Free Amore and Amaretti by Victoria Cosford Page A

the kitchen preparing food and feeling nauseated beyond belief. All I want to eat are hard-boiled eggs. A pregnancy test is positive. The abortion, which we both feel unreservedly is the best decision, is efficient and forgettable. That same day I am back home, where Ignazio waits on me with devotion. There is no sense of loss or grieving; on the contrary, I am struck by a feeling of weightlessness and freedom. Crisis averted, we resume our placid cosiness.
    By the time I met Raimondo, and then later his wife, they had been together for many years. Raimondo tells me he met his sweetheart Annamaria on the Ponte Vecchio, where he had set himself up with easel and paints. Being a painter is one of many skills: pianist-accordionist, polyglot, bon vivant, gardener, waiter, singer, cook and drinker. He is ten years older than Annamaria and, like Gianfranco, a boy from a small Umbrian village. Annamaria, on the contrary, comes from a good Florentine family. She has waist-length hair, enormous sorrowful eyes behind thick glasses, and a wardrobe of sensible Ferragamo shoes with flat heels. He works and lives in Florence, while she is a teacher of English to foreigners at the University of Perugia and lives in a little flat like an eyrie in one of the steep, narrow streets that drop away from Corso Vannucci. She speaks calm and exquisite English with a trace of an American accent, legacy of the years she spent at Harvard University acquiring her second or third degree.
    The day Raimondo brought Annamaria to the restaurant to meet me we loved each other immediately. After the healing, soothing time I spent in the country following the Gianfranco breakup it was to Perugia I headed, boarding a bus to stay with Annamaria. In the week that I was there, we both gained five kilos due to nightly sessions of wine and cheese while I poured out my sorrow, usually lapsing gratefully into English as the evening wore on. Annamaria and Raimondo are my solid rocks, the most romantic story I know, two people so extraordinarily unalike, whose love withstands long absences and little infidelities. Perhaps it is precisely because they are such an odd couple that they accept so unblinkingly the oddness that is Ignazio and me.
    Change seems to know when to strike and, as much as I feel that I control my life and determine my destiny, I see how I am just being buffeted along, tricked into placidness in order, perhaps, to be better prepared for the next upheaval. Unlikely we may be, but twelve months into the relationship Ignazio and I are very settled.
    Then Raimondo does what he has long talked of doing: he buys a restaurant. The restaurant is in Perugia, so he can finally be with Annamaria all the time, and he offers a share in the business to Ignazio, who accepts. Not without hours of dialogue, discussion and debate with me, the upshot being that I too agree to leave the restaurant, where I have no further to go, and move to Perugia as well to seek work. I am conscious that there is much at stake in this decision, and that what is about to happen will alter the nature of my relationship with Ignazio, with whom lately I feel bothered, obscurely, by a score of details. He has changed so dramatically from the beautiful child that I lured into my clutches to a self-confident young man, smoking too many Marlboros and experimenting with facial hair. He goes to Perugia to set up the restaurant with Raimondo and to find us a little apartment in Via Deliziosa – I feel I could only love a place in a street so named. After a month, I have formally extricated myself from the restaurant and packed up our apartment in Via Ghibellina, storing boxes of books and summer clothes at Ignazio’s parents’ place. Then I catch a train to join my beloved.

    Non tutte le ciambelle escono con il buco
    Not every doughnut has a hole
    (or, things don’t always turn out as planned)

    The steep, narrow streets in Perugia turn into tunnels for the wind and all the stone