Free A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi

her joy in this delicately savage escapade and hers enlarges mine. As we walk, she begins to talk about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I like the notion of this sixty-something-year-old Tuscan woman with a head full of pre-Raphaelite curls reading this quintessentially American adventure story. “You know, Chou, I’ve always wanted to build that very raft and float down that very river—the biggest river in the world—and pull into some lonely bank at the edge of a forest, light a fire, cook bacon, and eat it straight out of the pan. Come si dice pancetta in Inglese? How do you say pancetta in English? Ah, bahcone. Certo. Sarebbe bellissimo. It would be beautiful.”
    Once down at the springs, we arc the flashlights, looking for the right place to sit, kick off our boots, and plunge our feet into the warm, percolating water. But now that our feet are warm, the rest of us is colder, and Florì reaches for the blanket. Wrapping ourselves about the shoulders with it, we sit there talking about the books of our lives. Despite her love for Huckleberry Finn, Florì says her favorite “foreign” books are Madame Bovary, David Copperfield, and Anna Karenina. Especially Anna Karenina. “Ah, how I wanted to know a man likeVronsky. Someone dangerous like him. Dangerous in that there could never be anyone but him. Do you know what I mean?”
    “I think so,” I say, knowing that I do. Still wrapped in the blanket, flashlights spent, we lie back now, flattening the weeds and the prickly stalks of thyme, making little nests for ourselves, our faces tilted at the moon. Thrust by the winds, clouds swim fast about it, so fast it feels as if we’re swimming, too, backstroking across the sky. Free.
    Florì sits up and takes her feet out of the pool, then crouches by the springs, running her hands in the water, still gazing at the moon. Déjà vu rushes up from some long-ago place. “I knew a woman once who looked like you,” I say to her.
    “Do you mean to say that I look like an American?” Florì asks shyly, turning only partway around to look at me.
    “Not exactly. I saw this woman just once. I was eight or nine, I think, visiting friends or distant relatives of my grandmother who lived on the coast of Liguria, near Genova. I don’t think I was too happy about being there. Anyway, I went wandering on the beach near their house one day and I saw a woman who was roasting potatoes over a driftwood fire. She wore several layers of long skirts and was all wrapped in shawls and scarves. She smiled at me and I sat down on the sand next to her, watching her. Pulling a silver flask from her pocket, she reached out and turned my palm upward, poured out a few drops of thick, dark green stuff into it, lifting my palm to my lips. She poured some out deftly onto the wrinkled heel of her own handand sucked at it, closing her eyes and smiling. I did the same. At first I though it was awful, like medicine for a stomachache, but as I swallowed it, really tasted it, I smiled, too. My introduction to olive oil.”
    Florì stays crouched by the water and, while I talk, it’s to her closed-eye profile. Opening her eyes now, she turns to me, pokes her legs out in front of her, arranges her skirts. Lips compressed in an endearing smile, she stays still. “Please don’t stop. Tell me more.”
    “Well, the Potato Lady crouched down on the sand just as you were a moment ago, her thick rubber boots jutting out from under her skirts. She would stare at the fire or stand up and heave a stone or a hunk of wood out to sea, and as the potatoes blistered golden, she turned them, anointing them with the oil. She threw on a fistful of salt pulled from some other place in her magic stores, urging great, leaping flames from the fire. Finally she speared two or three pieces of potato onto a twig and offered it to me. By then I was fairly shaking with hunger for them, and I ate them, burning my mouth and tasting them and the moment with some new appetite. I