A Thousand Days in Tuscany (30 page)

I’m untrusting of the murky potion afloat with slime and foam until I taste the clean, sharp freshness of it. He empties the vat from its spigot into a pail and begins the process all over again with a different composition of materials. As each batch is brewed we filter the stuff through cheesecloth, pour it into scrubbed and sterilized wine bottles. Each one corked and labeled according to its particular benefit, we lay down some of the bottles on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; the remainder we store in the armoire. Wild chicory for internal cleansing; wild fennel and dandelion, a general
panacea;
rucola
and wild onion to cleanse the blood; passion flower, valerian root, and wild garlic to lower blood pressure; wild borage for the skin.

“These don’t age like wine, you know. Drink them all before the heat comes—a glassful, cold and neat, three times a day.” I fear for my bowels, having felt the ravages wreaked by quick sips, yet I promise to take the full cure.

One Saturday at the market in Cetona I’m in a rapture over a wooden box of lettuces, little ruffled nosegays of them. Leaves like satin cream or yellow speckled in winey red, some of them green as limes, frilled in pink. I want to just look at them, I want to draw them. Most of all I want to feel them in my hands, taste them. Maybe it’s true that life is a search for beauty, for the harmony that comes from the mingling of things. Maybe life is a search for flavor. Not the flavor of just a food but of a moment, or a color, a voice—the flavor of what we can hear and see and touch. Certainly good cooking is about flavor. About the liberation of flavor, the suspension of it, and, finally, the release of it. One liberates the flavor of an herb by gently bruising it, thus freeing its natural oils and essences. Next, one suspends those oils and essences inside other components. For instance, to make a basil pesto, one pounds garlic and basil to release their oils and essences. Then one captures, holds those flavors by suspending them inside olive oil, forming an emulsion, a thick, smooth
sauce. But this sauce has yet to rerelease all those flavors one worked to liberate and suspend. The sauce needs heat, contact with heat. First, taste the sauce cool, just as it is, from a spoon or your finger. Certainly it’s wonderful. But then toss the pesto with just-cooked pasta or spread it on a roasted tomato, hot from the oven. The contact with heat intensifies the flavors of the sauce to their fullness. The business of cooking has much in common with the business of life.

A Tasting of Pecorino Cheeses with Chestnut Honey

Approximately 3 ounces of cheese per person

A basket of thinly sliced artisanal breads

Dark honey, preferably chestnut or buckwheat, lightly heated

A bottle of
vin santo,
chilled

In lieu of a sweet, this is wonderful thing to carry out at the end of a Tuscan supper. The only work it asks is the shopping or the bread baking, if you wish. Collect as many varieties of pecorino—ewe’s milk cheese—as are to be found, trying to find both fresh, soft
varieties as well as those drier, crumbly ones with a bit of age on them. Tuscan pecorinos are more readily available now in America than they were a few years ago when only the Roman, peppercornstudded varieties, best used as grating cheeses, were to be had. Two soft varieties and two more aged ones compose an honorable field, yet serving one or two, especially paired with a pot of dark, rich chestnut honey, some dark, whole grain breads, and a bottle of chilled
vin santo,
will be quite enough to please.

15
Florì and I Are Shelling Peas

You haven’t said much about the house. I mean, do you like it, do you like the
idea
of it?” I ask her. Florì and I are shelling peas. Sitting on the terrace steps between the two pots of white hydrangea we’ve just planted, our frilly spring dresses ruched up on our thighs, the jellied peach light of five o’clock stroking our bare legs, bare feet.

“It’s a fascinating old place and I think it could be beautiful. But I’m not excited about it in the way Barlozzo is excited. Of course, he’ll see the process through and have it in the end. But, Chou, it’s enough for me when the daylight comes.”

Barlozzo’s been up terrorizing the butcher into carving lamb ribs, which he’ll grill out in the fire ring for our early supper. Toting his prize, he strides up from the drive and stops a little way from us.
“Poveri fiori,
poor flowers,” he says, “having to sit so close to the two of you. They might as well be swamp grasses for all anyone
could notice of them.
Belle donne, buona sera.
Beautiful women, good evening.”

He and Fernando set about bathing the ribs in oil and white wine. Pulling stalks of it from his ever-present canvas shoulder bag, Barlozzo tears the leaves of
mentuccia,
wild mint, he’d gathered on the hillside, pressing them onto the scant flesh of the lamb. They stoke up the fire and Florì pours some white wine into a pot, setting it over the grate to boil. She poaches the peas in the wine, drains them—saving the cooking liquors—and smashes the peas to a paste.

Meanwhile, I’m sautéing onions in a soup kettle with olive oil, sprinkling on some cinnamon and a few grains of sugar, sea salt, and grindings of white pepper. It takes a long time to caramelize the onions, to cook them down to a jam. Leaving the stirring to the duke, Floriana and I set the table and open some wine. Earlier, she had climbed the hill with a dish of eggplant, tiny white ones she’d roasted whole until their flesh collapsed. When they were hot from the oven, she’d poured over a sauce of crushed new garlic and olive oil and marjoram picked from the windowsill pot in her kitchen, piercing the skins of the eggplants so they could drink in the savory juice. I keep eyeing the old iron dish of them sitting on the table. How gorgeous they look. A fat round of potato bread, crusty and brown, rests on an upturned basket over a branch of rosemary, the scent of which it will take in as it cools. A bowl of young lettuces waits to be
dressed with the drippings the little ribs will surrender into a pan set below them as they grill. There’s nothing to do but finish the soup. I ladle veal stock into the cooked onions, add the smashed peas, the reserved pot liquors and a bit more wine, stirring the mass to blend and heat it. Carrying the pot directly to the table, I add a handful of pecorino to the soup and then spoon it out into shallow bowls, threading each portion with oil. The
carabaccia,
as it’s called, should be eaten tepid. And so we let it cool while we begin with the eggplant. Each of us tears away at the skin of one, spreading the perfumed cream on a piece of bread, eating it out of hand between sips of wine.

“I’ll take another dose of nightshade, if you don’t mind,” I say, reaching for the eggplant.
“Melanzana,
a bastardization of
mela insana.
Literally, ‘unhealthy apple.’ That’s what we’re eating. A part of the nightshade family, as is belladonna.” Eggplant was a centuries-old staple of Middle Eastern cuisine by the time it was introduced in Europe, but here it was shunned as food, revered as a table ornament. “I guess someone got hungry enough to eat it one day and here we are.”

“Belladonna,”
says the duke sotto voce. I’m sorry for the old chap who first called poison a beautiful woman.”

Florì and the duke say good night before the sun sets. They walk down the drive, climb up into town and we watch them until they vanish among the new-leafed trees.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
, Florì and I walk along the Celle road. I tell her that Barlozzo has told us about his mother, his father.

“I was certain, sooner or later, he’d tell you. He’s never talked to me about it, you know,” she says, stopping to look at me, facing the sun so her long skittish eyes are yellow as saffron.

“Maybe he never needed to talk with you,” I say. “He trusted that you knew it all. And, too, he trusted that you understood it had always been the obstacle between you.”

“I suppose that’s true. And it’s also true that, in the deepest part of me, I’ve always known that he wanted to love me. But maybe it was me, my inconsolable fear of what I knew must be his torment. I never felt wise enough to help him wash all that away so I could find his heart. So, you see, I was as much an obstacle as were Patsi and Nina. I never knew how to begin. I never knew what to say. Why can’t we talk to each other, Chou?” She asks the question for all of us.

We’ve walked only half a kilometer or so when she laughs and says, “I’m tired. Spring fever. I think I’ll just take to my bed for a few days, let everyone fuss over me. I can do that now that I know I’m well. Before, when I wasn’t sure, the idea of everyone being around me seemed too scented in farewell. But now I think I’m ready for a week of women’s care and company.”

The word goes out, and next morning five of us are gathered in Florì’s small apartment, each of us getting in the others’ way, cleaning,
cooking soup, keeping her company, painting her toenails, listening to her stories. She looks at me, tells me to come closer so she can ask me something important. She says she wants me to put makeup on her face. She wants mascara and a touch of powder, “
e un pò di ombretto, appena, appena,
just a very little bit of eye shadow.” But what she really wants are red lips. As though they were a sin, she asks for them in a hoarse whisper, pointing to mine—colored, as they always are, red as an anemone—then pointing to her own. I run up the hill to get my kit. I smudge and draw and brush about her eyes and face, paint her mouth and, when I finish, I hold a mirror for her inspection. She is silent. She closes her eyes. I sit next to her on the bed, holding her hand. We stay that way for a long time. When we look at each other, I see her face is wet and warm, her powder streaked, her mascara slipping into black puddles in the deep half moons under her eyes. But her lips are perfect. I tell her that and she answers, “Yes. They are perfect.”

I fix the damage before calling in the others to admire her. They shout and scream and say they all want red lips. One by one, I paint them until we’re all sitting there around the bed and on the bed, giggling, passing the mirror, telling first-time stories about lipstick and secret love and high heels and wedding dresses. Somehow the telling of memories gives way to a round robin of sorts whereby each one shares
un detto,
a quote from scriptures or from literature. But here,
more often the phrases are formed of succulent observation. Florì calls it saying truths.

“Tradition, whether the gastronomic kind or the lovemaking kind, is perpetuated by daily application.”

“Beware of the tyranny of the giver. The giver has more cards than the getter. Or perceives it so. Yet how often is the giver giving to gain control, or at the least, the sanction to plunder the givee’s life, how and when he may.”

“When choosing a mate, be certain it’s the one with whom you want to share your dying as much as your living.”

“The greatest emptiness comes to us when what or whom we thought we understood cheats us by being something else, someone else.”

“Sarcasm is a dagger honed from fear.”

“When you get old enough, you discover your sons have become the husband you’d like to forget, while your daughters are eerily the same as the mother from whom you ran. Life is just a series of strange tricks.”

“Don’t be afraid of your children. If they’re going to love you, they’ll love you on their own, without your having to pander to them. If they’re not going to love you, there’s nothing to do about it.”

“Most of us are rationed three silver bullets in a life. Each of them wants quiet deliberation before firing.”

“Every once in a while some small vendetta can do your heart good.”

“Why do we want them so much more than they want us?”

It’s my turn. “Too much sweet is bound to finish in despair. Balance the sweet and the salty. I knew a French woman, a cook in a tiny place in the village of Poissy, who would rub a few grains of coarse salt over the tips of honeyed plums or figs just before she’d shove a great tart of them into the oven.
The salt exalts the sweet,
she’d say, licking her fingers like a cat.”

After Florì takes a turn, there’s nothing left to be said.

“Do you know it was hard, some days and some nights, just to get through the hours. I was always looking for things to do to fill the spaces before lunch or to keep myself still before dawn. Now, all I long for is time. So short and fast is this life. And it’s not that I would have wished to slow it down as much as I would have wished to understand about the speed.”

When she thinks we’re ready for her, a woman called Tullia says, “What we should be doing is dancing, Florì. It’s
la tarantella
we should be dancing to drive the demons mad, to remind them how much stronger we are than they.”

A dance of rebellion against pain and death, a willful dance, arrogant, seductive, smashing bounds, tearing masks, shaking fists and shaking hips. It’s a dance Greek and Bohemian, Arab and African. A gypsy’s dance. Yet in this group of sober Tuscans, only she, born and bred in Salerno, only Tullia knows
la tarantella.
But like all
southerners, first she wants to talk. She tells us that, after the war, when she was thirteen, there was no one left in the two-room apartment where she’d lived with her parents. No one save the uncle who’d come to take care of her when her mother died and her father didn’t come home. But he had hands large and quick, she says, and she knew her fate if she stayed. So she stole from him before he could steal from her. She stole enough money to ride the train from Salerno to Florence, where she was sure to find work as a housemaid. Too, she stole half a loaf of bread and the three cuts of
salame
wrapped in brown paper he’d left in his pocket for his supper—he, as usual, not caring much what she ate for supper. Inside a tablecloth she’d tied these along with the red cotton skirt she’d outgrown but loved too much to leave behind, a nightgown she’d bleached white in the sun and patched with very small stitches, her mother’s black silk dress with the shoulder pads, the crucifix from over her bed. And a tambourine. Having no shoes, she’d scrubbed her feet in vinegar, straightened her pinafore as best she could, placed the bundle on her head as though she was taking it to the public fountain and, instead, walked away to the station. Bread and courage and a tambourine. Seeds to grow a life.