AT THE LONG TABLE IN THE COUNTRY ON SATURDAY night, I'm sitting between Ed and a woman with the mythic name of Leda. We're facing Giorgio and a man from Rome. As every stupendous platter is put before us, Lina smiles at me from on down the line. Five antipasti, a traditional polenta and cabbage soup from time immemorial, then gnudi, those delectable little balls of spinach and ricotta. And, ah, the duck that was squawking this morning, served with Ed's favorite local pasta, pici. The din rises. More bottles of wine and water arrive. Donatella and her daughter, Lucia, who have created this feast in their home, visit around the table. Then the roast pork, the rabbit suffused with fennel, the roasted potatoes. Two desserts. Vin santo, grappa, kisses all around, good night, good night. We whiz back to Cortona and Giorgio drops us at the duomo, where we left our car. The bell sounds its one lone gong, marking the first hour of a new day in this ancient place.
Following is an excerpt from Swan: A Novel by Frances Mayes, a Broadway Books paperback, available now.
J. J. STOOD ON THE END OF THE DOCK, FEELING AS IF THE four pilings might rip loose in the current and send him rafting. But the dock held. He loved the smell of rivers. In July heat, in wavy air, in the throbbing of cicadas, in the first light on the river, he was what he would call happy. A full moon angled down between pines, casting a spiraling silver rope across the curve of the water. He watched the light, flicking through his mind for words to describe it. Luminous, flashing. Ordinary. The light seemed liquid, alive, annealed to the water, too changeable for any word. The river rode high after two storms. A cloud of gnats swarmed his foot, then moved as a single body over a swirl in the current. He stepped out of his faded red bathing suit—automatically he pulled on this suit every morning when he got out of bed—and climbed down the ladder into the water. His morning libations, he called this routine. In all the good months, and sometimes in the cold ones just for sheer cussedness, he dipped himself in the river early in the morning. Near the dock he could stand on the bottom, feeling the swiftness or languidness of the current, sometimes jumping as a fish nipped at the hairs on his legs and chest. He floated for a minute, listening to water whirl around his head, letting himself be carried, then turned his body sharply and swam over to the crescent of washed-sand beach his parents had cleared years ago. From there he could walk out of the river and follow a trace covered in pine needles back to the dock. He noticed a fallen sourwood sapling, tangled with muscadine vines, and leaned to pull it out of the water. As he jerked loose the roots, a wedge of earth cleaved from the bank, spilling dirt onto his wet legs. At his feet he saw something white—a bone, a stick bleached by the sun? He waded back into the river and rinsed off.
Maybe what he glimpsed was an arrowhead. J. J. had found hundreds. He turned over the earth with his foot. There—he picked it up, blew off the dirt, and washed it. Never had he found one of these. He held a perfect bone fish spear, three inches long, with exquisitely carved barbs like a cat's claws on each side. He admired the skill—the delicate hooked end of each barb would bite into flesh while the fisherman dragged in the fish. At one end he saw slight ridges where the line was tied over and over by the Creek Indian who once fished these waters. Ginger, he thought, Ginger should see this. But his sister's green eyes were light-years away. He pawed through the dirt and pulled out other roots from the bank, but found only a smashed can. What a beauty, this small spear in the palm of his hand. He took in a breath of pine air as far as he could, the air driving out of his head the familiar surge of what felt similar to hunger and thirst. Ginger was not there, so to whom could he show his treasure? He regarded it intently for himself. He had no talent for needing someone else. He shook his hair and banged the side of his head to knock the water out of his ear. Rainy night in Georgia, he mocked himself. Last train to Clarksville.
He dressed in khaki shorts, not bothering with underwear. Six-thirty and already hot, heavily hot, steamy hot, the best weather. Nothing to eat in the refrigerator but some rice and a piece of left-over venison from a week ago, when he'd brought Julianne, the new schoolteacher from Osceola, out here. She'd said it was so interesting that he lived way in the woods all alone. As down-to-earth as she looked, she turned out to be afraid for her feet to touch the bottom of the river. She'd hung on to his back, her laugh verging toward a squeal, and he felt her soft thighs on his. She was hot to the touch, even under water. But then she couldn't eat venison because she thought of Bambi. She cooked the rice, which, as he remembered, had hard kernels at the center of the grain. Then she looked at his wild salad as though it were a cow pie. J. J. often went for days eating only greens he picked and fish he caught. He chewed slowly, watching her. If she was beautiful, as Liman MacCrea had promised, why did he think her skin looked so stretched tight across her face that it might split like a blown-up pork bladder? And eyes that close together made a person look downright miserly.
Then he'd rubbed his temples and looked again. A pleasant face, kind and expectant. Warm. What is she wanting? he wondered as she smiled. Then he noticed her teeth, which were ground down, like an old deer's.
“Pokeweed and lamb's-quarters? I've heard of dandelion greens before. Can you eat these? That's so interesting.” She pushed the fresh, pungent greens around with her fork. With the one bite she took, grit crunched between her teeth. Something she saw in his eyes appealed to her, some waiting quality. Not just a flirt or the good ol' boy he sometimes appeared to be, he was someone to solve, she told herself as she changed into her bathing suit in his room. She looked carefully at his things, comparing her own box bedroom to his, her pink chenille spread and the prints of Degas dancers on the wall, the lace curtains and view out onto an empty street, to his crammed bookcases, twenty or more ink pens, mounted fish and deer heads, his rough Indian blanket on the bed. I have no way to reach him, she thought, and would I want to? She felt suddenly tired but practiced a big smile in the mirror, lifting her thick chestnut hair off her neck. Her teeth gleamed white and even. The new red maillot certainly showed off her Scarlett O'Hara waist. “Cherry Bomb,” she whispered. Cherry Bomb had been her nickname at Sparta High, when she was Homecoming queen. But that was twelve years ago. She wished she had washed the lovely greens because she was not about to eat grit.
J. J. thought if she said “so interesting” again, he'd drive the fork through her eyes. He poured glasses of bourbon. “Let's toast your seventh-grade class who gets to spend all that time with you.” She lowered her eyes with pleasure, which shamed him. Was he becoming a God damned hermit? He wondered how he would feel with her legs wrapped around him. Lost in outer space? He knew he'd find fault with Christ Almighty. She played the flute, had a degree in music education. So what if she turned freaky in the woods? Still, he had felt a tidal wave of boredom flood through him, a craving to be alone so intense that he shuddered. Although he'd expected to be driving her home at one or two in the morning, top down, a little night music, he was burning up the road at nine-thirty.
He made a pot of coffee and heated Julianne's leftover clump of bad rice with some butter. The kitchen table was littered with chert, flint, a flat stone, and two antlers. Lately, he'd tried to teach himself flintnapping, using only tools the Indians had used. He'd ordered A Guide to Flintworking and driven over to a rock shop in Dannon to buy pieces big enough to work. He wanted to make a stone knife for gutting fish, but so far he'd split a lot of stones and created a pile of waste flakes and chips. One try, by accident, actually resembled a scraper.
He held up the fish spear to the sunlight at the window, admiring the fine symmetry. Balancing coffee, bowl, and notebook, the spear held lightly between his teeth, he pushed open the kitchen door with his elbow. Yellow jackets worked the scuppernongs, and bees burrowed into the rose that sprawled among the vines, his mother's yellow rose, still blooming and her gone an eon, a suicide. He did not want to think about that. She had loved the cabin as much as he did. Her rose had long since climbed from the arbor and bolted into the trees. He placed the fish spear on a piece of w
hite paper and opened his notebook to record his find. July 7, he wrote. The early sun through the grape arbor cast mottled light onto the table. He might love the light at the cabin even more than the water, but no, they were inseparable. The emerald longleaf pines tinted the light at all hours, casting a blue aura early and late, and in full sun softened the hard edges of objects. He moved the paper into a splotch of sun. The bone looked like ivory. First he measured the length, then in light pencil carefully he started to draw. What kind of bone, he wondered, maybe boar, maybe beaver. How long would it have taken the Indian to carve it?
He quickly went over his lines in black with his Rapidograph. Drawing, he thought, never captures the thing itself. At least mine doesn't. Maybe Leonardo da Vinci could get this right. But Leonardo never heard of the Creeks, or of the belly of the beast, south Georgia. Easy to get the likeness. The unlikeness is what's hard. Where the object ends and everything around it begins, that's the impossible part to negotiate. He held up the spear and turned it around. He decided to look at it under his father's microscope. He might find a speck of blood from the fish that swam away with the spear in its side. Too bad Ginger's not here, he thought. She ought to see this.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
Under the TuscanSun
“An intense celebration of what [Mayes] calls “the voluptuousness of Italian life . . . appealing and very vivid . . . [The] book seems like the kind of thing you'd tuck into a picnic basket on an August day . . . or better yet, keep handy on the bedside table in the depths of January.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Armchair travel at its most enticing . . . Mayes's delightful recipes, evocative descriptions of the nearby village of Cortona, and thoughtful musings on the Italian spirit only add to the pleasure. Can we really blame ourselves for wanting to strap Mayes down in some ratty armchair while we go live in her farmhouse?”
—Booklist
“Mayes [has] perfect vision . . . I do not doubt that centuries from now, whoever lives in Bramasole will one day uncover bits of pottery used at Mayes's table. She has, by the sweat of her brow and the strength of her vision, become a layer in the history of this place.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Can we bear yet another book about buying and remodeling a tumble-down house in some sunny foreign country? The answer, in the case of Under the Tuscan Sun, is a simple, unqualified yes . . . Warmth and light nearly glow from these pages, a tribute to the sun, symbol of hope and renewal.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Carefully written . . . an unusual memoir of one woman's challenge to herself and its successful transformation into a satisfying opportunity to improve the quality of life.”
—Library Journal
“A model for the open, curious mind and the questioning soul . . . Those who want to find parts of themselves they didn't know existed, take risks, have an adventure . . . and discover another culture altogether, with its different rhythms, tastes, smells, and ways of being human—those readers will find in Mayes a kindly, eager, tough-spirited guide.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Luscious . . . delightful . . . In the search for writers who thrill you just with their mastery of the language, include Frances Mayes.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A report from our dream Italy, still rural, still devoted to beauties that are not artificial . . . Mayes has a profoundly sensual relation to everything she touches, from texture to food . . . Her description of meals that we, alas, didn't get to eat evoke in me satisfaction without jealousy, like paintings.”
—Boston Globe
A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1996 by Chronicle Books. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Chronicle Books.
UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. Copyright © 1996 by Frances Mayes. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, contact: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Broadway Books trade paperback edition as follows:
Mayes, Frances.
Under the Tuscan sun : at home in Italy / by Frances Mayes.
p. cm.
Excerpts from this book appeared in the New York Times,
Ploughshares, and House Beautiful.
1. Tuscany (Italy)—Description and travel. 2. Tuscany (Italy)—
Social life and customs. 3. Mayes, Frances. 4. Cookery, Italian.
I. Title.
DG734.23.M38 1997
945′.5—dc21
eISBN: 978-0-7679-1745-2
v3.0
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 30