Elisabetta greeted them and went to the pantry, where Nonna Servano sat making pasta in a high-backed chair at a wooden table, her presence so regal that she transformed a stockroom into a throne room. Her tiny head was shaped like a quail’s egg, and her fine white hair was pulled back smoothly into a bun. Her steel-rimmed glasses perched on a beak-like nose, and cataracts had begun to impinge on her dark irises. Wrinkles draped her cheeks and radiated from her thin lips, drawn tight as a rubber band in concentration, as she worked. She wore a traditional black dress, a gold necklace with a filigreed crucifix, and earrings of coral drops that stretched her earlobes. Nonna was frail, but hardly weak, and she measured only 149 centimeters, but didn’t appear small. She looked older than her sixty-seven years, but age hadn’t diminished her faculties. On the contrary, she claimed that it had sharpened them, and nobody dared tell her different.
“Ciao, Nonna. What type of pasta are you making?” Elisabetta kissed her on her cheeks, which felt as soft as sifted flour.
“Cappelletti. Sit down, girl. You make me nervous, standing like a lamppost.”
Elisabetta sat down. So Nonna was in a good mood, but neither Elisabetta nor Paolo had guessed correctly. Atop the wooden table, on a thin dusting of flour, lay flat sheets of dough, yellow with egg yolks, and one of the sheets had been scored into squares with a knife, which rested next to a floured wooden rolling pin, long enough to serve as a cudgel. A mound of pungent ricotta rested in the center of each square, waiting to be formed into shape by Nonna’s fingers, still nimble despite her arthritis, perhaps from this very task.
“Guarda,” Nonna said. Watch. Nonna picked up the square of dough and folded it into a triangle. “Make sure the edges don’t match. Leave a little at the bottom, then press them together and make the seal.” She pushed gently on the dough with her fingertips, leaving the faintest prints. “You see?”
“Yes.” Elisabetta had learned from watching Nonna that there were many different types of pasta, and sauces. Pulpy marinara sauce was served with shorter types, which were usually factory-made. Fatto a mano, homemade pasta, was never served with aglio e olio, oil and garlic, as the pasta absorbed too much oil. Lighter tomato sauces and brodo, broth, were best for ridged cavatelli and radiatori, as they trapped the sauce, and a little went a long way.
“Now, I fold.” Nonna picked up the triangle by one of its corners on the long side, then picked up the other end with her left hand. Holding it between her thumb and forefinger, and with the triangle facing toward her, she slipped her right index finger around the back of the triangle and pushed the bottom upward. In one expert action, she brought the two corners together, pinching them, forming a perfectly round circle of filled pasta with a tiny triangle at the top, looking like a little cap, a cappelletto.
“Nonna, that’s the way I fold napkins, isn’t it?” Elisabetta flashed on Sandro, making her a hat from her newspaper by the Tiber.
“No, not at all. You weren’t paying attention. I can’t stop working to explain everything. The pasta will get hard.” Nonna picked up another square. “I have something important to discuss with you. I have done you a great favor. I’ve asked a very special guest to dine with us.”
“Who?”
“Your future.”
“What do you mean?” Elisabetta had grown accustomed to such mystic pronouncements, as if Nonna were the strega, witch, of Casa Servano.
“Moro Gualeschi, a name you will undoubtedly recognize.”
“Of course I do!” Elisabetta adored Gualeschi, whom she read every day. “He writes for the leftist papers. How do you know him?”
“I know everyone. Rather, everyone knows me.” Nonna kept folding pasta. “Leftists, rightists, centrists, no matter. Politics comes and goes. You know what abides?”
“Love?”
“No, pasta. I say sapore, sapere, to taste is to know. One cannot know me without tasting my pasta. One cannot know Trastevere without tasting our pasta. Likewise, Gualeschi prefers stuffed pasta, so I know he is a man of appetite, one who savors life. I had considered making cappellacci dei briganti tonight for him.”
“Why?”
“Cappellacci dei briganti is a hat with a wide brim that flips up, like the briganti used to wear after the Unification. I didn’t make it because Gualeschi wouldn’t have gotten the joke. Communists lack humor.” Nonna folded another piece of pasta with her floured fingertips, and the yellow cappelletti lined up in front of her, awaiting her command.