Formagini
by Gina Wilson
© 2006
Formagini
There were once two women who lived in a small village near Formagini, one tall and blonde, the other shorter and with dark hair. Both had beautiful smiles.
One day in February, when the capricious winds of the Fata Morgana scurried in tufts of chill air over the damp cobbles, the two women found themselves together in signore Princies Salumaria.
His small Aromatic Shop and Tratoria was off the central piazza. On days like this it was a warm and inviting place. If two women were to meet - in a province where farms are scattered and opportunities rare - then Signore Princies shop was as near to an invitation as the location and circumstance could conspire to make.
They did not enter the shop together, nor did they intend to meet.
The tall blonde woman had arrived mid morning, as habit, for coffee and warmth. In summer, when the winds made sweltering days limp and moist, she could be seen under one of the many plane trees around the piazza with cool iced water and book. In winter her nest was here.
The dark woman arrived later, when the other might ordinarily have been about to leave. She was not squat nor was she lithe; Her beauty was that of the landscape from which she came: round, fertile, deliciously moist and earthy.
She had come for oil and small goods, the ones her farm could not provide; the delicate touches that made ordinary fare delectable.
At the counter Signore Princie cut and wrapped, to her precise instruction. The blonde woman stopped, page half turned, and watched, her head cocked slightly to catch the conversation, then returned to a fresh page.
The fragrant fat warmth whispered, in ways words cannot, a desire for conversation and the communion of shared food.
Outside the morning whistled cold. In Signore Princie’s Salumaria it yawned and smiled like a blanket at bedtime.
She had chosen and picked, he had cut and wrapped ‘til the simple loveliness of their transaction had run its course. She paused and glanced - not sharply, no, glanced as twilight glances at the night - at the seated townsfolk.
The shop mumbled with conversation from the few tables where regulars lingered, avoiding the chill confrontation of the journey home.
She ordered Mocchiata, a treat, an exception to her weekly routine. There was a kind of sensory conjunction that demanded it.
As signore Princie busied himself at the espresso machine she turned to her seat.
But where…?
There were several vacant, and all but one opposite men. She chose a seat at the table where the blonde woman, curiously looking over the top of the page, was seated. She sat and sighed as a wave sighs when it meets the sand. The blonde woman, involuntarily, sighed in misplaced harmony. Realizing the gaff she whistled warm air between close teeth, a quickly inhaled silently acknowledged apology.
For some seconds only the noisy gush from the coffee machine filled the cloth between them. The dark woman sat, hands placed one upon the other, opposite the now inquisitive blonde.
Unexpectedly she stooped and drew from her handbag a small cloth bound book, placed it between them, opened to a blank page and began to write on its soft white emptiness.
The day rolled on its side, smiled briefly, then nodded off.
Signore Princie joked, at the far end of the counter, with a snaggletoothed elder, of boules and the leafy summer afternoons of yesteryear.
The two women fell into conversation. The cloth bound book passed between them for one to read the other to write. The dark woman wrote in curved green ink, as curved and verdant as the hills of her home.
Quietly, nearly imperceptibly, the air in the Salumaria grew smoky dark. The tables nearby emptied, the mumbled buzz of conversation receded till there was only that of the two women. One or two old men remained, slowly drinking now cold, dirt black coffee and reading papers at a polite distance near the door.
The two women noticed their solitude as a sudden chill, as if a sharp stream of outside air had poured onto the still interior of Signore Princie’s Salumaria.
The blonde woman removed the pen and book from the hands of her companion. In square capital letters she wrote an address on the last page, then stood and with unintended elegance donned her coat and handbag. Smiling briefly she placed the green inked clothbound book beneath the hands of its owner, then left through the milk grey doors to the chill remainder of the day.
The Salumaria grunted twice.
The dark woman turned over her book slowly; as a child might turn a turtle thinking that’s its undersides might reveal something of the mystery within. She did not open the book as impulse demands but held it warmly to her forehead, then, slowly standing, placed it in the buckled side of her handbag.
The Salumaria, now cold and dark, was left without acknowledgement. Signore Princie, busy and stooped, did nothing to show he had noticed, nothing to show the morning, now noon, had changed.
Yet if he was observed closely, observed with the intensity reserved for insects below a glass, there was a moment, brief, concealed, private, where still stooped, he turned his head and with the day and her receding shape in his eye, he watched.
He was warm enough.
Somewhere, from a mouse hole in the wainscot or a broken tile on the roof, the wind ruminated, sighed then, softly, howled.
For many weeks after the dark woman could be seen, in the piazza, in the back streets of the village, and occasionally, for long mornings as if in anticipation, in Signore Princie’s Salumaria.
Often, very often, she could be found in the ancient quarter of this very ancient village, at the door of the old DeLucia house on the Via Aguilla.
She never entered the house, she never knocked on its door; she did not appear to want to discover if the house was inhabited and if so by whom.
She stood before the house and waited.
The cold Morgana winds were warmed by the arrival of spring and so renamed by the townsfolk according to custom.
The dark woman ceased her journeys to the village, but not at once; rather she withdrew by degrees until at the post office, the library, indeed even at Signore Princie’s Salumaria the locals noticed. They noticed with a knowing wink.
The blonde woman had not been seen in the village since that morning, when coffee tasted like an opening paragraph and they were strangers.
This too was noted by the villagers and added to a gossip older and longer than their Sunday bible, added to her small reputation where the words foreigner and witch were joined to her name.
The weeks sparkled with early rain and new life until the first still days filled the air with the hot fug of summer.
A youth, the son of Signore Vincenzi a sheep farmer in the remote hills, had found a single shoe on an isolated pathway. It was beige and practical yet not one for the path on which it lay; nearby was the battered remnant of a book, Poems by Rimbaud, not a book the locals would need or even know of.
These facts were added to the gossip and given context according to convenience and salacious whim. They were added to a gossip where, it was said, the dark woman was to be married, it seems, to a cousin from Sasulo. He was young, handsome and, most importantly, well connected. It was a good match. The marriage was arranged by an Aunt, the wedding day was soon. The haste was noted with a knowing nod.
In the early autumn, when the winds begin their journey back to the chill Fata Morgana, the dark woman was again seen about the village. She was seen in the Pasticcerie ordering Torta nunziale , at Il Fioraio and at Signora DiBendetto’s Abbiglimento Fimminile, speaking with the Sarto.
The marriage, it was rumoured, would take place in Moderna where the young man worked, and the dark woman would soon leave the district. This news was received with clucks of approval and relief, as if word of a plague had proved false.
And so at length both the blonde woman and the dark woman passed from the attention of the villagers. From time to time, in the years ahead, when men and women gathered to expand the gossip or ruminate on its contents, the name of the dark woman’s family might be mentioned and some curiosity expressed concerning her fate. For although Moderna was nearby, nothing more had been heard since the arrangements for her wedding, nor could anything be found concerning her cousin and groom.
For the villagers this was a mystery as dark and tantalizing as the woman’s hair. They also spoke with satisfied certainty of the Strega Bianco and, when they did, the shoe was always mentioned.
These things though were seldom mentioned; the villagers were more interested in adding new delicacies to their delinquent chatter.
And so the tall blonde woman and the short dark woman disappeared in body and slowly in memory from the villages and hills around Formagini.
In the Blustering wetness of a suburban Sydney spring, I warm and reward myself with a ritual morning coffee.
I have my own Salumaria - for me a delicatessen - my own book with pages waiting for words, and the meditation that comes when aromas and circumstance calls me to the goddess.
From my seat I ponder the texture of the morning air and the lives of those on the street, at the tables, behind the counter.
I sit, I ponder, I write.
This morning two middle-aged women enter the delicatessen - one tall and Blond the other shorter and dark.
Both have beautiful smiles.
They sit at a table close by me. The short dark haired woman stoops and draws from her handbag a small cloth bound book.
She places it on the table between them.