Bella Tuscany (10 page)

But no, the gondoliers don't look like Charons on the River Styx. Instead, they walk the water, miraculously. The shape of the gondola shares more with the treble clef than with a coffin. The death connection is preconditioning, received knowledge, not experienced knowledge. This water is too glorious, a swabbed silver light streaking rose-gold, tesselate and far, far from death. But now I understand why Shelley, Mann, McCarthy, Ruskin, travel articles, films—all the ways I pre-experienced Venice—never got to the Venice I sensed under my skin.
Death
is what they called the mystery of Venice's allure. For me, they had it backwards. For
birth
we cross through the waters.

From a distance, the gondoliers appear as somnambulists, the black silhouettes of the gondolas propelled across the waters of the unconscious by dreams.

 

In the early evening, I'm still reflecting. We're having a glass of wine at a bar right on the Grand Canal. Is it always shimmering and clear? Probably it smells like garbage in August. The waiter is solicitous, friendly. “How can they stay nice when they have to put up with so many tourists?” The American at the next table has banged his glass to get the waiter's attention. His friends are pretending they're going to push each other's chairs into the water. And they're adults.

“Tourists are how they live. They're used to us. Imagine what it's like in July, with crud bobbing in the canals. We'd all be in a mob, sweltering, and oozing garlic sweat.”

Since it's April, the throngs have not yet arrived, but enough of the world's masses are here to make me want to avoid the main sights. They're often the unappealing kind of tourists in caps and shorts, trailing McDonald's junk behind them. I cross my arms and look sullenly at my neighbors, who are having a fine time.

When I turn my chair so that I can face the water directly and watch the gondolas pass, I observe the oddest thing: The faces of the tourists who are being ferried by the
palazzi,
the Ca'd'Oro, the lacy Gothic windows, landings lapped with moss, and the umber and old rose facades reflecting and lifting and breaking in the brushed blue water, the faces have gone blank. Their edges soften. Their eyes are full of beauty and the limpid light is on them. They are changed by what is seeing them. They step out of the gondolas like new beings.

 

All the restaurants we choose are in remote neighborhoods. We get lost and found over and over. After dinner, almost midnight, the
calli
fall silent; our footsteps echo and we find ourselves whispering. Sleeping cats on windowsills and doorsteps don't even look up. Back at the hotel, the desk clerk tells us about Padania, the separatist group dedicated to seceding from Italy. Today they've hijacked a ferry—although they paid the fare!—and loaded a panel truck painted to look like an armored vehicle. They drove across Piazza San Marco, waving guns. They were shortly arrested. “
Carnevale
. They think it's carnival time,” he shrugs. Around four, we awake to the sound of “Hut,
uno, due, tre, quattro,
” and rhythmic marching. We look out onto the
campo
and see about twenty Padania men in black, goose-stepping around—surreal flashback to the Fascist thirties. They look well-trained to me but Ed says it doesn't take much talent to goose-step. “I was dreaming,” Ed remembers, “of ice skating down the Grand Canal, doing figure eights in Piazza San Marco then I was gliding backwards underneath bridges I had to duck under.”

“What do you suppose that means?”

He's falling asleep again. “Venice on ice. Iced Venus. Venus and Venice. Us in Venice.”

Now I can't sleep so I read about Lord Byron's wild liaisons with Venetian women, his afternoons of study on the island of San Lazzaro, where Armenian scholars still live, and his swims from the Lido to the end of the Grand Canal. Ed has a talent for sleep. When his head touches the pillow, he's gone. I wonder if Lord Byron's back was as sexy as Ed's, if his luminous skin was as healthy and alive to the adoring wife of some Venetian merchant. Way back
in the prenatal abyss
—Byron's actual body in the cold; he shakes water from his eyes and sees the
palazzi
at sunrise, his lame leg trying to work against the tide.
Almost, I can feel the current rush and the strain in his muscles
. Impossible to read—my eyes are still printed with Venice and the wattage of the bedside lamp rivals a nightlight. Nothing is harder to hold than the reality of the past. My daughter's lost red pocketbook full of treasures. My book slides to the floor but Ed doesn't move. Briefly, I contemplate diving into a canal myself. Although I probably would have to have my stomach pumped, it would be something to add to my résumé.

Deeper into the Country

BATS ARE BACK, SWOOPING ERRATICALLY ABOVE
us. They don't seem to fly but to scatter like dark confetti in gusty wind. I used to be afraid one would land in my hair, but after hundreds of dinners under their flight path, I trust their echolocation. I remember seeing an
x-ray of a bat in anatomy class. The bones look like a homunculus hidden inside the leathery body. D. H. Lawrence described a bat as “a black glove thrown up at the light, / and falling back,” and its wings “like bits of umbrella,” but I can imagine only the rudimentary trapped human, fated to eat its weight in bugs. Since they share Bramasole with us, somehow folding themselves into cracks between stucco and stone, they now seem like friendly presences.

They may be excited at the energy emanating from a bowl of fava beans and a board holding a wedge of
pecorino
on the top of the wall, our convenient sideboard. If not, they are the only creatures in the Arezzo province not sharing this Tuscan mania.

To start or to finish dinner each night, we are fated to eat
fave
.

Anselmo's crop, as predicted, overwhelms us. We give bags of the tender young things to neighbors, friends, anyone who will take them. The local ritual of
pecorino
and
fave
is one of the most loved combinations in Tuscan food. Served as lunch in itself, or an
antipasto,
or in place of dessert, this sacred marriage exists for a short, intense season. The
pecorino
of choice is fresh; these two spring arrivals go naturally together.

Tonight's
pecorino
is special, thanks to our friend Vittorio. He grew up in Cortona and works for a vineyard now, after several years of working in Rome, commuting the long distance so he could continue to live the way he wants. He stops by the house after gathering
funghi porcini
in the mountains. When we're in town, we leave a bag of
fave
on his doorknob. He is president of the local chapter of Slow Food, an international organization devoted to preserving traditional cuisines and dedicated to pure methods of growing and preparing food and wine. Slow Food—as opposed to fast food. Naturally, we have joined. Local meetings consist of eight-course dinners with ten or twelve wines from a particular region. A club after my own heart. At the time of our “meetings,” other chapters around Italy are meeting, too, and at the end of the evening votes are cast, phoned in, and the best wines are elected.

Late in the afternoon, Vittorio took us far into the hills to meet a friend of his family, a farmer whose name, to our astonishment, is Achille. We waited for him to come in from milking. Outside the farmhouse, a metal bathtub under a cold water faucet was positioned for a perfect view of Cortona in the distance, with orchards sloping down his hills. Half an olive oil can nailed sideways to the wall held soap and a brush. Around the courtyard stood benches made from hollowed-out logs. Achille, around seventy years old, came in carrying a bucket of ewe's milk and a rake, the rake's handle a straight limb smooth from use, the tines strong sticks carved and set into a piece of branch, all finished neatly. He'd
made
his rake. Such a beautiful thing and a symbol of his individuality; rakes don't cost much and he prefers to make his own. Achille is a compact man, grave and slow. His remote tortoise eyes seemed to take the measure of us quickly. Every day he has lived in the sun has added a wrinkle to his face so that now he is completely furrowed and tanned to the color of an old baseball glove. We followed him into a room next to a stall with calves closed inside. His cheeses lined four hanging shelves. Ed noticed jagged tin rounds at intervals along the ropes. Achille smiled quietly and nodded. The
topi,
mice, can't crawl around the tin and eat the cheese.

Grass floated on top of the milk. He took a wad of cotton and covered the mesh of a sieve, then poured the milk through. He took a jug of what must be rennet and splashed in some. I wanted to ask questions but he did not seem cut out for casual conversation. The room smelled like nowhere I've ever been, a powerful, primitive lacteal ripening. Forget European Union rules of pasteurization, this is cheese as it has been made through the eons. He asked us to select a cheese, one with no cracks in the outer layer. He rotated the cheese, looking at me intently (I'm probably as exotic to him as he is to me) and said we should turn it every day. “Why?” I ventured, although I assumed the ingredients were not yet stable and continued to need mixing. No reply, but he almost smiled. The straw-colored two-pound round looked like a little moon. He wrapped it carefully in foil.

Achille's wife came in with another bucket. She wore boots and a housedress, and like her husband, was deeply sunbaked. They are extremely quiet, I think shy, probably from years of isolation. Right away, she started another batch. She has a wood stove in the courtyard for cooking in hot weather. A battered pasta pot on top attests to frequent use. I imagine her in the evening, after all the chores, bathing in that tub, nothing but silence all around her.

 

Young
fave
do not have to be peeled, just shelled at the table and enjoyed with the
pecorino
. Achille's cheese is smooth and tangy, without the barnyard taste many fresh
pecorini
seem to impart. Ed cuts another piece. I notice he has eaten a quarter of the yellow moon. We walk up on the terraces after dinner, carrying a last glass of wine. The zucchini are starting to bloom. Those audacious flowers deserve a van Gogh or Nolde to capture their melted gold. We linger at the tomatoes, figuring how long until we're coming up with baskets to pull them from the vines. Ed rubs a leaf on his fingers and lets me smell the promise of ripe tomatoes. The chard, more chard than I can imagine for risotto, is ready. We stop at the patch of
fave
. We hardly have made a dent. Something tells me I won't want to see a fava bean for years after this spring.

 

I'm spending the afternoon with Vittorio, roaming around the countryside in his car with all the windows down. Ed is taking a day for writing. We stop to visit a farmer who lives in a house built in the 1400s and still is owned by a count of the same family, whose villa is down the road. Tommaso is delighted to see Vittorio, who grew up nearby and used to play in the hay barn. He shows us an old painted cart still stored there. These places sequestered from time never become familiar; visiting, we drop behind the years, into a way of life we've imagined but never known.

When I ask about the chapel at the back of the house, Tommaso casually tells us that it has been closed since Napoleon passed by, as though he were saying it's been closed since Wednesday. “Before,” he says, “pilgrims used to stop for three days; the count gave them food and lodging.” The way he talks, we think it could be the current count, could be his own extra rooms involved.

Tentatively, I ask if we could see the inside of the chapel. He leads us through his house. I glimpse bare rooms where he and his brother live: iron beds, chests, yellowed crochet-edged linen curtains, remnants of a sister or wife, and a few photographs on the wall. No TV, no technology at all, not even a radio in sight. Austere as monk cells and utterly clean. We're winding around medieval corridors with no light. Tommaso's steps are secure. We follow blindly and finally he turns a key with a loud ka-lunk, ka-lunk and pushes open the door. The first thing I see is a copper bathtub, then some farm equipment and barrels. As my eyes adjust to the gray light falling from a single high round window, I make out frescoes of a saint and of the Madonna. A glaring blank space shows where a painting was removed. “It's down at the church now. Stop and the priest will show you San Filippio, who used to live happily here.” The chapel is oddly elaborate for a farmhouse of this type. Maybe the count wanted the sweaty pilgrims to stop somewhere well away from his own enclosed park.

Tommaso takes us to the kitchen and pours glasses of
vin santo,
the drink of hospitality in all farms. I've had
vin santo,
which tastes something like sherry, at all hours of the day in various houses. He props himself inside the walk-in fireplace in a chair and he and Vittorio reminisce about telling stories around the fire years ago. Tommaso is the opposite of the solemn Achille. He's lived his life without much of a cruising radius, too, but he's a talker, a storyteller. He stretches out his legs, mimicking how in old times the
contadini
used to toast themselves in winter, while staying close enough to stir the polenta. Looking around the kitchen I see no sign of heat, so I expect they still have this ancestral habit on January nights.

Tommaso shows us his Val di Chiana cows, those white beasts who turn into the famous Florentine beefsteak, grilled with rosemary. He has four grown ones and three calves, who fix great dark eyes at us and stare. Around their necks he has tied red ribbons to protect them from the evil eye. I always wondered why the steak highlights Tuscan menus yet you never see these creatures in fields. They're raised indoors, babied and petted but cruelly chained to the manger. They are immense, growing to three times the size of a normal cow.

Next to the house an enclosed and overgrown flower garden again attests to a long-lost feminine presence. The old roses trained on iron poles still bloom profusely. The yellow rambler with tiny blooms has spilled from its pole and crawled to a fence where it swoops and spreads recklessly.

I'm following warily because of the roaming ducks and chickens. My old bird phobia is a liability not only in
piazze
full of pigeons. If Tommaso suspects that I'm afraid of a chicken, he will think I am nuts. Two white turkeys peck the ground near the barn. They are the ugliest birds on earth.

We drive past the count's villa, a melancholy shuttered place surrounded by chestnut trees, and stop at the church. Stanislao, the Pole who helped build our long stone wall when we first bought Bramasole, and his wife Reina, live with the priest of this parish, Don Fabio. She cooks and takes care of the house and church. Stanislao works as a mason but does odd jobs for the church property on weekends. Some Saturdays when Stanislao works with Ed at our house, she comes to help me in the garden. Tiny and wiry, she has tremendous energy. The priest is teaching two children their catechism in the garden. Reina takes us in, pausing to show us Don Fabio's study. It could be the study in the paintings of Saint Jerome. An open window throws dusky light onto a desk stacked with leather books, some open, some turned face down. All we need is Saint Jerome's attribute, the sleeping lion. In a corridor we see the dim painting that used to hang in Tommaso's chapel. On a side wall in the church, snapshots of all parishioners who have died are arranged in rows. Vittorio finds many familiar faces from his childhood. We leave Reina to her ironing of the altar linen, leave Don Fabio to his two red-haired charges in the garden.

 

Growing up in a small town, I felt the tight bit in my mouth. I couldn't wait to leave. The pull of cities was strong. I remember, however, a slight pull, too, toward life far in the country.

My boyfriend's grandmother, Mimo, lived near Mystic, a crossroads out in tobacco and cotton country. A porch ran the length of her two-storey house. Her pie safe always was full of lemon and coconut meringue pies. In plain bedrooms her quilts lay folded at the foot of each bed. The porch faced the fields and she sat there in the afternoons shelling butter beans. Occasionally, she picked up a wooden-handled church fan printed with a picture of Jesus and fanned away the flies. I sat in the swing reading
Anna Karenina
. In this memory, I am somehow missing the boyfriend altogether. Through stirred-up field dust, the sunset sky turned lurid and splendid, popsicle orange and grape, with sprays of gold, and cheap-underwear pink. After the wobbling gold blob of sunset, the air over the tobacco turned blue, as though over a lake. We were the solemn witnesses. It could have been Doomsday every afternoon. After that Mimo would go fix herself a tall gin and tonic.

In his book I once loved,
The Mind of the South,
W. J. Cash observed that this air is responsible for Southerners' romanticism—they see through a haze and consequently have a hard time distinguishing reality. Mimo's life appealed to me. She roared in her Buick across rutted roads through crops to check on workers. Long a widow, she ran the farm, put up preserves, birthed calves, quilted and cooked, and always kicked open the screen door when we arrived, throwing open her arms.

Rediscovering deep country life, I wonder now what it would be like to live like Achille and Tommaso. For years I would have thought
What a waste
. I was interested in the dramatic life—maybe someone would throw himself under a train for
me
. I was pretty sure I never would be called on for something that rash.

Now I feel the lure of country dawns, sunsets, the satisfaction of living in a green kingdom of one's own. I feel as well a growing distrust of spending too much of one's life deifying work. Finding that running balance among ambition, solitude, stimulation, adventure—how to do this? I heard Ramsey Clark, then Attorney General, speak when I was in college. All I remember him saying was something like, “When I die, I want to be so exhausted that you can throw me on the scrap heap.” He wanted to be totally consumed by his life. I was impressed and adopted that as my philosophy, too. As a writer, I also had an inclination toward meditation and reclusiveness, and so have maintained for most of my life a decent balance. The last few years have pulled me too much in the exterior direction. After devoting five years to chairing my department at the university, I resigned from the hot seat and went back to teaching. I saw how a few months later hardly anyone remembered what I thought of as vast changes, how instantaneously time slid over my absence. I was left with the private satisfaction of a job well done. Considering time, stress, and pure hassle, private satisfaction did not seem like enough. I had wanted to rethink the department from the bottom up and was willing to write endless memos, reports, evaluations, and to straggle home at 8
P.M
. What is replenishing? What is depleting? What takes? What gives? What wrings you out and, truly, what rinses you with happiness? What comes from my own labor and creativity, regardless of what anyone else thinks of it, stays close to the natural joy we all were born with and carry always. Mystic, Georgia, was not for me. I would have been hell on wheels by thirty. Oddly, oddly, I probably could live a happy, sensuous life there now. Is the sun still blistering the paint on Mimo's house? Do the fields shimmer in the blue heat? Hey, Tommaso, Achille, do you want to die so exhausted you're just ready to be tossed away?
That American, have you ever known a woman afraid of a chicken?