My first time getting yelled at in Italian while the pads of my fingers burnt off was probably my fault, but I have no idea what I could have done to avoid it. The three middle-aged women with whom I shared maybe a hundred square feet of cooking space and a handful of English and Italian words spent at least twelve hours per day on their feet. They began cooking mid-morning, made lunch and dinner for their families and employees, made a massive prix-fixe dinner for their restaurant and hotel guests, and cleaned. During family meals they often hovered, chewing yesterday’s bread and moving dishes straight from their husbands’ hands to the dishwasher.
The farm was cooperatively owned by seven friends who expanded their preschool, first into an educational farm, then into a full-fledged agriturismo. Daily field trips from summer camps still wound their way past the farro mill and olive groves so Walter could teach them how to make honey. Sixteen-hour days were common and the owners rarely worked less than six days a week. The thin glass wall between the kitchen and the dining room failed to insulate guests from the strained relationships. Among the seven owners, there were two couples, meaning four of them spent 24 hours a day in the same place as their partner. Screaming matches occurred nearly hourly. My limited Italian helped me understand that a given argument centered around whose job it was to clean dozens of artichokes, but my basic understanding of social cues told me said fight probably had more to do with two decades of marriage. Gender roles certainly contributed to the tension as well. While the men worked brutal hours of manual labor in direct sunlight, the three women who worked in the kitchen seemed to spend far less time resting. In the dozens of meals I ate there, I did not see one man clear a single dish from the table.
I floated through the farm’s various jobs each day. I cut back grapes in the vineyard with five septuagenarian men wielding scythes. I foraged wild herbs and flowers for their “peasants’ salad”. In the evenings, Cristina would point, mime, and speak very slowly in Italian so that I could be of some use.
I had avoided any screaming entirely until a busy evening in the restaurant, where I was frying appetizers. I wrapped anchovies and mozzarella in thin slices of zucchini, skewered the bundle to keep it in place, then battered and fried them. Once pulled from the fryer, I had to quickly pull the toothpicks out and plate them alongside fried zucchini flowers and stuffed olives. At least I think that was my job. The language barrier was substantial.
It hurt only slightly to lift the zucchini wraps from the fryer basket into a hotel pan, but the delicate pressure required to pull the toothpicks out meant that my fingertips ached with pain before I had even finished the first batch. Halfway through the second batch, Cristina turned from the industrial pasta boiler and screamed, “Count!” I paused my toothpick pulling and began to count the appetizers and she said it again. “Count! SIXTEEN!” She doesn’t need to know how many there are, she wants sixteen. I pushed the pile of appetizers back together and separated out sixteen, then returned to the toothpicks.
Seconds later, Cristina was at my side. “How many?” How many? “Sixteen,” I responded, already knowing I’d made a mistake. My fingers glowed red.
“No, no, how many there are?” she asked. One of the maids rushed past with a stack of dirty plates. “You wanted sixteen,” I said, “sedici!”
“No, how many are all of them?” The maid set the dishes down and fled back to the kitchen.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I know she fucking said sixteen, twenty four, twenty five-
Cristina grabbed the hotel pan and began offloading four of them at a time onto plates. Four at a time, great way to count quickly.
“Maybe it would be helpful if I went and did some dishes?”
