A Thousand Days in Tuscany (10 page)

Monet would have loved the terrace table, bejeweled as it is with a jugful of poppies and lavender, candles set in old ships’ lanterns against sultry nine-o’-clock winds. I call for Fernando, who is upstairs somewhere. I lay the cool lettuces on a serving plate, drizzle them with more of the sauce, lay the soaked bread on top, strew the warm, winey raisins over the bread and, finally, set the chicken atop the whole creation. I’m starving.

I call up from the bottom of the stairs. “Fernando.
La cena è pronta,
supper is ready.”

I pour the wine, stand there on the terrace sipping it, a hand resting on a hip, looking out at the end of the day. Still, no Fernando. I walk out into the garden and call up to the open windows.

“Fernando, will you come down to supper with me?”

Someone who is not Fernando pokes his head out a guest-room window. Even in the dark I recognize him. Perhaps it’s more that I
sense
the presence of my old friend, Mr. Quicksilver. The Heaving Breast that inhabited my husband so freely in Venice has found our Tuscan hideaway.

“Non ho fame.”

Quicksilver was never hungry. “But why don’t you just come to keep me company? The chicken looks wonderful. At least have a glass of wine, a piece of bread. Come and talk to me.” I try all the buttons that have worked in the past, but none of them yields.

Master of the dramatic, he gives tension time to build for a few minutes before I hear him schlumping down the stairs. I take a long gulp of wine. One look at him and I see he is a janissary gone to war with his stars. He begins by announcing that his leaving the bank hasn’t provided the great washes of peace he’d searched for. He grieves his losses: no security, no position, no title. “There’s this hollow place where I thought serenity would be,” he says.

I want to tell him that serenity is not geographically dependent, that if he didn’t feel serene in Venice, how could he expect to feel serene in Tuscany. Instead, I say nothing. I only look at him in quiet wonder, glorious images from these past weeks and months fluttering through my mind. He tells me he feels robbed. He speaks this
indictment while standing very close to me. “And am I the thief?” I want to know. Now, I’m on my feet, too.

“Yes, of course you are. It was you who made it seem possible,” he says.

“It was you who made me believe that I could grow to be someone else besides good old Fernando,” he says, all ready for the tender mercies he knows are coming.

“Good old Fernando is the most beautiful man I’ve ever known. Don’t leave him behind. Take him with you and be patient. Instead of worrying about who’s robbing you of what, worry about how you thieve yourself. You rob time, Fernando. How arrogant you are, taking an evening like this one as though it were some sour cherry, spitting half its flesh into the dirt. Every time you pitch yourself back into the past, you lose time. Have you so much of it to spare, my love?”

Did he expect some Turkish fairy to rake a path for him through the Tuscan forest? Wasn’t it his general weariness of being the follower that caused his flight? Fernando cannot, it seems, sustain any emotion, save melancholy. I know this melancholy is an appeal for consolation, yet my ready sympathies are weak against it. His is a peace built up on sticks. The smallest sparring of his visceral forces shatters the falseness of it. Like a seabird’s nest riding a wave, it drowns in bitter waters. “Why will you always insist that you’re
falling off the edge of the world? Haven’t you heard? The earth is round, so when you feel yourself falling, tuck and roll and get up again just like all the rest of us have to do.” I’m shouting now.

Still he’s not hearing me. I pull out André Gide and read, “If one desires to discover new lands, one must consent to stay a very long time at sea.”

He says that’s rot, yells that’s where he’s been all his life, at sea. And now he’s further out at sea.

“And do you want me to take on the blame for this, when it was you who resigned from your job without even discussing it with me, when it was you who couldn’t wait to sell the house and
begin to be a beginner.
Would it just be simpler for you to forget those truths and let me indulge your coltish whinnying? Is that what it costs to be your wife? I don’t know if I can pay. I don’t know if I want to pay.”

I notice that I am speaking these things in pure, hot Italian. And with a fresh, biting eloquence. I am Anna Magnani
and
Sofia Loren. I am stunned as I watch from some safe place inside me while this other woman who is me bites the side of her hand, stamps her feet, tosses her hair. Is that really me screaming oaths? There is some sense of exhilaration in spewing out three years, a hundred years of swallowed thorns. Yes, it’s me. Tiny me who just cries when things hurt or smiles, saying something profound and soothing to whomever
might be near. I needed another language to release me from my own repression, my good-girl self-censoring. I walk away.

I walk right out the door. It’s past ten. The night is still moonless and I’m still hungry. I wish I’d taken the chicken. Though it’s hot, I shiver like November inside my dress with the orange and pink roses. I’m hungry and my dress is so thin. I’m not certain why these two facts seem related. At first I head up toward Celle, but change my mind and take a sharp left down the steep, sandy path toward one of the thermal springs. In the darkness, I slide and stumble without my boots. I sit for a while on a rock ledge and feel the tears start but I’m just too angry to let them fall. I use the tufts of dried wild flowers on either side of the path to foist myself back up the sheer side of the hill. I notice how fragile the flowers are, yet I trust them to hold me. I don’t have a license to drive in Italy. I have my strong legs, my sandals with the thongs that rub and hurt between my toes. I’ve forgotten to take my purse. But there’s not much money in it anyway. Talk about losses. I feel inside the pocket of my dress and take out a 5,000-lire note. Whatever it is I’ll be doing next, this will have to fund it. My steps are fast and heavy as I head down Route 321 toward Piazze. Six kilometers of starlit country road. Saturday night in Tuscany.

Save the few passing cars, I meet only a young gray fox on the way. I walk fast as though I’m heading someplace, but there is no
place to go. I know where Barlozzo lives and where Floriana lives, too, but this is not the sort of village where one drops in anywhere at 10:30 on a Saturday night unless stalked by a bear. Except at the bar, that is. I know that’s the first place Fernando will look for me, so I’ve headed in the opposite direction.

Piazze is even smaller than San Casciano, the whole village beginning and ending on a single curve in the road. But there’s an
osteria
and as I walk by it I can see the tables full of people still at supper. I walk inside and up to the bar, order an espresso, and try to begin some inane conversation with the
padrona,
but she’s all alone to serve and clear and probably cook, too, so she just smiles a
buona serata.
Good evening. Too late for that, I think, as I walk back out onto the road. And then I see the dark blue BMW prowling. I know he’s worried. He hasn’t seen me yet and I could choose to play with him but I don’t. Suddenly, I miss him. I know how hard all this is. I know how hard all this may always be. I step out and pretend to be hitching a ride. He stops and opens the door.

“Whatever else happens, however foolishly I may behave, promise me you’ll never do this again,” he says.

I promise because it’s this that I signed on for. I know that I signed on to indulge the lamenting and the quicksilverishness of him with as bold a signature as I signed on for the goodnesses of him. Still, I’m tired of packing and unpacking my heart. These crises of his, which
feel oddly like betrayals, cause desolation in me. And I have to push hard at that desolation so I can remind myself of how he is
made.
All this behavior is an expression of his character, inexorable as bones and blood. Besides that, Fernando is Italian, and he knows what I can’t learn. He knows that life is an opera that must be shrieked and lamented and only once in a while laughed. Between acts, he says how much better it is now that he has released himself from his old life’s sleep. He tells me he loves being able, finally, to shriek and lament and even laugh. He says he loves most of all that he can cry. He asks me to love him for the difficulty of him more than the ease of him, something a man would never ask of a woman unless he already knew it was so. Still, to pacify him has become a self-indulgence, a vanity of sorts, and I know I must beware of this.

We just sit there in the car, not talking at all, until I speak. “As much as I love you, you can push me away, at least from time to time and for a while. Let me try to tell you how you make me feel sometimes. When I met you, you were tired of being Fernando, that other Fernando who was poorly used in many quarters. You said you’d always been an honorable and patient and sacrificing person and still people handled you ever more brutally. They knew you’d take it. The bank, the family, the friends, they all trusted in your resilience. Do I understand all that correctly?”

“Absolutely correctly,” he says quietly.

“And beginning long ago and one by one, each of them was embittered in some way, when you cancelled them from your life. Is that how it happened?”

“That’s how it happened.”

“Well, then, why are you making me into your Fernando? Don’t you see that sometimes you treat me just a little in the way others treated you. It’s only once in a while and less often now than it used to be in Venice, but how I wish it was never. I just can’t hear you when you scream. And so, in defense, I’m learning to scream, too. And I think I could get very good at it, but then neither one of us will be heard, and there’ll be nothing left to do but walk away.”

His look speaks of both torment and chafe and I think he doesn’t understand at all. I’m too tired to try further, so I surrender to the silence he seems to prefer. I am reminded of my son, of some sting he flinched from years ago, the sort of sting that only a five-year-old knave can raise up upon his four-year-old mate. I remember trying to convince Erich that it wasn’t his fate to keep peace at any cost.

Right now all I know is that in love there must be some form of desperation and some form of joy. Both these sensations—along with whatever else the lovers invent or permit—are constants. Lovers are never long without one or the other or both of them. Is the joy fuller through the desperation, as it is to eat when you’ve been very hungry, to sleep when you’ve been awake too long? And
if it is, shouldn’t we welcome the despair as much as the joy? The giving, the getting, the taking, the nurturing, I have begun to understand that we take turns signing on for one or another of these as though they were daily jobs. We continue to assume jobs until all of them are filled, until all the roles established. The dynamic part of love lies within each of these jobs but rarely beyond it. Consider, too, that love transforms the lovers.

As though matter is recast, nothing can ever be as it was before the love. As you were with each other at the beginning of love, how you moved through the days and nights together, that is how you’ll move always. It was at the beginning when you learned to dance together. Notice that even now you dance together in the same way. Music, no music. A languid glide before an abrupt, explosive half-twist before a full turn. Two beats of stillness, awaiting further consideration. Fast, slow, quiet, sweet, angry. Love is a very personal tango. And every once in a while, just so we won’t forget it, the old truth comes to visit, the one that reminds us that we can grow but we can’t change.

N
EITHER OF US
wants to go home just yet. We head up into Camporsevoli, lay the car quilt on a hillside in a stand of pines. We talk. I lie on my stomach, a hot cheek pressed to the earth’s coolness seeping through the quilt. The pine boughs make a thick curtain over
our heads through which moonlight prickles. He lies so close, nearly covering me with himself, as though to protect me. I love the weight of him. This thought makes me smile and I say the word,
irony,
out loud. Fernando says “Hi, honey” back to me. He is perplexed at my laugh. We sleep this way. We wake and talk some more, sleep some more until we smell, then see the somber violet breath of first light, trembling, blowing out the stars. Just a few at a time, a contained overture, until
ecco, Apollo,
shrieks good morning to the night, exploding what’s left of the darkness, firing up the sky in great hallelujahs of amber and orange and the fierce pink of a pomegranate’s heart.

Fall

6
Vendemmiamo
—Let’s Pick Those Grapes

As we approach Palazzo Barlozzo it’s just seven, a touch early even for the duke to be paying us a call, and yet there he is coming round the back of the house, looking like Ichabod Crane. We walk up to meet him and, as a worried old papa who finally sees the objects of his concern all safe and sound might do, his dread slides into a scowl before it settles into peevishness.