A Thousand Days in Tuscany (13 page)

Serves 8-10 (or 4 Tuscans)

1 pound of dried white cannellini beans, soaked overnight

2 teaspoons coarse sea salt

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

1½ cups water

1½ cups dry white wine

1 large branch of rosemary

3 or 4 fat cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed

a good handful of sage leaves

2 teaspoons fine sea salt

Drain the soaked beans and place them in a kettle, covering them with cold water. Add the coarse sea salt and bring the beans to the boil over a high flame. Lower the flame and cook the beans for an hour. Drain them and pour them into a round-bottomed 2-liter Chianti bottle or some similarly shaped vessel. Add the oil, water, wine, rosemary, garlic, sage, and fine sea salt. Shake the bottle to distribute the ingredients. Stop the bottle with a strip of wet cloth, bury the bottle in the ashes of the fireplace, and go to bed. Alternatively, to cook the beans on top of the stove, braise them over a quiet flame in a heavy kettle for two hours, or until they are creamy but not collapsing.

7
Dolce e Salata,
Sweet and Salty—Because That’s How Life Tastes to Me

Because things are different now, that’s why,” Floriana fairly snarls at me over the crashing timbres of October.

“It’s been twenty years or more since I’ve bothered with all that. Do you know how many tons of peaches and plums and tomatoes and green beans and red peppers I’ve picked and cleaned and jarred and boiled and put away in my lifetime? And now you want me to do it all over again?

“Neanche per sogno.
Not even in a dream,” she says as we collect the last of the black plums from the trees in my yard, racing with the tempest threatening at our backs.

“Well, what I’d had in mind was only to save these,” I tell her, sweeping my hands across the crop piled into baskets all around us. “We can’t possibly eat them all before they rot, and then I went and
bought two bushels of tomatoes in Cetona this morning and I thought we could just spend a few hours together so you could show me how to handle them. Then I could do the rest by myself. All I need is a start,” I say, knowing I’ve asked too much.

As we walk back up toward the house, she says, “It never works that way. Canning is like kissing. One thing leads to another, and before you know it we’ll be surrounded by hundreds of jars and bottles with no place to put them and, in my case, no one to eat all the beautiful stuff that’s inside them. Like so many other things we used to do to survive, canning just doesn’t make all that much sense now.”

I stay quiet, just looking up at her from the seat I’ve taken on the terrace steps, thinking how little I still know of her. How little she’s willing to have me know and yet how it seems enough. She’s been a widow for more than twenty years, she has no children, she’s a housekeeper and a cook, working four days a week for a family in Città della Pieve. Her home is a small and handsome apartment—
una mansarda,
a rooftop space—in a small palazzo near the church. Born, bred, and having lived all her life right here in the village, she is warm and indulgent with her neighbors, yet often seems apart from them, a red-haired stranger embraced in sympathy by a benevolent flock. A Rafaello madonna, she is perhaps the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. An oval of moonstone for a face, the skin of her is translucent as a butterfly’s, blushing easily in deep patches of
scarlet that make her seem a girl. From the bantering I’ve heard between her and Barlozzo, she must be nearly ten years younger than he, perhaps somewhere in her sixties. He always refers to her as
una ragazzina,
a little girl, and she calls him
vecio mio,
dialect for, my old one.

From the first day we arrived, when Floriana stood here in the garden with her hands on her hips, offering to help us move in, there’s been something lovely between us. Something made of contentment. I think often to that piece of a July evening we spent with our feet in the thermal springs, eating biscotti by moonlight. Since then, on some of her days off she comes to visit in the late morning, giving me a hand with whatever I’m cooking or baking, or she stays outdoors to help Fernando rake or sweep. She must always be doing something. Earning her way through life, moment by moment. While Fernando and I are puttering about with one thing or another, sometimes she sits upstairs in the small room off the front hall and does her mending by the window. There, against one wall, is a large table filled with dozens of photos of my children, our wedding, our travels. She says she’d like to know my children and always looks at their photos for a long time, picking up one, then another and another, smiling and clucking. She says Lisa looks like Audrey Hepburn, that she should forget the university and just go to Hollywood. She loves Erich’s eyes, says, “
lui é troppo tenero da vivere tra i volpi.
He’s
too tender to live among the foxes.” Fernando says that’s her way of saying he looks kind. She is particularly fond of one of our wedding photos, one in which my back is to the camera as Fernando helps me step up from a gondola onto a landing stage. She takes it over to the window where she can see the detail better. She always looks at that photo for a very long time.

Florì never stays very long, an hour or so, and won’t hear of sitting down to lunch with us or eating or drinking a thing. I think she just wants to be here. Once in a while we walk together in the early evening, meeting by calculated chance more than design along the road to Celle. Not a talker, Florì is comforted more by smiles than words, by linking her arm through mine as we walk. We put our faces to the weather, both of us liking it in all its forms. One evening, I’ll have a sack of licorice drops, two ripe pears, or an orange, but most often Florì has her sweater pockets filled with tiny chocolates wrapped in blue foil. We divvy them like diamonds. I take on her ways, not feeling much of a need for words myself. If we never knew anything more about each other than what we’d gleaned from that first day, I think we would still be friends. Yet both of us can be politely curious about the other, and sometimes we ask questions freely enough. She wants to know about America, specifically about San Francisco, where I worked for many years, says she wants to walk along the Golden Gate Bridge one day and to ride the ferry to
Sausalito, to stand outside on the deck in the fogs as she saw an actress do in a film.

She likes the story of how Fernando and I met and wants me to tell it to her over and always asks me to repeat some part or another of it. Once I asked her about Barlozzo, about how long they’d been a couple, and she answered that they’d really never been a couple in the sentimental sense, that they’d been friends all their lives, always would be. Another time, she said she was
impazzita,
crazed, about him when she was still a girl, but that he never took much notice of her. She says he was always
un lupo solitario,
a lone wolf. I understand that when her answers are less than large, it’s not because a question offends her but more, I think, that it confuses her because even she doesn’t know the answer. Lit by sun, quickly hidden by shadows, I can see her but then I can’t. A trick we all use. Or perhaps there’s no trick at all with her. Perhaps it’s only that Florì is Tuscan.

“Oh, Chou. I’m not some depository of tradition you can tap into the way you do with Barlozzo. He’ll never tell you so, but he’s truly fond of taking you both by the hand and strolling backward. In one way or another he tries to do the same with as many of us who’ll let him. But with you two, and especially with Fernando, he seems to think he’s bequeathing his legacy, passing on the stories and somehow assuring the significance of his life. You three are complicit. And complicity is a kind of love, don’t you think? In some ways, he
is
behaving
like a man in love. He’s just been around all the rest of us for so long. The ones of us who are older than he think he still has so much to learn, and those of us who’re younger think we want something more—or is it less?—than the past. Older or younger, though, all of us are tired in our own way. It’s the freshness of you two that’s turning his head.”

Pulling away from her musing, she turns sly, saying, “It’s too bad you can’t ask
him
to help you with the plums and the tomatoes. Conserving is probably the single food art in which he’s not an expert. He can stick a pig and butcher it, saw the haunch bones just right so the prosciutto dries firm and sweet. He can make
salame
and blood pudding and head cheese, he can pickle the ears and the tail and boil down the fat to make cracklings. I’ve seen him skewer its heart on a branch with sage leaves, roast the thing over a fire and then gnaw at it, calling it supper.
Lui qualche volta è una bestia, altre volte, un principe.
He’s a beast sometimes, other times, a prince. But he’s always good, Chou.
Barlozzo è buono come il pane.
Barlozzo is good as bread.”

She’s doing her best to distract me, but it’s not working. All this publicity about Barlozzo’s talents and virtues is redundant, wasted on me. I’m already convinced he’s a fallen angel with neolithic, Roman, medieval, and Edwardian pasts. I know he knows everything. Except how to can plums and tomatoes.

“Ciao tesoruccio, devo andare. Ma, sai di che cosa hai bisogno? Un congelatore, bello grande. Così puoi conservare tutto quello che vuoi, anche tutte le prugne toscane. Ciao,
little darling, I must go. But do you know what you need? A freezer, a great big one. With that you can save all the plums in Tuscany.”

For a moment I think she’s serious and I’m about to condemn her blasphemy, but I see she’s having herself a fine laugh, so I do, too. Walking down the hill, she is a lonely figure who’s left me standing in a squall amidst the molding fruit.

B
ARLOZZO AND FERNANDO
are sitting at the dining table, drawing. Inspired by the one in Federico’s garden on the evening of the harvest supper, this time it’s a firewall they’ll build. All the project needs are stones and a flat, isolated earth space where the flames won’t threaten the trees. It will be a primitive barbecue pit over which we can grill and, with one of Barlozzo’s contraptions, hang a pot and braise everything from birds to beans, he tells us. An alternative to the wood oven, the fire ring is practical not only for cooking but also for our own bodily warmth. “Otherwise you’ll soon be saying it’s too cold to stay outside, and you’ll miss out on the most beautiful evenings of the whole year. There’s a long, deep winter coming on when living by the inside hearth is what you’ll
have
to do, but why rush it? And if you’re willing to surrender all your linens
and candles once in a while, you can sit right down close to the fire, cooking and eating under the stars just like a shepherd,” he says. He knew the shepherd image would get to me. He really is in love with us, I think as I listen to him going on about splendid autumn nights and pork chops dripping in garlicky juices. He keeps stumbling over his use of
we,
changing it to
you,
not wanting to impose himself onto these delicious fancies. I wish he’d understand that
we
is most appropriate. Barlozzo has come to matter so much to both of us, but I think he and Fernando are closest, if in their own economical fashion. I think they see themselves in each other. Fernando sees that, as he grew older, he might have become like the part of Barlozzo who is—or is it
was?—
too much alone and always scuffling about on the edges of anger. Barlozzo provided him with a Dickensian visit. The Ghost of Christmas Future. And I think the duke sees his younger self in my husband, most especially when Fernando displays the hard core of his will. That must be the reason he says, six times a day, how wonderful it is that Fernando
scappato dalla banca,
escaped from the bank. I don’t know why, but I think Barlozzo wanted to escape something or someone long ago. And because he didn’t do it, the duke celebrates all the more Fernando, who did.

T
HERE
’
S A
CAVA
, a stone quarry, a few kilometers down the Piazze road. Fernando says we can find enough stones there to raise
a coliseum, but Barlozzo tells him someone’s sure to see us digging about, wonder what we’re building, and then come by to tell us we’re doing it all wrong. This is a pleasure, we understand, Barlozzo wishes to keep all to himself. “They’ll wander over like they did when we were building the oven and we’ll have to listen to thirty opinions about the best way to pile stones. I know a place in Umbria where the Tiber is low at this time of year, and we can take what we need from the river bottom in a few hours. Besides, it’s a beautiful ride getting there,” he says.

And so on a limpid afternoon we heave our wheelbarrow and a sack of the duke’s Stone Age tools into the back of his truck. We’re off. Fernando begins his Cole Porter repertoire: “You do something to me, something that simply mystifies me.” Sometimes when we sit out in the evenings up at the bar, Fernando and I sing for hours while Barlozzo and his cronies listen, engrossed as though we were a traveling Jacques Brel troupe, applauding and saying
“bravi, bravi”
even when we stop only to think of the next line. The duke has learned a phrase or two and he joins in with Fernando.

“Tell-e mee-eh wh-h-y-ah should eet-ah be-ah, you-ah have-eh the power-r-r-ah to hyp-eh-notize-eh mee-eh?”

I turn to look at him and and he’s steely as a hangman, mouthing the words just as he’s heard us sing them. A phonetic coup. Pronouncing every vowel and separating every syllable, he’s three-and-
a-half beats behind Fernando, the Tuscan echo of a Venetian singing American love songs, and the effect is beautiful.