at eleven a.m. when they are taking a break from chainsawing the dead branches? There was the woman who made burratta and giuncata and she used to bring it to the house, still warm, in the basket of her bicycle until she died a few years ago. This man with the VW and the melons, his name is Cosimino—Alda buys a lot of fertilizer from him for her wheat fields, and he in turn, buys a lot of wheat from her, which he then sells for a profit. Along the way, he brings her nice things from his garden. Antonio brings the olive oil and cuts down the branches. Carmeluccia brings the eggs and her homemade pastas. The transactions and interactions seem so genuine and affectionate—and even without speaking Italian, I can see that these people hold Alda in great esteem with respect and kindness and she, I feel certain of it, regards them equally.
I study her. I need to know. I need to teach Marco and Leone.
I can’t tell if I am just learning how to make orecchiette, or if I am learning how to be the woman who keeps the sack of keys, but somehow, July with Alda and the Fuortes family has become the most important and anticipated month of my year.
18
WHEN MICHELE WAS FIRST TRYING TO GET WITH ME, HE MADE me some profoundly beautiful ravioli. He got up early on a weekend morning and made his dough. And he went to the gym and did two spinning classes in a row—while his pasta dough rested under a towel at home and became smooth as flesh and tender as lettuce. He then rode his bicycle all the way down to Greenwich Village to get his ricotta from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street and his pancetta from Pino’s across the way and he rode all the way back up to his apartment on the Upper East Side—the whole thing at least an hour’s excursion for just the right ingredients to fill his ravioli. Not to mention three hours of strenuous exercise to coerce his forty-six-year-old body into nail-the-thirty-five-year-old-girl shape.
They were small and delicate and a beautiful yellow from the yolks in the pasta dough and you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain.
For the ravioli, he rolled out his pasta with a rolling pin, like his mother uses, not even availing himself of the relative ease and short-cutting of those stainless steel crank jobs that roll dough on graduated thinnesses until you get to nine and you can read the newspaper through the dough. He did that instead by hand on a galley kitchen counter the size of a standard ironing board, between the toaster oven and the dish drying rack. He cut out each round with a paring knife, not even a cookie cutter, and filled each one by placing the ricotta and pancetta mixture in the center of the round, draping another disc of dough on top and then sealing the edges with a damp fingertip. He made dozens this painstaking way. I could imagine him in his lab at the medical college where he both teaches and does research—his technician’s/researcher’s skills totally utilized—where he gets close up on his task—preparing the Western Blot experiment in which he puts a drop of each “ingredient”—antibodies, saline, dry nonfat milk—onto the gel apparatus using a pipette, a ballpoint penlike tool that holds liquids and you click the top to dispense the drop as if you were clicking open your pen to sign important documents.
He brought Alda into things early on. I met her the first time, when I flew to Italy and met up with Michele on the annual summer month that he spends at home every year. I arrived in Rome, where Michele’s family is from, and Alda, his mother, hugged me in the first three minutes of setting eyes on me. Michele took me on a motorcycle around Rome all night, very fast, and gave me a tour of his city in the dark with the fountains and piazzas and cathedrals and statues high high up of winged horses pulling chariots across the sky made even more luminous and more amazing because of their being lit in golden floods against the orange-scented black night, the oppressive heat of the day diminished, the throngs of summer tourists asleep in their hotels. It was just like that.
I have loved making my way, imperfectly, around a foreign city