Rabbit stews

Everyone has some childhood memories, says my Chinese textbook. Some memories are good, some are bad, but all of them are equally engraved somewhere in the depths of our hearts. Well, let me dig a bit, see what I can find.

Sundays were a source of anxiety for me, when I was a kid. Don’t get me wrong, I never had to attend mass or anything like that: I was born into an agnostic family. But however agnostic, my family still had to respect the sacred tradition of Sunday lunch. Almost every Sunday, for lunch, my parents and I would go visit my maternal grandparents, who lived just a few blocks away from us: for my mom, going every Sunday was a sort of filial obligation. And despite her brother and sister being objectively less burdened than her by any kind of filial duty, they would still meet, the three of them, at least every other Sunday at the elders’ house. But my mom, being extremely filial, was always the first to arrive. She would pressure me and dad to hurry up and get ready, and than, seeing how sloppy the two of us were, she would just leave first, reminding us to hurry up as she left the house. Normally, me and dad would follow suite, between fifteen and thirty minutes later.

The reason mom was so anxious to be there early was that she was to assist my grandma, when she was still healthy, and later on my grandpa, with all the necessary preparations for lunch. She would, for example, set the table, help with the cooking, all the while performing a few checks on the general management of the household. With regards to cooking, there surely must have been countless different dishes prepared each Sunday by my grandparents during the years this tradition lasted. But my memory is fixated on one in particular: rabbit stew with polenta. That was my grandparents’ specialty, and it was, truly, a delicacy. With a bit of focus, I can still smell its scent: the thick tomato sauce, the few olives mixed in, the delicious, slightly charred rabbit meat, and, more than anything else, the overpowering sweetness of the white onion soffritto. This was all served with a side of polenta, to which, occasionally — but rarely — some strong blue cheese might be added. While this was usually our main, there were also many other foods that would be put on the table, for us to snack on while we waited for the rest of the family to arrive. Among these, two items would never be absent: parmesan cheese, which was cut in medium-sized, pungent, savoury cubes, and a sort of fresh salami, of a very mild sour and fatty flavour, a typical staple of peasant families in the region of Mantua, where my grandma was from.

Some Sundays, slightly more distant relatives would come to visit, adding to the numbers of our closer family. I’m afraid to admit that, many years later, the faces and persons of most of these relatives have blended together in my memory, creating one blurred, generic image: that of the distant relative. My grandparents’ apartment was that of a working class family in suburban Milan, and as such definitely could not be called large: the living room, which was joined with the kitchen, barely had space to fit a small dining table, which would have, in the intentions of its designer, theoretically accommodated at most six adults. But, when these distant relatives showed up, the house would be filled with at least double that number. My cousins would have to go down into the basement to fetch some extra chairs — sometimes, some people brought their own chairs. In the end, the table was completely crammed with people, and I remember squeezing my tiny body in the space left between the shoulder of an uncle and that of a cousin. Somehow, we always made it fit.

I should mention that, on top of the chairs, there was also a small sofa where one could sit: that, however, could never have possibly fit more than two people, the laws of electrodynamics holding valid as they are. Sofas were, for the generation that lived through the economic miracle, a status symbol of sort. I remember quite well the moment my grandpa chose that particular sofa, so I guess that — for whatever reason — I must have been there with him at the sofa shop when he was buying it. It was, in fact, a leather sofa, the leather dyed a very light color between pink and rose. My memory of it is quite blurry because, to be honest, the last time I saw the color of that leather must have been on the very day the sofa was bought. That is because — the sofa being a symbol of wealth, of achieved middle-class status — it was constantly, constantly protected by several layers of different kinds of textiles to act as covers, so as not to consume it. One particular layer, a kind of net made of some spongy rubbery material, was supposed to prevent the other layers from sliding on the leather, folding onto each other, and making a mess of the whole thing. Needless to say, that rubber net never worked, and it literally just took one relative to try and sit for the whole castle to crumble. In the end, the feeling one had while sitting on that sofa was akin to that of sinking within the folds of a carpet: and what’s more, it was this very abomination of textiles — rather than the sofa owners — the only one being granted the privilege of having skin contact with the underlying leather.

With lunch, adults would normally drink wine. This wine was not anything like the Italian wine that you can now find sold in foreign supermarkets, which is more like a treat for the fancies. This was actual, random-label Italian wine that my grandpa would buy at the local supermarket (and mind you, my grandpa was the descendant of Venetian farmers — stingy like God makes them, by definition); or, even worse, it could have been wine that he had bought years before and forgotten in his basement (and had by then become closer to vinegar), or even wine that he had made himself (that generation, I reckon, was the last in our history where each family would still produce their own homemade wine — and maybe it’s better this way). In either case, being still a child, I was forbidden from drinking wine. So in my Sunday memories, what I am drinking at those lunches is not wine, but rather a different drink of more intriguing composition. It was something called Ginger, a kind of soft beverage sold in most Italian supermarkets: sparkling, like a tonic, sugary in flavour but with a bitter aftertaste, and of a flashy red color. This was the drink my grandpa used to buy — for himself, surely, but especially for me, because I was the only underage in the family, my cousins being already much older than me. And so, as soon as my dad and I would enter the apartment, one of the first things my grandpa would say to me was:

Look in the fridge, I bought it, I bought the Ginger for you.

He would always smile and wink to me as he said that.

Television was a constant presence, some would say a curse, of these Sunday meals. As I mentioned, me and my parents were often among the first to arrive, and so while lunch was being prepared and my mom was busy helping out, me and my dad would sit on the sofa and enjoy some of the worst shows the Italian palimpsest had to offer. These shows were especially aired on Sunday mornings, when countless other families like ours would reunite, in some cases maybe attend mass, and then have lunch together. They were targeted at the most average of the average Italian audiences, and in particular, I believe, at pensioners. I’m sure that every TV channel would have produced their own version of these shows: the one we watched though was called something along the lines of Piazza Grande, or Festa in Piazza (my memory fails me again), literally “the big square party”. The name owed its origin surely to the studio setting, which was to resemble the big square of an average Italian town. The live audience would be sitting around tables resembling that of a bistrot, which on a Sunday morning would be typically placed outside, indeed on the main square of the city. The stage background consisted of drawings of buildings, cartoonish in style, which were supposed to represent the urban view from the square. On one side of the stage there would be a white grand piano, at which a maestro, of often very flamboyant appearance, would sit, playing the instrument while also directing a small musical orchestra. Between the many segments of this show, which was supposed to last a whole morning, many were musically-themed. In these segments, classic nostalgic songs from the 50s or 60s would be sung by some lesser-known singers, sometimes by celebrities, while some of the live audience could stand up and dance, the whole studio turning into a sort of ballroom. This whole performance was intended, I believe, to re-enact the experience of popular ball rooms, which sprung up in virtually every Italian village after the end of the Second World War. In those open-air ballrooms, which were often indeed set up on the village main square, the survivors of the war had rediscovered the joy of living through dance. For the generation that was coming of age just as the war had ended, those ballrooms must have represented one of the core memories of youth. For many older couples, including my grandpa and my grandma, that was also the memory of how they first met.

Around twelve, when the show was coming to a close, came the time for the horoscope segment. In this segment, a well-known astrologist would spend about half an hour elucidating the horoscope for the upcoming week. This was one of the moments that gathered the most attention in my extended family, because more or less all of its members, with the exception maybe of my grandpa and my father, were stern horoscope-believers. My maternal uncle, especially, believed with unquestionable security in the existence of a strict causal relationship between the movement of the stars and the accidents of his life. If I close my eyes, I can still see him there, standing next to the semi-open window, smoking his cigarette, occasionally turning his head to puff towards the outside, but otherwise always paying close attention to the screen and to the astrologist’s words. He would in fact listen to the horoscope of all twelve zodiac signs with unchanged attention. This was because, although he was obviously born under only one of them, he still knew at least one close friend or relative who was born under each of the other ones. For example, while Virgo was his sign (and that of my mother, since they were twins), Taurus was the sign of my grandma, Sagittarius that of a close friend, Pisces that of a colleague, and so on. The astrologist had the smart idea of going through the zodiac signs ordering them from the least lucky to the most lucky. This way, of course, if one’s sign was called at first, they knew to be doomed. But if, on the other hand, one’s sign was not being called as the reading went on, a sort of hope and anticipation would start to form. One could start to think, “Is my sign, perhaps, the luckiest of the upcoming week?”. This was, I have to admit, a truly smart trick. Even people that could not care less about the horoscope would stick to the show and watch it, just because they wanted to know in which position of the ranking their sign had placed. Naturally, as the reading for Virgo came up, my uncle would make a few comments on how he thought the fortune telling would have applied to his specific case. You can be certain that if his sign turned out to be first place, he would have gone and bought a lottery ticket the very next day.

By the time lunch was ready, and all family members had arrived, it would be past 1 PM, and all these silly shows would have already been over. Then, my grandpa would switch channel to the news. At this point, the room was already crowded and, inevitably, a bit noisy, with all the clanking of pans and pots, and the chattering of family members. And so my grandpa, who had lived through the war and had never stopped being interested in politics ever since, would turn the sound volume up. I was always sitting in a tiny corner right in front of the TV, and needless to say by the time lunch was over I had almost turned deaf. But to be fair, people sitting at other ends of the table wouldn’t have fared much better. Our family was a noisy one, and I can confirm from direct experience that the stereotype about Italians being a loud people is definitely a true one. The reading of daily news by the anchor would initiate some heated discussions between the men at the table. Heated, I say, because of the different political views of various family heads. For example, my grandpa had always been a stern communist, while his eldest daughter’s husband — my uncle — was more of a right-wing, populist type. Political allegiance to one side or another has historically been, at least in my experience, a family-wide matter. Both my grandpa and my grandma’s family had, for example, always been communist. Of course, the level of idealism and uncompromising attachment to the cause varied for different individuals. But overall, the placement of a family group on one side or the other of the overall political spectrum was more or less fixed. My grandpa’s political views had not changed the slightest as he had moved from the agricultural lands of Southern Veneto into the big city. Son of farmers, and himself having moved up into the ranks of the Milanese working class, his hatred for the bourgeoisie was a necessary fact of life, an inevitable consequence of the last couple of centuries of European history. But as for my aunt’s husband, I am not sure towards which side of history his family would have leaned before the war. All I know is that he was the son of a single-mother, that he had never met his father, and that he had to find a way to survive and provide for himself for all of his life. I’m not sure why, coming from what I can only describe as a urban sub-proletarian background, he ended up being such a convinced supporter of liberal right-wing movements, and most eminently, of the one initiated by the so-called evil dwarf of Italian politics. But the age in which I grew up was, regrettably, the very same one in which that dwarf came to power: and my grandpa, knowing very well whom every member of the family voted for, would not spare any sarcastic remarks to his son-in-law, whenever the president’s name came up.

But political discussions were, in all fairness, the mildest ones. For however heated a debate can get, the matters of politics always appear, at least to a superficial level, somewhat distant to the eyes of the common people. The proper, blood-infused fights would often be initiated by the female members of the family instead. They pertained issues that had a much closer connection to reality, issues belonging to the world of adults, that I was too young to understand back then. Sometimes it would be trivial things that sparked the fire: my mom’s brother deciding to stand up and have a cigarette just as lunch was being served, or crashing down horizontally on the sofa right after he was done with his meal (a behaviour his two sisters never failed to criticize as very rude and inconsiderate, but that nevertheless he would repeat every other Sunday). More rarely, it would have been issues related to money. Not that our extended family every sank into poverty, but we also never swam into money, as the saying goes. And as my grandma started to fall ill, and a caretaker was needed, I imagine that the decision of how much each sibling was supposed to participate must have stirred a few tensions between the various family members. I can’t recall many details regarding these moments of conflict — maybe I am guilty of selective memory — but I can definitely recall that they existed. My mom and my aunt had both inherited their father’s short temper, and their mother’s tendency to never be satisfied about anything. Especially on days when the preparations for lunch had been particularly tiresome, and the participation from men particularly lacking, the built up stress and fatigue would erupt in vocal fights between the two of them. Those fights were, unquestionably, also a form of let out for all the pressure and anxiety that had been piling up since the start of the day. The pressure, that is, to cater simultaneously to their parents, their husbands and their children. Whenever these moments arrived, I would slide out of my seat and sneakily hide into a bedroom or on the balcony, too shy and introverted to witness all of those emotional bursts. I would play by myself (just as I was comfortable doing, being an only child) and wait for the voices in the living room to calm back down. Then, I would hesitantly make my way back. By that time, it was already at least 3 PM, and most of the family had already left the house to head home, including almost all of the men. Around the dining table, I would find my mom and my aunt staring soullessly at the TV screen, their discussion officially over, but having not yet resumed to talk to each other. My grandpa would have switched to the football news and discussion channel, and would have then proceeded to sit on the sofa, where he would have fallen fast asleep, his feet resting on a chair placed in front of him. By that time, I imagine that most men in Italy, including of course both my uncles and my father, would have already been napping.

Alas, those times are long gone. My grandparents’ house was sold after my grandpa’s death, which occurred more than four years ago, and eight years after that of my grandmother. A lot of the other people that had at some point sat around that table are also gone, and if they are not gone, still, they have changed irreversibly. All that is left is the memory of those Sundays, of those rabbit stew meals, which, like my little treasure, I have decided to hide somewhere in the deepest depths of my heart.

-End of the second post in the Memories of my family series.