The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online

called after them, they who’d become my comfort, if you can believe that. In the arc of an hour, they’d gone from being the embodiment of my mortification to becoming, somehow, just
mine
. How strange. How …’
    â€˜Not strange. Not for you. Not strange at all.’
    â€˜Perhaps not. We tried to be a kind of family but that failed. Instead we slipped into twice- or thrice-yearly visits made more of duty than pleasure. I tried then to forge a friendship with them. I had more than they did, more than I needed. As soon as it was comfortable for the tenants to vacate it, I signed over the deed to Nilo’s family property up here in Umbria. It was the place where we’d planned to retire some day. A fine stretch of land, a small house, in Civitella del Lago. They moved there, mother and son, and she worked in the village. I think it might have been two, maybe three years later when she sold everything. They went back to Grosseto. Nilo’s son is married, I think it was four or five years ago. The friendship didn’t work, either. After all this time, I’m still not certain if it was more her pain or mine that kept us from it. I expect one day that he’ll come to see me, Nilo’s son. That he’ll bring his children. Another grandmother, I would like to be that for them. I wait for it but I would never ask for it. I do think that Nilo must have spoken well and often to his son of me, maybe not as his wife but as a good person. A good woman, something of the sort. Wishful thinking? Is my notion made of only that?
    â€˜Nilo’s betrayal did not leave me in despair. I never sat and rocked, imagining him kissing her or tangling his legs around hers in the candlelight, his feeling her belly when the baby quickened, I never did. All of that belonged to him and to her. It wasn’t the betrayal but Nilo’s treachery in not owning up to it. The dupe. That’s what left me stammering, inarticulate. It left me defenceless. And profiting from my teetering state, fear took over. Set up to stay. I was and remain victorious over despair, but fear is still with me. I cover it up with my prancing and joking, with my cooking. Once again, to answer your question, I would choose none of them.’
    â€˜But you and Filiberto …’
    â€˜Filiberto and I. An unlived love. Which is not the same as love denied or undeclared. It’s a love with distance between the lovers. A mostly private, mostly silent love, which – by its nature – avoids every kind of injury. Not even love can staunch a wound, Chou. Or if it can, while it’s doing its work on the old wound, the new love is equally busy wounding one in another place. If not in the same place.’
    Miranda smiles, looks up at me as if for sympathy, for accord but, so lost am I in my own story of wounds, both vintage and of recent harvest, I say nothing. She squints her eyes then, as though the old light by which she tries to look at the past has grown dim. When she looks at me again, she returns to the discourse about her shepherd lover.
    â€˜So, yes, Filiberto and I … there is this distance between us. As though there was a stand of ancient elms we must traverse in order to get to one another. And so we wander through the trees and that’s enough for us and has been for twenty years. It’s enough that I feel wiser and lovelier when he’s near, which doesn’t mean I can’t manage when he’s not. It’s Filiberto I run to on the morning when I see the olives have budded. I need to tell him about beautiful things. Him, exactly him. One must put a face to love. One must know who to run to.’
    â€˜Quaint. Charming enough. Perhaps even
ideal
. But …’
    â€˜Not
real
?’ Miranda smiles.
    â€˜It would be like living on sweets. I would miss the salt. Half a love.’
    â€˜The good half,’ she tells me.
    â€˜You said it:
I’m still working on the ending