A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  ON THE WAY home, Barlozzo slows down and turns off onto a road not much more than a goat path. We leave the truck and follow him to a ruin set on a hill, its walls thirsty-looking and crumbling down into the weeds. A fetid wind soughs and the droning of faraway sheep grudges through the silence. There is a group of farmers moving about. Like a room in the sky it seems, smoke climbing like clouds out from a chimney and wrapping the little house and the men and women in Elysian mists. We step inside the pageant and find them at work with a great heap of figs. They are preparing to dry them in a essiccatoio, just like the one Barlozzo described to us where chestnuts were once set to be parched of their juices. Some of them work at splitting the fruit, stuffing each one with an almond and a few anise and fennel seeds, laying the figs on trays. Another person is ready to carry the laden trays into the house, up the stairs, to slide the fruit onto the net screens that sit above the stove in a shank of wood smoke.

  Smooth as jasper beads are some of the figs now, all stuffed and dried and cooled and set before one last pair of hands, which waits with wooden needle and butcher’s twine. The hands dart about the fruit, fondling the skin of one or another of them, threading them, cradling a soft new bay leaf between each one and laying the finished necklaces in flat baskets.

  Barlozzo, Fernando, and I watch. We begin to talk and they offer us wine and bread, the remnants of their working lunch. The spokesman seems reluctant when we ask if we can buy a few strings of the figs, telling us this is late-harvest fruit, the last of the season and not the best of it. We say they look splendid and he offers us figs from the pile waiting to be strung. I take the fruit from his thick, rough hand, like the paw of a seraph-lion. We chew and close our eyes, saying, “Quanto buono, how good.”

  They all smile as if on cue. The artisan jeweler rises from her bench and, with a three-cheek kiss, places a necklace about each of our shoulders, saying, “Dio vi benedica, God bless you.”

  Fernando is reaching in his pockets for lire but she says, “Un regalo, a gift.”

  I run back to the truck and grab a sack of dried porcini, one of chestnut flour, and the branch of red berries Fernando had cut for me from a roadside bush.

  “A gift,” I say back to her. We’re all laughing, understanding, each of us in our way, that this might be a moment of life as life was meant to be.

  9

  Do Tuscans Drink Wine at Every Meal?

  A slashing November rain loops the olive trees in spangles while it darkles the morning sky. Leaning against the yellow brocade curtains on the long-windowed doors in the stable, I watch my husband climb the hill past the henhouse, past the sheepfolds, and up into our garden. Though the road would have been a drier path, he’s chosen the more beautiful way, looking up and around him as he stomps the swollen fields, not caring about the water that drips from his hair, dark and slick now as a beaver’s. He’s been shopping in the village while I’ve been writing. His hat must be in his pocket, his umbrella pitched up against a wall at the bar. How I love looking at him, un-posed. I can do that more often now, as he remains equally un-posed in company these days, this new life on dry land having somewhat loosened the despotic rule of his bella figura. He blooms, moves through his own quiet risorgimento. I think even he is beginning to recognize his beauty—the beauty of who he is and not who he might contrive to be.

  “Ciao, bambina” he says hugging me against him so that we press water from his sweatshirt onto mine. He’s full of the morning’s stories as he steps out of his boots, works on the fire, warms his hands. He thrashes about the room, alighting for a few seconds on the sofa, darting back to the hearth, kissing my hair or my shoulder each time he passes me as I sit at the computer. He wants to talk.

  “I’m just about ready to close up for the morning. Shall I make some tea?” I ask him.

  “No, it’s too close to lunch. And besides, I’ve just had two cap-puccini and an espresso for the road. I have something I want to show you,” he tells me, opening the armoire with the force to totter a hundred crystal wine glasses. He pulls out a drawer, gathers up the papers he’s been working on for the past few evenings.

  As a part of our eventual reinvention plan, we’ve been discussing, for months now, the idea of hosting small groups of travelers on tours through the areas that lie near us. We’ve talked about it long into many nights, picking up the discourse just where we’d left it as we wake the next morning. Once we’d exhausted many of the glossy guides we’d found in the bookstores of Florence and Rome, it was Barlozzo who took us to visit a gentleman, an academic who lives in Siena, for whom he’d worked years ago when the man still kept a country house near San Casciano, who was willing to lend us texts from his splendid collection of historical works, both culinary and artistic. Since then, Barlozzo, Fernando, and I, and sometimes Florì, have taken turns reading aloud in the evening, the duke being more patient with me than the others when I stumble through a passage or interrupt a narrative when I don’t understand the text. Slowly, deliberately, we plow through these books. The most splendid reward for the work is the realization that what we read about lies outside our door. Neither armchair travelers nor those in preparation for a journey to some distant place, we live here.

  We draw routes, engage ourselves in sessions with winemakers and cooks and artisinal food makers, seeking collaboration. Scouring the tiniest borgos, we find treasures. A bread baker who uses wheat ground in an old water mill, a renegade cheesemaker whose son is a shepherd. Out of league with the health department, she must sell her wares from a truck parked behind her village church or, sometimes, pass her soft, buttery kilo wheels wrapped in kitchen cloths down the pews at eleven o’clock mass, small envelopes passed silently back to her. The parish priests look benignly upon the commerce, so content are they with their gratis marzolino, fresh ewe’s milk cheese.

  We haunt the Etruscan museum at Chiusi as well as one in Tarquinia, which lies over the regional border in Lazio, and another in Orvieto in Umbria. We study the art in the churches, the art in the alleyways, the art that is everywhere, sanctified or, like the remnant tenth-century frescos on a courtyard wall of a dentist’s studio, taken for granted as a homely, everyday birthright. We study the offerings of tour guides, visit cooking schools all over the Chianti, rank the beds and breakfasts of small hotels and country houses. What we desire to do is to make a path, both gastronomic and cultural, through rural Tuscany and Umbria. A path for appassionati willing to muddy their feet and close their eyes, brave and unphased, as we speed past the Gucci outlet.

  We say we’ll host no more than six guests for each weeklong journey and that each program will resonate with its season. In September, we’ll harvest grapes and sit at the white-clothed tables set between the torch-lit vines in Federico’s meadow. In October, we’ll follow the Amiata road for chestnuts and porcini, dine with Adele and Isolina, two of Barlozzo’s old friends whom we visited during the chestnut crawl, perhaps invite our guests to cook together with us in Adele’s kitchen. In December, we’ll climb into the crooks of olive trees or search black diamonds armed with truffle-hunting dogs and a flask of grappa in the predawn woods above Norcia. We know how little we know. This truth is soothed by the sight of the books we’ve yet to read, by our own curiousity, this appetite to learn, by the growing roster of experts we can now count as colleagues. Art history professors from Perugia and Florence and Siena and even from Urbino, which sits over the hills in Le Marche. Museum curators, village chroniclers, church sacristans. Cooks and bakers and winemakers. We are gathering inside the circle of our project those who are simpatici, comrades of a sort, each of them intense in his or her own way about the glories of this countryside.

  We understand that the study of even the merest jot of these lands and their stories would ask thirty lifetimes. But we’ve begun. It seems important that we’ve begun.

  I am a sanguine who can walk a sanguine’s shoals. If it were only me in this life, perhaps I’d risk writing for my bread. Or set up some sort of rustic o
steria so I could cook and bake each day for a few locals and pilgrims. But we are two, and Fernando lunches poorly on rainbows. And so this preparation feels good. It feels right. But there are also moments when it seems a bauble, like a Tuscan revival of The Boxcar Children. I think back to some of the characters in my life—those who passed through it gently, those who trampled it. To some of the latter group, our plans would be flicked like ashes from the square shoulders of their Zegna suits or drop-kicked by the hand-sewn toe of a Hogan loafer. They would say we are buying lifetime tickets to the threater of the absurd. But that’s okay. Meanwhile there’s the consulting work, the first cookbook to edit, the second cookbook to write. The banker in Fernando has kept pristine records of every lira we spend and announces, now and then, that life here—life how we live it here—costs not one-fifth of life how we lived it in Venice. If we’re not exactly flush, we have enough to buy a little time. “So, show me,” I say, perhaps too lightly for him.

  “Sit down and concentrate,” he chides, spreading his papers.

  He traces his fingers along the itineraries he’s constructed for three different week-long tours. He has isolated the towns we’ll visit, the trattorie and enoteche and osterie where we’ll dine, the villas and country houses where we’ll lodge. He has considered, measured the distances necessary to travel during each day of the route, he’s balanced cultural jaunts with gastronomic ones, composed a harmony between rural and village events, demonstrated where and when we shall rely on our experts. Not waiting any longer for the Turkish fairy to do it, Fernando is carving a path.

  As I look at the programs all defined and in contiguous form, the chaff trimmed, the meed of them transparent, revealed as a grape just peeled of its skin, I say, “Bravo, Fernando.” I know that’s all I need to say. We sit long into the afternoon at the unset table, our lunch still to be cooked. We talk about the canal through which to launch our program. Because we will develop a specific route for each group we host, we know the number of tours must be very limited. Ten weeks a year to begin. But who is our audience, who is it that will be inspired, refreshed by coming here to us? Maybe they are adventures more than travelers, people who’ve already followed the predictable routes, who now want to be in Italy rather than scuttle over it. We’ll see.

  LATER, WE DRIVE over the mountains to Sarteano. A jaunt to watch the sky change at end of a day. Just beyond the road’s peak, I notice a bramble of blackberry bushes, their rain-washed fruit preened in the leaving light.

  “Can we stop to pick some?” I ask.

  We climb down into a mud trench. There is a miasma of berries. Branches and tendrils wound and woven together and bound up in thorns, the berries overripe and dripping juice at the barest touch. We pick them, carefully at first, placing a berry at a time in the bucket we keep in the trunk for such events until we taste one and it’s so sweet, a besotted sweet, sweet like no blackberry before it, and so we scrap the bucket and go directly from hand to mouth, picking faster and faster, damning the barbs of the vines now, laughing so the juice runs out of our mouths, trickles down our chins, and mixes with the blood from our thorn-pricked fingertips.

  Thunder. Great ponderous cracks of it. Raindrops. Large, plopping ones, healing ones that feel like tenderness. Climbing up out of the ditch, we head for the car with every chance to outrun the storm. I don’t want the dry port of the car. I want the rain. I want to be washed by this water that smells of grass and earth and hope. I want to be drenched in it, made supple in it like a shriveled fruit in warm wine. I want to stand here until I’m sure my body and my heart will remember the privilege of this life. Never minding that we are cold and wet all over, we tramp through the skirring furies of the storm and I think, once again, how much I want what I already have. I shout, “I love you,” to Fernando, who’s picking over in the next gully, but my voice can’t penetrate his falsetto rendering of “Tea for three and three for tea.” Though he well knows it’s “two,” he prefers “three,” for the better rhyme.

  “OGGI SONO BELLIGERANTE. Lasciatemi in pace. Today I am belligerent. Leave me in peace.” Inked out in a bold slant on thick white paper pinned to his shirt, this is the message Barlozzo wears one morning up at the bar. Signora Vera shakes her head, the oysters in her eyes sliding upward, nearly out of sight.

  “Preciso come un orologio svizzero, lui ha una crisi due volte all’anno. Precise as a Swiss watch, he has a crisis twice a year,” says Vera. An apology flecked with admiration.

  But since this is a duke behavior we’ve yet to encounter, we stand quietly next to him, sipping, shooting furtive smiles across the divide, longing for one of them to touch down into his exclusive estates. Nothing. I sneak a look at Barlozzo and then look hard at my husband, thinking that this duke behavior is also a Fernando behavior, even if his comes without such a helpful warning label. We shuffle about, order another cappuccino, waiting for the momentaccio, the evil moment, to pass, beginning to think it must all be some foolish affectation. But the momentaccio doesn’t end. As we pass him on the road later that day, his warning notice still intact, he barely brakes his trot. The next day we see him not at all, nor the next after that. Nearly a week passes before he raps a four o’clock knock on the stable door, steps inside. Tattered, broken he seems and I want to hug him and feed him. I want to wash him. He sits at the table and I set a tiny glass of brandy before him, stand nearby. Not even a sigh has one of us spoken.

  “People, especially people who live in small clutches like we do, tend to be a chorus of sorts, everybody singing the same song, if in different keys. Everyone endorses the thoughts of everyone else here. And this, in most part, thwarts any hope one man has of meeting up with himself, let alone with the peace it takes to nourish one or two of his particular hungers. Being on intimate terms with the cause of one’s own sufferance is the only way to kill it off, to choke its haunting. It’s the hardest work of all. And each one of us must do it for himself. Most of the pain in life is caused by our insistence that there is none. There are times when I just have to be alone, when I can’t tolerate another minute of anyone else’s chattering, much less their pontificating,” he says, himself in his own pontifical fever and worrying the week’s stubble on his face.

  Barlozzo paints when he talks. He prepares the canvas, splashes on the color, and throwing down his brushes sometimes, he opts for the thicker texture gained from a pallette knife. This is one of those times. “These past few days I’ve just been walking down the past like it was a country road, squinting at my own history, piece by piece.”

  “And so?”

  “And so here I am all fragile and naked as though I’d misplaced my sack of tricks, as though I’ve awakened from some long dream. But I think the dream was my life. It’s like I’d been sleeping on a train and suddenly arrived at my destination having seen nothing of the route. There’s all this howling going on inside me but I’m not sure if I still feel anything. Do you think I’m a crazy old man?”

  “Yes, of course you’re an old crazy man, one who’s suffering from his autumn crisis just like Vera said you were. You’re a crazy old man and a duke and a teacher and a child and a satyr. Why would you want to be one thing less than you are?”

  He doesn’t answer. Barlozzo never answers unless he likes the question. He shifts his bones as though the new position will make him less visible to me. He knows I feel, even see, that he has more to tell. But he wants to be finished more than he wants to continue. He sips the brandy.

  I look outside and watch as the day consigns itself to the night in a last great heap of fire. The sight goads my courage. I risk invasion.

  “What else is troubling you right now?”

  “It’s not what, it’s who. Time. He’s a blackguard, Chou. I didn’t even notice how old I’d grown until we began staging our little renaissance of the past. When you all pick up and leave—and you will pick up and leave—will I go back to spending my afternoons playing cards with the Brazilian shepherd on the hood of his Saab? It’s been
years since I’d remembered how good a castagnaccio can taste, longer even since I’d sat in the fields and really looked at a night sky. I didn’t know I’d surrendered all of my mystery and damn near all of my defiance. Did you know it’s defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself—if he loses these, he loses his voice. I’m faded, spent, yet I’m young and eager. Or is that only memory? I was born for, built for, a certain life that no longer exists. Oh, I don’t mean that all of it’s gone. Some of the appetites for life as it used to be still survive but it’s not the same. Can’t be the same. There’s an emptiness that comes with plenty. It’s that same sprezzatura, that nonchalance we’ve talked about before. I feel hollow and dulled most of the time, as though it’s only in the past where I can find myself. I’m my own ancestor. I’m full of history but I have no present. I feel like I’ve lasted too long, while others didn’t last long enough.”

  I’m not sure who these others are who didn’t last long enough. But I know he needed to say all this, to take it out of the fusty hole inside him and bring it to the light, if even for a minute. Still, he’s holding fast to some part of it, the hardest part. The duke is sitting on something just like a Sard sits on a stone laid over the firepit where his supper cooks. I understand that the argument is closed for now.