Bella Tuscany Read Free Page B

consult with me about expanding the garden exponentially. Formerly, we had potatoes, lettuces, basil.
    â€œBaccelli,”
he answers. “To eat with fresh pecorino.”
    â€œWhat are
baccelli?”
    He is uncharacteristically silent.
“Baccelli sono baccelli
.
”
They are what they are. He keeps chopping weeds, shrugs.
    I look up the word in the dictionary but it says only “pods,” so I call my friend, Donatella. “Ah,
sì, i baccelli,
as we call them—they are the
fave
he has planted, but in the local dialect,
‘fava'
means penis so I am sure he would not say the word to
you.”
    The
baccelli
flowers are tender white wings with a second pair of petals inside, each marked with a purple-black dot. I examine the leaves, looking for the dark veins forming the letter, which made the Greeks consider the fava dangerous and unlucky because
thanatos
(death) also starts with theta. So far, these are simply green and vigorous.
    In our absence, Anselmo has planted enough vegetables for several families. He has converted two terraces to an enormous garden. A Sardinian shepherd sold him fifteen great bags of sheep manure, which he works into the soil. So far, I've counted, besides the eighty fava plants, forty potato plants, twenty artichokes, four rows of chard, a patch of carrots, a large bed of onions, enough garlic for all the
ragù
in Cortona, and a beautiful triangle of lettuces. He has put in asparagus, too, but he says not to pick the scraggly spears coming up. Asparagus is ready after two years. Zucchini, melon, and eggplant are germinating in the
limonaia,
and sharpened bamboo stakes for tomatoes—quite a few stakes—he has stacked at the end of the garden until the weather stabilizes. I may have to set up a stand and sell zucchini flowers at the Saturday market. Since he is paid by the hour, we dread to know how many he already has spent.
    He also has pruned the roses, cut down three of my favorite wild plum trees that were in the way of the garden, and has begun to espalier a line of plums along the edge of the terrace. They look tortured. When he sees me looking at them, he shakes his finger, as though to a child contemplating a dash into the street. “Wild trees,” he says contemptuously. Whose land is this, I suddenly wonder. Like Beppe and Francesco, he considers anything that interferes with his domain to be a nuisance. And like them, he knows everything, so we do as he says.
    â€œBut the best yellow plums. . . .” I will have to keep my eye on these trees. One morning I may wake to find them stacked in the woodpile, along with the oaks Francesco would like to attack.
    Â 
    Even the spring night is shocking. The silence of the country sounds loud. I'm not yet accustomed to the shrieks of owls tearing apart the stillness. We're coming from burrito-and-a-movie nights, order-out-for-Chinese nights, seventeen-messages-on-the-answering-machine nights. I wake up at three or four and wander from room to room, looking out the windows. What is this quiet, the big, moony night with a comet ball smearing my study window and the dark valley below? Why can't I erase the image my student wrote:
the comet, like a big Q-tip swabbing the sky?
A nightingale practices some nightingale version of scales, lingering on each note. This seems to be a lone bird; no answer comes to the plaintive song.
    Â 
    Late every afternoon, Ed hauls in olive wood. We have supper on trays in front of the fire. “Now, we're back,” he says, raising his glass to the flames, perhaps to the humble god of the hearth. Happiness, divine and banal word, a complex proposition which shifts its boundaries constantly, and sometimes feels so very easy. I pull a blanket around me and doze over Italian idioms. A wind comes up. Which one? The
tramontana,
tinged with frigid air from the Alps, the
ponente,
bringing rain, or the
levante,
blowing hard and fast from the east? The cypresses outlined by