A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  Steeped in thin morning tea is the winter light, and the air smells of snow as we work in this small grove of some two hundred trees on the land of Barlozzo’s younger cousins. Even in the teeth of the cold, I love my tinseled perch and the prospect over these lands. More even than vines and wheat, the olive is cherished here. From my high seat, I see far beyond the small estate where we work. I see the trees that plait the red earth of Tuscany, that climb her chalky flanks, flock fields and meadows, and roll over the hills of her. Loyal as the stars are olive trees. But even as they stand together, they are desolate, each one alone with some primeval keen. The old ones seem tortured, hulking grotesques. As though they’ve kept custody of too many stories, their chests are cleaved to bare their stalwart hearts. But even the young ones, new and slender and yet unwounded, are already marked with a tinkling wistfulness. Perhaps, as a genus, olives know too much.

  A few kilos of each day’s bounty are carried into a stone barn where a brunette donkey, harnessed to a rope, pulls seventeenth-century crushing stones round and round, her annual dalliance with show business. She whines and shrieks, flashing black velvet eyes on her adoring audience, which is made mostly of the very young and the very old. Round and round, she steps away the afternoon, turning the stones that press the porphyry fruit into a thick olive stew. The resulting mass is then spread between mats woven of hemp and crushed again, until the first reluctant drops begin to trickle into the old tub beneath them. This is a decidedly artisinal methodology practiced only as tribute to the past. Almost all of the olives are brought to the frantoio comunale in Piazze.

  The olive mill is small, servicing only the local farmers or padroni, each of whom might have three or four hundred trees, less, perhaps, as Barlozzo’s family does. The farmers often help each other to harvest, but there the sharing stops. Every farmer wants to be assured his olives—coddled and cared for better than anyone else’s olives, harvested only at the moment of perfection—are pressed and returned to him as the jade fortune he deserves more than his neighbors do. And so he carts his own olives to the mill, sets them in un posto tranquillo, a quiet place, where he can guard them, protect them from ruffians while waiting his turn at the press. Finally, with a probing scrutiny he watches—as though he could recognize them—as every last one of his beloved purply fruits is heaved into the crusher to be pummeled and split between blocks of granite. He watches still, as the pulp is funneled into a vat to be agitated by steel paddles, to be warmed by friction so that the oil will drip less grudingly in the phase of spremitura, the pressing. Then the resulting paste must be forced through the mats, the debris left behind, so the oil can, at last, flow freely. Still he watches, until his blessed oil is funneled into bottles, which he will most often cork with his own hands, the very same hands that carved the corks, picked the olives, pruned the trees. The cargo is loaded into his ape—a three-wheeled motorized vehicle in which farmers are wont to terrorize back roads—or hauled up onto his tractor. Toward home now, he escorts his oil with the pomp of a crusading cavaliere returning with his spoils into a reddening sun. If I squint just so, the tractors fade, and I replace them with horses and wagons—a gentle tuning to turn things back half a thousand years or so.

  During what can be hours and hours of waiting for his own moments at the crusher, il frantolano, the olive mill owner, ministers to his clients. The mill is built for business: cement clocks and corrugated roofing, a dirt floor in part, smooth white tiles paving the machinery areas. Yet, in the end farthest from the fray, there is a great fireplace. Flames leap in the hearth and under the raised and burning logs rests a contraption that catches the white-hot ash. Over the gentle heat of this ash is laid an old grill. On a nearby oilcloth-covered table there are several kilo-rounds of country bread, a great-bladed knife, a dish of coarse sea salt, whole cloves of peeled garlic speared onto several branches of rosemary. There is a demijohn of red wine cuddled up to a stone sink, on whose draining board wait thirty or so tumblers, turned upside down to drain from frequent rinsings under the tap. The farmers keep watch over their waiting olives, breaking the vigil with ritual refreshment. One whacks off a hunk of bread, roasts it on both sides over the embers, rubs it then with the garlic-rosemary branch, carries it, in his hand and with some ceremony, to the grunting press and holds it under the spigot for a few seconds to let drip a thick sort of cream composed of the crushed but not yet pressed fruit. One carries his treasure, with some ceremony, back to the fire, to the demijohn, filling his tumbler with the thick, chewy wine of the countryside. He quaffs with unhidden pleasure, eats with a burly hunger, returning to his surveillance, comforted. This solace might endure as long as a quarter of an hour before the next inclination for succor.

  And so we sit together, the farmers and their families and I, as if in the waiting room of a wizard. And all we talk of is olive oil. At one point, looking to build a bridge between the old world and the new, I open discourse about America, saying that the medical community advises the consumption of extra virgin olive oil to help lower the evil side of blood cholesterol.

  To a person, the circle looks at me with something near to mercy, and so I scurry on with news of the American posture that touts “the Mediterranean diet.” “Constructed as it is of the freshest fruits and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, freshwater fish, sea fish, and a modicum of animal flesh—all of it laced with generous pourings of just-pressed olive oil and honest red wine—many American doctors call it the earth’s healthiest eating plan.”

  Under darting gazes and fidgeting hands, I continue. “Of course everyone knows that eating this way discourages heart disease and obesity, chases free radicals, and promotes longevity,” I say, but there is no one even pretending to hear me. My recital has fizzled as would a Tuscan’s who, in the locker room of a Gold’s Gym, tells his mates that lifting weights builds muscle.

  The mill owner has wandered over to the fire and caught the last of my feeble delivery. “Ah, signora. Magari se tutto il mondo era d’accordo con noi. How I wish that all the world agreed with us. Here people die of heart attacks, but most often in their beds and long past their nintieth birthdays.”

  Chuckles bustle through the crowd.

  “But you have some experience with olive oil. I can see it,” he says.

  In reflex, my hand reaches up to touch my face. Are there telltale marks of last evening’s supper?

  “No, no, signora,” says a man, perhaps the oldest one among the group. “There is no stain. He refers to your complexion. You have what we call here pelle di luna, skin like the moon. Your skin is illuminated. È abbastanza comune qui, it’s fairly common here among the country women. It’s the light that comes from eating olive oil all one’s life. But is there olive oil in America?”

  “Well, yes, there’s olive oil in America, most all of it imported from Mediterranean countries, but I haven’t really eaten olive oil all my life, unfortunately,” I say. “But since I was a teenager, I’ve been washing my face with it.”

  This humble revelation of my toilette animates them. Six or seven stories are shouted out into the warm, winey, smoky precinct by the fire. One about a grandmother who died with skin sweeter than a baby’s bottom is outdone by the telling of a great-grandmother who wore hats against the sun, cleaned her face with olive oil and rose-water, and died at 110 the day after someone mistook her at mass for her own granddaughter.

  I’m on a roll here, feeling part of things, and so I venture further. “And I also make a pap with coarse cornmeal and olive oil and spread it on my face and décolleté, leave it to work like a mask, and then rub it off.”

  This inspires an even more vividly screeched series of stories. Gesti di bellezza, gestures of beauty, one of the women calls them. And almost to a person—the men included—each is willing to part with the most guarded, most effective, most ancient prescription for skin care that ever graced a countrywoman’s face and body.

  One cure asks that skins of just-crushed wine grapes be applied to the skin
and left to repose for an hour or more, twelve days in a row. This makes sense to me, as I consider the current rage for alpha hydroxy acid, which is the chemical version of fruit acids, used to brighten and tense the skin by ridding it of dead cells. But there is another directive in this remedy, they say. One eats only wine grapes for the twelve days. One subsists on wine grapes, mineral water, and bed rest. The cure detoxifies, purges, purifies. And not only the skin, they say, shouting that fancy clinics up in the Alto Adige on the Austrian border offer the very same cure plus an hour’s daily body massage and ask $10,000 a week. There’s a great shaking of heads.

  I listen intently to all the recipes for endless youth. I am entertained and informed by them, but one becomes my instant favorite. A gentleman who introduces himself to me as an “available widower” of eighty-eight years tells a story of his mother. “From a two-kilo round of bread held tight against her breasts, she’d cut thick slices, pulling the knife in a sawing motion, closer and closer in, putting my infant brother’s nutritional future in great danger. She’d take the trenchers and soak them in fresh ass’s milk. And, when they were wet with it, she’d take the mess to her bed on which she’d lie perfectly flat, make herself comfortable and then press the dripping bread to her face, over her eyes, finally covering the whole operating area with a small linen towel. She’d rest away the afternoon like that, quiet in her shuttered room, staying still as death, rising only when it was time to prepare supper. She performed this cure every time she had her monthlies, but of course I didn’t understand that until much later, after she’d passed on the recipe to my wife. It didn’t take much time before I began to make the associations between the ass’s milk cure and my bride’s weeklong cold shoulder.”

  “But did they both have beautiful skin?”

  “The most beautiful of all, I’d say. Angels’ faces, if not angels’ dispositions.”

  Of both truths, there is a murmur of accord.

  AFTER AN HOUR or so spent around the fire in the mill, I catch a lift home from someone who is heading into town and return to Fernando by about five. Gloating in insolence, he is where I left him, holding court before his hearth. And with not even a suspicion of flu about him. His cough is his habitual cigarette hack, dramatized now by melancholy. A Venetian prince protesting the winter, he sits primped on the sofa, his neck swathed in a fine, fringed woolen scarf, his body in a red silk quilt. How he hates the cold. And this is only the beginning of the dark, at least four months of it still ahead. But I know all will be well. Didn’t Florì tell me it would? “Tutto andrà bene, Chou Chou, tutto andrà molto bene. Vedrai. All will go well. All will go very well. You’ll see.”

  She’s not been here for the past six or seven weeks, not since there’s been some trouble in the family for whom she works. She stays all the week now in Città della Pieve, coming home only once a week for a few hours to take care of things here. But I haven’t caught a single sight of her. Barlozzo says she just whisks in and out, that she’s distracted and disturbed by the events in this family. I take to leaving her notes in her mailbox, which are always gone a day or so later but which she never answers. I miss her.

  We pick the grove clean in three days, most of us working only one- or two-hour shifts, since there seems to always be a small army buzzing about, climbing up to retrieve full baskets from the pickers, spilling out the fruit into great plastic transporting tubs, and pulling out errant twigs and leaves. Even when my turn in the trees is finished, I stay in the grove, fetching and running with the others, then riding in the tractor to the frantoio at about three when the day’s work is done. Barlozzo manages to stop by at one or two junctures, though not to pick or even to help much. He shakes hands, hugs people, asks after their families, rubs an olive or two between his thumb and forefinger, bites into them, rolls the flesh about in his mouth, chews it, shakes his head affirmatively, his tightly closed mouth turned down into an upside-down U, the almost universal Italian expression of appreciation. I watch his duke’s prowess, how his presence enlivens these people. Still I can sense a skittishness about him. Someone asks after Florì. “Is she doing better?” the woman wants to know.

  It must be some other Floriana, because Barlozzo, not having liked the question, rebuffs her. If it’s our Floriana, why doesn’t he just say the truth, that she’s helping the family for whom she works to pass through a difficult period, just as he told us. But he doesn’t say a word. I watch as he continues to look for half a moment at the woman. And then I watch as he walks away. Surely, it’s another Floriana who has written this despair on the duke’s face. Of course it’s another one, I say over and over. But when he gets round to me, pretending to kiss him, I roar an icy whisper in his ear, “Tell me right now about Floriana. Ti prego. I beg you.”

  “Ne parliamo più tardi. We’ll speak later,” is all he says. Innocent words made of horror and tasting of metal. I run them about in my mind. I understand that he will say nothing more at this moment and I walk away from him.

  As I’d done yesterday and the day before, I catch a lift home and go in to fuss over the melancholy prince. I go upstairs, then, to run a bath and sit in the heat until I’m weak and red and weeping. As it does always for me, this sadness comes not from a single hurt but from their gathering together, all of them come to crouch about me now like a congress of harpies. I miss my children. And something is very wrong around my friend with the topaz eyes. Something, and maybe the same thing, is very wrong around the duke. Now I know it was his grieving for Floriana about which he couldn’t speak. And then there’s whatever lurks about Fernando. But the cherry on the cake arrived today in the form of a note from our friend Misha, who lives in Los Angeles. A man made mostly of Russian gloom is Misha. The note says that he wants to visit in February. Only Misha would choose to visit Tuscany in February. And, though I care for him so deeply, I’m ready at this moment for neither his scrutiny nor his questions—which always come ready-packaged with answers—nor his punctilious surveillance. I can hear him now. “Ah, Pollyanna with the black-sugar eyes, what have you done with your life?”

  Having nearly always disapproved of me, Misha has been asking that question for years. He’s loved me, been my Greatheart, and yet he’s been forever exasperated by what he scabrously refers to as my “spiritedness.” How many conversations has he opened with, “If you would only listen to me?” I can’t wait for Misha and Barlozzo to meet. Such a fine pair of sacerdotal cholerics they’ll make. Now that I think of it, with the two of them plus the melancholy prince, I’ll be cooking and baking for a weltschmerz congress. And beyond them, maybe this time some of the harpies’s mewling is about me. About the haughty me. About the me who at this moment is faltering, stunned by the extravagant folly of my believing that I could make a life simply from the stark, unmixed desire for it.

  When I take a bath alone, Fernando knows it’s not the bath I want but the hiding. He waits a long time before he comes upstairs with two flutes of prosecco on a tiny tray. I continue the soaking and weeping. We sip the cold wine and then he rubs the vanilla water from me with a linen towel the color of parched summer wheat. I say all I want to say with no words. And he, knowing my silence has not been caused by a tough day in the olive trees, chooses silence, too. How I love that he doesn’t ask what’s troubling me, that he trusts it’s a thing better kept to myself for the moment.

  As I’m pulling his robe around me, I ask, “Are you hungry?”

  “No, I’m not angry at all. But are you?”

  “A little.”

  “Why? What about? Will you tell me what’s happened?”

  “I don’t know what’s happened. Nothing’s happened. Everything’s happened. It’s eight o’clock and I’m hungry.”

  “What does the time have to do with your being angry?”

  “Because it’s about this time each day that my body is used to nourishment. Why all these questions? I feel hunger. A natural stimulus. It’s very simple. I’m just hungry.”

  “I don’t
believe anger è un stimolo naturale. To be angry is to have an emotion. It’s an emotional response to something or to someone, so tell me, why are you angry?”

  “I’m just hungry. At least I was just hungry. Why must you examine such a simple statement, looking for some deeper meaning?”

  “I’m not looking for deeper meaning, I just don’t understand why you’re angry. I just don’t understand it at all. By the way, are you angry? Maybe it’s just that you need to eat something.”

  When I go back downstairs to the fire, I find it stoked and roaring, the tea table set for a small supper in front of it. Every candle in the room is lit and Fernando is in the kitchen, foraging, fixing. A small sizzle of onion and butter wafts.

  “Fernando, what are you cooking? It smells so wonderful.”

  “I’m cooking an onion.”

  “An onion?”

  “It’s just for perfume. I know how much you like the scent of onions cooking. Onions frying in butter smell like home. Isn’t that what you always say? I couldn’t find anything else to cook with it, and so we’ll just have the onion. OK?”

  “It’s absolutely OK. I can’t wait.”

  He’s sliced a dried boar sausage and put it on a plate with a wedge of Taleggio and a few crumbles of Parmigiano, set out bread and a dish of the pear marmalade we’d made last October and one of crystallized ginger. And with a flourish, he brings out the onion. The prosecco leans in an ice bucket and we into each other, easy together. We laugh quietly about our continuing inability to understand the other’s language.