A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  “Whatever else happens, however foolishly I may behave, promise me you’ll never do this again,” he says.

  I promise because it’s this that I signed on for. I know that I signed on to indulge the lamenting and the quicksilverishness of him with as bold a signature as I signed on for the goodnesses of him. Still, I’m tired of packing and unpacking my heart. These crises of his, which feel oddly like betrayals, cause desolation in me. And I have to push hard at that desolation so I can remind myself of how he is made. All this behavior is an expression of his character, inexorable as bones and blood. Besides that, Fernando is Italian, and he knows what I can’t learn. He knows that life is an opera that must be shrieked and lamented and only once in a while laughed. Between acts, he says how much better it is now that he has released himself from his old life’s sleep. He tells me he loves being able, finally, to shriek and lament and even laugh. He says he loves most of all that he can cry. He asks me to love him for the difficulty of him more than the ease of him, something a man would never ask of a woman unless he already knew it was so. Still, to pacify him has become a self-indulgence, a vanity of sorts, and I know I must beware of this.

  We just sit there in the car, not talking at all, until I speak. “As much as I love you, you can push me away, at least from time to time and for a while. Let me try to tell you how you make me feel sometimes. When I met you, you were tired of being Fernando, that other Fernando who was poorly used in many quarters. You said you’d always been an honorable and patient and sacrificing person and still people handled you ever more brutally. They knew you’d take it. The bank, the family, the friends, they all trusted in your resilience. Do I understand all that correctly?”

  “Absolutely correctly,” he says quietly.

  “And beginning long ago and one by one, each of them was embittered in some way, when you cancelled them from your life. Is that how it happened?”

  “That’s how it happened.”

  “Well, then, why are you making me into your Fernando? Don’t you see that sometimes you treat me just a little in the way others treated you. It’s only once in a while and less often now than it used to be in Venice, but how I wish it was never. I just can’t hear you when you scream. And so, in defense, I’m learning to scream, too. And I think I could get very good at it, but then neither one of us will be heard, and there’ll be nothing left to do but walk away.”

  His look speaks of both torment and chafe and I think he doesn’t understand at all. I’m too tired to try further, so I surrender to the silence he seems to prefer. I am reminded of my son, of some sting he flinched from years ago, the sort of sting that only a five-year-old knave can raise up upon his four-year-old mate. I remember trying to convince Erich that it wasn’t his fate to keep peace at any cost.

  Right now all I know is that in love there must be some form of desperation and some form of joy. Both these sensations—along with whatever else the lovers invent or permit—are constants. Lovers are never long without one or the other or both of them. Is the joy fuller through the desperation, as it is to eat when you’ve been very hungry, to sleep when you’ve been awake too long? And if it is, shouldn’t we welcome the despair as much as the joy? The giving, the getting, the taking, the nurturing, I have begun to understand that we take turns signing on for one or another of these as though they were daily jobs. We continue to assume jobs until all of them are filled, until all the roles established. The dynamic part of love lies within each of these jobs but rarely beyond it. Consider, too, that love transforms the lovers.

  As though matter is recast, nothing can ever be as it was before the love. As you were with each other at the beginning of love, how you moved through the days and nights together, that is how you’ll move always. It was at the beginning when you learned to dance together. Notice that even now you dance together in the same way. Music, no music. A languid glide before an abrupt, explosive half-twist before a full turn. Two beats of stillness, awaiting further consideration. Fast, slow, quiet, sweet, angry. Love is a very personal tango. And every once in a while, just so we won’t forget it, the old truth comes to visit, the one that reminds us that we can grow but we can’t change.

  NEITHER OF US wants to go home just yet. We head up into Camporsevoli, lay the car quilt on a hillside in a stand of pines. We talk. I lie on my stomach, a hot cheek pressed to the earth’s coolness seeping through the quilt. The pine boughs make a thick curtain over our heads through which moonlight prickles. He lies so close, nearly covering me with himself, as though to protect me. I love the weight of him. This thought makes me smile and I say the word, irony, out loud. Fernando says “Hi, honey” back to me. He is perplexed at my laugh. We sleep this way. We wake and talk some more, sleep some more until we smell, then see the somber violet breath of first light, trembling, blowing out the stars. Just a few at a time, a contained overture, until ecco, Apollo, shrieks good morning to the night, exploding what’s left of the darkness, firing up the sky in great hallelujahs of amber and orange and the fierce pink of a pomegranate’s heart.

  Fall

  6

  Vendemmiamo—Let’s Pick Those Grapes

  As we approach Palazzo Barlozzo it’s just seven, a touch early even for the duke to be paying us a call, and yet there he is coming round the back of the house, looking like Ichabod Crane. We walk up to meet him and, as a worried old papa who finally sees the objects of his concern all safe and sound might do, his dread slides into a scowl before it settles into peevishness.

  “Buongiorno, ragazzi. Sono venuto a dirvi che la vendemmia a Palazzone comincerà domani all’alba. Io verrò a prendervi alle cinque. Good morning, kids. I came to tell you that the harvest in Palazzone will begin tommorow at sunrise. I’ll be here at 5:00. Be ready.”

  “Great, perfect, wonderful. Of course, we’ll be ready,” we tell him brightly but shamefaced, trying to slur the edges of our mischief. It’s clear he knows we’d had a bout of trouble, and I think Fernando is about to explain some of it to him, when the duke says, “Listen, Chou, the next time you want to let off some steam, take the road to Celle. It’s less dangerous. In trying to find your own tranquility, you’re disturbing the local peace.”

  Without warning, this man who’s yet to shake my hand is taking me, hard, by the shoulders, kissing each cheek, saying he’ll see us both in the morning. It’s stunning not only that he knows we’ve spent an unusual night but that he can scold and soothe and threaten with a few words and a single gesture.

  “Adesso, io vado a fare colazione in santa calma. And now I’m going to have my breakfast in sainted calm,” he says through wintry lips and assassin’s eyes, loping his way to the henhouse.

  We try not to laugh until one of us begins to laugh anyway and when he hears us, he turns back and he’s laughing, too.

  “Vi voglio un sacco di bene, ragazzi. I want your happiness, kids,” he yells out into the faint plash of a September rain.

  WE HAD BEGUN back in June to ask Barlozzo where he thought we could help pick grapes. In my journalist life, I’d traveled much of Europe to participate in one vendemmia or another—in Bandol in southern France, on the island of Madiera, and once, farther up north in Tuscany, in the Chianti—to collect information and impressions for my stories. Each time, the farmer in me was inspired. I couldn’t imagine living here and not being part of it. And more ardent even than my yearning for it, Fernando’s was fixed. One way or another, the banker was going to pick. But Barlozzo had been restrained about the idea. Did we realize it was un lavoro massacrante, a murderous work, that began each morning as soon as the dew was dry and lasted until sunset? He said that neighbors gathered on one farm, picked it clean, moved together to the next to do the same. He said that there were often six or seven or more small harvests in each of these circles bound by friendship and a mutual need for the simple wine that was food to them.

  “Whose grapes do you help pick?” I’d asked, hoping the directness of the question would stave off more scenes of Ar
mageddon under the still-cruel September sun.

  “Usually I go to help my cousins in Palazzone, though now they’ve got so many children and in-laws swarming the vines, they hardly need me,” he’d said.

  “Well, is there other work we can do to help? Can we cook?”

  “What you’re not understanding is that the harvest is ‘family’ work, open to neither the curious nor the admiring. But we’ll see. I’ll ask around.”

  After his clearly stated cultural lesson, I’d just let the subject sit. And the first we’d heard that we were invited to pick was this morning’s announcement that he’d be waiting for us at dawn tomorrow.

  La vendemmia, the grape harvest, is anticipated, celebrated more than any other seasonal event in the life of Tuscan farmers. The oldest cultivated crop on the Italian peninsula is the vine, the tendrils of its history wound about and grafted into rites pagan and sacred, into life itself.

  Almost everyone has vines, either his own or his landowners’, either a hundred or so scraggly plants grown up among blackberry bushes or set between rows of feed corn or hectares and hectares of luxuriant and photogenic vines nurtured by masterful hands. Or, as it is with Barlozzo’s cousins, some configuration in between. Most often, except on the great parcels of land where mechanical means are sometimes employed, the grapes are cut, cluster by cluster, the clicking of the secateurs meting out an ancient, pastoral rhythm.

  A strange sort of flat twig basket is hung from the vine where the harvester works, freeing his hands to clip the clusters and drop the fruit into it in a smooth two-step motion. When the basket is full, the fruit is turned out into larger plastic tubs, which are then carried to the small trucks or wagons that wait here and there among the vines to port the grapes down the road to the crusher. When I lived in California, I found that the innocent pleasures of wine were too often diminished by prodigies—real or self-imagined—bent on deep-reading a glass of grape juice. There is no such blundering here. These farmers make their wine in the vineyard rather than in the laboratory the way commercial winemakers do. The fruit—undisguised, unmanipulated, and just as the gods send it—is the stuff of their wine. That and their passion for it. And this congress is all the alchemy there is. Rough, lean, muscled wines, wines to chew, thick rubescent elixirs that transfuse a tired, thirsty body like blood are these. No fragrance of violets or vanilla, not a single jammy whiff nor one of English leather, these wines are the crushed juices of the grape, enchanted in a barrel. As we tumble out of Barlozzo’s truck on the vineyard road, we see what must be thirty people standing and sitting near a small mountain of baskets and bins. To a person, their hair is tied in some form of bandanna or kerchief. Hat brims buck up against the vines and inhibit the work of picking. This other form of headgear holds back sweat, if not the sun’s violence. I decide to put my Holly Golightly straw hat back in the truck, hoping not too many of the harvesters have noticed the two-foot diameter flounce of its offensive brim. As I come back to join the group, Barlozzo hands me a neatly ironed blue-and-white bandanna, boycotting my eyes, the better for me to feel his scorn. I want to ask him why he just didn’t remind me of my inappropriate hat while we were driving to the site, but I don’t. Fernando is loathe to surrender his black Harley baseball cap and receives the duke’s tacit approval.

  The other thing that separates us from the pack is that we have not come with shears attached to our belts. Suddenly I feel like a chef with no knives, a plumber who must borrow a wrench. But there are others without arms, and soon the vinaiolo, the winemaker, is distributing weapons and errant gloves to us as though we were on a breadline and had asked for toast.

  The spirit of festival is thin among the vines and under the wakening sun as the vinaiolo assigns territory, demonstrates technique to the few first-timers. I can’t help remembering the California harvests I’d witnessed. The estate manager and the winemaker mill about the vineyard, variously nodding and shaking their heads, touching, smelling the fruit, writing in notebooks, racing with the grapes into the lab to test the Brix. Would there be a harvest today, or would we wait for tomorrow and the further concentration of the fruit’s sugar? Here it’s another story: when the moon is waning and the grapes are fat and black, dusted in a thick white bloom and sundried of dew—the residual moisture of which might dilute the purity of the juice—the vinaiolo snaps off a bunch of grapes, rubs one or two on his shirt sleeve, tosses them into his mouth, chews, swallows, smiles and says, Vendemmiamo, Let’s pick.

  The work is beginning, but I have to use the bathroom. Two women in pinafores and corrective shoes with the backs cut out flutter about my needs, show me the way, ask after my comfort. I’m the last one to slip into the leafy avenues of the vines. My partners are a man called Antonio, thirtyish and swaggering, and another called Federico, seventyish, chivalrous as a count. When they see that I know how to use my secateurs, holding the curved handles easily in my fist, that I can burrow deep into the vines to clip and drop the fruit into my basket almost as rhythmically as do they, Holly Go-lightly is redeemed. “Non è la tua prima vendemmia. Sei brava, signora. This is not your first harvest, my lady. You’re good.”

  Less than two hours have passed and, drenched in sweat and rouged in grape juice, I am febrile, weak as a babe as I step out from the humid enclosure of the vines and into the light of the fiendish sun. It is the first collective rest of the morning and I can’t remember if I’ve ever been this tired. My legs feel just-foaled, not quite able to hold me as I try to stand. My body is seared but somehow exquisitely exalted and the all-absorbing sensation is not unlike a post-coital one. I look about for Fernando, who must be on the other side of the hill that separates the two fields. There he is, waving me toward him. Because they’re so beautiful, I can’t resist limping among the vines rather than along the sandy path beside them. Here and there among the green, succulent leaves, one or two are tarnished gold by the sun, crisped and beginning to curl. A symptom of autumn.

  We go to join the rest who’ve collected about iceless tubs of mineral water set in the shade between two old oaks. There are barrels of wine. There is no one actually swallowing the water, except the errant splashes of it that land in the mouth as they pour it over their heads and shoulders, chests, arms. They bathe in the water and drink the wine, and it all makes sense. I do what they do. There is a basketful of panini—thick cuts of bread stuffed with prosciutto or mortadella—and I eat one hungrily while Federico refills my tumbler with wine. I drain it like a true spawn of Enotria. I feel faint.

  I manage to recall enough strength to return to the bending and clipping until I hear an accordian whooshing and voices singing. Only sun-inflamed I think I am and that the pleasant fit will pass until Antonio says, “È ora di pranzo. It’s time for lunch.”

  Merciful lunch and a serenade. I find Fernando, unfolded flat between the vines he was picking when lunch was announced. He’s laughing, saying he’ll never move again. We follow the others to the place under the same oaks, if a little deeper into their shade, where a long, narrow table is laid with a green and blue cloth and set with great, round loaves of bread, bowls of panzanella, wheels of pecorino and a whole finocchiona—the typical Tuscan salame, big around as a dinner plate and scented with wild fennel. There are flat baskets piled with crostini smeared with a paste of fegatini, chicken livers. Someone taps into another demijohn of wine and people stand in line with pitchers while some let the stuff fizz directly from the spout into their glasses. Sitting on the packed earth among our colleagues, we and the sky and the sun are stitched together in a primitive agragrian motif.

  On a far hillside there are women on ladders pulling fruit from a stand of fig trees. They seem painted, a Sapphic bevy at work. Glass breaking under velvet is their laughter, riding the air like a shiver. They carry the fruit back to us in the skirts of their pinafores, letting the figs drop softly onto the table. I take one and it’s hot from the sun. I bite it, piercing its honey juices, rolling them about in my still wine-wet mouth. I bring on
e to Fernando and he eats it whole with his eyes closed. Everyone is quiet for half an hour, sleeping, half-sleeping. The accordianist sings alone.

  THE VINAIOLO MANOEUVERS through the vines, saying, “Per oggi, basta, ragazzi. For today, that’s enough, kids.”

  It’s only just after five in the afternoon, nearly two hours earlier than the usual quitting hour, and there’s a buzzing among the harvesters wanting to know why. The drift that circulates says it’s because we’ve stripped more than half the vines in record time and that the crusher, even though it will be fed all through the night, simply can’t accommodate more fruit than we’ve already picked. A great cheering rises up and the men strut about, hugging and kissing each other like a band of Latin desperadoes fresh from a raid. Grappa is offered all around midst the rush for autos or trucks and the milder spoils of a bath and a bed. The vinaiolo stands at the end of the drive where all our vehicles are parked and shakes hands with each of us, looks us straight in the eye and says thank you fervently, as if we’d snuffed the fires of hell. And I think how artistic is the Italian’s glissade from mood to mood. Perhaps it’s all the olive oil.

  We harvest with the same champion group in four different vineyards for nine successive days until all the grapes are in. The weather stays warm, energy and good humors prevail. Riding back home with Barlozzo in the truck on the last day, I tell Fernando my thighs have grown strong and firm, and he tells me he’s certain now that working the land is what he’s meant to do. Barlozzo says we’re once again lulling ourselves into the quaint thinking of the middle-aged in crisis. He says all we did was help our neighbors to pick a few grapes. The duke’s nimble restoration of equilibrium. I squeeze my Titian thigh and think maybe it’s not so taut after all. To heal his trounce, I suppose, he asks if we’re ready for the evening’s festival.