The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel (4 page)

Ironically, a
Cappa Nera
once provided Marco and me with a stroke of luck. We had lifted a ball of mozzarella from a cheese merchant’s barrel, a slippery trick, and success made us greedy. We once tasted bread with green olives baked into the crust, and eating it had been the epicurean experience of our lives. Unfortunately, olive loaves were long and unwieldy, impossible to hide under clothing and difficult to maneuver through the crowded Rialto at a dead run. But we knew a one-eyed baker whose handicap gave us
an advantage, so we decided to tempt fate by stealing an olive loaf to eat with our cheese.

I strutted up on the side of the baker’s good eye, frankly appraising his bread. I examined his loaves with an insolent smirk, critically inspecting wares I could never buy. While the baker kept his good eye on me, Marco sneaked up on his blind side, snatched an olive loaf, and bolted. But the baker must have heard something—perhaps the susurration of shifting loaves, or maybe a shopper’s gasp. He turned at the last second and saw Marco pushing through the crowd with the olive loaf under his arm. The baker hollered, “Thief!”

Shoppers looked up, but we darted around them, fast and agile. Laughing in wild anticipation of our banquet, we recklessly ran smack into a tall
Cappa Nera
with outstretched arms. He appeared out of nowhere. They did that. We froze.

His face was a hard mix of sharp angles: a prominent brow, a cleft chin, and thin lips. Marco, the quick thinker, offered him our precious olive loaf. I pried the ball of mozzarella from my grimy pocket and proffered that as well, but the big man laughed and said, “Bold little bastards.” He gripped us each by the back of the neck, hauled us over to the baker’s stall, and leveled a look at the one-eyed merchant. He said, “Generous of you to give these two your bread. You’re a charitable fellow, eh?”

The baker’s one good eye hardened in comprehension and outrage. He said, “
Sì, signore
. I always give to the poor.” The baker shot us a cold look that conveyed his wish to kill us. Amazing what he could do with that one eye. He tightened his lips and said, “Enjoy it, boys.”

The
Cappa Nera
kept hold of our necks. “Thank the man, ingrates.”

We mumbled nervous thanks. The baker, anxious to be rid of us all, said, “
Signore
, allow me to give you a fresh panettone. Feel. It’s still warm.” He held up his prized sweet bread. “Take it. Please.”

The
Cappa Nera
barked a brittle laugh. He let go our necks and cuffed the backs of our heads, saying, “Get out of here.” We ran clumsily, hugging our food and glancing back to make sure no one followed. We kept running until we reached a quiet, garbage-strewn cul-de-sac, where we sat against a sooty wall, panting and trembling.

I looked at Marco for confirmation that we had indeed survived a skirmish with a
Cappa Nera
. A tentative smile crept onto his thin, dirt-streaked face. He said, “We did it.”

It was hard to tell under the grime, but Marco had freckles and red hair. Whenever the sun lit a rusty halo around his head, as it did that day, Marco’s hunger-pinched face somehow looked simultaneously angelic and sly.

That time we ate our fill, but even with well-honed skills and the occasional bit of luck, there were too many hungry days. Vendors and shoppers alike watched for boys like us. Most merchants chased us off on sight. Once, as we crept up behind a fat lady at a fruit stall, her arms shot out and she grabbed each of us by the hair without even missing a sniff of the white nectarines. She said, “Not today, boys,” and gave us a shove that sent us sprawling.

Some days we rummaged through garbage heaps, fighting with the other urchins for scraps of anything remotely edible. On one of those lean days Marco and I had our first argument. Sifting through a pile of trash, I found a litter of new kittens, all dead but one. I cradled the little survivor in my hand, and it pointed its tiny face at me and mewled. I remembered La Canterina’s description of me as a newborn and felt an unexpected surge of affection. I lifted the kitten out of the garbage and ignored Marco’s look of contempt as I put it in my pocket.

That day I took the great risk of snatching an entire pail of milk from a dairyman’s stall. It was an awkward thing to steal, and I left a trail of spilled milk that anyone could have followed. The dairyman chased me, but he was reluctant to leave his stall unattended
for too long. When he gave up, I still had more than half the pail full. I found a quiet spot behind a neighborhood church and hunkered down to soak the tail of my shirt in milk and coax the toothless kitten to suckle. Marco fumed. “You’re feeding good milk to a
cat
?” His eyes were round with disbelief. “Give me that miserable thing, you cabbage-head. I’ll make short work of it.”

“Don’t touch him!” I moved the kitten behind me. A dangerous sneer was forming on Marco’s face, so I said, “You can have half the milk, your fair share. What I do with my half is none of your concern.” Marco flicked the underside of his chin, but he backed down.

For two days, I fed the kitten, drop by painstaking drop, until the last of the milk soured and I finished it off myself. As I watched the helpless thing feed, something inside me softened, but not too much. On the street, you have to be careful about getting soft. I named my kitten Bernardo after La Canterina’s lost baby, and I whispered all my secrets to him, all the soft things that I dared not share with Marco.

After a few weeks, Marco tired of calling me a fool and contented himself with a snuffle of disgust whenever I took a bit of chewed fish from my mouth and let Bernardo lick it off my fingertip. One morning, Bernardo disappeared to forage for himself, and Marco said, “Good riddance.” To his disappointment—and my relief—Bernardo found us that night and every night thereafter. All cats have a homing instinct, but Bernardo was especially talented that way.

Bernardo, who had grown into a skinny ginger cat, hunted at dawn and dusk, the feline witching hours, but he always found me after dark, purring and rubbing against my leg. I cuddled him to my chest and the newly softened thing inside me responded as much as I would allow. Bernardo accepted whatever morsels I saved for him, and then he let me pet him and coo into his small, pointed ear. He slept nestled under my arm, and I took comfort from the living
warmth of him against my body. I ignored Marco’s frigid stares and caustic remarks. After all, poor Marco slept alone.

Marco and I would never discuss anything so feebleminded as the love of an animal. We limited our conversations to scheming and bragging. The most intimate thing I confessed to Marco was my wish to stow away and sail to Nubia. I didn’t have the faintest idea where Nubia might be, but, remembering my honeyed mornings with La Canterina and her soulful
canzoni
, I thought the place would be worth finding. Stowing away had always been one of my favorite fantasies, until Domingo, the taciturn, pimpled boy from the Spanish port of Cádiz, described the fate of stowaways in lurid detail.

CHAPTER IV
T
HE
B
OOK OF
D
REAMS

D
omingo always stood with his arms crossed and his hands tucked into his armpits. Self-consciousness made him stare at his feet when he spoke, and he didn’t speak so much as mumble and shrug. One afternoon, Marco, Domingo, and I found a bag of barely nibbled chestnuts in a trash heap and we shared them happily while we strolled along the docks, admiring the ships. I mentioned my plan to stow away, and Domingo dug his hands deeper into his armpits. He said,
“Boh!”
Marco and I looked at him.

Domingo mumbled, “I was nine, maybe ten, when I hid on a Spanish galleon. It was bound for Constantinople with a stop in Venice. On the second day at sea, a sailor found me hiding inside a coil of rope. He pulled me out, and the sailors shoved me around.” Domingo shrugged with one shoulder. “They were laughing. I thought it was a game. Then one of them hit me.” He scowled at the harbor. “They forced me to carry the slop buckets and fed me from the garbage. I hauled rope until my hands bled and scrubbed the deck with salt water that ran red from my cuts and blisters. Some of them kicked me every time they saw me. I don’t know why they did that, but I learned to move fast.”

Domingo’s dull eyes came alive and his face, normally placid and flat, twisted with a surge of rage. “There was a rigger … a hairy animal with rotted teeth who … who …” He swallowed hard and bit his lip. “One night he caught me while I hung over the side retching from the motion of the sea and …” Domingo squeezed his eyes shut. “He held me over the side and ripped off my pants … he did it right there!
Right there!
”

As suddenly as it had come, the animation in his face disappeared, and his voice returned to its usual monotone. “I don’t remember the rest of the voyage, but when we docked in Venice they threw me off the ship.” He kicked at the ground. “Venice is no worse than Cádiz. I can pick pockets here as well as there.”

Marco and I exchanged a look, and then Marco gave him a friendly jab. “I’m glad you’re here, Domingo. When my whore mother disappeared I was, what, about five? I would have starved without you.”

Marco always called his mother a whore. Of course she was, but that’s not what bothered him. The fact that she had abandoned him and kept his twin sister, Rufina, was the thing that stung. She kept the girl because a shock of red hair would bring a high price on the street. He’d never seen either of them again, but Marco thought that if he could find Rufina, he could save her from a life of degradation. “That stinking
puttana
left me for dead and made Rufina a whore, but I’ll show her. I’m not dead and I’ll get Rufina back. You’ll see.” Marco could barely feed himself, much less a sister, but that didn’t stop him from dreaming. He regularly accosted redheaded prostitutes with a hopeful “Rufina?” and often got slapped for his trouble.

The thing we never spoke of was that street prostitutes did not live long. The fact that Marco had never seen his mother or Rufina after that last day was ominous. It had been ten years and we all knew prostitutes dropped like flies from diseases, hunger, abuse, drink, and despair. There were few old whores in Venice, only
young ones and dead ones. We all knew it, but no one acknowledged it in Marco’s presence.

When Marco’s mother left him crying on the docks and walked away with Rufina, it was Domingo who sat next to him and gave him a crust of bread. Domingo said, “You were a sorry sight that day. Weeping, shaking, wailing, ‘Rufina! Rufina!’”

“I wasn’t crying.”

“
Boh
. You were sobbing your eyes out. And when Rufina broke away, the two of you flew into each other’s arms and held on so tight your mother could barely pull you apart. When she dragged Rufina away the girl was screaming, ‘Marco! Marco!’ You were both pitiful.”

Marco’s lip quivered. He mumbled, “We were only five.”

“I know. That’s why I fed you.”

Domingo taught Marco to survive on the street, just as Marco later taught me. By the time Domingo was about twelve, his dour, pimply face had become familiar around the harbor, and a fishmonger allowed him to clean his stall in return for fish heads and bread. Domingo performed his chores reliably, and the fishmonger, who liked his quiet way, took him as an apprentice.

That was good for Domingo, but it enraged the fishmonger’s brother Giuseppe, the same wreck of a man who swept the doge’s kitchen and hated anyone who ran into a piece of luck. Giuseppe always stank of wine and sweat; he was lazy, slovenly, and malicious. His hair was streaked with gray and he walked with a slight stoop. His chances had come and gone, and he knew it.

Giuseppe was one of those sad men so befuddled by drink that they’ve given up and are content to sit back and blame the world. He was pathetic, but too spiteful to inspire sympathy. He flaunted his failures as if they were a license to make his way by any underhanded method he could. He lived a perfect reversal of the chef’s philosophy of personal responsibility.

The chef tolerated Giuseppe for the sake of the fishmonger, a
decent man from whom we often bought the daily catch. Giuseppe had a reptilian face with slit eyes and a hooked nose blasted by broken veins, but his brother looked more amphibian—froggish and friendly. The fishmonger was a peace-loving man, but he couldn’t curb Giuseppe’s bitterness about Domingo’s apprenticeship. Giuseppe often gave Domingo a mean kick to the shin or a hard twist of the nose behind his brother’s back. He called Domingo
“bastardo.”

Marco once asked, “Why does Giuseppe hate you so much?”

Domingo shrugged and looked away. “That’s Giuseppe.”

The only subject that made Domingo talkative was the New World. He loved to repeat stories he’d heard on the docks of Cádiz. He said, “The New World is full of golden people who wear nothing but blue feathers in their hair. They live an easy life in a lush green land. Ripe mangoes fall at their feet, and fish jump out of the water into their arms.” Domingo sighed. “Imagine whole days swinging in a hammock, snacking on sugar dates.” He gazed dreamily out to sea.

Marco reached into his imagination and wove embellishments to titillate. He said, “Women in the New World dance naked and they have three breasts.” Domingo gave him a skeptical look, but Marco went on. “The shores are littered with gold nuggets, and the forests are filled with supernatural creatures who grant wishes.”

Domingo looked at his feet and laughed quietly. Marco said, “It’s true. I’ve talked to sailors, too.”

I knew better because I knew Marco. He wanted to entice me into becoming a seaman and sailing to the New World with him, and he often talked of taking Rufina there to start fresh. But poor Marco didn’t have to tax his inventiveness to tempt me. I’d already fantasized about a glorious existence beyond the horizon. I believed that in the New World I could leave behind my ignominious beginnings and create a perfect life with Francesca. My dreams always included Francesca.