Barbabietola

I think I resisted beets as a child because they reminded me of some inner organ, like the liver, a little calcified, at least hardened by maybe cancer, as it sat there, cross-sectioned, bleeding on my plate…bleeding all over my plate, staining the respectable broccoli and even the mashed potatoes, its presence far too vivid and insistent. The taste was too strong as well. I think the beets my mother pushed on me were pickled and too vinegary, the beet’s inherent sweetness also strangely per-fumey, the fumes doing something to the inside of my sinuses and the back of my throat. It seemed utterly duplicitous the way my mother would carve off a little piece of beet-flesh, caught almost squirming on her fork prongs, and bring it so reverently toward her mouth, saying it’s fine, fine if you don’t like them because that merely means more for me.

I think I recall even Beet Gerber baby food, poised on the shelves looking like jars of coagulating blood. I think I recall her dipping the baby spoon in the jar to feed the clots to my little sister. There are very few foods I resist on principle, very few foods I frankly do not like. “I will eat anything that does not eat me first,” I used to joke with friends, because truly my tastes are encompassing and eclectic. “Except beets,” I would qualify. Beets, I surmised, may indeed have the capacity to “eat me first”—or perhaps suggest something that has already been eaten, digested, and converted into something else I didn't want to know.

Then arrived this past summer and the month of July when I was visiting my friend Anny, helping her, when the weather would permit, in her lush garden in Lisores, France. “We’ve got to do something with all these beets,” she proclaimed early in the adventure, yanking them up in great clumps of dirt by the purple stained greens that grew so innocuously from the muddy earth. She’d already initiated me by cooking the purplish Swiss Chard in Crème Fraiche du Normandie—there was a slightly beety tang to the chard, and a diluted bloodishness to the purple that puddled my plate. I did not want to offend or seem too childish in my disdain; I confessed that in truth I did not like beets, but insisted that I would face one, come to terms with one, if she insisted.

How generous she was the night she made red flannel hash to offer to leave the beets out of my portion, cook simply the corned beef and potatoes in a cream sauce for me. I was tempted to allow her to do this for me though it seemed like cowardice on my part and also seemed incomplete somehow, a recipe stripped of its essential ingredient so off-balance as to be genetically defective in a certain sense and liable to do the body harm. No, no, no, I insisted, I would go the distance.

Everyone remembers the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, and remembers the wordless two pages on which Sam-I-Am pauses before the fork offering his mouth the green eggs and ham. The silence is iconic, the certain adjustments taking place in the psyche of the one who is going to ingest what once disgusted him. I faced a Sam-I-Am moment before Anny’s red flannel hash, but then found as did in fact Sam-I-Am himself—I do, I do, I do like Anny’s red flannel hash; the French mustard and salty corned beef somehow cut the beet-sweetness in a way that made it palatable, more than palatable, even good, even wondrous, even delicious enough that I think I ate the leftovers three meals running, long after others at the table had moved on to duck and certain pates.

I still would not have considered myself a convert to beets. Even having enjoyed Anny’s red flannel hash, I was not convinced that it was the beets that had made the dish for me or that I would ever want to replicate the dish and certainly I did not imagine that I would buy beets on my own and figure out a way to deal with them. This moment of truth arose just the other night as I was following my resolution to eat only locally what I can buy at Antonio’s alimentaria up the street. Antonio is a co-conspirator in my diet and effort to live the politics expressed in so many of the books I’ve recently been reading. Desiree and I drop into Antonio’s daily after giri and he will announce what new variety of epicurean delight he has to offer my day--watermelon, zucchini flowers, a certain golden apple. And then Tuesday, he announced he had fresh barbabietole. I did not even know the word, did not know what barbabietola was, but it sounded promising. In the spirit of my newfound lust for the unusual, for getting past certain cravings and learning to want only what IS…I agreed to a cena of barbabietole and Antonio reached his hirsute hand into one of the crates gaping open near the cash register and did a little Ta-Da as he pulled out the globulous bunch of beets.

Oh, beets, I thought. Barbabietola means beet.

Two beets last forever if you are a single woman. These two were bigger than my fist, the waxy uncooked purple hardly indicative of the bleeding beasts themselves. I spent half a morning on the internet seeking out beet recipes. Borscht and pickled beets seemed most prevalent and I knew I needed mustard on mine, even if the corned beef was impossible given my resolutions and uncertainty that corned beef exists in Italy. It took all day for me to learn how to roast them and make a creamy mustard sauce, but I did, and perhaps they were as delectable as they were less for their intrinsic value as unique food as for what they represented in my quest to live in deeper more open and adventurous ways. I had mastered the beet and rendered the disgusting delectable. Now I could practice with the Buddhist meditation Tonglen—breathing in all that is bad in the world to breathe out only goodness, peace and joy--and somehow mean it in a more convincing way.

How delighted I was to find an email from Anny that night after gorging on the very meal she had somehow made possible for me. It was communion, I told her, a kind of pagan eucharist—how our souls had found each other this day of days that I had chosen to conquer my resistance to the Is-ness of Beet-ness. She’d been trying to call the entire time I’d been seeking out recipes. How wondrous is this? I wrote back. I thought perhaps she believed I was making too much of too small a thing, as usual. But she gets it.

Deus est Caritas

We had already done eight giri—eight kilometers!—when Daniela asked me to climb the mountain with her. It was the Festa di San Francesco—October 4th, the anniversary of his death—and she’d heard from Bente and Merisa that there would be a special mass followed by a cena at the Chiesa di San Francesco at the top of my mountain, in the very chapel where I’d experienced a miracle my first summer in Spoleto. All the little old ladies would be driving up with their offerings of pizza and lasagna and crostate. She thought it would be just the thing if we hiked up with the dogs and met them at Mass, participated in the feast, and then got a ride back down the mountain with one of them—since it would, by nine o’clock certainly, be dark.

It’s not as easy as it used to be to get to the summit of Monteluco. First of all they closed the ponte—the lovely aqueduct that traverses the valley between the hill Spoleto Centro sits on and Monteluco. Now you have to walk down to the Agip gas station and cross the highway, walk on the shoulder of the curving main road up the mountain and pray that a motorist doesn’t come hurling around a hairpin turn to knock you to your doom. Then technically one is supposed to be able to pick up the Monteluco path where the road meets the other side of the ponte, as Daniela and I had done a mere two weeks before, but now discovered we could no longer do—because a huge wall had suddenly been constructed to prevent hikers from climbing up the first gravely tier of the path.

What were two women and two dogs (we’d brought only Desiree and Tarontola) to do?

Valkyrie-like, two cyclists whizzed by us as we stood in the middle of the asphalt cursing the wall and construction in general that had rendered Spoleto a rat’s maze full of dead-ends and impossible detours. I had the sudden sense to call out after the cyclists—did they know a way up to Monteluco?—and one called back over his or her shoulder (impossible to tell whether man or woman given the helmet and goggles and blur-of-colors; even the voice itself was wind in my ears) that we could pick up another path just up ahead on the left and follow the red marks—on stones or tree-trunks—to our longed-for destination.

We trusted and did as we were told, but there followed a struggle against time, against the limitations of the human body, against the limitations of canine bodies that weigh less than 4 kilograms and wend their way on wee little dachshund legs. We faced a veritable allegory of trust and persistence, not knowing the path or believing it would lead us where we wanted to go, not having any way of gauging where we were on the path, how much distance we had covered or how much distance yet remained. The minute hand on my fat-faced watch quivered strangely as though will or might could hold back time just long enough for us to reach the pew in the church where Merisa and Bente and other women were awaiting us, their purses poised discretely to save our seats. I’d breathe deeply and trust only to blink my eyes and find the minute-hand bounding forward, twenty minutes, now only ten minutes left to get there and not knowing even if we could get anywhere following the path we had found. Time and space seemed to reach mysterious conjunctions, to participate in a new physics, as we negotiated stopping for a moment to catch our breaths and chug at our Nygene bottles bursting with tap water, splashing a bit in our palms for the dogs to lap at, though they would not lap, so eager did they seem to yank us toward our destination.

We made it to the Mass before our old lady-friends arrived in their gabardine suits, silk scarves, polished pumps. We took up an entire back row of chairs in the chapel specially opened for the occasion. It wasn’t a Eucharist Mass, but a Rosary Mass—all the decades of the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Marys and Gloria Patrias. The dogs were panting and we were sweating; it seemed almost sacrilege to be among these primped and powdered worshippers with our sweat rings so visible under the arms of our cotton tees, my entire back so sweaty that when I’d stand to sing between decades I could see little puddles of myself evaporating in the seat behind me. But there was something so mystical about a mountain high—that amazing rush of adrenaline and too much oxygen—heightened by the the incessant reciting of the rosary prayers. In between decades, after the Gloria patria, reciting da secoli a secoli all the congregants would wink open one of their prayer-closed eyes to watch the mystery of dogs in church, sitting there on our laps so sentient as though the dogs themselves were likewise deep in prayer, a witness to the movement of the spirit.

Time fell away from us completely when we stepped into the brother’s medieval dining hall and climbed up high on the benches, our backs against the wall as we faced the narrow boards that serve as tables. Ten fratti and four priests live in this particular convent, replete with their brown hooded robes cinched by ropes around the waist, their bare toes wiggling out of Birkenstocks. Six or seven postulants in jeans and sweatshirts were including among them, boys really, hippy-ish adolescents no older than my students, on the brink of committing their lives to the church. How young and full of pranks they seemed as they danced platters and platters of food before us: here a plate of salame, of prociutto, of pizza a rosmarino; here the pasta dishes, Bianca, Spoletina, Lasagna; here the fresh tomatoes, cut in oblong halves, too pink inside, but nevertheless garden-tasty, now the wild boar in a secret recipe, the roast pheasant and game hen; here the zuppa inglese, the tiramisu, and the crostate di moro made by Merisa. While we ate, the boys played guitar and sang folksy songs about new life in the spirit—jumping up and down and swinging their arms in gestures meant to indicate how each of us was included—embraced by the occasion. Bente sat to my right whispering to me that even the jugs of wine were blessed by God –vino benedetto--and could not make me drunk or hurt her liver—just a little more, a little more—dai!—what an occasion it was.

I had the distinct impression that something metaphysical had shifted at the moment Daniela and I had lost our habitual footing on the path we knew. I turned to fill her glass from the jug of deep red Montepulciano wine and found her so radiant on the bench beside of me, Tarantola poised sleepily in the crook of her elbow as Desiree was poised on the crook of mine. Out of her eyes a new light seemed to shine, her smile, her entire face seemed to have taken on a deeper resonance of some mysterious familiar as we nodded in recognition and agreement about something we are still at a loss to name.