The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi Page A

my gaze so fast and hard it frightened me. When he looked away, he said, “I don’t know. No one ever knows.”
    â€˜When Cosima wore the dress on Thursday nights, she’d always say how she preferred her black one, that any other one felt like someone else’s. Her heart-shaped lips compressed, nearly stretched into a smile, she’d touch the bodice, pat her hands cautiously here and there about the dress and wonder aloud if it truly
had
once been someone else’s. And if it had, she wondered, too, who was that someone else? What was she like? And what had her husband known of her?
    â€˜One evening while we sat out in the lane, she pulled the dress from her work sack, proceeded to cut off the sleeves, frayed and split as they were. Piecing together the remnants into one long length, she wrapped it about her head, securing the ends under her braids. She looked up at me, the metallic glint of the headdress dancing in her eyes like moonshine and, on the next Thursday when she wore it with the dress, I thought, at last, that Cosima had the right clothes for an enchantress. She never wore any other shoes, though, than the too-large black men’s oxfords or, in winter, Pierangelo’s discarded hunting boots. Had she manoeuvred things in another way, Cosima might have had more – more clothes, more comforts. Once when I asked her, “Wouldn’t you like to have …” it was the only time I saw her veer toward anger. “
Non hai capito niente. L’abbondanza é pericolosa
. You’ve understood nothing. Abundance is perilous.”
    â€˜Were any of the men at home on a Thursday, they would sit and eat and drink with us, having first made their own extraordinary ablutions for the event. White shirts, starched, ironed, buttoned to the neck, jeans or black trousers tucked into boots and, smelling of bergamot and red wine, their skins dark and luminous in the candlelight, they were knights errant, intriguing, erotic, fresh from battle, more lovers than husbands. As I was living it, that
divided
life seemed a noble one, unmuddied as it was by the niggling hostilities and household tyrannies of an everyday life. When we were together, we seemed new and, I think, exotic to one another. Every time was the first time. When we were apart, well, that’s how it was. Men left to their machinations and their swaggering. To their whoring. Maybe to their whoring. Women – loosed from the quotidian needs and wants of a domesticated man – could tend to one another, to their babies, to
themselves
and their own
modo d’essere
, their own way of being. To their own swagger and lust, I don’t know. I shall admit that for all these years since we returned to Orvieto I’ve adored that every-evening moment when I lay down with Pierangelo, limbs tangled, his breath even on my cheek. Still, there was something about that other way of being a couple, that other reality, which was good.
    â€˜Thursday Nights notwithstanding, I need not tell you that storms shook the lives of the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. No, I needn’t tell you that. But it was Cosima who kept things apace. Boiling up the mess of life until it came out right, she could lull an anguish, knead a rogue terror into calm, stir beans and potatoes into a feast, she could do that. All this sway of hers, though, was wider than over the seven women. You see, Cosima had a niece.
    â€¢
    â€˜Sitting not a hundred metres from Cosima’s place, Sofia lived in the
borghetto
, a group of cottages clustered on a rise and surrounded by tilled fields and sheepfolds, all of it the property of Sofia’s husband’s family. The daughter and only child of Cosima’s younger brother, Sofia had been orphaned when she was eleven years old. That would have been seventeen years before my time in Acquapendente di Sopra. Sofia was twenty-eight when I met her. Having in some manner displeased the clans,