Bread and Murder in Aramezzo

Saturday The baker did not look well. In the few months Stella had lived in Aramezzo, she’d come to think of the baker as the real-life equivalent of a Muppet character. How could she not, with his ruddy cheeks and lustrous red mustache that glimmered in the barest thread of light? Now though, the baker’s wan face echoed the pale dough appearing and disappearing beneath his hands. That vibrant mustache sagged, parentheses around his frown. Stella shifted her weight as she waited in the line snaking out of the tiny shop, past the bakery’s double doors thrown open to the street. She narrowed her eyes, her gaze following Antonio, now stalking to the oven to fling wood into the already roaring fire. Gazing down the line of villagers waiting to enter the diminutive bakery, Stella wondered if any of them noticed the baker slapping the dough against the counter with a thwack that carried in early spring’s brittle air. Everyone’s conversations must be far too engrossing. Not one face peered curiously into the forno, as Antonio’s hands—famed for coaxing flour and water into loaves beloved throughout Umbria—now punched the dough as if holding it accountable for its sins. She amended her earlier thought. He didn’t simply look unwell . . . he looked enraged. As she took in the preoccupied townspeople, Stella had to acknowledge herself to be the only person in line not gathered with a neighbor or two, debating the chance of rain or the merits of the Italian National Soccer team, affectionately known as Azzurri, or the Blues. She’d grown used to being the odd woman on the block and usually felt lucky that, as an outsider, she’d been able to form her few friendships. Except at times like this when she wished for eye contact with someone, to lift a quizzical brow at the smudge obscuring the baker’s usual sun. Antonio turned, and Stella couldn’t help but notice the dullness in his eyes. She watched as he sniped at a junior baker, barking at him to clean up his station while he himself ran a handheld razor—called a bread lame—over the top of six loaves to score the dough, giving the rising bread room to expand in the oven, creating an airy, tender crumb. At the sight of the junior baker now wordlessly scrubbing his station, Stella realized that though the villagers queued up for bread hadn’t picked up on Antonio’s seething, his apprentices couldn’t miss it. All the young men had their eyes fixed on their tasks, with none of their usual banter and teasing. The stiff hush suggested their determination to avoid Antonio’s notice at all costs. Quite a change from the usual boisterous clanging and calling out, laughter echoing joyfully down the street. After all these months, Stella considered that joyfulness as much a part of the forno as the bakers’ uniforms. Though, Stella remembered, those uniforms had initially thrown her. Manhattan bakers certainly didn’t work in white tank tops and boxer shorts. The first time she’d caught sight of Antonio standing on the cobblestone street in what she thought was his underwear, she’d thought he looked as out of place as she felt. It had taken her at least a month to not startle at the bakers’ matching white garb, topped with a blue apron for the apprentices and white for Antonio. She used to think she’d never grow used to the sight of barely clad men, pulling at each other, bursting into song, teasing and chiding and arguing good-naturedly even as they worked the dough and piled it into the blazing ovens, heat glinting off the sweat on their foreheads. But now she realized she had stopped remarking internally on the outfit altogether. Though back in December, she remembered Antonio joking about getting her into the forno to help with all the orders and maybe feed the bakers the sweet treats his operation didn’t have the time or capacity to manage. She’d responded that she didn’t think she’d look good in the uniform, and he’d looked down at his white boxer shorts, undershirt, and sneakers and roared with laughter. Funny how time softened edges. If Antonio made the same joke today, Stella likely wouldn’t have the presence of mind to quip back about the outfits. There were many ways that Stella still felt like an outsider, but she supposed that acclimating to bakers in their underwear was a sign of her immersion into her ancestral village. In fact, in retrospect, she thought the get-up lent a familiar, almost intimate, tenor to the bakery. Except in moments like this, when the stiff silence bumped up against the delicate apparel in a way most unseemly. A roar from the bakery cut off Stella’s thoughts. The villagers standing in the street fell silent. Stella couldn’t make out the words, only the volume of the tirade. Faces craned, staring into the forno, but Antonio was nowhere to be seen. On the bakery floor, the apprentices glanced at each other and then through the doorway that connected the floor with the shop. Antonio couldn’t be yelling at the woman who sold the bread, could he? Stella tried to remember the woman’s name, but she found it hard for names to stick and constantly defaulted to calling the villagers the baker, the butcher, the greengrocer, the florist—the legacy of a childhood spent devouring Richard Scarry books from the library (her mother refused to buy them for her daughters, considering Lowly Worm’s fixation on occupations entirely too American, even while she tossed the Italian books sent by family directly into the trash). In any case, what infraction could that mild-mannered bread seller possibly have committed that was worthy of Antonio’s snarl of rage? Just then, a stocky stranger, thin hair combed greasily across his scalp, emerged from the bakery. He walked stiffly, refusing to acknowledge Antonio, now looming at the threshold of the shop, arms folded across his chest. Could Antonio have raised his voice like that to a customer? Stella knew Italian notions of customer service were different from the States, where she had to sound remorseful when a diner sent back a properly cooked, medium-rare, steak. But still. Stella felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find the owner of Aramezzo’s alimentari. She hadn’t gotten to know Cristiana well, but she always enjoyed their casual exchange of pleasantries. “Who is that?” Cristiana asked, gesturing at the stranger ambling by, rolling his shoulders as if to shed Antonio’s thundering look of death. Stella almost turned to check if Cristiana had meant to ask someone else. But Cristiana’s eyes stayed fixed on her and Stella remembered that, of course, with her bed-and-breakfast, she would be likely to know a stranger in Aramezzo. She shook her head. “No idea.” Cristiana clarified, “He’s not staying at Casale Mazzoli? I thought you had guests this week.” Stella nodded. “I do. An American couple. Young. Not this guy.” Cristiana watched the stranger’s back recede down the street. “Allora, whoever that man is, he did something to get on Antonio’s bad side.” “And I would have thought that impossible.” Chuckling warmly, Cristiana said, “I know, he even smiles when Bruno makes snide remarks about his ‘stupid mustache.’ ” Stella nodded, remembering all the times she’d heard the butcher mutter unintelligible insults at the passing baker. “I figured Antonio chalked all that up to Bruno’s sour disposition.” Cristiana grinned. “Your Italian is coming along.” Laughing, Stella said, “I know, right? I’m finally expanding past my elementary school whining and restaurant bawdy talk.” Shaking her head, Cristiana said, “I meant your accent. You said that like an Umbrian. Not the usual medley of dialect.” Stella wanted to volunteer that her Italian was a potpourri of Tuscan slang from working in Florence and Lombardian vowels from her time in Milan, blurred with her mother’s barbed commentary, but she couldn’t think of the Italian word for potpourri. So maybe her language wasn’t as advanced as Cristiana thought. Cristiana went on, “Anyway, Bruno and Antonio used to get along. Before the whole television show debacle.” Stella stared at Cristiana. “What?” “The national news spot. The one that might have made them famous. Surely you know about this.” Cristiana gestured at the moving line. “Oh, you’re almost up. You getting bread or torta al testo?” Stella stepped forward without wondering why Cristiana only figured on two options—that’s all the bakery sold, mostly to area restaurants but also to the village’s residents and those who ventured within Aramezzo’s walls for a bite of the slow-fermented, naturally risen bread. Usually, these visitors were treated to better manners than a cursing out by Aramezzo’s perennially sunny baker. Stella realized she had yet to answer Cristiana. “A loaf. My guests are leaving today to drive to the Amalfi coast and asked me to pack them a lunch they can eat on the road.” Cristiana frowned. “Eat on the road? You mean . . . in the car? While they drive? Why wouldn’t they stop at an Autogrill or something to have a proper meal?” Shrugging, Stella answered as she stepped forward again. The line seemed to be moving swiftly now. “They said they tried the Autogrill on their way here from Rome, but found the system confusing—where they order, where they pay. I tried to explain it, but I could tell the idea made them too nervous.” It had been one of those complicated interactions she often had with guests—she liked this couple from Maryland (not only because they requested she make their dinners, a financial boon, but also because she never failed to warm to people who grew quiet with appreciation as they tucked into her food) and wanted them to have a memorable first trip to Italy. Which, by rights, should include a stop at Italy’s illustrious answer to fast food, a staple of road trips up and down the Boot. But Stella didn’t feel she could challenge them to push past their comfort zone. So to-go sandwiches it was. She finished the thought aloud: “They seem determined to travel only uncomplicated roads.” Nodding slowly, Cristiana said, “How in the world did they wind up in Aramezzo?” “A fair question,” Stella laughed. Aramezzo lay so far off the tourist trail, tucked in the hills behind Assisi, most travelers didn’t know of its existence. “The family I had at Christmas—you remember, they bought out all your decorative jars of Nutella. They’re part of the same supper club as this couple.” At Cristiana’s furrowed eyebrow, Stella went on, “It’s a thing in America. People schedule a night every month or so where they gather at a member’s house, and they all bring a dish on a theme, or from the same cookbook.” Cristiana shook her head slowly, “I will never understand you Americans. If you want to have a meal with friends, have a meal with friends. Why must you turn it into a chore?” Stella tamped down the pinch at Cristiana’s easy lumping of Stella in with a continent of people who didn’t know how to live. She pretended an ease she didn’t feel as she said, “Anyway, the family at Christmas told everyone about all their great Umbrian meals and inspired this couple to come. Originally, they had only planned on Rome and Amalfi.” Laughing, Cristiana said, “You are underselling yourself, Stella. I suspect they praised your Umbrian meals.” The comment eased some of the sting from Cristiana’s earlier words. Since she’d arrived, Stella had been working to weave in an understanding of the food of her ancestors with her education from stints at restaurants throughout Italy. She’d tired the butcher to impatience asking questions (which, granted, did not seem hard to do—any sentence beyond, “I’d like those pork chops cut on the thick side” seemed to annoy him) and spent several long afternoons with Adele, the woman who cooked at Trattoria Cavour, Aramezzo’s only restaurant. Stella had even considered asking Antonio for a bread-baking lesson, but hadn’t yet worked up the courage. For all his open cheer, she’d noticed a thread of steel around his methods. Mostly in the form of changing the topic whenever she got close to shop talk.