My Italian vocabulary often seizes up under pressure; I needed the Italian term for ‘hay-fever’ (l'allergia al polline = allergy to pollen) to explain why I was sneezing and coughing so violently as my system rebelled against alien varieties of tree pollen; my adorable Brother-Cousin (son of Big Fish and my favourite relative ever) managed to work it out for me. He suffers f too but is irritated by a whole different group of allergens: while I snuffled over ornamental cherries and choked from beech trees, he was affected by olive tree flowers and the like. He informed me that hay-fever was a family trait and that Papa Sangue suffered too. No wonder he was constantly clearing his throat.
I’m always thrilled by any information, no matter how trivial, which reaffirms links with Papa Sangue’s side of my family. Having got over the ‘shame’ of being Italian in my early twenties when I realized that my family didn’t just comprise a bunch of Italian chavs on Mamma Sangue’s side i.e., the ones brought up in Market Town, uncles and aunts who forbad my conformist, uncreative, dullard bunch of cousins from playing with me because I led them ‘astray’; no, in Italy there was another family, a group of educated, funny, independent uncles, aunts and cousins on Papa Sangue’s side whose children, effectively my second cousins, were closer in age to me and were witty, interesting and actually owned books! Mamma Sangue’s family, on the other hand, wasn’t renowned for valuing education. My cousins ranged from those who simply had no clue what I was talking about to those who mocked me for being ‘well-spoken’ and hence a ‘snob’. This is why I like sports; I could play tennis with my female cousins and I was spared the need for conversation; company without the ‘colour’. One uncle chided Mama Sangue for sending me to private school. He opened his tirade with demanding to know who she’d bribed to get me a place (I passed an exam) and then reminded her that to educate your children was a waste of time since they needed to join the work force and bring some money in for the family. You’d think we lived in the third world.
In Italy, my second cousins have degrees or are in further education working towards them; most have moved up North but Brother-Cousin, like his dad, Big Fish, will never move away. He has cornered the market in the village for internet delivery. The Italian, national telecommunications company has refused to get involved in this despite the fact that 80% of the population, hungry for iTunes, YouTube and Facebook, lives in the mountains and can’t get broadband. Brother-Cousin has set up the point-to-point transmitters and receivers in the local area, is working very hard and is doing rather well out of it. He has exactly the same sense of humour as me, the same fascination with local history and loves the traditional dialect and origin of words. Our conversations are vibrant and alive and full of piss taking. I adore him. Unfortunately he has a very grumpy wife who coddles their six year old son in a way that I find bewildering. For example, we went for a long lunch altogether and met at 1pm. I asked if her son was eating and she said,
“No, Little Fish eats at 12.30.”
Oh.
It was one of many memorable and delicious meals. The main meal of the day in Italy is at lunchtime; usually around one o’clock and the world and business grinds to a halt. People have two and three hour lunch breaks to accommodate the trip home, a long meal, a nap and the trip back to work. The rhythm of life is entirely different there. Women rise early, clean the house on just an espresso and set off to get the day’s food and queue in various shops. It always amuses me that if you pick up a child’s vocabulary book in any language, you’ll find the word for grocer, butcher, baker; in England, they ought to replace these with ‘cash-point’ machine, ‘twenty-four hour petrol station’ and ‘Tesco’. In Italy, it’s as if time has stood still; yes there are supermarkets but these are supplemented by roadside vegetable stalls much as you’ll get in multi-cultural central London but not many other places, certainly not in English villages where shops seem to have died a death. In Accadia, for the next few years at least, you can buy fresh-made mozzarella and cheeses, local grown fruit and vegetables and bread straight out of the oven.
Mr Sangue and I stuck to eating our main meal in the evening unless we were out. Nothing can be better than a bitter salad of endive, plum tomatoes and rocket, a thick slice of fresh-made tomato pizza bought by weight at the bakers and washed down with ice cold Peroni followed by a sleep. The baker’s is a sweltering location and it’s impossible to ‘nip’ in and grab a loaf. So people fan themselves and catch up while they’re in line. Weakened by the smell of freshly made biscuits, giant loaves some waxy, some smooth, bread rolls desperate to be filled with provolone and salami, and large round dishes of no-frills pizza that kept coming from the back: onion, anchovy, aubergine…my mouth ached. I looked at the old, blown up photos of the men in the family heaving loaves out of the oven in black and white. The sons still wear the traditional white hat. They’re big on uniforms here; it’s not considered demeaning to wear work clothes which, in many blue-collar quarters in England, have been replaced by plaint-splattered casual wear and the ubiquitous reflective vests worn by everyone from architects to road sweepers.
“You’re Mamma Sangue’s daughter, aren’t you?” Signora Baker said.
“Yes, how did you know?” I had met her before but it had been a few years.
“You talk exactly like her; the same voice.”
It’s an observation that no one has ever made and it made me feel connected and a bit proud in a way I couldn’t quite figure out. I liked that people knew who I was here. It gave me a buzz knowing that just by saying my surname, they’d know I was Big Fish’s cousin. It didn’t earn me any privileges, and I wouldn’t have wanted that, but it made me feel part of something. Of course, this is me romanticising again; in Market Town, when I was a kid, at least in the road we lived, just about everyone knew me and it felt like living under the Stasi with uncles and aunts reporting back to Mamma Sangue if I ‘got up to’ anything. But, for the few days I was there, I got a buzz.
loosen those waistbands
Big Fish asked us over for lunch one day. He owns a three-story building with a basement, his apartment on the first floor and Brother Cousin and his family on the floor above. The basement comes into its own when he has guests; meals are taken downstairs because its cooler and we ate round a large table, on plastic plates with plastic cutlery and the smell of ripening tomatoes all around us. One room is filled with the booty from Big Fish’s allotment, furniture salvaged from grandparents’ homes lines the walls alongside massive gas burners which can be hauled into service if there are more than twenty dining and the giant pasta pan, large enough to bath a baby in, is needed.
I ‘helped’ Signora Big Fish make orrechietelli, fresh pasta, rolled with your thumb and the edge of a teaspoon, (I made three); she was patience personified but I wondered what the point of having opposable thumbs is if you can’t make fancy food with them. I left her to it went across the road to the dairy to collect mozzarella and ricotta for later. In a tiny sweltering outhouse, over an ancient wood burning stove, while milk heated and curdled, Rossaria, with just a fan pointing at her face, immersed her hands in another hot tub of liquid and twisted and plaited the newborn mozzarella. She lowered her eyes when Mr Sangue took photos, the most flirtatious and coy this very masculine woman, could manage with her calloused hands and sports shirt. I tried one warm, straight out of the vat and it was a bit too much like baby food for me to cope with.
Brother-Cousin watched me intently while I ate mozzarella as my meat substitute at lunch;
“You like those, Sanguelina?”
“Ummm…” I grunted.
“I like them too but I try not to remember where and how they’re made. Once I took a client there; he’d asked me for some typical, local food. His first one he ate with a knife and fork, then you should have seen him pulling them out of the bag with his hands and stuffing them in whole!”
Our meal consisted of many courses; we began with ciambotta, a local ‘mess of vegetables’, courgettes, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, all fried in olive oil and mushy and fragrant. With bread, that’s a meal for me, but here you have to keep going no matter how much it hurts. There was fresh made pasta, then sausages and fried potatoes, bell peppers fried whole – all very simple but intense in flavour, suffused with olive oil, sunshine and garlic. I wanted to say “Lord take me now for I am happy!” but I worried that a straight translation into Italian may not have had the same light-hearted, reverential tone as in English so I just grunted.
Mr Sangue had made the salad and they ribbed him, ‘complaining’ that some of the pieces of cucumber weren’t cut quite the same size as others in the bowl. I love watching the affection they have for him, how they’re a little bit in awe of this tall, modest and polite Englishman and how everyone talks to him all the time in Italian or English remembered from school or used in work online.
Half way through the meal, more relatives turned up, not to eat, just to hang out with their kids. A neighbour appeared with a tall skinny bottle of leather brown liquid. It was a liqueur made from rocket. I loved it! This had to be good for you and contain some magical, anti-carcinogenic properties.
“Here, Sanguelina,” Brother-Cousin beamed his usual mix of proud and self-awareness that these are uniquely Italian quirks, “We make everything into alcohol.”
We tried some limoncella, a liqueur made from another cousin’s crop of lemons in Sicily. It was sweet and sour in a way that short circuited your mind. Brother-Cousin brought out a bottle of the crucial mixer which I don’t think you can buy back home.
This is all you need to make a palatable drink; mush veg or fruit of choice, a tad of water and a few shots of alcohol. Oh, and it needs to be legal. I don’t think it is, at least I think that’s why Papa Sangue used to retire to the bathroom to make Grappa on that weird machine he borrowed off an uncle.
Of course, there was no room for dessert, so we squeezed in a few gorgeous biscuits we’d brought along as a token gift. They were light pastry and filled with dried fruit and made to wash down with heaps of espresso.
After, Brother-Cousin showed us his office; I loved the collection of antique phones as well as computer innards such as 10” floppy discs and data cards.
“Where the hell do you get this stuff from?” I asked.
“Eee-bay. Shall we go and have ourselves a beer?”
It was futile to argue and ten minutes later we were in an air-conditioned bar surrounded by marble and fancy drapes.
Back to the apartment, three hours after we began the meal, Mr Sangue collapsed on the bed and we slept like seal pups.
More on food to follow…
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