Tartufo

by Kira Jane Buxton

Aria lifts her nose, and the whole world simultaneously expands and distills. A drama unfurls before her. Scents rise and swirl, bullied around by a light breeze. Some hover like small clouds above stones. There are the tentacled and tailed. A few sing. Some are like small poems. Many are ephemeral, quick as a cough. There are those that snarl, some snicker. Animal spoors trail with confidence like the smoke of a cigar. Some frolic like a dragonfly drizzling itself across a blue summer sky. Others haunt fallen leaves. They are bright and alive, these auras. They speak of sagas. Of sex. Birth. Battles. Death. The soil itself spells out life in all its fine notes—breath, death, decay, regeneration. A funky subterranean stew of the living and the dead simmering in a crumb kingdom. Where silverfish and centipedes are giants. Alliances form, wars start nearby. Sly fungi barter with the sunken veins of trees, sucking up ambrosia in their straw structures.

And all around, trees releasing heady waves of resin, each as bright as a burst of laughter.

Aria has found a black truffle. Giovanni turns over the warty gem in his palm. It is the size of a Ping-Pong ball. He smooths a thumb over the knobbled landscape of its surface. Tiny holes tell him that a burrowing mouse has nibbled it here and there, and who could blame it? He lifts the truffle to his nose and sniffs its magic. First, he registers the coat of damp, wormy dirt it wears, but then comes that animalistic horseradish and funk of good grana cheese. Leathery, nutty, yeasty, it has his heart racing, this naughty little oyster of the soil. And because the truffle is at its freshest, plucked right out from beneath the earth, it tells its truth and fills Giovanni’s senses with its ephemeral high notes—a quick pineapple kiss of sweetness. Eyes squeezed shut, Giovanni is hypnotized, whorled off his feet with a flood of emotion. Nostalgia wraps him in tepid waves. Fond memories of other truffle hunts. A shared plate of pasta and shaved truffles with Paolo, fingers interlaced under the table. Paolo in the early days, with his summer skin and beautiful black hair. His silly experimental mustache, marbled stomach muscles. The tidy trail of dark hair peeking out from the waistband of his swimming trunks.

The emotion summons a clearer picture of his father raising a belt high above his head, blue lips and face filled with hate. A painter by trade and a bully to his only son for loving boys. Boy. Only darling Paolo. Only ever Paolo for as long as he lived and beyond. Paolo, the beautiful soul he would leave his father for every day of eternity.

“Fagiolo, find it!” calls Giovanni. And Fagiolo has forgotten what it is precisely that he is supposed to find, but no matter, he is racing into the woods again. This moment is the best moment of his life, only to be topped by the next moment and the next. Giovanni is here, Aria is here, and they are in the woods with all these wonderful smells that are so much more than smells—they are emotions, stories, songs, secrets, riddles, thick and rotten gamey smears to roll in. Here is the slime of a carcass to roll in, and how he wriggles until he is wearing the remains of the rabbit, and how glorious this all is. And now he has found a stick he likes. Dropping the stick and with a billowing inward rush of purpose, he remembers that he is supposed to bring Giovanni something, and so he does, racing back up to a pair of olive rubber boots, ready to receive the treats that he can smell sitting in that waxy jacket pocket.

The white truffle rolls down the mudhole toward Fagiolo, and with a swift sloop—he swallows it whole. Fagiolo eats a whole truffle and is inebriated with it. What a day! What a life! Giovanni moans, raising his hands in the air. His apprentice truffle-hunting dog has just snorted a good hundred euros’ worth of earthen gold.

A white truffle is almost impossible to cultivate. It is forged by cryptic collaborations in a cauldron of darkest soil. It has traded with the trees, made discreet dealings with microbes. Fused to the tree roots like a good growth, plum-like, this not-so-tiny god has bulged to hideous perfection, sending out its intoxicating cry to be eaten so that it may spread its spores with the digestive aid of squirrel, rat, pig, dog, human. It does not discriminate. But timing is everything. Every second that truffle is out of the ground is a diminishing. Seconds tick toward the death of this warty diamond. Delicate, demanding; within five days, it will lose its enthralling spell completely.

Giovanni caresses the humungous fungus filling his hands. A fierce living perfume of the largest truffle he has ever seen envelops him. An earthy aphrodisiac.

Giovanni not only believes he holds a prized truffle. An incomparable lump of gold with no equal. The rarest among rubies. He believes that his clever little companion Aria has just gone and found what is about to be the most coveted truffle on earth.

Worse—she smells fear. Fear is turpentine and the crushed bodies of beetles. It menaces him with the shapeless grace of a gas leak.

Giovanni fears what he knows is to come. The truffle will incite hysteria, greed. Worst of all, danger. Tartufai—truffle hunters—have committed the most heinous of crimes over tartufi. Over forest territory, high-end buyers, the innocent dogs who find them. Where there be treasure, there be pirates.

“Oof, Giovanni, I thought I smelled you!” laughs Tommaso. Giovanni can only imagine what the villagers are smelling. He has brought a bull of an aroma into the piazza. Beneath the towel, bellowing fetor and funk in steaming clouds.

Love is a truffle. Delicate. A rarity that takes time to cultivate. A recipe of the right relationships. Sometimes with a too-short shelf life, he thinks. It is an erotic entanglement, an alchemy of chemistry and a seduction of the senses.

The villagers stare at the hulking diamond of desire. Its staggering size. Sitting on the table like the unearthed crown of a medieval king. Knobby and tumorous, each gnarled protrusion of it like the burl of a grand old oak. With the whipping off of the towel, they are now all under its scent spell. An aromatic canticle releases tantalizing notes. The scent of a truffle speaks to each soul individually. Plucking at the pain of longing and potential. Some of the villagers smell desire, others dreams, many destiny. Memories and a bit of magic are conjured. The villagers stare, agog, as though it were a lamp. As though they are waiting to meet the djinn trapped inside.

Except Giovanni. He knows exactly what is happening. The madness has begun. The spell of the truffle has been cast. Here comes hysteria. He has witnessed mania around truffles, even tiny ones.

chef de cuisine, Adroa Mbabazi. Fastest fingers and finest culinary creative Umberto has known. But due to pressures from the competitive hustle of haute cuisine, Chef Adroa is also taking part in a migraine trial and wears a mouth guard to deter him from grinding away his own teeth in the pepper mill of his mouth.

Sous Chef Ichika Tanaka. A chef who handles flavors like an intrepid pioneer of the tongue, a wayfarer of the avant-garde and the unexpected. A chef who has also explored the emergency ward three times this year for some equally enterprising accidental self-stabbings and who has taken to wearing her chef hat even outside of the kitchen due to several sizable bald spots.

pastry chef, Alban Toussaint, a master of sugar work, a chocolatier who once built an eight-foot Eiffel Tower out of cacao, but who is also on medication for “sleep cooking” after ...

Sauté Chef Farah Ahmad, small and ferocious, the self-proclaimed ...

He sometimes remembers the never-ending hours of a single day biking around his home village as a boy. Now, the world is moving faster, and he is moving slower.

Chef Umberto speaks to his hastiness of cooks in a voice rich and robust as ragù. “I want you all to remember that we are sorcerers of taste and scent. Scientifically speaking, smell and the memory are linked by the biological makeup of our brains. Emotion and smells are inextricable because they are stored in our olfactory bulb as one memory. And we must create a visual extravaganza on every plate because we humans smell in color.”

Chef Umberto knows that to become truly extraordinary, they must be dismantled and rebuilt. Rising stars must sink or swim. And a truth about stars is that the bigger they are, the quicker they burn up their fuel supply.

Chef Umberto doesn’t feel old, but it does feel that everything is changing fast. Does he take issue with these changes? Certainly not. He wants to get it right, to remain relevant; it’s just that he can’t get his matured mind to retain these shifts in language and sacrilegious online food trends. He still has an insatiable fire inside him, but maybe he is ready for a change of pace. During the few hours he is in bed, he has taken to calling out their names and pronouns in his sleep.

“Remember that each dish is a journey, a nostalgic foray into the past or the possibilities of the future. This is about creating new neurons in the human brain through taste and scent and texture. Through food.

“A clitoris?” Umberto raises his eyebrows and twists his mouth. He nods his head vigorously. “Very good. And what would you suggest we add to the dish to represent it?” “A pomegranate?” Chef Alban Toussaint asks, thumbing the bottle of Lexapro in his pocket. The other rising stars all pull faces suited to sewage smells. Chef Alban Toussaint had not expected his lack of experience with the female anatomy to hinder the culinary career that is the reason for his lack of experience with the female anatomy.

In the high-end culinary world, it can be difficult to regulate your stress levels, so the chefs often find themselves racing through relaxing activities—engaging in frenzied knitting, high-speed gardening, and listening to audiobooks at three times the natural pace.

Chef Umberto is here to expand the frontiers of food. He is here to push his people and his patrons until either their minds or their pants explode.

In a rather boring way, Chef Umberto finds that he is utterly untouchable.

“This networking of the creative impulses is an integral process in creating a culinary masterpiece. It cannot, ever, be interrupted. I will be available when we are finished here. Tell the person here to see me that I will be with them when we have given the time this creative exploration asks of us.” He lowers his orange frames to the phallus on the plate. He is still very much not looking at her.

“Marilyn,” says Chef Umberto through gritted teeth. In the beginning, their entanglement was an irresistible intoxication. Forbidden fruit. Chef Umberto finds the generation gap is sometimes quite charming, like when over a text he told Marilyn he was listening to the Beatles, and she assumed he had taken up entomological studies. But often it is less charming, like when she misunderstood the identity of his old VCR and forcefully inserted her cheese sandwich into the tape deck. Perhaps he struggles most with the particular horror that, although she is dating a world-class chef, she still insists on eating an inelegant hunk of cheese clapped between sacrilegious slices of white bread.

Never the lone poliziotto of Lazzarini Boscarino, whose most prolific police work was the apprehension of a pants-pilfering goat when it absconded with a clothesline. And, though he has never spoken of it since, the time Poliziotto Silvio was called into the piazza because a rubbish bin was pulsating with a suspicious object believed to be a bomb but that turned out to be an abandoned vibrator. A cold case that has never been solved.

There is only one gourmet comestible that can transfix him this way. The white truffle. To Chef Umberto Micucci, success is the smell of a truffle. Woodsy reek. Garlic gas. Sweat on leather. An earthen umami cologne. Naughty sulfuric skunk of the finest marijuana. But what he smells now is knocking his socks off. A bomb has detonated in his cucina, diffusing the most intoxicating lust potion. He has never smelled any truffle quite like the little lumps he imagines are waiting for him in that odd bundle Giovanni is cradling. And—what luck. Lately, with all the dry weather and changing climate, truffles have been stunted and strange, most offerings reminiscent of dehydrated Glis glis spleens. Piattelli—little plates—they call them. The value of truffles has skyrocketed in recent years. The pungent little treasures in Giovanni’s bundle might actually be worth their lofty price tag.

Chef Umberto has known Giovanni since he was a young man, cultivated this relationship like roots and a friendly fungus. Cut out the middleman. Chef Umberto will pay Giovanni handsomely—maybe a few thousand euros—and then he will sneak right past the dealers and take it to an international auction house. And—a good guess—sell it for more than half a million. Business is business. And Chef Umberto is a boar about his business. Chef Umberto is already famous. He is about to become infamous.

Chef Umberto Micucci now stands alone in a kitchen newly denuded of knives with Giuseppina Micucci and the largest truffle in the world. Not a word has passed between the estranged couple in eight months. Another dilemma for Chef Umberto—the truffle is a ticking clock, a potential for fortunes to seep away every second, and here he finds himself standing alone with the only human on earth he is afraid to hurry.

“Berto, listen to me. Do not take the truffle for yourself. I did not marry a monster.” “You married a man with ambition, and you couldn’t handle my commitment to my art, so you gave up on me and filed for divorce,” he seethes. “Don’t you dare tell me who I married! I fell in love with simple ribollita you, not lobster-boiled-in-LSD you, you pompous cretin!” “Pina, this art is who I am; you know it better than anyone, and when you talk like this, what you are saying is that you don’t love who I truly am!”

His heart kicks. Giuseppina. Pina. His Pina. There is no one more alive. She is an astronomical force, all of life helpless to her gravitational pull. A true star. Umberto has cooked for kings and sheiks, presidents and princes, and no one has come close to fascinating him in the way Giuseppina does. She is the rarest of truffles. Changes the air around you. Umberto was doomed to be born in the same village as this treasure. Doomed from the moment he, as a little boy, laid eyes on her. Doomed when, during one of their earliest interactions, she handed him half a bombolone and demanded to date him for one whole hour. Doomed because Giuseppina sees right through him; she always has. She holds a mirror up to the man inside, to everything he has spent a lifetime running away from. Umberto reinvented himself by diverting from classic Italian fare, flinging foie gras in the face of his ancestors. Peppering every delicacy with his irreverent personality. Proving with every adventurous plating that he is not provincial. And he has paid the price for it. And so he disappears further and further down the rabbit hole of experimental cuisine. It’s what pulled him out of the dirt. Made him money. It’s how he runs from his roots. But one smirk from Giuseppina and he is that little boy holding his breath and half a bombolone, hopelessly and utterly in love.

It is true that the lines of their reality have been blurred due to a microdose of MDMA in the amuse-bouche. But it is the love potion of a giant truffle that is truly evoking their carnal appetites.

He takes a long inhale, breathing her in. He savors a spice of star anise running through her veins. Some solvent smoldering just beneath her skin. He imagines she smells of a wished-upon star. The heady poison of her perfume, dismantling him slowly—death by hibiscus and honey. She is bread and warm butter. A million memories swim from these scents. They mingle and taunt him, all in cahoots with a tale the truffle tells. Umberto is transfixed. He has, all these many months, been paying his high-powered road hog of a lawyer a fortune to procrastinate with the divorce proceedings. Because he is hanging on to hope. Because Marilyn is a plastic strawberry and Giuseppina is foie gras. She is the finest fiorentina steak.

For Marilyn, the truffle does not elicit some of the deeper emotional responses it has for some souls. To young Marilyn, it smells as if a rugby team from her homeland had spent lockdown in their locker room, kneading aged Roquefort with their feet and then straining it through soiled jockstraps. Gagging, Marilyn manages, “Oh my god! Who farted?”

The Novelli patrons watching are overwhelmed by emotion. By truffled nostalgia wafting in from the cucina. The two humans in front of them are a volatile substance. Warring splendidly. They are a chemical reaction, this man and this woman, like the flame of a candle. The patrons don’t need to understand one word of Italian to know that they are witnessing a spectacle of the heart. Almost everyone in the room can relate, riding down memory lane on the powerful pheromones of a truffle. Many are quite overcome, tears streaming down upon their scorpions-on-sticks.

What a far cry from the Big Apple, she thinks, as a bulbous-eyed, micro-handed clergyman goggles her from the wall. She flew to New York once for a conference on animal hematology. Fell in love with the fizzing spectacle of it all. Trumpeting traffic, peppy flashes of neon, buildings glittering like tall gods. A million colorful coats striding across streets smoking from their manholes. The bright, living smell of the city—sizzling sausages, sautéed garbage, every perfume prickling the nose. Hope and hot coffee. Urine slicing through it all, screaming “This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.” She recalls savoring creamy spoons of cheesecake melting in her mouth, her heart chasing the irrepressible pulse of a city pirouetting around her. What she would have given to have left with the confidence New Yorkers seem to wear so stylishly.

“No, goat! Back! Get back!” Delizia can hear the panic rising in her voice. Her neck flushes red. She should have cut the video on her stream. But the goat is undeterred by her admonitions. He strides toward Delizia and the truffle. Delizia grabs the closest thing on the table, which so happens to be a medieval longsword. She lifts it into the air. The goat halts. He is taken aback. The feathered human is not as wet nor as weak as he’d originally suspected. This looks a lot like the stick his farmer wields, though this one is shinier, unfamiliar, and therefore quite terrifying.

Her cooking is a form of worship. Praise folded into an eggy pappardelle. A sermon in every sprinkling of chestnut flour. Time evaporates as she melds Tuscan tradition with the ingredients gifted to her by a garden. She comes from a long legacy of pastry pinchers, seasoners, and simmerers. Souls who listen to the language of garden growth. Her own Babbo was the proud village baker for all his life. In the cucina, Nonna honors her alchemist ancestors, awakening the spirit of their souls with flour fingers and the deepest of roots.

Each mouthful embodies science and soul and is a bright expression of this woman’s heart. Food can be comfort to everyone, so she fills them all up. Creativity digested into contentedness. Recipes traveling down through time and these Tuscan hills to the bowls of her beloveds.

In the company of her grandmother is the only place Vittoria feels safe. Everywhere else—school, home—feels unsteady, as though the soil is sliding beneath her. Cooking with Nonna is when the whirling chaos of being an eleven-year-and-eleven-month-old stills. Warm waves unfurling from the hearth. A sizzling tale spat by pancetta and oil. Her nonna seasoning an afternoon. Squeezing love from lemons.

“What really is a truffle?” Nonna’s hand hovers over Saint Christopher. She stares at her granddaughter, a slow smile burgeoning across her face. “Well, it depends on who you ask. There is a whole kingdom underneath the soil that we cannot see. All manner of fungi spread tiny threads through the earth—each thinner than spider silk or a single strand of saffron. The fungi are creators and destroyers of life; there are recyclers and undertakers. Some are friends and some are enemies in this dark kingdom.” “That sounds terrifying.” “Not at all. Fungi are essential to life. Without fungi, we would not have wine, beer, cheese, or chocolate! Or coffee!”

“Fungi are that important. And they do this work quietly, invisibly. Now, a truffle is the particular fruiting body of a particular fungus. It is the treasure of this kingdom. A subterranean jewel that only grows when there are good relationships underground between certain trees and fungi. Only when the soil is soft and the summer rains are just right. Only when there is a tree that is ready to form a partnership with the fungi and share food.”

“But the truffles look so ugly. Like potatoes from another planet. Why do people want to dig them up?” “Ah, that is part of the magic and trickery of truffles, you see. It is true, they aren’t much to look at. What they look like—unfortunate little lumps that make a potato look glamorous—and what they represent—wealth, refinement, power—are at odds. People love truffles because of their captivating smell. They are a very, very expensive ingredient.”

“Truffles are treated as more valuable than gold because they are so rare. And when something is worth a lot of money, it invites greed and corruption. Corruption worse than a worm inching its way through the truffle itself.”

the truffle—especially the white truffle—is mysterious. And when something is mysterious, man tries to unlock its secrets for himself. But maybe not everything is a problem to solve or a creature to be cultivated. When we embrace the mysterious, we relinquish our chokehold on control and accept that there is more to life than we can see and know. Isn’t that refreshing?”