The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

Thursday’s farewell feast with the intoxicated boar, the sting of Miranda’s news had yet to be soothed. As we sat down together, it was a muted gaiety the tribe mustered: feeble chatter around a table of funeral meats for the sake of the widow. Neither did the cold winey cream meeting the hot faint smokiness of the soup bring forth half a sigh nor the gold char of the boar’s crust nor the exquisite drunkenness of its flesh. As though awaiting a dreaded train onto which only one of us would board – the great black thing having just hurtled into its berth – we linger, saying little. I could be the dancing bear who distracts them from their bile but I will not. Grown weary of what seems their selfishness, I just want the evening to end. We’d not yet cleared the table when the candles had spent themselves and it was by the last of the firelight that we rose – scorning Miranda’s plea to leave it all to her – and began carrying things behind the bedsheet curtain, excusing ourselves like strangers if we brushed by one another, reached at the same time for the same dish. So much for pulling my chair a millimetre closer to the Thursday table.
    â€˜I need to be alone for a while. Some things I want to do without any of you underfoot. Be off, be gone.’
    The tribe bid one another
buonanotte
as though it was
addio
.
    All the way back into town I repeat and repeat what Andrè Gide taught me so long ago:
If you want to discover new lands, you must consent to stay a very long time at sea
.
    â€¢
    It is late November – five weeks since the Thursday night of the boar – and Miranda and I are sitting midst the market-day fracas at Bar Duomo with our high-noon white wine.
    â€˜They’ve been calling and stopping by and generally tormenting me, Chou,’ she says.
    â€˜I know. They’ve been calling me as well. I’d not expected that. More I’d assumed they would begin arranging things among themselves, hoping I’d set off for Mars or wherever they think I came from. On that last Thursday, I’d felt it was me, the prospect of my becoming more
present
, that had caused them to be so sullen, so …’
    â€˜How much you have yet to learn about Umbrians. Had they been anything
but
sullen, it would have been an afront to me, a form of disrespect. You saw and felt them to be unsympathetic. Cold. Both of which may or may not have been the case. They were being themselves. They were being Umbrian.’
    â€˜Touché.’
    â€˜You cannot be Umbrian. Nor must you try. We are all eternally ourselves.’
    â€˜Ditto. Touché.’
    â€˜Who’s been telephoning you?’
    â€˜It’s mostly Gilda who calls to say that when she passes by the rustico there’s no evidence of progress. Paolina calls, too, but just for a greeting. I’ve begun suggesting to both Gilda and Paolina that we meet at our place until the work is finished in the rustico but they baulk, say no one wants to drive up into town, look for a parking place, share the corso with tourists bemoaning the dearth of “lasagna” on every menu in
centro storico
.’
    Miranda laughs her goddess laugh and sips her wine. ‘It’s true. Country people tend toward listlessness after the day’s work and want nothing of town life to interrupt the tranquility of an evening. Most of us make the trek up onto the rock only on market days and then only if we have something to sell. They must be patient, our friends. Either patient or inclined to open their
own
homes for a Thursday night. Every one of them lives within decent striking distance to the others, wouldn’t you say? It would be only you who would have to drive a few extra kilometres. I should have thought to raise that possibility when we were all together.’
    She cracks a slender
grissino
and dips the piece into her wine, lets it fall delicately into her mouth, chews thoughtfully, shifting her