A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  The more clamorous of the two distinct San Cascienesi social sects, i progressisti, are chomping to leap into the future, pounding their fists and shrieking basta, calling for progress like another round of gin. In voices more wistful, the other sect, i tradizionalisti, court the rituals, saying that the only true progress waits a few steps back into the past.

  I progressisti who live in the village want to sell their crumbling red-roofed houses, heaped up along the tiny, winding streets. Fernando and I think these houses—defiant, bewitched in an eternal rakish slant—quite beautiful and wish we could buy one. But the villagers prefer a condominium or an apartment in one of the pink and yellow cement-block palaces that wait in the lower town. No more carrying wood up the stairs and ashes back down the stairs. Just the diligent, passionless flames of a nice gas fire. They’re longing for built-in, plastic-finished closets rather than those cherry-wood armoires, big and deep as caves. They want stainless-steel sinks rather than some marble tub worn to silk from matriarchal scrubbing; they want great, fake suns swaying from the ceilings instead of the rough, hand-wrought iron lanterns Biagiotti’s grandfather forged for the whole village a hundred years ago.

  As for i progressisti who still live in the countryside and farm the nobles’ lands, they ache to leave behind their rent-free, meter-thick-walled, freezing-eight-months-of-the-year houses, where once three and four generations of families lived together, each one doing for the others. But there are no more of these epic families. With the old ones dying and the young ones escaping, only the ones too old to escape and too young to die, only they, in that tethered, frozen range, remain.

  For some time now there’s been a paycheck every month for working the land, along with a very fair portion of the yields. So i progressisti say that surely they’re rich enough to buy their own piece of one of the pink and yellow palaces where their cell phones will have clear signals and where there are more outlets for television sets and fewer windows to wash. But it’s not just this lust for electronic amusement and straight, smooth walls that goads the progressives. The chafe is ancestral. “È la scoria della mezzadria. It’s the sludge left from the shareholding system,” Barlozzo is saying as Florì enters the piazza carrying a plate covered with a kitchen towel.

  She approaches us, tiptoeing, mouthing “scusatemi” as though she’s come late to the second act of Madame Butterfly. Barlozzo acknowledges her arrival by rising, taking the plate from her and putting it down on the stone wall beside our wine, kissing her hand, giving her his chair. Hardly missing a beat, he picks up with:

  “Ashamed they still sharecrop a nobleman’s fields, ashamed they still pay homage to him, take off their hats to him, they are resigned rather than proud to leave baskets of the best porcini and the fattest truffles by his great polished doors. A paycheck is too thin a gloss to paint over the history of a serf.”

  Knowing something wonderful waits under the towel, Fernando uncovers the plate, revealing what looks like a sweet but what turns out to be a round of salty, crusty pecorino bread. He cuts thin, very thin slices of the bread with the small knife Florì placed on the rim of the plate. She has paper napkins in her sweater pocket. Without taking her eyes from the duke, she pulls out the napkins, places one under each slice of bread as Fernando cuts it, passes it to each of us. This quiet diminishing of the bread by Fernando and his even softer distribution of it continues at well-paced intervals.

  “I tradizionalisti shake their heads. Some live in the village, some on the land, but not one of them will go to live in the pink and yellow palaces. They say life was better when it was harder. They say food tasted better laid down over hunger and that there’s nothing more wonderful than watching every sunrise and every sunset. They say that working to the sweat, eating your share, sleeping a child’s sleep, is what life was meant to be. They say they don’t understand this avid bent to accumulate things you can’t eat or drink or wear or use to keep you warm. They remember when accumulation still meant gathering three sacks of chestnuts instead of two. They say their neighbors have lost the capacity to imagine and to feel—some of them, the capacity to love. They say since we all have everything and we all have nothing, our only task is to keep searching to understand the rhythm of things. Light, dark. The seasons. Live gracefully in plenty and live gracefully in need. Embrace them both or swindle yourself out of half a life. They say that everyone who’s gone to live in the pink and yellow palaces is waiting to die and, in the meantime, they watch one more degenerate television transmission introduced by dancing girls and a man with a bad toupee, calling the experience leisure. Ease and plenty seep together to form a single sentiment that comes out looking a good deal like nonchalance. All that ease, all that plenty. What can one expect of them but nonchalance?”

  Barlozzo’s word for nonchalance is sprezzatura. A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is “the state of effortlessness.” It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.

  “Traditionalisti, progressisti. Bah. Maybe the only thing that matters is to make our lives last as long as we do. You know, to make a life last until it ends, to make all the parts come out even, like when you rub the last piece of bread in the last drop of oil on your plate and eat it with the last sip of wine in your glass,” Florì says.

  The duke gets up and walks over to Fernando, on whose shoulders he rests his hands. He looks from me to Florì and back to me again. “You and Florì are two of a kind, Chou. But you’re even more like my mother. Life was hard for her, too.”

  “But I don’t think life is hard.”

  “Of course not. Not now, anyway. Not with all the ‘adjustments’ you’ve made over time. My mother made similar adjustments. For her, life was too garishly lit, too big and too distant, and so she screwed up her eyelids and shortened the foreground. Like an impressionist painter, she rubbed the juts smooth, created her own diffusion, her own translucence. She saw life as if by the light of a candle. Nearly always she seemed to be wandering about in an elegant sort of defiance. Holding tight to her secrets. Like you do. And she thought everything could be solved with a loaf of bread. Like you do.”

  “It’s true, she sees things in her own way.” Fernando tells a story about Erich and me. About a morning I was driving him to school along the Rio Americano highway in Sacramento. We knew every turn and twist in the road and all the buildings and landmarks along the way, so that one morning when, about a hundred yards ahead, I spotted a new sign, I nudged Erich and said, “Look, honey, a new French bakery.” Pain, bread, is what I read in the four bright red letters.

  “Mom, that sign says pain. Pain, like in hurt. It’s a clinic, mom,” he told me.

  Never one to spoil a good story by sticking to the truth, Fernando decorates the events, raising up a hand-slapping between him and the duke. I wait until they’re quieted down and my embarrassment softens a little before I ask Barlozzo, “What do you know about my secrets?”

  “If I knew something about them they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? All I can say is that mysterious people usually recognize other mysterious people.”

  “So if you recognize that I have secrets, that means you have them, too. Right?” I say.

  Florì raises her head, quickly recovering her surprise by reaching for the dish, empty now except for crumbs and the old silver knife.

  “Right. And let’s just leave it at that for now.”

  “OK. But as for my trying to solve things with bread, well, all I think is that along with everything else there is or isn’t, a good loaf of bread can’t hurt. Speaking of bread, I’m out of rosemary again. Will you bring some to me?”

  “Are you making a mattress stuffed with rosemary? I’ve never known a person so fixed on this damn weed as you are,” he tells me.

  “Maybe it’s because I miss the sea. Rosmarino. Rose of the sea. The patch up by the old spa is almost as good as the salt-crusted bushes that grow along the Mediterranean.”

>   “I’ll get you enough rosemary to stuff a dozen mattresses and I’ll happily sit through any number of your exotic suppers. But will you always make me my own personal loaf of normal, daily bread? And will you pour me a glass of wine and put a pitcher of oil on the table? I think it’s time for me to do what Florì does, to practice making the parts come out even, the bread and oil and wine.”

  5

  Sit the Chicken in a Roasting Pan on a Pretty Bed of Turnips and Potatoes and Onions, Leeks and Carrots . . .

  Some mornings we abandon our walks down to the thermal springs and trudge up behind the village to the site of the original terme, spa. The very word spa is a Latin acronym for salus per acquum, health through water. Peeking into the derelict halls where the the Medici once came to soak, we’re wondering if what village intelligence touts is true. A grand reconstruction of the spa by a Florentine corporation would surely change the color of the village, a seduction for the chic and the stressed who would come to be revived by warm waters and kneading hands across their aching backs. The sleepy little village would be awakened, but not necessarily by a handsome prince. I steal a look at my own handsome prince as we walk without talking, each of us wandering inside his own reverie. But what is this? What is this long, slow shudder in me? Could it be caused by the tizzy of the winds, trying to push away the summer? Is it from the strength of my husband’s hand on my hip as we walk? My face is burning where he held it a moment ago as he kissed me, and I like the taste of him that stays on my mouth and mixes with the tastes of coffee and milk and bread, the grains of undissolved sugar on his lips. Like a good buttery kuglehopf, he tastes. How can he do this to me? How can he make me giddy? Maybe it’s not him at all. It’s high blood pressure. Why didn’t I think of that? I’m sure of it. High blood pressure is causing the quiver. Or is it a hormone rushing away, then rushing back again, just for fun? Maybe it is Fernando. I decide it’s him, but it’s horrid not being sure. More horrid is it that this man can just as skillfully send up a shudder in me of a different sort.

  I am out in the garden tending to a chicken, fixing it the way Florì told me her mama used to do it for Sunday lunch. I’d done just what she’d said, sit the chicken in roasting pan on a pretty bed of turnips and potatoes and onions, leeks and carrots . . .

  Her directions had stopped there, so I continue on my own. I fill its belly with a handful of garlic, the cloves crushed but not peeled, then rub its bosom to a glisten with olive oil, finally ornamenting it with a thick branch of wild rosemary. After an hour or so in the wood oven, the skin is bronzed and crisp, the juices running out in little golden streams, and I remove it to a long, deep, heated plate to wait. In the house, I set the roasting pan over a quick flame, scraping the bits of caramelized vegetables and the drippings that cling to the pan, blessing it all with splashes of white wine, finally transforming the juices into a sauce that tastes like Saturday night as much as Sunday noon. I lay trenchers of bread in the sauce, leaving them to soak in it for a few moments while I heat a half cup of vin santo, throw in a handful of fat zibibbi, raisins from the island of Pantelleria off Sicily. Wild lettuces, all washed and dried and tucked in a kitchen towel, are ready in the refrigerator. I open a sauvignon blanc from Castello della Sala and set it in an ice bucket.

  Monet would have loved the terrace table, bejeweled as it is with a jugful of poppies and lavender, candles set in old ships’ lanterns against sultry nine-o’-clock winds. I call for Fernando, who is upstairs somewhere. I lay the cool lettuces on a serving plate, drizzle them with more of the sauce, lay the soaked bread on top, strew the warm, winey raisins over the bread and, finally, set the chicken atop the whole creation. I’m starving.

  I call up from the bottom of the stairs. “Fernando. La cena è pronta, supper is ready.”

  I pour the wine, stand there on the terrace sipping it, a hand resting on a hip, looking out at the end of the day. Still, no Fernando. I walk out into the garden and call up to the open windows.

  “Fernando, will you come down to supper with me?”

  Someone who is not Fernando pokes his head out a guest-room window. Even in the dark I recognize him. Perhaps it’s more that I sense the presence of my old friend, Mr. Quicksilver. The Heaving Breast that inhabited my husband so freely in Venice has found our Tuscan hideaway.

  “Non ho fame.”

  Quicksilver was never hungry. “But why don’t you just come to keep me company? The chicken looks wonderful. At least have a glass of wine, a piece of bread. Come and talk to me.” I try all the buttons that have worked in the past, but none of them yields.

  Master of the dramatic, he gives tension time to build for a few minutes before I hear him schlumping down the stairs. I take a long gulp of wine. One look at him and I see he is a janissary gone to war with his stars. He begins by announcing that his leaving the bank hasn’t provided the great washes of peace he’d searched for. He grieves his losses: no security, no position, no title. “There’s this hollow place where I thought serenity would be,” he says.

  I want to tell him that serenity is not geographically dependent, that if he didn’t feel serene in Venice, how could he expect to feel serene in Tuscany. Instead, I say nothing. I only look at him in quiet wonder, glorious images from these past weeks and months fluttering through my mind. He tells me he feels robbed. He speaks this indictment while standing very close to me. “And am I the thief?” I want to know. Now, I’m on my feet, too.

  “Yes, of course you are. It was you who made it seem possible,” he says.

  “It was you who made me believe that I could grow to be someone else besides good old Fernando,” he says, all ready for the tender mercies he knows are coming.

  “Good old Fernando is the most beautiful man I’ve ever known. Don’t leave him behind. Take him with you and be patient. Instead of worrying about who’s robbing you of what, worry about how you thieve yourself. You rob time, Fernando. How arrogant you are, taking an evening like this one as though it were some sour cherry, spitting half its flesh into the dirt. Every time you pitch yourself back into the past, you lose time. Have you so much of it to spare, my love?”

  Did he expect some Turkish fairy to rake a path for him through the Tuscan forest? Wasn’t it his general weariness of being the follower that caused his flight? Fernando cannot, it seems, sustain any emotion, save melancholy. I know this melancholy is an appeal for consolation, yet my ready sympathies are weak against it. His is a peace built up on sticks. The smallest sparring of his visceral forces shatters the falseness of it. Like a seabird’s nest riding a wave, it drowns in bitter waters. “Why will you always insist that you’re falling off the edge of the world? Haven’t you heard? The earth is round, so when you feel yourself falling, tuck and roll and get up again just like all the rest of us have to do.” I’m shouting now.

  Still he’s not hearing me. I pull out André Gide and read, “If one desires to discover new lands, one must consent to stay a very long time at sea.”

  He says that’s rot, yells that’s where he’s been all his life, at sea. And now he’s further out at sea.

  “And do you want me to take on the blame for this, when it was you who resigned from your job without even discussing it with me, when it was you who couldn’t wait to sell the house and begin to be a beginner. Would it just be simpler for you to forget those truths and let me indulge your coltish whinnying? Is that what it costs to be your wife? I don’t know if I can pay. I don’t know if I want to pay.”

  I notice that I am speaking these things in pure, hot Italian. And with a fresh, biting eloquence. I am Anna Magnani and Sofia Loren. I am stunned as I watch from some safe place inside me while this other woman who is me bites the side of her hand, stamps her feet, tosses her hair. Is that really me screaming oaths? There is some sense of exhilaration in spewing out three years, a hundred years of swallowed thorns. Yes, it’s me. Tiny me who just cries when things hurt or smiles, saying something profound and soothing to whomever might be near. I needed ano
ther language to release me from my own repression, my good-girl self-censoring. I walk away.

  I walk right out the door. It’s past ten. The night is still moonless and I’m still hungry. I wish I’d taken the chicken. Though it’s hot, I shiver like November inside my dress with the orange and pink roses. I’m hungry and my dress is so thin. I’m not certain why these two facts seem related. At first I head up toward Celle, but change my mind and take a sharp left down the steep, sandy path toward one of the thermal springs. In the darkness, I slide and stumble without my boots. I sit for a while on a rock ledge and feel the tears start but I’m just too angry to let them fall. I use the tufts of dried wild flowers on either side of the path to foist myself back up the sheer side of the hill. I notice how fragile the flowers are, yet I trust them to hold me. I don’t have a license to drive in Italy. I have my strong legs, my sandals with the thongs that rub and hurt between my toes. I’ve forgotten to take my purse. But there’s not much money in it anyway. Talk about losses. I feel inside the pocket of my dress and take out a 5,000-lire note. Whatever it is I’ll be doing next, this will have to fund it. My steps are fast and heavy as I head down Route 321 toward Piazze. Six kilometers of starlit country road. Saturday night in Tuscany.

  Save the few passing cars, I meet only a young gray fox on the way. I walk fast as though I’m heading someplace, but there is no place to go. I know where Barlozzo lives and where Floriana lives, too, but this is not the sort of village where one drops in anywhere at 10:30 on a Saturday night unless stalked by a bear. Except at the bar, that is. I know that’s the first place Fernando will look for me, so I’ve headed in the opposite direction.

  Piazze is even smaller than San Casciano, the whole village beginning and ending on a single curve in the road. But there’s an osteria and as I walk by it I can see the tables full of people still at supper. I walk inside and up to the bar, order an espresso, and try to begin some inane conversation with the padrona, but she’s all alone to serve and clear and probably cook, too, so she just smiles a buona serata. Good evening. Too late for that, I think, as I walk back out onto the road. And then I see the dark blue BMW prowling. I know he’s worried. He hasn’t seen me yet and I could choose to play with him but I don’t. Suddenly, I miss him. I know how hard all this is. I know how hard all this may always be. I step out and pretend to be hitching a ride. He stops and opens the door.