A Thousand Days in Tuscany (29 page)

“Floriana is all the women I’ve ever loved or wanted to love, meant to love if I’d only known how, or would have loved if I could only have managed to find them. And when I thought she might be dying, I felt as though I wouldn’t be losing just her but everyone. Floriana
is everyone. Though we’d never been together for anything more than the most public of occasions before she became ill, she was always near. We’ve lived two hundred meters apart for most of our lives. And I’d convinced myself to settle for that proximity, to mistake it for some form of intimacy. I told myself over and over again that the nearness of her was enough. But when she came back home from Città della Pieve, all I wanted to do was to begin
living
this love for her. At last I would submit to it, devote myself to it, trust it and her and myself with my whole heart. It seemed natural and right that I should be the one to care for her. It must have seemed natural to her as well, though we never discussed it. Never
decided
about it. I don’t even know if she’ll let me stay close to her after she’s regained her strength. But I think this house might help us. I would go mad, now, trying to live without this connection to her. Haven’t I told you that all my motives are selfish?”

As he’s wont to do, the duke is moving too fast for me. I need to understand more than I do. I ask, “Why didn’t you ever tell your father about the soldier?”

“I was eleven years old when all that happened, Chou. And my mother treated his presence in our home and in our lives so undramatically that I did, too. She never told me to keep anything secret from my father, but somehow she must have known I’d never say a word, she being certain that I knew it would hurt him and hurt her.
She knew I would protect her and protect my father without asking me to. I just followed her lead for those few weeks that he was with us. I accepted him, enjoyed him. I heard my mother laugh and I liked that. She seemed like a girl, and that made me think I could stop trying to be a man. His name was Peter.

“As much as I can piece it all together now, he must have been a deserter from the troops stationed at La Foce, the Origo estates that sit between Pienza and Chianciano. I think he just walked away one day and came down through the woods, over the mountain roads. He must have simply showed up at the door one day. Situated as we were outside the town, our house—your house—would have seemed a relatively safe one in which to ask for water or a place to sleep. Perhaps she was out in the garden hanging the wash and he caught sight of her. She was beautiful. All that dark hair piled up on top of her head, eyes like a doe. He would have found her irresistible. That part of the story is hardly rare.

“And maybe the rest of the story, albeit in less treacherous forms, is also not so rare. Casualties of war. Nina was twenty-eight, and I think Peter must have been younger, perhaps not more than twenty. And so all three of us were children, really. Frightened, hungry, not knowing what was next and when that might be.”

“Did you hate your father?” Fernando asks him.

“No. It’s a horrifying thought, but each of us is responsible for our
own judgment. No one else knows what we know about ourselves. Even when the state takes over, it still remains a private thing in the end. Besides, I think my mother lived her whole life in those thirty-three years. Sometimes I think she’d lived all of it by the time my father had returned from the war, that those intervening years must have truly been a death for her. And so I closed my father’s eyes, lit a candle, washed him in oil, wished him peace. I arranged to have Nina buried properly, but not in the same place where I buried my father. I just couldn’t do that to either one of them.”

We are silent now, staying so until the fire burns to ash. The dark is thick and cold as we find our way out into the night, starless and waiting for the moon. Back in the village when we leave him, the duke asks, “Don’t you think it’s strange that, of all the farmhouses in Tuscany, you two chose to come and live in the one where I’d lived? I mean, I understand that my having lived there was unknown to you, just as I was unknown to you. But if you look carefully you’ll see there are the pale tracings of a circle about us. Nothing much at all is accidental in a life.”

Spring

14
Virtuous Drenches

Bursting in upon the pitiless winter, the torrid breath of Africa rises up to warm the afternoons. Each day’s good news of Florì the duke carries to us like flowers, settling himself near our fire after he’s said good night to her. He continues negotiations to gain the pile of stones with the seven fire-places and the sleeping vines.
L’eremo,
the hermitage, he’s taken to calling it. The Vulcan seems sluiced out of him. Surely the crust and the grit remain, but the ghost is gone. And in its place there has sprung up an old, gangly chap who sticks close to us as a night-spooked child.

He rings the buzzer early one morning while we still sleep. And when we don’t answer swiftly enough, he pounds urgently at our door. Something is very wrong. I turn myself face down into the hollow where Fernando had lain, my heart thudding loud as Barlozzo’s fist.

“Le erbe sono cresciute.
The weeds are up,” I hear him yell as though the British were coming. It’s only grass he wants to talk about.

Minutes later we are trudging behind Barlozzo over the back meadows and into the new light. A cloth sack over his shoulder, trowel and knife handles protruding from his jacket pockets, he folds himself neatly in two over every bright patch of hours-old green, loosening, digging, pulling some of it up with its roots, cutting others at the quick, bundling like kinds with lengths of kitchen string and flinging the muddy faggots into his sack. He hands us tools, but I’m all thumbs when I dig, my movements neither sure nor quick enough to sustain Barlozzo’s patience. “You hinder me more than you further me,” he says.

And so he and Fernando go on ahead. I take my time, separate leaves I can recognize such as wild arugula and dandelion from those I only think might be worthy of a salad or a session in the saute pan with wild garlic and oil and at least one fat red chile. The sun is awake now and so am I, grateful for Barlozzo’s invitation to this dawn sortie. I’m walking along feeling the softening earth under my boots, composing menus, feeling gallant about my new life as a forager, singing a little. And I’m laughing, too, at a long-ago remembrance of the frantic Saturday lawnmowing scenes in my surburban Saratoga County neighborhood. The sinister whacking of the electric weed eater, the great toxic puffs of spray choking children and choking
dandelions, the same race of dandelions that, today, will compose my lunch.

I’m having a lovely time when I’m interrupted by the sound of whopping and shouting. I think they must have excavated a lode of Etruscan jewels, but when I finally get to them, they’re busy tying together bunches of scrawny brown stalks that look like perverted asparagus. They are
brusandoli,
wild hops, a whole patch of them. Barlozzo is already touting how he’ll cook them for our supper. “First we’ll have a salad of dandelions and other field grasses with a good spoonful of ricotta mixed with salt anchovies on top. Then we’ll eat the hops, barely poached, drained while they’re still a little crunchy, tossed with the thinnest shreds of sharp spring onion, dressed with only the squeezing of a lemon. Then we’ll fry some in the best oil, add some white butter, beat this morning’s eggs and pour them in only when the butter begins to talk. A little sea salt. And when the underside is deep brown, I’ll toss the frittata in the air, catch it on its other side, and just when the vapors of it begin to make you crazy, I’ll set it on the table and we’ll eat it straight out of the pan. Very cold white wine is permitted, but no bread. Nothing else. Florì will want to stir them into rice or some other insipid pap, but just ignore her.”

“And since when did you begin reciting preludes to supper?” I ask him.

“Va bene,
OK, take credit for my poetry, but I do find that saying my plans out loud does stimulate the appetite more than just thinking them.”

On another morning when March feels warm as June, Fernando is under orders from the duke to head down near the thermal springs to find wild garlic and herbs for the brewing of tonics. I stay behind for the bread vigil, and when it’s done I slip a jacket over my night dress and pull on my boots, take a basket and scissors for flowers, and walk down to meet him. It’s a rare morning during these days when Barlozzo is not present looking for cheer or balm in ever-increasing doses. I’m feeling blissfully free of him for a few hours, like a beleaguered mom when the Irish au pair takes over. Looking around me, I’m thinking there is nothing at all here that bespeaks an era, sets a date on this morning. It could be fifty years ago, two hundred years ago, many more ago. Just earth and sky and wild roses budded, sheep grazing.

It’s so warm I take off my jacket, leave it on a rock for later. I think I see Fernando not too far ahead and, in my gauzy white dress, I am Diana invoking the chase, flailing arms, calling to him. Nothing. It’s too warm to walk farther so I’ll lie here in the spicy grass and wait for him. Now I hear him coming closer, singing “Tea for Three,” as usual. I’m still and quiet, sinuously arranged in pastoral goddess pose, ready to devastate him with my supine self. He’ll fall to his
knees and cover me with kisses. My heart beats like a child’s when she’s playing hide and seek, but all my husband says is,
“Ma cosa fai qui? Alzati, ti prego. Sei quasi nuda e completamente pazza.
But what are you doing here? Get up, I beg you. You’re almost nude and completely crazy.”

“I’m just feeling playful, that’s all. You were without the duke for once, and I thought I’d surprise you. Just you.”

“But you’ll get sick lying on the damp ground,” he says bending down to hug me. “And you know as well as I do that our rascal child is stalking the meadows somewhere near. I don’t want him or anyone else to see you wandering about in your night dress.”

I try to rise elegantly but I step on and finally trip over the Diana dress, falling, catching the heel of my boot in the hem of it, ripping the thing, trying again to get up, falling again. Some pastoral goddess, I tell myself, clumping back up the hill, up into the garden, up the stairs, damning my even fleeting faculty for self-deception. As I’m fastening my skirt, I can hear the duke shouting to Fernando from the back meadow: “Sorry I’m so late.”

T
HE CHEESEMAKING SEASON
is underway, with the ewes feasting on the same newly sprouted grasses as we do. And though it’s late this year, the first cheese of the season is called
marzolino,
little March, a
pecorino
eaten white and sweet and fresh, after only a
few weeks of aging. Partnered with a heap of fava beans still in their pods, the cheese is dressed with oil and grindings of pepper.

We slip the favas from their pods, ignore the still-soft inner skins, and eat them, on a hillside, with the
marzolino
and half a loaf of good bread. Perhaps an even better accompaniment to a fine
marzolino
is honey. Long before beekeeping became an art, bees still made honey and shepherds risked wrack and ruin by plunging an arm into a hive for a piece of comb, breaking it, scraping it, and eating it with their fresh sour cheese. An early
dolce-salata
dish. It was the shepherds who knew most about life. Shepherds who were born, lived, and as often died under the stars. They followed the pastoral ritual of the
transumanza
—the shepherd’s crossing with his flocks from summer mountain pastures to winter lowlands and back again, journeys of three hundred kilometers or more. As solitary as was his life, a shepherd was a bon vivant of sorts, a nomadic storyteller who carried news and folklore into the even greater isolation of the villages he passed, remote hamlets from which people never ventured from one mountaintop to the next. Welcomed as an entertainer, invited to sit around the fires of the farmers and the woodsmen, he traded tales for bread and wine and oil. An ancient supper from the days of the
transumaza
is one that a shepherd made with his own ricotta. He mixed the ricotta with a stolen egg or two, formed dumplings from the mash, dropped them into a kettle of water boiled over his fire,
drained them, and finally dressed them with a piece of hard bread rubbed between his palms and, if he was lucky, a few drops of bartered oil. As I imagine this, I wish it were possible to trade one comfort for another as the shepherds did, as Barlozzo’s mother used to trade a pot of soup for one of ricotta. I would trade bread for secrets.

B
ARLOZZO HAS FORMULAS
for tonics and all sorts of virtuous drenches he mixes and ferments in a hideous vat. A wet and rusted tub on wheels, he parks it in our barn and heaves what look and smell like lawn trimmings into it, pounding at them with one of his hand-hewn tools. With the garden hose, he douses the mash, lets loose the vat’s metal cover, and says,

“We’ll need to let it sit for a week or so.”