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

…’
    â€˜Never mind. The last thing I need right now is a dose of pontification from
la lupacchiotta
. She’s a big stick that women use to beat men over the head with, and I say there’s nothing wrong with men that isn’t likewise wrong with us.’
    I know her dethroning of Woolf is burlesque but still it irks me and I let her know by refusing to parry. Miranda rises, comes to me, takes my face in her hands, shakes it back and forth as she might to a loved child. In a tired, gravelly whisper, she says, ‘We were talking about Nilo Bracciolini and Miranda Filippeschi and I could give a damn at this moment about Virginia Woolf.’
    â€˜Fair enough,’ I concede and she returns to her chair.
    â€˜It wasn’t our living apart four days a week. ‘I’ve never believed it was that which provoked Nilo’s betrayal. Out of sight, out of mind signifies something less than love. Our story was likely finished long before he ever held the other one in his arms. Our story ended when we struck a truce, when we stopped trying to finesse one another, when we quit the game of convincing and beguiling. Beware of tolerance between lovers. We are obliging only of those we don’t love. The more obliging we are, the less we love the one obliged. Love and tolerance are antagonists. No, they are mortal enemies. Nilo and I, at some point in time, we became
tolerant
of one another. Believing we’d earned it, I saw nothing of peril in the long, unbroken peace we lived and I called it happiness. I named it happiness, the good-natured dance we did,
adagio, adagio
, around the carcass of a long-dead love.’
    She stands upright, unties her kitchen-towel turban, rewraps it around her braids, pats it into place, goes then to fetch two baskets from where they hang by the back door, slips them over one arm. She tells me she’s going to see what vegetables the others have left in the shed. Weary of groping in that darkish past, I think it’s the present Miranda’s gone to retrieve as much as the vegetables. No sooner out the door, she comes back in.
    â€˜In case you’re also wondering if I miss him, I will tell you that I don’t. I don’t miss Nilo, not he, himself.’ She heads out the door, turns back once again. ‘Ah, but how I long for the man I thought he was.’
    For the man I thought he was
. I don’t know how much time passes before I hear her shouting, half laughing, from the shed. ‘Come and help me with the wine, will you, Chou?’
    Some of the mischief back in her gaze, she nods to a demijohn and we begin rolling it the few metres between the shed and the back door into the kitchen.
    â€˜And as for
la lupacchiotta
, the she-wolf, everything I’ve read of hers sounds as though her nostrils quiver when she speaks.
Puzzo sotto il naso
– a stink under the nose.’
    Seeking relief in sarcasm, Miranda is pleased with her lampoon and begins to launch another one, but I’m already telling her about the time I tried to speak of Proust to Barlozzo.
    â€˜All I did was to ask him if he’d ever read Proust,’ I tell Miranda as we position the barrel near the supper table, both of us already laughing.
    â€˜And he said, “For pity’s sake, an epicene Frenchman rhapsodising over a cake damped in tea, no less. At the least he might have poured himself a thimbleful of
vin santo
. I can’t imagine what he might have written had there been a tin of cornmeal biscotti thick with pine nuts and white raisins near to hand … Better yet, spaghetti carbonara, the pancetta crisp, a whole hill of pecorino on top, a lovely glass of red … I could understand a man getting misty over the taste of that.”’
    Miranda laughs with only half a heart, the rest of her lingering among the ancient elms with Nilo and the costumeless emperor. Perhaps she’s still in the church with
l’altra
. I feel desolate with