The corn is starting to show in its pregnant husks and the fields sway with wheat. There are apricots and peaches and cherries at the fruit stalls. On the road to Arezzo people are selling truffles and walnuts and mushrooms from the front doors of their farmhouses. We buy a bag of cherries and eat them, meditatively spitting out the stones. We buy big rough disks of bread. We buy a lettuce, and a fennel bulb like a swollen green knuckle. We buy a jar of truffle paste. The Italians make bruschetta with truffle paste. It is dark gray and closely textured. For a while we eat it, until I realize it is beginning to arouse feelings of disgust in my suspicious palate. The truffle paste makes me think of something horrible. One day, while eating it, it occurs to me that it is like eating puréed mouse.
We eat things that are red, white, and green, like the Italian flag. Yellow, that area of the food spectrum so favored by the English, has disappeared. So has brown, the color of sausages and gravy and a cup of tea. We eat hard little cantucci biscuits and drink espresso. We eat sheep’s milk cheese and tomatoes. We eat the rough white bread. It is strange to eat the same things over and over again. It is a discipline in its way. It is not that we dislike this new, narrow range of satisfactions: on the contrary, the idea of eating at a wider scope begins to seem more and more grotesque. How could we ever have eaten curry one night and enchiladas the next? How could we have eaten chilies and chocolate bars and pancakes and wonton in the same twenty-four hours? Our promiscuity amazes us; our bodies remember by its absence the feeling of being thronged, of moving between hemispheres and time zones in the pause between breakfast and lunch, of being overrun, a hub of transient sensations like an airport terminal. It all seems now to have added up to a gluttonous neutrality, this specifying hunger that must select its object from the whole world. The discipline of our new regime is that of dissociating hunger from choice. Now there is only hunger, with sheep’s milk cheese and tomatoes to satisfy it. It is important to be satisfied by what is known to you. Is that not a basic truth, biblical like the olive tree? But what of the desire to experiment, to roam, to know the whole of life in your allotted portion of it?
The Italians have an answer for that. It is gelato. In gelato the writ of choice runs free. Facing the refrigerated counter of the gelateria you are harried by choice, vexed and tormented by the power to select until you nearly beg for it to be taken from your hands. Everywhere I see people eating ice creams, children and old women, stringy teenagers and burly men in business suits, beautiful donne strolling down the smart Arezzo streets at four o’clock licking cones laden with nocciole. The oral neurosis of the Italians appears to deposit the whole of its weight in this realm of frozen childhood pleasure. Once, in a gelateria in the middle of Rome, I saw a man rush in from the street, where his limousine remained parked on a double yellow line, and order the biggest ice cream I have ever seen. He laid his leather briefcase on the counter and carefully spread a paper napkin over the front of his double-breasted suit. Then he applied himself with an extraordinary, determined rapacity to the heaped-up mountain, diminishing it with great bites like a giant and looking at his watch after each one, while his chauffeur sat outside and stared through the windscreen. This was an entirely private transaction, it was clear. I remember noticing that the outermost peaks and ridges of the ice cream remained erect and frozen around the bitten-out voids, so quickly did the whole thing occur. Usually it is not possible to eat an ice cream quite so destructively. The mound begins to thaw and lose its definition: it becomes transitive, passing from object to subject, until it wears the marks of irreversible ownership and gives itself up entirely to the passion of the human mouth. Sometimes the children mismanage this transaction. They work away at one side of the ice cream while the other languishes, collapsing into landslides and milky rivers that run across their clutching fingers. Or they dislodge the whole ball with the first contact of their tongues, and it falls to the pavement with an abortive splat.
The display at the gelateria is an artist’s palette that awakens deep urges and anxieties, for it asks that something be created without hinting at the form it might take. Each color has its own significance, but it is sufficient unto itself. What human mood is ever so monochromatic, so pure? And how can one choose without transgressing the truth of one’s own fundamental ambivalence? I notice that the children do not suffer from this difficulty. They are monotheistic: they choose the same thing over and over again. But the adults experience a distinct anxiety at the gelateria, which is the fear of misrepresenting their own desires. There are some people who regard this inexactitude in a detached way: they are slow to blame themselves for choosing what did not suit them. They are interested in what they have chosen, up to a point, but if the pistacchio is less delicious than the cioccolata they had yesterday, then that is the fault of the pistacchio. It is nothing to do with them. But there are others who take these things more personally. They must choose the right thing: they strain after the prestige of premeditated satisfaction. Some people are more easily made unhappy than others, that much is clear. Often I do not eat a gelato. I sit at a table while the others choose, and think about something else.
There is coconut and hazelnut and pistachio. There is grapefruit, lemon, lime, and mint. There is strawberry and raspberry and blackberry. There is bacio, kiss-flavor, an ice cream made of the Italian foil-wrapped chocolates whose infinite availability is a point of national pride. There is straticella, a streaky white-inflected substance that causes me to feel a strange constriction of the lungs. There is nougat. There is zuppa inglese, a flavor so surreal that it seems to belong in a gelateria of the subconscious, a place where the artist’s palette has given rise to whole sense memories and the ice creams have names like “Summertime” or “My First Day at School.” Zuppa inglese translates as “English Soup.” Apparently it is based on the recipe for sherry trifle.
One day we have lunch with Jim and Tiziana. It is Friday, and the restaurant in the village has fresh clams. Every Friday they serve spaghetti alle vongole and crowds of people come. The car park is full of lorries. The drivers sit alone, each at his own table. They are young men, clean-looking and disciplined. They gather like novitiates for the sacrament. I have seen these same types of men pull to the side of the road near Arezzo, where wan-looking girls in scanty clothes wait, hugging themselves with their arms. I have seen the cab door open and the girls clamber up, showing their underwear and their bare bruised legs, their spike-heeled shoes. The lorry drivers sit at their tables, clean and correct, while the waitress brings the dishes. She too is correct, reverent, as silent as an acolyte. She wears her shining hair in a plait down her back.
Tiziana has been learning English. She has just returned from her class in Città di Castello, where she goes twice a week as a form of obeisance to Jim. She does not perform this romantic duty with good grace. She resents it: it gnaws at her pride, to be reduced to reticence, for she does not find the English tongue congenial. It is not she, Tiziana, who is at fault: after all, her Spanish is fluent and her French is not bad. No, it is the language of the English that is to blame. It is an ugly language, indelicate, stodgy, filling the mouth with its cloying, indigestible sounds. Th-th-th, she says, grimacing as if she were being strangled. That th is enough to choke you. She is surprised the English don’t choke on their own tongues. Jim begins to speak to us in English and Tiziana folds her arms and puts her nose in the air. Blah blah blah, she says loudly, after a while. Blah blah blah blah blah. Th-th-th-th.