The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi

wanting to bring Miranda back. I try another dose of folly. I tell her about little Biagio. My darling Biagio, an eighty-something farmer from western Tuscany who has long been my friend. Another in the anti-Proust league, he’d start ranting and snorting every time I’d paraphrase Proustian text about twilight:
When the trees are black and the sky is still light …
    â€˜Look, Biagio, it’s Proust light,’ I’d tell him.
    â€˜Who the hell is Proust?’
    â€˜You know very well who is Proust.’
    â€˜And what did he know about light? My grandfather would call all of us out into the vineyard just before twilight. He’d already be there, the legs of his wooden chair stuck into the earth between the vines, his head thrown back, studying the sky. He said he could smell the twilight before it fell. I wonder if Proust ever smelled the twilight. Every damn farmer who’s ever ploughed a field at sunset could have told you more and told you better than a body who sat squinting at things from a window.’
    â€˜End of that discussion,’ I say, knowing it’s the end of another one. We are quiet too long before we remember to laugh. But our laughter now has no music and so dies quickly, the foolish repartee impotent against the past where Miranda’s eyes still search. She adjusts her headdress, pinches her upper lip between thumb and forefinger, tilts her head to look at me.
    â€˜Life’s a bungled hobble over thin ice, my love.’
    â€˜Always thin, the ice?’
    â€˜Mostly thin. Such a foolish sight we must be from some other vantage than our own as we leap, floe to floe, our gathered trifles – mostly worldly – weighing us down and causing much of the bungling.’
    As though she can see herself now – a lifetime of leaping, gathering, bungling – Miranda’s laugh is raucous, contagious and then my own parade of storms and passions marches before me and, through the strange broken old place on the verges of the Montefiescone Road, my laughing echoes hers.
    At last, gasping for air, Miranda says, ‘I say we should heed Orazio and prune back hopes for anything more than tonight’s supper. And you?’
    She’s on her feet and out the door to the gravel drive before I can shout, ‘Where are you going?’
    â€˜To light the lantern. Miranda’s back in business for the evening and my truckers need to know. And to hell with the buckets and the rodent holes and will you please go to see what creatures might be hanging in the cheese hut and bring them here so we can get to work? But first, go to Bazzica and use the phone, get Fernando here.’
    â€˜We’d already agreed that he would be here at seven so …’
    â€˜Wonderful. And Filiberto … He’ll see the lantern lit and come to find out why, but you must still go to Bazzica to telephone Ninuccia. Tell her to bring her supper here and to call the others. They’ll all know what to do. ‘
Vai, vai
, go, go,’ she says, first hugging me close then heaving me away as she begins to topple down the tables stacked up along the walls by the nephews. Flapping her great lovely form about the place, she stops only to press the hem of her apron to the weepy midnight blue of her eyes, pulls down another table and another one, lining them up, wiping them down with a kitchen towel dipped in a rainwater bucket and I think that Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of Buonrespiro, is a queen bee in connubial frenzy. She stops in mid flight, looks at me, ‘How I miss him, Chou. I miss Filiberto who is real and I am decidedly not longing for the man I thought was Nilo and I’m thinking that the ice is good and hard this evening and that I’m hungry in my belly and my soul and how dearly I wish Orazio was here. And Barlozzo. Tell Ninuccia to bring a pack of
Toscanelli
.’
    â€˜Is that all?’
    â€˜
Per ora
, for now.’

PART