7
Truffles
December 12, 2000, was a very good day. I had a ticket in my hand to visit Italy for truffles. One does that. One goes to Italy for white truffles, as one goes to Nova Scotia for Fourchu lobster, as one goes to Ginza for Fugu-chiri, as one goes to Paris for macarons, as one goes to the Iowa State Fair for deep-fried butter. If one must.
Ostensibly, I was going to Italy for the truffles—white, mostly, but I’m not opposed to black. Tartufo bianco—white gold, twee food writers call it—melts with delicacy on your tongue; it’s earth made ephemeral, ephemera made earthy. It’s why God made Barolo, really, for there are few entities made for each other so completely as truffles and Barolo. While the black truffle has its delights—it has muscle, heft; it needs heat to open it, to pry its tiny knees apart and entice it to offer up its sex-tasting funk—the white truffle is the ne plus ultra of funghi. Italians love few things as much as they love their mushrooms, and they love little more than they love their tartufo bianco. Truffles, Italian truffles, are a course in erotics for your mouth. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t adore them.
In the winter of 1998, about eight years after Andrew hired me to write for Noir, it folded. However, I was fortunate to sidestep the magazine’s demise. I’d caught burblings of Noir’s closing, and in 1997, I’d jumped from Andrew’s bed and masthead to Gil Ramsey’s Eat & Drink. At Gil’s magazine (and also in his bed), I had free rein, able to pursue my own flights of food fancy with a breathtaking budget and a remarkably lavish lifestyle.
Thus it was in December 2000, Eat & Drink was sending me to Italy to hunt for truffles. Looking back, as I am wont to do during
these mind-numbing incarcerated days and restless imprisoned nights, I wonder if I hadn’t been called to Italy by a higher power. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason—things happen because we make them happen—but sometimes the mystic reaches its long fingers through the ether and taps us on the breastplate.
Truffles or fate, Italy beckoned that December, and I was thrilled.
Some people prefer truffles from Languedoc or Provence. I prefer mine from Alba. I could justify my preference; I could say pointed things about terroir and minerality, about the proximity of cypress trees and Nebbiolo vines to truffle-hosting oaks; I could sing an aria about microclimates, sun-slant, and tubers. I could talk a silky swath about tradition and the Italian Lagotto Romagnolo, an unparalleled hunting dog, and the gleaming bond between truffle hunter and hound. I could, but I won’t, because my preference is purely chauvinistic. I prefer Italian truffles because I prefer Italy. I prefer Italian wine, Italian food, Italian opera, Italian culture, the insane troll logic of Italian bureaucracy, and Italian men. I admit that French women’s fashion is better—with the exception of Gucci, Italian women’s fashion is boring, really. The boots are good, I’ll grant them that.
I am visceral and I am lazy. I like my truffles like I like my men: Italian. And if in Europe and if I’m in a pinch, Spanish. I have nothing against American men (and much in favor of them), but America doesn’t produce white truffles, at least not any worth eating. Don’t believe the lies. Don’t believe those lies, anyway. Believe others, if it makes you feel safe. Safety, too, is a lie.
That winter, Marco was sadly eschewing all pleasures of the flesh beyond the borders of his marital bed. It was a tedious thing he did from time to time—grow conventional, make nice to his screeching donna with the bottle-blond locks and the veiny hands, heavy with jewels wedged on starving fingers. In any case, Marco was regrettably unavailable. “Mia cara, mi dispiace ma non posso vederti.
Il mio cuore appartiene a mia moglie, siamo due fatto uno, come cigni, come lupi, come tortore,” he wrote to me. He was sorry. It wasn’t possible. He and his ropy Borghese donna were two made one, he said, like swans, like wolves, like turtledoves. “Like black vultures,” I wanted to add, but why bother. Soon enough, Marco
would drift away and return to his natural bonobo ways. I had only to bide my time.
I fortunately had a backup plan in Giovanni, a man who was different from Marco in almost every way but his passport and his names’ ending in vowels. Giovanni was slender, almost emaciated.
He could have body doubled for Gandhi, had Gandhi looked stereotypically Italian. His legs were thin, his arms were thin, his chest was thin, his knees were knobby as a whippet’s. My thighs nearly matched the circumference of Giovanni’s waist. His wrists bobbled with bones like small bags of marbles. He had fantastic hair, though, rich and lustrous, and long. The hair on his chest grew in these pin-straight follicles approaching two knuckles in length.
Likewise the hair that nestled his penis; giving him a blowjob was like pawing through an Easter basket to find the last candy eggs. (Side note: cazzo is Italian for “cock,” but it really means so much more than that. It’s a word that’s larger on the inside than its five letters would lead you to believe. Cazzo carries a fine, long, winding caravan of epithetic meanings: cock, dick, prick, shit, penis, pecker, and fuck. For example, you might in exasperation exclaim, “Che cazzo stai dicendo?” Which, literally translated, means, “What the cock are you saying?” but more meaningfully translates to “What the fuck are you saying?” However, if you’re a woman talking to your girlfriend, she might ask of your new lover, “Ha un bel cazzo?” an inquiry regarding the fitness of your new lover’s genitals. Cazzo is an elastic word, one whose growth verges on tumescence.) To be honest, Giovanni’s cazzo was bello enough, I suppose. It landed slightly on the niggardly side, a metonym for the man.
Generosity was not Giovanni’s strong suit. Aside from his hair, he was skin and he was bones. Were Giovanni a fowl, you’d stew him and use him to make stock.
I had met Giovanni two years before on a train going from Venice to Genova, where he lived. I’d taken an apartment in Chiavari for the summer. I’d wanted a break from New York to work on my first book, Ravenous: The Guide to Eating Gloriously, so I traded apartments with a man who lived near the beach in that Italian Riviera town. It’s a strange place, Chiavari, equal parts Mussolini-era stacked white apartments and crumbling fin de siècle villas, with a dash of Roman-
era aesthetics as seasoning. But Chiavari is on the Medi terranean, and it’s easy to get anywhere you want to go, and it’s close to Portofino. Plus, it’s home to Osteria Luchin, home of divine farinata.
This specific farinata, a thin, wood-oven-baked bread with a pleasing, crisp crust and an elastic center, stands as the apotheosis of chickpeas, which are ground for the flour. Sometimes on rainy days, I taste it, a phantom farinata accompanied by a ghostly minestrone; it’s a wish my unconscious makes, a prison tease.
Seated across from one another on the train, Giovanni and I chatted; he was surprised I spoke Italian. Giovanni’s body was slight as a political prisoner’s, but his eyes were a severe blue. Bright, charismatic eyes and these long eyelashes like thickets on either side. In short time, my skirt was hiked up over my ass and we were unsteadily studying each other’s face in the train’s bathroom mirror as he fucked me from behind, out of time with the rocketing of the train.
Among many other bothersome qualities, Giovanni was a mystic.
Everything happened for a reason in Giovanni’s dragonfly-pocked world. Everything could be believed. Everything was energy.
Everything was imbued with woo. Everything was there, radiant and untrammeled and lying in wait for ripe understanding. Giovanni was ever credulous, as long as the tenet to be believed blazed with the otherworld.
There’s a strong strain of the mystic in Italy. It might be the sheer improbability of Italy’s existence, a peninsula that juts like Europe’s tasty cock into the briny twat of multiple oceans. The mountains that run their course up and down and side to side. The volcanoes that burble and threaten and occasionally belch acrid smoke. The steroid hills of Tuscany and Piedmont that pop like acne out of the plains.
The quick vertigo of cliffs tumbling into the Ligurian Sea. The crystalline light of Venice, and the dowager’s string of jewels that makes up that sinking, fetid city. If any of this is possible—and all of it is, all of it lives in the weird, cheek-by-jowl, e così resignation of Italy, a country that is still, for better or worse, not much more than a collection of nation-states on speaking terms—then why not reincarnation. Why not believe in the energy of stones. Or the power
of shamans, or the importance of balanced shakras, or that sickness comes from baring your wind points.
Giovanni. Say the name and it’s a push-me-pull-you contraction, like the ululation of a sea anemone or an orgasm. Say his name and the mouth kisses twice, the second time more lasciviously, as it should. Humbert Humbert had his tongue-tripping Lolita, but I would take my Giovanni (and I would leave him, and he me; it was a complicated relationship and so rarely fun).
Giovanni. I killed him, and ate his liver.
It was an accident, of course. Well, the killing was accidental; the eating was deliberate. I cooked Giovanni’s liver in the Tuscan way: I made a paté using a recipe calling for fegato di cinghiale, liver of wild boar, spread it on crostini, and relished it with a good Chianti and a kiss of irony. The paté was surprisingly tasty, sapid yet nuanced, though I did have to cheat and use a touch of chicken fat to make it creamy. But given Giovanni’s decades-long adherence to veganism and a lifestyle so ascetic it anesthetized his desires, what else could I do. It was the cleanest human liver ever likely to cross my path. I could hardly waste it.
Truffles brought me to Italy in December 2000 because everyone loves truffles. Truffles were becoming all the rage, and Eat & Drink had to have truffles. At the turn into the new millennium, truffles were ubiquitous—truffle salt and truffle oil and microscopic filings of shaven truffles. If you’ve a fat wallet, a broad palate, and a pica- driven yen, truffles are your fix, the methadone to your dirt-eating ecstasy. But at the bottom of it, you should know this: you wanted to eat truffles because someone like me told you to eat them. Without me and people like me, food commoners would be like Sims characters, turning endless, aimless circles, appetites spinning them into unrequited nothingness.
Working with Eat & Drink’s big, beautiful, bloated budget, I found a trifulau, a truffle hunter. A gnarled olive tree of a man, Salvatore, the trifulau, was a superannuated uncle of a Barolo producer I knew (not biblically—I didn’t like his scent). This uncle was a very successful truffle hunter, one of the legends in the region. And even
though the trifulau held his hunting secrets close as a drug dealer, I’d managed enough money to convince him to take us on a hunt.
It’s more or less a charming myth that truffle hunters use pigs.
Pigs are big and obstinate; it’s hard to shove a pig into the back of the car at the end of a hunt. The uncle had once used pigs to hunt, way back when this wizened tree was a mere green sapling, but now he used dogs. He had three, all in different stages of training, all mixed hounds with pink sensitive noses and limpid eyes. Truffle hunters had switched to dogs for the simple reason that dogs rarely weigh more than the human holding the leash and thus they can be restrained when they try to eat the truffle, which dogs tend not to do.
Stupid dogs, placated with a desiccated biscuit and the tossing of a ball. Pigs can’t be bought with charades; they shuffle and snuffle and eat that fungus whole.
There were four of us who met at six A.M. that chilly December morning, and for Salvatore, this was a very late start. He customarily began hunting in the tiny hours of the morning, the club hours, when, hazy with dance beats and flirting and drugs, you fumble your way with someone strange to your bed, or you to his. Grappa aside, truffle hunters tend to be an abstemious bunch. They go out with their dogs in the dark of dawn or in the gloam of twilight, for to hunt during daylight is to risk other hunters stealing your secret spots. But it’s tough to get good photographs in the dark, and, soothed by the salve of Eat & Drink’s copious lire, Salvatore had kindly agreed to lead us in the daylight hours. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t have to be happy; he only had to be rustic and photogenic and capable of finding us some fucking truffles, or at least faking it for the camera.
Fog snuggled the ground like a fat gray cat. Driving through those swirling Piemontese hills, our little Fiat’s headlights pushed weakly against the fog’s wispy fur, lighting a few feet at a time until we reached the farm where my photographer, Giovanni, and I met the uncle trifulau. Of this ménage a quatre, my photographer, Matteo, and I were hungover, but the others had the audacity to be clear headed: the uncle too ancient to drink and Giovanni too pure.
Truffle hunting, it turns out, is exactly as tedious as you’d imagine. So much tromping over tufted grassy hillocks. So many
trees, so many fallen leaves, so many loose rocks, so much boredom, so many moments of waiting for something, anything, to happen. The sheer slow-wittedness of walking with a dog as your guide is like being suspended inside a koan: what is the sound of one mind snapping? From time to time, Stella, the dog, would stop and bury her nose in the dirt, her blunt hound tail quivering in the air like an antenna. She’d dig, and Salvatore would call her off, palm her a dog biscuit, and, with his ancient truffle hoe, carefully part the ground, gently feel for the fungus, and gingerly twist until it pulled free. Then, he’d studiously fill the hole. Like a surgeon, Salvatore knit the wound back together, nurturing next year’s growth.
Three times the truffle was no bigger than a gumball, yet when Salvatore held it up, tiny and crenulated as a fetus’s brain, the white truffle’s honied funk filled the air. Even tiny, these truffles were potent. The long-ago lore is that trifulau used sows to hunt because truffles smell like male pigs’ pheromones. All these sows hoping to fuck and finding a tiny, tasty morsel in its stead, a metaphor for modern women’s twee passion for cakepops. Me, I’ll take the truffle.
Eventually, we gave up. We had to stage finding a generously photogenic tartufo bianco. We had prepared for such a scenario— there’s a reason why, ounce per ounce, white truffles are almost as expensive as printer ink: they’re rare. You can cultivate black truffles, after a fashion, but science has yet to nail nature’s alchemy for white. For this reason, and for the growing love of the Japanese and the Americans, white truffles are very dear, indeed. We unwrapped a golf-ball-sized tartufo bianco, and handed it to Salvatore, who first appraised it with a jeweler’s eye, gave a grudging consent, and then gently placed it in the dirt.
Matteo took several shots of Stella finding the funghi and Salvatore unearthing it—sorry to be a truffle truther, but we faked it.
The sun almost high in the sky, we pronounced the hunt to be finished, and we all piled back in our cars, happy to be clear of one another. We waved goodbye to Salvatore and the cheerful dog, and then Matteo, Giovanni, and I went to this trattoria outside of La Morra that I love. It’s tiny, just six or seven tables, and they’re almost always filled with winemakers. Winemakers brook no bullshit with
their food. If you’re in wine country, find out where the winemakers eat and go there.
The next day, Giovanni was displeased. There was little pleasing Giovanni, something that might have been explained by his fruitarian existence. We fought, he behind the wheel, I riding shotgun. We’d driven about an hour away from the La Morra agriturismo to go to a restaurant I’d heard about. I was delighted. Tartrà piemontese, delicate little custardy quiche-like entities filled with truffles; sanguinaccio, the Piemontese answer to blood sausages, so thick with copper that the flavor hung in your throat; insalata di carne cruda, a kind of Italian steak tartare, topped with shaved truffles; and brasato al Barolo, beef stew that died and went to Barolo heaven. It was glorious. I could roll naked through those dishes.
Giovanni, however, was upset because the proprietor had refused to make his bagna càuda without anchovies. He was in a pet, having to sate himself on white bean salad and risotto reluctantly made with vegetable broth, poor vegan fool. He was nearly vibrating with rage, while I was mildly drunk and fatted as a Japanese cow happily awaiting her next massage before slaughter.
“You,” he said, “you are too interested in words. What are words?
Pfft,” he said, and his mouth turned down as his shoulders moved in parabolic arcs. His body looked like a series of parentheses.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m a writer. Words would be important to me.”
“Words! What is important, it is here.” He thumped himself on the chest. “Words are nothing. They are like this.” He puffed his cheeks full and blew the air out at me. “I know everything I need to know by looking into your tiger eyes.”
Yes, well, I thought, then why the fuck are we having this discussion. The ice-blue light of the Fiat’s dashboard cast a spectral
glow on Giovanni’s bony wrists.
“My tiger eyes,” I said.
He glanced at me. “They used to be wolf’s eyes, but now they’re tiger.” The eye of the tiger, the thrill of the fight. The car cut around a curve and the trees seemed close enough to brush. He stared at the road. I stared at the road. We stared at the road together, and then the wheels went bump over something.
It wasn’t a big bump, just a modest bump, but a bump all the same.
“Che cazzo,” Giovanni said. He pulled to the side of the road, as far as he could on that narrow Piemontese shoulder. He clicked on the hazard light, glared at me, and opened the door to inspect the cryptic bump.
I tried to open my door, but the car was wedged against a guardrail. The door opened about four inches, then a wide girth of steel stopped it, and a good thing, too, because even by the light of the moon and the weak light of the Fiat, I could see that it was a deep drop, down, down, down into the Piemontese black.
I heard Giovanni muttering, and in the rearview mirror, I could see him standing with pelvis thrust forward, his posture of consternation.
I slipped over the gearbox and got into the driver’s seat. I saw the key in the ignition.
I was tired, frankly. Tired of arguing and tired of trying to defend myself to a man I wasn’t even sure I enjoyed. Tired of trying to unscramble his inscrutable Italian idioms and his impossible new- age beliefs. Tired of tiger eyes and stinky feet and tired of the knowledge that Giovanni was a man who liked women best when they didn’t like him. I was tired, too, of disliking him.
I closed the door, clasped the seat belt over me, turned the key, and left him in the middle of the road with the undisclosed bump.
Driving felt cathartic. I opened the window and let the cold air run like river water. I drove and imagined finding a little taverna where I could get a proper grappa. I could use a drink. I looked at the sky and the tree branches flickering past like Morse code and the twin beams of my headlights that verged together like fate to make this cone of silence and peace.
And then, I felt bad—guilt or something like it. I had left my lover in the dark with a bump. The road was narrow; beyond my headlights and below the canopy of the trees, the night was ocean dark. I slowed the car. I stopped. I made a ragged three-point turn, and I drove back toward Giovanni, scanning the night for him and the bump. My bowels contracted in anticipation of his fury. It was not altogether unpleasant.
The return seemed longer; perhaps I was going slower. Gripping the steering wheel, my knuckles turned the white-blue of raw tripe in the light of the Fiat’s dash. The car caromed around a corner.
Giovanni’s slender form was silhouetted against the revenant trees.
And something happened. I felt for the brake with my foot. I fumbled.
My foot slipped. It pushed the gas pedal. The car leapt forward. The fender on the driver’s side struck Giovanni, who pirouetted like a toreador, and, airborne, flipped over the car and landed behind. I could, I think, hear a splat. Maybe I imagined it, the splat. There was a noise. There had to have been a noise. I’m sure I heard a noise.
This Giovanni splat was more meaningful than the earlier modest bump, the bump in the night that brought me here, parked once again on the slim shoulder of the road. I reversed the car, driving a few feet backward, the Fiat’s headlights now illuminating Giovanni, who hung on the guardrail, suspended, teetering on the edge of the Piemontese abyss.
He did not look good. Giovanni glistened, for one thing. People ought not to glisten, not darkly in the night, not like that. For another, Giovanni’s insides were out, and much of his outsides were gone, trailing down a length of pipe—a long metal rod, rebar, I remember some man calling it—sunk into the ground alongside the guardrails.
The rebar stuck straight up as a monolith, stood rampant as a needle, gleaming with a dull metallic evil in the light of the pale moon. Impaled, Giovanni hung on the rebar, glistering ominously.
Dying, Giovanni had become the scarecrow that he’d always threatened to be in life. Judging from the glistening and the juicy viscera, he’d not had an easy time of it.
Seeping in great blooming stains, the blood looked grape-skin black. It all was so broken, so limp, so vulnerable, and so tender, like conigli at the butcher shop. Great reams of intestines, a vague almost hallucinatory wash of purple in this half-light, tumbled higgledy-piggledy, like streamers. There, though, that orb. That fat, succulent bit right there. That bulbous piece that popped like a fat tomato, squidging with pressure from the ribs. That, I thought, that orb was a liver.
I once had thought I had loved Giovanni. We’d whispered declarations of love in multiple tongues, had laid them like the petals
of roses on each other’s flesh. We’d stared into each other’s eyes and felt the hot rush and push of blood and hormones. We’d fumbled for each other in the dark, and we’d found that fumbling fleeting sweet. We’d loved, or it seemed we had. Once the affection is gone, I always have a hard time recollecting it; it comes to me in phantasmagoric slivers in the quicksilver small hours of the night.
Once the affection is gone, it slips from my memory like the face of a dead relative.
I looked at his body, pierced like a medieval saint’s, and I remembered. We’d loved, Giovanni and I. Giovanni’s head lay back as if in a postcoital swoon. His eyes were open, and for one last time, I stared into them. At last I knew what I would do.
I walked back to the Fiat, rummaged through my purse, and found my wine key and the nylon bag that all Italians carry with them for trips to the market. I flicked open the foil cutter on the corkscrew and walked back to the body that lay limp and perfect, glinting still in the silent night.
The blade was tiny. It took some patience and more time than I strictly wanted to give, but I worked the blade through the gristly bits that held the liver to the body. The liver was hard, slippery, and hot, though cooling quickly in the night air. Finally, the liver sprang free into my fingers. I wrapped it in my nylon bag. I returned to the car and found a bottle of Pellegrino in the back, and I poured it over one hand, then the other, trying to wash the gore off my hands in the lights of the Fiat. I found a second bottle of Pellegrino and an old shirt stuck in the back seat. I wiped first my hands and then the Fiat’s fender, and I hoped that no one would stop me as I drove back to the agriturismo.
When I got back to the farmhouse, I threw the bloodied shirt into the fire in my room. I brought the liver to the farmer’s wife, saying that I’d received a boar’s liver as a gift. She cleaned it for me and put it in her refrigerator. I kept it on ice as I drove back the next morning to Giovanni’s apartment in Chiavari, where I cooked it and ate it and found it delectable.
