A Thousand Days in Tuscany (6 page)

Dispensing with invitations and acceptances, Barlozzo simply takes on the habit of visiting each afternoon at four. And we take on the habit of waiting for him. Between us, Fernando and I call him
il duca,
the duke, yet we never use that name with him directly. But in his honor, we’ve christened the house Palazzo Barlozzo, and each time we call it that, his face ruddies like a boy’s. I’m never sure if it’s in pleasure or discomfort.

Barlozzo and Fernando are easy together, as one might expect Gary Cooper and Peter Sellers to be easy together. Barlozzo instructs Fernando on how to care for the olive seedlings he’d planted a few months earlier when we’d first decided to rent the house. They discuss a vegetable plot, but Barlozzo says most of the land assigned
to the house slopes down toward the sheepfolds and that the patch that was his mother’s kitchen garden is where the Luccis put up the ugly cement-block structure they refer to as “the barn.” He says what’s left of the garden is just too small to do much other than plant some flowers. But when Fernando tells him I’ve been begging him to construct a wood-burning oven out there, Barlozzo, the thin set of his Tuscan lips taking on a slight upward pitch, says, “I’ll take you to see a friend of mine in Ponticelli. He’ll cast the
canna fumaria e la volta,
the chimney and the vault. And there’s plenty of old brick around that we can use to line the oven chamber and to build up a hearth wall all around it. We’ll use clay and sand to insulate and . . .”

He proceeds, touched, I think, by the fascination he’s causing in Fernando’s eyes. Has my husband found a hero? Like two nine-year-olds, as nine-year-olds once were, they call for paper and pens and sit cross-legged on the floor scratching out primitive designs not so different from the ones an Egyptian might have drawn for the first ovens a few thousand years ago.

We tell Barlozzo about our hunts for communal ovens all over the north of Italy when I was researching my first cookbook. Our favorites were the communal ovens in some of the smaller villages of the Friuli, ovens that are still lit at midnight each Friday with vine cuttings and huge oak logs so the Saturday bake can begin at dawn. We tell him about the official
maestro del forno,
the oven master, a man
whose social and political position is second only to the mayor. The oven master maintains the oven and schedules the baking times, which begin at sunrise and end just before supper. Each household has its own crest of sorts to identify its bread—a rough cross, or some configuration of hearts or arrows slashed into the risen loaves just before they’re slid onto the oven floor. And then, so as not to squander the waning heat after the last bake, people arrive toting terra-cotta dishes and iron pots full of vegetables and herbs bathed in wine, a leg of lamb, once in a while, or hefts of pork with small violet-skinned onions and rough-cut stalks of wild fennel to braise in the embers all through the night and then to rest awhile in the spent oven, breathing in the lingering aromas of wood smoke. On Sunday morning before mass, the older children in each family come to fetch Sunday’s lunch, some of them wrapping their prizes in linen, carting them to church for a priest’s blessing.

Now the upward pitch of the Tuscan mouth has nearly reached into a smile, so I ask Barlozzo about the communal oven in San Casciano. “Actually, there were two village ovens once. One of them was in the meadow, which is now the soccer field, and the other is still sitting behind the tractor repair shop on the road to Celle. But there hasn’t been a communal oven in use since before the second great war. And the smaller ovens most of us built in our yards are mostly squirrel dens now, or pigeon nests, or rests for tools and
flowerpots,” he says, as though he can’t quite recall why or when that became so.

Barlozzo suggests that we three work on the oven every morning, beginning at ten, breaking at one for lunch and avoiding the afternoon heat. This is good, because it’s exploration we want to do in the early mornings. But I suspect Barlozzo already knows this and thus has set the plan to accomodate us.

As we work one morning, I ask him why this can’t be the new communal oven, why we can’t fire it up on Saturday mornings and invite the San Cascianesi to bake their bread. “Because the San Cascianesi don’t bake their bread. No one bakes bread anymore. Neither inside the house nor outside. Almost no one. We’ve got two perfectly fine village bakers who keep us supplied. People just have other things to do these days. All that’s part of the past,” he says.

This sounds like a reprise of Fernando’s early tirades in our Venice kitchen when I wanted to bake bread or roll out my own pasta or construct some six-storied confection slathered in butter creams. He’d tried to cool my desires with the same arguments, saying that no one bakes bread or desserts or makes pasta at home. Even grandmothers and maiden aunts queue in the shops, then sit in the cafés with their
cappucini
all morning, he’d assured me back then. Was that the same man who, now, can’t wait to get his hands into the bread dough?

“And so why are you helping us with this oven if all this is only ‘part of the past’?” I want to know.

“I’m helping because you need help,” he says. “Because from everything I’m learning about you two, it appears that what you want most is the ‘past.’ I’m hoping all this isn’t just some folkloric interlude for you two. I’m hoping you’ve got your feet securely on the ground. What I mean is, you’ve come here from another life and yet you seem to expect to step into this one just as it used to be in the nineteenth century. As though it were waiting for you, as though it were Utopia. Or worse, as though it were Sybaris. Well, there is no Utopia here, never has been. And you must know what happened to Sybaris? The past here was sometimes brutal and tragic, just like the present can be.”

The swiftness of his exit leaves a chill behind in the burning light of noon.

I am startled neither that the old duke knows Greek history nor that he would finally get round to digging into our souls. He cuts off all receiving channels, except to bid us
“buon pranzo,
good lunch” over his shoulder as he takes the shortcut through the back meadow up toward town. Barlozzo’s questions were both oblique and semantic. He can be sharp as a scimitar, even though I don’t believe he means to cut. We watch him for a while and then look at each other, both of us a bit mystified. We’ve trespassed upon Barlozzo. Though it’s
been he who has pursued us in his often vulpine manner, he who loves to talk and preach, to plumb his history before such a new and eager audience as we are, he will not suffer our sidling up too close to him or upon his memories. Barlozzo is a man with boundaries, confines unsusceptible to our pressing for even the smallest part of him that lies beyond them.

T
HOUGH DISAPPOINTED, NEITHER
of us is surprised at 4:00 when no knock sounds on the stable door. Fernando says the duke is staying away for the sake of showmanship—
un colpo di teatro,
a theatrical move. We pretend not to notice when the afternoon becomes evening without sign from him. A long time to keep his audience waiting, I think. We’re out on the terrace, changing our shoes and just about to start up to the bar for apperitivi, when the duke rounds the back of the stable.

“Avete benzina per la machina?
Do you have gas in your car?”

“Certo,”
Fernando tells him.
“Ma, perchè?
But why?”

“Because I’m inviting you out to supper.”

We drive south through the nearby villages of Piazze and Palaz-zone. Twenty minutes later, Barlozzo, navigating from the backseat, says
“eccoci qua”
as we round a curve on which sits a curious structure.

Half hut, half rambling shed, its haphazardness is surrounded by
grand magnolia bushes whose shiny leaves are strung with many-colored lights, their winking and shimmering making the only noise in the dark, silent night. Tomatoes and garlic are moving about together over some nearby quiet flame and the scents curl up to and mingle with the char of slow-burning wood. Leaving the car on the edge of a ditch and alongside a truck that Barlozzo says belongs to the cook, we push our way inside the place through a curtain of red plastic beads.

Pinball machines, wine casks, a small bar, and the strangled air of fifty thousand smoked cigarettes fill the first room. There is no one about. A second red bead curtain leads to a larger room set with long refectory tables, each one covered in a different pattern of oilcloth. Announcing himself with
“permesso,”
Barlozzo walks through a small door at the end of the room, letting loose the steamy breath of a good kitchen. He motions us to follow.

Slowly, rhythmically rolling a sheet of pasta on a thick wooden table is the truck-driving cook—a petite woman of perhaps seventy, her violently red hair pinned up under a white paper cap. She is called Pupa, Doll.

We are interrupting the final scene of
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
which creaks out from a wall-hung television set. As though he were at mass, Barlozzo seems to know to wait for the film’s finish before speaking and so we stand, equally hushed, behind him. As Clint
lopes out into the Maremma, Pupa—never once having broken her rolling stride—turns only her head to us and, rolling still, bids us good evening. “C’
è solo una porzione di pollo con i peperoni, pappa al pomodoro, cicoria da saltare, e la panzanella. Come carne c’è bistecca di vitella e agnello impanato da friggere.
There’s only one portion of chicken with peppers, there’s tomato porridge, chickory to sauté, and bread salad,” she tells us without being asked what’s for supper.

“
E la pasta?
And the pasta?” Barlozzo wants to know, nodding toward the thin yellow sheet she’s been rolling.

“
Eh, no. Questa è per domani, per il pranzo di Benedetto.
No, this is for tomorrow, for Benedetto’s lunch,” she tells him, slowly unfolding her torso from the rolling posture.

“We’ll take a little of everything, then,” he tells her, and realizing he’d forgotten us, he says,
“Scusatemi, siete i nuovi inquilini di Lucci.
Excuse me, they are the Luccis’ new tenants.”

Back out in the dining room, we wander about looking at the wall art—a serious collection of
Daredevil
comics covers, each one framed in bright blue enamel—while Barlozzo fills a ceramic pitcher from the spigot on a barrel of red and pours it into tumblers.

“Aspetta, aspetta, faccio io,”
says a voice from the other side of the red beads. It belongs to a young man of twenty or so who seems to have sprung from somewhere beyond the magnolia bushes, engulfed in Armani, jet hair gelled into curly Caesar bangs and giving up the
scent of limes. Barlozzo introduces him as Giangiacomo, grandson of Pupa, and official waiter.

He shakes our hands, welcomes us, gives Barlozzo a three-kiss greeting, seats us, pours wine, tells us the lamb is divine, and all of a sudden, here in the Tuscan wilderness, we could be tucked in at Spago. Even though this is a trattoria without a menu, a place where one dines on whatever it is grandmother has cooked that day, Giangiacomo insists on taking orders, writing them down scrupulously in a slow, labored hand, recounting each person’s wishes aloud several times, then racing off to the kitchen, carrying the news like hot coals.

“He wants to be a waiter in Rome and he’s practicing here for a while before heading off to find his way,” says Barlozzo, as though waiting tables in Rome were the same as selling postcards in Sodom. Barlozzo tells us that hunters bring their quarry here for Pupa to clean and hang and then cook for them. One of the hunters is her
amoroso,
boyfriend, and during the season, he calls her on his
tele-fonino
from his truck each morning to give her a report on his bird pursuit. According to Barlozzo, Pupa says it’s
carina,
sweet, when he calls her from the road. She says she gets dressed, fixes her hair, sprays herself with perfume, and waits for the phone to ring. Then again, Pupa is always in a twitter over something. Anyway, she and her
amoroso
settle on a point of rendezvous and she drives to meet
him so he can hand over his bag of birds, which she’ll cook for lunch, and so she can pass him a pair of
panini
stuffed with mortadella, an eight o’clock snack before he gets to work in his garden.

“During hunting season, there are more wild hare and boar and deer, pheasant, woodcock, thrush inside her kitchen than are left in the woods. All the hunters bring their booty here and then take turns ordering big feasts for their family and friends, for each other, but it’s always Pupa who does the cooking. This is the sort of place where one can phone in the morning and order a fried rabbit and a dish of stewed beans for his supper,” Barlozzo says as though it’s his own habit he’s talking about.

“When a man finds himself alone, through death or some other interference, he simply joins the ranks here at lunch and supper. Even the widows come, but mostly they stay in the kitchen helping Pupa before they all eat together and watch
Beautiful.
Then they walk in the hills, gathering wild grasses for salad and telling their own stories. Until it’s time to start cooking again,” he says.

Barlozzo is proprietary, as if we are sitting at his own table. There is a great wedge of bread, which he tears at, passing crusty chunks of it to us before serving himself. This is how I’ve always served bread at my table, but it’s the first time anyone has ever served it to me this way. We begin with that last portion of chicken with red peppers, which, once Giangiacomo sets it on the table, he spritzes with a few
drops of the same white wine in which it was braised. There are just two or three lush bites for each of us. Now Giangiacomo brings out a bowl of bread salad. It’s a wonderful Bordeaux color, very different from the usual look of
panzanella.
Here, lost bread, rather than being moistened in water, has been doused with red wine, then mixed with chopped tomatoes, shreds of cucumber and tiny green onion, whole leaves of basil, tossed about with oil, and set to rest while each perfect element becomes acquainted with the others. There are small dishes of fresh tomato soup, thick with more bread and gratings of sharp pecorino, before a platter of the thinnest lamb chops, breaded and fried, is served with leaves of wild lettuces. There are charcoaled veal steaks set down with wedges of lemon, a bottle of oil, a pepper grinder, a dish of sea salt. Pupa herself rushes out with an oval copper pan of bitter greens sauteed with garlic and chile.