A Thousand Days in Tuscany (8 page)

O
UT IN THE
garden ahead of the sun, we arrange the wood and kindling as Barlozzo recommended, only with greater precision. We create a still-life of oak branches and vine cuttings, a great faggot of dried wild fennel stalks piled on top for fragrance. For luck. Fernando lays a match on the fennel, another on the kindling under it, igniting a roar through which flames leap and thick muffles of smoke push out the chamber door, concealing us even from each other. We run from the wreckage until we see the choking gust is contained and beginning to climb the chimney walls before the black
runic plume of it bursts through the aperature. Coughing, screaming, we are triumphant. The valley is safe, and we will bake bread.

In two wrought-iron chairs pulled up close in front of the oven, we are midwives who wait. The meadows beyond are green, barely green, like crushed sage and celery run through with mascarpone, the olive trees glint silver messages up to a flight of scolding birds and the wheat stumps in farther-off fields are roasted to a crackle, brittle as caramel gone cold. I’m living the life I’ve always imagined. I want what I already have. When I tell this to Fernando, he says, “It’s time to move the wood about.” Perhaps we are saying the same thing.

Sliding his hand into the leather strap of his long, homemade baker’s pole, he riddles the red-hot pile, shooting sparks and smudging the air all over again. It won’t be long now, so I go inside to shape my half-kilo
pagnotte,
rounds of dough, let them rise for an hour. Using the pole again, Fernando shoves the coals to one side while I climb up onto my box, give the peel a good shake, slapping the loaves onto the oven floor, heaving the chamber door closed with my hip, sending them to glory. It’s nearly 9:30 and we thought someone would have come to join us by now. No one yet.

And no one later during the morning. While the second batch bakes, we pull a fresh leg of pork out of its red wine bath, making incisions in its purpled flesh, stuffing the holes with a paste of garlic and rosemary and cloves, rubbing it all over with oil, then pouring the
marinating wine back over it. The oven is cooling as we set down the sealed pot, banking it with the white ash, hoping for the best. We breakfast on our first bread, lunch on it, too, laying it with prosciutto and munching it hungrily out of hand between pulls of cool
trebbiano.

It’s nearly nine in the evening now and, in the aftermath of a fierce, short storm, a languishing sun reappears, bids a flitting good night. We’re setting the table for supper out on the terrace as we look up to see Florì shuffling reluctantly down the hill, holding a bowl to her chest as though it were a rifle she was carrying over a river. Twenty meters behind her is the duke, swinging a five-liter bottle of red in a straw basket. There will be a celebration supper after all.

I run down to meet Floriana who is breathless from her hike. She stops in the road, the last light at her back. Prickles of rain cling to her unkerchiefed, loosened hair, capturing her in the flickering russet frame of it. Topaz almonds are her eyes, lit tonight from some new, old place, from some exquisitely secret oubliette, which she must often forget she possesses. We talk for a minute and Barlozzo passes us by like a boy too shy to speak to two girls at once.

“Belle donne, buona sera.
Beautiful ladies, good evening,” he says without breaking stride.

Our guests are polite, pleasant, yet, even if lightly, they seem to wear some weight of obligation. But the pork is tender as fresh
cheese, its sauce is like thick, black mulled wine. The bread tastes of scorched wood and of the ages. And soon they begin to talk more between themselves than to us, and we know that what they’re also tasting is a greater ease in our company. I try not to stare at them, but they’re really quite wonderful together, each of them taking care of the other without making a show of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them touch or even look at each other directly and yet there’s a sense about them of great love, the first-love-in-the-world kind of love. Officially, they are not a couple, or at least not in any way either of them has shown us in all these weeks. Each has his own home, her own life, and goes about it it all quite separately. But there must be more. There has to be more.

“So do you know the derivation of the word
compagna,
companion?” Barlozzo asks as he takes a new loaf and tears it down its center. “From the Latin.
Com
is ‘con,’ with,
pan
is
’pane,
’ bread. A companion is the one with whom we break bread.”

Each of us raises his glass, each of us passes the loaf to the next, all of us skate pieces of the bread over the last of the sauce. Amen.

After supper, the gentlemen want to sit and smoke and snort their
grappa.
Florì and I decide to trek down to the thermal springs where Fernando and I go to bathe most mornings. We stuff handfuls of biscotti into a paper sack and put it in a shopping bag with a small blanket and an old towel to dry our feet; we check the batteries in two
flashlights, kick off our sandals, and slide on mismatched emergency Wellies we find in the barn. Covered in our shawls, we take leave of Fernando and the duke.

The night is cooling quickly, and we giggle and shiver and agree
“siamo due matte,
we’re two crazy women” to be setting off like this so late. I sense her joy in this delicately savage escapade and hers enlarges mine. As we walk, she begins to talk about
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I like the notion of this sixty-something-year-old Tuscan woman with a head full of pre-Raphaelite curls reading this quintessentially American adventure story. “You know, Chou, I’ve always wanted to build that very raft and float down that very river—the biggest river in the world—and pull into some lonely bank at the edge of a forest, light a fire, cook bacon, and eat it straight out of the pan.
Come si dice
pancetta
in Inglese?
How do you say
pancetta
in English? Ah,
bahcone. Certo. Sarebbe bellissimo.
It would be beautiful.”

Once down at the springs, we arc the flashlights, looking for the right place to sit, kick off our boots, and plunge our feet into the warm, percolating water. But now that our feet are warm, the rest of us is colder, and Florì reaches for the blanket. Wrapping ourselves about the shoulders with it, we sit there talking about the books of our lives. Despite her love for
Huckleberry Finn,
Florì says her favorite “foreign” books are
Madame Bovary, David Copperfield,
and
Anna Karenina.
Especially
Anna Karenina.
“Ah, how I wanted to know a man like
Vronsky. Someone
dangerous
like him. Dangerous in that there could never be anyone
but
him. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so,” I say, knowing that I do. Still wrapped in the blanket, flashlights spent, we lie back now, flattening the weeds and the prickly stalks of thyme, making little nests for ourselves, our faces tilted at the moon. Thrust by the winds, clouds swim fast about it, so fast it feels as if we’re swimming, too, backstroking across the sky. Free.

Florì sits up and takes her feet out of the pool, then crouches by the springs, running her hands in the water, still gazing at the moon. Déjà vu rushes up from some long-ago place. “I knew a woman once who looked like you,” I say to her.

“Do you mean to say that I look like an American?” Florì asks shyly, turning only partway around to look at me.

“Not exactly. I saw this woman just once. I was eight or nine, I think, visiting friends or distant relatives of my grandmother who lived on the coast of Liguria, near Genova. I don’t think I was too happy about being there. Anyway, I went wandering on the beach near their house one day and I saw a woman who was roasting potatoes over a driftwood fire. She wore several layers of long skirts and was all wrapped in shawls and scarves. She smiled at me and I sat down on the sand next to her, watching her. Pulling a silver flask from her pocket, she reached out and turned my palm upward, poured out a few drops of thick, dark green stuff into it, lifting my palm to my lips. She poured some out deftly onto the wrinkled heel of her own hand
and sucked at it, closing her eyes and smiling. I did the same. At first I though it was awful, like medicine for a stomachache, but as I swallowed it, really tasted it, I smiled, too. My introduction to olive oil.”

Florì stays crouched by the water and, while I talk, it’s to her closed-eye profile. Opening her eyes now, she turns to me, pokes her legs out in front of her, arranges her skirts. Lips compressed in an endearing smile, she stays still. “Please don’t stop. Tell me more.”

“Well, the Potato Lady crouched down on the sand just as you were a moment ago, her thick rubber boots jutting out from under her skirts. She would stare at the fire or stand up and heave a stone or a hunk of wood out to sea, and as the potatoes blistered golden, she turned them, anointing them with the oil. She threw on a fistful of salt pulled from some other place in her magic stores, urging great, leaping flames from the fire. Finally she speared two or three pieces of potato onto a twig and offered it to me. By then I was fairly shaking with hunger for them, and I ate them, burning my mouth and tasting them and the moment with some new appetite. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be that woman on the beach. I wanted her skirts and her scarves, her shawls, her silver flask. I wanted to make a potato taste better than a chocolate pie. As much as anyone ever has, she let me see myself. Sometimes I think the Potato Lady must have been a dream or a red-wrapped specter come to pass on the great secret that living in the moment and being content with one’s portion makes for the best of all lives. But she was real, Florì. And as I think about
her now, she likely had her miseries. It was how she seemed to stand apart from misery, though, how she pulled the beauty out of that afternoon as skillfully as she pulled the flask from her pocket. That was her gift to me. She made happiness seem like a choice.”

“Do you think it’s true? Is happiness a choice?”

“Most times I think it is. At least much more often than many of us understand or believe it is.”

The village bells ring midnight and, Cinderella-like, we scurry about, packing up our things, pulling on our boots. Laughing all the way, we climb the slippery hillside, tugging each other up the steep. We find the men sitting on the terrace floor, facing each other, the duke giving an astronomy lesson to a sleeping Fernando.

“I see all’s well here, so I’m going up the hill to bed.” Florì laughs her little girl’s laugh while the duke unscrambles the length of him to follow her, their
buona notte, notte ragazzi, notte tesori
chiming through the blackness and the breeze. Arms crossed over my chest, hands trying to rub warmth into my shoulders, I stand there thinking about how much alike human hungers are, about camping along the Mississippi and splashing in Etruscan pools and bacon frying and the perfume that can come from a potato and a weed set together over the smoke of a fire, about the smell of a wild sea and the hoarse moaning of water rasping on stone, of the waves as they push farther and farther onto the sand, searching for the end of the earth. A place to rest. And how we do, too.

Schiacciata Toscana
Tuscan Flatbread (or “Squashed” Breads)

Two 15-inch flatbreads

1 tablespoon active dry yeast or 1½ small cakes of fresh yeast

1 scant teaspoon of dark brown sugar

2¾ cups tepid water

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

3 teaspoons fine sea salt

6½ cups all-purpose flour

1 cup finely ground yellow cornmeal

2 tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves, minced to a powder

coarse sea salt (optional)

additional extra virgin olive oil for baking pans, drizzling, and final glossing

In a large bowl, mix the yeast and the sugar into the tepid water, stirring until the grains of sugar are dissolved. Cover with plastic wrap and let the yeast activate for 10 minutes. Stir the oil and salt together and pour it into the yeast mixture. Begin adding the flour, a cup at a time, stirring well after each dose. Add the cornmeal all at once and mix to form a soft, dry dough. Add additional flour—a tablespoon
at a time—if the dough feels sticky. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for 10 minutes. Place the dough into a clean, lightly oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise for an hour, or until its mass doubles.

Release the air in the dough with a firm punch, divide the dough in two, and stretch each piece onto the surface of a lightly oiled 12-inch baking pan sprinkled with cornmeal. The dough will fight a bit, but don’t be tempted to use a rolling pin. Using your fingertips, push the dough to the edges of the tin and let it rest. Go back to it in a few minutes and stretch it to the edges once again. The dough will have relaxed sufficiently by this time and should behave quite nicely under your hands. Cover the prepared
schiacciate
with clean kitchen towels and let them rise for half an hour. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 450°.

After the second rise, press your fists, knuckles down, all over the breads, “squashing” them and creating indentations. Drizzle the tops of the
schiacciate
with oil, which will be captured in the indentations, and sprinkle over the rosemary and the sea salt, if using. Bake the
schiacciate
for 20–25 minutes, or until they are deeply golden. Transfer the baked breads from their tins to wire racks to cool. Using a pastry brush, paint the hot, just-baked breads with a few drops of oil.