The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read Online Free PDF

gaze to two men who sit at a table to our right. In their market-day corduroy suits, freshly ironed shirts buttoned to their throats, black wool
coppolas
pulled to their brows, they are farmers whose wives are in the Piazza del Popolo bartering and selling the stuffs they’ve grown, harvested this morning before dawn and ported up into Orvieto. At last they can sit together to drink and smoke in
santa pace
, sainted peace. One of them holds a
Toscanello
between his lips, puts a match to its tip and, like a fish, makes short, quick puffs to set the grappa-soaked leaves aflame. He puffs, inhales, puffs some more until, at last, its smoke cuts the wine-laden air of the bar. Miranda closes her eyes.
    â€˜All the men I’ve ever loved have smoked
Toscanelli
: my grandfather, my father, who knows how many uncles and cousins, the first boy who kissed me, my husband …’
    Without deciding to, I interrupt her. I say, ‘Barlozzo smoked them. Vanilla-scented.’
    She’s quiet for a long time, the
Toscanello
smoke having set her dreaming until, the spell broken, she looks at me, says, ‘As far as I can recall, this is the first you’ve spoken of your old duke since …’
    â€˜Is it? Is it? I never intended to … I guess it’s only that …’
    â€˜It’s only that you were in love with him and that makes it difficult, makes it …’
    She cuts short her thought, sips her wine, waits for me to speak. After a while I say, ‘I wish you had known Floriana.’
    â€˜An artful foil. Deflect me with talk of his lover, will you?’
    Let me be
, I beg her silently, knowing she won’t. At best, she will only shift recourse. If I won’t talk, Miranda will. ‘I find myself thinking about him,’ she says, ‘reminded of things he’d say, how he’d lope rather than walk in that right-sided tilt of his, as though Aeolus walked on his left and he wanted nothing to do with the wind. Will you deny it?’
    â€˜Deny that I loved Barlozzo? Why would I?’
    â€˜That you were
in love
with him.’
    â€˜Miranda, please …’
    â€˜You’ve not been the same since, when was it? Nearly a year ago by now?’
    â€˜In December. It will be a year in late December.’
    â€˜Even widows shed their weeds after a year. Umbrian women, if not Sicilian. You two had – what shall I call it? – a kind of delerium of comradeship. Your affinity was complete and often exclusory. Even Fernando was superfluous, any fool could see that. As far as I know, Barlozzo was an anchorite before you came along and …’
    â€˜You’re mistaken. Fernando excluded himself when his concentration wandered elsewhere, knowing he could re-enter our society at will. And as for the anchorite in Barlozzo, it’s true that he lived a long time as a recluse but his renaissance began when he and Flori began to spend time together. He loved her, Miranda, how he loved her, had always loved her since they were children.’
    I told her that we, Fernando and I, were background music, a fresh audience for his stories, the tales of his beloved patrimony. Consenting to his raging and blustering, his gestures of imperiousness, we knew he was fragile as a beaten child. To me, he was a tall, skinny boy with a small boy’s persistent hunger for caress. He could live on filched eggs, mostly raw, and great quantities of dubious red and if his pantry was bare save half a bushel of chestnuts, he’d invite us to dine, roasting the things, splashing them with wine so they’d go soft like pudding inside their shells. We’d salt the first batch and sugar the second. A two-course feast. ‘
Non omnis moriar –
I will die but not wholly.’ He quoted Horace like prayers.
    Sotto voce, Miranda says her own Horatian prayer: ‘Be wise and strain the wine for life is brief. Prune back hope. Even while we speak, envious time has passed;