Ali Babà and the forty raccoons

Cinzia Romanazzi Grillo

ALI BABA’ AND THE FORTY RACCOONS

Youcanprint Self - Publishing

To my father and my mother who gave me life

To my son who has given me the joy of living it

And to my husband who has made it infernal!

Smile and life will smile at you!

INTRODUCTION

THE JOYS OF FOOD (ALIMENTARY REFLECTIONS)

A healthy life, a balanced diet, sport, few calories, no fats - how boring! Television, radio, the newspapers recommend them at least ten times a day as do our dearest and most affectionate girlfriends, who inform us with a mocking smile that we have put three kilos on our hips since last year - how sweet of them! We now live obsessed with diets and that terrible instrument of torture - the bathroom scales - which stare at us every morning and drag us onto their horrible transparent top every time we make our way to the bathroom. What a nightmare to start the day with!

Why then write a cookbook full of temptations and forbidden dreams? Simply because in a world that is going to the dogs lunch and dinner are those rare moments when everyone is really cheerful and carefree, moments when we make peace with ourselves and the world forgetting everything else. Even statesmen, negotiating after a war, do it more successfully after a banquet. Food unites people like the blended ingredients of a good sauce.

Have you ever seen anyone cry at table before a rich and lavish meal? I have… A month ago when everyone was enjoying my famous lasagne, my cousin Mafalda, who was on a diet, had only a carrot, a tomato and a cucumber – undressed - on her plate.

She wept, poor thing! How she would have loved a world where models wearing fabulous clothes are curvaceous girls, rather than the spectral figures we see who feed on an egg and three apples a day - and don’t love themselves.

Throughout my life I have inflated and deflated like a balloon every time I have tried to slim; so, to free myself from that stress , I have written and even tasted the 100-odd recipes presented here…. a real treat… Even the cover of the book, when I prepared 7kg of spaghetti alla bolognese, cocked a snook at diets; and what a pleasure, when the photographer had finished immortalising us, to tuck into that delicious dish with my girlfriends!

My grandmother always used to say that meat makes beautiful bones and perhaps she was right…

Down with diets! Down with hunger!

Up with life! Up with food!

Bon appétit!

Cinzia e Jeunevieve Makaping, famous anthropologist native of Camerun

I REMEMBER

I wake up with a start. It’s night, I’m damp with sweat, gripped by a feeling of terror and distress, I’m in another dimension where life does not exist: is this a nightmare or reality? I’m walking down a long deserted road wrapped in dense fog, I can see my mother, my father, my husband, my dearest friends but no-one recognises me, they all look at me with indifference . I call them desperately but however hard I try not a single sound comes out of my mouth. What is happening? Have I perhaps become a ghost? Then in panic and utter despair I start thinking of what their lives would have been like without me: better, or worse? Had I in some way changed the course of their existence? Had I been indispensable to any of them? Had I achieved anything it was really worth living for on this earth? Had the path of my life always followed a straight course? I am a shape without face or identity; it’s terrifying to think you may have never lived, or been worth nothing. An indescribable anguish takes hold of my whole being, paralysing my limbs: so even my son has never been born. My breath fails me while I wander through the night like a character from Shakespeare: to be or not to be…..? In the dark I can glimpse a huge, sinister shadow with eyes of ice, transparent as diamonds, with long claws stretched out towards me. Who are you, I ask, who come to disturb my dreams - are you perhaps death? No, I am loneliness, mother of your nightmares, your anxieties and your tormented thoughts; by now I am part of your life, I am you……you are me, forever! I try to control myself and start uttering sounds with my lips, touching my legs, my arms, my cheeks and as my heart beats wildly I become aware that I have a body. In the shadow I catch sight of the photograph of Gianluca who looks at me smiling as he does every morning, I see the photo of my wedding and in the library in a big frame the picture of my father and mother taken at a dance years ago; irrepressible happiness fills me entirely – if my son exists, I am alive…. I find myself lying on the floor in a corner of the room, curled up in a foetal position, as if in those moments of distress I had wanted to go back to my mother’s womb, to safety, far from any danger. I struggle up, I’ve lost all my strength. The forgotten faces of those I have loved merge magically with my tormented thoughts, dancing gaily if part of a great circus. The scenes of my life start unrolling slowly before my eyes like a film, the past comes back alive and throbbing while I am washed by liberating tears. In the mirror I can see reflected my trembling face marked by time – are those the lines of wisdom? Outside the doors of oblivion there is still a future that awaits me; it’s the other half of my life that calls me and invites me to open this great box full of surprises and mysteries: curious, I accept the challenge…. I want to look inside as deep as I can go. From above someone has given us this extraordinary gift which is life, we have been drawn from darkness to see a dazzling light, the light of the universe, let’s not extinguish it or waste it foolishly. This nightmare, like an electric shock, has awakened me from a lethargy that has lasted for months, perhaps for years, in a precarious balance between dream and reality. I was living like a mole underground locked in my neurosis. In the midst of this existential torment I can hear, through an open window, yearning notes played on a piano, and seduced by the sweetness of the music I feel my soul becoming free from matter … it’s dawn and the fog is lifting while a shy ray of sunshine lights the city. It’s enough to watch the world through a keyhole, away from the anguish, the depression, the sleepless nights. I want to see, feel, sense, grant myself a truce and begin by throwing everything behind me; I shall stop hiding my age, I even told my confessor two days ago! Long live my wrinkles! I shall start from zero, I shall try to put a lid on all that anxious anger which I have nursed inside me during the last years. I am alive, the blood pulses in my veins. I have a family that loves me, a wonderful son and friends, I can look at the stars during the warm summer evenings, hear the rain beating on the windows in winter. A marvellous world is opening its doors to me giving me a chance to join the game of life again. If we think for a moment that we have never existed, then ugly or good-looking, rich or poor, fat or thin this journey becomes for us a sweet and wonderful folly. Life often subjects us to hard trials, the obstacles we meet during our journey will be many, but at the end of the tunnel, after tackling dangerous climbs and bends, we shall once more be awaited by the light. Life is like a spiral, but at a point between the beginning and the end of the line, before our destiny has been fulfilled, it will be up to us to decide where to go. Let’s not surrender, let’s not stop, let’s go on. After the mountain we shall find ourselves in a valley of flowers where the snow has just melted while a new day, after the darkness, will show us the way. I want to stop this moment and fix it somewhere in my soul. I feel as if I have been shot by a cannon into the energy of the universe, into a clear starry sky where, free of the forces of gravity and time I can dance, light and pure, in the infinite. The material world we are so attached to is only a heavy casing which imprisons our soul and our mind, and as I hold my breath I become extremely aware of being alive. Another dimension appears to me: now I am old and tired and even my son’s hair has become visibly white at the temples. I can see the countryside of my childhood , the olive groves and the vineyards, my father and mother walking hand in hand, while memories chase each other like crazy swallows through the sky. For a moment i have challenged time and in this condition of ecstasy I can feel a mysterious force dragging me once more into the world, into the present, while a voice, in a whisper, bids me start again where I have left off. I shall start this morning by greeting my odious neighbour, his sour wife and that pest of a son who always puts his tongue out at me. I shall smile at the postman who always delivers my registered mail ten days late, at the barman who serves my cappuccino cold and without froth, and lastly at that detestable clerk at the post office, counter no.2, who has whiskers and a big hairy mole on her chin and is always admiring her false nails while she stares at me every time I see her with a snarling, satanic grimace.

I pack my bags in a flash and leave. I shall make a voyage