Maria Teresa

Out for dinner in Canareggio with my wife, a friend and an old friend of hers, Maria Teresa. Maria Teresa was waiting for us at the restaurant* when we arrived; this being Venice, a fish restaurant.

At the time she was eighty, alert with an unbending desire to live that I could only admire. Vigorous both in speech and gesture, she was living her life right up to the very last day. Other details have faded from view, but I recall her in a red skirt cut at the knee, black tights and black pumps. A woman, sure of her looks, seeing no reason in her age to conceal her assets, yet dressed with a precise diginity: she looked terrific. She was ageing very, very well indeed. She had a talent for life itself.

We started with calamari, sarde in saor and scampi. If I remember correctly, we drank prosecco and the four of us chatted pleasurably. Maria Teresa lit up however, the moment I laid my fork on my scampi.

’No, no, use your fingers’

Maria Teresa being Neapolitan, this injunction was accompanied by a battery of hand gestures - the Italians are famously unconvinced of the merits of purely verbal communcation - and multiple repetitions of the instruction ’Your fingers, your fingers...’ What could I do? I laid down the cutlery and set to work with my mouth.

Of course, on a purely practical level, cutlery is unsuited to shellfish and it is just easier to work your mouth over shell and meat, sucking off juices and olive oil as you go. Without the distraction of having to handle the cutlery, you can just concentrate on the simple sensual pleasure of the food, we all know how rich and subtle the mouth can be when we use it well. In comparison knife and fork offer very poor sport.

As I ate, Maria Teresa offered encouragements, evidently pleased that I had taken her advice and she expressed her satisfaction by expounding on her theory of sex and food: that you fuck (her word) like you eat, that you can tell if someone’s any good in bed by watching them at table.

She started talking about when she was younger and that when she was attracted to a man, the first thing she would do would be to take him out to eat. To see how he performed at table, to observe what relationship he had with his sensual nature, to understand what kind of animal he was. Only having passed this audition would she consider taking him to bed. In fact on one occasion she had her eye on a man but called it off after having seen his poor performance in the restaurant. As she told this story, her voice shaded with irritation and contempt at the memory of the man who had disappointed her: no amount of physical beauty could ever compensate a man if he didn’t have the goods in this department.

Of course, she was perfectly right. To be able love someone with your body is not remotely connected to appearance and it begins with your own relationship to yourself; to turn a head is only a start. I admired her unwillingness to waste a night with an inadequate lover and her acumen in knowing how to discern the good ones from the bad ones. I had to admire too the style of the lecture itself. Driven by the need to impart this essential information she cared not who heard her. The couple next to our table with their nine year old daughter kept giving us nervous glances, though I am sure that that young woman would have a much better chance of a fulfilling life by listening to Maria Teresa’s advice than by torturing her body to make it resemble Paris Hilton.

We finished our meal and stood up to go home. Maria Teresa helped me with my overcoat and as her hand glided down to the small of my back, I did wonder how things might have turned out had we met a while before.

*Paradiso Perduto, Canareggio 2540, 30121 Venezia. Tel. 041.720581