My daughter, Chiara, turns five today. I get up when it’s still dark because, if I wait until after the Tuscan sun rises, it will be too hot to bake a cake. I pour myself cold coffee, then I close the windows and shutters to trap the fresh night air in the house. In the thumbed recipe book handed down for generations, I look up Grandma’s instructions for a sponge cake. Quality butter, she had said, is the secret to a good cake. But our Maremmana cow died long ago, when the grass turned brown and dry. Now, I make butter from our scraggly goat’s milk instead. Our chickens have stopped laying eggs, so aquafaba will have to do. And I use flour from sorghum, not wheat—a plant tougher and more resistant to these arid climes.
The clinking of the whisk against the glass bowl wakes Chiara. I kiss her soft cheeks, flushed already, and we both step outside, where we moved the oven to keep the house cool. The sun, red and fiery, peeks over the hills, announcing another scorching day. Soon, the crows will seek shelter, fleeing from the heat. Chiara runs off into what used to be the vineyard, her pigtails bronze in the light of dawn. The lush plants have long lost their leaves and the branches stick out of the ground like gnarled zombie hands. Chiara will never know the weight of their fruit, the juice squeezing between your toes as you squash the grapes with your feet to make wine. She will never know the meaning of the songs we sing—the joys of harvest they were meant to carry. ‘Chiara,’ I call when the cake is ready and the sun too hot to stay outside. The searing wind sweeps up the dust as we shut the door behind us.
In the cool, dark kitchen, I reach for the terracotta jar on the top shelf. I lift the lid, tilt the jar and carefully shake out five hard raisins into my palm—one for each year of Chiara’s life. If only these were raisins from our own farm. But they’ve come by sailboat, all the way from Scandinavia—the only place where grapes still grow. They cost an arm and a leg, so I keep them for special occasions. I place the raisins carefully on top of the cake, for Chiara to pick them off again with her delicate, little fingers and pop them between her smiling lips, one by one. ‘Mmm,’ she says, ‘I love raisins, Mamma.’ Then she throws her arms around me in a tight hug, and I think to myself, If only you knew, my love, raisins don’t taste anything like grapes.
Brecht De Poortere was born in Belgium and grew up in Africa. He currently lives in Paris, France. His writing has appeared in Consequence Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Every Day Fiction and elsewhere. You can find Brecht on Twitter at @brecht_dp and at www.brechtdepoortere.com
Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash.
