A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  “I always ate my potato when I got into bed, peeling back its skin and eating it like an apple. I loved potatoes so much I just couldn’t wait until morning, even though I knew it meant my mother would serve me angry looks with my milk and coffee for breakfast.”

  “You must have been fairly well off as things went in those days,” says Pupa. “We hardly had any meat at all. Where I lived, la veglia took on another form. Everyone would collect about the fire, all of them direct from their ablutions, hairdos in place, fresh shirts and smocks. Risen bread dough sat in the madia, the bread-rising cupboard, and the kettle hung in the hearth, ready to boil. The lady of the house fetched the dough from the madia drawer, placed it in the biggest bowl in the house, and set it on a table in front of the fire. Each person broke off a bit of dough and began rolling it between his palms into a short, slender rope, fashioning a rough sort of pasta. Each piece of pasta was gently dragged through a dish of hard wheat flour and then placed on a tray. The process continued until all the dough was shaped into pasta. The trays full of pasta were then heaved into the boiling water, and as the pieces rose to the top of the pot, they were retrieved with a skimmer and placed back into the same bowl, warmed now and in which a small amount of good oil and a few generous handfuls of grated pecorino waited. A cupful of the cooking liquors, more cheese, a few more drops of oil, more cooking liquors, and pepper, freshly cracked with an exuberant hand, the whole was tossed about and served with a small wooden shovel. We called the confection pizzicotti, pinches. Supper made from almost nothing.”

  “Was it like that during the wars?” I want to know.

  “Was what like during the wars?” the duke asks.

  “I mean, eating boiled pinches and saving a scrap of meat to add to the neighbors’ scraps of meat to make a supper.”

  “No. That wasn’t wartime, it was life. Even when times were good they weren’t so good,” says Barlozzo. “The truth is that much of the time we were OK, but in great part it was because of our cunning as much as our fortunes. When the ground wasn’t cold and hard, we had whatever we could forage—grasses, herbs, wild onions, chestnuts, figs, mushrooms, berries. We always kept some of everything apart, drying or preserving the bounty against winter. And in the orchards when fallen fruit didn’t suffice, we robbed the trees by moonlight. And so we had pears and apples, cherries, peaches, plums, and sometimes quince and persimmons and pomegranates. Again, we feasted on the glorious stuff, guzzling its ripeness, sucking in the sweet juices of plenty. But we saved some. We saved some for the other, less balmy time that always followed. Same with the things we grew. We had vines and my father and my uncles vintnered the gaunt, snarling red wine without which life was impensabile, unthinkable. It was food to us like bread, like the coffee, which most times we brewed from weeds and roots. We dried tomatoes and white beans and corn to grind into yellow flour. Not one of us having anything of money to buy what we needed or desired, it was by mutuality that we lived, everyone trading everyone else for what they didn’t have, shuffling back and forth whatever they could grow up or gather or shoot or steal. But nothing was casual about the trading.

  “There were regulations, firm and constant, honored by everyone. We bartered a two-liter jug of wine for a two-kilo round of new cheese from the shepherd. When we could, we’d bring him supper in the sheepfolds and he’d come by the next morning to return my mother’s pot, filled then with soft, creamy dollops of the ricotta he’d just made by cooking part of the evening’s milking over his wood fire, then adding some of the morning’s milk and cooking it again until it curdled. It was the greatest of entertainments for me when the shepherd came carrying that pot full of cheese. And the canning jars and the canning kettles were like family jewels.

  “My father would say that the canning jars were better dressed than I ever was, all washed and wrapped in clean rags and stored away against the wolf. But still, sometimes we were empty. The stores were finished before we could begin planting and harvesting a new season’s food. We were hungry. Really hungry sometimes. Hungry enough so that the suffering was the only thing we felt. My mother would slice the bread, holding the great, round, now dwindling bulk of it on the shelf of her breast. She’d slice with her left hand, longwise across the loaf from right to left. I would sit there looking up at her. One night, I was feeling sick, and I told her so. As I remember, it wasn’t only the hunger but the fear of this insufficiency that left me weak. I wasn’t old enough to understand the rhythm of that life of ours. I didn’t remember that it wouldn’t always be this way. My mother came into where I was resting, the room dark and quiet and cold. She carried in something wrapped in a cloth, bearing it like a sacrament. Tesoro, I have a surprise for you. Now, sit up and take this, open it up. Go on, she’d said, as though it was true. I could feel it was only bread waiting under the cloth. Sullen, I stayed. No, no, it’s not just bread. It’s bread and cheese. Look. She opened the cloth. See, here is the bread. And here is the cheese. Now close your eyes and taste how good they are together. It’s a special supper only for you. Take a bite. See. It’s a thick, soft slice of marzolino. Just like butter. Just the way you like it. I closed my eyes, held her uplifted hands and bit into the bread she raised to my mouth. There was no cheese, of course, but only two slices of bread, stacked one on the other. But somehow her charm worked. I could taste cheese. I could really taste it. I ate slowly at first, then faster and faster until I’d finished it, keeping my eyes closed all the time. When I opened them, I saw that she’d been crying, smiling, sobbing. I think it must be the hardest thing for a mother, having both a hungry child and empty pockets.”

  THE DUKE SHOULD never have begun all this talk about a veglia, because now I ask him about it each day. “Who has a house large enough to hold a veglia?” I want to know.

  “What sort of veglia are we talking about? If it’s just twenty or thirty people, we can use Pupa’s place, but if you want to invite the whole village, we’ll have to hold it in the piazza, build a bonfire, and use the bar as an emergency room against the cold,” he says as though we could truly execute such a party.

  Knowing the very idea would be thrilling to me, he begins laughing out loud even before I say, “That’s it. That’s how to do it. We’ll post a notice in the bar and—”

  “And just say it’s in honor of Florì’s homecoming,” he interrupts.

  “What? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you thirty minutes after she told me. She says she’s feeling up to it, that she misses her little place. And most of us, I think, although she’d never say that. I’m going to pick her up on Wednesday morning. Let’s let her just be quiet for a few days and set Sunday evening for the veglia.”

  I look for a long time at the duke and it’s easy to see he’s having a homecoming of his own, that he’s consented to reinhabit his peace, to wash off the bad weather he’s been wearing, in greater or lesser degrees, all these past weeks. We sit there grinning at each other, each of us sending out rounded daggers at the other, each of us trying not to be the first one to cry.

  LETTERS AND NOTES are affixed to every centimeter of the small, sturdy mahogany door with the lion’s-head knocker that is Floriana’s. The three high cement steps that comprise her stoop are beset with flowers, mostly small nosegays of wild ones, the short stems of them twisted in aluminum foil or a dampened handkerchief. One of the village women has organized a troupe of cooks, each of whom will carry in Floriana’s lunch or supper on a certain day of the week. I’ve been asked by the strategist to bring a sweet or some bread up to her ogni tanto, every once in a while, she already knowing my propensity to overfeed. Housekeepers, chauffeurs, handymen, wood-cutters, ladies’ maids who would see to her toilette, all have been anticipated and delegated with great care and affection. And, of course, Florì, with an equal dose of care and affection, demurs, then objects more animatedly, assuring the village spokespeople that she’ll be the first to ask for help. If she needs it.

  Her cheeks are f
laming roses on the parchment skin of her face. A scarf, eerily russet as was the color of her hair, wraps her head and is tied jauntily in a grand, drooping bow in the middle of her forehead. Though the day is bitter, she wears only a cardigan and a thick, brown shawl over her gray wool dress. She has new shoes, pumps in soft black kid with a pretty, delicate stub of a heel.

  “I got them in a shop in Perugia,” she says giggling, Perugia being about the same thing as Paris to her and the ladies who are ogling them.

  She does not look so different, no less beautiful, certainly not so very much thinner and yet there is less of her, as though a dimension was missing, as though she were an apparition of herself. Barlozzo husbands her along the few steps from the piazza up to her door, nods and softly speaks requests and directions to one person and another. They both smile and wave and go inside and I’m thinking how much they look like a bride and groom trying to go off to the privacy of their honeymoon. The only thing missing is a handful of rice, but even that appears, cooked in a soup, still warm in a lovely blue-and-white tureen enfolded in a kitchen cloth and pressed upon them by Vera as they close the door.

  FLORÌ WALKS IN the village each morning, does her shopping, chats as reticently as she always did, takes her caffè macchiato as she always did, smiles and laughs as easily as ever. Neither mysterious nor voluble about her illness, she says she will continue with her treatments, that she feels quite strong. She says she is healing. She always wears the new black shoes.

  Barlozzo says little more than Floriana save his expressions of faith, and even those he mostly flashes from his eyes. He’s decided not to tell her about Sunday’s veglia, reasoning that she’ll be embarrassed for all the fuss. He says we’ll just invite her at the last minute and say it’s something we’d planned long ago. But he knows just as well as I that what was born as a poetical rebellion against the mopes of January has taken on Saturnalian proportions to celebrate Florì. And surely she’ll know it, too.

  THREE IRON DRUMS full of wood are set afire at the bottom of the hill that leads up into town and torches are set all along the way to the piazza, where more flaming iron drums are collected along the overlook wall. Something heathen flits about the scene. There’s been some cheating in that there’s much more to eat than the traditional scottiglia, though that very concoction bubbles gently in two huge pots on the back burners of the bar’s kitchen stove. But there’s cinghiale al buglione, wild boar braised with tomatoes and garlic and red wine; ribollita, thick with cavolo nero, black cabbage; cardi gratinati, gratineed cardoons, the pale green stalks poached and baked with cream and cheese. There are trays and trays of crostini, bowls groaning with pici, and barrels spewing wine. And Floriana takes it all in stride, tasting and sipping and saying how hungry she’d been for these foods, that though her Umbrian friends in Città della Pieve—sixteen kilometers distant from San Casciano—were fine cooks, she’d missed the Tuscan hand.

  What she doesn’t say is that even the Tuscan hand changes from province to province and sometimes even from comune to comune, family to family. She doesn’t say that gastronomic regionalism is an abiding fact of Italian life. Every once in a while she looks down at her shoes and does a sort of two step, admiring them, I think. At the moment in the festival when the recitations are to begin, one by one, the elocutionists beg off, saying they can’t recall their lines or that they’ve had too much wine, both excuses being one in the same, I guess. There is a lull, an expectation, but the duke fills it. “My father used to say that hell is where nothing’s cooking and no one’s waiting.”

  The lull lengthens a few beats before the applause, the cheers of agreement. It is a strange moment. It passes, though, immediately dissolved in the comfort of a great farrago. Fernando and I give each other a sign from our different places in the piazza. We agree that it’s time to go. We slip off, not really saying good night to anyone, always preferring to exit a party at its peak. Leaving early and unnoticed feels like escape, and so we walk fast. We run, then, all the way down the hill, then up to our place. Slowing down, catching a breath, we walk beyond our house, up the Celle road. Fernando turns back to look at the village, says the firelight becomes the ancient stones. He kisses me gently and holds me.

  “She’s dying, isn’t she?”

  I just look at him for a while before asking, “What makes you say that? Barlozzo would never be so jubilant if he thought that was true.”

  “That’s the part that confounds me, too, but still, when I look at her she seems haunted in a way, as though she’s already gone but has been allowed back on some reprieve, given a dispensation so she could say good-bye.”

  “I think it might be only that she’s been so very far away. She’s been in a place we can’t begin to imagine, and so now it’s as though she’s arriving back in pieces, in stages. She’s just not whole yet.”

  “It all makes me think about us and what we would do if one of us was Floriana.”

  “We’re both Floriana. Dying is what we’re all doing, each in our own way. Anyway, death is just moving house. And we’re getting very deft at that,” I tell him, longing to leave this discourse.

  “Just moving house, is it? Just another journey? Is that how you see it? Well, I don’t see it that way at all. Besides, I like it here. I want to stay as long as you do, but not any longer. I want to stay right here close to you. What you do, I want to do. Wherever you go, I want to be there. But how can you be so unmoved by all of this?”

  “I am not at all unmoved. It’s just that I’m moved for Floriana rather than for you or me. And besides, I’m freezing and I think it’s this talk of dying as much as the cold that’s causing it. Please, let’s go home.” I turn back and walk fast.

  “The truth is you’re very frightened about dying,” he shouts. Overtaking me, catching me by the arms, he walks backward so he can face me, wanting company for his own fresh terrors.

  “No, that’s not the truth. I think I’d be very frightened if I were facing Florì’s particular moment. And you know I’m desperately frightened for her. But this is her illness. And everything about it belongs to her. And because we’re her friends, our emotions must be about her rather than about us. Why do you tangle up what’s happening to Florì with what’s not happening to you or me? If you get sick or I get sick, then it will be time to practice for dying.”

  Under a raw blue sky sugared in tiny stars we walk back home in single file along the icy road, Fernando leading. We build up the fire and we sit close to it, sipping tea. Fernando is right. All of us consider our own lives when someone close by is losing hers. Or seems to be. And maybe he’s right, too, about my appearing to be unsentimental, unmoved, as he called it. But I honestly don’t worry about my own death. At least not since those days when the children were little and I plotted with the gods, struck all those pacts beseeching them to keep me upright until the babies were. I’d sworn to never ask more for myself. Truly grateful about how that all turned out, I’ve stayed respectfully hushed on my own behalf, even if I do still bargain from time to time regarding the well-being of the long-since upright children and, more lately, of Fernando. But for all my embracing of how this living and dying seems to work, it’s as though I haven’t yet applied it to myself. Caused less by the Narcissus in me, I think it’s more the imprint of Pollyanna on me that lets me live as though I’ll never die. Or is it that it’s just fine if I do, since I’ve lived so long and well already? Surely I’d like to stay longer, though. When my own dying does pass through my thoughts, I think mostly about not wanting to miss out on life with Fernando and the children and my friends. I think about them saying their good-byes to me, then going off to supper. Without me. I’d be flailing my arms from wherever I’d landed, urging them not to go to one place but to another one, suggesting certain dishes and wines, trying to take care of them, even though the truth is they’d always taken care of me.

  I try to tell Fernando what I’m thinking and he says he understands.

  “I’m not so
worried about my dying as I am yours.”

  “I think I’m safe for tonight,” I say. “And if we work things right, we can turn the next few hours into a lifetime.” Just as he seems soothed, I begin to cry. He thinks the tears are for Floriana and they are but, damn it, they’re also for him. And for me.

  13

  Fasting Was How We Were Living Anyway

  Carne vale, literally, “meat is valid.” The eating of meat has long been consented by the Church during the festivals that herald forty days of purification via the tight and sober way of quaresima, Lent. Carnevale became the sweeping name for all such presacrifical events, including those other fleshly ones that took place beyond—and perhaps on and under—the table, the perspired cavortings of bodies, licensed by a mask. Once carnevale in Venice was celebrated for half the year and more—and a long and brazen mazurka it was, the canonical festal foods’ only sauce glutted between the partaking of other plums. But here in the hills of southern Tuscany, carnevale has borrowed from Venice only the single, fried, and sugary pecadillo of le frittelle, fritters.