The story that I propose to you tonight has participated in the contest" Good words ". It was necessary to write a story, any genre, whose opening words were necessarily the one signed by the writer Valentina Fortichiari.
The contest "The Buoneparole, conceived by the cultural association" Women's Initiative "together with" the Other Library "is part of the program" Abbiategusto ", the food and wine festival held in Abbiategrasso the last weekend of November dedicated to the flavors, good food, the art of receiving, at the pleasure of knowing better products and places from which they come.
And it is precisely the idea of \u200b\u200bcombining literature and taste, food and words, that seven years makes the competition was born. The authors who have written the opening words of the previous years were: Carmen Covito, Margaret Oggero, Dacia Maraini, Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti, Modignani Sveva Casati, Gianni Biondillo and Valeria Montaldi.
E 'was inspiring words from the Fortichiari. Here it is.
cherries, grapes and chestnuts-the flavor of love
He hands me cherries by hand with long, tapering fingers. No, not a gesture of love. At least, not yet.
Talk incessantly, but I'm wandering in my thoughts, wet with rain at night, when - sick baby - my mother forced me to eat rice and milk, which I hated. I'm not cured, ever, I mean the feelings healed, healed with love.
Mangia, still repeating my mother, years later, as if eating were a rite of salvation even in adulthood.
slow to anger, abounding in love: the man by the kind gesture leads me where he wants, has already decided the way to go, but not together, not yet. I'm in a hurry, hurry. And while it gives me a couple of cherries that are the color of wine, smiles and invites me to slow. Wait. (Incipio V. Fortichiari)
look, the mature wheat, the grape blush, the chestnut trees that drop their curly leave full. And while the wait nourishes the soul, he is beside me with a disarming simplicity. As the water in a river bed. I'm running, he embraces me and I damming.
Sometimes I wonder what made us meet. Like a leaf in the palm of the hand in an autumn evening. I was out to buy fruit and vegetables. The sky in November lost all colors, as if someone washed them away without mercy. I was out to buy colors: red and yellow peppers for a good mood, grapes, red and black for happiness, squash blossoms and spinach for the nostalgia.
My mother was a single woman. My mother had a body that was not listening, not listening to a husband, a daughter who did not know. When my mother looked after me with white recipes I did not understand yet that the white of the recipes was a ritual magic, an alchemy to banish from us all that fear. I hated his monochrome plates, colorless, odorless. Today I care
with colors. My dishes are rainbows of flavors, and when I sit at the table I feel that the secret of a healthy heart is a delicious blend of flavor, color and love.
If that night had not gone to buy fruit and vegetables on the street corner, I would not have known this man from the great and wise hands, handing me in the summer cherries and chestnuts in autumn. As if the flavor gushes from her fingers to feed the soul. When he wakes up and asks me if I'm happy I feel the aroma of coffee, the fragrance of life in the kitchen. And I know that this is what I have been looking for. And I know that this is what my mother never had. (Gi)
