Amore and Amaretti Page 3
1 medium red onion, finely chopped
2–3 cloves garlic, finely sliced
400 g peeled and coarsely chopped tomatoes, tinned or fresh
Salt and pepper
Heat olive oil in saucepan, and add onion and garlic. Stirring frequently, cook about 8 minutes or until softened. Topple in the peeled tomatoes and about 1/2 cup of water. Season with salt and pepper and bring to the boil. Lower heat and simmer 30 to 40 minutes, adding extra water if it reduces too much.
Then there is the world of the restaurant, where sixty hours of my week are spent. We are a birreria-ristorante, which means there is an enormous selection of local and imported beers available to accompany the meals. Our menu is eclectic and international, thereby ensuring that we are popular with both the fashionable young Florentines who arrive clutching their car radios (to prevent the incessant thefts) and the busloads of tourists; we have something to please all palates. There are the traditional Tuscan offerings – the pastas (including my favourite, the nutmeggy, creamy spinach and ricotta) and Florentine (porterhouse) steaks and anchovy sauces and crespelle – alongside a range of hamburgers, pronounced ‘umborgers’, to go with the beers, and mayonnaise for the French fries. Gianfranco has negotiated special deals for the tourists via a travel agency, and I am often struck by the beautiful irony, as I ladle lemon sauce over 140 veal scaloppine before sending them out of the kitchen on platters, that groups of Australian tourists are heartily tucking into a meal in a Florentine restaurant that has been cooked by an Australian. In the enormous kitchen, two young girls assist me, while a series of dishwashers come and go. We wear pale-blue uniforms like nurses, and in quieter moments invent potent cocktails and bake batches of biscotti. By 11.30 p.m. the kitchen is packed up, gleaming, and I am dining either with my beloved or at the apartment wondering what time he will come home.
Our flat is just two rooms, tiny and purpose-built for restaurateurs who never cook at home, who work, live and eat at restaurants. Provision for the stove-top coffee maker and Gianfranco’s collection of fancy liqueurs constitute the kitchen space. The other room is occupied exclusively by the double bed, above which presides a large television set, as if all a bedroom’s purposes consist of sleeping, having sex and watching television – which, apart from the long nights I lie waiting for him to come home, is essentially all the entire flat is for.
My sister, who came here to be with me, often feels further away than if she were back in Australia. I know she is working as a sales assistant at a gold shop in Piazza Santa Croce and that she has put on twelve kilograms, but my self-absorption has blinded me to anything beyond that. Occasionally she comes in the car with us on day trips to the ocean; she sits in the back popping M&Ms into her mouth while Gianfranco teases her about her weight.
Penne with ricotta and spinach
For the sauce, blanch 300 g spinach, then squeeze dry. In a food processor, whizz the spinach together with 240 g ricotta and 1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, and set aside. While pasta is cooking, dollop about a tablespoon per serving of the spinach/ricotta mix into a frying pan and add cream to extend it. Blend well to combine, check seasoning and gradually bring to the boil. Drain pasta, add to sauce, toss quickly to coat, then serve.
Subservience sits uneasily on me and I start to resent the fact that, after long, gruelling days running the restaurant, Gianfranco chooses the companionship of other men with a pack of cards and whisky, while I am relegated to trophy status. When in a positive frame of mind, I manage to be philosophical about the hours I am left alone, in Florence or in his village, while he hooks up with old friends, attends to a business matter, or simply disappears. I am aware that I made the choice of both man and lifestyle, and of the privileges offered.
Yet, increasingly I find myself wading through impotence and incomprehension, like those dreams where your legs are clinging to a soaked and heavy garment and are struggling through the mud. I am so seriously in love that I have thrown out my contraceptive pills and I have had my blonde hair permed into a frizz to match Gianfranco’s new hairdo. I am ironing his T-shirts. I suffer the interminable conversations, which swirl around me, about people and places I do not know. I am docile and stoic. I lie in our double bed in Via Osteria del Guanto waiting to hear the sound of Gianfranco’s motorino as it turns into our narrow street. But the night deepens and empties, and still Gianfranco does not come home. I torment myself with imaginings and suspicions; I rewind details of the day as I try to trace back to where I may have given offence or let him down. There must have been something I did or said to make him value me less, to pretend I was not there, to exclude me, to stare through me, not answering my questions… when every fibre I possess shivers with the force of my adoring. I feel I have become another person.
The winter before he met me, Gianfranco had learned to ski. A new girlfriend is not going to impede this recently discovered passion, and he tells me that I, too, will learn to ski. We head to one of Florence’s smarter sports stores to fit me out. Because I have never skied in my life – nor been remotely tempted to do so – I have no idea what is required, but with his usual authority Gianfranco selects stretchy pants, zipped polo necks, a padded jacket so lovely I could weep, soft leather gloves and a cosy woollen hat, ski boots and shiny handsome skis. I try on this fancy costume, and in the shop mirror see a woman I do not recognise. Gianfranco pays for it all and I never find out if he subtracts the vast cost from my monthly stipendio. (That salary always seems inordinately large to me – two million lire! – and therefore somehow unreal. And because Gianfranco pays for everything, money is something I seem not to really need.)
And so commence the Wednesday trips to Abetone. The winter ski resort for Florentines, this village sits high in the Apennine Mountains above Pistoia, a ninety-minute drive from Florence. Four valleys link up to create ski slopes and cross-country runs through forests of firs, larches and pines. Figures fly past on skis and it is so beautiful that even before setting foot on the snow I am convinced I will love it.
Of course, the reality is quite different. Gianfranco teaches me the rudiments before sailing gracefully away, swallowed up in the frigid landscape. That first day I never stop falling over. I am appalled at my clumsiness and lack of coordination – I, who studied ballet for ten years, shone in aerobics classes and can still do the splits! Collapsed ignominiously in the snow, I feel discouragement seep into me. The warm spicy wine at the rifugio where I later meet up with Gianfranco restores my humour somewhat, and by the time the following Wednesday has come around I am prepared to publicly humiliate myself all over again.
Having only one day a week in order to learn a difficult sport like skiing at the reasonably seasoned age of twenty-eight means that progress is slow, painfully slow. In fact, every Wednesday I spend most of the day falling over, lolling abjectly in the snow longing for the whole ghastly ordeal to be over. Gianfranco finds it, and me, vastly entertaining. We always start out together and he is patient until I begin to sulk, at which point separation seems the most sensible idea, and off he sails.
And then, on the very last day we visit – winter on its way out and the snow patchier and thinner – something seems to snap into place. I have chosen a cross-country path through the trees, worn out by the steep slopes down which I mostly roll, flailing. Sun dances and dazzles and I have a clear, smooth passage ahead of me. I set off cautiously, increasing in confidence and speed, threading efficiently through the trees, my hips obeying – and suddenly I am flying, all fluid rhythm and calm, clear grace. It is one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.
Val più la pratica che la grammatica
Experience is more important than theory
My Italian slowly improves, and yet, impeded by limited vocabulary, I remain frustrated by the inability to express my character and voice my opinions. For that first year I am perceived as quiet and acquies
cent. I often feel like screaming out that I am really a strong, bubbly, opinionated, articulate and independent woman, and that in Australia most women are not required to sit for hours on end doing nothing while their partners are out hunting or playing cards or drinking with friends.
Gianfranco’s closest friend is a waiter from Vecchia Toscana, married to a Russian woman. We go to their apartment for lunches, and when the business of eating is out of the way, the television is switched on for an afternoon’s viewing of soccer, Formula 1 car racing or the sacred calcio – association football. Dulled by post-lunch liqueurs I slump in the darkened living room while cars roar around circuits and the air thickens with cigarette smoke. Olga, whose air of submission is probably as misinterpreted as mine, does not engage me in a female chat; we all stare at the screen.
Walrus-moustachioed Raimondo has left Antica Toscana, and has come to work at our restaurant. He is my ally. And so it is Raimondo to whom I turn after slicing my finger open, not to the man with whom I share my life who is up to day three in his silent treatment towards me. Our freshly laundered white aprons require perforated holes in the fabric for threading the ties. Generally, these perforations are effected with a knife. My little paring knife, newly sharpened, slips smoothly through first the starched fabric, then my finger. Blood shoots out. I have barely felt any pain and yet within seconds there is a heavy throbbing sensation, which I try to stem with a makeshift bandage. I find Raimondo, who takes charge immediately, organising our absence from the restaurant for the following hour while he drives me to the nearest hospital.
It is just before lunchtime and Gianfranco is at a table with the other partners discussing the specials of the day. I stand in front of him with my throbbing finger and tell him what has happened and where I am about to be taken. I stand in front of him willing him to put his arms around me, to forgive me for whatever sexual transgression he believes I have committed, to remember he loves me. Instead, his eyes examine me like tiny black stones and I realise what has just happened has alienated him from me even further – that the inconvenience of my accident, indubitably an act of carelessness or stupidity, is merely adding to his contempt. He says not a word. Raimondo leads me gently away.
Inevitably, when I start to make sense of this world, the relationship begins to fall apart. This takes place painfully over many months, during which Gianfranco decides that I am being unfaithful to him. Unfaithful! I am so fiercely in love with him that the concept is almost laughable, except that his punishment is so severe. My sister has returned to Australia, and he is now the one I must rely on.
One afternoon he comes back to our apartment and does not greet me. He fails to respond to my concerned questions and looks right through me with hard, cold eyes. We go off to work together, and I am ignored for the evening. I am desperate with incomprehension and unhappiness. Back home, I wait and wait and wait, then eventually fall asleep, to awake at three o’clock or four o’clock in the morning to an empty bed. Days later, in his jeans pocket I find cards for out-of-town hotels that we have never been to together. The very fact that I am spying on him, not trusting him, searching for clues, appals me, and yet I cannot stop.
It is during one of these bouts of ostracism that I receive a rare phone call from Australia. At the sound of my mother’s voice all I long to do is to pour out my sadness and my vulnerability, to hear her sensible voice and her unconditional love. But she is telling me about Tony, and how he had contacted her some weeks before, wanting my address in Florence. His plan was to travel to Europe via Bali – except he never got beyond Bali, because he drowned. He had gone out to one of the islands and somehow this former champion swimmer had drowned. Hearing about this good and gentle man whom I had discarded in my selfish urge for a larger, brighter life – hearing about it, furthermore, in the midst of yet another romantic crisis with the man who took his place – ushers in a bleakness as deep as it is lonely. I cannot even confide my grief in Gianfranco, because, at that time, I no more exist for him than Tony now does for me. I just fold it inside me.
Grande amore, grande dolore
Great love, great pain
Then one day he speaks to me; the wall of silence lifts. He accuses me of making love to the greengrocer in the mornings on my way to work. He is sick with jealousy, he tells me, and his excuse is that he is made that way. ‘Io sono fatto così’ I hear a million times throughout that turbulent, glorious relationship, as if by saying those words he is giving himself permission to be as difficult, as cruel and as irrational as he likes.
Making up is so passionate that for a long time afterwards we are more in love than ever. My relief at being permitted to once more exist drowns out the utter absurdity of his accusations, and the danger of his paranoia. It turns into a pattern that is only broken after fifteen months, coinciding with both my beginning to dream in Italian, and, most significantly, finally turning back into myself. We break up just in time for my thirtieth birthday. Gianfranco drives me, the delicate invalid, out to Strada-in-Chianti outside Florence, to the sprawling country home belonging to our friends Vincenzo and Claudia to convalesce.
Biscotti di prato
(Almond biscuits)
200 g almond kernels
500 g plain flour
Pinch salt
300 g caster sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs, plus 2 egg yolks
Grated rind 1 orange
Toast almonds in moderate oven until crisp. Remove and cool. In a large bowl, mix together flour, salt, sugar and baking powder. Make a well in the centre and add whisked eggs and yolks. Work together with hands to form a smooth dough, then incorporate the almonds and orange rind. Shape into 4 logs about 3 cm wide and set aside on greased oven trays for about an hour, covered with a clean tea towel. Glaze logs with extra beaten egg yolk, then bake in 175°C (340°F, Gas mark 4) oven for about 30 minutes. Remove and slice diagonally into 2 cm strips. Return to oven and bake both sides 5 minutes each. Cool on trays.
And so for several weeks all I do is sleep and read and help in the domestic kitchen. I go for long walks and eat a lot and dip Claudia’s home-made almond biscotti into Vin Santo until late at night in the company of this infinitely kind couple who feel like my grandparents. They have known Gianfranco for many years and are not surprised it has turned out this way. Then one day I feel ready to re-enter the real world of work and relationships. I have no desire to follow my sister back to Australia. Florence has become home, and it is time to look for a job and a place to live.
Nella guerra d’amore vince chi fugge
In the war of love he who escapes wins
I am sharing a flat in Via de’ Barbadori with two students who study architecture at university. My bedroom is just large enough for a camp bed, a chest of drawers and a Pink Floyd poster. Each morning when I cross the Ponte Vecchio on my way to work at a tiny restaurant, the reflected shimmering of the ochre buildings in water stir me. The restaurant’s name, I’ Che C’è C’è, is colloquial Florentine, meaning ‘What’s there is there’, suggesting pot luck as far as the food is concerned. And yet the new owner, Piero, has carefully composed a menu combining traditional meals with inspired modern flourishes. I am assistant chef to Maurizio, who used to work with – of course – Gianfranco. We are assisted in turn by Maurizio’s mother, Emba.
Io sono aperta come una finestra in estate
I am as open as a window in summer
Emba is really everybody’s mother. In her little girl’s voice she calls us by her pet names. She is round and pinkly gleaming and huggable, except my arms do not reach all the way around her. She often describes someone as having a heart as big as a church, but no one I know deserves that accolade as much as she does. She is much more modest about herself. Another favourite expression of hers is, ‘Io sono aperta come una finestra in estate’ – ‘I am as open as a window in summer’. Emba mainly washes
up, but two of the pasta dishes on the menu use her special sauces, and our famous tiramisu, which she teaches me, is her own particular version.
We bump along together in the kitchen – Maurizio, with his heroin habit; la Veeky, finding another opportunity to make her cheesecakes; and Emba, who wears floral aprons from home and uses her wide, thick fingers to measure out ingredients. She aspirates the letter ‘c’ in true Florentine style, so that it comes out ‘h’, like the Florentine teenagers who ask for ‘Hoha-Hola’ when ordering a Coke.
Emba’s hands scrape out the finely chopped herbs (thyme, tarragon, parsley) and onions from the food processor. Then she stirs them into her simmering tomato sauce before adding cream. This is the exquisite salsa aI’che c’è c’è, which is tossed through pasta. The sauce is one of the reasons – along with our desserts – why this is a very busy restaurant. At the entrance of the kitchen she unzips her cloth purse and passes money to Maurizio. When he returns from his outing, he is white and sweaty and begins scrubbing, vigorously, the same square of bench-top for ten minutes as the orders pile up, his eyes pupil-less. Emba and I often manage the whole evening’s cooking between us.
Tiramisu all’arancia
(Orange tiramisu)
6 eggs
6 tablespoons caster sugar
500 g mascarpone
Grated rind 1 orange
Cold strong espresso coffee
Cocoa powder
Savoiardi biscuits
Separate the eggs, and whisk together the yolks with the sugar until well blended. Fold through mascarpone and orange rind until smooth. Separately, whisk egg whites until very stiff, then gently fold through mascarpone mixture until completely amalgamated. Dip savoiardi into coffee and arrange one layer at the base of a bowl. Dollop in mascarpone cream and sprinkle with sifted cocoa powder. Continue these layers until the bowl is full, finishing with a generous layer of cocoa. Chill at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.