For three days now we have been enveloped in fog and only the odd car or tractor lights loom by to show the boundaries. It happens often at this time of the year but then November is full of such gloom and forms the transitional month between summer and winter.
Autumn exists in its colours and the gradual returning to bleak outlines of trees and bushes. Rarely does it signal its presence in the temperatures, and, before the fog, we sat outside in 28C heat swatting away lazy but angry wasps and hornets.
Even now it’s not cold and jeans and a jumper are all that are needed, although the heating is on inside as a physical comfort blanket against the greyness.
My Italian city dwellers hear strange sounds and grow a touch fearful outside at night when walking Cesar, twitching with him at rustling in the undergrowth. They become quickly disorientated when the house disappears from sight and the outside lights lose their glow.
How strange that I no longer really notice the disappearance of the familiar, or even slightly worry about it. If anything I find it only fitting it is such in this month of the dead – All Souls, All Saints, Armistice Day and now Paris: solemn remembrance should take place in leeching damp and melancholic tones.
Inside, though, with all lamps lit, cupboards stocked with food and wine, replete and needing to be nowhere, we focus on the internet for information, entertainment and work. The dark and the fog are banished, ignored and no longer feared. They are simply out there. In their place.
Meal times are when we cast aside the technology and the outside pressures, and our odd, little, temporary family talk, laugh and tell each other our stories. The languages switch back and forth from English to Italian to French; Spanish when Sandy makes her daily call to her mother.
My lifelong collection of curses from Arabic to Gaelic is being further enriched by Livio’s sports journalism and obsession with football, particularly AS Roma. For a nation known to love their mamas it is telling that the most vicious and obscene ones involve … their mamas and even their mamas’ mamas. The least offensive I can write here are: your bald mama; you old drooling dog of a mama and – no, just those two, I think. There were many Sandy simply refused to translate for me but by then, goals scored, Livio had run from the house, flung himself on the stones and was gesticulating to the sky.
Sometimes I feel I’m living in a black-and-white Anna Magnani film from the 1960s. I often want to run outside too, expose my heaving bosoms and scream to the heavens: "Perché? Perché?" ("Why?") Just for the hell of it.
My house, once as sterile as the inside of the microwave I used for my bits of food, is now wreathed in the smells of garlic; wine bubbling over meat or fish; potatoes smothered in oil and rosemary. Avocados are mashed or chopped into a salad of the colours of the Italian flag and pasta, lasagne, stews and cheese-laden vegetable bakes seem effortlessly to flow from kitchen to table. There is no fuss, no lengthy discussion, no consultation of cookery books – meals just happen as easily as day turns to night.
And after a lifetime’s lack of interest in food beyond the odd lust for Chinese or Lebanese, I am eating daily, relishing the complex flavours, though permitted the occasional oven chips as an apero treat, never a meal. Perhaps my inner self has been Italian all along and I just never realised it.
Bizarrely too, after years of believing I needed just 600 calories a day to stay slim, I am now as plumped with oil and carbs as a Tuscan peasant but haven’t put on a pound.
The background to my day is the sound of chopping, of sauces bubbling, and Cesar being cajoled and soothed with varying intonations of "Amore".
Livio calls him Emperor and wraps him in a precious red and yellow AS Roma scarf; photographing him against the same coloured sunset sky on the day they won the derby. Cesare, as we now call him in the Roman way, is becoming less petulantly French and more languidly Italian too, occasionally howling to the skies in response to a new rhythm.
He’s developing a passion for pasta dripped in his bowl on match days only and his breath matches mine in its garlic intensity. Soon he’ll be demanding Ray-Ban glasses to match Livio’s when they sashay into town.
Sandy counteracts the passion of the males with a dancer’s liquid walk, a smile that never falters and an innate grace that senses when to be silent and when to speak. And I sit at the head of my table or turn to see them anxiously watching me as I now march out without crutches all the way to the road and back.
Today I had a check with my doctor. He’s Spanish. He looked at me and said, in French: "My God, you’re eating."
"Sí, son los Italianos," I answered with a smile.
European union. Balignac.
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