A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  “When choosing a mate, be certain it’s the one with whom you want to share your dying as much as your living.”

  “The greatest emptiness comes to us when what or whom we thought we understood cheats us by being something else, someone else.”

  “Sarcasm is a dagger honed from fear.”

  “When you get old enough, you discover your sons have become the husband you’d like to forget, while your daughters are eerily the same as the mother from whom you ran. Life is just a series of strange tricks.”

  “Don’t be afraid of your children. If they’re going to love you, they’ll love you on their own, without your having to pander to them. If they’re not going to love you, there’s nothing to do about it.”

  “Most of us are rationed three silver bullets in a life. Each of them wants quiet deliberation before firing.”

  “Every once in a while some small vendetta can do your heart good.”

  “Why do we want them so much more than they want us?”

  It’s my turn. “Too much sweet is bound to finish in despair. Balance the sweet and the salty. I knew a French woman, a cook in a tiny place in the village of Poissy, who would rub a few grains of coarse salt over the tips of honeyed plums or figs just before she’d shove a great tart of them into the oven. The salt exalts the sweet, she’d say, licking her fingers like a cat.”

  After Florì takes a turn, there’s nothing left to be said.

  “Do you know it was hard, some days and some nights, just to get through the hours. I was always looking for things to do to fill the spaces before lunch or to keep myself still before dawn. Now, all I long for is time. So short and fast is this life. And it’s not that I would have wished to slow it down as much as I would have wished to understand about the speed.”

  When she thinks we’re ready for her, a woman called Tullia says, “What we should be doing is dancing, Florì. It’s la tarantella we should be dancing to drive the demons mad, to remind them how much stronger we are than they.”

  A dance of rebellion against pain and death, a willful dance, arrogant, seductive, smashing bounds, tearing masks, shaking fists and shaking hips. It’s a dance Greek and Bohemian, Arab and African. A gypsy’s dance. Yet in this group of sober Tuscans, only she, born and bred in Salerno, only Tullia knows la tarantella. But like all southerners, first she wants to talk. She tells us that, after the war, when she was thirteen, there was no one left in the two-room apartment where she’d lived with her parents. No one save the uncle who’d come to take care of her when her mother died and her father didn’t come home. But he had hands large and quick, she says, and she knew her fate if she stayed. So she stole from him before he could steal from her. She stole enough money to ride the train from Salerno to Florence, where she was sure to find work as a housemaid. Too, she stole half a loaf of bread and the three cuts of salame wrapped in brown paper he’d left in his pocket for his supper—he, as usual, not caring much what she ate for supper. Inside a tablecloth she’d tied these along with the red cotton skirt she’d outgrown but loved too much to leave behind, a nightgown she’d bleached white in the sun and patched with very small stitches, her mother’s black silk dress with the shoulder pads, the crucifix from over her bed. And a tambourine. Having no shoes, she’d scrubbed her feet in vinegar, straightened her pinafore as best she could, placed the bundle on her head as though she was taking it to the public fountain and, instead, walked away to the station. Bread and courage and a tambourine. Seeds to grow a life.

  Only Tullia knows la tarantella. “Show us,” we ask her. “Show us how.”

  Nearing seventy now, perhaps more, she stands up to her full height, which might be approaching five feet. She removes her pink cardigan, baring a sleeveless woolen undershirt, edged in lace. And in her slippers and elastic stockings, her prim navy skirt pulled up above her knees, Tullia strikes a pose. She closes her eyes, staying still as stone, listening for the music, I think. Listening for her youth. When she’s ready, she throws back her head, thrusts out her chin, raises her arms and begins a slow, deliberate series of turns and slides and more turns, accompanied by her own whispered hisses and long, gutteral groans. I want to see the scenes that must be passing behind her clenched eyes, hear the sounds. Plump and elfin, she is neither lithe nor clumsy. And surely she is beautiful.

  “Ma, ho bisogna del mio tamburello. But I need my tambourine,” she says breaking the spell, putting the sweater back on and wrapping herself in a shawl. “Vengo subito. I’ll be right back.”

  Meanwhile some of us begin to try out the moves, but like all folkloric dances, this one must be danced from the inside. And so, before Florì’s bed, three of us dance strange amalgams of jitterbug and cha-cha while, in my fashion, I tango, it being the only dance I ever wanted to know. When Tullia returns, she claps away our folly and begins, in earnest, to teach us. She tells us to think erotic thoughts, angry thoughts, vengeful ones, loving ones, sad ones. She tells us to mix them all up together like they are mixed together in life, and then, she says, we’ll be ready to dance. There seems no hope for us as Tullia slaps her tambourine.

  Someone says, “I don’t think I’ve ever had an erotic thought, the nuns having slapped them out of me before they were even formed.”

  And now Florì, rooting hard, says, “Dance for me, if not for you.”

  “Oh, no. It doesn’t work that way. Get up and dance for yourself,” says Tullia.

  Florì walks to the armoire in the corner, opens it, takes out her now not-so-new black pumps from Perugia. She sits down on the bed to slip them on. In her white flannel shift, the long, narrow lines of her body and her large, full breasts evident, she stands before us. And before her very own troupe of demons. Black shoes. Red lips. Now Florì dances. She’d been paying attention, because she’s truly dancing, the staccato of her heels keeping time with the tambourine, the sounds surely waking the devil, then taunting him, just like Tullia said they would. And when she’s pink and breathless and dripping with the sweat of triumph, she opens her eyes and weeps old tears. She asks for wine.

  All our thirsts and hungers have been whipped by the talking and dancing and it’s more than broth and white rice we crave. Some one begins to heave flour onto the kitchen table, building it up into a hill and urging a crater into its middle. Another one is ready with eggs and milk, butter, softened yeast. Four hands, mine and Tullia’s, work at the mass, kneading and slapping it into pale satin. Covered in a white cloth, the dough rests. Someone else is already heating fat over a low flame, a liter and a half of sunflower oil in a heavy, shallow pan. I wash my hands and dry them on the apron Florì had tied around me and think that it’s this, it’s this connection that I need and desire most from this life. Humble as it is, this is my legacy. I’m a cook and a baker. Such an ancient metier is mine, descended from the loaf-givers, the keepers of the fire, the distributors of largesse. I’d always known I was playacting whenever I’d tried to learn more about business, to “ask for the order” or “go in for the close.” I never fooled myself any more than I did other people. And so it’s good to be home. This is what I’ve wanted to do and how I’ve wanted to be.

  Flori’s gone to fetch la ciliegina, dry white wine scented with cherry leaves. She’d brewed it a year ago, set it in a cupboard to age. This is the occasion of its debut.

  “This is the first time in my life I’ve ever drunk wine when my husband was not present,” someone says.

  “Here’s to the next time!” says another.

  We take turns cooking the cincialose, tearing pieces of the dough, stretching them with our fingertips into uneven little cakes, slipping them, then, into the bubbling oil, watching them rise and blister and turn to gold. Each of us cooks six pieces, drains them, sprinkles them with salt or sugar, as requested, passes them out. The next one does the same and the next one, too, biting into the hot, crisp stuff between sips of the cool, sweet wine. Erotic memory for all of us.

  16

  The First of the Zucchini Blossom
s Are Up

  April had been feverish. The sirocco pumped wild and hot from the south and some days it brawled, head on, with the tramontana, the reckless northern wind not yet ready to rest. And so everything happened in April. Storms ripped, winds gasped. And in the lulls, the sun practiced for August. Now the cherries are ripe, the wild strawberries, too. Basil and borrage and small green-fleshed melons are in the markets, ripe wheat in the meadows. And on this first day of May we’re halfheartedly packing to leave it all.

  I don’t want to go away right now any more than Fernando does. He’s thinking we can wait until the autumn to begin the research I must do for the book on southern Italy. But I know I can’t. I’ve drawn a work plan and it tells me, plain and simple, it’s time to begin or be crushed at deadline. We’ll be gone nearly two months, moving through Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, Calabria, and into Sicily, returning here just a few days before the children arrive for the summer. Routes are mapped and colleagues have prepared insider paths to cooks and bakers and winemakers. “It’s time to go.”

  “Yes, yes, of course it is. It’s just that it’s so beautiful here.”

  “It’s always beautiful here. The beauty will still be here when we come home,” I tell him, trying to fit my ruffled lace skirt into the single suitcase we’ve alloted for me. It fights, though, with all the other skirts and jackets and shawls I’ll probably never wear betwixt the goats and the oranges. Still, I like to be ready. Fernando’s case is half empty. I fill it up with the apricot-colored lace and the sandals with the ties that wrap like ballet shoes. He always chooses the big red case for himself, knowing I’ll run out of room, liking that I’ll mix my things with his.

  “I’m just happy you’ve stopped carrying around the ball gown,” he says hugging me, smoothing my hair.

  We’ve invited Barlozzo and Florì to lunch, so I get to work. There’ll be frittatine, small omelettes stuffed with the tender, thin stems of new garlic sautéed with borrage flowers, and suckling lamb braised in butter and onions until the flesh nearly melts. A salad made only of basil leaves, whole and sweet, and wood strawberries. A drizzle of oil, a few drops of old balsalmic, some pepper. A decidedly un-duke-like menu. But Florì will love it.

  It’s the front door buzzer that breaks through my singing and Fernando runs up the stairs two at a time, knowing it’s announcing some playful intrigue of Barlozzo’s.

  “It was early this morning as far as anyone knows. Barlozzo went to bring her the paper . . . the priest . . . a doctor . . . an ambulance.”

  Wiping my hands on my apron, I walk to the foot of the stairs. I don’t recognize the voice of the visitor, and hearing but pieces of his words, I take in nothing but chill. There’s noise, then, behind my eyes, like something made of steel and spinning hard, shutting out the light, and I know it’s the truth that Florì is dead. Fernando’s arms are around me, his hands pushing my head to his chest, covering me, rocking me.

  The afternoon of the red lips and the cherry wine was nine days ago. Today she’s dead. We run down the hill to the curve, up the steep into town, but it’s just as true there. Florì is dead. When people say something, it’s a broken phrase, a thought choked off somewhere in its middle. We drink the water Vera offers. Someone says there will be a procession from the church to the campo santo tomorrow at sunset. There will be a mass in the morning. No one speaks of what or how. In a starched white shirt and dark gray trousers, his freshly washed hair combed back straight from his broken brow, Barlozzo walks down into the piazza from the lane that winds up beyond it. From her house. He shakes hands and woodenly accepts hugs as he proceeds. As he approaches the entrance to the bar, Fernando walks out a few steps toward him and I walk behind Fernando. The two of them speak and I reach around my husband to take Barlozzo’s hand, parched skin over long bones. He holds my curled hand tight in his curled hand as he continues to speak to Fernando. He and I don’t look at each other. “Ciao,” he says. “Ciao,” he says again, gorging the word with all the other words he can’t say.

  When we’re back at home, Fernando goes directly to the desk, begins to write notes to people who’ll be expecting us at our first few stops, notes he says he’ll fax from the bar later on. We won’t go away. We open every door and window in the house, wanting the weather to take us over, to make the noise, to cover the noise. We take off our clothes and climb back into our unmade bed.

  “SHE WAS GREEDY for death. A month ago, maybe less, when she’d gone for her scheduled check, the scans showed new masses. She was reaching for her purse, her sweater, as the doctor was explaining the next procedures. She thanked him. She smiled as though it had been such a lovely visit. And both he and I knew she’d already made up her mind to die.”

  It’s just after dark now, and we sit on the terrace floor, Fernando and I with our backs to the stones of the stable, the duke facing us. “It wasn’t long after that when she called all of you in to play house with her. I think she’d already begun to hear that tumult, that whirring that comes with dying. People know. She knew. But it wasn’t until she saw those ghostly films hung up there in the white light that she began to listen to what she knew. I knew she believed that her long, slow dying was not the best way to love me and so I never begged her, not once. I never got angry with her, never asked her why. And fast as she could, she slipped away. No fear. No hope. An ancient way of facing life and facing death. But there was nothing of despair in these last days. I did my crying apart from her. And if Florì cried at all, she cried alone. She wanted to wash the walls, all the walls in her house, and so we did. She’d work on the bottom parts then stand back and look up at where I was scrubbing, tell me the spots I’d missed. It took all day, and when I asked her why she was so worried about having clean walls she said, ‘Because it’s something I can decide.’ She said she didn’t want stains on her walls any more than on the beauty of these past few months together. I think she was satisfied. She’d lived the life she’d longed for since she was a girl and it mattered less to her the length of that life than that it had finally become real. But I was sure we had time. I began thinking in terms of months, maybe a year. Sometimes I would dare to think about more. No matter when it came, I would never have been ready for this morning. And she knew that before I did. She kept telling me how much she loved me. She’d say it and say it again like she was trying out the words in all her voices, her girl’s voice, her young woman’s voice. Her voice before she got sick. I think the pain and the pleasure came out even for Florì. She left me a note.” Taking a small envelope out from his white shirt pocket, the kind of envelope that comes with flowers, he removes the card. “She left me seven words,” he says, “I wanted death to find me dancing.”

  THE SKY PROMISES stars, the first ones glinting even as a red sun still soaks the Tuscan hills. Each of us holds a candle. In his purple robes, the priest waits, the altar boys light the censer. When no one else can be seen coming in from the village, the litany is said. Frankincense mists tremble over the grave and flowers are dropped in, the first ones slap hard against the metal: the rest make a sound like hush.

  BACK AT HOME we open some wine and talk a little. I tell Fernando that Barlozzo looked like a child to me this evening. “I wish I could have picked him up, folded all that length of him into my arms, told him that the pain would go away.”

  “He knows it won’t. But at least it’s his pain. Finally it’s his and not his father’s, his mother’s. Just as the duke said it had for Florì, I think the pain and the pleasure will come out OK for him.”

  We sit there by our fire, telling each other it’s the last one of the season. We say that every night when we don’t set the fire outside in the ring, never wanting to relinquish the ritual of one fire or the other. “Are we waiting for the duke?” I ask.

  “I think we are, even though we know he won’t come.”

  We take our supper by the hearth, cover a bowl of soup with a plate and set it on the ledge. A snack for Santa Claus, I think. Fernando thinks it, too, an
d we laugh. It feels so good to laugh. Like a swallow of strong spirits makes room for more supper, laughing seems to make room for the rest of the tears. Fernando and I have another thought in common.

  Sweaters tied round our shoulders, we don’t have to wonder where to look for him. We walk to the campo santo. It’s not hard to locate the grave, since it’s the only one lit by a torch, a man digging in its light. “I thought she’d like to sleep with the pomegranates,” he says, leaning on the shovel. The tree he is planting looks to be a meter or so high, but already its limbs are thick and twisted, the bark of its trunk black and rough. A tree to reckon with. Not at all surprised to see us, he continues to work, dumping earth from a plastic sack, patting it gently against the roots, filling the hole, patting the earth again and again. He has a demijohn of water in his wheelbarrow, and he bathes the tree, waits for the earth and roots to drink, pours on more. Two dwarf pomegranates are planted in terracotta urns and he moves them to flank the bigger tree. He’s finished. At least for now, I think, wondering if he has plans for an olive tree, a grapevine or two. Surely there will be roses. He sits on the shorn grass, knees pulled up to his chin, lights two cigarettes, gives one to Fernando. “I’d like a cigarette this evening,” I say, and he offers me one from his pack, no questions asked. My husband lights the cigarette from the ash of his, puts it between my lips. We all sit and smoke and no one cries until he’s home.

  NEXT MORNING ON our way up to the bar, we meet the duke coming the other way. His favorite blue plastic carrying case is under one arm and full of flowers. “The first of the squash blossoms are up, ragazzi. They’re beautiful, all feminine.”

  “Does this mean I’m cooking lunch?” I ask him.

  “Not for me. Not for a while. Maybe when you come back from the south.”

  This is his way of saying we should leave, not suspend our plans any longer.

  “We’ll be getting on the road soon enough,” Fernando says, offering his friend the chance to change his mind.