A Thousand Days in Tuscany (18 page)

We understand that the study of even the merest jot of these lands and their stories would ask thirty lifetimes. But we’ve begun. It seems important that we’ve begun.

I am a sanguine who can walk a sanguine’s shoals. If it were only me in this life, perhaps I’d risk writing for my bread. Or set up some sort of rustic
osteria
so I could cook and bake each day for a few locals and pilgrims. But we are two, and Fernando lunches poorly on rainbows. And so this preparation feels good. It feels right. But there are also moments when it seems a bauble, like a Tuscan revival of
The Boxcar Children.
I think back to some of the characters in my life—those who passed through it gently, those who trampled it. To some of the latter group, our plans would be flicked like ashes from the square shoulders of their Zegna suits or drop-kicked by the hand-sewn toe of a Hogan loafer. They would say we are buying lifetime tickets to the threater of the absurd. But that’s okay. Meanwhile there’s the consulting work, the first cookbook to edit, the second cookbook to write. The banker in Fernando has kept pristine records of
every lira we spend and announces, now and then, that life here—life how we live it here—costs not one-fifth of life how we lived it in Venice. If we’re not exactly flush, we have enough to buy a little time. “So, show me,” I say, perhaps too lightly for him.

“Sit down and concentrate,” he chides, spreading his papers.

He traces his fingers along the itineraries he’s constructed for three different week-long tours. He has isolated the towns we’ll visit, the
trattorie
and
enoteche
and
osterie
where we’ll dine, the villas and country houses where we’ll lodge. He has considered, measured the distances necessary to travel during each day of the route, he’s balanced cultural jaunts with gastronomic ones, composed a harmony between rural and village events, demonstrated where and when we shall rely on our experts. Not waiting any longer for the Turkish fairy to do it, Fernando is carving a path.

As I look at the programs all defined and in contiguous form, the chaff trimmed, the meed of them transparent, revealed as a grape just peeled of its skin, I say, “Bravo, Fernando.” I know that’s all I need to say. We sit long into the afternoon at the unset table, our lunch still to be cooked. We talk about the canal through which to launch our program. Because we will develop a specific route for each group we host, we know the number of tours must be very limited. Ten weeks a year to begin. But who is our audience, who is it that will be inspired, refreshed by coming here to us? Maybe they are adventures
more than travelers, people who’ve already followed the predictable routes, who now want to
be
in Italy rather than scuttle over it. We’ll see.

L
ATER
,
WE DRIVE
over the mountains to Sarteano. A jaunt to watch the sky change at end of a day. Just beyond the road’s peak, I notice a bramble of blackberry bushes, their rain-washed fruit preened in the leaving light.

“Can we stop to pick some?” I ask.

We climb down into a mud trench. There is a miasma of berries. Branches and tendrils wound and woven together and bound up in thorns, the berries overripe and dripping juice at the barest touch. We pick them, carefully at first, placing a berry at a time in the bucket we keep in the trunk for such events until we taste one and it’s so sweet, a besotted sweet, sweet like no blackberry before it, and so we scrap the bucket and go directly from hand to mouth, picking faster and faster, damning the barbs of the vines now, laughing so the juice runs out of our mouths, trickles down our chins, and mixes with the blood from our thorn-pricked fingertips.

Thunder. Great ponderous cracks of it. Raindrops. Large, plopping ones, healing ones that feel like tenderness. Climbing up out of the ditch, we head for the car with every chance to outrun the storm. I don’t want the dry port of the car. I want the rain. I want
to be washed by this water that smells of grass and earth and hope. I want to be drenched in it, made supple in it like a shriveled fruit in warm wine. I want to stand here until I’m sure my body and my heart will remember the privilege of this life. Never minding that we are cold and wet all over, we tramp through the skirring furies of the storm and I think, once again, how much I want what I already have. I shout, “I love you,” to Fernando, who’s picking over in the next gully, but my voice can’t penetrate his falsetto rendering of “Tea for three and three for tea.” Though he well knows it’s “two,” he prefers “three,” for the better rhyme.

“
O
GGI SONO BELLIGERANTE.
Lasciatemi in pace.
Today I am belligerent. Leave me in peace.” Inked out in a bold slant on thick white paper pinned to his shirt, this is the message Barlozzo wears one morning up at the bar. Signora Vera shakes her head, the oysters in her eyes sliding upward, nearly out of sight.

“Preciso come un orologio svizzero, lui ha una crisi due volte all’anno.
Precise as a Swiss watch, he has a crisis twice a year,” says Vera. An apology flecked with admiration.

But since this is a duke behavior we’ve yet to encounter, we stand quietly next to him, sipping, shooting furtive smiles across the divide, longing for one of them to touch down into his exclusive estates. Nothing. I sneak a look at Barlozzo and then look hard at my
husband, thinking that this duke behavior is also a Fernando behavior, even if his comes without such a helpful warning label. We shuffle about, order another cappuccino, waiting for the
momentaccio,
the evil moment, to pass, beginning to think it must all be some foolish affectation. But the
momentaccio
doesn’t end. As we pass him on the road later that day, his warning notice still intact, he barely brakes his trot. The next day we see him not at all, nor the next after that. Nearly a week passes before he raps a four o’clock knock on the stable door, steps inside. Tattered, broken he seems and I want to hug him and feed him. I want to wash him. He sits at the table and I set a tiny glass of brandy before him, stand nearby. Not even a sigh has one of us spoken.

“People, especially people who live in small clutches like we do, tend to be a chorus of sorts, everybody singing the same song, if in different keys. Everyone endorses the thoughts of everyone else here. And this, in most part, thwarts any hope one man has of meeting up with himself, let alone with the peace it takes to nourish one or two of his particular hungers. Being on intimate terms with the cause of one’s own sufferance is the only way to kill it off, to choke its haunting. It’s the hardest work of all. And each one of us must do it for himself. Most of the pain in life is caused by our insistence that there is none. There are times when I just have to be alone, when I can’t tolerate another minute of anyone else’s chattering, much less
their pontificating,” he says, himself in his own pontifical fever and worrying the week’s stubble on his face.

Barlozzo paints when he talks. He prepares the canvas, splashes on the color, and throwing down his brushes sometimes, he opts for the thicker texture gained from a pallette knife. This is one of those times. “These past few days I’ve just been walking down the past like it was a country road, squinting at my own history, piece by piece.”

“And so?”

“And so here I am all fragile and naked as though I’d misplaced my sack of tricks, as though I’ve awakened from some long dream. But I think the dream was my life. It’s like I’d been sleeping on a train and suddenly arrived at my destination having seen nothing of the route. There’s all this howling going on inside me but I’m not sure if I still
feel
anything. Do you think I’m a crazy old man?”

“Yes, of course you’re an old crazy man, one who’s suffering from his autumn crisis just like Vera said you were. You’re a crazy old man and a duke and a teacher and a child and a satyr. Why would you want to be one thing less than you are?”

He doesn’t answer. Barlozzo never answers unless he likes the question. He shifts his bones as though the new position will make him less visible to me. He knows I feel, even see, that he has more to tell. But he wants to be finished more than he wants to continue. He sips the brandy.

I look outside and watch as the day consigns itself to the night in a last great heap of fire. The sight goads my courage. I risk invasion.

“What else is troubling you right now?”

“It’s not what, it’s
who.
Time. He’s a blackguard, Chou. I didn’t even notice how old I’d grown until we began staging our little renaissance of the past. When you all pick up and leave—and you will pick up and leave—will I go back to spending my afternoons playing cards with the Brazilian shepherd on the hood of his Saab? It’s been years since I’d remembered how good a
castagnaccio
can taste, longer even since I’d sat in the fields and really looked at a night sky. I didn’t know I’d surrendered all of my mystery and damn near all of my defiance. Did you know it’s defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself—if he loses these, he loses his voice. I’m faded, spent, yet I’m young and eager. Or is that only memory? I was born for, built for, a certain life that no longer exists. Oh, I don’t mean that all of it’s gone. Some of the appetites for life as it used to be still survive but it’s not the same. Can’t be the same. There’s an emptiness that comes with plenty. It’s that same sprezzatura, that nonchalance we’ve talked about before. I feel hollow and dulled most of the time, as though it’s only in the past where I can find myself. I’m my own ancestor. I’m full of history but
I have no present. I feel like I’ve lasted too long, while others didn’t last long enough.”

I’m not sure who these others are who didn’t last long enough. But I know he needed to say all this, to take it out of the fusty hole inside him and bring it to the light, if even for a minute. Still, he’s holding fast to some part of it, the hardest part. The duke is sitting on something just like a Sard sits on a stone laid over the firepit where his supper cooks. I understand that the argument is closed for now.

“What’s happened since I last saw you? Have you redrawn the boundaries of Tuscany?” he asks with a wide, fake smile.

Fernando brings out his portfolio of the programs and hands one to Barlozzo, who reads them slowly and without comment, placing them neatly back into the folder. He closes the folder. He looks at Fernando and then at me, back at Fernando. He’s smiling from his eyes now, shaking his head, still saying not a word.

“Allora,
well?” asks Fernando.

He doesn’t like that question either. I take another shot.

“Listen, would you like to come with us next week up into the Val d’Orcia? We’re going to evaluate one of the programs, go through it day by day, see how it all fits.”

“Not if I have to wear the same white sneakers Americans wear. I’ve called Pupa and she’s roasting pheasants. I’m really hungry. Aren’t
you so very hungry, kids?” he asks as though bread and wine and the flesh of a bird can fill up emptiness.
“Aperitivi
at the bar? 7:30?”

F
EELING MORE UPHOLSTERED
than dressed this evening, I’m wearing a new skirt, one I’ve made with leftover lengths of drapery fabric from my house in California. The skirt is red, an amaranthine red, velvet and dark and like burgundy before it goes brown. There were only eighteen-inch widths of it from where I’d trimmed the hems of the too-long drapes in my bedroom, so it’s a tiered skirt I’ve put together—wide, overlapping ruffles of velvet attached to a taffeta lining. It’s heavy and warm and nice with a thin rusty-colored sweater. Boots and a shawl and Opium complete my winter costume, and here we are at one of Pupa’s long tables, shoulder to shoulder with a party of Hollanders. They tell us they’ve been renting the same nearby farmhouse in Palazzone each November for twenty years, but even without that introduction I think we would all be easy together. We make our way through a heap of
bruschette
and then a great tureen of
acquacotta,
cooked water—a beautiful soup built of porcini and tomatoes and wild herbs that Giangiacomo ladles into each person’s dish over roasted bread and a perfectly poached egg. Up through the fine porcini steam and the fumes of honest red comes the thick Hun-ish accent of one of the Hollanders asking, “Do Tuscans drink wine at every meal?”

Just then, holding aloft two giant platters, Giangiacomo enters, followed close behind by Pupa, cheeks pink with triumph, screaming oaths that she’ll cut short her grandson’s life should he spill even a jot of sauce. The crowd screams. And so we scream, too, get to our feet and applaud just as they do while the duke stays seated, laughing, but just a little. The Dutch are a fine culinary audience and ask Pupa all about the preparation of the pheasants. She says she roasted the birds wrapped in cabbage leaves, each one of them bound round its middle with a thick rasher of pancetta, and glossed them with nothing more than their own scant, rich juices. But underneath the pheasants we find apples, roasted and still whole, their skins bursting, the aromas from the soft meat of them enchanting the air.

“The cabbage and the apple,” Pupa explains, “keep the dry flesh of the birds moist during the roasting.
È un vecchio trucco,
an old trick for roasting rabbits and quail and other wild birds. The gamy flavor of the flesh is enhanced by the sweet juices of the apples on which they sit while the smokiness of the bacon seeps in from the top.
Buono, no?”

“Buono, si,”
say the Hollanders in a single voice. And as the table sets to work on the pheasant, Barlozzo, with an appetite for distraction more than for wild birds, repeats the question asked earlier.

“So you’d like to know if Tuscans drink wine at every meal? Well,
let’s see how Chou, here,” he says pointing across the table at me, “would answer the question since she’s also a
straniera,
foreigner.”