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

Sofia’s parents – Cosima’s brother and his wife – had also been dispatched in ritual fashion: he heaved into the lane, throat slit, castrated, his severed member placed in his mouth to stifle his final scream; the corpse of his wife strewn, nude and raped, in a ditch in the nearby woods. Cosima took Sofia to live with her and Pierangelo and there Sofia remained until her marriage to Lamberto – eldest son of the “richest” family in the village – when she went to live with him in the
borghetto
.
    Lamberto, too, did the clans’ bidding. It wasn’t that the malevolence of the clans was less than brazenly clear to him – or to the other men, for that matter – rather it was that each man thought himself to be above or beyond that brazen malevolence. In the way that the rest of us believe dying happens to others, each man in the village took a turn believing that his rapport with the clans would end in riches and glory. Never in a stifled scream. Never him.
    â€˜As did the other men, Lamberto lived a once-in-a-while life in the village, spending more of his time soldiering for the clans. This despite his relative familial wealth. This despite his undisguised love for Sofia and the twin daughters who’d been born to them only days after my arrival in Acquapendente di Sopra. Surrounded, coddled – perhaps suffocated – as she and her baby daughters were by the women in Lamberto’s extended family, Sofia only infrequently visited her aunt Cosima. When she did wander down the rise and through the woods to us, each of her fat cherubs tucked into her own sack, the sacks criss-crossed upon Sofia’s chest, Cosima’s mood was festal. But as much as Cosima would dandle and coo to the baby girls, it was Sofia upon whom her gaze lingered, Cosima never having, I think, outlived the time when Sofia was her own baby girl.
    â€˜But even greater than first-blood kinship, there was another connection between Cosima and Sofia. That Cosima’s husband and Sofia’s father – who was, you’ll recall, Cosima’s brother – had been entrenched in the higher echelons of the clans, that their murders both bore the grotesque clan shibboleth, this was the crucial tie that bound Cosima and Sofia. And when one of Lamberto’s sisters came screaming to our door so early one morning that the light was still grey, Cosima, bent to the fire toasting bread while I was seeing to the coffee, took her shawl from a hook near the hearth and walked behind the woman to the
borghetto
. I walked behind Cosima.
    â€˜It was December. Someone, one of the shepherds I think, had carried Lamberto’s body into an outbuilding under the main house, thinking to wait until Sofia had been told before bringing him upstairs. Cosima set to work, sending me to fetch oil, to ask for the finest sheets in the house. Candles, incense. Cosima decided that Sofia would never see her husband until she had prepared him, washed him like a newborn, swaddled him in scented linens so that only his head was free, the cloth cunningly wrapped to cover his garrotted throat, and the other indignities that had been perpetrated upon him. She lit six candles around the wooden table where he lay. Then she called for Sofia.
    â€˜Having left Sofia to be alone with Lamberto, Cosima soon joined me outdoors, gestured for me to follow along a beaten path to a shed of sorts, which housed a stove, a stone sink, a work table already laid with baskets of eggs, vegetables, meats, oil, wine, a bin of flour, other things she’d asked to be brought to her. From the rafters of the shed, haunches of prosciutto were aging and, hung by their feet from a wire strung along one wall, freshly killed pheasants and guinea hens twisted in the breezes seeping through the cracks of the rough wooden walls. There was an electric light bulb in a wire frame above the work table. Patting the surface of the table with one hand,