“What’s happened since I last saw you? Have you redrawn the boundaries of Tuscany?” he asks with a wide, fake smile.
Fernando brings out his portfolio of the programs and hands one to Barlozzo, who reads them slowly and without comment, placing them neatly back into the folder. He closes the folder. He looks at Fernando and then at me, back at Fernando. He’s smiling from his eyes now, shaking his head, still saying not a word.
“Allora, well?” asks Fernando.
He doesn’t like that question either. I take another shot.
“Listen, would you like to come with us next week up into the Val d’Orcia? We’re going to evaluate one of the programs, go through it day by day, see how it all fits.”
“Not if I have to wear the same white sneakers Americans wear. I’ve called Pupa and she’s roasting pheasants. I’m really hungry. Aren’t you so very hungry, kids?” he asks as though bread and wine and the flesh of a bird can fill up emptiness. “Aperitivi at the bar? 7:30?”
FEELING MORE UPHOLSTERED than dressed this evening, I’m wearing a new skirt, one I’ve made with leftover lengths of drapery fabric from my house in California. The skirt is red, an amaranthine red, velvet and dark and like burgundy before it goes brown. There were only eighteen-inch widths of it from where I’d trimmed the hems of the too-long drapes in my bedroom, so it’s a tiered skirt I’ve put together—wide, overlapping ruffles of velvet attached to a taffeta lining. It’s heavy and warm and nice with a thin rusty-colored sweater. Boots and a shawl and Opium complete my winter costume, and here we are at one of Pupa’s long tables, shoulder to shoulder with a party of Hollanders. They tell us they’ve been renting the same nearby farmhouse in Palazzone each November for twenty years, but even without that introduction I think we would all be easy together. We make our way through a heap of bruschette and then a great tureen of acquacotta, cooked water—a beautiful soup built of porcini and tomatoes and wild herbs that Giangiacomo ladles into each person’s dish over roasted bread and a perfectly poached egg. Up through the fine porcini steam and the fumes of honest red comes the thick Hun-ish accent of one of the Hollanders asking, “Do Tuscans drink wine at every meal?”
Just then, holding aloft two giant platters, Giangiacomo enters, followed close behind by Pupa, cheeks pink with triumph, screaming oaths that she’ll cut short her grandson’s life should he spill even a jot of sauce. The crowd screams. And so we scream, too, get to our feet and applaud just as they do while the duke stays seated, laughing, but just a little. The Dutch are a fine culinary audience and ask Pupa all about the preparation of the pheasants. She says she roasted the birds wrapped in cabbage leaves, each one of them bound round its middle with a thick rasher of pancetta, and glossed them with nothing more than their own scant, rich juices. But underneath the pheasants we find apples, roasted and still whole, their skins bursting, the aromas from the soft meat of them enchanting the air.
“The cabbage and the apple,” Pupa explains, “keep the dry flesh of the birds moist during the roasting. È un vecchio trucco, an old trick for roasting rabbits and quail and other wild birds. The gamy flavor of the flesh is enhanced by the sweet juices of the apples on which they sit while the smokiness of the bacon seeps in from the top. Buono, no?”
“Buono, si,” say the Hollanders in a single voice. And as the table sets to work on the pheasant, Barlozzo, with an appetite for distraction more than for wild birds, repeats the question asked earlier.
“So you’d like to know if Tuscans drink wine at every meal? Well, let’s see how Chou, here,” he says pointing across the table at me, “would answer the question since she’s also a straniera, foreigner.”
Because he is surrounded by such a rapt audience, this generosity with the floor is a surprising gesture from the duke and I’m pleased to take it. “I’d say it’s difficult to talk about how a Tuscan drinks without talking about how he eats.”
The Hollanders like the opening, another excuse for a cheer and the clanging of glasses. I continue. “A day’s and an evening’s eating and drinking usually goes like this. Upon rising, a man takes a caffè ristretto corretto con grappa, which is to say he holds the bottle of spirits over the small cup with the left hand where not more than two tablespoons of thick, almost syrupy espresso wait, while he makes the sign of the cross with the right hand. The perfect dose of grappa splashes into the coffee with only that gesture, which also performs as morning prayers. Hot milk and bread or marmalade-filled coronets complete the breaking of the fast. Then, at about nine, after three hours of work in the fields, a glass of red wine lifts the spirits and makes good company for a round, crisp roll stuffed with mortadella. Then, another espresso. Nothing much until noon, when one wants a light aperitivo—Campari soda, Aperol with a spritz of white wine, or even a quick prosecco. At the stroke of one, seated at table, a liter of local red is placed close to his drinking arm. The main meal of the day is long, rich in variety, but not weighted down in quantity. A plate of crostini or one of salame or a heft of cooled melon or a basket of figs, tastes of braised fennel or onions or eggplant. Then a thick soup or a plate of sage-scented beans, sometimes both of them, before a stew of rabbit with olives or veal with artichokes, maybe porchetta if it’s Thursday. Roasted potatoes and spinach or beet greens sauteed with garlic and chiles are always there. Then, una grappina—literally, a tiny shot of grappa, but since Tuscans are not literal about such piddly things, they pour the stuff out into a water glass, filling it to the rim—is taken for digestive purposes before il sacro pisolino, the sacred nap.
“At three-thirty or four, an espresso and back to the fields or into the barn for mending and building projects until seven. A quick face wash, un colpo di pettine, a stroke of the comb, into the truck and back up to the bar for a glass or two of simple white, a saucer of fine, fleshy olives, focaccia, crunchy with crystals of sea salt and set down with a pitcher of oil for drizzling. A nice prelude to supper. But once back at table, out comes the red again, less of it, though, because supper is thin compared to the harvest table at lunch. Now there wait only a few hand-carved slices of prosciutto from the mandolin-shaped leg dangling conveniently overhead in the pantry. Maybe a mingy ten centimeters worth of dried sausage. Bread is near. Then a soup of farro or lentils or ceci with fat, roughly cut strips of pasta called maltagliati. Leggera, they call such a soup, light. Then una bistecca sizzling on a grate in the fireplace across the room or a breast of chicken braising away in the kitchen with red and yellow peppers and a handful of sage leaves. A few stalks of wild salad. The tiniest wedge of pecorino. A pear, skin stripped, its juicy transparent flesh carved into wedges, each of which is brought to the mouth on the point of his knife. A hard, sweet biscuit or two with a thimbleful of vin santo. A short bracer poured out from the grappa bottle to sip with the day’s last espresso. All in all, a moderate feast.”
I’ve barely, if at all, larded the truth in my telling of the story and am rewarded with polite applause and many repetitions of incredible in Dutch. I think the duke enjoyed hearing me recount impressions in Italian to Hollanders who speak the language in what he calls the sopravvivenza, survival style, when I could have spoken more easily in English, which they all understand and speak quite well. Of couse he takes this as a show of deference to him rather than considering that I might prefer speaking in Italian. Lulled, now, and deep into their cups, the Hollanders talk quietly among themselves, comparing their gastronomic culture to this Tuscan one. Pupa comes out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, makes room for herself between two of them, asks Giangiacomo to open more wine. She points to the bottles in scandalous formation at the end of the table and laughs. She says she loves the plump sound a cork makes as it’s urged, guided toward freedom. Her mother once told her that opening wine is like birthing babies. Everyone likes the metaphor, save one magnificently pregnant woman, her head wound in thick blond braids. She absorbs her wince inside a smile.
Fernando nods Barlozzo and me up onto our feet and, our good-nights
said, steers us out to the truck. Pewter gauze drapes the moon. Dogs bark and frilled, parched leaves whir about this night of November. And as though he’s finishing a sentence he’d begun a minute ago, the duke says, “What you should be doing is what you’re already doing. You should be cooking for people. Just like Pupa does. Much better than traipsing all over the earth with strangers in tow, telling them things they won’t remember and taking them places that are bound to come up short after that cruise to Cozumel or some whirl through Disneyland. Anyone with a whole soul and even the dimmest passion for adventure will find his own way through Tuscany. Write. Cook. That’s what you love to do.”
“We talk about having a little place of our own. We talk about it all the time,” says Fernando.
“I can help you negotiate with the Luccis about restructuring one of the outbuildings, about putting in a kitchen and making space for a few tables. And the permits would be no trouble, since your house is already licensed as an agriturismo. It would take very little to set up.”
“How is it that our house is officially an agritursimo?” Fernando wants to know.
“Another politesse passed to the nobility by the local authorities. Signora Lucci applied for funds to cover the costs of restructuring your house, signing papers that said the place would be used to attract tourism and to provide cultural activities. It’s so that she could have a state loan with less payback. The system is called i patti territoriali a fondo perduto, terrirtorial incentive or loans that require only partial restitution. Haven’t you ever wondered why she asks you to sign a different person’s name each month in her rent register? She’s covering herself should anyone come to check her records. By law, you’re living in a country hotel. But running a hotel or setting up concerts in the garden would be too much trouble, so she just collects her rent from you—in cash and under the table—on an abandoned building for which the government paid part of the expenses to repair and put in order. Or almost in order. The whole scheme is fairly common in these regions.”
I remember, now, the first day he visited us and what he said about Signora Lucci having done everything as cheaply as she could with the state’s allotment.
“And you want a person like her to be our patron in a business as well as our landlady?” Fernando asks him.
“Her noble morals won’t interfere with your less greedy ones. You can run your business as you see fit, as long as you pay her the way she wants to be paid each month. With a fat, sealed, unmarked envelope. I just want you to put your energies into something that will work, that will bring you satisfaction. Do something small, contained, and with the least possibility of failure. I want you to stay here, to prosper here. Isn’t that what you want, too? You don’t want to send me back to playing cards with that Brazilian. All I ask is that you just consider it.” Caught by the wind, a brittle leaf raps fast against the window glass.
Consider it? I already know how it would look and feel and smell. A taverna it would be, a small room in a small town somewhere. The walls would be rough and washed in the color of ripe persimmons, the whole of it lit by a great black iron chandelier with forty candles and the flames of a fire. A single long table would be set before the hearth. Twelve chairs, maybe fifteen. That’s all. I’d offer supper, one supper each evening built from whatever was fine and just harvested. Yes, supper made of soup and bread, some winey stew of game or lamb, pungent with wild herbs and my joy in fixing it. I’d set down a shepherd’s cheese and then a nice slice of pie—one of berries, probably, or of opulent brown pears, their still-warm juices spilling over a yellow cornmeal crust and scribbling in the beaten cream beside it. Consider it? Yes, I promise I will. But now is the time for Fernando and me to invent something together. The taverna fantasy is mine. The project of the tours belongs to both of us.
We ask Barlozzo to leave us at the Centrale so we can walk up the hill. We kiss him good night, ask him to please stop fussing and ranting about what we should and shouldn’t be doing, that we’ll decide things in our own way, in our own time. Eyes full of woe, he waves, drives off. Fernando and I both feel the old duke’s sadness, know that his discourse about our future, though sincere, was raised up tonight as smoke. Rooted deep as a weed in a wall is his anguish.
SINCE BARLOZZO CHOSE not to accompany us on the trial tour, we decide not to wait out the week. Next morning we’re up at daybreak, packing sweaters and books and a few essentials, both of us excited about this journey. We close up the house and we’re off to ride the most wondrous roads in all of Tuscany. Our first stop will be the thermal village of Bagno Vignoni, then on to Pienza and Montichiello, San Quirico d’Orcia, Montalcino, Montepulciano. Just outside of Pienza, we ride a zigzag road beveled into a rise and paraded on either side by a courteous rank of soldier trees, black and inevitable. The female cypress grows fuller with age, more round and lush about her middle, while the male stays thin and dry. Both stand watch. Made of savage land, tamed, is this Tuscany, instructed by a million hands into obedience. A dominion all of silk and velvet, the green and pink and tawny stuff of her bestrides the curve of the earth tight as new skin, rolling, riffling, then plunging deep into a blind, hiding from the sun, resting herself before a sudden surge onto a slope smothered in wild roses. High on a steep, sheep crop and chalky crags break the hills now and then, relieving the green that abides even in winter. The Tuscan light heaves glitter up at the olive leaves and they dance. In summer they dance as the poppies do and as the wheat does when it’s ripe, all of them keeping time with the winds and the birds’ wings beating. But today the branches are heavy with ready fruit, and so the leaves slow dance to a song of December. We wander in each of the villages, supping like warriors, drinking humble wines, astonishing wines. We sleep.
We telephone the bar each evening when it’s nearing seven, knowing everyone will be gathered for aperitivi. As though we were calling from Patagonia rather than from fifty kilometers up the road, they line up to take a turn at shouting the day’s news, which is mostly about what they’re cooking or who’s got the flu or how cold it was at dawn, always asking if there’s anything worth eating so far away from home. Admonishing us to take care. And it’s always Vera who reads our faxes to us. In a clear, official tone, she recites the English words as she perceives they should sound, pausing for punctuation and, at will, for gloss. I can hear how straight she keeps her shoulders, how high her chin. We understand nothing, yet we listen to her devotion. She will decode messages for two lambs in the wildeness, the wilderness which she is certain is everywhere away from her own doors.
One evening, it’s the duke who answers, without a greeting and against a strangely silent backdrop, “Torna subito. La raccolta è cominciata. Come back quickly. The olive harvest has begun.”
Castagnaccio
1 pound of chestnut flour (available in specialty stores and in every Italian grocery)
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
cold water
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
½ cup pine nuts (optional)
2 teaspoons rosemary leaves, minced to a powder
Preheat the oven to 400°. Lightly oil a 10-inch cake tin. Pour the flour and sea salt into a large bowl and, in a thin stream, begin adding cold water, beating with a fork or a wooden spoon, until the batter takes on the consistency of heavy cream. Add the oil and beat for half a minute more. If using the optional pine nuts and rosemary, add them along with the oil. Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 30 minutes, or until it takes on the dark look of a crackled chocolate cake. Serve warm in wedges, as is or with a spoonful of lightly sweetened ricotta and a few roasted walnuts. A small glass of chilled vin santo goes well with it, however it’s served.
Winter
10
Perhaps, as a Genus, Olives Know Too Much
So you really want to climb up into those trees when it’s colder than hell, a basket strapped around your waist, and pick those olives, one at a time? Is that wha
t you really want to do?” Barlozzo asked every time I reminded him to include us in the raccolta. And now, plumped three meters up into the saddle of a hundred-year-old tree, my bundled torso pitched about in the gasping breath of early December, my wish is granted. I’m harvesting olives.
Ears tingling under my old felt cloche, my fingertips are white with cold as they slide in and out of Barlozzo’s gloves, which I’ve borrowed back from my husband. My nose runs. And all I do is send curses upon Athena. It was she who, posturing with Posiedon for dominion, sprung the first olive tree from the stones of the Acropolis, proclaiming it the fruit of civility. A fruit like no other. She said the flesh of an olive was bitter as hate and scant as true love, that it asked work to soften it, to squeeze the golden-green blood from it. The olive was like life and that the fight for it made its oil sacred, that it would soothe and feed a man from birth until death. And the goddess’s oil became elixir. Soft, slow drops of it nourished ewe’s milk cheese, a ladle of it strengthened wild onions stewed over a twig fire. Burned in a clay lamp, oil illuminated the night and warmed in the hands of a healer, it caressed the skin of a tired man and a birthing woman. Even now, when a baby is born in the Tuscan hills, he is washed in olive oil, modest doses burnished into every crease and crevice of him. On his deathbed, a man is anointed with the same oil, cleansing him in yet another way. And after he dies, a candle is lit and oil is warmed and kneaded over him, a farewell bath—the oil having accompanied him on all his journeys, just as Athena had promised.
BARLOZZO HAS DRIVEN Floriana to a doctor’s appointment in Perugia, and Fernando is at home by the fire, aspiring to the grippe, so it’s just me who’s come to pick. I look about at my fellow harvesters. Primitive ornaments they seem, hitched up in the glittery ruckus of the leaves. Wrapped in kerchiefs and shawls, a layer of woolies, one of skirt, one of apron poufed out from under two of sweater, the women are a sturdy breed of sylph. The men, in the camouflage-green-and-orangeade regalia of the hunter, are less beautiful. All of them must be cold, bone cold, yet they banter and shout across winds, practicing a farmer’s rite, perhaps the most ancient of all farmer’s rites. They will have this year’s green-gold sap as those have had it for eight thousand years before them. Still I’m thinking it must have been warmer during the harvest on the Acropolis.
A Thousand Days in Tuscany Page 14