A Thousand Days in Tuscany (21 page)

We pick the grove clean in three days, most of us working only one- or two-hour shifts, since there seems to always be a small army buzzing about, climbing up to retrieve full baskets from the pickers, spilling out the fruit into great plastic transporting tubs, and pulling out errant twigs and leaves. Even when my turn in the trees is finished, I stay in the grove, fetching and running with the others, then riding in the tractor to the
frantoio
at about three when the day’s work is done. Barlozzo manages to stop by at one or two junctures, though not to pick or even to help much. He shakes hands, hugs people, asks after their families, rubs an olive or two between his thumb and forefinger, bites into them, rolls the flesh about in his mouth, chews it, shakes his head affirmatively, his tightly closed mouth turned down into an upside-down U, the almost universal Italian
expression of appreciation. I watch his duke’s prowess, how his presence enlivens these people. Still I can sense a skittishness about him. Someone asks after Florì. “Is she doing better?” the woman wants to know.

It must be some other Floriana, because Barlozzo, not having liked the question, rebuffs her. If it’s
our
Floriana, why doesn’t he just say the truth, that she’s helping the family for whom she works to pass through a difficult period, just as he told us. But he doesn’t say a word. I watch as he continues to look for half a moment at the woman. And then I watch as he walks away. Surely, it’s
another
Floriana who has written this despair on the duke’s face. Of course it’s another one, I say over and over. But when he gets round to me, pretending to kiss him, I roar an icy whisper in his ear, “Tell me right now about Floriana.
Ti prego.
I beg you.”

“
Ne parliamo più tardi.
We’ll speak later,” is all he says. Innocent words made of horror and tasting of metal. I run them about in my mind. I understand that he will say nothing more at this moment and I walk away from him.

As I’d done yesterday and the day before, I catch a lift home and go in to fuss over the melancholy prince. I go upstairs, then, to run a bath and sit in the heat until I’m weak and red and weeping. As it does always for me, this sadness comes not from a single hurt but from their gathering together, all of them come to crouch about me
now like a congress of harpies. I miss my children. And something is very wrong around my friend with the topaz eyes. Something, and maybe the same thing, is very wrong around the duke. Now I know it was his grieving for Floriana about which he couldn’t speak. And then there’s whatever lurks about Fernando. But the cherry on the cake arrived today in the form of a note from our friend Misha, who lives in Los Angeles. A man made mostly of Russian gloom is Misha. The note says that he wants to visit in February. Only Misha would choose to visit Tuscany in February. And, though I care for him so deeply, I’m ready at this moment for neither his scrutiny nor his questions—which always come ready-packaged with answers—nor his punctilious surveillance. I can hear him now. “Ah, Pollyanna with the black-sugar eyes, what have you done with your life?”

Having nearly always disapproved of me, Misha has been asking that question for years. He’s loved me, been my Greatheart, and yet he’s been forever exasperated by what he scabrously refers to as my “spiritedness.” How many conversations has he opened with, “If you would only listen to me?” I can’t wait for Misha and Barlozzo to meet. Such a fine pair of sacerdotal cholerics they’ll make. Now that I think of it, with the two of them plus the melancholy prince, I’ll be cooking and baking for a weltschmerz congress. And beyond them, maybe this time some of the harpies’s mewling is about me. About the haughty me. About the me who at this moment is faltering,
stunned by the extravagant folly of my believing that I could make a life simply from the stark, unmixed desire for it.

When I take a bath alone, Fernando knows it’s not the bath I want but the hiding. He waits a long time before he comes upstairs with two flutes of
prosecco
on a tiny tray. I continue the soaking and weeping. We sip the cold wine and then he rubs the vanilla water from me with a linen towel the color of parched summer wheat. I say all I want to say with no words. And he, knowing my silence has not been caused by a tough day in the olive trees, chooses silence, too. How I love that he doesn’t ask what’s troubling me, that he trusts it’s a thing better kept to myself for the moment.

As I’m pulling his robe around me, I ask, “Are you hungry?”

“No, I’m not angry at all. But are you?”

“A little.”

“Why? What about? Will you tell me what’s happened?”

“I don’t know what’s happened. Nothing’s happened. Everything’s happened. It’s eight o’clock and I’m hungry.”

“What does the time have to do with your being angry?”

“Because it’s about this time each day that my body is used to nourishment. Why all these questions? I feel hunger. A natural stimulus. It’s very simple. I’m just hungry.”

“I don’t believe anger
è un stimolo naturale.
To be angry is to have
an emotion. It’s an emotional response to something or to someone, so tell me,
why
are you angry?”

“I’m just hungry. At least I
was
just hungry. Why must you examine such a simple statement, looking for some deeper meaning?”

“I’m not looking for deeper meaning, I just don’t understand why you’re angry. I just don’t understand it at all. By the way, are you
angry?
Maybe it’s just that you need to eat something.”

When I go back downstairs to the fire, I find it stoked and roaring, the tea table set for a small supper in front of it. Every candle in the room is lit and Fernando is in the kitchen, foraging, fixing. A small sizzle of onion and butter wafts.

“Fernando, what are you cooking? It smells so wonderful.”

“I’m cooking an onion.”

“An onion?”

“It’s just for perfume. I know how much you like the scent of onions cooking.
Onions frying in butter smell like home.
Isn’t that what you always say? I couldn’t find anything else to cook with it, and so we’ll just have the onion. OK?”

“It’s absolutely OK. I can’t wait.”

He’s sliced a dried boar sausage and put it on a plate with a wedge of Taleggio and a few crumbles of Parmigiano, set out bread and a dish of the pear marmalade we’d made last October and one of crystallized ginger. And with a flourish, he brings out the onion. The
prosecco
leans in an ice bucket and we into each other, easy together. We laugh quietly about our continuing inability to understand the other’s language.

“Do you know a couple who loves each other the way we do?” He’s pouring out the last of the wine. “I wish I’d been around people who loved each other when I was growing up. Even if they didn’t love me, it would have been comforting to know that there really was love.”

“Actually, I did once know a couple who might well have been like us. I haven’t thought about them in a long time, but when I was very young, they seemed like storybook people to me. And I wanted to be just like them.”

“Who were they?”

“They were servants—the caretakers or perhaps the housekeeper and the goundskeeper—at a place in southern France, in the Languedoc not so far from Montpellier.

“I was twelve and a chum from school invited me to spend that August with her and her parents on what she’d called ‘The Farm.’ It was just outside the little town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. It turned out to be a rather glorious house, a turreted château, really, with hectares of gardens, not at all the sort of place I’d imagined. But there were a few sheep and a small vineyard. And there was this couple—Mathilde and Gerard—who watched over my friend and me
when her parents went off on jaunts or to their offices a few days each week. I think Isolde and I must have been very young twelve-year-olds and not at all like girls of that age today. We played theater in her mother’s long, swishy dresses and read
Fanny and Caesar
to each other while lying on our backs in the sun, each of us with a branch of lilac resting on our reluctant breasts—all the better to gulp the scent and sigh and scissor-kick our legs, then crumple into a swoon for the passion it raised up in us.

“I remember that Isolde asked me if I thought kissing a boy would feel as good as breathing lilacs, and I told her that I already knew it didn’t. I told her that Tommy Schmidt had kissed me long and hard and more than once and that it didn’t feel even half as good as breathing lilacs. With Mathilde, we baked endless peach tarts and broke them, still warm, placing the jagged chunks in deep, white café au lait bowls, pouring over thick cream from demiliter bottles and crushing it into the crust with the backs of our big soup spoons, then eating the sugary, buttery mess until we were breathless and fat and sleepy from the goodness of it. Nearly every day we’d follow Gerard into the dim, damp of the limestone caves that rimmed the far edges of the property where he went to inspect and turn the wheels of ewe’s milk cheese he’d set to age. Sometimes we’d go into the caves alone and talk about menstruation or how much we hated Sister Mary Margaret, who looked like a reptile with a very black
mustache, and how we just couldn’t believe that Jesus would take her as his bride. But the most beautiful memory I have of that August is the one evening I spent alone with Mathilde and Gerard. I don’t remember how it happened, something about Isolde having to accompany her parents into Montpellier, while I asked if I might stay behind.

“Mathilde and Gerard made their home in an apartment on the third floor of the château. I saw it once when Isolde and I were invited to tea. It was quite lovely, all painted in a pale, icy green with flowers and plants everywhere. But they had another space, one which they used as their summer house, and that was where we three had supper that evening. They’d fixed up the inside of one of the caves as a hideaway, and when Mathilde pulled back the heavy canvas curtain, I felt like I was stepping inside a doll’s house. The color of the stone was light, as though it had been washed in something the color of roses. And it smelled like roses, too, and it was cool. Almost shivery cool. There was a dining table and two chairs, a small stone sink, and a day bed covered in purple chintz with brown satin flowers all over it. Bowls and baskets of melons and potatoes and onions and pots of mint sat on stones and on the earth floor itself, so there was almost no room to walk. The only light was from candles, crooked and flickering in a silver candleabra that seemed much too big for the table, though I thought it was perfect.
There was a stove outside the cave—some strange-looking thing Gerard had built and of which he was very proud. It contained a spit on which a scrawny chicken turned, its juices dripping into a pan set beneath it. On its single burner rice simmered.

“I watched while Mathilde readied herself for supper. Having peeled off her cardigan and hung it on a peg, she appraised herself in the mirror propped up against the stone sink. She washed her face and neck and décolleté, lathering with a thin wafer of soap sliced from a loaf of it she kept on a shelf, just like bread. She shook drops from several little vials into her palm, rubbing the potion with the fingers of the other hand, warming it, then patting it onto her just-scrubbed skin. Oils of roses and violets and orange blossoms, she’d said. Pulling out her small, golden hoop earrings, she threaded in little beaded ones that looked like tiny blue glass chandeliers and which moved every way she did. Undoing her hair, combing it, rebraiding it, twisting the long, thin plaits into coils and fixing them with tortoiseshell pins, she smoothed the sweet oil remaining on her hands along the part. She might have been ready for a waltz with a king. Or for supper, which I think would have been the same thing to her.

“Gerard performed his own abultions outdoors by his stove, using the water they kept in what looked like a holy water font or a bird bath, cracked and crumbling and wonderful. When he came inside, they greeted each other as though they’d been separated for
weeks. They couldn’t have been doing all that for show. They did it for themselves, for each other. They did it because that’s what they always did. It was lovely for me that they stayed absorbed in their intimacy even in my presence, that they let me
see
them.

“Save a bit of the chicken and some rice, a few wrinkly, hard olives, and what must have been sardines, although I wasn’t familiar with them at the time, I don’t remember all that we ate, but I do remember the ceremony of the meal—the sharing of each thing, the changing of plates, the wine, the endless bringing forth of tiny morsels and tastes. She brought small clusters of grapes and a bowl of water to the table, dipping the clusters one by one and offering them to us. Then there were a few nuts warm and salty from her frying pan, cookies from a tin and sugared, dried figs cut from the string of them that hung near the canvas curtain. We talked and laughed. And they told me stories. I told them stories, too, the few I’d had to tell. Or dared to tell. But I liked the silences with Mathilde and Gerard, which sounded like smiles to me. I liked them most of all. In the candlelight of that snuggery, I believe it was the second time in my young life that I ever thought about how I wanted to be when I grew up. That evening I knew I wanted to be like them. And this evening I know I want to be like us. Which is to say, I did what I set out to do, they and us being of the same tribe, I think. I guess it doesn’t matter that it wanted half my life before I did.”

“You were way ahead of me,” Fernando says. “I never knew anyone I wanted to be like before there was us. Anyway I think it actually works like this. You can’t
become
like someone you admire. But if what you admire about them is already lurking about in yourself, they can stimulate it, inspire it, coax it out of you like the words to a song. Don’t you think that’s what we did for each other?”

“Yes. Surely that’s what we did for each other.”

“But when you were a little girl didn’t you ever want to be a rock star or a ballerina or at least Catherine of Siena? Didn’t you ever want to be rich?”