A Thousand Days in Tuscany (22 page)

“I always thought I
was
rich. And when I was older, I knew it was true. But most of all, I wanted to matter. You know, really
matter
to someone. Once. Just once. But still I feel sad that most of us will never, not even for one of the suppers of our lives, dine as Mathilde and Gerard did, feel the nourishment of their food and their wine and their love as they did.”

“Do you know why that’s true, why most people will never have that?”

“Probably because simplicity is the last thing a person considers as he’s madly searching for the secret to life. Mathilde and Gerard had so much because they had so little.”

• • •

I
T
’
S PAST ELEVEN
and I know by now it’s not this evening Barlozzo meant when he’d said we talk later. We go upstairs, toting the priest with us. A rustic master stroke, a priest is a sort of metal lantern into which white-hot ashes are shoveled. The lantern is hung from a small metal arc and attached to a wooden base. Once assembled, the whole thing is placed between the sheets, creating a great bump in the territory of the bed and, in twenty minutes or so, warming it to welcome a shivering Venetian prince and his consort.

I place the priest on the floor and crawl up into the readied bed beside Fernando, who pulls me close, chortling with glee for the comfort of it and of me, he says. “But I warn you, this night you must not discover me. I don’t like it at all when you discover me, pull the quilt away from me.” In Fernandese,
discover
means
uncover.
Actually, I think I prefer “discover” in this context. Across the cultures, the discovering is never finished.

Between the tucks and folds of linen, how many battles and dreams have we played out upon the field of this bed, I wonder. How many crumbs have we shed from little feasts nibbled under the quilt? The scent of some spilled drops of good red wine, the scents of us. The parts of life left unsaid in other places we confide in bed. I hold the prince and the prince holds me. He unfastens the cord that keeps back the curtains, which hang from the four-poster frame, and the heavy red stuff falls about us. Clasped now in a candlelit tent, we
lie on the inside of a cloud, flitting across the moon. He unties the ribbons on my nightdress, props himself on his elbow, and looks at me, running his fingers over me.

I ask him later, my voice small, whispering up from the darkness after the candle’s long, slow sputtering, “Remind me to ask around where I can get fresh ass’s milk once a month, will you?”

“Jesù.”

11
December Has Come to Live in the Stable

The surgery was nearly two weeks ago, and soon she’ll be beginning postoperative therapies both at the hospital in Perugia and in a clinic in Florence. Her doctors say it was contained, that there is every reason to expect a full recovery. Meanwhile her friends in Città della Pieve insist she remain with them so they might look after her, take her for treatments, follow her progress with the doctors. These people are family to her. And they understand her desire for seclusion. She’s Tuscan. And one of the essences of that birth is the right to confront one’s own life and one’s own death in private.”

It’s the next morning and Barlozzo’s face is broken granite, the pieces of it like shards put back together badly. He sits at the table and speaks of Floriana. He states facts, proffers all technical information, leaving nothing for me to ask save the questions I know he won’t answer. I stay quiet and let him read me.

“It was her choice to shelter you. And not only both of you, but everyone else in town. But, of course, someone from the hospital talked to someone who talked to someone else and so in very little time the news arrived here. And besides, you and Floriana have known each other for only a short while. What is it, seven or eight months?” He looks at Fernando for confirmation. “She didn’t want to worry you. But, more, I think she just can’t imagine burdening you.” Now it’s just me on whom he flashes his gaze. “You know, you’re not the only one among us who has a hard time believing anyone really truly loves you. When she’s ready, she’ll let you know how she’s doing. Meanwhile, love her the way
she
needs to be loved, which may not be at all the same way
you
need to love
her.
”

The duke has said everything, knotted up the argument all alone. Fernando asks some standard questions, which Barlozzo answers in two- and three-word sentences, as though we were suddenly in overtime. It’s clear that anything more than he’s already said is pure concession.

You know, you’re not the only one among us who has a hard time believing anyone really, truly loves you.
My mind repeats his words. And those words attach themselves to other, older ones.
I can make you feel loved but you can’t make me feel loved. No one can. And if you try too hard, I’ll bolt. I’m a runaway, after all.
Before knowing Fernando, this was my sutra, one of the self-observations I kept in a stash of secret aches. Maybe I’m Tuscan, too. And maybe it takes one to know
one, and that’s why Barlozzo knows me as much as I’m beginning to know him.

“Is that what you do?” I ask the duke. “Do you love her the way she needs to be loved, or do you love her in
your
way?” Silver swims in his eyes like minnows in black water, and he knows I’m not finished yet. “Why didn’t you ever marry her?”

Wanting deliverance from me, he looks at Fernando, who comes to sit at the table now. “Why don’t we talk about his some other time?” my husband suggests.

“I would like to talk about this. I would like to talk about it just as soon as I can.” The duke tries a smile, opens the door to leave.

Frowning, stoking the fire, I see that Fernando is unhappy with my questioning of Barlozzo. But, for right now, I just don’t have the will to defend my behavior or myself. I’m thinking that if I can’t see Florì or talk to her, I’ll write to her. I tear the first few pages from a small, leather-spined book in which I’d begun to keep notes for my next book. I’d bought it in Arezzo, taken by the rough feel of the handmade Florentine paper in which its cover is bound and by the pale reds and greens and golds of the Piero della Francesca madonna that adorns it. Now this will be Florì’s book. And in it I can tell her what I’m feeling about her or thinking about her, or about anything at all I think she’d like to know. I may never give it to her; in fact, I doubt I ever would, but her reading it is not what matters about Florì’s book.

D
ECEMBER COMES TO
live in the walls of the stable. The chill and the cold and the damp entwine and all of them prosper deep in the souls of the old stones. It’s colder by more then ten degrees inside the house than it is outdoors, and the crusade we fight with fires and socks and warmed wine soothes us, but not always, and never for very long. Each morning we wake to vesperal light and a chill that compels us, like mountaineers, to move or perish. Up and out of our naked bundling into the breath of Siberia, where the floors are corrupted in the sheerest gray rime. Even the church bells sound cold, their ring funereal, as if veiled reapers had taken over the tower. Costumed against the freeze, we begin our day. Fernando sets the fire while I make the bread dough and race back up the stairs to place the bowl between the sheets and the quilt, packing our pillows around it in the bed so the stuff will have some hope of rising. I’m sure that our just-vacated bed is the warmest place in the house. The oven is a whimsy that takes an hour to heat but refuses to hold temperature for more than a few minutes unless something is set to bake in it. Otherwise it pouts and stutters, spends itself. Meanwhile the fire thaws the downstairs space enough so that we can pat the barely bed-risen dough into fat round loaves and set them near the hearth for a second rise. We perform the winter version of our toilettes, which means we brush our teeth and splash our faces and leave the rest of us to go French. We calculate thirty minutes of freedom
to race up the hill to the bar for breakfast before the fire goes out, the bread rises, and the oven gets hot. I admit there is a certain awkwardness about our winter life here. Still, crack as firemen, we pull on boots and jackets and run to find our
cappuccini.

Nothing much ever changes at the Centrale, the good forces of its gods being ever present and never minding the weather or what the calendar and the clock have to say. Some form of sympathy and of courage seems to offer itself in just doses, and so we sip or gulp from them according to need.

Back down the hill to stoke the fire, bake the bread, and turn on the computer. Cold or no cold, there’s work to be done these days—a deadline for the book’s edit; other, yet tighter, cutoffs for the bits and pieces of consulting work that trickle in and for commissioned travel articles and rewrites. I wear Barlozzo’s gloves, leg warmers, the prince’s fringed scarf, and I’m fine seated there before the fire in the waft of the bread’s perfume and with a belly full of warm milk and coffee. Barlozzo gave us a space heater, a great hulk of a thing that sends up a hot, dry, choking breath for a few minutes before its greediness for electric juice kills off the computer and the lights and the oven and causes its own blustery death. Since the woodpile is diminishing at an alarming rate and—at least the way Fernando has calculated it—wood costs more than electricity, the heater is voted in. I must find a way to use it. Through trial and error I learn that if
the oven is off, I can keep both the computer and the space heater. But so miserly tuned is this electrical system that I can’t have lights. Who needs lights, anyway? Again, this is just a simple awkwardness, and I refuse to let it take on the air of an agony. Surely there are moments when I’d like a wolfskin cape, but things are OK just as they are. I think of my long-ago New York self fettered to a gray plastic desk in the poisonous stifle of a steam-heated cell as I sat spinning out clever text about Adolf’s Meat Tenderizer and Welch’s Grape Juice. I much prefer this workplace.

We discuss the wisdom of renting an office, but it’s a consideration short-lived since we’ve portioned ourselves a hundred and fifty thousand lire—about $75—weekly for food and gasoline and wood. There is no money for any purchase or service beyond this unless we begin to pilfer the remains of our savings. I could set up at Barlozzo’s place or even at the bar, but with the warmth I’d gain, it’s privacy I’d lose. Besides, spring is three months away. And so, a willing, part-time anchoress on a cold hill in Tuscany, I warm my fingertips between my thighs. Now it’s Low Renaissance architecture and pagan festivals, wild boar hunts and the one true formula for saltless Tuscan bread, the lords of Ferrara, the wines of Verona, and the alabaster mines of Volterra about which I write, pacified by the whoosh of the brutish heater, by Paganini and Astor Piazzolla, by firelight and candlelight and the shy winter sun that leaks between the yellow curtains.

S
INCE THERE IS
no market that sets up in San Casciano, on Friday mornings we head for the bawdy, spirited fair in Acquapendente over the regional border in Lazio and, on Saturday, to the picturesque market in Spoleto. Both are fine enough small-town markets, each of them boasting tables and stalls lorded over by the farm families, plying just-dug or harvested goods from their rich, fat earth. Surely we go to buy our daily food, but sometimes I think I haunt markets less for goods than for a few moments’ fraternity with the farmers themselves, a daily indulgence of my Venetian life that stays pungent against time:

I hear it, feel it, the shivery pull of the Casbah, another call of the wild. I walk faster, faster yet, tilting left past a cheese shop and the pasta lady, finally braking in front of a table so sumptuously laid as to be awaiting Caravaggio. The farmers are sublime hucksters, rude, sweet, mocking. They are all of a seductive society, collaborators in a crack theater troupe. One holds out a single, silky pea pod or a fat purple fig with honeyed juices trickling out from its heat-broken skin, another whacks open a small, round watermelon called
anguria
and offers a sliver of its ice, red flesh from the point of a knife. To upstage the watermelon man, another cuts through the pale green skin of a cantaloupe, holding out a salmon-pink wedge of it cradled on a brown paper sack. And yet another one shouts, “The pulp of this peach is white as your skin.”

When I lived in Venice, it was mostly about everyday life, about
language and local culture and history, that I learned from my friends in the market and in the nearby
bacari,
wine bars. But in Tuscany, the lessons are all about food. As Barlozzo promised from that first day, for a rural folk, food is the fundamental theme of their lives.

It’s different from that of the American who gets excited about the restaurant of the week or a holiday feast or a dinner party at which someone auditions a recipe from a just-acquired cookbook. Lunch and supper here compose a twice-daily-said mass. After all, here in the countryside, some people still grow it, gather, forage, and hunt for it. Often, they’ve transformed it from innocence into its supreme form, as is the case with the courtyard pig. They birthed him, fed him, raised him up into a fine, snorting creature, butchered him, salted his legs and washed them in wine, strung them up high from the eaves of their barns to swing in the Tuscan winds. Even now that most neither desire nor have need to follow each step of this getting-the-pig-to-table, they use this history, this sort of ancestral energy in other ways, as in the angst over the acquisition of the daily
etto di prosciutto.

“From what position on the leg are you slicing? And will you slice it by hand or in the machine? Is that sweet or salty? Was it cured nearby? How near? If it’s that too-sweet stuff from the Friuli, I’ll take
nostrano,
our own. How long did it age? Is the flesh moist? Or is it
dry? Is the grain of the meat smooth? Let me taste it. Let me taste the other one.”

Munching dolefully, shaking his head in pig-inspired grief, he says, “
Che ne so, io? Dammi un etto abbondante di quello lì.
What do I know? Give me a hefty hundred grams of that one.”