A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  “Do you know a couple who loves each other the way we do?” He’s pouring out the last of the wine. “I wish I’d been around people who loved each other when I was growing up. Even if they didn’t love me, it would have been comforting to know that there really was love.”

  “Actually, I did once know a couple who might well have been like us. I haven’t thought about them in a long time, but when I was very young, they seemed like storybook people to me. And I wanted to be just like them.”

  “Who were they?”

  “They were servants—the caretakers or perhaps the housekeeper and the goundskeeper—at a place in southern France, in the Languedoc not so far from Montpellier.

  “I was twelve and a chum from school invited me to spend that August with her and her parents on what she’d called ‘The Farm.’ It was just outside the little town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. It turned out to be a rather glorious house, a turreted château, really, with hectares of gardens, not at all the sort of place I’d imagined. But there were a few sheep and a small vineyard. And there was this couple—Mathilde and Gerard—who watched over my friend and me when her parents went off on jaunts or to their offices a few days each week. I think Isolde and I must have been very young twelve-year-olds and not at all like girls of that age today. We played theater in her mother’s long, swishy dresses and read Fanny and Caesar to each other while lying on our backs in the sun, each of us with a branch of lilac resting on our reluctant breasts—all the better to gulp the scent and sigh and scissor-kick our legs, then crumple into a swoon for the passion it raised up in us.

  “I remember that Isolde asked me if I thought kissing a boy would feel as good as breathing lilacs, and I told her that I already knew it didn’t. I told her that Tommy Schmidt had kissed me long and hard and more than once and that it didn’t feel even half as good as breathing lilacs. With Mathilde, we baked endless peach tarts and broke them, still warm, placing the jagged chunks in deep, white café au lait bowls, pouring over thick cream from demiliter bottles and crushing it into the crust with the backs of our big soup spoons, then eating the sugary, buttery mess until we were breathless and fat and sleepy from the goodness of it. Nearly every day we’d follow Gerard into the dim, damp of the limestone caves that rimmed the far edges of the property where he went to inspect and turn the wheels of ewe’s milk cheese he’d set to age. Sometimes we’d go into the caves alone and talk about menstruation or how much we hated Sister Mary Margaret, who looked like a reptile with a very black mustache, and how we just couldn’t believe that Jesus would take her as his bride. But the most beautiful memory I have of that August is the one evening I spent alone with Mathilde and Gerard. I don’t remember how it happened, something about Isolde having to accompany her parents into Montpellier, while I asked if I might stay behind.

  “Mathilde and Gerard made their home in an apartment on the third floor of the château. I saw it once when Isolde and I were invited to tea. It was quite lovely, all painted in a pale, icy green with flowers and plants everywhere. But they had another space, one which they used as their summer house, and that was where we three had supper that evening. They’d fixed up the inside of one of the caves as a hideaway, and when Mathilde pulled back the heavy canvas curtain, I felt like I was stepping inside a doll’s house. The color of the stone was light, as though it had been washed in something the color of roses. And it smelled like roses, too, and it was cool. Almost shivery cool. There was a dining table and two chairs, a small stone sink, and a day bed covered in purple chintz with brown satin flowers all over it. Bowls and baskets of melons and potatoes and onions and pots of mint sat on stones and on the earth floor itself, so there was almost no room to walk. The only light was from candles, crooked and flickering in a silver candleabra that seemed much too big for the table, though I thought it was perfect. There was a stove outside the cave—some strange-looking thing Gerard had built and of which he was very proud. It contained a spit on which a scrawny chicken turned, its juices dripping into a pan set beneath it. On its single burner rice simmered.

  “I watched while Mathilde readied herself for supper. Having peeled off her cardigan and hung it on a peg, she appraised herself in the mirror propped up against the stone sink. She washed her face and neck and décolleté, lathering with a thin wafer of soap sliced from a loaf of it she kept on a shelf, just like bread. She shook drops from several little vials into her palm, rubbing the potion with the fingers of the other hand, warming it, then patting it onto her just-scrubbed skin. Oils of roses and violets and orange blossoms, she’d said. Pulling out her small, golden hoop earrings, she threaded in little beaded ones that looked like tiny blue glass chandeliers and which moved every way she did. Undoing her hair, combing it, rebraiding it, twisting the long, thin plaits into coils and fixing them with tortoiseshell pins, she smoothed the sweet oil remaining on her hands along the part. She might have been ready for a waltz with a king. Or for supper, which I think would have been the same thing to her.

  “Gerard performed his own abultions outdoors by his stove, using the water they kept in what looked like a holy water font or a bird bath, cracked and crumbling and wonderful. When he came inside, they greeted each other as though they’d been separated for weeks. They couldn’t have been doing all that for show. They did it for themselves, for each other. They did it because that’s what they always did. It was lovely for me that they stayed absorbed in their intimacy even in my presence, that they let me see them.

  “Save a bit of the chicken and some rice, a few wrinkly, hard olives, and what must have been sardines, although I wasn’t familiar with them at the time, I don’t remember all that we ate, but I do remember the ceremony of the meal—the sharing of each thing, the changing of plates, the wine, the endless bringing forth of tiny morsels and tastes. She brought small clusters of grapes and a bowl of water to the table, dipping the clusters one by one and offering them to us. Then there were a few nuts warm and salty from her frying pan, cookies from a tin and sugared, dried figs cut from the string of them that hung near the canvas curtain. We talked and laughed. And they told me stories. I told them stories, too, the few I’d had to tell. Or dared to tell. But I liked the silences with Mathilde and Gerard, which sounded like smiles to me. I liked them most of all. In the candlelight of that snuggery, I believe it was the second time in my young life that I ever thought about how I wanted to be when I grew up. That evening I knew I wanted to be like them. And this evening I know I want to be like us. Which is to say, I did what I set out to do, they and us being of the same tribe, I think. I guess it doesn’t matter that it wanted half my life before I did.”

  “You were way ahead of me,” Fernando says. “I never knew anyone I wanted to be like before there was us. Anyway I think it actually works like this. You can’t become like someone you admire. But if what you admire about them is already lurking about in yourself, they can stimulate it, inspire it, coax it out of you like the words to a song. Don’t you think that’s what we did for each other?”

  “Yes. Surely that’s what we did for each other.”

  “But when you were a little girl didn’t you ever want to be a rock star or a ballerina or at least Catherine of Siena? Didn’t you ever want to be rich?”

  “I always thought I was rich. And when I was older, I knew it was true. But most of all, I wanted to matter. You know, really matter to someone. Once. Just once. But still I feel sad that most of us will never, not even for one of the suppers of our lives, dine as Mathilde and Gerard did, feel the nourishment of their food and their wine and their love as they did.”

  “Do you know why that’s true, why most people will never have that?”

  “Probably because simplicity is the last thing a person considers as he’s madly searching for the secret to life. Mathilde and Gerard had so much because they had so little.”

  • • •

  IT’S PAST ELEVEN and I know by now it’s not this evening Barlozzo meant when he’d said we talk later. We go
upstairs, toting the priest with us. A rustic master stroke, a priest is a sort of metal lantern into which white-hot ashes are shoveled. The lantern is hung from a small metal arc and attached to a wooden base. Once assembled, the whole thing is placed between the sheets, creating a great bump in the territory of the bed and, in twenty minutes or so, warming it to welcome a shivering Venetian prince and his consort.

  I place the priest on the floor and crawl up into the readied bed beside Fernando, who pulls me close, chortling with glee for the comfort of it and of me, he says. “But I warn you, this night you must not discover me. I don’t like it at all when you discover me, pull the quilt away from me.” In Fernandese, discover means uncover. Actually, I think I prefer “discover” in this context. Across the cultures, the discovering is never finished.

  Between the tucks and folds of linen, how many battles and dreams have we played out upon the field of this bed, I wonder. How many crumbs have we shed from little feasts nibbled under the quilt? The scent of some spilled drops of good red wine, the scents of us. The parts of life left unsaid in other places we confide in bed. I hold the prince and the prince holds me. He unfastens the cord that keeps back the curtains, which hang from the four-poster frame, and the heavy red stuff falls about us. Clasped now in a candlelit tent, we lie on the inside of a cloud, flitting across the moon. He unties the ribbons on my nightdress, props himself on his elbow, and looks at me, running his fingers over me.

  I ask him later, my voice small, whispering up from the darkness after the candle’s long, slow sputtering, “Remind me to ask around where I can get fresh ass’s milk once a month, will you?”

  “Jesù.”

  11

  December Has Come to Live in the Stable

  The surgery was nearly two weeks ago, and soon she’ll be beginning postoperative therapies both at the hospital in Perugia and in a clinic in Florence. Her doctors say it was contained, that there is every reason to expect a full recovery. Meanwhile her friends in Città della Pieve insist she remain with them so they might look after her, take her for treatments, follow her progress with the doctors. These people are family to her. And they understand her desire for seclusion. She’s Tuscan. And one of the essences of that birth is the right to confront one’s own life and one’s own death in private.”

  It’s the next morning and Barlozzo’s face is broken granite, the pieces of it like shards put back together badly. He sits at the table and speaks of Floriana. He states facts, proffers all technical information, leaving nothing for me to ask save the questions I know he won’t answer. I stay quiet and let him read me.

  “It was her choice to shelter you. And not only both of you, but everyone else in town. But, of course, someone from the hospital talked to someone who talked to someone else and so in very little time the news arrived here. And besides, you and Floriana have known each other for only a short while. What is it, seven or eight months?” He looks at Fernando for confirmation. “She didn’t want to worry you. But, more, I think she just can’t imagine burdening you.” Now it’s just me on whom he flashes his gaze. “You know, you’re not the only one among us who has a hard time believing anyone really truly loves you. When she’s ready, she’ll let you know how she’s doing. Meanwhile, love her the way she needs to be loved, which may not be at all the same way you need to love her.”

  The duke has said everything, knotted up the argument all alone. Fernando asks some standard questions, which Barlozzo answers in two- and three-word sentences, as though we were suddenly in overtime. It’s clear that anything more than he’s already said is pure concession.

  You know, you’re not the only one among us who has a hard time believing anyone really, truly loves you. My mind repeats his words. And those words attach themselves to other, older ones. I can make you feel loved but you can’t make me feel loved. No one can. And if you try too hard, I’ll bolt. I’m a runaway, after all. Before knowing Fernando, this was my sutra, one of the self-observations I kept in a stash of secret aches. Maybe I’m Tuscan, too. And maybe it takes one to know one, and that’s why Barlozzo knows me as much as I’m beginning to know him.

  “Is that what you do?” I ask the duke. “Do you love her the way she needs to be loved, or do you love her in your way?” Silver swims in his eyes like minnows in black water, and he knows I’m not finished yet. “Why didn’t you ever marry her?”

  Wanting deliverance from me, he looks at Fernando, who comes to sit at the table now. “Why don’t we talk about his some other time?” my husband suggests.

  “I would like to talk about this. I would like to talk about it just as soon as I can.” The duke tries a smile, opens the door to leave.

  Frowning, stoking the fire, I see that Fernando is unhappy with my questioning of Barlozzo. But, for right now, I just don’t have the will to defend my behavior or myself. I’m thinking that if I can’t see Florì or talk to her, I’ll write to her. I tear the first few pages from a small, leather-spined book in which I’d begun to keep notes for my next book. I’d bought it in Arezzo, taken by the rough feel of the handmade Florentine paper in which its cover is bound and by the pale reds and greens and golds of the Piero della Francesca madonna that adorns it. Now this will be Florì’s book. And in it I can tell her what I’m feeling about her or thinking about her, or about anything at all I think she’d like to know. I may never give it to her; in fact, I doubt I ever would, but her reading it is not what matters about Florì’s book.

  DECEMBER COMES TO live in the walls of the stable. The chill and the cold and the damp entwine and all of them prosper deep in the souls of the old stones. It’s colder by more then ten degrees inside the house than it is outdoors, and the crusade we fight with fires and socks and warmed wine soothes us, but not always, and never for very long. Each morning we wake to vesperal light and a chill that compels us, like mountaineers, to move or perish. Up and out of our naked bundling into the breath of Siberia, where the floors are corrupted in the sheerest gray rime. Even the church bells sound cold, their ring funereal, as if veiled reapers had taken over the tower. Costumed against the freeze, we begin our day. Fernando sets the fire while I make the bread dough and race back up the stairs to place the bowl between the sheets and the quilt, packing our pillows around it in the bed so the stuff will have some hope of rising. I’m sure that our just-vacated bed is the warmest place in the house. The oven is a whimsy that takes an hour to heat but refuses to hold temperature for more than a few minutes unless something is set to bake in it. Otherwise it pouts and stutters, spends itself. Meanwhile the fire thaws the downstairs space enough so that we can pat the barely bed-risen dough into fat round loaves and set them near the hearth for a second rise. We perform the winter version of our toilettes, which means we brush our teeth and splash our faces and leave the rest of us to go French. We calculate thirty minutes of freedom to race up the hill to the bar for breakfast before the fire goes out, the bread rises, and the oven gets hot. I admit there is a certain awkwardness about our winter life here. Still, crack as firemen, we pull on boots and jackets and run to find our cappuccini.

  Nothing much ever changes at the Centrale, the good forces of its gods being ever present and never minding the weather or what the calendar and the clock have to say. Some form of sympathy and of courage seems to offer itself in just doses, and so we sip or gulp from them according to need.

  Back down the hill to stoke the fire, bake the bread, and turn on the computer. Cold or no cold, there’s work to be done these days—a deadline for the book’s edit; other, yet tighter, cutoffs for the bits and pieces of consulting work that trickle in and for commissioned travel articles and rewrites. I wear Barlozzo’s gloves, leg warmers, the prince’s fringed scarf, and I’m fine seated there before the fire in the waft of the bread’s perfume and with a belly full of warm milk and coffee. Barlozzo gave us a space heater, a great hulk of a thing that sends up a hot, dry, choking breath for a few minutes before its greediness for electric juice kills off the compu
ter and the lights and the oven and causes its own blustery death. Since the woodpile is diminishing at an alarming rate and—at least the way Fernando has calculated it—wood costs more than electricity, the heater is voted in. I must find a way to use it. Through trial and error I learn that if the oven is off, I can keep both the computer and the space heater. But so miserly tuned is this electrical system that I can’t have lights. Who needs lights, anyway? Again, this is just a simple awkwardness, and I refuse to let it take on the air of an agony. Surely there are moments when I’d like a wolfskin cape, but things are OK just as they are. I think of my long-ago New York self fettered to a gray plastic desk in the poisonous stifle of a steam-heated cell as I sat spinning out clever text about Adolf’s Meat Tenderizer and Welch’s Grape Juice. I much prefer this workplace.

  We discuss the wisdom of renting an office, but it’s a consideration short-lived since we’ve portioned ourselves a hundred and fifty thousand lire—about $75—weekly for food and gasoline and wood. There is no money for any purchase or service beyond this unless we begin to pilfer the remains of our savings. I could set up at Barlozzo’s place or even at the bar, but with the warmth I’d gain, it’s privacy I’d lose. Besides, spring is three months away. And so, a willing, part-time anchoress on a cold hill in Tuscany, I warm my fingertips between my thighs. Now it’s Low Renaissance architecture and pagan festivals, wild boar hunts and the one true formula for saltless Tuscan bread, the lords of Ferrara, the wines of Verona, and the alabaster mines of Volterra about which I write, pacified by the whoosh of the brutish heater, by Paganini and Astor Piazzolla, by firelight and candlelight and the shy winter sun that leaks between the yellow curtains.