A Thousand Days in Tuscany (5 page)

We won’t be like a prisoner, emotional or physical, faltering before the wide-open door of his claustral cell, timid and not at all certain he wants to leave. What will he do without the walls? he asks himself, and so he sets out to build new ones, to draw fresh limits to his freedom—to commit the same crime, to marry the same person, to take the same train, to find the same job, write the same letter, the same book. People who search for change, new beginnings, another kind of life, sometimes imagine they’ll find it all set up and ready for them simply because they’ve changed address, gone to live in some other geography. But a change of address—no matter how far away, how exotic—is nothing more than a “transfer.” And at the first moment they look about them, they see everything they thought to leave behind has arrived with them. Everything. And so,
if we have a plan at this early point, it’s to invigorate our lives, to reshape them rather than to repeat them.

We wander about our new home, room to room, up the stairs and back down again. Fernando says it’s great and I, too, say it’s great if we want to live in an
agriturismo
or a sanitorium for consumptive Berliners.

“Some paint. Some fabric. A few wonderful old pieces of furniture.” I shrug the words in falsetto, oiling them in indifference, and yet I don’t fool my husband. Only a few days after I’d come to live with him in Venice, he left the comfort of his dust-crusted beach house one morning, returning nine hours later to a pasha’s lair—marble floors burnished, white brocade flung at every surface, the delicate preen of cinnamon candles chasing twenty years of cigarette smoke.

“Cristo.”

B
ARLOZZO ARRIVES AT
four bells. Unsmiling and at ease with silence, his Tuscan reserve clashes with my piffling chatter and my Donna Reed–twirling about him, patting a cushion where he might sit, telling him how happy we are to have our first visitor, coming at him with a wine glass full of water, which he refuses, saying,
“Acqua fa ruggine,
water makes rust.” Once I’ve exchanged his water for wine, he drains half the glass and, without preamble,
reveals that he was born in this house. “Upstairs in the little room that looks west. Down here is where the animals lived. Dairy cows and a mule slept here,” he says sweeping his hands about our
salotto,
living room, “and the manger was in there, in the space that’s your kitchen.”

This fact enchants me, soothes the earlier jilt I’d felt about its stingy space. Now I think my kitchen is a beatific snug. I’m so sure that Donna Reed never cooked in a manger. “Four generations of Barlozzo men sharecropped Lucci lands. I would have been the fifth but, after the war, everything changed. My father was too sick to work, and so I did odd jobs for the Luccis to earn our keep. I was more valuable to them as a handyman than a farmer. They have eight properties that sit between Piazze and Celle and I just moved from one to the other, patching roofs, building up walls, trying to rescue things from neglect, from the shame the war left behind.”

At ease with silence.
Until he wants to talk. As though he’s been saving stories, his is a soliliquy, an old monk’s soft chanting. He tells us that when his parents passed on he stayed alone here for a few years before he rented a postwar apartment in the new town, a kilometer or so down the road. He was the last person to have lived in this house full-time, its having since been used for storage and sometimes to house the extra hands the Luccis hired during the olive and grape harvests. He hasn’t worked for the Luccis or even set foot in the house for more than thirty years. What he doesn’t say is as eloquent
as his spoken story. He rests between phrases, leaving time for us to listen to the silent parts.

“Would you like to see how it’s been restructured upstairs?” I ask him.

He walks the rooms with us. Barlozzo’s family kitchen was where our bedroom is now. He runs his hand over the new drywall where the fireplace once was. The two other bedrooms were a pantry—
la dispensa,
he calls it—where, from great oak beams, his father set the wine-washed hind legs of his pigs to swing in the cool, dry breezes of a winter and a spring until the haunches shriveled into the sweet, rosy flesh of prosciutto.

“We hung all sorts of things from these beams,” he says, “figs and apples threaded on strings, whole salami, tomatoes and chiles dried on their stems, braids of garlic and onions. There was always a pyramid built up of round, green winter squash, each one piled on the other, stem-side down, and they’d last that way from September til April. The walls were lined with wide board shelves sagging with the weight of peaches and cherries and apricots preserved in jars,
sotto spirito,
under spirits. When things were good, that is.”

Having understood him to say
“Santo Spirito,”
I tell him I’d surely like to have the Holy Ghost’s formula for putting up cherries, and it’s the first time I hear him laugh.

We show him the two bathrooms and he just shakes his head,
mumbling something about how shabbily the Luccis put things together. He talks about claw-foot tubs and exposed brick walls. He laments that the Luccis ignored the mountains of old handmade terra cotta floor tiles that sit in their sheds and cellars all over the valley, opting for the sheen of factory-made ones. The distinctiveness of the old farmhouse has been disgraced.

“È una tristezza,”
he says,
“proprio squallido come lavoro.
It’s a sadness, an absolutely squalid work. The Luccis did everything as cheaply as they could with the state’s allotment.”

Though we don’t understand the meaning of this last sentence, Barlozzo’s facial expression and the bold period he’d placed at its end make it clear this is not the moment to seek further. His cruelly honest take on the house smarts, and yet I share it with him. I remind myself that we didn’t come to Tuscany for a house.

T
HE SUN HAS
gone to wash the other side of the sky and the light is blue over the garden when we go out to sit on the terrace. It’s just past seven and Barlozzo is still in soliloquy mode, talking now about the history of the village. Like all good teachers, he begins with an overview of his subject. “The last of the hill towns on the southern verges of Tuscany as it gives way to Lazio and Umbria, San Casciano is
precisamente,
precisely, 582 meters above sea level, built on the crest of a hill that divides the valleys of the river Paglia and the
river Chiana.” It’s thrilling to be sitting in the midst of what he describes, and I want to tell him this, but so deep is his own captivity in the story that I stay quiet. “Old as Etruria and likely older yet, the village grew up under the Romans. It was the baths, the healing, theraputic waters that sprung from the rich argillaceous soil of the place that attracted the upper-bracket Romans, put the village on the map.” And when the Empire built the Via Cassia—a most grandiose feat of construction that connected Rome with Gaul—San Casciano dei Bagni, San Casciano of the Baths, now more accessible to travelers, became the watering hole of such personages as Horace and Ottaviano Augustus.

“Toward the medieval epoch, baths gave way to wars and invasions between the Guelfs and Ghibellines in all the territories from Siena clear to Orvieto. And so it wasn’t until 1559, when the village entered under the protectorate of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, commanded by Cosimo dei Medici of Florence, that the baths of San Casciano returned to fame, attracting all of crowned Europe and their courts. This royal traffic inspired some of the more ornate constructions in and surrounding the village.” All that history right outside our door. Though I still look at Barlozzo as he proceeds, my mind flits about, needing to rest from his docent’s lessons. It’s enough for now to just imagine that we can bathe in the same warm spring where an Augustus once did.

E
ACH MORNING, WE
walk early, while the sun is still rising. We find the Roman springs, which gurgle up soothing and very warm waters in which we soak our feet or, when we like, much more of us. The still cool air and the hot water are delicious taken together before breakfast. There are few paths among the meadows and moors and so walking becomes a swashbuckling causing my thighs to burn as they did during my first Venetian days among the footbridges. A rogue breeze ripples up every now and then, intruding upon the stillness. Sometimes it becomes a wind, announcing the rain, which soon blows down in sultry sheets against us, the force of it carving tiny rills in the warm earth. We take off our boots, then, and squish in the mud like the two children we never were but can be now.

When we can’t bear to wait for breakfast any longer we move fast as we can through the brush, over the fields, back up to the house, arriving breathless, hearts pounding, bodies sweating out the juicy scents of grass and thyme. I feel as though we are living in a summer camp directed by obliging absentee counselors who look smilingly and from afar upon genteel eroticisms. We bathe and dress and head up to the village.

Within a few days, we are setting rituals. As we pass the baker’s, he, or sometimes his wife, meets us on the road in front of their shop with still-warm cuts of
pizza bianca
wrapped in thick gray paper.
Made from bread dough stretched thin, swathed in olive oil, dusted with sea salt then heaved into the oven beside his bread, it bakes in a minute or two. He pulls it out on his old wooden peel, slashes at it with a thin knife, and sets the thing, peel and all, on a table by the door. The whole village wakes to its perfumes. We devour the pizza, the first course of breakfast, during the thirty-meter trek up to the Centrale. Once installed at the bar, our
cappuccini—caldissimi e con cacao,
very hot and with a sprinkle of bitter chocolate—are set before us, the tray of croissants slid within reach. There will never be a substitute for Pasticceria Maggion’s warm, crisp cornets fat with apricot marmalade with which I’d buttered my hands and chin daily for three years on the Lido. But these will do. And I feel that I will, too. I was mistaken about the adventuress. The mettle, the suppleness. All my parts arrived from Venice to Tuscany, entire. I still savor things. A kiss. A breeze. The trust is still at work here. And just as it happened in Venice, an exciting sense of place rescues me from nostaglia.

Here, right here, along this road where I gather wild fennel stalks, passed the Roman legions. It is the ancient Via Cassia, now Strada Statale Numero 2, and right here beside it, in this field where we’ve made love and drunk our sunset wine, the Romans surely laid fires among the Etrurian stones and cooked their porridge of
farro
and slept a cheerless sleep. We seem to be always in a dazzle. We drive
to Urbino and say, That house is where Rafaello’s mother was born. In Città della Pieve, we say, That church is where Il Perugino worked. We wander about in Spoleto and say, This is the gate at which Hannibal was stayed by the
spoletini
tribes. In the woods just beyond our own garden, we say, That band of Sunday stalkers will take two wild boar this morning, practicing the same rites and rituals of medieval hunters.

In nearly each village and commune and fraction of a
borgo,
there will be one ruin to redeem its humbleness, one fragment of a wall, one painting, one chapel, one grand church, a tower, a castle, a lone and everlasting umbrella pine defending a georgic hill, a half a meter’s worth of a tenth-century fresco still discernable from among the millennia of transformations surrounding it. Preserved, revered, now it is a bit of frostwork ornamenting a pharmacy, a chocolate maker’s kitchen. Passages, imprints, traces that, like us, ache to be touched and never forgotten.

We learn a little each day. We stop along every roadside
frantoio
and taste olive oil until we find one we like enough to fill our twenty-liter spigoted terra-cotta vase, called a
giara.
At the usage rate of one liter a week, the supply will serve until December, when the new oil will be pressed. We haul the oil vase in through the stable door and set it in a dark, cool corner.

This is the land of
Chianti Geografico.
Though the wine here is built from the same grape varietals and with much the same methodology as it is in the Chianti itself, these vines lie outside the designated Chianti regions and must bear a different classification. We set out over the hills, our supply of just-scrubbed and sparkling five-liter bottles clinking about in the trunk, and knock on every vineyard keeper’s door on which there is the invitation
degustazione, vino sfuso,
tasting, barrel wines. We swirl and sip our way through the afternoons and finally settle on one from Palazzone to be our official house red.

From Sergio and several other garden farmers, we shop for each day’s vegetables, herbs, fruit. Our egg supply is secured. We buy bread flour in ten-kilo paper sacks, buckwheat and whole wheat flour in two-kilo sacks from the miller in town. We are still deciding who will become our
macellaio di fiducia,
butcher of confidence, though the tall young man in Piazze who wears a cleaver slung from his Dolce e Gabbana belt appears to be winning us over. There’s a cooperative in Querce al Pino where other necessaries wait. And for help beyond the table, the local
lavanderia
is much more than a laundry. The services include dry cleaning and dressmaking; a fabric shop and a knitting factory sit under the same busy roof. The proprietress also sells her famous cordials and tonics, rustic poteens elicited from a still that often purls along beside the steam presser. Her husband is
the village shoemaker, her son the auto mechanic, her son’s wife the hairdresser, and all their enterprises are neatly clustered about the modest square footage of their yard. Thus we have achieved essential maintenance. This is good. This is how I’d wished it would be.

One morning on our way up to the bar, we catch Barlozzo breakfasting outside the henhouse. We watch as he cracks an egg into his mouth, takes a modest swig from a bottle of red, wipes his mouth with his handkerchief, places the wine back in his sack and is about to head up the hill. We yell to him to wait for us and, once up at the bar, he swallows another wine chaser while we sip
cappuccini.
He tells us all that milk we drink is going to kill us.