Читать книгу Bellagrand - Paullina Simons - Страница 15

SHE MAKES HER OWN tomato paste. She is dressed in some shimmering gauzy summery thing, and her hair is tied up. The dress has to be loose and sheer because she is about to undertake heavy physical labor. She might perspire. All he does is sit and watch her, his mouth slightly open, his whole soul short of breath. He has watched her make the paste so many times. He never gets tired of it.

She has been simmering tomatoes all morning, boiling them down. She has strained all the pulp, removed their seeds, their skin. She has undressed the tomatoes.

Now she needs his help, and that’s why he’s been sitting at the kitchen table gaping at her.

They drag two plywood boards from the porch down the stairs and to the back. The boards take up nearly the whole overgrown yard. But that’s where the sunshine is. It’s late summer and warm, and it’s the only way to make enough paste to last the winter. The tomatoes she grows are always splendid. In his father’s house he never ate tomatoes the way he eats them now, raw, cooked, boiled, steamed, fried. Any which way he relishes the tomatoes. It’s the fruit from the Sicilian tree of life.

They carry the two pots of stewed tomatoes to the boards. She spreads the thick messy pulp over the boards, tilting them slightly to drain off any remaining liquid. There is much liquid. They set the tomato boards in the sunshine to dry.

Mimoo is cleaning houses, Salvo is sweeping the streets. Harry and Gina make love all afternoon, as the sun moves forty-five degrees in the August sky. They can barely stumble down the stairs to bring her boards back inside. All he wants now is to take a long nap, but it’s almost dinnertime, and she is forcing him to help her. But now, after, he doesn’t want to.

They roll the dried-out paste into large balls. He tries not to make any off-color jokes, but fails. He doesn’t particularly want to make jokes. What he wants is to nap and then make love to her again. Their hands are sticky with gooey sickly sweet paste, red and overripe. They clean their hands as best they can. Sometimes they make love again, with all their clothes on to save time, though it’s so late, and any minute everyone else will come home—Angela, Mimoo, Salvo, Rita for Saturday night dinner. Panting and disheveled, with the hands that just loved one another, they coat the balls of tomato paste with a layer of olive oil, cover them tightly with cheesecloth and pack them into large glass jars. It’s work for a whole Saturday afternoon. She grows enough tomatoes to feed them the whole winter. They never have to worry about sauce for anything they cook. They always have plenty.

Harry associates tomatoes with love. He gets a physical throb in the pit of the place that makes him a man, a flame of fire about two pounds large whenever she opens one of those jars, whenever she feeds him from them, when she asks him what he wants for dinner. What springs to his mind is the heady, acidic sweetness of their sweltering summer afternoons.