, inscribed with my name and years of service, in a presentation given by the director.

  I had gained a lot of weight since I left the fattoria twenty-five years ago. My breasts, still large, now sagged, and in a few years more would sink farther to reach what remained of my waist. My hair, once the color and luster of a raven, was streaked with gray, and years of cataloging books in the library had weakened my eyesight so that I balanced a pair of severe spectacles on the bridge of my nose.

  It is not right to think that I had lived in grief for all of these years. Honestly, once I had emerged from la cucina at Castiglione, my rage left me. In fact, I felt nothing for a quarter of a century. I did not even continue to mourn the loss of Bartolomeo. I accepted my life, and it caused me no pain.

  I had come here, to the library, on the very first day I arrived on the autobus from Castiglione with my parrot and my tiny suitcase in my hand, to make a new life in the big city, away from the town where I had been born and grew up and where everyone knew my business.

  In Palermo I had no past; no one knew me, my family, or my tragedy. All they knew was what I told them, and being from Catania Province, I told them very little.

  Back on that winter day in 1933, the rain fell desultorily as I disembarked from the autobus at the Capolinea in the center of Palermo. Not knowing where to go, I spent the whole day walking around the Arab quarter, thinking how best to find work and how I would survive in the noise and bustle and confusion that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Even on my infrequent trips to Randazzo, the most substantial town in my region, I had never felt so anonymous and alone in the din of surrounding humanity.

  On passing the biblioteca, I noticed a handwritten sign on one of the glass-covered notice boards that advertised the position of a clerk for a reasonable salary.

  I mustered my courage and went inside. After I made the necessary inquiries about the job—it mostly involved shelving books—and left the parrot and my suitcase in the care of Crocifisso the doorman, I was invited into the office of the senior librarian. He seemed pleased with my answers to his questions, and proposed that I start the next day. My salary of twenty lire a week was subject to a probationary period of one month.

  I left the library in high spirits, congratulating myself on my courage. Then I set myself the task of finding a place to live. Again fate seemed to smile upon me. A little farther down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I came upon a grocer’s store that also bore a sign in its window: ROOMS TO LET, RESPECTABLE PERSONS ONLY, EIGHT LIRE PER WEEK.

  The grocer, Donna Maria Frolla, was a little old lady, at least eighty years old. She sat behind a counter framed with prosciutto, salami, all manner of cheeses, ciabatta, fresh pastas, panettone, and biscotti. Donna Frolla assessed me with her squinty eyes while petting a f
at black pug sitting on her lap.

  “Prego, signorina?”

  “Signora, I have come about the rooms,” I stuttered.

  Donna Frolla viewed me with mistrust through her one level eye.

  “Are you married?” she asked without any preliminaries. “For the rooms are only suitable for single occupancy.”

  “No, I’m not married,” I replied as the knife twisted in my wound.

  “So what are you wanting lodgings for?” the grocer continued. “I keep a respectable house, signorina, I wasn’t looking to take a single girl into the rooms.”

  “I work at the library, signora, and am looking for a place close by. I live quietly and can promise I will cause you no trouble.”

  At this the negoziante softened, for she had a great respect for learning and books, and would be proud to be able to tell her customers when they came in to buy their coffee that she had rented her rooms to a librarian.

  Donna Frolla left the store in the care of her husband, who was even older and more shrunken than herself, picked up the pug in her arms, and led me, my parrot, and my suitcase along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele to the duomo. She took a left turn into a little narrow street, Via Vicolo Brugno, crisscrossed with lines of laundry.

  At number fifty-three, she took a key from her pocket and admitted me to the rooms on the second floor. There was a reasonably sized kitchen, a bedroom with a small balcony, and a shared bathroom. It was a little dark, a little fetid, but I needed a roof over my head and did not want to be back out there pacing the streets among strangers in search of something better.

  After Signora Frolla left I opened the doors onto the balcony and looked out. The street was so narrow there was only an arm’s length between the balconies on my side of the street and those on the other. How different it was from the majestic view from the windows of my room at the fattoria, where the eye roved over an expanse of lush green fields to the white-dusted volcano in the far distance.

  This is how I started my new life and a career as a shelver. After years of hard work I attained my present position of assistant junior librarian, and I’ve been as content as one would expect of a woman in my predicament.

  I knew that the younger girls in the library derided me. They mimicked my country accent, and laughed at my homemade clothes, in particular at my gray and capacious underwear, which I once accidentally revealed to the merciless Costanza while taking off my winter boots with an over-vigorous motion of the legs.

  They mocked my passion for food, my generous size, my overwhelming breasts.

  Most of all they ridiculed me for not having a man, and behind my back, and sometimes even to my face, they called me la zitella, the spinster, and la vergine.

  But I was not a virgin. I knew what it was to experience the love of a man, in spite of all Mama’s efforts to make sure that I did not.

  From an early age Mama would lock me in my room at night, fearing for my virtue in a house full of men, and by day she kept a vigilant eye on the lustful Luigi, his brothers Leonardo, Mario, Giuliano, Giuseppe, and Salvatore, and even the unfortunate twins, Guerra and Pace, and also the farmhands, the postman, the priest, Padre Francesco, and in their time both her husbands: poor Papa and his successor, Antonino Calabrese. She trusted no man between the stages of pubescence and senescence, for Mama knew men, and she did not like what she saw in them.

  Nevertheless, I have known love and I still remember, decades later, the one night with Bartolomeo that changed the course of my life forever.

  It was, I recall quite clearly, the very hot summer of 1932, the year of the mysterious, some said supernatural, rain of toads on the slopes of the volcano.

  Mama had taken the unprecedented step of staying for one night away from home. Her mother, my grandmother, Nonna Calzino, was dying of hemorrhoids in Adrano, which was on the other side of the volcano, and Mama could not trust her sisters, Caterina, Ida, Rita, and Lucia, and her brothers, Guglielmo, Lorenzo, and Pietro, to protect her interests in the matter of il testamento.

  Mama knew there was money hidden all over the house: in teapots and cookie jars in the kitchen, in the mattress, the cellar, the eaves, and the wardrobe, and her nature was such that she could not stand idly by and permit herself and her brood to be robbed by her own siblings.

  In addition to the money, there was the matter of the linens and furniture promised to her, the carpets and kitchenware, the clothes and the crockery, and some few remaining pieces of silver that had remained in her family since its descent from gentility in the Middle Ages to its present, more humble condition. Mama was proud of her family’s heritage. Though Papa’s family had land, Mama’s had nothing to show for its lineage except a few relics of a former glory. Still, Mama liked it to be known that she had married down. She approached Nonna Calzino’s deathbed with the intention to have it all, and what she could not get she would fight for nonetheless.

  Mama drove off at a pace in the cart, taking the half-witted farmhand, Rosario, to protect her from the banditti then known to be lurking in the hills. As she left the farmyard Mama must have felt some strange misgiving, so she offered a prayer to the blessed Virgin, protector of the innocent, and urged her husband, Antonino Calabrese, to safeguard the virtue of her only daughter, Rosa, in her absence.

  Catching a sly look passing over the features of the licentious Luigi, Mama fetched him a blow to the side of the head. The resounding smack was so powerful that it sent all lustful thoughts out of Luigi’s mind, and they stayed away even after Mama was, by the grace of the holy Virgin, happily ensconced at home once more.

  Nevertheless, as night fell Antonino Calabrese grew forgetful of his promise to safeguard my virtue and was tempted to take advantage of Mama’s absence by bringing a barrel of grappa up from the cellar. He and his stepsons, my brothers Luigi, Leonardo, Mario, Giuliano, Giuseppe, and Salvatore, caroused in the kitchen while Guerra and Pace attended to their own concerns.

  The twins were then nine and had for some years been running their own very successful business. From an early age they were thought to possess magical powers: clairvoyance, fortune-telling, and dowsing. The same villagers who had bayed for their blood at the time of their birth now consulted the twins as if they were oracles in the ancient tradition.

  The lovelorn asked them how to engender desire in their chosen ones. Parents sought direction on how to deal with wayward children. Heirs sought counsel about undying benefactors. Wives consulted them on straying husbands.

  The twins could tell a goatherd the precise whereabouts of a missing goat, or a farmer about the location of his mule, and predict the dates of births, deaths, plagues, and all other forms of disasters. They were able, with unerring accuracy, to predict the timing of an eruption of the volcano and the direction the lava flow would take, and for this valuable knowledge they charged a tidy sum.

  Indeed they charged a high rate for all their services and were by nature incredibly parsimonious. During any free time when they were not giving consultations in the old pigsty that had been converted into an office, they would spend hours counting their gold, stroking it lovingly between their little fingers and smiling.

  They had amassed a sizable fortune in their nine years, and as a sideline had begun to run a money-lending business. They made a fat profit on our own farmhands. On payday the workers would gather in the inn at Linguaglossa, where Luigi’s sweetheart served behind the bar. There would be drinking contests and gambling and before the night was over their wages would all be spent. Then the twins would step in and supply the farmhands with sufficient cash to keep them until the next payday came, but at a rate which was never below 50 percent.

  Another of their ventures was to act as go-betweens between lovers, as they could be relied upon for their secrecy and discretion. They knew the business of everyone in the region, were feared and respected in equal measure, and because they spoke primarily in their own private language, some considered them to be on the edge of insanity.

  When
they reached puberty, the twins indulged their own precocious sexual development by siphoning off an amount from their profits to finance weekly visits to the whorehouse in Castiglione. This was where they met their future bride—but again I am racing ahead.

  The twins acted as go-betweens for all of us in matters of the heart, myself included, but they charged members of their family the same rates as they did outsiders. After all, work was work, and they could not afford to be sentimental. The fact that I had been more of a mother to them than a sister did not entitle me to a discount.

  And so the twins passed messages between me and my sweetheart, Bartolomeo, and however watchful Mama was, she never detected them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  And so, on the evening of Mama’s departure for Adrano, I was able to slip away from the fattoria through the offices of Guerra and Pace to join Bartolomeo, and together we strolled through the meadows by the light of the winking stars.

  The evening before, Bartolomeo had entrusted the twins with a message for me, saying that as a matter of greatest urgency I should meet him the next day at sunset. No matter how I wheedled and cajoled the twins, I could not prevail upon them to disclose to me the details of this urgent matter. Only when I gave them a silver coin did they reveal that Bartolomeo had kept his own counsel and not spoken of it, and as a matter of principle they would not use their clairvoyant powers to determine what it was.

  I could scarcely contain my curiosity and I lay awake through the night inventing reasons to account for my absence, each less plausible than the last. The next morning I descended into the kitchen in complete despair, hoping that at least the preparation of some wild boar sausages would encourage my brain to think more creatively. Imagine my joy on discovering that Mama was to leave for Adrano immediately after la colazione and was to stay away overnight.