Keeping the Feast Read Online Free PDF

there finished it off in short order, marveling that none of us had ever eaten a risotto like it before. When somebody murmured that she was full, John responded without missing a beat, “Barrels are full. You have had sufficient.” He looked at us and laughed: “Chapter three, verse two, May Tagliabue’s own Bible of personal rules of behavior.”
    Since my own kitchen was minuscule, with no oven and just two tiny gas burners, Lou offered to host a similar meal a week or two later so that I could make good on my offer to make the group one of my family’s favorite dishes, gnocchi verdi —tiny, light dumplings made with ricotta and spinach—served with a mild, buttery tomato sauce enriched with a bit of cream. Late one night we all crowded into Lou’s small kitchen while I made the gnocchi dough. John pitched in to help with the messy job of forming cherry-sized gnocchi in the floured palms of our hands. Laughing and chatting easily, we rolled and rolled the sticky dough in tiny balls as flour flew in all directions. Even Lou, fastidious to a fault, agreed the floury mess on his countertop and floor was easily worth the taste.
    Maybe it was John’s Jersey accent or his help in the kitchen that so reminded me of home. Maybe it was his innate gentleness or the kindness and light I saw in his eyes. Maybe it was that he looked like a cross between Alan Alda and my mother’s cousin Tom, or that his face was as boyish as his too-short chinos. Whatever it was, all I knew was that within a few weeks, for the first time since my divorce six years earlier, I felt drawn to a man instead of wanting to flee; felt promise, not fear.
    John and I first came to know each other over what seems now like an endless series of dinner tables, most of them set on the cobblestones outside simple Roman trattorie, because when one works until ten or eleven or midnight, night after night, movies or concerts or museums are not real options. So after John had finished filing his nightly story and after I had closed the UPI bureau, we fell into the habit of meeting up with other reporter friends for late, light, cheap suppers of honest food and nonstop conversation.
    It was here—over tables covered in white butcher paper, tables that wobbled on the uneven cobblestones, over small pitchers of Rome’s trademark sour white wines—that John and I watched and listened to each other kibitzing with friends, where we first dared to open up to each other. We would talk and eat, eat and talk, for hours, all under makeshift roofs of giant white canvas ombrelloni , oversized parasols that spout like mushrooms outside so many Roman restaurants.
    We might talk about the day’s news, Italian politics, Vatican pronouncements, boneheaded editors, whatever new archaeological or architectural details we might have discovered that day, for bella Roma is an endless trove of nooks and crannies filled with visual treasures just waiting to be noticed during a morning stroll to the market or the office: a tiny fountain in the shape of a foot-long barrel tucked into the façade of an otherwise nondescript palazzo; the ornately carved capital of an ancient Roman column peeking out of a pockmarked, dirty wall.
    Working our way through small bowls of spaghetti with fresh baby clams, or a small grilled sea bass, a mound of barely cooked spinach, or bowls of tiny blueberries, raspberries, and currants, we would talk, listen, debate, argue, regale. John, who had studied and taught Latin at Bonn University and worked at an institute of medieval Latin for years before becoming a reporter, had a way of mixing the erudite with the goofy, going on at length in pig Latin, then bringing in a few lines from Horace or Virgil to hammer his point home. Once the cooling night air signaled it would soon be time to end the evening, his jokes would start coming. John would somehow manage to get us laughing at his father’s oldest, corniest jokes—What was the head singing as it floated