Keeping the Feast (5 page)

I loved John also because, like me, he liked to cook as much as he liked to eat, because both of us grew up in homes where honest food was the central magnet that brought us all to the same table two or three times a day. I loved him because both of us were blessed with a metabolism that let us eat with pleasure, not guilt. I loved him also because both our families came to the table not just to eat, but to talk, laugh, share our problems, share our lives. I loved him because I could envision a lifetime of ordinary meals together, alone or with good friends who might share our sense of what nourishment really means. I loved him because he knew that good talk, good books, good music were one staff of life, and that simple, good food, shared with others, was the second. I loved him because he was smart enough to know that food was a lot more than fuel.

That both of us were working as foreign correspondents made our courtship easier, for only another reporter (or perhaps an obstetrician) could understand completely that when the job called, all other life went on hold. Even though John was in Rome for much of the next year, neither of us ever spent much time in the same place. Much of our courtship was, in fact, spent apart, because of the nature of the daily news business. Long and short absences were, from the beginning, part of our life together. Even before John returned to Bonn, we were used to depending on telegrams, letters, cards, telephones, and telexes—a clunky, international communications service dating back to the 1930s that sent and received hand-punched messages by teleprinter—to stay in touch. I have a file full of yellowing messages sent from wherever John happened to be working that remind me how happy we both were to have found each other, how the knowledge of each other’s existence was enough to keep happy two people who had for years been feeling essentially alone. That we were usually in different cities or countries did not seem an insurmountable problem, as long as we knew the other could be reached by written or spoken word.

About eighteen months after we met, John’s editors in New York named him Warsaw bureau chief. Even better, the
Times
gave him five months off from reporting duties to learn Polish. Overjoyed at the opportunity of actually being paid to learn a new language, John threw himself into intensive, one-on-one language studies with a Polish university student eight hours a day, six days a week.

His classes were scheduled to end in August 1987, two years after we had met, and when he asked me to marry him and move to Poland with him, I did not hesitate to accept. It meant giving up the UPI job that had brought me to Europe, but I would happily freelance in order to be with John—and then, serendipitously, I was hired by the
Chicago Tribune
as Eastern European correspondent. The wedding we initially envisioned in Warsaw would turn out to be bureaucratically impossible, but I see that now as providential. Our wedding ended up being celebrated—four years after we had met—in Rome, where we would eventually return, much sooner than we’d ever dreamed, to find sustenance and strength at a time of seemingly endless woe. It seemed right that the place that initially brought us together, as friends, lovers, and then as man and wife, would also be the place that held us together through our later trials.

T
o my mother’s everlasting dismay, I was born scrawny. My brother, seven years later, was born scrawny, too. My mother herself was scrawny, most of her life, and my father even scrawnier, most of his. But rather than see her children’s scrawniness as genetically expectable, she took it as reproof. Her vision of babyhood was plumpness and robustness: babies with dimpled knees and elbows—pillows of flesh where kisses could be dispensed. Our bony limbs never fulfilled her dreams. Into her seventies, she would still utter the same lament that greeted our arrival at the hospital decades earlier. How come, she would say, all my friends got beautiful, chubby babies? So how come, she would say, I got two plucked chickens?

I wonder now if it was this chasm between babies dreamed and babies born that made food and our ingesting of it so critical to her. Somewhere along the line she must have come up with the idea that if she could plump us up, fill us out, she would fulfill some primal requirement of good mothering. But if we stayed thin, if we followed her own childhood example of picking at our food, refusing milk, eating only what we felt like eating, God himself would brand her as eternally unworthy, an unspeakable failure.

 

 

 

 

T
hose last weeks in Rome were chaos as I tried to finish work, pack up my apartment, and figure out how to keep us fed in the years we would be behind the Iron Curtain. We knew Poland’s food supplies were erratic, and that basics taken for granted anywhere in Western Europe either were not available in Poland or showed up so infrequently that they could not be counted on.

I had recently returned from a weeklong trip to Poland, crisscrossing the country during Pope John Paul II’s third visit to his homeland. While in Warsaw I had slipped into a small grocery store to see what we were in for. The shop was a dreary void of mostly empty shelves peopled by weary clerks constantly muttering the same phrase,
Nie ma,
which means “There isn’t any
.”
Flour?
“Nie ma.”
Sugar?
“Nie ma.”
Pepper?
“Nie ma
.
”
Having seen that market, where a few jars of strawberry jam were spread across six feet of shelf space, where eight pickle jars, each standing a foot apart, were occupying another section of otherwise empty shelving, where the only shelves that looked crowded were the ones bearing cans of tripe stew or bottles of cloudy vinegar, I took our colleagues’ advice about stocking up.

In the weeks before we left Rome, I spent hours with our corner grocer, who ran a hole-in-the-wall shop in the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills. Roberto delivered endless cases of spaghetti, spaghettini, penne, fusilli, tiny stars of soup pasta, short, stubby Arborio rice for risottos, long-grain rice for other dishes, canned tomatoes, tuna and anchovies, olive oil, red-wine vinegar, fifteen-pound wedges of Parmigiano-Reggiano and pecorino cheeses, bags of dried
funghi porcini,
olives, jars of pesto, of artichoke hearts in olive oil, of baby onions in vinegar, of eggplant salads. I bought whole salamis, canisters of teas and coffees, and simple wines.

I spent some $1,500 in the weeks before we moved, mainly on food but also on other basics, such as toilet paper, paper towels, dishwashing soap, laundry powder, bath soap, toothpaste, shampoo, and standard cleaning products. Our shipment was full of seed packets, too: basil, parsley, zucchini, green beans, and arugula. But the following spring most of our Italian seeds proved too fragile for Poland’s continental climate, and only the parsley and the arugula, a hearty, bitter salad green that is nearly impossible to kill, ever thrived in our tiny back garden. The other seeds sprouted but refused to grow.

Although our shipment of personal goods—a few bits of furniture, clothes, and housewares—looked more like the commercial move of a grocery store than the private move of a domestic household, my purchases were not nearly enough to last the years we were there. After the first few months, anytime John or I passed through a Western country, we would replenish our dwindling supplies and stagger back through Polish customs, like the Poles themselves, carrying bulging shopping bags. Ours were filled with tins of olive oil, cases of Italian pasta, or a couple of juicy, fresh pineapples.

 

 

 

 

I
know it was those empty grocery shelves I had seen during my last papal trip that made me want to record the
abbondanza
I would be leaving behind. If I had to choose a single word to describe my life in Rome,
abbondanza
—which means “abundance, plenty, copiousness”—is the word that springs to mind. In Italian a cornucopia is a
corno dell’abbondanza,
our English horn of plenty
.
To roll in wealth in Italian is to swim
nell’abbondanza.
Eating one of Sicily’s signature dishes,
caponata,
is a lesson in
abbondanza,
for the purple-black eggplants, the pale green celery, the white onions, the red bell peppers, the dark gray-green capers, the black olives, all cooked in oil, doused with a trace of sugar and a splash of red-wine vinegar, produce a dish of extraordinary beauty as well as taste, the individual colors of the vegetables taking on the beauty of bold stained glass.

I already knew I would never live in a more beautiful location. My roof terrace, three times as big as my tiny apartment, was drenched in sunlight and covered in monster terra-cotta pots of geraniums, cosmos, oleander, bay laurel, and sage. I already knew I would never again have such extraordinary views, for I looked up to the Palatine Hill, where the ancient Roman emperors used to live, to the Capitoline Hill, where they used to govern, and to the Aventine Hill, still a tree-covered oasis of calm in the city’s historic center where ancient Roman aristocrats once built their homes. I already knew that my terrace could never be matched. How I loved its terra-cotta tiles, its dependable breezes, its faded canvas tarp that protected the big table and comfortable chairs where I ate all my meals, read all my books, spent all my waking hours. The terrace was where John, who loves to dance, would scoop me into his arms and waltz me around in the moonlight, the sunlight, or the occasional rain; where John, mid-waltz, was sure to whisper in my ear one of his standard old jokes: “ Waltz a little faster, dear, they’re playing a fox-trot.”

Unconsciously perhaps, I also knew that the
abbondanza
of Rome’s outdoor markets was the other thing I was sure to miss once the tiny moving van that was taking our few bits of furniture, clothes, and household gear to Warsaw arrived. The morning before moving day, I took a notebook instead of a shopping bag to the Campo dei Fiori and wrote down everything on offer at one of the more modest stands in the square. A truck farmer named Domenico presided over that stand, and much of what he sold he grew himself.

On that sunny August morning, Domenico was selling fat, round heads of soft Bibb lettuce and wild-looking heads of curly endive. He had crates of romaine lettuce, whose elongated heads form the base of many salads, and tight little knobs of red radicchio, to add color. He had fistfuls of wild arugula, which the Romans call
rughetta
and use to add a peppery bite to a meal. He had foot-long bunches of Swiss chard, tiny new shoots of broccoli rabe, bunches of slim scallions. He had bouquets of zucchini flowers, which Romans stuff with mozzarella and anchovy, dip in a light flour-and-water batter, then deep-fry till golden.

He had flat, green broad beans, the kind the Romans stew slowly in garlic, onion, and tomato. He had red and white runner beans, which housewives use to fill out a summer vegetable soup, and regular green beans, tiny, just picked, perfect for blanching and serving with a dribble of olive oil and lemon juice. Domenico also had the usual array of tomatoes, each with specific uses: tiny cherry tomatoes, so good halved and turned into a Neapolitan-style sauce; meaty, plum tomatoes used for endless tomato-based pasta sauces; salad tomatoes, always slightly green, as the Romans prefer them. He had Casilino tomatoes, too—small, flat, highly creased, with a sunlit, concentrated flavor, favored by Roman housewives for raw sauces during summer’s worst heat. He had gigantic beefsteak tomatoes, too, meant for stuffing and baking with rice, potato wedges, oil, and herbs.

That day, Domenico was also selling carrots, celery, cucumbers, lemons. He had skinny frying peppers and fat bell peppers—red, yellow, and green—which the Romans love to roast and serve with oil and garlic. He had yellow- and red-skinned potatoes and the tough cow corn that Europeans seem to think people as well as cows can eat. He had fat, glossy, black-skinned eggplants, and long, narrow white ones with bright purple markings near the stem. He had hot red
peperoncini
, tiny peppers still on the stalk and ready for drying, and several types of zucchini, some a deep, dark green, others light and striated, none of them much bigger than an American hot dog, all sweet and free of seeds because of their tiny size. He was selling round yellow onions, sweet red onions, and flat white onions. He had garlic and fennel bulbs, their feathery tips a dark, cool green. He also had eggs, brown-shelled, as the Romans favor them, their shells never quite as clean as a shopper would hope.

Domenico had nectarines and peaches, too, yellow-fleshed and white. He had the tiny figs, some green, some purple, known as
settembrini
, or “little September ones,” to distinguish them from the first growth of larger figs that appear in June. He had dark purple grapes; fat, round green grapes nearly as big as apricots; and long, narrow seedless grapes, always slightly tart. He had cantaloupes, some with smooth, green skins, others with veined yellow rinds, both with bright orange flesh. He also had bright yellow melons, whose white flesh lasts long after cantaloupes have gone by. He had watermelons, red plums, yellow plums, blue plums. He had yellow apples, green apples, and even a few red ones. He had case after case of prickly pears, so full of spines that they’re best eaten with gloves.

And of course he had just-picked herbs—parsley, basil, sage, rosemary, and
mentuccia
, the small-leafed wild mint that Roman cooks often use to flavor artichokes or lamb. At any Italian market, sellers toss in these
odori
for free once a customer has completed his or her purchases. At the Campo, the usual
odori
included a carrot, a stalk of celery, a fistful of flat-leaf parsley, a sprig or two of rosemary, and—unless it is the dead of winter, when it must be greenhouse-grown, at great expense—several stalks of basil.

I stood in front of Domenico’s U-shaped stand and wrote down what he was selling that broiling, sunny morning. He never used to carry any of the dozens of fancy or exotic fruit and vegetables some vendors stock—no avocados, mangos, blueberries, or ginger. But the bounty of Italy’s growing season seems endless, and clearly visible in even a simple stand, where produce, piled high in wooden crates, is generally so fresh, bright, clean, and colorful, that it begs to be bought and eaten.