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

bartered lamb and cheese from the shepherds. They decided upon things by “committee”: who was to get her boots repaired, her knives sharpened, her teeth fixed, how much wood was to be cut, which mattresses were to be restuffed. What they didn’t grow in their
orto
or forage in the meadows and the woods, they bought from the
fruttivendolo ambulante
, the travelling fruit and vegetable wagon, on Saturday. And to supplement mean times – their own or, more often, those of their neighbours – they sold their handiwork: prized by the fancy women of Reggio and Catanzaro were the table covers and bedspreads of vast dimension and heirloom design, which were crocheted by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra from white cotton string, tea-dyed to a pallid amber brown. And what they didn’t knit or sew, they would fetch in the markets, riding down the mountain to Reggio in the Thursday or the Saturday bus several times a year. You will recall that it was 1969 when I arrived in Acquapendente di Sopra. That these women lived then in that cloistered self-sufficiency seems an imponderable truth. Having so little, they were free to have everything.’
    â€¢
    Never asking me if I’d wanted another caffé, Ninuccia has been up and down, slapping the wet grains from the Bialetti into the sink, rinsing all its parts, spooning out more ground espresso, packing it into place, filling the pot with water. Never breaking the stride of her story, she lights the burner, sits down. We avoid one another’s gaze. I don’t want to hear more of this story. I don’t want this Cosima to be relegated to fable. I want to know her. I am wishing that I
was
her. At the least, I want to be there with her, with all of them. I belong there. I’m certain of this. How can it be that I am feeling the loss of a woman I never knew, would never know? I think of their soprano voices in the evening, under the mountains.
    My throat tightens, tears threaten. I think how absurd is this response of mine to the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. I will drink this fresh caffé and then explain to Ninuccia that I really must go. First I will steer our talk to the present. To the less remote past.
    â€˜I never knew it was you who began the Thursday Night Suppers. I mean, with Miranda.’
    â€˜Those Marvellous Thursday Nights, that’s what Cosima called them. Yes, yes, it was me who carried the idea home to Miranda years ago when I returned from Calabria. Missing life with Cosima and the women as I did, I’d hoped to feed my nostalgia for those nights in the mountains by raising up some kinship here in Umbria. Of course, it was not at all the same. I should never have expected it to be. What they had and who they were in Calabria and what we have and who we are here … was
unequal
. Discordant. How could I expect to satisfy them with what had delighted Cosima’s tribe?’
    â€˜I would cook a pot of beans, not so different from that one over there, and call it Thursday Night Supper. There were more of us back then, sometimes as many as twenty squeezed into the rustico. I’d ladle out beans or some thick soup of barley and spelt scented with whatever herbs were near. Bread, wine. Of course, there was always cheese. Once I made
la polenta in catene –
cornmeal in chains – thin cornmeal mixed with stewed white beans spooned into deep bowls over bread. Filiberto called it war food. He remembered his father hanging a sardine from a string tied to the light above the kitchen table; the oil dripping from the little fish was the only condiment for his family’s nightly polenta during the meanest years. His father never changed the sardine for another until only bones swung from the string.
    â€˜â€œWe’d cut a piece of the flat, yellow pudding, swipe it across the sardine, trying to wet it with the little fish’s salty oil,” Filiberto told us. “There was watered wine until that