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Tortellini and Tears
The rolling pin is long and thin, as if someone has stood at either end of a regular-sized roller and pulled. It sits off to the side on a wide wooden table with a small volcano of flour in its center. In the mouth of the volcano rest four yellow egg yolks. Why are the egg yolks so yellow? The pasta maker, Renata, says that the hens are fed lots of corn. Her sister, busy cleaning out the refrigerator, looks out from behind the door and replies, “Depending on where you buy your eggs, it could be yellow dye. So be careful. Buy the best.”
I am in Bologna, Italy to study Italian. Class ends every day at 1PM but often, in
the afternoon, the school has arranged for a small field trip. This afternoon we are visiting Renata’s pasta shop. Like most of the shops in Bologna, the store is closed from 1PM to 4 PM. This is a good time to visit and watch Renata as she makes pasta. We are expected to ask questions in Italian. Renata speaks no English.
Our pasta maker, in her little white hat, large tortoise-shell framed glasses, and red apron and sweater, smiles at us and launches into a torrent of Italian. Her hands dive into the volcano. The yellow yolks bleed into the white flour. Renata keeps a smooth stream of talk going and quickly the mixture assumes its own flow, pulling away from her fingers, lifting from the table. Renata works the dough. Her arm muscles tense from the shoulders to her wrists. Her face shines with effort.
“Look how soft the dough is,” she comments, “ but it’s not ready yet.” She rolls it back and forth, folding it into itself. Sometimes she dusts her hands in a pile of flour sitting on the side of the table.
“How do you know when it’s ready?” I ask. I know the answer but I need to practice my Italian. I have worked with dough before: Swedish limpa bread at Christmas, pizza dough, cookie dough, pie crust dough and dough for kids to decorate and bake for tree trimmings.
Renata stops and smiles back at me. “Your hands tell you when to stop.” I nod my head in understanding while the younger students in the class look at Renata and me suspiciously. No one in the group speaks Italian well enough to question the reply and by now, Renata has grabbed the long, narrow rolling pin and flattens the dough, back and forth, back and forth, with her arm muscles rippling. Dull thuds reverberate like the beat of a drum, as the roller hits the wooden table again and again. Renata’s talk slows down, she breathes hard. The dough lies thin like skin on the table. It is almost transparent. She sets the rolling pin off to the side of the table, wipes her hands on her apron, turns to us and announces, “Now we are ready to make the tortellini.”
What hard work. I understand now why fresh-made tortellini is so expensive. But
Renata says, “This isn’t hard work. I’ve been doing it since I was a young girl growing up in a family with seven children. My mother died when she was young so my sister and I had to cook for the family. We lived in the country. The only way to have fresh pasta was to make it.”
She is shy as she talks about her family. Every now and then her sister looks in our direction as if she could tell us a thing or two about growing up in a family of boys, but Renata is already on to the next task. We watch her cut the pasta into small squares, fill them with a meat mixture and then wrap each one, pinching the enclosure tight along the edges. Each tortellini is made this way, one by one. There is no tortellini machine—just hours and hours of work by hand. Then the tortellini is put on display. Customers come in and pay so much per gram, take them home, boil them a few minutes and eat them with a little bit of butter or sauce. Italians do not linger over their homemade tortellini.
Later that afternoon, after our Italian teacher leaves early for an appointment elsewhere, I have the duty as the most advanced Italian speaker of the group to thank Renata for her demonstration. We all stand on the outside of an enclosed counter that separates her work area— her laboratorio in Italian—from the store’s entryway, and munch on home-made cookies that Renata offered us when we turned down her generous offer of home-made tortellini with ragu sauce. If we had accepted she would have had no break before the shop must open again at 4. I am nervous about which words or expressions I should use. She has been so thorough in her demonstration and kind in giving up her lunchtime that I don’t want to make any mistakes.
My five classmates look to me, as I launch into a long thank you, using polite Italian, not the familiar, acknowledging all the hard work and effort that has gone into her pasta making all these years. Maybe I overdo it a bit, but I can’t help making a comparison between our lives. We are both over fifty years old, we have worked hard and raised families while continuing to work out of the home, we feel strongly that there is something sacred when food is made from scratch, that food shaped by human hands is infinitely better than food made by machine. Midway through my thank you speech, Renata begins to cry. The other students stare at me. What have I said? I stammer a final thank you. Renata smiles through her tears and we leave.
Outside the pasta shop, my classmates and I walk together in silence a bit before they begin to joke and tease. We’re going to tell the teacher your Italian made Renata cry, they taunt.
I look at the mostly young faces around me. “I think Renata has not been thanked or recognized for her work in a long while. She denied that the work was hard. She’s been doing it for years for her brothers and sister, then her own family and now as a business. She was overwhelmed by our interest and appreciation. That’s what I think.”
Maureen, a classmate from Australia, mother of six grown children and a few years younger than I, speaks up, “That’s it. She’s never received such attention about her work, and from foreigners no less. She was touched. That’s why she cried. Would any of us go through all that trouble to make pasta that will disappear down someone’s throat in less than five minutes?”
The others nod. The look of the youngest in the group, a young woman from Japan, remains accusatory.
Okay, so I went back to visit Renata about four weeks later when my Italian was even better. Those tears. I was curious. Without telling anyone, I made an appointment to visit Renata and interview her. I told her that I needed to practice my Italian.
On the day of my scheduled interview, Renata worked her dough and talked with me at the same time. Orders for tortellini were piled up on the pad next to the phone. She revealed that her daughter refused to help her make pasta, that her sister doesn’t make pasta half as well as she does (but thinks she does), and that her husband prefers her at home to cook for him. He walked into the shop for his lunch that day and complained to me —a total stranger— that all their married life Renata has worked outside the home and he has had to suffer for this. Just before he left with his lunch bag, he turned and said that the proper place for a woman is in bed, beneath a man. I muttered my newly learned phrase from Italian class that morning, the one that my teacher said was good to use on the street when being harassed by Italian men, an insult that translates more or less into “stop acting like a cretin.” Renata lowered her head and dove into her pasta dough. I saw no tears, only a stoic smile and accepted her invitation to come back another day.
Christmas holidays weren’t far off and soon I would be leaving Italy. It would be my final visit. I arrived about eight minutes too early but in time to listen to Renata and a customer exchange recipes for cooking fennel. Tony Bennett was singing “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” on the radio. In a week or so I would be there.
Renata prepared to make cookies in a large, slow-moving mixing machine for the cookie dough. She stood with creamy yellow cookie batter hanging off of each finger as we chatted about cooking. Renata looked at me with clear blue eyes as I struggled to speak correct Italian. She never interrupted but waited, as if she knew I would get the language straight sooner or later. White hair escaped from beneath her cap and framed her translucent skin. Her daughter swept the floor around us murmuring, “Scusi, scusi.” The telephone rang and her sister interrupted, “Scusi, scusi, do we want extra eggs for tomorrow’s cooking?”
Renata had scarcely answered my question about her other daughter, an opera singer, when her husband marched in, grabbed her for a big kiss and announced that they had been married for forty years. The anniversary date was very soon. What had happened to the boor of the other day? The door to the store opened again and the husband of the daughter who was sweeping the floor walked in for a lunch date with his wife. The radio played an Italian Christmas carol and the daughter turned it up, saying, “Scusi, scusi, it’s one of my favorite songs—Lucio Dalla—he’s a Bolognese.” Renata stood statue-like in her beat-up white clogs, the yellow cookie dough dried to her hands and fingers as everything flurried around her. I laughed and gave up on my questions, shook hands with the daughter’s husband, ate cookies and drank coffee with everyone, as they interrupted each other with talk and jokes. Renata’s husband came near, “I know some English. Did you know I was once in America? Why don’t you interview me?”
Renata dipped her hands back into the smooth dough, caressing and folding it into the slow-moving blades of the beater. The large, stainless steel bowl turned slowly in its universe and I watched my reflection come and go with each revolution.
©Audrey Fielding, 2008
Audrey Fielding became a BAWP consultant in 1984 and returned as a Fellow in 1991. She was a San Francisco Spanish Bilingual teacher and curriculum specialist for twenty years. For the past six years she has worked as a writing consultant on a teacher education project in Namibia. Her present project is a book about the Salentine Peninsula in Southern Italy, a joint effort with her husband David and three Italian teacher friends from the area.
Audrey,
I loved your piece. It is tender and evocative.
Maybe you and I were in BAWP together? I recognize your name.
I wrote the one on the Chinese Kitchen God here.
Barbara
--fBarbara Bornet Stumph, BAWP TC ( bbornets@yahoo.com ) from USA on 4/4/2008; 1:48:56 PM
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Copyright 2008 Digital Paper
Copyright 2008 Digital Paper
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