However: he is worried that Roger offended us, that evening up by the shooting range. We mustn’t be offended by Roger. Amanda would hate to think that we had been. He’s just a bit excessive sometimes. He finds it hard to contain himself. Jim tells us that when Roger and Amanda arrived here in Italy, Roger was enormously fat. He was a massive mountain of flesh. He and Amanda seemed happy enough. But almost as soon as they arrived, Roger began to lose weight. Jim didn’t know why, but the pounds just fell off him. It was quite dramatic, happening almost in front of your eyes. That was when he started wanting to play tennis with Jim. His fat man’s frustration began to come out. The tennis made him lose weight even faster. And soon he was actually slim, for the first time in his life. The past didn’t fit him anymore, like a fat man’s gargantuan clothes.
Jim says he has to be going: he was on his way to pick up a fare and thought he’d just drop by to check up on us. He raises a hand behind him as he walks down to where his taxi waits on the drive and then he is gone, leaving us with images of giant trousers, of shirts like tents, of a fat man’s jackets and jumpers, too big ever to be worn again.
GIANFRANCO’S STORE
In the drab gray folds of an English winter we speak of food. What will we eat in Italy? This is one of the details we consider, when we examine our voyage in its theoretical state. Human beings cannot proceed until their fear of hunger has been assuaged. We do not, of course, experience this fear: it is to celebrate its absence that we bring the subject up. There are countries you could go to where this is not the case. When I was a student, a girl I knew went to Russia for a term and came back grotesquely shrunken, with her clothes hanging round her in great vacant pleats. There had been nothing to eat, she said: nothing at all. Her teeth had turned black from lack of calcium. She had taken a two-day train journey in which the only thing she was offered was boiled chickens’ feet.
From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to bend to its rigor, like the French. It is not rough and boisterous like the Spanish. It is soft and feminine and is adored in the highest circles, though it is not above a degree of prostitution too. But first and foremost it is kind to children. Consider the pizza: all around the world the pizza has come to represent the deepest forms of security known to the human palate. It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface. The pizza has nothing to hide, no dark interior, no subconscious fascination with its own viscera. That is why children like it. Indeed, it is the opposite of haute cuisine, which seems to be predicated entirely on the tendency of children to experience disgust. To eat lungs and livers and whole lengths of intestinal tubing is to declare yourself beyond revulsion and hence mature. As a child I was sent to stay with a French family, and watched in dismay as the mother opened a tin of chicken gizzards for lunch. No doubt I would have learned a valuable lesson in self-control if I’d eaten them. I’d have been as separate and contained as her own children were, instead of the lachrymose creature I remained, awash with emotion and homesickness.
Italian food has been widely taken up in modern times as a counterideology, to signal that such attitudes are in decline. Why should one be taught a lesson at suppertime? Why should one be made to grow up? And why should one be inducted at all into the darkness of our carnivorous nature? To bathe the palate early on in blood, to harden the body by the ingestion of other bodies: it was to extinguish sentimentality that such practices were inflicted, along with the strap and the cane. But sentimentality, like the pizza, is suddenly all the rage. Let the child’s mouth be filled with comforting Italian starch, with substances that are soft and white and melting, with dough as pliant and soothing as his mother’s breast. Let him remain forever babied by his beautiful mother cuisine, and never want to leave her. The English have latched onto the Italian breast with a vengeance. There are children in England who view the pizza as a talismanic icon, by which they can ward off the advance of any other foodstuff. There are children who eat pasta strictly unsauced and inviolate, like an ascetic religious order. And there are English adults who seek to intellectualize the spaghetti alla carbonara in order to dignify their primal attachment to its farinaceous qualities.
All the same, there is a certain pretentiousness in the English conception of Italian food that I dislike the more for its infantilized origins. It seems unlikely to me, for example, that Italian magazines are quite so full of fetishistic images of their staple diet, of olive oil running in golden streams, of the red genital center of a sliced tomato, of pasta in its rigid and its flaccid state. After all, these things are not exotic: to the Italians they are as rudimentary as fish and chips. There is something a trifle pathetic in our English reverence for Parmesan cheese, our tittering fear of the aubergine, our belief that making fresh pasta is equivalent to building your own rocket and flying it to Mars. There is no particular need for us to be told again and again that cooking a risotto is as easy as standing on your head, but we want to hear it, and to hear it from the mouths not of Italian chefs but of native experts who understand that for the English the risotto itself is neither here nor there: it is merely the occasion, the transitional object that will facilitate our regression into infancy. We don’t actually need to make the risotto to be healed by the philosophy that underpins it. It is merely the vehicle by which our childhood fears about food can be expressed. There are reasons why the English cookery expert does not approach us with the recipe for jugged hare (main ingredient: four tablespoons of blood): such things would only upset us. But in the innocent, sensory world of Italian food we can safely recall our primitive feelings of confusion and disgust for things outwith the body. The English cookery expert is the therapist who coaxes us through these labyrinths and rewards us with a spoonful of pappy rice, whether real or imaginary. He understands the repression of the English, a race reared for too long on kidneys and tongue. He understands our need to hear of the farinaceous south, where food is as milk from the mother’s breast.
I, too, anticipate the Italian diet with feelings of relief, for I am not the omnivore I would like to be. There are whole continents I could never visit, so frightened am I by what I might be expected to eat. Even in France I exist in a state of constant suspicion and anxiety, rifling through my plate for signs of frogs or snails or songbirds, placed beyond the reach of self-consciousness or shame in my resolution to ask for everything bien cuit. A friend of mine describes how in a street market in China at night he bought something that was revealed by a streetlamp to be the jaw of a dog, but only after he’d eaten half of it. To China I will never go, nor to the territories of the Silk Road, where the travel writer Colin Thubron describes the horror of eating and drinking in near-total darkness, only to be told afterward what it is you have ingested. I will never go where they eat monkey brains or cats or guinea pigs, and though I love the literature of the past I would never go there either, to an England where larks and blackbirds lay beneath the pie crusts and something called headcheese was widely consumed. The English used to roast crows and eat them, and the idea of this funereal repast is worst of all. I am not proud of my revulsion. It is, I know, a form of stupidity. I do not wish to associate myself with the thoughtlessness of the modern palate, with its preference for deracinated flesh, for hamburgers and hot dogs and chickens crammed in cages. Better to eat a proud crow, with the sheen of life on its black feathers.