Making, Feeling

One night, the other side of the street had simply sunk. Most of the villagers had evacuated in time, forewarned by a creaking scricolico, but a blind man was left stranded in his house and rescued after days. His house remained intact but encased in earth. Nico told us that when villagers finally got to him and pried the door open he was kneeling on the floor in prayer.

In the years since the landslide Nico and his partner, Lucia, had done minor renovations to the house, nothing structural. Made the house more “bespoke”, as Lucia described it; replacing plastic chairs with ones Nico’s great grandfather had woven by hand; decorated all the strange alcoves of the house with handmade ceramics and Lucia’s prints. White walls, floral and flannel sheets, scratchy woollen blankets with saturn trim.

I told myself I was at the residency to “make art” and not to run away. I worked as a chef in Melbourne but had burnt out. Working in commercial kitchens had proven too hard, my sensitivity no match for the extreme bullying and the long, relentless hours of physical work that had left me despondent. I’d been waiting for it to pass, though the longer I waited the more diminished the idea of cooking had become. I’d drawn a line between the two sides of my mind – things I did with my hands (intuition) and things I did with my brain (intellect) and decided in my apathy that the reason I’d lost my passion for food was because it was all ‘hand’ work. I was under stimulated! I started glorifying something more academic than cooking, something more important.

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We spent our first days of the residency talking, eating and exploring the surrounds. We foraged for wild dock, lemon sorrel and dandelion, occasionally finding single spears of wild asparagus. Abruzzo is known as the greenest region in Europe, almost half its land protected in national parks. The only thing non-green was the Majella, a snow-capped mountain hanging in distance, its tiered blue hues too vivid in the summer sun. It was cherry season. Branches of trees we passed bowed with ripe fruit. Cherries fell on us as we gathered the greens below. Wading through tall grass, humidity clung to me and my juice-stained hands. Crisp mornings turned to steam in the afternoons.

Lucia said Nico was a magnet for elderly men with war stories. We would stand silently and wait as he stopped to talk with anyone we passed. In my short time in the village, I’d noticed everyone seemed so content. I attributed it to being satisfied in what they did all day – of having one thing to focus on and be consumed by, a life synced with a cycle of growing and harvesting.

One afternoon when out foraging, we waited while Nico spoke to an old man picking cherries high in a tree. His ladder was balanced precariously on a single branch as he yelled down to us in a coarse voice. “Take the cherries. They’re shit anyway.”

Late rain damaged much of the fruit, Nico explained, causing rot. The man’s whole fate in the hands of the weather. Back at the house, we worked together to clean the foraged greens then braised them with onions and garlic. Sweet and bitter and spicy. We made a frittata out of goose eggs from a neighbour, their yolks more buttery than a regular egg. Everyone described the texture as luxurious. Nico made us chickpea pancakes crispy from so much olive oil in the batter.

We ate under a tree that sat close to the cliff edge. Fields of vineyards striped the valley below in a checkerboard of greens alternating between dark-fruited Montepulciano and lighter Pecorino, named for the pecora sheep that love to eat its grapes. The wind picked up but only enough to make everything sparkle and to remind us we were outside.

Days passed like this. Everyone worked in the morning until voices from the kitchen brought us downstairs. There we would cook together, eat together, maybe forage in the afternoon. And that would lead into dinner. No one got much work done. There was more purpose in the collective passing of time.

When I did work, I flitted between painting and writing, spending all day trying to decide what made me more content only to be frustrated at my lack of direction. I drank coffees until I’d had too many, stressed, trying to imagine my future life.

We visited the house next door. There, the grandmother of the family, also named Lucia, was in her garden, which was alive with spring vegetables, all the greenery of the garden set against the red poppies that litter the ground throughout Abruzzo. We trailed behind Lucia as she ripped young garlic and leeks out of the dirt and pushed them to our chests. We stuffed handfuls of broad beans into plastic bags.

After bestowing on us as much as she could, she gestured for us to sit on the ground beside her. She apologised for speaking dialect then told us how the property was on the front line of the war. I looked beyond the house to her garden and the greenhouse that she’d recently built herself, at 84 years old. On the walk home, the younger Lucia told us that her grandmother was disregarded by her family because they saw her as an uneducated farmer. It was clear, though, that she was the backbone of that household, even as an outsider. Hand skills and intuition are always undervalued.

We podded the broad beans together when we got back to the house on the cliff, sitting in a circle on the ground. They were young and tender enough to leave in their opaque skins. Nico cooked them with the garlic and leeks from Lucia’s garden. The spring garlic was so sweet we could eat the cloves whole once they had cooked down.  The vegetables pooled in olive oil and lemon. We ate over a red checked tablecloth, tearing off chunks of white bread, a slab of parmigiano in the middle of the table beside a knife. In that moment, food, (farming, cooking, eating) was the centre of the universe.

I sat and watched the younger Lucia in her garden that evening, with her own rows of vegetables. She said that sometimes she watched everything grow so fixedly it was like she was watching television. I wanted to be as consumed by something as much as her.

The next morning, I walked to the shops listening to a recording of the writer Camille Bordas reading her story, The Presentation on Egypt. In it, the protagonist tells her friend she thinks that people don’t get along because everyone was always trying to convince themselves the one path they’d chosen was the most meaningful. Her friend disagrees, saying he didn’t think mathematicians saw everything through a maths prism and farmers never talked in farming metaphors.  It was only writers who thought they did. I laughed at myself, wandering around the village, searching for something to definitively tell me what to do.

As I walked slowly back towards the house I ate cherries plucked from the trees while the Majella watched from behind. The people that drove past me every day had stopped offering lifts after numerous explanations that I preferred to walk for exercise. Now they waved and beeped, laughing as they passed me. And I decided to enjoy where I was