They will sit side by side at the large table, surrounded by thirty people, and she will notice everything which is happening. Nothing will escape her. Wedding feasts are the happiest because something new is beginning, and with the newness comes a reminder of appetite, even to the oldest guests.
Renzo and Ercole will carry Emanuela out of the house on their shoulders and she’ll hold, high up above her head, a plate as wide as a bicycle wheel, piled with eels cooked in her own fashion. She cuts them into thick slices and impales them on a spit with sage, bay leaves and sprigs of rosemary, and bastes them before a fierce fire with their own oil, till their skins turn almost black. Then she serves the eels on the plate as wide as a bicycle wheel with the Mostarda di Cremona which is made from mustard oil, melons, pumpkins, little oranges, apricots, according to a recipe which dates back to the time of Sikelidas. Wonderful, said the same Sikelidas, wonderful the spring winds for mariners who long to set sail …
Ninon will be the first to clap, men will cheer, and Emanuela, the widow, her face flushed from the fire, will suddenly remember her husband saying to her: If you’d like to marry me, I have this house and a boat …
The two men lower the widow to the ground and she places her dish on the table in front of the newlyweds and Ninon kisses her, and only then does Emanuela take the hem of her apron to dab at her eyes.
Jean is distributing bottles of spumante in blue buckets full of broken ice: the plastic buckets are the ones Aunt Emanuela’s husband used on his fishing boat before he died. After Jean has opened a bottle and filled the nearest glasses, he sits down beside Marella. Other bottles pop as they are opened under the apple trees around them.
I’d know you were Ninon’s father anywhere, says Marella.
We look alike?
It’s the way you smile.
For a moment Jean is shy, lost for words.
You’re her best friend, he says at last.
In Modena, yes, I am. Have you noticed? Nobody can take their eyes off her, even when they’re eating.
She’s the bride, says Jean.
And she’s so determined, so determined to live. She says this quietly, their two heads close together. You have a tough daughter, Signor Ferrero.
You’ve been a great help to her.
I’m her friend, yes, and I feel closer to her than I ever have. But what could I do? I invented the word STELLA. And I told Gino to be patient. I told him she was dead. Dead. When you learn what she learnt, it kills you. I told him he had to wait and perhaps, just perhaps, she might have a second life, if he really wanted her, I added. And you know how he replied? He surprises me, Gino does, he never hesitates. Her second life, he said, will begin on our wedding day. They’d never thought of marriage before. Now look at them.
Zdena is sitting beside Scoto, the watermelon seller.
Happy? asks Scoto, are we happy?
Zdena lowers her eyes.
The sun is in your eyes? He asks, miming the dazzle and offering her his sunglasses. She shakes her head and finds her own sunglasses in her meticulously arranged handbag.
Everyone is eating and talking, joking and drinking. The cascading noise of feasts which nobody can recall until they are fortunate enough to find themselves at another.
Good? The melon seller asks Zdena.
First time, says Zdena.
Behind Scoto’s sad joker’s eyes there’s a love of questions which cannot be answered. A great mystery, he says, like everything.
Like some things.
Many things, Signora, and the most mysterious of all creatures is the anguilla.
He looks to Jean on the other side of the table, hoping he will translate.
Misterioso.
Jean translates sentence by sentence.
They have no lungs, begins Scoto, and they live for days out of water. Nobody knows how. They swim, swim very fast, and they cross overland. When they make a hole in the earth, they make it like a corkscrew tail first!
Zdena, as she listens to the story of the eels, gazes at her daughter.
The females are larger than the males and when they are ready to lay their eggs their bellies turn silver and their faces fill out and they smile … When the high tides come, they taste the saltier water and it makes them want to leave the river for the sea. This is the sacred moment for catching them. Millions of anguille swim into the traps which are called lavoriere. Yet some escape. We don’t know how. Everything about these creatures is mysterious.
If only I could take her place, whispers Zdena to Jean.
The ones who make their way to the open sea reach the Atlantic and swim across the ocean to the Sea of Sargasso, which is deeper than anybody knows, and on the ocean bed there, they lay their eggs and the male eels fertilise them.
Ninon suddenly laughs at a joke Emanuela has told her. She laughs as if laughing is the joke, and the joke is spinning the world round faster and faster so that only the joke holds and doesn’t go dizzy and gets bigger and bigger like a man’s prick, and throws off light and flecks of laughter and grains of sugar and with its head back swallows vino spumante, and plays with the bubbles and gives them to every comer with a kiss when they join her laughter.
The little eels start their long journey home, says Scoto. It takes them two, three, perhaps four years. And when they arrive here, Signora, they’re still no larger than one inch of shoelace!
And the parent eels? asks Jean.
Dead in the Sargasso Sea. The little ones come back alone.
I can’t believe it, says Zdena.
Again she hears her daughter laughing. Zdena lets her head fall back abruptly. Beyond the branches of the apple tree above her, there is the dazzle of the sky and, for one brief instant, without understanding anything, Zdena is happy.
I propose a toast, announces Federico, getting to his feet, a toast to our children’s happiness.
Happiness, Scoto says, come here happiness!
Then they will eat the meat. The sea, which farther south becomes my Aegean, is calm. Imperceptibly between the fingers of the Po’s hands, the sea slips into the lagoon where the inhabitants fish for mussels and where the shallow waters once drove sailors crazy with the desire to leave this swamp and sail across the world. The lagoon is lapping the dyke which protects some scattered houses, the church and the village square with the bench by the bus stop. From the church tower you’d smell the meat roasting. Lower than the square and far lower than the lagoon is the orchard of three apple trees beside the house. Beyond the house is the grass basement where the vans are parked and where Roberto and Gino are carving the lamb. I hear a knife being sharpened and men’s laughter. The smell of the fire hangs everywhere. Around the table in the orchard the women guests in their finery and the men in their shoes of softest leather sit or stroll or loll, yet all of them are in orbit round the bride. She doesn’t let them go, or they don’t let her go? As with a player on a stage it is hard to know which; both are true. And her dress glimmers amongst the boughs of the apple trees.
Roberto and Gino will carry the meat, sliced and served on boards as square as an arm is long, into the orchard. Their faces are stained and streaky. With the eating of the meat something changes at the feast, a last formality gives way to something older. Rose pink, infiltrated with garlic, heady with thyme and wood smoke, the lamb has an animal taste of young flesh and fresh cropped grasses.
Eat for a lifetime! Ninon will sing out. Gino and I, we went to the mountains together, we want the one there, we said, the one with the black nose, because we’d felt her with our hands, that’s our lamb! Where has Roberto gone? Drink to Roberto who has cooked for us!