A Thousand Days in Tuscany (9 page)

Serve warm or at room temperature. Traditionally, rather than being cut into slices,
schiacciate
are torn and passed around the table, hand to hand.

4
Are You Making a Mattress Stuffed with Rosemary?

The left. Always the left. A reflection of political sentiment in this part of Tuscany and of the hand Barlozzo uses, skillfully as a maestro before his orchestra, to punctuate his speech.

“Siamo un pò rossi qui.
We’re a little red here,” says Barlozzo one evening as we walk up to the bar for
aperitivi.

His reference is to communism. Red politics took root here after the First World War, when the
contadini,
the farmers, came home to Tuscany to less than they had when they left it. The gulf between the haves and the have-nots had grown wider and deeper until poverty was savage as plague. People died of hunger just as though the war still raged. The political factions that sprung from that poverty demanded the right to work and eat, not unlike similar factions were doing in Russia. That’s what being red meant here. Still does.

After the First World War, the state legislated and relegislated, inventing glorious-sounding systems, some of which were even brought to light, functioned, carried relief. But the momentum was too weak, too ill conceived against what remained an essentially medieval serfdom for those who would still work the land. The nobles continued to write contracts with their illiterate farmers declaring that 75, even 80 percent of the yields would be surrendered, the lords knowing full well these portions would keep the farmers hungry. Education for the farmers’ children was forbidden, not only because even the youngest hands could work, but because unstimulated minds insured another generation of servitude. As they’d been doing for seven or eight centuries, in handsome coats cut from rich cloth, riding high in the saddles on their cosseted Crimean hunters, the lords bought more land with their profits. Always more land, without a thought to better tools or the renovation of the houses where their serfs lived with the animals. And so in the short peace that interrupted the two wars, there’d been time only to tinker with reconstruction. But afterward, the leftist factions gathered force.

The nobles remained noble, but local legislation firmly inspired their reform. The farmers’ shares were increased, the more hideous edges of their squalor eased. Too little, too late; many country people were long gone, having taken flight north, feverish for an encounter with an industrialized misery. Wages that could buy food
and pay rent, if barely, seemed a grand benevolence, and they hardly looked back.

Sitting on the stone wall in the piazza, a pitcher of wine nearby, we three have been talking politics through the sunset. The duke brings the subject to the present. “There is always happiness in a new set of problems. And because that’s true, there’s another kind of flight going on right here and now in the village.” Curls of smoke wreathe his blond-white head. “The crusade of
i progressisti.
”

The more clamorous of the two distinct San Cascienesi social sects,
i progressisti,
are chomping to leap into the future, pounding their fists and shrieking
basta,
calling for progress like another round of gin. In voices more wistful, the other sect,
i tradizionalisti,
court the rituals, saying that the only true progress waits a few steps back into the past.

I progressisti
who live in the village want to sell their crumbling red-roofed houses, heaped up along the tiny, winding streets. Fernando and I think these houses—defiant, bewitched in an eternal rakish slant—quite beautiful and wish we could buy one. But the villagers prefer a condominium or an apartment in one of the pink and yellow cement-block palaces that wait in the lower town. No more carrying wood up the stairs and ashes back down the stairs. Just the diligent, passionless flames of a nice gas fire. They’re longing for built-in, plastic-finished closets rather than those cherry-wood
armoires, big and deep as caves. They want stainless-steel sinks rather than some marble tub worn to silk from matriarchal scrubbing; they want great, fake suns swaying from the ceilings instead of the rough, hand-wrought iron lanterns Biagiotti’s grandfather forged for the whole village a hundred years ago.

As for
i progressisti
who still live in the countryside and farm the nobles’ lands, they ache to leave behind their rent-free, meter-thick-walled, freezing-eight-months-of-the-year houses, where once three and four generations of families lived together, each one doing for the others. But there are no more of these epic families. With the old ones dying and the young ones escaping, only the ones too old to escape and too young to die, only they, in that tethered, frozen range, remain.

For some time now there’s been a paycheck every month for working the land, along with a very fair portion of the yields. So
i progressisti
say that surely they’re rich enough to buy their own piece of one of the pink and yellow palaces where their cell phones will have clear signals and where there are more outlets for television sets and fewer windows to wash. But it’s not just this lust for electronic amusement and straight, smooth walls that goads the progressives. The chafe is ancestral.
“È la scoria della mezzadria.
It’s the sludge left from the shareholding system,” Barlozzo is saying as Florì enters the piazza carrying a plate covered with a kitchen towel.

She approaches us, tiptoeing, mouthing
“scusatemi”
as though she’s come late to the second act of
Madame Butterfly.
Barlozzo acknowledges her arrival by rising, taking the plate from her and putting it down on the stone wall beside our wine, kissing her hand, giving her his chair. Hardly missing a beat, he picks up with:

“Ashamed they still sharecrop a nobleman’s fields, ashamed they still pay homage to him, take off their hats to him, they are resigned rather than proud to leave baskets of the best porcini and the fattest truffles by his great polished doors. A paycheck is too thin a gloss to paint over the history of a serf.”

Knowing something wonderful waits under the towel, Fernando uncovers the plate, revealing what looks like a sweet but what turns out to be a round of salty, crusty pecorino bread. He cuts thin, very thin slices of the bread with the small knife Florì placed on the rim of the plate. She has paper napkins in her sweater pocket. Without taking her eyes from the duke, she pulls out the napkins, places one under each slice of bread as Fernando cuts it, passes it to each of us. This quiet diminishing of the bread by Fernando and his even softer distribution of it continues at well-paced intervals.

“I tradizionalisti
shake their heads. Some live in the village, some on the land, but not one of them will go to live in the pink and yellow palaces. They say life was better when it was harder. They say food tasted better laid down over hunger and that there’s nothing
more wonderful than watching every sunrise and every sunset. They say that working to the sweat, eating your share, sleeping a child’s sleep, is what life was meant to be. They say they don’t understand this avid bent to accumulate things you can’t eat or drink or wear or use to keep you warm. They remember when accumulation still meant gathering three sacks of chestnuts instead of two. They say their neighbors have lost the capacity to imagine and to feel—some of them, the capacity to love. They say since we all have everything and we all have nothing, our only task is to keep searching to understand the rhythm of things. Light, dark. The seasons. Live gracefully in plenty and live gracefully in need. Embrace them both or swindle yourself out of half a life. They say that everyone who’s gone to live in the pink and yellow palaces is waiting to die and, in the meantime, they watch one more degenerate television transmission introduced by dancing girls and a man with a bad toupee, calling the experience
leisure.
Ease and plenty seep together to form a single sentiment that comes out looking a good deal like nonchalance. All that ease, all that plenty. What can one expect of them but nonchalance?”

Barlozzo’s word for nonchalance is
sprezzatura.
A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is “the state of effortlessness.” It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.

“Traditionalisti, progressisti. Bah.
Maybe the only thing that matters is to make our lives last as long as we do. You know, to make a life last until it ends, to make all the parts come out even, like when you rub the last piece of bread in the last drop of oil on your plate and eat it with the last sip of wine in your glass,” Florì says.

The duke gets up and walks over to Fernando, on whose shoulders he rests his hands. He looks from me to Florì and back to me again. “You and Florì are two of a kind, Chou. But you’re even more like my mother. Life was hard for her, too.”

“But I don’t think life is hard.”

“Of course not. Not now, anyway. Not with all the ‘adjustments’ you’ve made over time. My mother made similar adjustments. For her, life was too garishly lit, too big and too distant, and so she screwed up her eyelids and shortened the foreground. Like an impressionist painter, she rubbed the juts smooth, created her own diffusion, her own translucence. She saw life as if by the light of a candle. Nearly always she seemed to be wandering about in an elegant sort of defiance. Holding tight to her secrets. Like you do. And she thought everything could be solved with a loaf of bread. Like you do.”

“It’s true, she sees things in her own way.” Fernando tells a story about Erich and me. About a morning I was driving him to school along the Rio Americano highway in Sacramento. We knew every
turn and twist in the road and all the buildings and landmarks along the way, so that one morning when, about a hundred yards ahead, I spotted a new sign, I nudged Erich and said, “Look, honey, a new French bakery.”
Pain,
bread, is what I read in the four bright red letters.

“Mom, that sign says
pain.
Pain, like in hurt. It’s a clinic, mom,” he told me.

Never one to spoil a good story by sticking to the truth, Fernando decorates the events, raising up a hand-slapping between him and the duke. I wait until they’re quieted down and my embarrassment softens a little before I ask Barlozzo, “What do you know about my secrets?”

“If I knew something about them they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? All I can say is that mysterious people usually recognize other mysterious people.”

“So if you recognize that I have secrets, that means you have them, too. Right?” I say.

Florì raises her head, quickly recovering her surprise by reaching for the dish, empty now except for crumbs and the old silver knife.

“Right. And let’s just leave it at that for now.”

“OK. But as for my trying to solve things with bread, well, all I think is that along with everything else there is or isn’t, a good loaf
of bread can’t hurt. Speaking of bread, I’m out of rosemary again. Will you bring some to me?”

“Are you making a mattress stuffed with rosemary? I’ve never known a person so fixed on this damn weed as you are,” he tells me.

“Maybe it’s because I miss the sea.
Rosmarino.
Rose of the sea. The patch up by the old spa is almost as good as the salt-crusted bushes that grow along the Mediterranean.”

“I’ll get you enough rosemary to stuff a dozen mattresses and I’ll happily sit through any number of your exotic suppers. But will you always make me my own personal loaf of normal, daily bread? And will you pour me a glass of wine and put a pitcher of oil on the table? I think it’s time for me to do what Florì does, to practice making the parts come out even, the bread and oil and wine.”

5
Sit the Chicken in a Roasting Pan on a Pretty Bed of Turnips and Potatoes and Onions, Leeks and Carrots . . .

Some mornings we abandon our walks down to the thermal springs and trudge up behind the village to the site of the original
terme,
spa. The very word
spa
is a Latin acronym for
salus per acquum,
health through water. Peeking into the derelict halls where the the Medici once came to soak, we’re wondering if what village intelligence touts is true. A grand reconstruction of the spa by a Florentine corporation would surely change the color of the village, a seduction for the chic and the stressed who would come to be revived by warm waters and kneading hands across their aching backs. The sleepy little village would be awakened, but not necessarily by a handsome prince. I steal a look at my own handsome prince as we walk without talking, each of us wandering
inside his own reverie. But what is this? What is this long, slow shudder in me? Could it be caused by the tizzy of the winds, trying to push away the summer? Is it from the strength of my husband’s hand on my hip as we walk? My face is burning where he held it a moment ago as he kissed me, and I like the taste of him that stays on my mouth and mixes with the tastes of coffee and milk and bread, the grains of undissolved sugar on his lips. Like a good buttery
kuglehopf,
he tastes. How can he do this to me? How can he make me giddy? Maybe it’s not him at all. It’s high blood pressure. Why didn’t I think of that? I’m sure of it. High blood pressure is causing the quiver. Or is it a hormone rushing away, then rushing back again, just for fun? Maybe it is Fernando. I decide it’s him, but it’s horrid not being sure. More horrid is it that this man can just as skillfully send up a shudder in me of a different sort.

I am out in the garden tending to a chicken, fixing it the way Florì told me her mama used to do it for Sunday lunch. I’d done just what she’d said,
sit the chicken in roasting pan on a pretty bed of turnips and potatoes and onions, leeks and carrots . . .

Her directions had stopped there, so I continue on my own. I fill its belly with a handful of garlic, the cloves crushed but not peeled, then rub its bosom to a glisten with olive oil, finally ornamenting it with a thick branch of wild rosemary. After an hour or so in the wood oven, the skin is bronzed and crisp, the juices running out in
little golden streams, and I remove it to a long, deep, heated plate to wait. In the house, I set the roasting pan over a quick flame, scraping the bits of caramelized vegetables and the drippings that cling to the pan, blessing it all with splashes of white wine, finally transforming the juices into a sauce that tastes like Saturday night as much as Sunday noon. I lay trenchers of bread in the sauce, leaving them to soak in it for a few moments while I heat a half cup of
vin santo,
throw in a handful of fat
zibibbi,
raisins from the island of Pantelleria off Sicily. Wild lettuces, all washed and dried and tucked in a kitchen towel, are ready in the refrigerator. I open a sauvignon blanc from Castello della Sala and set it in an ice bucket.