The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi

now. I’ll invent something else. No, of course not. Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that’s dangerous.” As we withdrew that afternoon further into the wilderness, I began to feel a kind of qualm, mild enough at first before building to a tease, to a menace and causing my chatter to sound tinny, far away. Someone else’s noise. I would look at my husband who looked only ahead, the muscles in his face rippling under flesh gone white.
Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that’s dangerous
.
    â€˜Hung from a mountain spur two thousand metres above the sea, the village seemed a pile of Iron Age stones relieved here and there by a ruin from the epochs of the Greeks and the Romans. Though people were about the narrow lanes in front of and between the houses, so pure was the silence that I’d thought to have lost the capacity to hear. Later Pierangelo would explain to me that it wasn’t silence I heard but the great, incessant noise of streams and torrents and waterfalls that surrounded the place.
Aquapendente
, falling waters. It was the raucous crashing of water that I took for silence.
    â€˜Pierangelo stopped the auto in a curve of the unpaved road in front of a long, narrow stone building that would have seemed abandoned were it not for wisps of woodsmoke rising from four chimneys and window curtains of bright-coloured cloth swelling in the breeze. Four separate dwellings were suggested by as many wooden doors, one of them opened to reveal a room not two metres high, a bed and a chair filling its whole space. A small flock of scraggy, brownish sheep were being rallied through the lanes by two despotic dogs and I remember waiting until the parade passed before opening the auto door. And then I saw Cosima. She’d come, unnoticed by me, to within a metre or so of us and there she stood, arms crossed over her chest, weeping and smiling. In a shapeless black dress and men’s shoes too large, she was a romantic figure, a kind of timid enchantress from whom someone had stolen her real clothes. I waited for Pierangelo to go to her but he sat quietly in his seat. I stepped out and Cosima stepped closer – another kind of love at first sight. Gathering me to her, saying a few words of welcome, our sympathies were immediate, reciprocal, tender. All that I loved about my husband was
authenticated
in her. His cautionary tales he needn’t have told but rather he should have trusted his mother to be also mine, and to know that both would be my shelter.
    â€˜Cosima’s house was the most spacious of the four in the low stone dwelling with its blue shale roof and paint-peeled doors. The walls she whitewashed every Easter and Christmas and the packed-earth floor had so long been swept and trod upon that it had the texture and the sheen of stone. In the sitting room there were white-painted iron sconces on the walls, only occasionally stuck with light bulbs, hand-hewn chairs also painted white, a kind of sofa strewn in a length of salvaged boat sail from the seaside markets and a woodpile laid neat and even. In the kitchen there were four more chairs about a small square wooden table scrubbed nearly to splintering and a pile of plates in a basket by the hearth. Three pots hung from the stones above the hearth shelf, though two were for show since Cosima always reached for the same one no matter what she was about to cook. In the sleeping room there was a small white bed and a trunk larger than it on which stood two tall silver candlesticks, almost garish in that setting, about which she never spoke. Only a sheaf of evergreen or a bottle stuck with wildflowers intruded upon the shades of white in Cosima’s house and the dark figure of her moving about against the pale light there made a
quadro vivente
, primitive, calming.
    â€˜The sail-clothed sofa became Cosima’s bed and there was never a word of bickering among us about her will to relinquish the sleeping room: “The sofa had