Anna, their daughters Agnese and Maria, Anna’s sister, Carlo’s best friend and workmate Paolone and his girlfriend Angela as well as their cat, make the trip in June and stay, more or less, the entire season. Alda takes the train with her youngest son, Giulio, who at forty still lives at home because he is Italian and this is what Italians do if they haven’t married.
On that first long trip, on the motorcycle—when we left Rome early in the morning—Michele brought me a cold apricot juice and a hot coffee as soon as I woke up. He did the difficult work of driving through that relentless, excruciating hot afternoon on the shimmering asphalt of the autostrada while I sat on the back, lost in the cushion of my helmet, enjoying that exquisite feeling of being totally surrendered, relinquished from all of my responsibilities, even for taking care of my own heartbeat. He drove with care and expertise. He drove fast and assertively. I never felt doubtful. I locked my arms around his chest, leaned into the turns as he had instructed me, and for the rest of the journey spent all those hours on the road gazing out at the rolling hills, and remnants of aqueduct, and skinny tall cypress trees, and centuries old stone barns and let my mind wander further and further away from the kitchen, the hot stove, the chronic necessity of meeting payroll, until I had wandered so far away from my life in New York that I began to think of books, and foreign countries, and I had silvery little fantasies in which I had lived my life as a singer in a small choir and not as a cook in a kitchen.
Michele, meanwhile, paid for the gas and had Italian money already in his wallet before I had even woken up to the fact that I was in another country and needed another currency. He had mortadella sandwiches that he had made—with just the right butter-to-meat ratio—in the saddlebags for our roadside snack under a tree. While I took it all in—the phlegmy diesel rattle of the trucks with whom we shared the lanes, also heading south, their beds empty, while across the median, they teemed north in a militarylike procession loaded to the top of their canvas flaps with San Marzano tomatoes. I knew that we had crossed from Campagna into Puglia, that we had definitively reached the south, not by reading a road sign, but by the tiny Fiat we passed packed to the gills with luggage and in the front seat, the man driving with his suntanned arm out the window while his ample wife rode in the passenger seat with her bare feet up on the dash and white cream bleach on her moustache. Both of them were smoking.
When we stopped for gas outside of Bari, Michele phoned ahead and had cold rosé wine waiting for us at the house when we arrived.
His mother had taken the train. She arrived from Rome at the train station in Lecce and was met by Giovanni, her second oldest son. Alda packs very little for herself. She has one old worn leather satchel that has her few housedresses—that uniform of widowed women all over Europe who wear the same simple smock dress every day, and all of those women, every widow in Europe, has one drying on the clothesline under the oleander trees while the other is on her body. Beyond that, Alda packs not much more than a comb and her toothbrush and a few photos of her decades-deceased husband, Tommaso Fuortes, who died in 1970, at fifty-eight years old, from complications due to malaria he’d contracted when he was a kid. The rest of Alda’s luggage—an arsenal of crumpled plastic bags leftover from grocery shopping and tied at the neck with twine and rubber bands—are bulging with things she “needs” that she shuffles back and forth between the house in Rome and the house in Leuca: her pressure cooker, some jars of jam, a kind of biscuit that she likes, and the whole set of good silverware, rolled up in chamois sacks and polished for so many years that it looks white more than silver.
Giovanni, with his quiet, patient, and unflappable demeanor, is waiting for her at the station and carries all the bags to the car. She walks faster than he does, in spite of her pronounced limp from her hip surgery, and her eighty years, forty of them spent