A Memorable Meal

Lunch in an Umbrian tavern.

We were on holiday in the hills outside Spoleto. It was the early 1980s, so Italy was not as dense with the locust clouds of tourists as it is now. We were not tourists, of course, oh, no – we were visitors, and we could prove it, too, because we were staying at the house of a friend. It was a big old rambling place, that had been our friend’s family home for more generations than anyone could remember, set high up among immemorial woodlands and looking north over range upon range of dream-blue mountains.

The early October days were gauzy and warm, but the nights were bitterly cold. We were a big group – friends, relatives, children – but each bed in the house was equipped with its own warming pan. This was a handsome as well as a handy utensil, consisting of a wooden handle polished by long use, to the end of which was nailed a copper box with a lid. At eventide, after the pasta and the wine had been consumed, the box was fed with a shovelful of fragrantly smouldering embers from the huge fireplace in the central living room, borne gingerly upstairs and slid under the bedclothes and left there until we were ready to retire. How we avoided burning the house to the ground is a mystery.

Mostly we ate ‘at home’. In the mornings one of us would drive down the switchback road to forage among the city’s many open-air markets. Autumn fare in Umbria is redolent of loam and smoke and dry leaves. I can still summon up the flavours of freshly picked mushrooms – funghi porcini – grass-green olive oil, ricotta soft as ice cream, and farm eggs with yolks of a deep, deep shade of cadmium yellow.

One of the party, let us call him Bill, was a black American long resident in Italy. My wife had been to college with him in Berkeley, his hometown. He was a linguist, and made his living as an interpreter, but his true calling was as an operatic tenor. He sang a Purcell anthem at our wedding. He was funny and irreverent, with a strain of melancholy that was peculiarly attractive. Years later, somewhere outside Parma, where he was living at the time, he dived one evening deep into a natural pool beside an olive grove sacred to one of the ancient gods, and suffered a fatal heart attack. I have some recordings of him singing, but I have not the heart – the heart! – to listen to them.

One day, my wife and Bill and I left Spoleto behind and went on an outing to the little town of Todi, perched atop its pointy hill halfway between Spoleto and Orvieto. It is, or was, a sleepy place, the air over which seemed to vibrate ceaselessly with the pealing of church bells. We looked at the sights, such as they were – I recall a particularly grisly crucifixion scene above the altar in one of the town’s innumerable tiny churches – after which our thoughts turned inevitably to lunch.

The prospects were not promising. Todi is not, or was not then, a restaurant town. We wandered the narrow streets radiating from the Piazza del Popolo with sinking hearts and rumbling stomachs. Then Bill spotted, down a cobbled alleyway, a neon sign for ‘Taverna da Maria’ with a flickering arrow pointing to a narrow, bottle-green doorway. He remembered the place, he said: he had eaten there once, long ago. Should we try it? We should.

That doorway really was narrow – I see us shuffling in sideways in single file, our chins averted. There was a stone floor, and three small round tables with plastic tablecloths of a shade of bile-green. There was only one window giving on to the street, and the air within was greyly shadowed. On each of the three tables there stood a lonely, unlit, bedribbled candle stub. Silence reigned, and had been reigning, perhaps, since the time of Garibaldi.

We looked at each other with fraught misgiving. Perhaps we should quietly leave, we whispered, and look for a more approachable place, even if only a pizzeria.

But we were too late. From somewhere vaguely at the back there emerged an ancient person, garbed in funereal black and hobbling on a cane. She spoke a guttural word at us, which sounded to me like a threat but which Bill was able to interpret as a greeting in the local dialect. None of this was promising, but we were young, bold and the world was wide.

Lunch was mentioned, and Maria – for it was she – gave a short laugh and shook her head, as if we had made an outlandish request. Lunch? At lunchtime, at Taverna da Maria? What a notion. But Bill persisted, and after a long and, as it appeared, ill-tempered exchange, the old girl conceded that she could rustle up something for us. ‘Ma solo spaghetti,’ she croaked, addressing the missus and me and shaking an admonitory forefinger. ‘Solo spaghetti con tartufi – capisci?’ We understood. We had not tasted truffles before. We were doubtful, but eager for a new experience.

What did Bill think? He shrugged. What had we to lose? Maria grinned, showing a mouthful of clinkers.

Now she shuffled off, her cane tapping like Blind Pew’s on the stone floor. Another tombal silence settled. We waited. There was the sound of rattling pots and pans, of running water, and presently we caught faint but encouraging cooking smells.

While we waited, Bill told us an anecdote of his mother, a feisty old lady who all her life had worked as ‘the help’ in the homes of wealthy Berkleyans. One day when Bill was back for a visit, she turned to him and said, ‘You’re an educated boy – can you explain to me how it is that us handsome brown folk have to spend our lives cleaning up after all them ugly pink people?’

Maria reappeared, bearing a lighted candle. Again that furnace flash of a smile, before she knelt on one knee, sighing and groaning heavily, and disappeared from view behind her plastic-covered counter. Came a metallic clickety-clicking, and then a clunk as – could it be? – the door of a safe was unlocked. She rose again, clutching in her fist a pair of dark-brown spheroids which for a queasy second I thought might be the testicles of some large herbivore. She brandished them triumphantly aloft.

‘Tartufi!’

She was as good as her admonition – we had spaghetti with truffles, a basket of unsalted bread, and a carafe of the local wine which was the colour of arterial blood and tasted of rust; as it turned out, it was just the thing to cut the richness of the food to come, a wine made for grown-ups.

And the truffles? Truffles smell of the underworld. They are the essence of autumn. Eating them, we had a sense of transgression, as if we had stolen the food of the gods, a fare too darkly rich and sumptuous for mere mortals.

That was the transcendental side of the meal. The other was far more basic. I hesitate to say it, I really do, but to eat a dish of spaghetti and truffles is most closely analogous to – well, to engaging in a session of bad sex. A revolting comparison? Yes. But the deepest and most memorable of life’s delights have a murky underside. A pinch of guilt drives pleasure to its highest pitch.

Maria’s spaghetti was bathed in butter and stippled throughout with freshly grated black pepper. At first my eyes deceived me and I was convinced the little black grains were some kind of animal life, miniature ants, say, or a nestful of baby spiders. If they had been, I would have eaten them anyway. So entranced was I, I think I would have eaten the plastic tablecloth, if enough garlic had been rubbed into it.

Bill questioned Maria. Her father had been a professional truffle-hunter, her mother a cook. They were long gone. Did she run the taverna on her own? She had a niece, she said, who came in occasionally and pretended to help. The young did not understand food, did not appreciate it; they had more immediate gratifications. She smiled, and for a moment, just a moment, she was as young as her niece.

After the spaghetti con tartufi she served us tiny wedges of polenta cake drizzled with the juice of Amalfitan lemons. The coffee was a smear of thick, rich mud at the bottom of a little white cup. There was grappa, too – homemade, Maria said, with a wink.

The afternoon was already beginning to wane. There is a light which is peculiar to the mountain towns of Umbria, at once clear and dense, almost compacted, as if it were not light at all, but a liquid, rather, a kind of clarified glair. We paid the bill – the total was ridiculously small – and wandered back to the piazza. We felt a little dazed, a little overfed, a little tipsy.

Had we enjoyed our lunch? The question was, and is, irrelevant, even inappropriate. Looked back on, certain experiences, unique, intense and strange, seem to have occurred in another dimension to the one in which we live our everyday lives. I would not have been surprised to turn back to that narrow lane to find that Maria’s taverna had vanished from view – that, indeed, it had never been there in the first place.