A Thousand Days in Tuscany (14 page)

Barlozzo elbows me to sing, too. Our noises seem to propel the old truck, to make it fly over the road all the way to Ponticelli, onto the
autostrada
and then over the snaky trail toward Todi. No matter what song Fernando and I sing, Barlozzo sings his one and only remembered line, fitting the words into the different tunes, always trilling out the last note until his breath gives way. Singing seems to embolden the duke, kindling his curiosity.

“So what do you call that dress you’re wearing?
Mi sembra un avanzo del ottocento.
It seems some remnant of the 1800s,” he tells me, arching his brows in the direction of my autumn costume, recently assumed in favor of the dress with the pink and orange roses. I wear Wellies and a long, wide black flannel skirt, a Kamali skater’s skirt softened over at least fifteen Septembers.

“I guess it’s true that both my clothes and I are survivors of some other time.”

Barlozzo eases the truck off the road into a swag of soft earth in front of a stand of pines. We take out the tools and the wheelbarrow, cross the road to the riverbank. I leave my boots on the shore. Kilting up my skirt, knotting the bulk of it on my hip, I walk barefoot into the Tiber. The sun is mean on my back, the water ices my feet and, as though I’ve waded in the Tiber all my life, I’m familiar with
it, splashing and kicking at it. As I high-step across the whole eight meters or so of the river to the other shore, a small epiphany roils up in me, and I think once again how much I like this life. It feels purloined in a way, or like a prize. First prize for not waiting. For not waiting to splash in a river, for not promising myself that I would
someday
splash in a river, but for doing it now, right now, before destiny or some other interloper stops by to tell me there’s been a change of plans.

The men are loosening stones with crowbars, pulling them up from the shallow, skirling water, laying them in the wheelbarrow. One trip to the truck. Another one. I don’t help at all except to sing to them, shout encouragement. I cheer them on with a delectable litany of what we’ll cook over the first fire.

Squeezing the river from the edges of my skirt, letting the drops wash my fingers, I go to sit on the bank. Watching them work, then wandering a bit about the woods, cutting orange-berried branches that look something like bittersweet, I am cozy as velvet when they call me, saying it’s time to go. We drive up the hill into Todi and stop for
un espresso in piedi,
on the run, stroll for a while before we sit, sipping
prosecco
and agreeing about the grievious state of our hunger. It’s only seven, an indecently early hour to contemplate supper and so we head for the truck.

“We can watch the sunset and then go to eat fish at a roadhouse on the way home,” says Barlozzo.

We stop at another point by the river’s edge, handing each other jackets and sweaters against the gathering breeze. Rinds of golden light wrap apricot clouds and the leaving sun colors the Tiber red as blood, a crimson rift in the heart of the new night. We stumble down to sit by the water, and with no warning I hear myself saying, “I think we’re going to look for a place to buy.”

“Where?” Barlozzo asks.

Fernando answers, “As close to San Casciano as we can find.”

“I thought you were just passing through. I thought this interlude was adventure, amusement. I thought you’d be heading back to Venice at some point, or the States,” he says, though he already knows it’s not amusement we’re seeking. He pushes a tiny spade further into me.

“What are you going to do here? I can understand you wanting a holiday place, just like everyone else in the world seems to want. But most of the folks who buy something here have lives, houses, work. They have a
somewhere else.
Oh, they love it here all right, or at least the parts they bother to get to know, but the best I can say for most of them is that they’re straddlers—one foot here, one foot stuck hard back in that somewhere else. In the end they really don’t live anywhere. They play it safe. But you two don’t seem to be talking about safety. Why would you want to
live
here?”

I don’t say a thing but, with my chin, I point to the river and the pines.

“Because of those,” I tell him, “and because of what we look at every day back in San Casciano. I want to live there in those pink hills with the sheepfolds and the leaves of the olives twisting in the winds like so much silver and the sound of the bells pounding up through the mists. I want to live there because of all that.”

I turn to him, then, and I say, “And because of you.”

Bemused now, shadows collect about his eyes.

“I want to live there because of you. I want you to be my teacher. I like that you’re passing on to us even a little of what you’ve seen, what you know, how you’ve done things. What you feel.” Only the river makes a sound until we hear a slow shuffling step coming from a nearby hillside stitched with a few rows of vines. There’s just enough light to show us the figure of an ancient, her hair wrapped in a kerchief, a man’s cardigan her cape. Likely the
padrona
of the farmhouse upriver, she’s come to survey her realm. Her feet spread apart, she stands solidly on her wooden clogs in front of the vines, picking the errant grapes left here and there, unseen by the harvester’s shears. As if they were stolen and she was hungry, she eats them from her palm. And still chewing, her hands making sounds like a wounded bird in a bush, she searches in the withered leaves for the next hidden bounty. Venus grown old and artless, she charms me. As though I’d put my eye to a peephole to look at my someday self, she is me. We sit a few yards distant, yet we are unobserved by her.
Or dismissed by her. She knows the truth, that it’s all moot, that both calamaties and triumphs are passersby and mostly insignificant. She knows that neither of them is what it seems and that, if there is a difference between the two, it’s only that our great feats stale in less time than our injuries are recovered.

“She’s craving a burst of sweetness before the light fades. Isn’t that what we all want?” asks Barlozzo. “But before I get to that, it’s the salty crackle of a great pile of fried fish I want,” he says rising, slapping the latest dirt from the back of his already dirty khaki pants.

We eat fried
latterini
at a place called Luciano. Tiny lake fish the size of smelt, a platter of them is delivered to the table. I think it’s too much for us, until two other platters of the same dimension arrive and a jug of cold white wine is plunked down. Nothing else. I watch the duke. Picking up one and putting a part of it in his mouth, he does a sort of folding motion and the whole diminutive structure is dispatched in two chews and a swallow. I do the same and taste the suggestion of hot, crisped, sweet flesh, but I need two or three more, taken faster, then faster yet, before I can get the full, rich taste of them to fill my mouth. I sip the cold wine and rest.

T
HE STONE RING
is built up in a day, and over the smoldering ash of our first fire, we roast a meter’s worth of fat sausages made by the butcher with the hachet that swings from his Dolce e Gabbana
belt. We turn them until they’re bursting, laying them, then, on trenchers of good bread and eating them between long, hard pulls of wine, sitting right there on the red Sienese earth like Barlozzo said we would. We feed the fire again, watching the flames burn holes in the dark, feeling the night roll in and over us like a silent sapphrine wave.

“Why do you insist on sitting so close to the fire? Do you desire to become a burnt offering?” Fernando asks me.

“I have to find the right position. I like being close to the edge. Not too close but not too far away, either. Though I guess I prefer to be too close than to be too far,” I say.

“You don’t trust comfort any more than I do, Chou,” says Barlozzo.

“Because I like to sit close in to a fire?”

“No. Not just because you like to sit close in to a fire. That’s only a symbol of the fact that you don’t trust comfort. You trust risk more than comfort. I’ve always been afraid of comfort, too. Bring on the pain, because during those moments when I can neither see it nor feel pain, when it’s quiet, I know it isn’t really quiet at all but only gathering force. Better that pain stays where I can keep an eye on it. There’s risk in comfort. There’s comfort in risk. Risk, risqué. It adds piquancy, that’s what risk does. Repress the appetite. Give in to the appetite. Stay close to the edge. Stay away from the edge.”

“Which is it?”

“It’s all of them. All of them in judicious doses, taken at judicious
moments. Finesse is what life asks. Otherwise one rots before his time.”

The duke is grisly this evening. Fernando stares at him, abashed, I think, that his simple warning to me to sit back from the fire has unleashed discourse about the risk comfort poses, about judicious doses of finesse and a faster rotting. We both know there’s nothing to do about it and so we listen.

“Cominciamo dal fondo.
Let’s begin at the beginning. St. Augustine said it most clearly,
We are, every one of us, going to die.
Rotting is the way of all things. A tree, a cheese, a heart, a whole human chassis. Now, knowing that, understanding that, living begins to seem less important than living the way you’d like to live. Do you agree with that?”

I look at Fernando, we nod yes to each other, he nods yes again to Barlozzo.

“So, life, by definition, is impermanent. All the energy we spend in trying to fix it, secure it, save it, protect it, leaves damn little time for living it. Pain or death or any other pestilence doesn’t pass over us because we’re careful or because we have insurance or, God forbid, because we have
enough
money. All right. So how does one come to understand exactly
how
one wants to live? How one wants to use up his time?”

Fernando seems to be holding up under the irascibly delivered monologue, but I’m caught back somewhere between St. Augustine
and the rotting cheese. Yet I understand that, for Barlozzo, the shortest distance between two points is a convolution, so it’s not surprising when he says, “If you want, I’ll help you to look for that house.”

Floriana was right. We three are complicit.

T
HOUGH IT
’
S FELT
like another room in our house since that first night we spent in San Casciano, as time goes by, Bar Centrale becomes more like a whole other home. Rosealba, Paolo, Tonino, Sig-nora Vera, the whole family of patrons who oversee the bar takes us in, makes life better for us. There’s a telephone on the wall in the corner by the pinball machines. When we call Lisa or Erich or my agent in New York or editors in California, Signora Vera shushes the clamor of the children, telling them we’re talking to Bill Clinton. After having lived for years under the gelato maker, an old fax machine is dusted, cleaned affectionately with cotton dampened in alcohol, and set upon a small table behind the bar that has so recently become the international communications center
and
bar, truly
Centrale.

Three, four, sometimes more times throughout the day and evening find us there, at a table on the little terrace, leaning into the bar in the morning with hands wrapped around our
cappuccini,
screaming into the phone in the late afternoons. Wiping the coffee drips and the wine stains off the day’s fax receipts, the Centrale is the great convergence. It’s Hollywood and Vine, it’s Wall Street, the Champs Élysée. It’s the juncture at which all news, even the undistorted, is
revealed. It’s where fortunes are punted, mostly at cards, and where, when thirsts are tamed, peace is restored. It is our office, tea salon, war room, inner sanctum, refuge, and pied-à-terre. Is there anyone who really needs more than this? I begin to understand why some Italians will tell you they’d rather choose their bar than their neighborhood, that it’s better to settle for an apartment short of their dreams as long as the local bar feels right. Some will even tell you that their bar is what the neighborhood church was to its parishioners long ago—a place for comfort.

A
ND CONSTANT AS
are true Centrale’s pleasures, so, too, is Barlozzo’s desire to provide delight. Or his idea of it. A giver, he is. A giver from far away, most often. He leaves things by the door or, yet more removed, piles up his gifts on our habitual path through the woods—a purple-stained sack of blackberries propped up with an armload of white flowers, a small, neat stack of split wood tied up in a weed. When we thank him he says he knows nothing at all about wildflowers or a wood stack. Hoof-up, wiry black hairs standing stiff and straight and stuffed in a plastic sack, the haunch of a beast is one morning’s gift. Screaming, slamming the door shut on the piece of a beast, the fracas brings a naked, half-sleeping Fernando running down the stairs.
“Cosa c’è?
What is it?”

My back tight against the door, I tell him with my eyes and a slight lean of my head that something evil lurks behind me.

He takes on the silent mode of communication now, mouthing his questions.
“Che cosa è sucesso, chi è?
What happened, who is it?”

“Guarda.
You look,” I dare him.

Barely cracking the door, placing an eye to the light, he whispers, “
Non c’è nessuno.
There’s no one.”

“Guarda in giù.
Look down.”

“Cristo. È solo una coscia di chingiale.
It’s only the leg of a boar,” he says, opening the door wide, his slender boy’s body bending to retrieve it. What does my Venetian know of wild boar, I wonder as he ports it across to the kitchen, laying it in the sink, removing its wrappings. Another
Cristo
is whispered before a long, slow exhale.
“Caspita che grande.
How huge,” he says, hoisting it up by its ankle, turning it, twisting it to inspect it from all angles. “It must weight fifteen kilos or more.”

I don’t much care how many kilos it weighs. I just don’t want it in my kitchen. Adrenalin coursing, I’m about to rush Fernando, to take the thing and heave it somewhere outside, anywhere away from me, when the duke thrusts his grinning face inside the door.
“Buongiorno, ragazzi. È una giornata stupenda, no? Ah, bene, avete trovato quel bel giovane mostro.
Good morning, kids. It’s a wonderful day, no? Good, you’ve found that beautiful young monster.”