About the Fat: Reflections on Lent, Food, and Italian Traditions

These are full body yawns. I’m sitting in Serravalle’s church of Sant’Andrea with Tizi and her friend Alba. We’re here tonight for the Ash Wednesday service. As soon as we sit down, the yawning starts. Every muscle in my body participates, tensing, contracting. I lean back in the pew so the yawn can travel down the whole length of my body. It feels great, it’s borderline orgasmic to yawn like this, a release that should be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home. Church has this effect on me. There’s no yawn quite like a church yawn. I freely give myself to them.  

It’s a late service.  Earlier tonight, around 5:50, down in our apartment, Tizi said we should go.

“I didn’t hear bells,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “there should be bells.”

When we walked up the street and got to the church, there was no one there. There should have been a gathering of the congregation on the sidewalk, townfolk leaning toward each other, chatting, waiting to go inside. 

“What the hell,” she said. I had to agree.

“Let’s go home,” I said. 

“What the hell,” she said again. “Let’s go in anyway.” We took the left door. The one she walked through with her family when she was a little girl. 

Inside, the church was empty, except for one person. She called across to him, said something in Italian, a polite formulation of what the hell. This church was made for echos. (And for yawning.) Whatever the guy said, Tizi heard it without hearing it. She asked him to repeat himself three times before she got it.

“The service is at 8:30,” she said to me. Thinking, I suppose, “What the hell.” 

“Remember, people work late,” I said. “They work until 7:00 or 7:30.”

A few hours passed. We’re in it now. The church is filling up.  And I’m yawning hard. As the faithful file in, I notice down in front, the woman with the guitar. I hear the E, A, D, G, B, E as she tunes the instrument. Last year there was an organist and a singing nun. This year will be guitar, a knot of nuns, and a few parishioners down there with the guitar, a little choir. 

I never want to hear a guitar in church, ever. But at the start of the liturgy, when the woman begins strumming something in D minor and the singing begins, first the little choir, then the congregation joining, voices in song rising to the vaulted ceiling, filling the church, the music sounds good. Everyone sings. 

To prepare ourselves for the spiritual journey called Lent, we fasted yesterday. We fasted, that is, in the manner of this foodful culture. Meaning we avoided meat. For lunch we had one of the finest dishes of strozzapreti with fish sauce I’ve ever eaten, at Tizi’s friend Adele’s house down in Rimini. (It seemed fitting to eat strozzapreti on this day. Strozza–choke–preti–priests, referring to this culture’s religious orientation, while also reflecting its wonderful sense of humor.)

It was also a day full of ordinary pleasures. Before lunch Tizi needed to shop for a shepherd for her nativity set back home. While she shopped at Semprini, the vast Catholic accessory store–if you need a life size statue of Padre Pio, they’ve got one, looming peacefully, like a sanctified Frankenstein, in the front display window–while she shopped I hung out on the corner, in front of Rimini’s duomo, a 13th-century church, then cathedral, then temple to the Malatesta family, which was almost completely destroyed in the 1944 bombardment of the city. Most of Rimini, in fact, was bombed until the rubble bounced. One thinks of Gaza today and that fact that mankind has learned nothing.

It was market day yesterday. Men’s underwear, 1 euro. Sunglasses, 5 euro. Towels, table cloths, sweaters, jackets, hats, everything imaginable at rock-bottom prices. Most of it trash. While I waited, the locals streamed past me, old men walking with their hands joined behind their back, old men standing with their arms folded across their chest, showing their patience with the things of this world; very old men wearing jackets and ties, dress pants and hats, walking slowly behind their wives. Ladies with little dogs on a leash. Ladies wearing fine shoes, glittery shoes, leopard pattern shoes, and long, below-the-knee coats now in fashion.

After Semprini, when Tizi entered another shop, I stopped and waited in front of a coffee bar, watching a man eat potato chips from a paper bag, ten chips one after the other, as if he had a metronome timing his consumption. Ten chips, a sip of white wine. Ten chips, a sip of white wine. Maybe he had decided to go forty days without potato chips and was getting the most of them.  

To my knowledge we did not observe Ash Wednesday when I was growing up. I knew it existed. It was just something other people in other faiths observed. When I was in college, one of my friends was part of an oral interpretation competition, in a kind of oral interp choir that performed T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday.” Before going to a rehearsal of the performance, I read some of the poem. It’s long, it’s about sin and penance. When I read it, I heard, as one does, a voice in my mind reciting these words: 

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

The questioning voice, with that quality of resignation, for me culminated in this line: “Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.” 

Then I went to hear the choral reading of the poem, not knowing what to expect, and I hated it. I knew I wasn’t supposed to hate it, because these performers were among the program’s finest and because they were apprentices of a professor who gave off a light, a teacher they idolized. She must have been amazing. And they must have been amazing, too, to someone else’s ear. But they made Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” a poem I read as a meditation, into a protracted groan.  

Who knows? Sitting in the church of Sant’Andrea in full body yawn, if I had recited “Ash Wednesday” tonight, it might have sounded like a groan. 

The whole idea behind carnevale in Italy is to enjoy excess before renunciation. Carnival, Tizi likes to explain, isn’t just one day. Fat Tuesday is a season in Italy, a season that culminates on that one day. A season of your own personal excess, fat, sweets, whatever. Then carne vale. Subtract the meat, suspend the fat. For forty days. Meat, sweets, something–you give up something. If you’re that guy down in Rimini, you suspend potato chips. One sets a standard and tries to live up to it. 

It’s a challenge.

Thursday, the next day, our fast should begin in earnest. I ask Tizi what we’re going to give up for Lent. We’re in the car, on our way to her cousins’ trattoria for lunch. 

“I just remembered,” she says. 

“The sauce.”

“Right.”

“Lard,” I say.

“Right.”

“Impossible to give that up,” I say.

“We’re only here for a short time,” she says.

Some years back our daughter apprenticed for a few months with the cousins, learning pasta making, egg and flour, rolling and cutting, all done by hand, the way her nonna used to do it. She said one day when I asked, “Dad, you don’t want to know how Marco makes the ragu.”

“Sure I want to know.”

“It all starts with lard.”

Making it dark, rich, and velvety.

“So much lard. You can’t believe how much lard.”

“And the peas?” They come in a dish next to the pasta.

“Yes,” she said. “The peas too.  Lard.”

When we get there, Tizi and I ask for the tagliatelle. With ragu. And with peas. And we eat. While we’re eating a couple comes in with their teenage son. He follows them to the table, looking surly, unhappy, focused on the phone in his hand. On the sweater he’s wearing, in English, is written PLEASURES. 

A serious reader of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” writes, “The poet-pilgrim hopes to press forward, distinguishing things that last from things more frivolous, and also distinguishing ideological blindness from a turning toward the good.”  We eat. We chat with our busy cousins. Others have come for the lard-laden sauce and peas today, too, and will continue to come through the Lenten season. 

How do we turn toward the good?

In the car after lunch, on the way to our next stop, I tell Tizi what I read that morning about the Battle of Rimini in WWII, the nearly total destruction of the city. You can’t see those photos and not think of Gaza. It would seem that we have learned nothing. How do we turn toward the good?