Read Online A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi - Free Book Online
Authors: Marlena de Blasi
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dress with the roses is the best dress of all for me during these summer days.
The next entry on my private agenda asks for a work plan. As much as we want to bolt the stable door on such imperatives and mandates as those which tortured Fernando’s life as a banker, I must submit to some sort of discipline. It’s my turn to work now for a while so that he can luxuriate in his fresh status as a pensioner. My first book, written in Venice, is a volume of memoirs and recipes, scenes from my travels through ten of Italy’s northern regions. Since it’s buried in the production process, due to be published in late autumn, there’s nothing more I can do to help it along right now. Meanwhile I have a contract to write a second book, this one with much the same format but focusing on eight regions of Italy’s south. The eighteen months I’ve been given to research and write seem to stretch out like forever before me, yet I know what a trickster time is. It’s now that I must begin writing outlines, planning the journeys.
I look forward to the whole process, yet, at least for this moment, I’d rather tuck it all under the yellow wooden bed and just live this Tuscan life. But I can’t. Even though I want to be true to our rebellion against structure, there are also several monthly assignments from clients still clinging from the states—a newsletter for a smallgroup of California restaurants, some menu and recipe development for another, and, most recently, concept and development for a start-up project in Los Angeles. The deeper-down truth is that I luxuriate in all this, am grateful for these opportunities that will sustain us, keep our hands out of our own thin pockets.
I begin setting up an office of sorts in a space across from the fireplace in the stable. And like a hound on the scent of a hare, Barlozzo angles his bony self halfway inside the door. “ Ti serve un mano? Do you need a hand?” he wants to know, looking at the great snarl of computer wires in my hands. The duke already understands I submit to only the smallest doses of the twenty-first century. “I thought you’d be writing your books and stories with a quill on sheepskin,” he tells me as he takes over.
“I use the computer as a word processor. Only a word processor. Its more complex wiles, I leave to Fernando. But how do you know so much about such things?” I ask.
“I’m not so sure I do, but I must know more than you do,” he says. “Besides, all the instructions are in Italian and I do read. You just go on with your work as a tappezziera, upholsterer. There must be something left in the house that’s not yet been draped or swaddled.”
Why must he stick fast to this sham scoundrel’s behavior? Shaking my head and muffling a laugh at his nearly constant need to hide hiskindness behind that Tartar face and voice of his, I pull curtains out of a trunk. Of heavy yellow brocade, they’d once hung in some theater or chapel, according to the merchant from whom I’d bought them at the fair in Arezzo. I push them onto the black iron rod with the wooden filials carved like pineapples that fits across the top of the stable doors. The fabric glides into place. Three panels, each about six feet wide, twice again as long, the lush length of them pours down into great buttery puddles over the stone floor. I fix one panel off to the side with a long piece of red satin cord, tying it into a perfect Savoy knot. The thick cloth restrains the sun but still the sun exalts its color, drenching the little room in gold. The duke hasn’t said a word through all this, and even now, sitting back on his haunches looking at the effect, only his smile tells me he thinks it’s lovely.
A S THE CONSTRUCTION of it proceeds, there is much daily pacing round and round the oven site by the village men. There are mutterings and whistles, some saying it’s formidabile. The ones who pull their hair and screech “madonnina” say we’ll blow up the whole damn
The next entry on my private agenda asks for a work plan. As much as we want to bolt the stable door on such imperatives and mandates as those which tortured Fernando’s life as a banker, I must submit to some sort of discipline. It’s my turn to work now for a while so that he can luxuriate in his fresh status as a pensioner. My first book, written in Venice, is a volume of memoirs and recipes, scenes from my travels through ten of Italy’s northern regions. Since it’s buried in the production process, due to be published in late autumn, there’s nothing more I can do to help it along right now. Meanwhile I have a contract to write a second book, this one with much the same format but focusing on eight regions of Italy’s south. The eighteen months I’ve been given to research and write seem to stretch out like forever before me, yet I know what a trickster time is. It’s now that I must begin writing outlines, planning the journeys.
I look forward to the whole process, yet, at least for this moment, I’d rather tuck it all under the yellow wooden bed and just live this Tuscan life. But I can’t. Even though I want to be true to our rebellion against structure, there are also several monthly assignments from clients still clinging from the states—a newsletter for a smallgroup of California restaurants, some menu and recipe development for another, and, most recently, concept and development for a start-up project in Los Angeles. The deeper-down truth is that I luxuriate in all this, am grateful for these opportunities that will sustain us, keep our hands out of our own thin pockets.
I begin setting up an office of sorts in a space across from the fireplace in the stable. And like a hound on the scent of a hare, Barlozzo angles his bony self halfway inside the door. “ Ti serve un mano? Do you need a hand?” he wants to know, looking at the great snarl of computer wires in my hands. The duke already understands I submit to only the smallest doses of the twenty-first century. “I thought you’d be writing your books and stories with a quill on sheepskin,” he tells me as he takes over.
“I use the computer as a word processor. Only a word processor. Its more complex wiles, I leave to Fernando. But how do you know so much about such things?” I ask.
“I’m not so sure I do, but I must know more than you do,” he says. “Besides, all the instructions are in Italian and I do read. You just go on with your work as a tappezziera, upholsterer. There must be something left in the house that’s not yet been draped or swaddled.”
Why must he stick fast to this sham scoundrel’s behavior? Shaking my head and muffling a laugh at his nearly constant need to hide hiskindness behind that Tartar face and voice of his, I pull curtains out of a trunk. Of heavy yellow brocade, they’d once hung in some theater or chapel, according to the merchant from whom I’d bought them at the fair in Arezzo. I push them onto the black iron rod with the wooden filials carved like pineapples that fits across the top of the stable doors. The fabric glides into place. Three panels, each about six feet wide, twice again as long, the lush length of them pours down into great buttery puddles over the stone floor. I fix one panel off to the side with a long piece of red satin cord, tying it into a perfect Savoy knot. The thick cloth restrains the sun but still the sun exalts its color, drenching the little room in gold. The duke hasn’t said a word through all this, and even now, sitting back on his haunches looking at the effect, only his smile tells me he thinks it’s lovely.
A S THE CONSTRUCTION of it proceeds, there is much daily pacing round and round the oven site by the village men. There are mutterings and whistles, some saying it’s formidabile. The ones who pull their hair and screech “madonnina” say we’ll blow up the whole damn
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