CONTENTS

1) The Non- Camillo Books (Introduction)

2) Early Family Stories
- Introduction
.
- "He and She"
- "Age Forty"
- "Venice..."
- "Birthday Cake"
.
- "Travelling..."
- "...Revolution"
- "Prisoner..."
- "Purgatory Cake"

3) Later Family Stories

4) Drawing Room Farces

5) Notes from Prison Camp

It was the day before the Pasionaria's ninth birthday, and she wanted assurance that we were aware of it.

"Of course," said Margherita. "Everything's under control."

"How about the cake with the nine candles?" asked the Pasionaria. "I don't want to feel ashamed in front of my friends."

"It'll be all right," I said. "I'll buy it in town tomorrow morning."

"Not at all," said Margherita. "I'm going to make the cake myself."

This was serious. The Pasionaria and Albertino looked at me in horror.

"Margherita," I murmured, "why wear yourself out? You've already done too much."

Margherita shook her head. "A mother's first duty is to bake her children's birthday cakes with her own hands." The tone of Margherita's voice was final, and the Pasionaria and Albertino turned pale.

"But if you do too much," observed the Pasionaria, "then you'll say you have a headache and I'll feel guilty--"

"I won't say a word. Mothers have to suffer in silence. As soon as we've had our coffee, you two will go to bed, and I'll bake the cake."

"Do you know how to make Paradise cake?" asked Albertino.

"No," replied Margherita.

"What she'll make is Purgatory cake," grumbled the Pasionaria, as she rose from the table.

"Will you be quiet!" Margherita cried.

"That's the way it always is," said the Pasionaria. "When my birthday comes, everybody takes advantage of it. If it was his birthday, you'd have bought the cake."

"And for yours I'm going to make it! You ought to be ashamed, saying things like that when my every thought is to make you happy!"

"I don't eat thoughts," said the Pasionaria. "I eat cake." She left the kitchen.

Albertino followed without a word, but the look he gave me was a desperate one.

Margherita finished her cigarette, then rose.

"I've got a very good recipe," she said. "The cake's as light as a feather, and it doesn't have any of those awful fats that make most cakes so indigestible. It's just eggs, sugar, corn starch, and a little baking powder."

As a matter of fact, what Margherita should have done, to make her cake even more digestible, was leave out the eggs, sugar, corn starch, and baking powder as well.

However, I could hardly tell her that, so I asked her what I could do to help.

"You get the stove good and hot, that's all. But first I wish you'd weigh out the sugar and the corn starch--here's the recipe."

I did all this very carefully, then put some wood in the stove, and stood around watching.

Margherita worked with great authority and skill: anybody who had never tried one of her cakes would have said, "There's a woman born to bake cakes!"

Now is the moment to explain that Margherita's cakes aren't bad, they're just terrible. Indeed, Margherita bakes cakes as she reasons. Using a rigid logic all her own, Margherita reaches conclusions that are the most logically illogical in the world.

Eggs, corn starch, sugar. Margherita accepts this basis, and begins beating the eggs and the sugar together in a bowl. Then she decides the mixture is too thick, and she adds a bit of Marsala. Having, in this way, obtained a mixture that is too thin, she adds some graham crackers; then she forces the whole mixture through the meat grinder; and so on and so on.

Margherita worked with great authority for some three quarters of an hour, at the end of which time she handed me a baking pan filled to the brim with a delicately yellow mixture.

"Just put this in the oven," she said. "Every once in a while, stick a toothpick in it, and when the toothpick comes out dry, take the cake out of the oven and let it cool. Then you can decorate it with this whipped cream and a little imagination, arrange the nine candles, and put it in the pantry."

She went peacefully off to bed, and I sat down in front of the oven, to stand guard over the cake. Every once in a while I opened the oven door to see what was going on.

At first the cake made no move at all save to turn a rather golden brown. Then, as the baking powder went into action, it began to swell, until finally it touched the top of the oven. Slowly it began to go back to normal, and after a time was no higher than the pan, but it must have had trouble with the brakes, for it kept getting lower and lower.

I decided to try a toothpick, but the toothpick wouldn't go through the top of the cake. It simply broke. I managed to get a nail through, however, and when the nail came out wet, I closed the oven door. At that moment the kitchen door opened, and in came Albertino and the Pasionaria in their pajamas.

"How's it going?" asked the Pasionaria.

"It's baking."

"How does it look?" asked Albertino.

"Hard to say, it's not ready yet."

We waited about ten minutes more and then had a look. The cake had fallen even lower. We managed to get a nail into it, and the nail came out dry.

I took the cake out of the oven and put it on the table. "It looks like a pancake," Albertino remarked rather cautiously.

Now the Pasionaria tried to put the nail into it, but didn't even succeed in scratching the top.

"We'll need a drill," she said, "to get the candles in."

"Or we could attach them," said Albertino, "with carpenter's glue."

"That won't be necessary," I said. "Once we put the whipped cream on it, it'll look all right and the candles will stand in the cream."

We put the cake into the refrigerator. It cooled very quickly. Then we turned the pan upside down on the kitchen table, and as the cake fell out, it sounded like a piece of wood.

It was somewhat less than an inch high, and when you struck it, it returned slowly to normal, for it had maintained a fair degree of elasticity.

We stood looking for a time in silence at the cake that should have been the lightest and most digestible in the world.

The Pasionaria's sigh was hardly audible.

"Poor Mama," she said. There were tears in her eyes.

"There's no need to dramatize the thing," I said. "We're going to counterattack. And don't forget, you're not fighting for a cake, children, you're fighting for your mother!"

I put the cake back into the oven. When I took it out again, it was as thin as a biscuit.

The problem was how to soften it. I broke off a piece and tried dipping it in milk, but it absolutely refused to absorb a drop. We then hammered it into small pieces and put it through the meat grinder.

I put the powder thus obtained into a bowl and added some Moscato wine: the result was a sluggish mass that boded no good.

I added flour, eggs, and sugar, but the mixture seemed very hard and lumpy, no doubt because the meat grinder was not as efficient as it ought to have been.

"We could make a kind of pastry," said the Pasionaria, "and then press it out with the iron."

This suggestion gave me a brilliant idea. I broke the mixture into small pieces and put them through the rollers of the machine that makes pasta. When I put all the sheets together, they formed a fairly compact mass.

"If we cook it that way," said the Pasionaria, "it'll come out like a brick."

"And," added Albertino, "it'll never rise.

"True," I said. "It's been devitalized by the rude treatment its received. We'll have to liven it up."

We dried it out in the oven, grated it, added milk and Marsala, then some baking powder, and mixed the whole thing together: the result was soft and smooth.

We buttered a pan, poured the mixture in, and put the pan in the oven.

It was clear to us, after a few minutes, that the mixture was somewhat too lively, so we took the pan out of the oven again and put a heavy lid over it, which we wired down, so that the mixture would be confined and forced to restrain its ebullience.

We put it back into the oven. We were then faced with the problem of how we were to tell when it was finished. To take the lid off would have been like breaking one of the master dams of the Po in full spate.

The Pasionaria got the drill, and we punctured holes in the lid at five or six points. From time to time we put toothpicks though the holes.

When the cake was finished, we took the pan out of the oven and let it cool. Then we freed it from the cover and trimmed it with scissors, where the lid and the top of the pan didn't exactly meet.

"To do a really good job," the Pasionaria remarked, "we should have soldered them together."

Although the cake seemed to be cooked, it did not present a very attractive appearance, because in many places the top of it had stuck to the covering.

"Now we really do need the iron," said the Pasionaria, who was a farsighted woman.

I had one slight improvement, however. I sprinkled powdered chestnut over the top, filling in all the holes, and then very carefully ran a hot iron over it. The top now looked firm and bright; we put powdered sugar over it.

The cake did not seem to be quite so light as might be desired, so Albertino went to my workroom and got my spray gun, and I inundated the cake with a light shower of white wine.

We then went on to the decoration: whipped cream, nuts, bits of candy, raisins, and crystallized fruit. After we added the nine candles, we admired the masterpiece briefly, then put it into the refrigerator.

It was dawn; we were exhausted; but Margherita was safe.

The cake looked splendid when it came to the table after dinner.

But after each of us had a slice on our plates, we looked at one another in perplexity: who was going to be the first to try it?

The Pasionaria, strong and generous as always, made the supreme sacrifice and swallowed a large mouthful.

"Extraordinary!" she cried.

It was, in truth, a very good cake; and Margherita was loaded with praise.

"It's all in a day's work," she said coolly. "I can do a lot better."