They may be excited at the energy emanating from a bowl of fava beans and a board holding a wedge of pecorino on the top of the wall, our convenient sideboard. If not, they are the only creatures in the Arezzo province not sharing this Tuscan mania.
To start or to finish dinner each night, we are fated to eat fave.
Anselmo's crop, as predicted, overwhelms us. We give bags of the tender young things to neighbors, friends, anyone who will take them. The local ritual of pecorino and fave is one of the most loved combinations in Tuscan food. Served as lunch in itself, or an antipasto, or in place of dessert, this sacred marriage exists for a short, intense season. The pecorino of choice is fresh; these two spring arrivals go naturally together.
Tonight's pecorino is special, thanks to our friend Vittorio. He grew up in Cortona and works for a vineyard now, after several years of working in Rome, commuting the long distance so he could continue to live the way he wants. He stops by the house after gathering funghi porcini in the mountains. When we're in town, we leave a bag of fave on his doorknob. He is president of the local chapter of Slow Food, an international organization devoted to preserving traditional cuisines and dedicated to pure methods of growing and preparing food and wine. Slow Food—as opposed to fast food. Naturally, we have joined. Local meetings consist of eight-course dinners with ten or twelve wines from a particular region. A club after my own heart. At the time of our “meetings,” other chapters around Italy are meeting, too, and at the end of the evening votes are cast, phoned in, and the best wines are elected.
Late in the afternoon, Vittorio took us far into the hills to meet a friend of his family, a farmer whose name, to our astonishment, is Achille. We waited for him to come in from milking. Outside the farmhouse, a metal bathtub under a cold water faucet was positioned for a perfect view of Cortona in the distance, with orchards sloping down his hills. Half an olive oil can nailed sideways to the wall held soap and a brush. Around the courtyard stood benches made from hollowed-out logs. Achille, around seventy years old, came in carrying a bucket of ewe's milk and a rake, the rake's handle a straight limb smooth from use, the tines strong sticks carved and set into a piece of branch, all finished neatly. He'd made his rake. Such a beautiful thing and a symbol of his individuality; rakes don't cost much and he prefers to make his own. Achille is a compact man, grave and slow. His remote tortoise eyes seemed to take the measure of us quickly. Every day he has lived in the sun has added a wrinkle to his face so that now he is completely furrowed and tanned to the color of an old baseball glove. We followed him into a room next to a stall with calves closed inside. His cheeses lined four hanging shelves. Ed noticed jagged tin rounds at intervals along the ropes. Achille smiled quietly and nodded. The topi, mice, can't crawl around the tin and eat the cheese.
Grass floated on top of the milk. He took a wad of cotton and covered the mesh of a sieve, then poured the milk through. He took a jug of what must be rennet and splashed in some. I wanted to ask questions but he did not seem cut out for casual conversation. The room smelled like nowhere I've ever been, a powerful, primitive lacteal ripening. Forget European Union rules of pasteurization, this is cheese as it has been made through the eons. He asked us to select a cheese, one with no cracks in the outer layer. He rotated the cheese, looking at me intently (I'm probably as exotic to him as he is to me) and said we should turn it every day. “Why?” I ventured, although I assumed the ingredients were not yet stable and continued to need mixing. No reply, but he almost smiled. The straw-colored two-pound round looked like a little moon. He wrapped it carefully in foil.
Achille's wife came in with another bucket. She wore boots and a housedress, and like her husband, was deeply sunbaked. They are extremely quiet, I think shy, probably from years of isolation. Right away, she started another batch. She has a wood stove in the courtyard for cooking in hot weather. A battered pasta pot on top attests to frequent use. I imagine her in the evening, after all the chores, bathing in that tub, nothing but silence all around her.
Young fave do not have to be peeled, just shelled at the table and enjoyed with the pecorino. Achille's cheese is smooth and tangy, without the barnyard taste many fresh pecorini seem to impart. Ed cuts another piece. I notice he has eaten a quarter of the yellow moon. We walk up on the terraces after dinner, carrying a last glass of wine. The zucchini are starting to bloom. Those audacious flowers deserve a van Gogh or Nolde to capture their melted gold. We linger at the tomatoes, figuring how long until we're coming up with baskets to pull them from the vines. Ed rubs a leaf on his fingers and lets me smell the promise of ripe tomatoes. The chard, more chard than I can imagine for risotto, is ready. We stop at the patch of fave. We hardly have made a dent. Something tells me I won't want to see a fava bean for years after this spring.
I'm spending the afternoon with Vittorio, roaming around the countryside in his car with all the windows down. Ed is taking a day for writing. We stop to visit a farmer who lives in a house built in the 1400s and still is owned by a count of the same family, whose villa is down the road. Tommaso is delighted to see Vittorio, who grew up nearby and used to play in the hay barn. He shows us an old painted cart still stored there. These places sequestered from time never become familiar; visiting, we drop behind the years, into a way of life we've imagined but never known.
When I ask about the chapel at the back of the house, Tommaso casually tells us that it has been closed since Napoleon passed by, as though he were saying it's been closed since Wednesday. “Before,” he says, “pilgrims used to stop for three days; the count gave them food and lodging.” The way he talks, we think it could be the current count, could be his own extra rooms involved.
Tentatively, I ask if we could see the inside of the chapel. He leads us through his house. I glimpse bare rooms where he and his brother live: iron beds, chests, yellowed crochet-edged linen curtains, remnants of a sister or wife, and a few photographs on the wall. No TV, no technology at all, not even a radio in sight. Austere as monk cells and utterly clean. We're winding around medieval corridors with no light. Tommaso's steps are secure. We follow blindly and finally he turns a key with a loud ka-lunk, ka-lunk and pushes open the door. The first thing I see is a copper bathtub, then some farm equipment and barrels. As my eyes adjust to the gray light falling from a single high round window, I make out frescoes of a saint and of the Madonna. A glaring blank space shows where a painting was removed. “It's down at the church now. Stop and the priest will show you San Filippio, who used to live happily here.” The chapel is oddly elaborate for a farmhouse of this type. Maybe the count wanted the sweaty pilgrims to stop somewhere well away from his own enclosed park.
Tommaso takes us to the kitchen and pours glasses of vin santo, the drink of hospitality in all farms. I've had vin santo, which tastes something like sherry, at all hours of the day in various houses. He props himself inside the walk-in fireplace in a chair and he and Vittorio reminisce about telling stories around the fire years ago. Tommaso is the opposite of the solemn Achille. He's lived his life without much of a cruising radius, too, but he's a talker, a storyteller. He stretches out his legs, mimicking how in old times the contadini used to toast themselves in winter, while staying close enough to stir the polenta. Looking around the kitchen I see no sign of heat, so I expect they still have this ancestral habit on January nights.
Tommaso shows us his Val di Chiana cows, those white beasts who turn into the famous Florentine beefsteak, grilled with rosemary. He has four grown ones and three calves, who fix great dark eyes at us and stare. Around their necks he has tied red ribbons to protect them from the evil eye. I always wondered why the steak highlights Tuscan menus yet you never see these creatures in fields. They're raised indoors, babied and petted but cruelly chained to the manger. They are immense, growing to three times the size of a normal cow.
Next to the house an enclosed and overgrown flower garden again attests to a long-lost feminine presence. The old roses trained on iron poles still bloom profusely.
The yellow rambler with tiny blooms has spilled from its pole and crawled to a fence where it swoops and spreads recklessly.
I'm following warily because of the roaming ducks and chickens. My old bird phobia is a liability not only in piazze full of pigeons. If Tommaso suspects that I'm afraid of a chicken, he will think I am nuts. Two white turkeys peck the ground near the barn. They are the ugliest birds on earth.
We drive past the count's villa, a melancholy shuttered place surrounded by chestnut trees, and stop at the church. Stanislao, the Pole who helped build our long stone wall when we first bought Bramasole, and his wife Reina, live with the priest of this parish, Don Fabio. She cooks and takes care of the house and church. Stanislao works as a mason but does odd jobs for the church property on weekends. Some Saturdays when Stanislao works with Ed at our house, she comes to help me in the garden. Tiny and wiry, she has tremendous energy. The priest is teaching two children their catechism in the garden. Reina takes us in, pausing to show us Don Fabio's study. It could be the study in the paintings of Saint Jerome. An open window throws dusky light onto a desk stacked with leather books, some open, some turned face down. All we need is Saint Jerome's attribute, the sleeping lion. In a corridor we see the dim painting that used to hang in Tommaso's chapel. On a side wall in the church, snapshots of all parishioners who have died are arranged in rows. Vittorio finds many familiar faces from his childhood. We leave Reina to her ironing of the altar linen, leave Don Fabio to his two red-haired charges in the garden.
Growing up in a small town, I felt the tight bit in my mouth. I couldn't wait to leave. The pull of cities was strong. I remember, however, a slight pull, too, toward life far in the country.
My boyfriend's grandmother, Mimo, lived near Mystic, a crossroads out in tobacco and cotton country. A porch ran the length of her two-storey house. Her pie safe always was full of lemon and coconut meringue pies. In plain bedrooms her quilts lay folded at the foot of each bed. The porch faced the fields and she sat there in the afternoons shelling butter beans. Occasionally, she picked up a wooden-handled church fan printed with a picture of Jesus and fanned away the flies. I sat in the swing reading Anna Karenina. In this memory, I am somehow missing the boyfriend altogether. Through stirred-up field dust, the sunset sky turned lurid and splendid, popsicle orange and grape, with sprays of gold, and cheap-underwear pink. After the wobbling gold blob of sunset, the air over the tobacco turned blue, as though over a lake. We were the solemn witnesses. It could have been Doomsday every afternoon. After that Mimo would go fix herself a tall gin and tonic.
In his book I once loved, The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash observed that this air is responsible for Southerners' romanticism—they see through a haze and consequently have a hard time distinguishing reality. Mimo's life appealed to me. She roared in her Buick across rutted roads through crops to check on workers. Long a widow, she ran the farm, put up preserves, birthed calves, quilted and cooked, and always kicked open the screen door when we arrived, throwing open her arms.
Rediscovering deep country life, I wonder now what it would be like to live like Achille and Tommaso. For years I would have thought What a waste. I was interested in the dramatic life—maybe someone would throw himself under a train for me. I was pretty sure I never would be called on for something that rash.
Now I feel the lure of country dawns, sunsets, the satisfaction of living in a green kingdom of one's own. I feel as well a growing distrust of spending too much of one's life deifying work. Finding that running balance among ambition, solitude, stimulation, adventure—how to do this? I heard Ramsey Clark, then Attorney General, speak when I was in college. All I remember him saying was something like, “When I die, I want to be so exhausted that you can throw me on the scrap heap.” He wanted to be totally consumed by his life. I was impressed and adopted that as my philosophy, too. As a writer, I also had an inclination toward meditation and reclusiveness, and so have maintained for most of my life a decent balance. The last few years have pulled me too much in the exterior direction. After devoting five years to chairing my department at the university, I resigned from the hot seat and went back to teaching. I saw how a few months later hardly anyone remembered what I thought of as vast changes, how instantaneously time slid over my absence. I was left with the private satisfaction of a job well done. Considering time, stress, and pure hassle, private satisfaction did not seem like enough. I had wanted to rethink the department from the bottom up and was willing to write endless memos, reports, evaluations, and to straggle home at 8 P.M. What is replenishing? What is depleting? What takes? What gives? What wrings you out and, truly, what rinses you with happiness? What comes from my own labor and creativity, regardless of what anyone else thinks of it, stays close to the natural joy we all were born with and carry always. Mystic, Georgia, was not for me. I would have been hell on wheels by thirty. Oddly, oddly, I probably could live a happy, sensuous life there now. Is the sun still blistering the paint on Mimo's house? Do the fields shimmer in the blue heat? Hey, Tommaso, Achille, do you want to die so exhausted you're just ready to be tossed away? That American, have you ever known a woman afraid of a chicken?
Anselmo takes his time. Even when he had his office covered with photos of broken-down houses, where he hoped someone would invest their souls, he had time to talk. In his transformation to gardener, he lavishes his attention on perfect bamboo tepees for the tomatoes. He brings me roses from his own garden and flats of strawberries. Best of all, he takes us on excursions. When Ed asks him about a cart for hauling the lemon trees into the limonaia in winter, he drives us immediately to his neighbor, a blacksmith in Ossaia. The fabbro makes a sketch, promises the low cart, which will slide right under the pot, for next week.
Anselmo motions us to follow him. “What is that flower?” I ask, pointing to a compact bush growing out of a stone wall.
“I've seen that all over the town walls. Looks like the flower on a passion vine,” Ed notices.
Anselmo looks at us incredulously. “Capperi.” He pulls off several buds. “I'll plant them in your wall, but they are bad for the wall. You must control them.” Capers—wild, everywhere. We'd never known.
In his barn, a royal mess, he leads us far in the back where extensive wine-making equipment is covered with dust: barrels, small casks, bottles, and a grand torchio, the slatted vat with iron bands and levers where grapes are pressed. Ed is admiring it the way men admire a new car, nodding his head and walking around it. Anselmo explains the mechanism to us. From a shelf he pulls down two bottles of his own vin santo. “Something to drink with biscotti.”
His vin santo looks slightly murky. I wonder how long it has waited for us on the shelf.
Since we are close to his sister and brother-in-law's house, he wants us to meet them. We pile back in his huge Alfa and he shortly takes a rough turn up into their yard. His sister comes out and greets him as though she hasn't seen him in years. His brother-in-law, thinning pears on one of his acre-long lines of espaliered fruit trees, comes running. We are introduced as “stranieri,” foreigners. Out comes the vin santo for the foreigners. “Is this yours?” Ed asks Anselmo, but no, it is the brother-in-law's own. Ed is looking at the orchard. In the distance I see a corrugated roof on poles has been erected over what looks from here like a swimming pool. “May we look at the fruit trees?” Ed asks.
“Certo.” The rows are elegant. The vase-shaped trees are developing vase-shaped pears. They are vigorous, all except for one section, which has a deep hole around it, causing roots to die and leaves to drop. The brother-in-law seems annoyed. He pulls on a nonexistent beard. His mouth curls in scorn.
“What happened here?” Ed asks.
Anselmo shakes one hand slowly in the air, that flinging gesture which means something like Good God Almighty. “Porca miseria,” the brother-in-law says, pig misery. He points toward the roofed structure. “They have discovered a Roman villa, the archeologists, and are making an excavation. They have dug here, and have killed this tree.�
� Clearly the sacrifice was not justified in his eyes. In Italy, whatever is underground on your property does not belong to you. “They have killed an olive.” He inclines his chin toward an olive now on a raised mound with a ditch around it. We know that to be a cardinal sin.
“A Roman villa?”
“The whole hill is a museum. There was not only a villa, but a whole town. Everyone knows, but now it is a discovery.” He shrugs. “If they asked me, I could show them where Hannibal's house is. But they don't ask. Just dig.”
Hannibal's defeat of Flaminio was a few miles away. Ossaia means ‘‘boneyard'' and derived from the stacks of bodies brought here after the battle. He leads us through his vegetable garden and a field to a ruin of a stone house which does look old but not two thousand years old. “Sì, Hannibal lived here.”
We walk back by the dig. Under a temporary roof, we see a black-and-white mosaic Greek key floor, the geometry of rooms. A large villa stood here, with a view right into the sister and brother-in-law's garden. The dig is inactive at this season.
As we drive away Anselmo tells us they added a room years ago. “They found a mosaic floor right where they poured the foundation.”
We stop once more to talk to a widow who wants him to sell her house. Even though Anselmo has closed his office, he still does a little business. “Maybe you would like this house. There is everything to restore.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror, almost clipping a bicyclist. He loves his sly little digs.
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