A Thousand Days in Tuscany (26 page)

“I’m telling you thirty minutes after she told me. She says she’s feeling up to it, that she misses her little place. And most of us, I think, although she’d never say that. I’m going to pick her up on Wednesday morning. Let’s let her just be quiet for a few days and set Sunday evening for the
veglia.”

I look for a long time at the duke and it’s easy to see he’s having a homecoming of his own, that he’s consented to reinhabit his peace, to wash off the bad weather he’s been wearing, in greater or lesser degrees, all these past weeks. We sit there grinning at each other, each of us sending out rounded daggers at the other, each of us trying not to be the first one to cry.

L
ETTERS AND NOTES
are affixed to every centimeter of the small, sturdy mahogany door with the lion’s-head knocker that is Floriana’s. The three high cement steps that comprise her stoop are beset with flowers, mostly small nosegays of wild ones, the short stems of them twisted in aluminum foil or a dampened handkerchief. One of the village women has organized a troupe of cooks, each of whom will carry in Floriana’s lunch or supper on a certain day of the week. I’ve been asked by the strategist to bring a sweet or some bread up to her
ogni tanto,
every once in a while, she already knowing my propensity to overfeed. Housekeepers, chauffeurs, handymen, wood-cutters,
ladies’ maids who would see to her toilette, all have been anticipated and delegated with great care and affection. And, of course, Florì, with an equal dose of care and affection, demurs, then objects more animatedly, assuring the village spokespeople that she’ll be the first to ask for help. If she needs it.

Her cheeks are flaming roses on the parchment skin of her face. A scarf, eerily russet as was the color of her hair, wraps her head and is tied jauntily in a grand, drooping bow in the middle of her forehead. Though the day is bitter, she wears only a cardigan and a thick, brown shawl over her gray wool dress. She has new shoes, pumps in soft black kid with a pretty, delicate stub of a heel.

“I got them in a shop in Perugia,” she says giggling, Perugia being about the same thing as Paris to her and the ladies who are ogling them.

She does not look so different, no less beautiful, certainly not so very much thinner and yet there is less of her, as though a dimension was missing, as though she were an apparition of herself. Barlozzo husbands her along the few steps from the piazza up to her door, nods and softly speaks requests and directions to one person and another. They both smile and wave and go inside and I’m thinking how much they look like a bride and groom trying to go off to the privacy of their honeymoon. The only thing missing is a handful of rice, but even that appears, cooked in a soup, still warm in a lovely
blue-and-white tureen enfolded in a kitchen cloth and pressed upon them by Vera as they close the door.

F
LORÌ WALKS IN
the village each morning, does her shopping, chats as reticently as she always did, takes her
caffè macchiato
as she always did, smiles and laughs as easily as ever. Neither mysterious nor voluble about her illness, she says she will continue with her treatments, that she feels quite strong. She says she is healing. She always wears the new black shoes.

Barlozzo says little more than Floriana save his expressions of faith, and even those he mostly flashes from his eyes. He’s decided not to tell her about Sunday’s
veglia,
reasoning that she’ll be embarrassed for all the fuss. He says we’ll just invite her at the last minute and say it’s something we’d planned long ago. But he knows just as well as I that what was born as a poetical rebellion against the mopes of January has taken on Saturnalian proportions to celebrate Florì. And surely she’ll know it, too.

T
HREE IRON DRUMS
full of wood are set afire at the bottom of the hill that leads up into town and torches are set all along the way to the piazza, where more flaming iron drums are collected along the overlook wall. Something heathen flits about the scene. There’s been some cheating in that there’s much more to eat than the
traditional
scottiglia,
though that very concoction bubbles gently in two huge pots on the back burners of the bar’s kitchen stove. But there’s
cinghiale al buglione,
wild boar braised with tomatoes and garlic and red wine;
ribollita,
thick with
cavolo nero,
black cabbage;
cardi gratinati,
gratineed cardoons, the pale green stalks poached and baked with cream and cheese. There are trays and trays of crostini, bowls groaning with
pici,
and barrels spewing wine. And Floriana takes it all in stride, tasting and sipping and saying how hungry she’d been for these foods, that though her Umbrian friends in Città della Pieve—sixteen kilometers distant from San Casciano—were fine cooks, she’d missed the Tuscan hand.

What she doesn’t say is that even the Tuscan hand changes from province to province and sometimes even from
comune
to
comune,
family to family. She doesn’t say that gastronomic regionalism is an abiding fact of Italian life. Every once in a while she looks down at her shoes and does a sort of two step, admiring them, I think. At the moment in the festival when the recitations are to begin, one by one, the elocutionists beg off, saying they can’t recall their lines or that they’ve had too much wine, both excuses being one in the same, I guess. There is a lull, an expectation, but the duke fills it. “My father used to say that hell is where nothing’s cooking and no one’s waiting.”

The lull lengthens a few beats before the applause, the cheers of agreement. It is a strange moment. It passes, though, immediately
dissolved in the comfort of a great farrago. Fernando and I give each other a sign from our different places in the piazza. We agree that it’s time to go. We slip off, not really saying good night to anyone, always preferring to exit a party at its peak. Leaving early and unnoticed feels like escape, and so we walk fast. We run, then, all the way down the hill, then up to our place. Slowing down, catching a breath, we walk beyond our house, up the Celle road. Fernando turns back to look at the village, says the firelight becomes the ancient stones. He kisses me gently and holds me.

“She’s dying, isn’t she?”

I just look at him for a while before asking, “What makes you say that? Barlozzo would never be so jubilant if he thought that was true.”

“That’s the part that confounds me, too, but still, when I look at her she seems haunted in a way, as though she’s already gone but has been allowed back on some reprieve, given a dispensation so she could say good-bye.”

“I think it might be only that she’s been so very far away. She’s been in a place we can’t begin to imagine, and so now it’s as though she’s arriving back in pieces, in stages. She’s just not whole yet.”

“It all makes me think about us and what we would do if one of us was Floriana.”

“We’re both Floriana. Dying is what we’re all doing, each in our
own way. Anyway, death is just moving house. And we’re getting very deft at that,” I tell him, longing to leave this discourse.

“Just moving house, is it? Just another journey? Is that how you see it? Well, I don’t see it that way at all. Besides, I like it here. I want to stay as long as you do, but not any longer. I want to stay right here close to you. What you do, I want to do. Wherever you go, I want to be there. But how can you be so unmoved by all of this?”

“I am not at all unmoved. It’s just that I’m moved for Floriana rather than for you or me. And besides, I’m freezing and I think it’s this talk of dying as much as the cold that’s causing it. Please, let’s go home.” I turn back and walk fast.

“The truth is you’re very frightened about dying,” he shouts. Overtaking me, catching me by the arms, he walks backward so he can face me, wanting company for his own fresh terrors.

“No, that’s not the truth. I think I’d be very frightened if I were facing Florì’s particular moment. And you know I’m desperately frightened for her. But this is
her
illness. And everything about it belongs to her. And because we’re her friends, our emotions must be about her rather than about us. Why do you tangle up what’s happening to Florì with what’s not happening to you or me? If you get sick or I get sick, then it will be time to practice for dying.”

Under a raw blue sky sugared in tiny stars we walk back home in single file along the icy road, Fernando leading. We build up the fire
and we sit close to it, sipping tea. Fernando is right. All of us consider our own lives when someone close by is losing hers. Or seems to be. And maybe he’s right, too, about my appearing to be unsentimental,
unmoved,
as he called it. But I honestly don’t worry about my own death. At least not since those days when the children were little and I plotted with the gods, struck all those pacts beseeching them to keep me upright until the babies were. I’d sworn to never ask more for myself. Truly grateful about how that all turned out, I’ve stayed respectfully hushed on my own behalf, even if I do still bargain from time to time regarding the well-being of the long-since upright children and, more lately, of Fernando. But for all my embracing of how this living and dying seems to work, it’s as though I haven’t yet applied it to myself. Caused less by the Narcissus in me, I think it’s more the imprint of Pollyanna on me that lets me live as though I’ll never die. Or is it that it’s just fine if I do, since I’ve lived so long and well already? Surely I’d like to stay longer, though. When my own dying does pass through my thoughts, I think mostly about not wanting to miss out on life with Fernando and the children and my friends. I think about them saying their good-byes to me, then going off to supper. Without me. I’d be flailing my arms from wherever I’d landed, urging them not to go to one place but to another one, suggesting certain dishes and wines, trying to take care of them, even though the truth is they’d always taken care of me.

I try to tell Fernando what I’m thinking and he says he understands.

“I’m not so worried about my dying as I am yours.”

“I think I’m safe for tonight,” I say. “And if we work things right, we can turn the next few hours into a lifetime.” Just as he seems soothed, I begin to cry. He thinks the tears are for Floriana and they are but, damn it, they’re also for him. And for me.

13
Fasting Was How We Were Living Anyway

Carne vale,
literally, “meat is valid.” The eating of meat has long been consented by the Church during the festivals that herald forty days of purification via the tight and sober way of
quaresima,
Lent.
Carnevale
became the sweeping name for all such presacrifical events, including those other fleshly ones that took place beyond—and perhaps on and under—the table, the perspired cavortings of bodies, licensed by a mask. Once
carnevale
in Venice was celebrated for half the year and more—and a long and brazen mazurka it was, the canonical festal foods’ only sauce glutted between the partaking of other plums. But here in the hills of southern Tuscany,
carnevale
has borrowed from Venice only the single, fried, and sugary pecadillo of
le frittelle,
fritters.

Little doughnutlike confections, they are piled up into fetching pyramids in every
pasticciera
window and sit, beckoning, on every bar. Filled with ricotta or marmalade or a satiny rummed cream, or
empty except for sighs, dragged through warm honey or sugar or wet with the pink jolt of
alchermes
—an ancient herbal concoction used to flavor and color—one, maybe two bites and the wisps dissolve into memories only the thighs seem to recall. They begin appearing sometime in late January or early February, depending upon the date of Easter in a given year. And on
martedì grasso,
Fat Tuesday,
le frittelle
are presented for the last time, never again to be dispensed until next
carnevale.
I think it’s their short, mandated season, like the one for local strawberries or asparagus, that adds to their lusciousness. Amnesty for a forbidden food.

And more than we ever did in Venice, we eat
frittelle.
We engage in “tastings” by bringing home four of each variety from the
pasticceria
in the village, thoughtfully rating them for crispness, delicacy, flavor. That sampling too small for serious research, we enlarge the field, braking for every hand-lettered sign announcing
oggi frittelle,
today, fritters, at bars and pastry shops from Chiusi, Cetona, Città della Pieve, Ficulle, Sarteano, Chianciano Terme. Sometimes we carry a few home for four o’clocks with Barlozzo or to bring to Floriana, both of them usually shaking their heads over the little morsels, bemoaning what passes for
frittelle
in this day and age. The two of them must have schemed on the subject because one day they
both
arrive at four, Floriana’s market sack full and hanging from Barlozzo’s arm.

“Ciao, belli,”
says Floriana,
“cosa pensate se facciamo una piccola dose di frittelle, al modo mio?
Hi, beauties, what do you think about our making a tiny batch of fritters, according to my method?”

Fernando is hugging her and I’m trying to peel off her coat from behind and the duke is already messing with the fire, saying, “I’ll heat the wine if you’ve got any decent cinnamon.”

We have to mix the fritters on the dining room table because Floriana and I can’t both fit in the kitchen. We are constantly foiled by Barlozzo, who interrupts each phase of the operation, assuring us that his mother always did it differently. Fernando quiets the crowd by reminding them that he’s the only Venetian on the premises and that
le frittelle
belong to his own culinary culture. He proclaims that Venetians won’t tolerate raisins in their fritters. Floriana tells him that she knows very well it’s
he
who won’t tolerate raisins in his fritters and that he can’t denounce the poor little fruits for the whole of the water kingdom. “And besides,” she says, “these are white raisins that have been soaking in dark rum for half a year, and once you taste them you’ll be begging me for the whole jar.”