A Thousand Days in Tuscany (25 page)

I tell him it’s glorious and all of a sudden I feel like it’s Christmas, too, and Fernando must as well because he’s racing out the door to the barn to look for our decorations box from Venice. The search is futile and we think it must have stayed on the Albanians’
truck, but it hardly matters, because the tree, the trees themselves, are perfect.

We sit there in our own private woods, we three alone in custody of the sour wine and the great dark fir tree and its kin, all of them ornamented only by the fire, their scent intoxicating our little parish, intoxicating us. We sit like this, staring and fascinated, not saying very much at all. I’m thinking that not a single sweetmeat did I bake, no gingercakes, no sugarplums, no pie, no roast, no wassail bowl. Save the trees and the truffles, no presents. Neither has there been agony nor temper nor fatigue nor a thin graciousness sipped with the eggnog. This is a good Christmas.

I struggle to get behind the big tree, trying to enter the kitchen to search some small tidbit to put before the men, but Barlozzo is saying, “Since we’re due at Pupa’s by eight and it’s already seven, hadn’t we better head up to the bar? Oh, and by the way, Floriana sends her good wishes, says she’s doing just fine.

“Merry Christmas,” he says in his proud English with the bedouin accent.

I think I’m beginning to like that he tells me only half his sentiments, while another part of them he simply lets me know.

The One and Only True Bruschetta: (brew-sket’-ah)
What It Is and How to Pronounce It

The almost universal mistaken pronunciation of
bruschette
by foreign visitors to Italy sometimes causes chagrin, but most often just quiet laughter from waiters and Italians who are dining close by. But whatever name one gives it, honest country bread, sliced not too thickly and roasted lightly over the ash of a wood fire, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, and then sprinkled with fine sea salt, is a primordial gastronomic pleasure that is Tuscan to its core. The addition of chopped, fresh tomato is wonderful, especially in high summer, as is the perfume of a fat clove of garlic rubbed into the hot bread. But Tuscan purists will tell you that bread and oil and salt compose the best
bruschette
of all.

To make
bruschette
at home, find (or make) a dense, crusty loaf, slice it no more than half an inch in thickness, set it under a hot broiler or over a charcoal or wood fire, and toast it lightly on each side. Drizzle the hot bread with oil, sprinkle on sea salt, and serve immediately as part of an antipasto or, better, all by itself with a glass of red wine.

12
Supper Made from Almost Nothing

January arrives brooding. But we’ve settled nicely into winter, our tricks against the cold performed with ease so there is the illusion, at least, of warmth about the house. Fernando continues to read and work toward the planning of the “journeys project,” as he’s taken to calling it, while I write and edit and write some more. The village is quiet as a vapor. Even the bar seems in slumber, things barely stirring there except for an hour or so in the early mornings and for as long again at
aperitivo
time. Everyone is in recovery from the intemperance that began in September with the
vendemmia,
swelled into October with the chestnut and wild mushroom festivals, mounted, then, in November and early December with the olive harvest, all of it clinched in the keeping of the sweet, quiet rituals of a rural Christmas. Now, a long, delicious rest.

Fewer people come to Friday nights, muzzled up with their fires and televisions against the crisp ten-meter walk to the Centrale, but
we persist in the ritual until the evening when we find absolutely no one in the bar except Tonino, deep in lesson planning for his Saturday class at the high school. Determined to dine out this evening, we just cart our basket back to the car, drive up to the overlook on the Celle road, indulge in the extravagance of leaving the heater on, open one window a crack, and set up for supper. The old BMW becomes an instant dining room. Always ready in the boot is a basket fitted with wine glasses, two of our most beautiful ones, plus two tiny Bohemian cut-crystal glasses, napkins made from the unstained parts of a favorite tablecloth, a box full of odd silver, a wine screw, a good bottle of red wine—always replaced immediately after consumption—a flask of grappa, a Spanish bone-handled folding knife, a pouch of sea salt, a small blue-and-white ceramic pepper grinder, plates of varying size, a tiny plastic bottle of dishwashing liquid, two linen kitchen towels and paper towels. Warm enough now, we turn off the heater, close the window and open the wine. Snow falls and swirls thick about the windows like curtains. Lifting the lid from the pot of sausages braised with white beans and sage and tomatoes, we decide to use it as a communal dish. We eat hungrily, digging for the pieces of sausage, feeding them to each other. There’s half a sponge cake, split and filled with apricot jam and spread with hazelnut cream. We cut it with the Spanish knife, evening it out, then evening it out a little more, until only a strangely shaped wedge of it remains.
Too ugly to keep, we say, and we eat that, too. A sip of grappa in the Bohemian glasses.

O
NE EVENING
,
WE
convince Pupa to close her doors and come to supper with Barlozzo at our house and, over a soup of
ceci
and
farro,
the duke begins to talk about
la veglia.
Once
la veglia
was a way for farmers and their families to gather of an evening in the pitch of winter. Often one farmhouse was separated from the next by kilometers and, in winter, the only time neighbors saw each other was by plan. Apart from its promise of a supper of relative plenty,
la veglia
was hungrily anticipated to indulge social appetite. “And so folks would trudge through the snow with whatever they could spare from their pantries,” he says. “Someone brought the end piece of a prosciutto, another a wild hare trapped in the gloaming of that morning, someone else lamb, another some part of whatever beast he’d been able to hunt, each one placing his offering into a cauldron set over a blazing fire. Cabbages, potatoes, herbs, heels of wine, and drops of oil flavored the great stew, which they called
scottiglia.
And while it all braised in symphony, people warmed themselves by the hearth, passed around a bulbous-bottomed wine flask in which white beans had been braised in the ash of yesterday’s fire with herbs and oil and wine. Each one poured out a few beans onto his thick slice of bread, quaffed his wine, took a turn reciting Dante or telling ghost
stories while they waited for supper. It was here that the old passed down stories to the young, saving history the way their elders had saved it for them. And when the last smudge of
la scottiglia
was finished, the wine jugs hollow as drums, the host, if he had them to spare, would pull blistering potatoes out from the cinders, giving one to each child for his coat pocket, a hand warmer for the long walk home over the frozen hills. It was understood that the potato was to be saved and, mashed with hot water or a little milk, eaten for breakfast.

“I always ate my potato when I got into bed, peeling back its skin and eating it like an apple. I loved potatoes so much I just couldn’t wait until morning, even though I knew it meant my mother would serve me angry looks with my milk and coffee for breakfast.”

“You must have been fairly well off as things went in those days,” says Pupa. “We hardly had any meat at all. Where I lived,
la veglia
took on another form. Everyone would collect about the fire, all of them direct from their ablutions, hairdos in place, fresh shirts and smocks. Risen bread dough sat in the
madia,
the bread-rising cupboard, and the kettle hung in the hearth, ready to boil. The lady of the house fetched the dough from the
madia
drawer, placed it in the biggest bowl in the house, and set it on a table in front of the fire. Each person broke off a bit of dough and began rolling it between his palms into a short, slender rope, fashioning a rough sort of pasta.
Each piece of pasta was gently dragged through a dish of hard wheat flour and then placed on a tray. The process continued until all the dough was shaped into pasta. The trays full of pasta were then heaved into the boiling water, and as the pieces rose to the top of the pot, they were retrieved with a skimmer and placed back into the same bowl, warmed now and in which a small amount of good oil and a few generous handfuls of grated
pecorino
waited. A cupful of the cooking liquors, more cheese, a few more drops of oil, more cooking liquors, and pepper, freshly cracked with an exuberant hand, the whole was tossed about and served with a small wooden shovel. We called the confection
pizzicotti,
pinches. Supper made from almost nothing.”

“Was it like that during the wars?” I want to know.

“Was what like during the wars?” the duke asks.

“I mean, eating boiled pinches and saving a scrap of meat to add to the neighbors’ scraps of meat to make a supper.”

“No. That wasn’t wartime, it was life. Even when times were good they weren’t so good,” says Barlozzo. “The truth is that much of the time we were OK, but in great part it was because of our cunning as much as our fortunes. When the ground wasn’t cold and hard, we had whatever we could forage—grasses, herbs, wild onions, chestnuts, figs, mushrooms, berries. We always kept some of everything apart, drying or preserving the bounty against winter.
And in the orchards when fallen fruit didn’t suffice, we robbed the trees by moonlight. And so we had pears and apples, cherries, peaches, plums, and sometimes quince and persimmons and pomegranates. Again, we feasted on the glorious stuff, guzzling its ripeness, sucking in the sweet juices of plenty. But we saved some. We saved some for the other, less balmy time that always followed. Same with the things we grew. We had vines and my father and my uncles vintnered the gaunt, snarling red wine without which life was
impensabile,
unthinkable. It was food to us like bread, like the coffee, which most times we brewed from weeds and roots. We dried tomatoes and white beans and corn to grind into yellow flour. Not one of us having anything of money to buy what we needed or desired, it was by mutuality that we lived, everyone trading everyone else for what they didn’t have, shuffling back and forth whatever they could grow up or gather or shoot or steal. But nothing was casual about the trading.

“There were regulations, firm and constant, honored by everyone. We bartered a two-liter jug of wine for a two-kilo round of new cheese from the shepherd. When we could, we’d bring him supper in the sheepfolds and he’d come by the next morning to return my mother’s pot, filled then with soft, creamy dollops of the ricotta he’d just made by cooking part of the evening’s milking over his wood fire, then adding some of the morning’s milk and cooking it again until
it curdled. It was the greatest of entertainments for me when the shepherd came carrying that pot full of cheese. And the canning jars and the canning kettles were like family jewels.

“My father would say that the canning jars were better dressed than I ever was, all washed and wrapped in clean rags and stored away against the wolf. But still, sometimes we were empty. The stores were finished before we could begin planting and harvesting a new season’s food. We were hungry. Really hungry sometimes. Hungry enough so that the suffering was the only thing we felt. My mother would slice the bread, holding the great, round, now dwindling bulk of it on the shelf of her breast. She’d slice with her left hand, longwise across the loaf from right to left. I would sit there looking up at her. One night, I was feeling sick, and I told her so. As I remember, it wasn’t only the hunger but the fear of this insufficiency that left me weak. I wasn’t old enough to understand the rhythm of that life of ours. I didn’t remember that it wouldn’t always be this way. My mother came into where I was resting, the room dark and quiet and cold. She carried in something wrapped in a cloth, bearing it like a sacrament.
Tesoro, I have a surprise for you. Now, sit up and take this, open it up. Go on,
she’d said, as though it was true. I could feel it was only bread waiting under the cloth. Sullen, I stayed.
No, no, it’s not just bread. It’s bread and cheese. Look.
She opened the cloth.
See, here is the bread. And here is the cheese. Now close your eyes and taste how good they are together. It’s a special supper only for you. Take a bite. See. It’s a thick, soft slice of
marzolino.
Just like butter. Just the way you like it.
I closed my eyes, held her uplifted hands and bit into the bread she raised to my mouth. There was no cheese, of course, but only two slices of bread, stacked one on the other. But somehow her charm worked. I could taste cheese. I could really taste it. I ate slowly at first, then faster and faster until I’d finished it, keeping my eyes closed all the time. When I opened them, I saw that she’d been crying, smiling, sobbing. I think it must be the hardest thing for a mother, having both a hungry child and empty pockets.”

T
HE DUKE SHOULD
never have begun all this talk about a
veglia,
because now I ask him about it each day. “Who has a house large enough to hold a
veglia?”
I want to know.

“What sort of
veglia
are we talking about? If it’s just twenty or thirty people, we can use Pupa’s place, but if you want to invite the whole village, we’ll have to hold it in the piazza, build a bonfire, and use the bar as an emergency room against the cold,” he says as though we could truly execute such a party.

Knowing the very idea would be thrilling to me, he begins laughing out loud even before I say, “That’s it. That’s how to do it. We’ll post a notice in the bar and—”

“And just say it’s in honor of Florì’s homecoming,” he interrupts.

“What? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”