A Thousand Days in Tuscany (28 page)

I don’t know whether it’s the aftermath of the horn-locking with Misha or unexpired emotion over Floriana’s plight or some other calamity, real or perceived, that causes the shades to cross his face
again. But there they are, gnawing into the hollows about the duke’s eyes as we sit, on the same afternoon of Misha’s departure, in the plush blue of a sofa in Florì’s little parlor. We’re waiting to take her shopping in Città della Pieve.

“There’s a place I’d like to show you,” he says.

“What sort of place?”

“Just a place. A house. Or what’s left of what was once
una casa colonica,
a country house,” he says.

“Is it nearby?”

“It’s not too far away. Do you remember that bend in the Tiber just a few kilometers before the turnoff up to Todi, where we collected the stones for the fire ring? It’s near there, on the other side of the road, about five hundred meters into the woods,” he says.

“And you want us to see it? I mean, are we going to visit someone?”

“No, we’re not going to visit anyone. No questions, please. I just want Floriana and you and Fernando to come with me tomorrow. See if you can’t arrange things with her,” he says, nodding toward the next room, where Floriana is muttering about the whereabouts of a glove. “Set it for either tomorrow or Saturday. We can lunch at Luciano’s and then stop to see this place for a few minutes. I know I’m being mysterious, but it’s just that I want to talk to all of you about something and I can’t do that until I show you this house. Will you just do this for me?”

“Of course I will. Or I’ll try,” I tell him.

But Florì wants no part of this
gitarella,
little journey, saying she loathes that road as much for how it winds and twists as for the memories of riding it to the hospital in Perugia every week for the past four months. Now that those horrors are past, she says she doesn’t care if she ever sees that road again. She’ll stay at home and cook a little supper for us, have things ready for when we return. “Tomorrow will be a perfect day to stew a hen,” she announces as she marches downstairs, on her way to the butcher.

Barlozzo is gracious about Florì’s refusal, saying it’s probably better if we three go alone anyway, calling us the “front guard” and almost relishing the perplexity he’s causing.

It’s just after four as we climb down from the truck into a bluish light. Following the duke up a dirt path trampled in goat and sheep hooves, February’s wind is a banshee’s wail, the howling up of a thousand wolves broken by the brio of a lone bird squalling. The path is hardly steep, but still I’m breathless from going against the wind as Barlozzo stops in sight of a ruin. Tall and narrow as a tower, it is made all of chimneys, the caps of which rise above the flat roof and form a crenellation. Grasses grow high up and into its long paneless windows, the past sucked tight into the stones. We walk closer, wander inside and about it, up the stairs, down a different flight of stairs. It’s a big place and I count seven fireplaces, maybe ten rooms. There
are two small barns and a winemaking shed, complete with a rotted press and a row of dark, green demijohns dressed in straw jackets.

“There’s not much land, except the few hectares of dormant vines up the hill, but there’s more than enough for a vegetable garden and a good patch for flowers and herbs,” Barlozzo says, as though he’s trying to sell it to us. “In that barn over there,” he says pointing to the farther one, “there’s a summer kitchen with a wood stove, which I could re-vent and convert into an oven. I’ve studied it carefully.” Now I’m certain he wants
us
to buy the place. “But whose house is this?” Fernando asks him.

“This hasn’t been anyone’s house since after the last war. There’s a chance it might be mine. And Florì’s, if she wants. And for you two, if you’re willing. The chance of my buying it at this point is still small, but I’m in discussion with the owner, a Roman who’s never even been up here to look at the place since some uncle or great uncle left it to him last year. His relatives keep dying and he keeps inheriting their properties and this is one of the few he seems willing to surrender from his growing realm,” he says.

“Why would you want to be so far from San Casciano?” I ask him.

“It’s not that I want to be so far from there as much as I think I’d like to be here. At least some of the time. I’m barely free of the preliminary stages in what might be years of negotiating,” he says.

“Years?” Fernando and I ask together.

“What’s this? You doubt my immortality? I say let’s take it while we can, and when we’re gone, the almighty sheep can have it. I don’t mean it to be anyone’s ‘principal dwelling,’ as the lawyers say. This could be a place where one of us or all of us comes to be alone or to be together. Even when we’re all here at the same time, there would be no dearth of privacy. Like Fernando’s trees, the house is a symbol. Whatever else happens, it will be here,” he says lighting two cigarettes at once and passing one of them to Fernando.

“But why would you want to take on such a project?” I ask.

“That’s a strange question coming from you. Besides, I’m not thinking of it as a
project.
I’d tile the roof, fix the floors, rework the plumbing. I wouldn’t even think of a heating system, what with all these fireplaces. I’ve been meaning to find something like this since my father died, and that was more than forty years ago. He left me a humble stake, which I’ve yet to touch. I think it’s time I did.
Parva domus magna pax
—in a poor house there is great peace. And Jesus knows this is a poor enough house,” he says, just standing there smoking, waiting for us to say something. We’re both too stunned for much more than awkward laughs and professions of disbelief.

“You just have to promise me one thing, Chou. We’ll have to ration your fabric and I must ask you to respect the limits set by the rest of us. I won’t have this place looking like some baroque drawing
room. No tassels, no fringes,
neanche un putto,
not even a single angel.”

We’re still not saying much. He talks some more.

“What I’m wanting to do here is to make a home, a second home, if you will, an alternative home, if you must, where all of us can spend some time together. As much or as little as we might desire. My motives are purely selfish. My place in San Casciano is more a den than a house, and that’s all it will ever be. Floriana’s apartment is wonderful, but it sits right in the middle of the village and, especially since she’s been sick, I think she often feels too much on view, like she can’t take a walk without collecting an entourage of well-meaning invaders. And, last of all, I don’t like it much that the only place you call home belongs to the Luccis. That’s a feeling born of very old rancor, which nothing and no one can soften. I know full well that you’re in your vagabond phase and that by this time next year you might be living on Elba or Sicily or somewhere in the south of France. But wherever you are, Floriana and I and this place can still be here waiting for you. Now, there’s nothing you have to agree to except, when the time comes, to take a set of keys and make yourself at home. I would not be opposed to your helping me with the work, but all the expenses involved, as well as what it will cost to maintain the place, belong to me,” he says.

He’s picking up twigs now and making a pile of them. “Let’s try
out the little fireplace. It’s too cold to stay out here any longer. I’ve got some logs in the truck and a pair of bottles.” He and Fernando go to fetch the wood and the wine and I roam the house. When they return, Fernando begins to set the fire and the duke opens the wine, pours it out into paper cups, passing one to each of us. He and I sit on a couch covered in a blanket, which I gingerly pat into some order, not lifting it for fear of seeing what might be living beneath it.

“Why did you let someone else marry Floriana?” I ask him without picking up my head from the blanket fixing. Fernando turns toward me from his bending over the fire and bores into my eyes with his blueberry ones. But I keep going. “Once upon a time, you and Floriana were in love, weren’t you? And you are still. What happened to you? Why didn’t you marry her?”

“I’ve already told you that the answer is very long,” he says. “It’s a story that began years before Floriana’s and mine began. And it’s a story that nearly everyone in town knows except you two, even if no one knows it from my telling of it. But I want to tell it to you. I’ve wanted to tell it to you since long before you began asking me to tell it. And now I will.”

The flames leap and lick at the old, blackened hearth walls, yellowing the light around us. The duke rises from the couch, gives his place to Fernando. He goes to sit on a pile of rags, which once were
pillows and, slouching in the spectral dark of the fire, he begins to talk.

“You already know a great deal about my mother, but I don’t remember if I’ve told you her name. Her name was Nina. And my father was called Patsi. Patrizio. Since I have no experience in recounting these particular events out loud, I’m not certain where to begin, but I think this part of the story began when Nina told Patsi about the soldier. Yes, surely it began when she told him about the soldier. She just couldn’t
not
tell him any longer. And as though there was nothing else to do for it, Patsi shot her. He shot her while she slept. He dug a grave a few meters from the house, the house where you live now, and he buried her, artfully covering up his deeds. It was early spring and he’d sent me to my great uncle’s for a day and a night on the pretense of my helping him to put in tomatoes and peppers and beans. And when I came home, he told me Nina had gone away, that she’d packed some of her things and taken the train to Rome to look for work. He said we’d hear from her when she’d had time to reflect. But, of course, we never did. I was sixteen at the time. It was three years later, when he was dying, that he told me the truth.

“He said,
You know, son, a person can die of shame and she’d been dying of it, in one form or another, for all the time I knew her. She was my brother’s
fidanzata,
his girlfriend. He loved her, or at least he did for a while, until
he met another girl he thought he loved more. But he wasn’t quite ready to let go of Nina. My brother finally decided which one of them he wanted when Nina told him she was pregnant. Nina lost. I’d been watching all this, almost predicting it, a
cavaliere
at the ready. I’d loved her since she was ten, since I first saw her sitting in church. I remember she was wearing a white beret. It was pulled way down over her forehead so all I could see were those eyes. Those endless black eyes. Just like yours. But I was a big guy of fourteen, much too old to be thinking about babies like her. As we all grew up a little, she and my brother fell in love and well, now you can put the pieces together for yourself. Do you understand that her troubles began long before she took this man, this Tedesco, into her bed? When she couldn’t have my brother, she took me.
Secondo scelta,
second choice, I was, and there were very few days when I didn’t sharply feel that fact. She was a good wife, dutiful, correct, often even sweet, but her broken heart kept spilling out old dreams and she was mostly busy picking up the pieces, endlessly sorting them out into different configurations, never knowing quite what to do with them. So when she told me what happened while I was away, it wasn’t the shock a man might feel if he and his wife had been mad for each other or even reasonably content with each other. She’d been betraying me always. Is emotional betrayal any less real than the carnal sort? And so for me, this other betrayal was not altogether unexpected. But it was more than I could contain. I was weary of forgiving her for not loving me. Weary of loving her with every breath and surviving on only her merciful kindnesses. Not even you were mine. Even you were someone else’s. I’d agreed to take over where my brother left off, but that pact did not include my suffering yet another man.”

Barlozzo has been saying all this in a voice different from his own. An older, more feeble voice, and perhaps in the way his father might have spoken it for himself. Now his own voice returns. “What Patsi committed was known, in those times, as
un delitto d’onore,
a crime of honor. When a man was wronged, cuckolded, it was socially and morally acceptable for him to defend himself. An outgrowth of dueling, I think. The state silently condoned those acts, while Mother Church shook her head and turned away. Until the fifties, that’s how it was all over Italy, and until much later in parts of the south where the code of silence still prevails. Surely the village knew of the events; they knew what Nina did and they knew what Patsi did. Of course, no one has ever trespassed upon the subject with me. No one ever will. It’s just something that happened. A fact of local history.

“Do you remember what I said at the
veglia? My father always said hell is where nothing’s cooking and no one’s waiting.
That was the first time I’ve ever mentioned my father to anyone since the day he died. And certainly I chose a rather strange quote of his to pass on. But it just sort of slipped out, uncensored. That was the reason for the silence up there that night. All this is why, or at least most of the reason why, I’ve stayed alone. You see, I was afraid of loving a woman as completely as Patsi loved my mother, but I was more
afraid of loving someone less than that. Both doors opened onto the lion’s den. You might say that I refused Florì way back then. I believed those feelings I’d had for her were passing ones, like some small bewitching from which I’d soon awaken. I never called it love. But instead of the feelings passing, only time did. So much time, and all the while I was perpetuating the legacy. Or at least helping it along.

“Floriana spent twenty years with her
seconda scelta.
And I’ve spent my much of my life in a great, long de profundis. What I’ve done, mostly, is to surrender my own turn at having a life. I let Nina’s and Patsi’s lives wash over into mine, transfusing it with their pain. And as though it were my salvation rather than my ruin, I’ve been holding on to that pain like a trust, holding it so tight to my chest there was no room to hold anything or anyone else. Under the weight of lesser or greater fortunes, I think what happens to a great many of us is that we really don’t know what we want or with whom we’d like to have it. Nothing seems real until it’s already gone. Until it’s sealed up tight, out of reach. Until it’s dead. Be it a person or a dream. And then the light comes, and so we mourn.