Dirty Dishes Read online

  She helped me hone a sense of timing: if we were having pasta, then come the dinner hour she’d have the water boiling, and she’d watch out the window until she saw the tips of my father’s shoes round the corner at the end of our street. She’d then drop the pasta into the water, prepare or reheat the sauce, and have the pasta perfectly al dente and on the table at the moment he had slipped off his shoes, said his hellos, and taken his seat. (As an adult, I developed a few pasta rituals of my own; for example, the amount of time it takes for spaghetti to cook is just enough for an impromptu tryst in the hallway outside the kitchen. But that’s another story.) At the table, she refined my understanding of the progression of a classic European meal. For example, we rarely had dessert; instead, she’d present a piece of cheese, followed by some sliced fruit.

  My mother also passed on her frugal nature to me, developing my ability to survey the contents of a refrigerator or pantry and improvise a meal with almost no forethought: leftover pasta would be fried in hot oil before whisked eggs were poured over it to be baked into a frittata (omelet); leftover vegetables were finely chopped and tossed with diced boiled eggs (or flaked preserved tuna), cubed mortadella, and sturdy greens such as frisée for a salad substantial enough to be a meal; leftover fruit, such as peaches, became the basis for a sour marmalade, and so on.

  Her examples were so firmly etched in my mind that the first time I cooked anything myself, it was as though I’d been doing it all my life: one Sunday morning, when I was about twelve years old, she was behind in her housework. I saw her running around nervously tending to various chores and I thought that I’d take the edge off her day and make breakfast for the family. I decided to make her favorite frittata, with potatoes and onion. I par-cooked and sliced the potatoes and lightly sautéed the onions. Then I greased a skillet and started the eggs, embedding the vegetables in them when they began to set. Then came the moment of truth, flipping the frittata. I lifted the pan off the heat, and with the image of my mother confidently flipping an omelet firmly in mind, I flicked the pan and the yellow disk did a perfect turn in the air, landing almost silently back in the pan, the top a lovely golden brown. I set the pan out on the table and served everybody breakfast. It was a big moment for me, but they were all decidedly nonplussed, except my mother.

  “You made this?” she asked me.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, proud of my accomplishment.

  She nodded and said “ah.” It was faint praise, but that’s the Italian way: you’re expected to do good, and a non-criticism from your parents is a compliment in its own right.

  FOOD WAS SUCH an integral part of every day of my life at home that, even years later, when I would drive back to visit from Rome I had the feeling that I was following the scent of my mother’s cooking, like a trail of bread crumbs to lead me back.

  It’s pretty much a straight shot from Rome to Grosseto. You head north on a highway called SS1, also known as Aurelia, for about two hours, depending on how fast you drive, which is a significant variable in Italy. As you get farther and farther from Rome, the modern world falls away, and when you enter Tuscany, it goes positively medieval: you can look up and see little villages—each a constellation of centuries-old structures—dotting the craggy hills. As a child, I took them for granted, but as an adult the feeling of hurtling back through time never ceased to surprise me.

  To get to Grosseto, just past the village of Ansedonia, you turn off the highway and west toward Orbetello. There’s a huge watermelon field there where, as teenagers, my friends and I engaged in a form of oral sex with the fruit: we’d bust the melons open on our knees, stick our heads inside, and devour the sugary flesh, emerging with devilish smiles and dripping-wet faces. After we had our fill, we’d stage a watermelon war, lobbing the orbs at each other in the dark until we were covered from head to toe with juice. Then we’d hop on our scooters and disappear up into the hills to the east, toward Saturnia, where there were warm sulfuric waterfalls. We’d let the spa water cleanse our clothes and skin, then collapse in the grass and stare up at the moon and the stars until we fell asleep.

  THESE WERE THE things that I usually thought about whenever I went home to visit my parents.

  But this drive was different: it was an angry drive. I whipped around every turn, engaging the clutch with the abandon of a race-car driver.

  Darkness was falling around me. The air was growing cold. Passing through the town of Tarquinia, I detected a whiff of chimney smoke for the first time that year, a moment I’d usually savor because it brought its own rush of memories, but not tonight.

  Though I was making it quite spontaneously, this visit had been on my mind for months. I had been living in Rome since 1971, when I moved there at the age of eighteen to pursue my dream of being an actor. I studied at the Fersen Acting Studio and went on to land parts with some of the most prestigious theatrical companies in Italy. I was consumed with learning my craft, not just acting, but all aspects of the theatrical profession. Once in a while I’d get to participate in a special project, as during my second year with Fersen, when I was selected to be part of a team charged with creating minimalist sets for an experimental production inspired by Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.

  I also loved my daily routine: sleeping late, hanging out with friends, and going to movies in the middle of the afternoon or after midnight. I was crazy for the intimacy and raw emotion of independent films, especially those of Cassavetes, Bogdanovich, and Polanski. Sitting in the dark of a movie theater and savoring instant classics such as Minnie and Moskowitz, Husbands, The Last Picture Show, Cul-de-sac, and Chinatown was among my greatest pleasures, and it inspired me to be fearless on stage. All my cinematic heroes were iconoclasts, from Orson Welles to a young American filmmaker named Martin Scorsese and his little company of actors like Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro.

  I didn’t just love movies; I often related to specific characters. The one I most identified with was the young Vito Corleone played by De Niro in Godfather II. I was fascinated by both Godfather movies and their fantastical depiction of an Italy that neither I nor any of my friends had ever known, but mostly I felt a strong bond with Vito. I understood that circumstances and a corrupt society forced him into the underworld, and I believed that if I had been in New York City back in those days, relegated to the immigrant ghetto and subject to the will of the local villains, I would have become a gangster to provide for myself and my family, and I’d have done it with no regrets. The movie solidified a personal philosophy that had been coalescing for some time: some people are meant to take it and some people are meant to dish it out. If forced to choose, I’m more of a dish-it-out kind of guy.

  It was a thrilling time for a young actor to be living and working in a city like Rome. For nine years, my life just got better and better. I got bigger parts, made new friends in every play, and was earning a good enough living to be comfortable. I had also scored a miracle of an apartment for somebody of my means: an eight-hundred-square-foot unit on the twelfth floor of its building that, thanks to an architectural quirk, was the only dwelling at that level and was surrounded by a four-thousand-square-foot terrace, where I kept patio furniture and hosted innumerable parties.

  Living on my own, I cooked almost every day, and grew to love it even more than I had back in Grosseto. I re-created dishes I remembered fondly from home, tweaking many of them to make them my own, and also wove in influences from the towns and regions that my work as an actor took me: Italian food is so simple, and the foundation my mother gave me was so strong, that I was able to approximate just about anything I tasted in Rome or on the road based on the memory of eating it. As was the case in my parents’ home, my favorite dishes were braised meats and game, because they filled the apartment with potent aromas, offering such an intense sensory experience that it was almost as if I’d eaten them before they were done cooking. I came to see pasta as the most complete of all foods, something that never failed to nourish both body and soul.

  I had
never been formally trained, but I knew that I’d become a serious cook, and not being schooled at a culinary academy had its benefits: not knowing all the rules, I began breaking many of them to suit my own taste. For example, I stopped flouring meats before cooking them for stews or braises; even though the flour supposedly cooks out, I found that it obscured the flavor of the meat in the finished dish.

  My love of food and cooking in general, and pasta in particular, led me to kick off a tradition among my acting circle: after Saturday night’s performance, always the last one of the week, we’d gather at one member’s apartment and have a pasta carbonara party. Each week a different person would make their version of this quintessentially Roman dish that I had come to adore while living there. It’s wide open to interpretation: the basic ingredients are pasta, egg yolks, pecorino cheese, onions, and some type of Italian bacon, such as pancetta (salt-cured pork) or guanciale, made from spiced pig cheeks or jowls. Though some of my friends preferred fresh fettuccine, my version, perfected over years of tinkering, was always prepared with dried pasta, usually spaghetti. I’d sauté diced onion until golden, sauté guanciale, then toss the pasta with them, the yolks, and grated pecorino. It was a Roman dish, but it called on all my skills: the key was to get the yolks and pasta into contact with each other at precisely the right moment so that the heat of the spaghetti would warm, but not scramble, the egg, forming a silky-smooth emulsion.

  By 1980, I had also left behind the bachelor life for a more serious relationship with my girlfriend, Patty, a blonde, free-spirited American from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. We met when I was in Trieste, acting the role of Raskolnikov in a television production of Crime and Punishment. She lived in Trieste and was employed by a local marketing company, but she was working as an extra on the production. She spoke five languages, Italian among them, so we had no trouble flirting. She was the exact opposite of any Italian woman I’d dated at the time. The late 1960s and early 1970s might have been known as the era of “free love,” but in my opinion it came at a high price: before you could have sex with a woman, you had to engage in a political debate. Patty, on the other hand, was just fun. We began a long-distance relationship, zipping back and forth on the train to see each other, until she moved in with me in Rome and took a job as an interpreter. I cooked for her all the time, and even taught her to make some dishes as well, such as a version of chicken cacciatore using garlic, tomatoes, rosemary, black pepper, and red wine, that we usually served over roasted potatoes.

  To cap it all off, I had just landed the role of Octavian in a Roman stage production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It was, potentially, my big break.

  Things could not have been better.

  But one afternoon in April 1980, I had arrived home and picked up my mail, and mixed in with the other papers was a pink postcard from the Italian army. It was a draft notice, telling me to report for military service in October in Barletta, in the deep south of Italy.

  Upon reading it, I stopped breathing and sweat broke out on my forehead. It didn’t make sense. Nine years earlier, when I had turned eighteen, I had registered for Italy’s then-mandatory draft; every unmarried Italian boy had to register at that age and take a physical exam. The term of duty could be anywhere from one to two years, depending on the type of service to which you were assigned. I requested civilian service, meaning a year and a half doing social work in a Mediterranean country. I never got a reply from the army, and I went about my life in Rome. We weren’t at war, and so I didn’t find any need to press the issue, and so much time had gone by that I had forgotten about it. But now, here was a notice to show up for regular army duty, not even civilian service.

  There were any number of reasons why it might have happened—some ancient clerk might have been catching up on his filing and unearthed my record; or it might have taken them this long to find me as I moved around a lot in those days and the Italian government has a laconic approach to these things. For all I knew they were sending me a card once a year only to have it come back marked Indirizzo Sconosci-uto (Address Unknown).

  But there was something about the summons that troubled me for months: normally, the cartolina rosa (“pink card”) comes from your district of residence, which in my case was still, legally speaking, Grosseto. But my card had come from the district to which I was supposed to report. The more I thought about it the more I realized that it had to involve some high-level intervention. The base was in the same area of Italy where my father had served for much of his career, so this led to a persistent suspicion. Most people’s parents use their influence to get their kids out of the military, but I had to wonder: had my father, without my knowing it, pulled a string to get me into the army?

  I would find out, by surprising him with a visit to his home.

  And so I was driving to Grosseto, to see Papá, toward a confrontation that had been coming for a long, long time.

  MY FATHER AND I had our problems from the very beginning, starting with the day I was born. He was watching the Giro d’Italia bicycle race when my mother went into labor, and by the time he heard the news and got home, where my mother delivered me, I was already napping in my crib.

  As I say, Antonio Luongo was a military man. My father’s parents died when he was young, and he left the orphanage where he was raised and joined the Italian army when he was just eighteen. He was slight, with tiny black eyes, sculpted hair, chiseled features, and a permanent tan. As they did with my mother, friends compared him to a movie star, too—Tyrone Power—though neither he nor Má was that attractive. During the African campaign, he found himself in a POW camp where the conditions were subhuman: the prisoners were treated worse than the pigs that roamed the grounds freely; he had to boil urine to make drinking water, and he often stole potato scraps from the swine to survive.

  When the war was over and my father was liberated, he staggered around Greece, eventually finding his way back to Italy and ending up on a small military base in Orbetello. It was there that he met my mother, and they fell in love at first sight. There was just one problem: my mother’s family were staunch socialists and her brothers were partisans who lived high in the mountains in perpetual hiding from soldiers like my father. It was a true Capulet-and-Montague situation. Two of my mother’s brothers had been killed by fascists, and were anyone in the family to learn that she was in love with one of Mussolini’s soldiers, they’d have killed my father, brutally, and probably in public.

  So, when word finally did get out, my mother, in desperation, took my father to meet her father, Ettore, a gentle giant of a man with wrinkled leathery skin from his decades in the sun and hands as big as shovels. He was one of the real patriarchs of their village, even though he was just a fisherman. Ettore, also known as Bó, was one of the most simple, honest men I ever knew and he had a wisdom and grace that, even at age fifty-five, still eludes me. He had seen two sons murdered, and because of his well-known political leanings, he had himself been tortured. And yet, after interviewing my father, he was able to put all of that aside and see him as an individual.

  My grandfather walked my parents into the center of the village and stood with them before everyone: “This man is not a fascist,” he proclaimed. “I do not hold him responsible for what happened to me or to my other children. Yes, he wears a uniform, but only because he had to. He says that he loves my daughter and I believe him. I ask that everyone accept him and leave them in peace.”

  That was all it took: my parents were allowed to marry and my father was welcomed into the family.

  Personally, I always thought that my grandfather gave my father too much credit. He might not have been a fascist in the Mussolini sense of the word, but he was definitely a tyrant in my world. His parental motto was: “Do what you’re told. Don’t ask questions. Or else!”

  When I was eleven, on the verge of manhood, Papá sent me off to a military boarding school. The school, three hours from our home by car, overlooked the Bay of La Spezia. It was a secluded
place and when I think of it, the first thing I recall is a bit of graffiti, scrawled on a wall by another boy who suffered there some time before I did: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.” It’s from Dante’s Divine Comedy, but to me it was no joke. A constant reminder of the stifling environment was the uniform I had to wear from sunup to bedtime: made of cheap, stiff material, it always felt like something that enveloped and consumed the real me and made me indistinguishable from my classmates.