Pizza Bianca 2 ¼ oz packages of active dry yeast or 3 teaspoons 2 cups warm water 1 teaspoon sugar ¾ tablespoon salt 2 tablespoons olive oil 6 cups (approximately) unbleached flour Francie should have known that her marriage was coming to an end. All the signs had been there: the slowly accumulating distance between Russell and her, the Sunday mornings spent sleeping instead of sweet hung-over lovemaking and the time apart left unaccounted for. Not that she’d expected every minute to be tallied-up, but over the months the discrepancies had become noticeable, then alarming and, finally, the source of bitter dispute left unresolved. They’d finally divorced two months ago and Francie decided to take leave from her stockbroker job in Chicago, and a leave from Chicago as well. And then, a leave from the whole stock-breaking United States. She cashed-out some options, took a mental health sabbatical with the blessing (and a very well written note) from her physician friend Katy and boarded an Alitalia flight from Chicago to Rome. She spent a few days in Rome—and an athletic night with a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed free gigolo named Mateo or Mario or something-O—then rented a car and started driving south, down the ancient Appian Way, now a merely old two-lane Italian highway. Once out of the Roman suburbs she meandered through poor villages to the winding coastal highway that’s cut into the mountains of Amalfi. Driving her rented Fiat with mountains jutting straight up on her right and a hundred-foot drop to the Mediterranean Sea on her left, Francie stopped wherever looked interesting and stayed wherever had the best food. Gaeta and Positano, Naples and Maratea. A few nights she slept in the tilted-back passenger seat of the Fiat and, one time, in Maratea late on a Sunday afternoon with no place to stay, she went to the train station and called the first English-sounding female name in the telefon book. “I’m sorry to bother you but I’m an American woman traveling alone and, since you live here, I thought you might know of a good place to stay? You know, someplace pretty and quiet, with good food and, well, nice?” “Yes, I know just the spot,” the older-sounding woman replied in an English accent, “the Villa Cheta up the coast a bit. If they’re open this early in the season. But it’s Easter-time and many Italians take a week’s holiday, so I expect they’d be. May I ring them for you?” “Oh no, I’ll look up the number in the book and give them a call. Thank you so much; you’ve been most helpful,” Francie replied, trying to sound English. So Francie found the number, called and reserved a room for that night, and in half an hour was handing her American Express card to the elderly Italian gentleman at the desk. He refused it until she’d followed him up the curving staircase, through a wide hallway lined with flowers and paintings and marble busts of cardinals and bishops and into a large room with a chandelier, a desk, a balcony and still more flowers. “I love it!” she squealed as the bent gentleman grimaced, “I’ll take it!” They returned to the lobby desk where he accepted the card and recorded her Fiat’s license and her passport’s visa number. He insisted on carrying her bag to the room and, as he handed her the key, instead of accepting a tip he asked, “And what would the Signora like for dinner?” Francie’s mind went blank and, after a hesitation, she was finally able to reply, “Well, you have a restaurant here, right? I’ll just order off the menu.” “There is no menu. Only Anna.” Confused, she replied, “You know, something light. Maybe just a pizza,” and was immediately sure that she’d said the wrong thing. “Pizza.” The old gentleman said flatly, but not judgmentally, and added, “Pizza Bianca. The best you’ve had. And an insalata after?” “Yeah. Sure. That’s perfect,” Francie murmured with no idea to what she’d just agreed, “I’ll be down shortly.” When he’d left she noticed that there wasn’t bath in the room. She finally found it, down the hall a bit but pleasant and clean and with a tub but no shower. In the bathroom it occurred to her that maybe she was being a nuisance. It was late and maybe poor Anna must now make something special just for her. She left her things packed, put on a clean blouse with her jeans and went in search of the dining room. Downstairs she found a room with an ancient buffet table of split wood and a marble top and a small bar in the corner with bottles of Compari and vermouth and British whiskey and rows of various sparkling glasses. Most of the bar was devoted to an ornate brass steam machine for coffee. There were seven or eight tables with white cloths and old paintings on the wall, some with small tears in the canvas that no one had attempted to repair. As she looked at a painting of a boy leading a lamb down a tree-lined lane, what could only be Anna emerged from a room behind the bar. “You want pizza?” she asked gruffly and Francie prepared for a scene. “Well, that would be great. If it’s not too much trouble.” “No trouble. Is simple. Like Fredo.” “Fredo? Oh, is that the man at the desk? He’s very nice.” “Yes, mostly nice. But simple,” and she put her forefinger to her temple and smiled. Anna is short, stern and stout, almost a sphere with fat cheeks and fat, but powerful, arms and dressed in a dull, brownish short-sleeved shirt-dress that comes just below her knee. “Listen, if pizza is too much trouble I’ll just have whatever you have, you know, whatever is easiest.” “Trouble? Is no trouble. You are alone?” “Yes. I’m travelling alone. Escaping from my husband. I mean my ex-husband. I’m divorced. Recently.” Anna’s look softened and her wide shoulders slumped an inch. “Some wine?” she asked. Without an answer Anna went to the bar. “Chianti?” “That would be great,” Francie replied softly and Anna poured two small glasses, like water glasses not stemmed glasses, from a three-liter bottle. They clinked, drank and Francie smiled inside. Anna smiled and showed her crooked teeth and said, “I make you pizza. Come, no sit by you-self.” Francie followed her into a well-lit kitchen with a reddish tile floor and old plaster walls. Pots hung from the ceiling and a gas stove sat beside a wooden counter-top and across the room a stainless steel sink with a suspended sprayer for cleaning vegetables and washing dishes. “You make pizza?” Anna asked as she mounded flour onto the wooden counter-top. Suddenly Francie realized that Anna was preparing to make pizza from scratch! Not frozen. Not from a box. But from scratch! Anna made a mound of what looked like about four cups of flour and then made a well in the middle of the mound, like a volcanic crater in the middle of a mountain. Then she took an earthen bowl from a cabinet. She ran hot water into it to warm it, drained the bowl and then put into it 2 cups of warm water, a teaspoon of sugar and two ¼ ounce packages of active dry yeast. She let the yeast dissolve on top of the water, stirred it and set it aside. “You love you husband?” she asked. Francie was caught off-guard but replied, “Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, I did. But not now.” “Not now? It go away so soon?” Francie looked at the mound of flour, with the well in the center, and said, “No, it doesn’t. Not so soon.” “You know, do you not? That it will never go away?” “Yeah, I guess I know that. But I need to pretend that it has. Or how can I go on?” “No pretend. Just go on. Come to Italia! Make pizza! Drink Chianti! Go on.” Anna laughed a big belly laugh, from low and deep inside herself, stepped into the bar and returned with the big bottle of Chianti to fill Francie’s glass and her own. The mixture of yeast and sugar and water had started to foam in the bowl. Anna added a tablespoon of salt and two tablespoons of olive oil from a big brown bottle and stirred it all together with a fork. Now with a wire whisk she slowly added two cups of flour, whisking until it made a thick pasty liquid. Francie watched her put a plate on top of the bowl before she set it aside again. “You asked if I make pizza,” she said with a Chianti chuckle. “Not hardly! Pizza in Chicago comes in a box delivered by a teenager in an old car with a loud muffler and a plastic sign on top. The box is in an insulated plastic bag that’s supposed to keep it hot but never does.” Anna didn’t follow most of what Francie said but she seemed to understand the point. “That not pizza,” she declared. “Pizza is good bread with few good things on top. Not too much.” She stepped to the counter, flexed her arms and poured the warm bubbling yeast mixture into the crater in the mound of flour. With a fork, she began to stir the liquid, pulling flour from the sides of the crater and thickening it into a wet dough. She worked the dough until all of the flour had been absorbed, sprinkled it with a little more flour and covered the mass with a towel moistened with warm water. “No bambini?” Anna asked, looking directly into Francie’s eyes. “No,” she replied almost guiltily, looking down at the floor, “No bambini.” Anna shrugged her heavy soft shoulders a fraction of an inch and tilted her head a few degrees to the right in a practiced gesture that seemed to indicate both regret and disregard. “Eh. You young.” Francie laughed, as Anna poured their third glass of Chianti, and replied, “Yeah, but I also don’t have a husband!” Anna repeated the shrug but this time with more disregard than regret. “Nyahh! That the easy part. You make-a you husband happy? In the beginning? At night?” Francie looked away in embarrassment and then, with a broad grin, “Yeah! I sure did,” and some of those Sunday mornings came to mind. “So you do again. You young. And pretty. Bella,” and Francie blushed, feeling the blood, and the wine, rush to her face. Anna took the towel from the dough, picked it up in one hand and slammed it down hard on the counter with a “Whap!” that startled Francie like a pistol shot. Anna laughed out-loud when Francie jumped and pushed the heels of both hands down into the dough, making two deep indentations. She anchored the dough with one hand and pushed with the other to stretch it. She folded the lengthened dough over once, turned it a quarter-turn and stretched it again. She repeated this motion, gradually quickening the tempo: anchor, stretch, fold, turn. Over and over. Every twenty turns or so she’d stop, dust a little flour over and under the dough and then begin again until Francie had finished her wine. Anna continued to work the dough with one hand and, incredibly, with the thumb of her other hand, she worked the cork out of the Chianti bottle, lifted the bottle by the neck and refilled Francie’s glass. Francie’s eyes widened and she smiled her biggest, prettiest smile in three years. After ten minutes of Anna’s kneading and stretching, the dough was a soft, pliant mass. Anna poured a small amount of olive oil into a large earthen bowl and, with her hands, spread the oil to evenly coat the inside of the bowl. She rolled the dough around in the bowl until it glistened with olive oil, placed a wet towel over the bowl and put it in the oven, a large gas variety made of cast iron and steel. Francie asked, “You bake pizza in a bowl? I never knew that.” “No, is like a warm room. The oven not hot, just the little light make warm and the towel make wet. For raising up,” and she gestured with both hands under her breasts, like hefting two melons, and laughed. Francie made the same gesture under her own breasts and giggled, “Mine could use a little raising up!” “No, no. You perfect. Just a little bit, uh, just a little bit…..” and Anna fumbled for the right English word. “Sag?” Francie suggested with a laugh. “Yes, sag. A little bit sag make the man want to help you with them.” Anna laughed but seemed to have slightly embarrassed herself. Francie was a little embarrassed too and they fell silent for a few moments. Finally, Anna said, “We wait one hour, maybe two, for raising up,” and started to make the melon gesture but cut it short. For the next hour and a half, Anna and Francie talked about Francie’s life in Chicago, about Anna’s life in Italy and they continued to drink the dark purple Chianti from the short, simple glasses. When Francie observed that she was beginning to feel drunk, Anna went to the cupboard and returned with a bottle of San Pelegrino. She filled Francie’s glass, half with Chianti and half with the cool sparkling water. The lightened wine seemed to instantly clear Francie’s head and, when her glass was half-full, Anna filled it with San Pelgrino, but no more Chianti. Now the glass was a lavender pink instead of dark red. “It’s just that I haveneaten since a grilled sandwich with a bag of Italian potato chips at the gas station outside Naples today,” and she slurred the “haveneaten” into a four-syllable word. Francie recalled the clean gasoline station where the fuel was dispensed in liters, not gallons, so the price seemed cheap until you multiplied by four, and the lunch counter where pre-made refrigerated sandwiches were pressed in a hot two-sided grill like a waffle iron, melting the inside and toasting the outside, and the expresso bar where thin Italian men stood tossing off tiny cups of strong black Italian expresso like they were popping pills. As she nibbled the sandwich wrapped in bakery paper, she’d scanned the covers of the lurid French and Italian tabloids. Pouting, bleached-blonde but dark-eyed Italian women bowed to the camera, spilling their breasts to the nipples. Many of the papers catered to clandestine shots of celebrities, taken from miles away with powerful telescopic lenses that produced grainy photos of Princess Di’s flabby ass as she bent over the side of a sailboat or Sting’s ocean-shrivelled penis as he emerged from the Mediterranean along the Sicilian coast. Francie had bought three of these papers and had planned to read them tonight in her room. Anna took the bowl from the warm, moist oven. The dough had risen above the rim, puffing out from under the towel. She removed the towel and punched her fist down into the bowl, releasing the carbon dioxide that had inflated it to three times its original size. Anna lifted the mass from the bowl and again slapped it down onto the countertop, though this time Francie was ready for the sharp report. She watched as Anna kneaded the dough, anchoring, stretching, folding and turning it then finally shaping it into a thick disk. She took an old knife, the blade bowed in the middle from repeated sharpenings, and cut the dough into three wedges, as if she were serving a whole pie to three people. She stepped to the oven, opened the door and moved one of the racks to a middle position. From the bottom of the oven she moved a large half-inch-thick stone disk to the middle rack and turned the gas control all the way up. They heard the low “whoosh” as the gas ignited. They’d been silent for a while and suddenly Anna commanded, “Come. You make pizza.” Francie smiled at Anna’s Italian bossiness, remembering her high school Latin and the ancient Romans’ fondness for the imperative tense. Imperatus, or was it imperati? She wiped her hands on her jeans and stepped to the countertop as Anna stepped closely behind her. Francie blushed as Anna put her arms around her, from behind, and taking Francie’s hands in her own placed them onto the soft dough. Francie could feel Anna’s matronly breasts in her back and smelled her faint wine breath. Mater, she thought, recalling the Latin again. Anna took Francie’s hands in her own and, working her like a puppet from behind, anchored Francie’s left hand into one wedge of the dough, stretched it with her right and then folded and turned. She repeated this three more times and then removed her hands from Francie’s. Francie stopped working the dough until Anna barked, “No stop! Make pizza!” Francie resumed the kneading, clumsily working the dough, until she began to feel the rhythm of what must be an ancient genetic memory: women working cereal grains, water, yeast and female energy into an edible form. Just as Francie imagined herself to be at the end of a long line of her female ancestors, all standing at an infinitely long table and each kneading their own lump of dough, Anna said, “Bah! That enough,” and took the dough away from her. Anna reached for a long-handled wooden paddle that hung from a hook in the ceiling, placed it on the counter and sprinkled the wide blade of the paddle with coarse corn meal. She flattened the dough into a circle and placed it over her upraised fist. Now with both fists under the dough, she rotated it over her fists in small circles, stretching it into a wider and wider circle. She laid the pizza onto the floury counter top and jabbed around the dough with her fingertips to make the familiar lip around the outer edge. “Now it’s starting to look like a pizza!” Francie said as Anna put the pizza onto the corn-mealed paddle. Anna nodded and poured a thin line of olive oil around the edge of the pizza, continuing the line in smaller and smaller circles until it reached the center. She took a paintbrush from a drawer and spread the olive oil evenly over the dough, dabbing extra oil around the rim. “Now for the oven,” Anna said. Francie looked at the unadorned pizza, then at Anna and raised her eyebrows questioningly. “But it’s naked!” she laughed. Anna smiled and asked, “Were you not born al fresco?” “But I’m not a pizza,” was all Francie could think to reply. Anna opened the oven door. Francie could feel the heat on her face as Anna took the wooden paddle by the handle and in one quick flick of her wrist slid the pizza onto the hot baking stone. She closed the oven door, walked to the refrigerator and removed three plastic bowls with sealed lids. The plastic looked foreign in a kitchen where everything was made of stone, wood and iron. “Tupperware,” said Anna, “from Chicago!” and she opened the three plastic bowls. One contained thick bacon, already fried into dark meaty slabs. The next held a heavy wedge of white cheese wrapped in paper. The third was full of cloudy water. She took a piece of the bacon and chopped it into irregular squares the size of her thumbnail and then she ran the wedge of cheese across a grater so old it looked perpetually dirty. The cheese planed off the wedge in thick curls of white, making a nice pile on the countertop. “Parmesana Reggiano,” Anna commented and kissed her fingertips, “’da best in Italia.” “And what’s that?” Francie asked, her face screwed in distaste at the bowl of cloudy water. “I show,” Anna replied but moved to the oven, opened the heavy door and slid the wooden paddle under the rim of the pizza. She caught the pizza on the paddle like she was landing a fish in a boat and set it, paddle and all, on the countertop, the wooden handle pointing at Francie’s navel. The smell of the half-baked pizza shot straight to Francie’s brainstem and retriggered the weird feeling of ancestry that she’d felt earlier when she was kneading it. The pizza had risen further in the oven, especially around the edge but also in the middle. Anna flattened the bubbles down in the middle with her fingertips. As Francie watched, Anna walked to the window over the sink, opened it and reached outside to a windowbox on the ledge. She returned with several dark green leaves of fresh basil. She crushed the leaves in her fist, chopped them coarsely on the countertop and worked some salt and ground black pepper into the leaves. Then she spread the mixture over the pizza, added the bacon, the parmesana reggiano and slid the pizza back into the oven. When the door was closed, Anna followed Francie’s eyes to the bowl of cloudy water. “Okay, I give up. What’s the water for?” Anna smiled, reached into the water and pulled out a white congealed mass that looked as if she’d just reached into a sheep’s belly and extracted some vital organ. She squeezed it in her hand and the cloudy water squirted from between her fingers and ran down her arm, dripping off her elbow and onto the floor. “Mootza-rella I make myself from buffalo milk.” Francie felt a wave of nausea not entirely due to the wine and thought that surely Anna had confused buffalo and meant to say cow. Anna read her thoughts, widened her stance, hunched her shoulders and made a fearsome face. She really did look like a buffalo that Francie remembered from a Wild West picture book and had once actually seen up-close on a specialty farm outside Chicago. “Buffalo, not cow, make the best mootza-rella,” and Francie realized that she truly meant buffalo and that “mootza-rella” was actually the stringy “mahtza-rella” cheese that she knew in Chicago. She doubted that this “mootza-rella” would much resemble the American “low moisture part skim” variety. Anna wiped the cheese water from her hands on a towel and put the towel on the counter to absorb the water there. She leaned against the counter, crossed her arms over her breasts and looked at Francie. “I like you,” she said. Francie smiled and said, “I like you too, Anna,” and the kitchen grew very quiet. There was no sound, only the gentle hiss of the gas fueling the oven. “This has been a wonderful experience, here, in your kitchen, watching you make pizza. Helping you make pizza.” Anna put her pudgy hand to the side of Francie’s face, like a priestess blessing her, and said, “You be happy again. One day.” Francie could smell the sweet pungent basil on Anna’s hand as it brushed her cheek. “I’m happy right now,” she whispered and felt her eyes cloud with tears. Anna turned and opened the oven door. She slid the paddle under the pizza and again brought it from the oven to the countertop. She crumbled the mozzarella onto the pizza, swept up the remaining basil cuttings, sprinkled them over the cheese and returned the pizza to the oven. Anna walked toward the kitchen door leading to the dining room and said, “Come. You eat very soon,” and led her to a small, round table set for one. Surprised, Francie asked, “Won’t you be joining me?” Anna looked surprised too and said, “No. This a restaurant. I cook. I serve. You eat.” Francie had assumed that Anna would join her but realized that must violate some silly Italian custom. “I see,” she muttered in disappointment, “then I think I’ll run up to my room for a second. I’ll be right back.” She climbed the staircase to her room and heard a radio, or maybe a television, playing in the room across the hall from hers. She opened her unlocked door and smelled the flowers as she entered. She took the three Italian tabloids from her bag and, closing her door, heard the plaintive sound of a female voice edged with tears coming from the television in the room across the hall. She walked into the empty dining room and stopped to look at her table. On the small round table was her pizza cut into quarters and still on the hot baking stone from the oven. There was a large white plate and cutlery and to the side a bowl of glistening salad and a cup of steaming tomato sauce. A tiny vase held one pink carnation and a wall-mounted lamp lit the table in a soft yellowish light. She sat, bowed her face to the indescribable smell of the pizza and, for the first time in many years, said a simple grace, “Thank you for bringing me to this place, and this food.” She took a quarter piece of the pizza, balancing it on the fork for it was much too hot to pick up, fold down the center and ravish as she would in Chicago and carefully placed it on the plate. She sampled a bite from the outer crust and thought, “My God, it’s like the best French bread,” and she could actually taste, or maybe smell, the wheat and the yeast. She cut another piece of the crust and this time dipped it into the tomato sauce, rolling her eyes as she chewed. Then she cut the cheesy tip from the pizza wedge and tasted the smoky bacon, the peppery basil and the creamy “mootza-rella”. She arranged a tabloid under the lamp and opened it to a photograph of Sophia Loren with those beautiful eyes still enticing over her sunglasses and those famous breasts spilling from a low-cut peasant blouse.
Copyright © 2001 Mark Herner |