The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi Page A

been Pierangelo’s and now it will be mine. The bed had been mine and now it will be yours.” Cosima had a wondrous way of weeding her discourse, plunging as she did to the marrow of a thing. And her talk reflected her resolve, her ideas slow-ripening as mountain fruit. She seemed free of dilemma. Hers was a road straight, cleared of obstacles, immutable. Divine in its way. Even her wrath she managed with serenity. No bile, no hackles, never demurring from her path, she could unburden rage as genteelly as she could embrace peace. “Lament is futile. Scorn makes bitterness. Vendetta soothes,” she would say.
    â€˜Pierangelo soon slipped back into the life he’d led before his sojourn to Umbria. Before us. Setting out with his former mates to fish for tuna, he’d stay away for three or four days, return for one or two, before going off again. I knew it wasn’t always to the sea where Pierangelo went. Normal as raising sheep or fishing the seas, working a job now and then for the clans. “We all do it. Nothing dangerous. I told you, nothing dangerous at all.”
    â€˜Meanwhile I learned more about my mother-in-law. Unsought, unacknowledged by her, Cosima had long ago been assigned to the province of myth by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra, she having ministered to two generations of them since she was in her early adolescence. In her men’s black shoes and her shapeless black dress, loping over the fields or between the lanes, she’d be bent on birthing babies, washing the dead, keeping vigil over the sick. Pulling an anise cake from her basket, the perfumed thing still warm from her hearth, she could light up gloom by walking through the door. But her more constant sympathies Cosima reserved for the seven women who lived within her nearest reach in the three houses attached to hers.
    â€˜Save when they slept or on the occasions when their husbands or sons were at home, the seven and Cosima were together. In summer they cooked in the spare kitchen of the deconsecrated church’s cellar where it was cool. In winter when the cellar was cheered only by a small hearth by which hermit monks once warmed themselves, they cooked together there as well, neither knowing how to nor desiring to live separately from one another. Bringing shaped and risen loaves covered with cloths to the communal oven, which sat in a clearing of oak scrub just outside the village, they’d settle themselves on stones or among the weeds with their knitting while their bread baked. On Mondays, they mounted their washing in baskets on their heads and walked to one or another of the nearby streams, whichever one was rushing good and fast. At noon they ate bread and cheese from their pockets and, at sunset, laid supper on a table in the front lane when it was fair or piled together in one of their houses or back in the church cellar when it was cold. The table cleared away, their kitchen chairs in a half circle in the lane, they’d once again pick up their needles and yarn and talk and work and sing.
Santo cielo
, sainted heaven, how they could sing. Not an alto among them, they raised their seven soprano voices in a blaze of plainsong or chanted and keened as women before them had chanted and keened in those mountains for thousands of years, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.
    â€˜And so I went about my days as they did theirs, blithe as well-loved children. Their almost breezy sanguinuity sprang, it seemed, from their abiding concern for one another, each one trusting the others to be thinking of her while she was thinking of them. Though those who were widows – Cosima and two others – were pensioned by the State and the others supported, more or less, by their husbands, their economic lives were mostly operated collectively. Whoever had, shared. Cosima was their purser. They worked an
orto
, kept hens and raised rabbits, and