A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  Little doughnutlike confections, they are piled up into fetching pyramids in every pasticciera window and sit, beckoning, on every bar. Filled with ricotta or marmalade or a satiny rummed cream, or empty except for sighs, dragged through warm honey or sugar or wet with the pink jolt of alchermes—an ancient herbal concoction used to flavor and color—one, maybe two bites and the wisps dissolve into memories only the thighs seem to recall. They begin appearing sometime in late January or early February, depending upon the date of Easter in a given year. And on martedì grasso, Fat Tuesday, le frittelle are presented for the last time, never again to be dispensed until next carnevale. I think it’s their short, mandated season, like the one for local strawberries or asparagus, that adds to their lusciousness. Amnesty for a forbidden food.

  And more than we ever did in Venice, we eat frittelle. We engage in “tastings” by bringing home four of each variety from the pasticceria in the village, thoughtfully rating them for crispness, delicacy, flavor. That sampling too small for serious research, we enlarge the field, braking for every hand-lettered sign announcing oggi frittelle, today, fritters, at bars and pastry shops from Chiusi, Cetona, Città della Pieve, Ficulle, Sarteano, Chianciano Terme. Sometimes we carry a few home for four o’clocks with Barlozzo or to bring to Floriana, both of them usually shaking their heads over the little morsels, bemoaning what passes for frittelle in this day and age. The two of them must have schemed on the subject because one day they both arrive at four, Floriana’s market sack full and hanging from Barlozzo’s arm.

  “Ciao, belli,” says Floriana, “cosa pensate se facciamo una piccola dose di frittelle, al modo mio? Hi, beauties, what do you think about our making a tiny batch of fritters, according to my method?”

  Fernando is hugging her and I’m trying to peel off her coat from behind and the duke is already messing with the fire, saying, “I’ll heat the wine if you’ve got any decent cinnamon.”

  We have to mix the fritters on the dining room table because Floriana and I can’t both fit in the kitchen. We are constantly foiled by Barlozzo, who interrupts each phase of the operation, assuring us that his mother always did it differently. Fernando quiets the crowd by reminding them that he’s the only Venetian on the premises and that le frittelle belong to his own culinary culture. He proclaims that Venetians won’t tolerate raisins in their fritters. Floriana tells him that she knows very well it’s he who won’t tolerate raisins in his fritters and that he can’t denounce the poor little fruits for the whole of the water kingdom. “And besides,” she says, “these are white raisins that have been soaking in dark rum for half a year, and once you taste them you’ll be begging me for the whole jar.”

  There’s flour and potato starch, eggs and sugar and butter, the juicy zests of oranges and lemons, vanilla beans, fat and soft, which Barlozzo slits and scrapes with the tiniest blade on his pocket knife. We beat and spoon and fry the ravishing things, tossing them, hot, in a bag of pastry sugar, piling them up on a footed dish just like they do in the shops. We eat them then, and drink the duke’s warmed wine, and there is a party in the stable that afternoon, a homespun sort of carnevale all our own.

  Barlozzo and Florì take turns telling us stories of the old lenten fasts that, apart from penitence of the faithful, served a real purpose for the body. “Those fasts cleansed the innards, especially the liver, prepared one for spring tonics and for the hard work that lay ahead. Eating is all about rhythm, just like everything else. A body can’t thrive eating the same things day in, day out. Eat with the seasons, fast for one dark month each year, and always rest for at least an hour after lunch and supper. Some of us stayed the forty Lenten days without sugar, meat, wine, or bread. We ate beans and lentils, sometimes eggs and whatever vegetables there were. Of course, there were times when fasting was how we were living anyway, so Lent was just another name for it,” sums up the duke.

  None of us wants to hear about supper after the frittelle, so we just sit and talk and listen to each other until Floriana says she’d better go. She is halfway out the door, Barlozzo already out on the terrace, when she turns to me saying, “You know, Chou, I’m sorry about leaving you with all those plums last autumn. You can’t imagine how many times I’ve wished we’d made that jam. But I was lazy then. I think that’s all it was. But now, I don’t feel lazy at all. Buona notte, ragazzi.”

  IT IS ASH Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and I think how quaint it is that Misha is arriving just as we go, spiritually, into the dark. Fernando and I are on our way to Florence to fetch him and, though we are happy for his coming, so are we agitated for it. He represents some strange conjunction of pugnacious coach, loving Jewish uncle, and Jungian, the last of which he truly is, a psychiatrist by profession. He has been my friend for many years and, during his two visits to us in Venice, he and Fernando struck the sparks of sympathy, though each with a hand on his dagger.

  We tuck Misha into the backseat, his small black leather traveling bag next to him, exactly where he wants it to be. I breathe deeply and the scent of him comforts me. Always the same boarding-house perfume, it’s made of old sweat trapped inside damp tweeds, the Cavendish shag of his pipe, and a single note of cabbage, stayed too long in a pot. As a young doctor, just out of school in Russia, he emigrated to Italy, living for many years in Rome before finding his way to Los Angeles, and it was in these Tuscan hills where he came often to walk and write and think. He is at ease throughout the ride home, saying, in his perfect Italian, how much he misses Italy, which is almost as much as he misses Russia. He neither asks trick questions nor ones to which he already knows the answers. I know that he’s saving those, that he will spew them forth fast and sharp as a quiet serpent will his tongue. But I’ll be ready for him.

  He tours the house with Fernando, settles himself in a guest room while I’m in the kitchen, and when we sit down at table, I see he’s pomaded his hair to a plumbago sheen and tied a handsome paisley cravat at his neck—battle dress, I think. I can’t help myself from holding down one leg of the table, girded for the first blow. It comes in the form of “The house is charming and could be quite more so with a few changes. It’s a shame it’s not yours.”

  Fernando jumps in. “We’ve begun to look about for a house to buy but, actually, we feel no urgency about it. We don’t feel the need to decide about that. Or about much of anything else right now. Besides, we’re becoming quite affectionate about this place, and it hardly seems to matter whether it belongs to us.”

  “Living life on the social margins doesn’t disturb you, then?” His glance is a sword, which I thrust back at him.

  “I think ‘social margins’ is a subjective state, and if that’s how our life seems to you, so be it,” I tell him, getting up to pour more wine for him.

  “You define ‘social margins,’ then,” he says, not resting half a beat before he defines them for himself. “You don’t have jobs and you don’t have investments. You seem to have dissolved your professional histories and set up here among the olives, assuming a stance in the whirring diorama of village life. You are behaving irresponsibly at a time in your lives when such can be very dangerous.”

  “We don’t have children to raise. We don’t have debts. And it’s living here and doing what we’re doing that feels good right now,” I tell him.

  Fernando has taken on the crack rhythms necessary to converse with Misha, and he steps on my last word. “How many of your patients tell you they want to change things in their lives? How many of them keep those dreams locked in a box, only taking them out for a weekly airing when they come to talk to you? I honestly think I’m stronger for having ‘dissolved my professional history,’ as you say. I still have some paralyzing moments, times when I want things to be easier or clearer, but I had worse terrors sitting, day after day, in that office in the bank.”

  “But at least you had security then. Now, you have nothing. Prudent people build security rather than rip it apart just when they might need it most.” There is an almost withering
unction dripping from his eyes now. He places both hands on the table, palms down, long white fingers splayed.

  “Do you really still believe in security? It’s a myth, Misha. And I’m surprised you haven’t understood that. It’s a treacherous delusion. Do any of us need yet more proof that security can neither be bought nor built nor gained by deeds, good or evil?” I ask him, placing my hands on the table, miming his. “Shrink the complexities. Divine, distill, Misha. Cook the juices down to a syrup. It’s sensations rather than things I’m after. Only the mysterious is eternal. I prefer to feel this life rather than to grow foolish enough to believe I own it. The only way to be safe is to understand that there is no safety.”

  Misha stays silent. Very quietly, then, I remind him: “But to the other realm, alas, what can be taken? Not the power of seeing, learned here so slowly, and nothing that’s happened here. Nothing.”

  “Ah, now you quote Rilke.”

  “No, I’m quoting you quoting Rilke, the way you used to twenty years ago when I first knew you.”

  “But you quote us out of context. You rest your head in the brumes, Chou. You always have. And it seems Fernando has taken to the same airy comforts,” he says quietly. “To the romantic, all things are romantic. To romantic people, only the romantic can happen. I think you must have been some species of an innocent abroad since your beginnings. I think you were born in a time very much out of harmony with your nature. But instead of that being a problem, you’ve just marched or danced or wandered through the eighteenth century. Or perhaps it’s the nineteenth by now?”

  “And now who are you quoting?” I ask.

  “I can’t remember, but it might be myself,” he says. “But what I’m hoping is that you don’t lean too much on this coupling with Fernando. I hope you understand that we’re all, each one of us, alone.” He says this looking poker-straight into my husband’s eyes.

  “I’m not alone now, Misha, and I think most people who are alone are so by choice as much as they are by fortune and destiny. There’s a great humility about love. Before a person can surrender his aloneness, he has to care for someone more than he cares for himself.” I get up to take away the untouched plates of soup, but first I hold Misha’s face in my hands. “Please don’t worry so much. I’m doing well. We’re doing well. You know better than anyone that most of us are moved by the same desires and fears. It’s the timing and the proportions these take on that separate us. Right now we’re, emotionally, a little distant from you.”

  Misha looks at us, one and then the other. Still sitting, he takes both my hands and kisses them, gets up from his chair then and solemnly kisses Fernando on the shoulder, Russian style.

  “Shall I fry the cutlets, or are your appetites confined to blood and wine this evening?” I ask. They say they’re starving now that we’ve got past the welcome speeches. I melt sweet butter over a slow flame, add a drop of oil so the butter won’t burn when I raise the heat. I slip in the pork, pounded thin and pressed all over with shreds of dried orange zest, fennel seed, and the crushed crumbs of cornmeal bread. I crust them quickly, one side, other side, turn them onto a warm plate while I build a sauce. Fernando and Misha have gone out on the terrace for a smoke, to make their own peace, and I’m thinking that perhaps I’ve been too hard on my old friend. For Misha, to torment is to love.

  But he knows me so well, knows I’ve always tripped on ladders, corporate or otherwise. Never having quite seen the point in climbing north all the time, I rather liked moving through life in arabesques—a little turnoff here, another one there. Dallying it might have seemed sometimes, though it wasn’t. I always finished things, rounded them out smooth as I could. I didn’t rush, but I didn’t sleep either. Besides, I never would dress for success. And I understand that Misha is not charmed by witnessing happiness. His pain is old, much older than he is, so that even the hypothesis of happiness seems vulgar to him. Happiness is for stones, he always says. And so for him, it’s better to pass the time with a malcontent, a cynic. Someone loathe to lay down his burdens. Or at least someone who is still waiting for his happiness. Some people are afraid of joy. Terrified that they don’t deserve it or that they won’t be able to feel it, should it ever come to visit. Mostly I think people are terrified that joy won’t stay, won’t last. Another reading of Barlozzo’s warning that says Don’t trust the peace.

  I notice that Fernando and Misha are no longer on the terrace. Since I don’t see them in the garden, I think they must have taken a walk up into town. I slow the supper proceedings, pour a glass of wine, and sit by the fire, but as soon as I do, they appear, arms full of wood, cheeks reddened in winter.

  “We’ve been in the barn, solving things,” says Fernando.

  “Your husband here is actually quite Machiavellian, Chou. I may have found my match in him. He can quote more passages from The Prince than I can. And we both agree that the only real bandits in life are those who believe themselves immaculate, without stain. Perfect people make us feel bad, isolated, punished. We agree on that, as well.”

  All this accord built in half an hour makes me smile. I go back to my sauce, but they follow me and we’re so tight in the kitchen-that-was-a-manger that all we can do is laugh and say how good it is to be together. We decide to eat on our laps by the fire. I push them away to set things up while I heat the buttery juices from the cutlets, add a long splash of fino, two drops of red vinegar. When the mass begins to bubble I squeeze the juices from a beautiful blood orange directly into the pan. A grinding of pepper, a knob of butter for shine, and we’re ready. I make pools of the sauce on the plates, lay the barely reheated cutlets over it. Misha carries out the dishes, sets them on the shelf of the hearth, Fernando brings the small bowl of celery root and mascarpone purée. And we dine.

  The Machiavelli festival proceeds with the consideration of the merits of good and evil. I half-listen, since I’ve heard Misha’s interpretations many times before. “All of us must be aware of our own capacity for evil. Evil is a skill, a defense, an art, a sport. One simply learns it, as one learns to shoot or to ride. Then one tucks away the skill, applying it as needed.”

  “But what does one do for practice? I mean, how does one keep the skill sharpened?” Fernando asks, but, like the duke, Misha answers only the questions that suit him.

  “One who wants to be always good is inevitably ruined by those who are not good. I think that was your case, wasn’t it, Fernando? There were those who abused your goodness, mistook it for frailty, yes? You may be the least frail man I’ve ever known.”

  “Io lo prendo come un complimento. I take that as a compliment,” says Fernando. “But I think it’s too late for me to learn evil. I’m having enough difficulty with English.”

  I kiss them, leave them to their cups, and take the priest up to bed.

  “It has been an evening of unexpected beauty, Chou,” Misha says as I’m climbing the stairs. Actually, it was, I think, as I tuck the priest under the sheets.

  IN HALF A DAY he’s become the town divo. The San Cascienesi are all in a twitter over Misha, charmed by his truculence, marveled by his command of their language. Un straniero, a stranger who drinks and smokes and plays cards, who tells jokes in dialect and who is, most stupendous of all, uno psichiatra Californiana. Misha cuts una gran’ bella figura. Did I notice more than one widow sliding off her kerchief and fluffing up her hair? I chide him on the way home, ask him if he wouldn’t like to come and “live among the olives” with us, but he just tilts his head, not quite allowing himself a grin.

  The five days he’d planned to stay with us spill over into eight or nine and I think Misha rather enjoys the celebrity bestowed upon him by the town as much as he does our cosseting of him. He keeps his dour face through it all, though, save when he can cajole Fernando into another Machievellian tussle.

  Early on Misha and Barlozzo seemed to find sympathy in each other over their sunset grappa up at the bar or sitting by our fire, but the two wear neither long nor well together, Misha sayin
g Barlozzo is a Spartan, too repressed in his general discourse. Barlozzo lets his feelings be known by simply interrupting his visits to us and taking polite leave from the bar as soon as we enter with Misha in tow. Fernando says they are like two bull moose, staking out territory. He says they are jealous of each other. Perhaps he’s right. But even so, when Misha is ready to leave, all packed up in the Renault he’d rented in Chiusi so he can travel about a bit before heading to Rome and his return flight, I think I can read some joy in his old face. It’s not so with the duke.

  I don’t know whether it’s the aftermath of the horn-locking with Misha or unexpired emotion over Floriana’s plight or some other calamity, real or perceived, that causes the shades to cross his face again. But there they are, gnawing into the hollows about the duke’s eyes as we sit, on the same afternoon of Misha’s departure, in the plush blue of a sofa in Florì’s little parlor. We’re waiting to take her shopping in Città della Pieve.

  “There’s a place I’d like to show you,” he says.

  “What sort of place?”

  “Just a place. A house. Or what’s left of what was once una casa colonica, a country house,” he says.

  “Is it nearby?”

  “It’s not too far away. Do you remember that bend in the Tiber just a few kilometers before the turnoff up to Todi, where we collected the stones for the fire ring? It’s near there, on the other side of the road, about five hundred meters into the woods,” he says.

  “And you want us to see it? I mean, are we going to visit someone?”

  “No, we’re not going to visit anyone. No questions, please. I just want Floriana and you and Fernando to come with me tomorrow. See if you can’t arrange things with her,” he says, nodding toward the next room, where Floriana is muttering about the whereabouts of a glove. “Set it for either tomorrow or Saturday. We can lunch at Luciano’s and then stop to see this place for a few minutes. I know I’m being mysterious, but it’s just that I want to talk to all of you about something and I can’t do that until I show you this house. Will you just do this for me?”