A Thousand Days in Tuscany Read Free Page B

perfect health. One day Ilario, here, went mushroom gathering, came home and cooked a frittata for his wife’s lunch. She was dead in an hour. Some say it was her heart, but we all know it was the mushrooms.”
    “Did Ilario eat the frittata, too?” I want to know.
    “Only one alive who knows the answer to that is Ilario, and he’s not talking.”
    I sit breaking my bread into pieces, dipping them into my wine. I notice three people. I look at Fernando sitting across and halfway down the table from me, smiling, holding court, it seems, among the men and women around him. They are comparing dialects, the Tuscans trying to mimic Fernando’s slippery Venetian cant but managing only what sounds like an underwater lisp. They applaud and laugh with each new phrase he offers. His voice is in symphony with his face, which is beautiful, pink-cheeked from the wine. Florianastands up, putters about the table, adjusting things, sweeping crumbs with the side of her hand, scolding, teasing as she goes. I catch her eye or she catches mine and she nearly whispers, as though there are only two of us, “Tutto andrà bene, Chou-Chou, tutto andrà molto bene. Vedrai. All will go well. All will go very well. You’ll see.”
    Barlozzo stands behind Floriana now, smoking and sipping wine as though his watch is finished for the evening, as though, now, he can stay a little apart from things. From everything and everyone except Floriana, that is. Nowhere has he fixed his eyes but on her for more than a few minutes at a time all evening. A discreet chatelaine? A gallant lover? Surely he’d heard Floriana’s affirmation to me. Surely he never misses a beat. I look at him. I watch him. And he doesn’t miss that either.
    Bice sets down a small plate in front of me, a fine-looking panna cotta, cooked cream, unmolded and sitting in pool of crushed strawberries. I’m about to excavate it with my spoon when a man who introduces himself as Pioggia, Rain, comes to sit by me and asks if I’ve yet met Assunta.
    “No, I don’t think so,” I tell him, looking about.
    “Well, she’s Piero’s”—he points to a burly, youngish man in jeans and a T-shirt—“finest cow. And she’s blue-eyed. Assunta is the only blue-eyed cow I’ve ever seen,” he says.
    He reads my open-mouthed stare as disbelief and so he softens the story of Assunta’s astounding loveliness.
    “Well, her eyes aren’t exactly blue, but they’re not brown either. They’re gray and brown with little blue spots in them and they’re wonderful. So after I milked her this morning, I brought the milk directly up here to Bice. I do that only with some of Assunta’s milk, all the rest of it goes to the co-op to get pasteurized and ruined. Can’t make a decent panna cotta with pasteurized milk. At least that’s what Bice tells me, and so I bring her a six-liter jar of Assunta’s morning milk at least three times a week, whenever she tells me she needs it. Prova, prova. Try it,” he urges.
    I shrink for a moment under this revelation of Assunta’s most private ministrations. From her teats to my spoon with only Pioggia’s jar and Bice’s pot in between. These facts redraw my concept of “fresh.” And so I eat blue-eyed Assunta’s milk, coaxed from her by a man called Rain, and it’s delectable. I lick both sides of my spoon and scrape the empty bowl, and Piogga beams.
    Una crostata, a tart, sits within reach, but Pioggia is watching me and, if I touch it, I fear he will somehow anthropomorphize the apricots that sit, crowded in their own treacly juices, on a palette of crust. I just know this fruit will have been plucked from the only tree in Tuscany where druids live.
    • • •
    A S WE ’ RE SAYING buona notte, we notice the carabinieri bending over maps with flashlights, giving the Albanians directions back to Venice. The Albanians are going back to Venice. But we’re not.
    Over these past three years that Fernando and I have been together, our journeys have