A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi Page A

to keep searching to understand the rhythm of things. Light, dark. The seasons. Live gracefully in plenty and live gracefully in need. Embrace them both or swindle yourself out of half a life. They say that everyone who’s gone to live in the pink and yellow palaces is waiting to die and, in the meantime, they watch one more degenerate television transmission introduced by dancing girls and a man with a bad toupee, calling the experience leisure. Ease and plenty seep together to form a single sentiment that comes out looking a good deal like nonchalance. All that ease, all that plenty. What can one expect of them but nonchalance?”
    Barlozzo’s word for nonchalance is sprezzatura. A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is “the state of effortlessness.” It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.
    “Traditionalisti, progressisti. Bah. Maybe the only thing that matters is to make our lives last as long as we do. You know, to make a life last until it ends, to make all the parts come out even, like when you rub the last piece of bread in the last drop of oil on your plate and eat it with the last sip of wine in your glass,” Florì says.
    The duke gets up and walks over to Fernando, on whose shoulders he rests his hands. He looks from me to Florì and back to me again. “You and Florì are two of a kind, Chou. But you’re even more like my mother. Life was hard for her, too.”
    “But I don’t think life is hard.”
    “Of course not. Not now, anyway. Not with all the ‘adjustments’ you’ve made over time. My mother made similar adjustments. For her, life was too garishly lit, too big and too distant, and so she screwed up her eyelids and shortened the foreground. Like an impressionist painter, she rubbed the juts smooth, created her own diffusion, her own translucence. She saw life as if by the light of a candle. Nearly always she seemed to be wandering about in an elegant sort of defiance. Holding tight to her secrets. Like you do. And she thought everything could be solved with a loaf of bread. Like you do.”
    “It’s true, she sees things in her own way.” Fernando tells a story about Erich and me. About a morning I was driving him to school along the Rio Americano highway in Sacramento. We knew everyturn and twist in the road and all the buildings and landmarks along the way, so that one morning when, about a hundred yards ahead, I spotted a new sign, I nudged Erich and said, “Look, honey, a new French bakery.” Pain, bread, is what I read in the four bright red letters.
    “Mom, that sign says pain. Pain, like in hurt. It’s a clinic, mom,” he told me.
    Never one to spoil a good story by sticking to the truth, Fernando decorates the events, raising up a hand-slapping between him and the duke. I wait until they’re quieted down and my embarrassment softens a little before I ask Barlozzo, “What do you know about my secrets?”
    “If I knew something about them they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? All I can say is that mysterious people usually recognize other mysterious people.”
    “So if you recognize that I have secrets, that means you have them, too. Right?” I say.
    Florì raises her head, quickly recovering her surprise by reaching for the dish, empty now except for crumbs and the old silver knife.
    “Right. And let’s just leave it at that for now.”
    “OK. But as for my trying to solve things with bread, well, all I think is that along with everything else there is or isn’t, a good loafof bread can’t hurt. Speaking of bread, I’m out of rosemary again. Will you bring some to me?”
    “Are you making a mattress stuffed with rosemary? I’ve never known a person so fixed on this damn weed as you are,” he tells me.
    “Maybe it’s because I miss the sea. Rosmarino. Rose of the sea. The patch up by the old spa is almost as good as the salt-crusted bushes that grow along the