A Thousand Days in Tuscany Read online

  Campari and soda gives way to white wine after which someone begins pouring red. And what better after bowls full of fleshy, salty black olives than a great heap of bruschette—bread roasted over wood, drenched in fine local oil, dusted in sea salt and devoured out of hand? Still, no one seems ready to say arrivederci.

  More conferencing ensues, this time among Fernando and I and the two cooks, Bice and Monica, who work at the bar’s restaurant. Our numbers have grown to seventeen. Can they feed us all? Rather than giving a simple yes or no, Monica reminds us that each of these seventeen people is related to at least one other person, and that all of them are expected home to either sup or cook within the next half hour. But I needn’t have worried. Floriana, formerly with hands on hips, has taken over here just as she did back at the house. Some women scatter. Others move out onto the little terrace, push tables together and spread plastic cloths, set plates and silverware and glasses, plunk down great jugs of wine. More tables are unearthed from the cellars of the nearby city hall and soon the whole piazza is transformed into an alfresco dining room.

  The fornaio, the baker, had been summoned and, like some sweat-glistened centaur, peaked white hat floured, bare knees poking up from his aproned lap, he pumps his bike up the hill into the village, alternately ringing his bell and blowing his horn. I watch him and the others and I think how so simple an affair can inspire their happiness.

  He unloads rounds of bread big as wagon wheels from his saddle baskets, lays them on the table, stands back to admire them, telling us one was meant for the osteria in Piazze and the others for the folks in the castle up in Fighine. “Let them eat yesterday’s bread,” he says remounting, yelling over his shoulder to save three places for him at table. After brief raids on their own kitchens, fetching whatever it was they had prepared for their family supper, the scattered women reconverge at the bar. Their mothers and children and husbands in tow, they come toting pots and platters under an arm, a free hand tucking drifting wisps of hair under their kerchiefs. Like a gaggle of small birds, their high-pitched patter pierces the soft ending of the day. Flowered aprons tied—at all times of the day or evening, I would learn—over navy tube skirts, their feet slippered in pink terry-cloth, they move easily between their private spaces and the public domain of the piazza. Both belong to them.

  A man they call Barlozzo appears to be the village chieftain, walking as he does up and down the tables, setting down plates, pouring wine, patting shoulders. Somewhere beyond seventy, Barlozzo is long and lean, his eyes so black they flicker up shards of silver. Gritty, he seems. Mesmeric. Much later I see the way those eyes soften to gray in the doom just before a storm, be it an act of God or some more personal tempest. His thick smooth hair is white and blond and announces that he is at once very young and very old. And for as long as I will know him, I will never be certain if time is pulling him backward or beckoning him ahead. A chronicler, a raconteur, a ghost. A mago is Barlozzo. He will become my muse, this old man, my ani-matore, the soul of things for me.

  FRESH FROM THEIR triumph of the squash blossoms, now Bice and Monica come back laden with platters of prosciutto and salame—cose nostre, our things, they say, a phrase signifying that their families raise and butcher pigs, that they artisinally fashion every part of the animal’s flesh and skin and fat into one sort or other of sausage or ham. There are crostini, tiny rounds of bread, toasted on one side, the other side dipped in warm broth and smeared thickly with a salve of chicken livers, capers, and the thinly scraped zest of lemon. Again from the kitchen, two large, deep bowls of pici, thick, rough, hand-rolled ropes of pasta, are brought forth, each one tucked in the crook of Bice’s elbows. The pici are sauced simply with raw crushed green tomatoes, minced garlic, olive oil, and basil. Wonderful.

  Many of the women have brought a soup of some sort, soup, more often than pasta, being the traditional primo, opening plate, of a Tuscan lunch or supper. No one seems concerned that the soups sit on the table while we work at devouring the pici. Soups are most often served at room temperature with a thread of oil and a dusting of pecorino, ewe’s milk cheese. “There’s more intensity of flavor quando la minestra è servita tiepida, when the soup is served tepid,” says Floriana to me across the table, in a voice both pedantic and patient. “People who insist on drinking soup hot burn their palates so they must have it always hotter yet, as they search to taste something, anything at all,” she says as though too-hot soup was the cause of all human suffering.

  There is a potion made of farro, an ancient wheatlike grain, and rice; one of hard bread softened in water and scented with garlic, oil, rosemary and just-ground black pepper; another one of fat white beans flavored with sage and tomato and one of new peas in broth with a few shreds of field greens.

  The second courses are equally humble. Floriana uncovers an oval cast iron pan to display a polpettone, a hybrid meat loaf/paté. “A piece of veal, one of chicken, one of pork, a thick slice of mortadella are hand ground at least three times until the meat is a soft paste. Then add eggs, Parmigiano, garlic, and parsley before patting the paste out into a rectangle, laying it with slices of salame and hard-boiled eggs, then turning it over and over on itself, jelly-roll fashion. Bake it, seam side down, until the scent makes you hungry. You know, until it smells done.” Floriana offers this information without my asking, talking about the polpettone as though it was some local architectural wonder, looking down at it with her head cocked in quiet admiration.

  Her whole creation couldn’t weigh more than a pound or so, and I am preparing myself for a loaves-and-fishes event when two of the other women uncover their own version of polpettone. Each slices hers thin as leaves, then passes the plates around. Still, we are thirty at table. But soon enough other dishes are introduced.

  Faraona, guinea hen roasted with black and green olives, is offered by the baker’s wife. There is an arista, a loin of pork stuffed with herbs and roasted on branches of wild fennel, a casserole of tripe, its cover still sealed, which had been set to bake with tomatoes and onions and white wine in a slow oven the whole day long. There are all manner of little stews and braises, each of a moderate portion, a dose meant to sustain two, perhaps three, restrained appetites. Yet the crowd ogles and groans and protests.

  “Ma chi può mangiare tutta questa roba? Che spettacolo. But who could eat all these things? What a spectacle.”

  Each person eats a bite or two from the dish that is closest to him, takes a slice or a morsel of whatever is passed before him. Chewing and mopping at jots of sauce with their bread, sipping wine, arms in allegro postures of discourse—I wonder if this is a Tuscan reading of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Are they truly convinced this collection of their suppers to be la grande bouffe? How careful they are to pass the plates and dishes, how they ask, check, ask again who would like some more. Many here seem beyond fifty, some twenty or thirty years more. Those who are younger echo their elders’ kindnesses and somehow seem older than their years. There is less distinction among the generations. A girl of perhaps seventeen gets up to fix a plate for her grandmother, telling her to watch for the bones in the rabbit stew, asks her if she’s taken her pills. A boy, not more then ten, slices the bread, telling his younger brother to stay clear of his work, that he should never play where someone is using a knife. A suggestion of calm and small graces wash the tableau in long ago. 1920? 1820? How is this evening different from an evening in June when the oldest man here was young, I wonder. I ask the question of Floriana, who is of a certain age, though hardly old. She’s quiet for a bit before she puts the question to the table. People answer but more to themselves than to the assembly.

  Up from the din, Barlozzo says, “No one’s going to bed without his supper tonight.” Shifting the great bony length of himself to sit sideways in his chair, he crosses his legs, lights a cigarette. The laughter that follows is thin and sounds like memories.

  Wearing a rumpled face and a stiffly starched shirt, one bumptious man redeems the mood, “Whoever cooked the
lamb stew is the woman I’ll take for my next bride.” Now the laughter is refreshed and Floriana looks at me, nods toward the rumpled face, “He’s ninety-three and has buried four wives. There’s no one left who’ll take a chance with him. The last one was only sixty-three when she died. She was a bit fat but in perfect health. One day Ilario, here, went mushroom gathering, came home and cooked a frittata for his wife’s lunch. She was dead in an hour. Some say it was her heart, but we all know it was the mushrooms.”

  “Did Ilario eat the frittata, too?” I want to know.

  “Only one alive who knows the answer to that is Ilario, and he’s not talking.”

  I sit breaking my bread into pieces, dipping them into my wine. I notice three people. I look at Fernando sitting across and halfway down the table from me, smiling, holding court, it seems, among the men and women around him. They are comparing dialects, the Tuscans trying to mimic Fernando’s slippery Venetian cant but managing only what sounds like an underwater lisp. They applaud and laugh with each new phrase he offers. His voice is in symphony with his face, which is beautiful, pink-cheeked from the wine. Floriana stands up, putters about the table, adjusting things, sweeping crumbs with the side of her hand, scolding, teasing as she goes. I catch her eye or she catches mine and she nearly whispers, as though there are only two of us, “Tutto andrà bene, Chou-Chou, tutto andrà molto bene. Vedrai. All will go well. All will go very well. You’ll see.”

  Barlozzo stands behind Floriana now, smoking and sipping wine as though his watch is finished for the evening, as though, now, he can stay a little apart from things. From everything and everyone except Floriana, that is. Nowhere has he fixed his eyes but on her for more than a few minutes at a time all evening. A discreet chatelaine? A gallant lover? Surely he’d heard Floriana’s affirmation to me. Surely he never misses a beat. I look at him. I watch him. And he doesn’t miss that either.

  Bice sets down a small plate in front of me, a fine-looking panna cotta, cooked cream, unmolded and sitting in pool of crushed strawberries. I’m about to excavate it with my spoon when a man who introduces himself as Pioggia, Rain, comes to sit by me and asks if I’ve yet met Assunta.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I tell him, looking about.

  “Well, she’s Piero’s”—he points to a burly, youngish man in jeans and a T-shirt—“finest cow. And she’s blue-eyed. Assunta is the only blue-eyed cow I’ve ever seen,” he says.

  He reads my open-mouthed stare as disbelief and so he softens the story of Assunta’s astounding loveliness.

  “Well, her eyes aren’t exactly blue, but they’re not brown either. They’re gray and brown with little blue spots in them and they’re wonderful. So after I milked her this morning, I brought the milk directly up here to Bice. I do that only with some of Assunta’s milk, all the rest of it goes to the co-op to get pasteurized and ruined. Can’t make a decent panna cotta with pasteurized milk. At least that’s what Bice tells me, and so I bring her a six-liter jar of Assunta’s morning milk at least three times a week, whenever she tells me she needs it. Prova, prova. Try it,” he urges.

  I shrink for a moment under this revelation of Assunta’s most private ministrations. From her teats to my spoon with only Pioggia’s jar and Bice’s pot in between. These facts redraw my concept of “fresh.” And so I eat blue-eyed Assunta’s milk, coaxed from her by a man called Rain, and it’s delectable. I lick both sides of my spoon and scrape the empty bowl, and Piogga beams.

  Una crostata, a tart, sits within reach, but Pioggia is watching me and, if I touch it, I fear he will somehow anthropomorphize the apricots that sit, crowded in their own treacly juices, on a palette of crust. I just know this fruit will have been plucked from the only tree in Tuscany where druids live.

  • • •

  AS WE’RE SAYING buona notte, we notice the carabinieri bending over maps with flashlights, giving the Albanians directions back to Venice. The Albanians are going back to Venice. But we’re not.

  Over these past three years that Fernando and I have been together, our journeys have always ended with our coming back over the water to our funny little house by the sea. But there’s no more beach house waiting for us now. We’ve exchanged a beach house for a stable. And though the warm welcome offered us this evening seems a fine forecast of life in these hills, what could truly measure up to those last thousand days we lived in Venice? It’s still unclear to me why we let go of the Princess’s skirts, why we left behind her glories for a leap onto dry land to dice with yet another beginning.

  I know this launch is different. This time our collective stakes have been pulled. We have neither a home nor jobs, and no more than the sheerest notion of how we’ll whittle out the next era. Much about this new life suggests a reassertion of our vows—“for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.” Fernando remains giddy with anticipation and unmanaged expectations. He’s a child who’s run away from home, a man who’s run away from disenchantment, from the torpors of an unexamined life and from old, still tortuous pain.

  As we climb the steep stone stairs to our new front door, I am quiet, taking in his joy but resonating little of my own, save a giggle every once in a while when I think of Assunta. I delight in Fernando’s pleasure at this fresh new gambol, yet I wonder about the Homeric me. Can I kindle her another time? Is she still supple, will she fit lissomly into her old mettle?

  I stay outside alone for a moment playing games with my longing for Venice. I tell myself, “Look at that Tuscan landscape. This is where everyone in the world would like to live. There are no cypress trees in Venice. And no olive trees in Venice, either, no vines, no sheep, no meadows, no fields of wheat, no sunflowers, not even one poppy field. Nor a thatch of lavender high enough in which to hide.” I try not to think about the sea and the rosy light and the beauty of Venice that, not for a day, failed to astonish me. This starting place is good, this place among two hundred souls, they and it and now us, lost in time. They and it and now us clinging to a patch of ancient earth where Tuscany and Umbria and Lazio collide. I hear Fernando rummaging about, tripping over what remains of the packing crates. He’s singing, and his sounds are so sweet.

  I head indoors and directly to the puce-tiled bath to fill the tub. As we sit there in the vanilla bubbles, I want to know, “Is it possible to paint ceramic tile?”

  “Cristo,” says Fernando. “We’ve just arrived and you want to paint over brand-new tiles. What is this fire in you to always be changing things?”

  “I don’t like puce,” I tell him.

  “Che cos’è puce? What is puce?”

  “It’s the color of these tiles. Puce is brown and green and purple. And I hate brown and green and purple all stewed together. Actually we could just take the tiles down and replace them with some sort of deep, toasty terra cotta. Or we could do a reprise of our black and white in Venice. That’s what we’ll do. Tell me true, you ended up loving that bathroom, didn’t you? Come on. It will make us feel more at home here. Say yes. We can put up the baroque mirrors and sconces, hang the small lantern that was in the entry, and, with baskets of beautiful towels and soaps and candles, this could be luscious.” But my voice already sounds of defeat.

  “Why must a bathroom be luscious? Luscious is for cakes with cream. Luscious is for beautiful women,” he says, pulling hard with both hands at the damp hair about my temples.

  The bed doesn’t feel right. It seems crooked, as though the canopy frame is higher on one side. But the sheets and my husband both feel cool and smooth. How delicious it is to rest after such a day. To lay down blood and bones in a place, almost any place, where someone waits to hold what’s young of you and what’s old of you. What’s just happened to you and that which has happened so long ago to you. All of you.

  While Fernando sleeps, I lie there and think of our little dawn hegira, which already seems part of another lifetime. Was it only this morning? I miss the sea. I wish for a single blue velvet caress of thick salt air. And for a walk, a half-loping run over da
mp sand at land’s end, icy seafoam purling round my ankles. It’s no use. I can’t sleep. I get up, pull on Fernando’s robe, and go to sit on the terrace.

  Even the sky is different here, I think. The lagoon sky is a cupola, softly hung and barely out of reach. This one is farther away, as though the night roof was raised a million miles. A boat horn’s wail was my Venetian lullaby. Now it’s made of newborn lambs bleating.

  The village church bells ring quarter past midnight. My first Tuscan friend is a bell who will make himself heard four times an hour, every hour. Loyalty. And what else is there in my thin store of assets? Besides the bells and the sheep and the big sky, I have my own history. I have the love of my children, as they have mine. The man whom I love with my whole heart is inside sleeping in the yellow wooden bed. I have my two hands, which are older than I am. And I have that quiet frisson. An undine’s hissing near my ear, part threat, part invitation, it penetrates me with some unclassifiable hunger. A thistle fallen back somewhere in my mind, gently, urgently rasping, it keeps me curious, keeps me new. These are the things I can count on. These are my comforts. My charms.

  Deep-Fried Flowers, Vegetables, and Herbs

  1½ cups all purpose flour

  2 cups beer

  ½ cup cold water

  2 teaspoons fine sea salt

  3 ice cubes

  Peanut oil or extra virgin olive oil for frying

  Zucchini blossoms, nasturtium flowers, and borage flowers, rinsed, dried, and stems trimmed

  Celery leaves cut in branches, rinsed, and dried

  Whole sage leaves, rinsed and dried

  Tiny spring onions or scallions, stems trimmed to about 4 inches in length, rinsed and dried

  Warm sea-salted water in a sprayer

  In a large bowl, beat together with a fork the flour, beer, water, and sea salt to form a thin batter. Let the batter rest for an hour or so, covered and at room temperature. Stir in the ice cubes and let the batter rest for an additional half-hour. Stir the batter again. It should now be smooth and have the texture of heavy cream. If it’s too thick, add cold water by the tablespoonful until the “heavy cream” texture is achieved.