The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi Page A

II
NINUCCIA

    Â 
    â€˜ AFTER ALL, I’LL BE SEVENTY-SIX IN FEBRUARY, GOOD ENOUGH reason for me to stay out of the trees, wouldn’t you say?’
    It’s a late afternoon in the first week of December and, having neither seen nor heard from her in a few days, I’ve telephoned Miranda, asked her if she would join us – the Thursday tribe – tomorrow morning while we work at harvesting olives on a farm belonging to Ninuccia’s cousins.
    â€˜I wasn’t suggesting that you pick but just that you be there with us. We’ve missed you during these days of the
raccolta …
and besides, what has your being seventy-six to do with anything. You’ve been seventy-six for as long as I’ve known you.’
    â€˜Have I? And for how long has that been?’
    â€˜Six years.’
    â€˜Do I understand that you are accusing me of approaching my eighty-second birthday?’
    â€˜Based on what you, yourself, have told me of your anagraphic history, I am only suggesting that …’
    â€˜You needn’t bother accusing or
suggesting
since it’s my life and I like being seventy-six and so I’ll just carry on being seventy-six until I feel like being seventy-five. Besides, no one has yet to take me even for sixty-six. Not to my face.’
    â€˜All I was trying to tell you is that this is the first year we haven’t harvested together in one grove or another …’
    â€˜Have you been working with Ninuccia?’
    â€˜She’s been picking in the northern groves with family members while I’ve been working in the more southern territory with Gilda and a group of Moldavans from Porano. The harvest is just about finished and that’s why I wanted you to come tomorrow. The only trees left to strip are the ones on the farthest southern corner below where we’ve been working, not more than a day’s work if some of the others come to help us. Maybe Ninuccia.’
    â€˜Good. I’ve been hoping that you two would spend some time together, get to know one another. Have you decided who’ll be your first Thursday partner?’
    â€˜Not really. It’s not as though any one of them is waving her arms in longing to get into the kitchen with me. I’m not so certain this “cooperative effort” is going to be …’
    â€˜
Zitta
. Hush. I, myself, I’d begin with Ninuccia.’
    â€˜What makes you think she …’
    â€˜I just do. She’s a lovely creature, Ninuccia.’
    â€˜Lovely, yes, even though she’s the self-appointed president of the International Society for the Supression of Savage Customs.’
    â€˜Did you just make that up?’
    â€˜No. Thomas Hardy, I think it was.’
    â€˜A friend of yours?’
    â€˜Not exactly.’
    â€˜Well, the title would suit our Ninuccia. Her traditionalism is religious, result, in part, I think, of her long sojourn in the south. Pierangelo is Calabrian, you know, and when they first were married she lived with him down there in some mountain village on the edge of the world. Ninuccia and her stories.’
    â€˜More a despot than a storyteller …’
    â€˜
A punto
. Exactly. I’ve always known her family. I remember her as a girl. Hardworking as a mule, a big lumbering gawky sort of girl. Loveable. Her parents delighted in her, despaired for her. No one came to court Ninuccia until Pierangelo. The just-wed girl who set off for Calabria with her love returned a few years later still in Ninuccia’s form, the same only in her form, her spirit having been transformed. Dour, withdrawn, save when she was pontificating. From then until now, when she does speak of her life in the south, it’s always of the isolation, the beauty of the place. Almost never about people save her mother-in-law whom, it would seem, she adored. How ever it was that they lived up there in those mountains, whatever it was that happened there, it was what