it is.
But still I craved some arugula to go with it. Some broccoli rabe, even.
To Alda I said, “Is there arugula, even, anywhere?”
But Alda shook her head and tsked—“Non è stagione. Non è stagione.” Not the season.
In the shade of the tree in front of the old school that sits on the market square, I see my old man. My spirits lift to see my vecchio, the old bent-in-half farmer with his pants held up by twine, but even he has only a few eggplants, four lonely eggs, and some incredibly small dried white beans in a knotted plastic bag in the wagon of his ape. I buy the eggs and the beans. I am running out of eggplant ideas. I have roasted it with harissa and caraway. I have smoked it with garlic and lemon and parsley. I have fried it with egg and bread crumbs. I have quickly pickled it, sort of, with Alda’s rough red wine vinegar and some green onions. The beans might be a nice jump-start to my imagination. But when I soak them later and start to skim off the dried skins which are floating to the top of the pot, I notice that there is a brown spot on each pea. I split one open with my fingernail and inside is a larval shell of a tiny worm. I split open another and it holds another larval shell. And on I go, splitting each tiny bean, until I realize that the whole kilo is bad with worms.
“Imbroglione!” Alda cries when I show her the beans and tell her from whom I bought them.
There is only a week left of my vacation and I am falling apart from maintaining my chill with Michele, who has, oddly, perhaps in being faced with his failing mother, started to call me Mamma as well. He has always had difficulty saying my name, he kind of chokes on it, stumbles on it—but this is new, this calling me Mamma. With a tremendous fervor, since the day of the birth of Marco, Michele has taken to fatherhood so completely, so thoroughly, that it has become his priority to the exclusion of all other relationships, including our romantic one. This new habit of calling me Mamma sips the very last lungful of air from our romance.
I’m also falling apart from nothing but eggplant at the market since we arrived, from trying to strike a balance between cooking what I’d like to eat and cooking what Alda would like to eat. Alda has started to give me instructions while I am cooking, and seems no longer quite so pleased to have all the cooking done for her so she is free to enjoy her family around the table.
I cook a pot of mussels to tender perfection and she says, “E, Gabrielle, non credi sono crudi?” Don’t you think they’re still a bit raw?
I don’t, obviously. I think they are all open, tender and perfectly cooked, but I say, “Should I cook them a little longer?”
“Five minutes,” she says.
After each five-minute interval, she suggests another until I have cooked the mussels to rubbery bits, fifteen-minutes later, and she is satisfied with the results.
It’s the last straw that my beloved vecchio sold me shitty wormy beans. Giovanni digs around in the heavy drawer once more, still searching, fifteen days later, for the right cap for the olive oil jug. To me, he seems insane. This repeated futile search for a thing that doesn’t exist in a drawer full of promising crap is my definition of insanity. But of course, that is just the mechanism of hope itself. And it’s not lost on me that I’ve been doing the exact same thing, in a way, digging around in that drawer looking for something that doesn’t exist. It’s promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by the olive trees. But it’s not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking the leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don’t come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline. To Giovanni, I seem insane. I spend a quick fifteen minutes before starting to cook each day, tidying up the cyclone debris