In search of comfort food

Ulysse declared that he needed pizza. On a hard climb the day before, he’d had two fingers in a snug pocket and had not fully extracted them before trying to make a big, powerful reach upwards. I heard the crack from where I belayed 20 m below and then he slumped onto the rope, cradling his right hand. At first, he thought he might have broken something, but it turned out that he’d just bent those fingers in a way that they were not pleased with. The day after, they expressed that displeasure by causing him a lot of pain. So, obviously, the solution was to eat pizza!

I’d been told by a local shopkeeper that there was only one restaurant open in town, but during an afternoon walk, I’d seen a little place that said “Pizzeria” on the outside. I suggested we check it out as we’d been to the other place a few times already. As we approached, there was a gaggle of jolly fellows standing outside the door: smoking, drinking, laughing. We peered inside and saw half a dozen tables, but not a single person. It didn’t seem like a pizzeria, but the jolly fellows welcomed us to go inside.

We’d concluded that the place served no pizza or other real food and were about to skulk out when the pack of fellows came inside. They confirmed cheerily that indeed, no supper was to be found there, but that was no problem! We must first have a drink and then worry about supper. They were so jolly and so insistent that we couldn’t say no, so I asked the woman who had appeared behind the bar for some red wine. She produced a big jug from under the counter and poured two small glasses. Feeling more than a little out-of-place, we stood, sipping our wine.

The tipsiest of the follows, clad in a camouflage jacket, khaki pants, and green rubber boots, wandered up, introduced himself proudly as Fabio, and started asking us questions. Some were comprehensible: where were we from, why were we in town, etc., but between his beer-blurred speech and liberal use of Sardinian language, we couldn’t understand most of what he said. Another friendly fellow, Antonio, came over to help, and though he was easier to understand, there were simply a lot of words we didn’t know. We managed to figure out that they’d been hunting (we’d earlier learned that it was the season for wild boar) and had good success, but then they lost us. I looked at Ulysse, who just grinned back in amused bewilderment. At one point, Fabio said, “Baa-a-aaaa,” like a sheep, and then added, “Boom, boom!” pantomiming that he was holding a rifle. To help us fully get the picture, Antonio put both hands up to his forehead, holding index fingers aloft like horns. The whole thing had deteriorated into a comical, slightly drunken, grown-up version of Old MacDonald’s farm. “And on that farm, he had some sheep, e-i-e-i-o, boom-boom!”

When I tried to explain that we tended to just buy our food from stores, Fabio waved his hand dismissively and said something like, “Yes, yes, you can buy, but what do you hunt?” Ulysse pulled up a picture of a moose and they looked at it admiringly, then shook their heads sadly and said that they didn’t have any moose in Sardinia.

Phones became an indispensable communication aid. Antonio showed us a photo of the back of his truck, full of carcasses—boar, I think. Since we were on the topic of food, I asked him about casu marzu, the famous Sardinian maggot cheese. He raised his eyebrows, impressed that I knew about it, but then told me that it is only available in late summer. Instead, he showed me a picture of what looked like shrivelled leather pouches that turned out to be a pile of goat stomachs! The conversation soon took another turn that left us in the dust. I looked at the lady behind the bar. She smiled sympathetically and shrugged: what can you do?

Wine finished, we decided it was time to continue our search for comfort food. I asked the bartender how much we owed, but she said the drinks had already been paid for and gestured to a fellow at the end of the bar. We went over to thank him and learned that his name was Giuseppe. He insisted that we should come back the next night, but as we exited into the cool night air, we agreed that perhaps we needed more than 24 hours to recover from that friendly linguistic whirlwind we’d naively stumbled into.

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