Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,105

something that feels so uncomplicated and without subjugation about it even though I see perfectly well that Alda is the one with the heavy sack of keys. Not one of us seems to prefer sitting down in the parlor being served ice cream. Alda’s tone when speaking to these women sounds, to my ear, totally equal and not for a moment proprietary. There seems to be absolutely no money, at all, and nothing coming in, really, from all the land they own, and most of the house seems to be in serious disrepair. But there is no confusing this: They call Alda “Donna Alda,” they call me “Signora,” they call Michele “Dottore,” and when the sun finally sets over the impluvium, we sleep in the big villa on the big street called Via Tommaso Fuortes. Leone’s full name, to be clear, is Leone Tommaso Fuortes. He is three months old and already has international travel stamped into his passport. He has a passport.

He will grow up to inherit this house with Marco, or what’s left of it by then. This is so far removed from my own experience that I am made breathless by it.

Carmeluccia rolls out a small rope of pasta dough and then cuts little pellets about the length and diameter of a squeeze of toothpaste. From these she makes the orecchiette by smudging them with her thumb until they look like little flat coins on the table which she picks up, turns inside out to become concave and sets to dry on a tray. They look exactly like small delicate ears. The “little penises” she makes by pressing a common knitting needle down into the pellet and using it like a rolling pin until the dough has closed into a tube around the needle. Americans would never recognize the shape as a penis, because of our obsession with circumcision, but anyone familiar with the un-maimed ones—in their unaroused state—will see it in an instant. She slides each minchiareddo off the needle and lets it dry, also, on the tray. These two shapes, she explains, are typically made together and served together because they share a cooking time. This starts a loud friendly argument among them all in rapid Italian—with accompanying hand gestures—about correct cooking times.

I practice my orecchiette.

I ruin my first dozen but then finally get it and suddenly there I am making perfect little ears right alongside these three Italian women—Rosaria, Carmeluccia, and Alda. With more than forty years between our ages, Alda who owns the house, Carmeluccia who has kept the house, and I who have married into the house, we are all at the kitchen table making orecchiette like we are the same.

Later, in the evening, I am sitting outside in the front, having an al fresco dinner with Marco at his “restaurant,” a small wooden chair pulled up to the massive granite front stoop of this villa. He’s blond and tan and in nothing but a diaper, trying to manage tortellini with prosciutto and butter with his own fork and he is explicit in wanting no help from me. A battered Volkswagen Rabbit slowly pulls in at the end of the drive and comes to a stop; the driver cranks the hand brake and turns the car off, but leaves the headlights on. He gets out of the car, stands at a respectful distance from the house—not to presume.

“C’è Donna Alda?” he inquires.

“Aspetta,” I call to him.

I get Michele, Michele gets his mother, and suddenly we are unloading gorgeous Gallia melons and red plum tomatoes out of this gentleman’s dusty car. This has happened a dozen times over the years that I’ve been coming here. A woman at the end of the driveway with giuncata in her bicycle basket. A farmer with a three-wheeled motorized wagon unloading olive oil and eggplant and bringing it into the storage room next to the kitchen. This man, tall and slender, bringing melons and tomatoes. He stands inside the house without touching anything, and will not allow himself to lean against the wall or the door frame even. He is tan.

Who are all these people who approach the big house and stand at a respectful distance until warmly welcomed into the magnificence by Alda herself, once she squints and adjusts her old eyes and then lights up with immense warmth and recognition? Who are all these people of the local countryside who bring her things and to whom she has Rosaria bring out a couple of beers