Fighting Mussolini with Minestrone
Rosa prepared the minestrone. She cut the chard, runner beans, carrots and potatoes with fast irregular motions. Her hand slipped; she almost cut herself again. Every last morsel of vegetables, bacon bits (although she would have preferred prosciutto), beans and seasonings had been put into the pot. The soup simmered, and the aroma of fortune filled the kitchen.
Rosa cleaned up the counter and called out to the boys. They ran into the kitchen with blackened hands and shoe polish smudges on their faces.
“Ma…che cosa è successo? Siete pazzi!”
She held little Michele’s hands under the faucet and scrubbed them with soap until they turned pink; she yelled at his older brother Daniele to do the same or he’d go to bed with an empty stomach.
“In America no one goes to bed hungry except prisoners and naughty boys.”
The three of them ate in silence around the small square wooden table under the windowsill in the kitchen. Rosa looked out into the pale winter night. The fog was billowing in, non-threatening, like a blanket putting the city to sleep.
She thought about what her mother, father and sister were eating. In the winter they had always eaten polenta and stew, bread and preserves. She knew food was scarce. She worried if they had enough to eat. Then she reminded herself that they had never had enough to eat.
A few minutes after Rosa tucked the boys into bed, she heard Paolo on the back stoop taking off his overalls and brushing the sawdust off his boots. He’d been loading lumber into the truck for the next day’s job and going over the day’s accounts. He had work. They were lucky. He walked in the back door holding a paper bag and a dark bottle of homemade wine. He smelled the minestrone and grimaced.
“Minestrone, again. It’s a good thing I brought some sausages from Lucca’s deli.”
He pulled out a string of pork sausages from the bag and laid them on the counter, then produced a wedge of cheese bigger than his own large contractor’s hand and put it in the middle of the table as if it were a vase of flowers for Rosa.
“Mamma mia! Where did you get the parmigiana?”
“This isn’t parmigiana; it’s pecorino.” He cut a thin slice of the hard sheep’s cheese and handed it to Rosa. “I know people.”
“People? You mean it’s from Lucca’s.”
“Lucca’s can’t sell this kind of stuff; they’d be thrown in jail. I got it from Joe.”
“Joe? Japanese Joe? Didn’t he have to leave with his family?”
“No, not that Joe. Giuseppe.”
“Giuseppe, the Genovese?”
“Yeah, Giuseppe the Genovese. I did some work for him and he gave me this.” He patted the wedge of pecorino as if it were the little lamb it came from.
“Do work for him more often.” Rosa smiled at her husband. Paolo smiled at the pecorino and then at his wife.
Rosa fried the sausages. Paolo grated the cheese over the minestrone and poured wine from the obscure bottle. He took a hunk of dry bread and dipped it in the wine. After Paolo finished supper Rosa washed up and went to bed. Paolo sat at the kitchen table with his ear to the radio.
When Rosa married Paolo she told him she didn’t know how to cook. “I’ve never cracked an egg before. My sister was the cook in the house. All I know is how to be a seamstress.”
He told her that she’d learn, which she did, but cooking was a struggle; it took her too much time and effort to prepare a simple polenta or risotto, and more complicated dishes like roasting a chicken or ossobuco was an all day affair when the boys were constantly tugging her skirt seams.
Rosa fell asleep thinking about the letter; she ruminated certain phrases, I won’t be coming home this summer, he has asked me to marry him, Zio Antonio approves, he’s Italian and an American citizen. The letter was a turning point in her life. There was no turning back, there was no going home. Italy was the past. America was her future. Rosa had rewritten the letter five times before posting it. When she did a pang of regret hit her in the stomach. She still wasn’t sure she had made the right decision. The response was dry and concise. She couldn’t read between the few short lines her sister had written.
Rosa and her sister continued to write letters about what was going on in their lives. Rosa didn’t mention the abundance of everything, especially food and cloth for making clothes. Instead she described her neighbors and all the different places they had come from and the different languages they spoke. Rosa’s sister talked about their relatives, those who were marrying, dying or having babies, and she mentioned the impending war. Her letters stopped as soon as the war started.
Rosa woke up in the middle of the night. Michele was crying out for no reason that she could ascertain until she heard a chorus of pots, glassware and silverware and Paolo singing and then shouting. She settled Michele to sleep and then followed the sweet rosemary aroma coming from the kitchen.
“That bastard Mussolini has given his country to a German. He has pushed Italy back 150 years. We had Garibaldi and Mazzini and then comes along this stronzo who calls himself Il Duce. Che coglione! I hope the Americans hang him by the balls.”
He continued singing. The wine bottle sat on the table nearly empty. Rosa stood barefoot in the doorway in her nightgown.
“Santo cielo! You’re making risotto at midnight. Now I know where Daniele and Michele get their craziness from.”
Paolo ladled risotto onto a plate and poured a glass of wine. “Come here and try risotto alla milanese. It’s my mother’s recipe.”
“Well, why not, I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyways.”
“This is the kind of food our boys should be eating; they need to grow up healthy and strong so they can help me with the business. Your minestrone is good but it’s not enough, hai capito?”
“Do you know what our relatives are eating in Italy? They’re eating the leather off their shoes. Grazie a Dio per il minestrone.”
Paolo continued singing. “Grazie a Dio per l’America.” He grated cheese on top of her risotto. “Taste it. Mangi.”
Rosa tasted the sweet simplicity of ground sausage and creamy rice with a hint of salt and pepper; she was experiencing forgotten flavors from home. She closed her eyes.
“Adesso hai capito, you taste home. You are imagining that this kitchen is Italy. Mussolini has been sacrificing our young men and has been starving our families but he will never destroy the Italians. We will bury him and very soon everyone will be eating minestrone. Don’t worry, everyone will be eating your delicious minestrone Rosa.”
Rosa realized that there was much more to food than eating. It was a simple daily ritual that connected her to home, a temporary relief for nostalgia. From then on, she made food the center of her family’s life. Rosa’s children and grandchildren would grown up and speak American English and forget the Italian language, but they would never forget her Italian kitchen with its smell of rosemary chicken, risotto, sourdough bread and minestrone.
