A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online Page A

as not to squander the waning heat after the last bake, people arrive toting terra-cotta dishes and iron pots full of vegetables and herbs bathed in wine, a leg of lamb, once in a while, or hefts of pork with small violet-skinned onions and rough-cut stalks of wild fennel to braise in the embers all through the night and then to rest awhile in the spent oven, breathing in the lingering aromas of wood smoke. On Sunday morning before mass, the older children in each family come to fetch Sunday’s lunch, some of them wrapping their prizes in linen, carting them to church for a priest’s blessing.
    Now the upward pitch of the Tuscan mouth has nearly reached into a smile, so I ask Barlozzo about the communal oven in San Casciano. “Actually, there were two village ovens once. One of them was in the meadow, which is now the soccer field, and the other is still sitting behind the tractor repair shop on the road to Celle. But there hasn’t been a communal oven in use since before the second great war. And the smaller ovens most of us built in our yards are mostly squirrel dens now, or pigeon nests, or rests for tools andflowerpots,” he says, as though he can’t quite recall why or when that became so.
    Barlozzo suggests that we three work on the oven every morning, beginning at ten, breaking at one for lunch and avoiding the afternoon heat. This is good, because it’s exploration we want to do in the early mornings. But I suspect Barlozzo already knows this and thus has set the plan to accomodate us.
    As we work one morning, I ask him why this can’t be the new communal oven, why we can’t fire it up on Saturday mornings and invite the San Cascianesi to bake their bread. “Because the San Cascianesi don’t bake their bread. No one bakes bread anymore. Neither inside the house nor outside. Almost no one. We’ve got two perfectly fine village bakers who keep us supplied. People just have other things to do these days. All that’s part of the past,” he says.
    This sounds like a reprise of Fernando’s early tirades in our Venice kitchen when I wanted to bake bread or roll out my own pasta or construct some six-storied confection slathered in butter creams. He’d tried to cool my desires with the same arguments, saying that no one bakes bread or desserts or makes pasta at home. Even grandmothers and maiden aunts queue in the shops, then sit in the cafés with their cappucini all morning, he’d assured me back then. Was that the same man who, now, can’t wait to get his hands into the bread dough?
    “And so why are you helping us with this oven if all this is only ‘part of the past’?” I want to know.
    “I’m helping because you need help,” he says. “Because from everything I’m learning about you two, it appears that what you want most is the ‘past.’ I’m hoping all this isn’t just some folkloric interlude for you two. I’m hoping you’ve got your feet securely on the ground. What I mean is, you’ve come here from another life and yet you seem to expect to step into this one just as it used to be in the nineteenth century. As though it were waiting for you, as though it were Utopia. Or worse, as though it were Sybaris. Well, there is no Utopia here, never has been. And you must know what happened to Sybaris? The past here was sometimes brutal and tragic, just like the present can be.”
    The swiftness of his exit leaves a chill behind in the burning light of noon.
    I am startled neither that the old duke knows Greek history nor that he would finally get round to digging into our souls. He cuts off all receiving channels, except to bid us “buon pranzo, good lunch” over his shoulder as he takes the shortcut through the back meadow up toward town. Barlozzo’s questions were both oblique and semantic. He can be sharp as a scimitar, even though I don’t believe he means to cut. We watch him for a while and then look at each other, both of us a bit mystified. We’ve trespassed upon Barlozzo.