Aundi

The communication via Skype is disturbed. The image of Aundi is frozen, motionless, her eyes half closed, her fleshy mouth open and rigid as her voice continues: “I can’t hear”.

“I do hear you, Aundi, go on”, I say, twirling my hand to signal her to continue.

But she stops, does not understand my motion. In Tennessee they don’t twirl their hand to mean continue, they must use some other sign.

Or maybe the audio is frozen, too.

I restart the laptop. Bloody connection. I get up, rubbing my eyes, looking around in frustration. One meter away from me, Grandma Caterina did not even look up, continuing impassively to mix water, flour and salt. We will have homemade bread. And maybe ravioli, too. There is a rabbit in the pan. Good decision to come and visit her.

Da- di- dang, di – da – ding. Here is the call. I try again. Now it seems to work.

Aundi smiles, then stifles a yawn. For her it’s early morning. Her sprinter’s legs and her infinite shoulders are covered by the blue pajamas I gave her. Pure silk, cost me a fortune. A shimmering sublime curtain against the deep black of her skin. It leaves me breathless even through the misery of our precarious grainy connection.

She moves the tablet to show me the cramped room, congested with books and suitcases, a mug of steaming coffee on the bedside table, a cat lying in the square of sunlight in front of the tiny window.

“Like it?”

“Superb. Pure luxury. The most spacious closet you’ll ever see in New York.”

“To close the door I have to put my suitcase on the bed. I don’t know how we’ll manage to be here, the two of us, when you come to see me.”

I fake a thoughtful look.”I think I ‘ve got an idea.”

Suddenly a half-naked young man enters the visual field, covered by a pair of jersey shorts, sculpted abs, a turban-towel on his head, and a thick creamy green mud covering his face.

“This is Didi. My roommate.”Didi greets with his hand and blows a kiss. “Hello, boyfriend”, I seem to hear.

“Couldn’t you have chosen an uglier one?”

“Cute, isn’t he? When you come and there will be three of us here, I will die of jealousy.”

“Hopefully.”

“Hopefully what? That I die of jealousy?”

“That Didi will keep to the party line, and will not broaden his interests.”

“Don’t be stupid. We are six thousand miles away, and I’m in New York. You know I can cheat when I want, how I want and with whom I want – if I want to.”

“Thanks Aundi. You really know how to reassure me.”

“And who’s there with you?”

“Two finalists of Miss Thong and… Oh, they must have gone. This is my grandmother.”

“Is that your grandma? Adorable! Say hello for me!”

I smile gazing with pride at my women, one after the other.

“Buon… Buongiorno!” Tries Aundi in her pitiful Italian.

I signal to grandma Caterina to answer, not to just stand there like that. She does answer, pulling a confused smile. She respectfully greets Aundi with a raised arm that borders on the Roman salute and a peremptory nod.

Didi has something to ask Aundi. Something that has to do with the bathroom. I hear the words dryer, and very important. For a while, I see only the outline of his abs in the foreground, and occasionally a flourish of finger nail polish of a dark purple hue that, I have to concede, doesn’t look bad on him.

Grandma Caterina, her eyes glued to the bread dough that is beginning to assume the right consistency, takes the opportunity for some questions.

“Is that your girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Does she speak Italian?”

“No”.

“And what’s her name?”

“Aundi.”

“And – Aundi esti?” She says, which in Sardinian means: where is she?

I do not know if she wants to tease me or just did not hear.

“She’s in New York, Grandma. But she is from Tennessee.

“Tenesi? Where is it?”Aundi esti, again. She’s teasing me.

“In America, Grandma. In America.” I try to decipher the element in her deadpan expression that makes it so clear that she’s having fun.

 

“She’s black.”

“Right and acute observation. Nothing escapes your eye, o Eagle of the Mediterranean.”

“Real black. Her skin is just like chocolate.”

“Yeah. Dark chocolate, I daresay”.

Grandmother Caterina laughs.”Looks like a chocolate. Your chocolate. Is that what you call her? my chocolate?”

“It never happened, but if you insist, I will…”

“And what does she call you, as you are so white that you look sick? Cream cheese?”

“Enough, don’t be disgusting, grandma! We are old fashioned people, we call each other by name”.

“And what can she cook?”

“Grandma, I’m Italian”.

“That you’re Italian I know – what does that mean?”

“It means that I do the cooking”.

She makes an expression that means duh. She does not get it.

“In a couple it’s always the Italian that does the cooking”, I explain.

Another duh. You can tell that she’s had a different explanation about roles in cooking.

“Who is that, her brother?” She says, pointing at the jersey shorts.

“No, it’s her roommate. In New York, the houses are expensive and space is limited. Everyone shares a room with someone else.”

“Ah! And he does not have a girlfriend?”

“He might have one too, but over there you do not live with your boyfriend… I mean, girlfriend. You live with your roommate. You go out with your girlfriend, in the evening.” I give up going into the details of the complicated protocols of dating.

“Men and women? Together?” She asks, feigning indifference.

“There is very little space. You take what comes.”

This concept is so difficult to comprehend that Caterina stops kneading for a moment.

“So, you are engaged with a man and you live with another man?”

“She’s called Aundi, grandmother, Aundi. And we’re not engaged. And then, this way of doing things has its advantages. Now if there was a stranger here with me, making bread, I wouldn’t be asked all these questions”.

She keeps laughing to herself. “Be honest. You would like it, if … what’s her name…”

“Aundi…”

“If Aundi was here to make bread in my place”.

“Aundi? She doesn’t even know how you do it, the bread I mean. She does not even know that it takes water and flour”.

She seems to find this subject interesting. She stops again, leaning on her knuckles against the table.

“Okay, she’s young, she hasn’t learned yet. But, let’s say, her mother, her grandmother?”

“Her grandmother’s gone. I know her mother. She does not cook either”.

“And how does she eat?”

“She buys something that’s already been prepared and puts it in the microwave for two minutes”.

“Why?”

“Because is it ready quickly. To save time.”

“And what does she do with the time she saves?”

“I don’t know. Watches television”.

She frowns thoughtfully.

Like me, when I was hospitalized. Prepared stuff, bad bread and television all day. I didn’t like it”.

She resumes her kneading.

“And when she feels like good bread what does she do?”

“Nothing. She does not eat good bread. She has never tasted it. She does not know what it tastes like. She does not know that there is a better bread than what she knows”.

“No, really?”Caterina says in disbelief for a moment, then forgets everything and plunges back into the dough.

 

Aundi was able to dismiss Didi and returned to us. She begins to speak. Talks about the unbearable heat and the broken air conditioner, about the first day of work at the museum, the fact that they put in her hands, as if it were a postal packet, a genuine Masaccio, a small canvas that almost made her burst into tears on the spot when she held it, asking her if she thought the frame could be restored in a non-invasive way, about Didi who is desperate because the hairdryer broke; but since she is speaking in English, for grandmother Caterina it might as well be a deathly silence.

“Tell her I’m doing the bread,” she says.

“What’s your grandmother saying?”Aundi enquires.

“She says she is preparing…”

 

I stop. People use the same word for many different things.

If I say bread Aundi will think of a tasteless, pre-sliced block, with the texture of foam rubber.

To explain what grandma is preparing I should use another term. A word that makes the ancient and miraculous process that is taking shape, the son of a yeast given to us by a benign Goddess and three thousand years of wandering in the Mediterranean Sea. That from that oven which you would not give a penny for will emerge a sort of tortoise-shell, dark, hard and cracked outside, in some places as black as the bark of a burned tree trunk, wrinkled like an elephant hide, releasing soft and fragrant secrets from the moist inside. That comes out of the oven with the same parched earthen colors and smells of the land that produced its grain, so sensitive that if you use water from a different source, a little further away, a little higher in the hills, the taste changes, and also the shape of the internal labyrinth of galleries loses the rhythm of the pores that become irregular, and the reaction to the bite and the palate changes irreparably. With a prodigious specific gravity, as dense as the center of the earth, composed of ground and compressed ancient grains always complicit to the benign workings of man’s body, never frozen at any stage of its preparation, never touched by machinery, never contaminated by protein enrichment, never tempted by the idea of mass production: only tortured with care by knowing hands, in ovens already perfected at the beginning of human history, at the peak of generations of loving improvements.

For Aundi, bread is a carbohydrate, that is sugar, that is poison. She is like those who watch wrestling matches and believe that those thugs are doing it for real. She is naive. She believes in the tables printed on labels, listing carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and sugars. For her, a meal is a formula, a diet an algorithm, a number a number; Grandma Caterina’s bread a toxic formula with a protein value just a little lower than the sad criminal compound that Aundi buys downstairs and smears with peanut butter.

You have to understand her. She is from Tennessee. A delicate harmonious flower from those vast prairies.

And certainly I could never tell her that in grandmother’s bread there is history. History is myth, was written on a mural in front of her apartment, where I closed the window every night to admire the blue pajamas falling to the ground with a sliding imperceptible rustle and I could see for a moment Botticelli’s Venus emerging from the sea with a much less glorious body than that of Aundi, although well equipped with sunglasses; meaning that history is nonsense and only current events exist. While I can not help but think that history is more real than current events, and myth is more real than history, and bread the most real of all myths.

“Hey, did you tell her that I am making bread?” Asks Caterina.

“No”.

“What? You are not able to say bread in American?”

“No, Grandma, I can’t say bread in American”.

“All that time you’ve been away and you can not say bread? Then, explain it in some way”.

“It would take me two hours, and then she would tell me that we Italians only think about food”.

Caterina wipes her forehead with her arm, like a cat, and immediately starts to knead.

“Really? What nonsense! Who would think that of us?”