She likes the story of how Fernando and I met and wants me to tell it to her over and always asks me to repeat some part or another of it. Once I asked her about Barlozzo, about how long they’d been a couple, and she answered that they’d really never been a couple in the sentimental sense, that they’d been friends all their lives, always would be. Another time, she said she was impazzita, crazed, about him when she was still a girl, but that he never took much notice of her. She says he was always un lupo solitario, a lone wolf. I understand that when her answers are less than large, it’s not because a question offends her but more, I think, that it confuses her because even she doesn’t know the answer. Lit by sun, quickly hidden by shadows, I can see her but then I can’t. A trick we all use. Or perhaps there’s no trick at all with her. Perhaps it’s only that Florì is Tuscan.
“Oh, Chou. I’m not some depository of tradition you can tap into the way you do with Barlozzo. He’ll never tell you so, but he’s truly fond of taking you both by the hand and strolling backward. In one way or another he tries to do the same with as many of us who’ll let him. But with you two, and especially with Fernando, he seems to think he’s bequeathing his legacy, passing on the stories and somehow assuring the significance of his life. You three are complicit. And complicity is a kind of love, don’t you think? In some ways, he is behaving like a man in love. He’s just been around all the rest of us for so long. The ones of us who are older than he think he still has so much to learn, and those of us who’re younger think we want something more—or is it less?—than the past. Older or younger, though, all of us are tired in our own way. It’s the freshness of you two that’s turning his head.”
Pulling away from her musing, she turns sly, saying, “It’s too bad you can’t ask him to help you with the plums and the tomatoes. Conserving is probably the single food art in which he’s not an expert. He can stick a pig and butcher it, saw the haunch bones just right so the prosciutto dries firm and sweet. He can make salame and blood pudding and head cheese, he can pickle the ears and the tail and boil down the fat to make cracklings. I’ve seen him skewer its heart on a branch with sage leaves, roast the thing over a fire and then gnaw at it, calling it supper. Lui qualche volta è una bestia, altre volte, un principe. He’s a beast sometimes, other times, a prince. But he’s always good, Chou. Barlozzo è buono come il pane. Barlozzo is good as bread.”
She’s doing her best to distract me, but it’s not working. All this publicity about Barlozzo’s talents and virtues is redundant, wasted on me. I’m already convinced he’s a fallen angel with neolithic, Roman, medieval, and Edwardian pasts. I know he knows everything. Except how to can plums and tomatoes.
“Ciao tesoruccio, devo andare. Ma, sai di che cosa hai bisogno? Un congelatore, bello grande. Così puoi conservare tutto quello che vuoi, anche tutte le prugne toscane. Ciao, little darling, I must go. But do you know what you need? A freezer, a great big one. With that you can save all the plums in Tuscany.”
For a moment I think she’s serious and I’m about to condemn her blasphemy, but I see she’s having herself a fine laugh, so I do, too. Walking down the hill, she is a lonely figure who’s left me standing in a squall amidst the molding fruit.
BARLOZZO AND FERNANDO are sitting at the dining table, drawing. Inspired by the one in Federico’s garden on the evening of the harvest supper, this time it’s a firewall they’ll build. All the project needs are stones and a flat, isolated earth space where the flames won’t threaten the trees. It will be a primitive barbecue pit over which we can grill and, with one of Barlozzo’s contraptions, hang a pot and braise everything from birds to beans, he tells us. An alternative to the wood oven, the fire ring is practical not only for cooking but also for our own bodily warmth. “Otherwise you’ll soon be saying it’s too cold to stay outside, and you’ll miss out on the most beautiful evenings of the whole year. There’s a long, deep winter coming on when living by the inside hearth is what you’ll have to do, but why rush it? And if you’re willing to surrender all your linens and candles once in a while, you can sit right down close to the fire, cooking and eating under the stars just like a shepherd,” he says. He knew the shepherd image would get to me. He really is in love with us, I think as I listen to him going on about splendid autumn nights and pork chops dripping in garlicky juices. He keeps stumbling over his use of we, changing it to you, not wanting to impose himself onto these delicious fancies. I wish he’d understand that we is most appropriate. Barlozzo has come to matter so much to both of us, but I think he and Fernando are closest, if in their own economical fashion. I think they see themselves in each other. Fernando sees that, as he grew older, he might have become like the part of Barlozzo who is—or is it was?— too much alone and always scuffling about on the edges of anger. Barlozzo provided him with a Dickensian visit. The Ghost of Christmas Future. And I think the duke sees his younger self in my husband, most especially when Fernando displays the hard core of his will. That must be the reason he says, six times a day, how wonderful it is that Fernando scappato dalla banca, escaped from the bank. I don’t know why, but I think Barlozzo wanted to escape something or someone long ago. And because he didn’t do it, the duke celebrates all the more Fernando, who did.
THERE’S A CAVA, a stone quarry, a few kilometers down the Piazze road. Fernando says we can find enough stones there to raise a coliseum, but Barlozzo tells him someone’s sure to see us digging about, wonder what we’re building, and then come by to tell us we’re doing it all wrong. This is a pleasure, we understand, Barlozzo wishes to keep all to himself. “They’ll wander over like they did when we were building the oven and we’ll have to listen to thirty opinions about the best way to pile stones. I know a place in Umbria where the Tiber is low at this time of year, and we can take what we need from the river bottom in a few hours. Besides, it’s a beautiful ride getting there,” he says.
And so on a limpid afternoon we heave our wheelbarrow and a sack of the duke’s Stone Age tools into the back of his truck. We’re off. Fernando begins his Cole Porter repertoire: “You do something to me, something that simply mystifies me.” Sometimes when we sit out in the evenings up at the bar, Fernando and I sing for hours while Barlozzo and his cronies listen, engrossed as though we were a traveling Jacques Brel troupe, applauding and saying “bravi, bravi” even when we stop only to think of the next line. The duke has learned a phrase or two and he joins in with Fernando.
“Tell-e mee-eh wh-h-y-ah should eet-ah be-ah, you-ah have-eh the power-r-r-ah to hyp-eh-notize-eh mee-eh?”
I turn to look at him and and he’s steely as a hangman, mouthing the words just as he’s heard us sing them. A phonetic coup. Pronouncing every vowel and separating every syllable, he’s three-and-a-half beats behind Fernando, the Tuscan echo of a Venetian singing American love songs, and the effect is beautiful.
Barlozzo elbows me to sing, too. Our noises seem to propel the old truck, to make it fly over the road all the way to Ponticelli, onto the autostrada and then over the snaky trail toward Todi. No matter what song Fernando and I sing, Barlozzo sings his one and only remembered line, fitting the words into the different tunes, always trilling out the last note until his breath gives way. Singing seems to embolden the duke, kindling his curiosity.
“So what do you call that dress you’re wearing? Mi sembra un avanzo del ottocento. It seems some remnant of the 1800s,” he tells me, arching his brows in the direction of my autumn costume, recently assumed in favor of the dress with the pink and orange roses. I wear Wellies and a long, wide black flannel skirt, a Kamali skater’s skirt softened over at least fifteen Septembers.
“I guess it’s true that both my clothes and I are survivors of some other time.”
Barlozzo eases the truck off the road into a swag of soft earth in front of a stand of pines. We take out the tools and the wheelbarrow, cross the road to the riverbank. I leave my boots on the shore. Kilting up my skirt, knotting the bulk of it on my hip, I walk barefoot into the Tiber. The sun is me
an on my back, the water ices my feet and, as though I’ve waded in the Tiber all my life, I’m familiar with it, splashing and kicking at it. As I high-step across the whole eight meters or so of the river to the other shore, a small epiphany roils up in me, and I think once again how much I like this life. It feels purloined in a way, or like a prize. First prize for not waiting. For not waiting to splash in a river, for not promising myself that I would someday splash in a river, but for doing it now, right now, before destiny or some other interloper stops by to tell me there’s been a change of plans.
The men are loosening stones with crowbars, pulling them up from the shallow, skirling water, laying them in the wheelbarrow. One trip to the truck. Another one. I don’t help at all except to sing to them, shout encouragement. I cheer them on with a delectable litany of what we’ll cook over the first fire.
Squeezing the river from the edges of my skirt, letting the drops wash my fingers, I go to sit on the bank. Watching them work, then wandering a bit about the woods, cutting orange-berried branches that look something like bittersweet, I am cozy as velvet when they call me, saying it’s time to go. We drive up the hill into Todi and stop for un espresso in piedi, on the run, stroll for a while before we sit, sipping prosecco and agreeing about the grievious state of our hunger. It’s only seven, an indecently early hour to contemplate supper and so we head for the truck.
“We can watch the sunset and then go to eat fish at a roadhouse on the way home,” says Barlozzo.
We stop at another point by the river’s edge, handing each other jackets and sweaters against the gathering breeze. Rinds of golden light wrap apricot clouds and the leaving sun colors the Tiber red as blood, a crimson rift in the heart of the new night. We stumble down to sit by the water, and with no warning I hear myself saying, “I think we’re going to look for a place to buy.”
“Where?” Barlozzo asks.
Fernando answers, “As close to San Casciano as we can find.”
“I thought you were just passing through. I thought this interlude was adventure, amusement. I thought you’d be heading back to Venice at some point, or the States,” he says, though he already knows it’s not amusement we’re seeking. He pushes a tiny spade further into me.
“What are you going to do here? I can understand you wanting a holiday place, just like everyone else in the world seems to want. But most of the folks who buy something here have lives, houses, work. They have a somewhere else. Oh, they love it here all right, or at least the parts they bother to get to know, but the best I can say for most of them is that they’re straddlers—one foot here, one foot stuck hard back in that somewhere else. In the end they really don’t live anywhere. They play it safe. But you two don’t seem to be talking about safety. Why would you want to live here?”
I don’t say a thing but, with my chin, I point to the river and the pines.
“Because of those,” I tell him, “and because of what we look at every day back in San Casciano. I want to live there in those pink hills with the sheepfolds and the leaves of the olives twisting in the winds like so much silver and the sound of the bells pounding up through the mists. I want to live there because of all that.”
I turn to him, then, and I say, “And because of you.”
Bemused now, shadows collect about his eyes.
“I want to live there because of you. I want you to be my teacher. I like that you’re passing on to us even a little of what you’ve seen, what you know, how you’ve done things. What you feel.” Only the river makes a sound until we hear a slow shuffling step coming from a nearby hillside stitched with a few rows of vines. There’s just enough light to show us the figure of an ancient, her hair wrapped in a kerchief, a man’s cardigan her cape. Likely the padrona of the farmhouse upriver, she’s come to survey her realm. Her feet spread apart, she stands solidly on her wooden clogs in front of the vines, picking the errant grapes left here and there, unseen by the harvester’s shears. As if they were stolen and she was hungry, she eats them from her palm. And still chewing, her hands making sounds like a wounded bird in a bush, she searches in the withered leaves for the next hidden bounty. Venus grown old and artless, she charms me. As though I’d put my eye to a peephole to look at my someday self, she is me. We sit a few yards distant, yet we are unobserved by her. Or dismissed by her. She knows the truth, that it’s all moot, that both calamaties and triumphs are passersby and mostly insignificant. She knows that neither of them is what it seems and that, if there is a difference between the two, it’s only that our great feats stale in less time than our injuries are recovered.
“She’s craving a burst of sweetness before the light fades. Isn’t that what we all want?” asks Barlozzo. “But before I get to that, it’s the salty crackle of a great pile of fried fish I want,” he says rising, slapping the latest dirt from the back of his already dirty khaki pants.
We eat fried latterini at a place called Luciano. Tiny lake fish the size of smelt, a platter of them is delivered to the table. I think it’s too much for us, until two other platters of the same dimension arrive and a jug of cold white wine is plunked down. Nothing else. I watch the duke. Picking up one and putting a part of it in his mouth, he does a sort of folding motion and the whole diminutive structure is dispatched in two chews and a swallow. I do the same and taste the suggestion of hot, crisped, sweet flesh, but I need two or three more, taken faster, then faster yet, before I can get the full, rich taste of them to fill my mouth. I sip the cold wine and rest.
THE STONE RING is built up in a day, and over the smoldering ash of our first fire, we roast a meter’s worth of fat sausages made by the butcher with the hachet that swings from his Dolce e Gabbana belt. We turn them until they’re bursting, laying them, then, on trenchers of good bread and eating them between long, hard pulls of wine, sitting right there on the red Sienese earth like Barlozzo said we would. We feed the fire again, watching the flames burn holes in the dark, feeling the night roll in and over us like a silent sapphrine wave.
“Why do you insist on sitting so close to the fire? Do you desire to become a burnt offering?” Fernando asks me.
“I have to find the right position. I like being close to the edge. Not too close but not too far away, either. Though I guess I prefer to be too close than to be too far,” I say.
“You don’t trust comfort any more than I do, Chou,” says Barlozzo.
“Because I like to sit close in to a fire?”
“No. Not just because you like to sit close in to a fire. That’s only a symbol of the fact that you don’t trust comfort. You trust risk more than comfort. I’ve always been afraid of comfort, too. Bring on the pain, because during those moments when I can neither see it nor feel pain, when it’s quiet, I know it isn’t really quiet at all but only gathering force. Better that pain stays where I can keep an eye on it. There’s risk in comfort. There’s comfort in risk. Risk, risqué. It adds piquancy, that’s what risk does. Repress the appetite. Give in to the appetite. Stay close to the edge. Stay away from the edge.”
“Which is it?”
“It’s all of them. All of them in judicious doses, taken at judicious moments. Finesse is what life asks. Otherwise one rots before his time.”
The duke is grisly this evening. Fernando stares at him, abashed, I think, that his simple warning to me to sit back from the fire has unleashed discourse about the risk comfort poses, about judicious doses of finesse and a faster rotting. We both know there’s nothing to do about it and so we listen.
“Cominciamo dal fondo. Let’s begin at the beginning. St. Augustine said it most clearly, We are, every one of us, going to die. Rotting is the way of all things. A tree, a cheese, a heart, a whole human chassis. Now, knowing that, understanding that, living begins to seem less important than living the way you’d like to live. Do you agree with that?”
I look at Fernando, we nod yes to each other, he nods yes again to Barlozzo.
“So, life, by definition, is impermanent. All the energy we spen
d in trying to fix it, secure it, save it, protect it, leaves damn little time for living it. Pain or death or any other pestilence doesn’t pass over us because we’re careful or because we have insurance or, God forbid, because we have enough money. All right. So how does one come to understand exactly how one wants to live? How one wants to use up his time?”
Fernando seems to be holding up under the irascibly delivered monologue, but I’m caught back somewhere between St. Augustine and the rotting cheese. Yet I understand that, for Barlozzo, the shortest distance between two points is a convolution, so it’s not surprising when he says, “If you want, I’ll help you to look for that house.”
Floriana was right. We three are complicit.
THOUGH IT’S FELT like another room in our house since that first night we spent in San Casciano, as time goes by, Bar Centrale becomes more like a whole other home. Rosealba, Paolo, Tonino, Sig-nora Vera, the whole family of patrons who oversee the bar takes us in, makes life better for us. There’s a telephone on the wall in the corner by the pinball machines. When we call Lisa or Erich or my agent in New York or editors in California, Signora Vera shushes the clamor of the children, telling them we’re talking to Bill Clinton. After having lived for years under the gelato maker, an old fax machine is dusted, cleaned affectionately with cotton dampened in alcohol, and set upon a small table behind the bar that has so recently become the international communications center and bar, truly Centrale.
Three, four, sometimes more times throughout the day and evening find us there, at a table on the little terrace, leaning into the bar in the morning with hands wrapped around our cappuccini, screaming into the phone in the late afternoons. Wiping the coffee drips and the wine stains off the day’s fax receipts, the Centrale is the great convergence. It’s Hollywood and Vine, it’s Wall Street, the Champs Élysée. It’s the juncture at which all news, even the undistorted, is revealed. It’s where fortunes are punted, mostly at cards, and where, when thirsts are tamed, peace is restored. It is our office, tea salon, war room, inner sanctum, refuge, and pied-à-terre. Is there anyone who really needs more than this? I begin to understand why some Italians will tell you they’d rather choose their bar than their neighborhood, that it’s better to settle for an apartment short of their dreams as long as the local bar feels right. Some will even tell you that their bar is what the neighborhood church was to its parishioners long ago—a place for comfort.
A Thousand Days in Tuscany Page 10