The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

mistrust tomorrow and seize the day.’
    She takes my chin in her hand, looks at me hard and long. ‘Better to admit that you were in love with him.’
    During these past months I have been writing about our years in San Casciano. About Barlozzo. I think to an early passage in the text:
    A man they call Barlozzo appears to be the village chieftan, walking as he does up and down the tables, setting down plates, pouring wine, patting shoulders. Somewhere beyond seventy, Barlozzo is long and lean, his eyes so black they flicker up shards of silver. Gritty, he seems. Mesmeric. I will come to know those eyes, the way they soften to grey in the doom just before a storm, be it an act of God or some more personal tempest. His thick smooth hair is white and blond and announces that he is at once very young and very old. And for as long as I will know him, I will never be certain if time is pulling him backward or beckoning him ahead. A chronicler, a raconteur, a ghost. A
mago
is Barlozzo. He will become my muse, this old man, my
animatore
, the soul of things for me.
    Miranda breaks another breadstick in two, wets half in her wine. Holding it near her mouth, she says, ‘Whether or not you were in love with him, let him go. It’s time to let him go.’
    A parting gift, she hands me the wine-soaked piece of bread-stick, sips the heel of her wine, kisses the top of my bent head. ‘I’ll see you later, little one.’
    Worse than a Cassandra, my darling Miranda. How does she
see
, how can she know.
Let him go?
Not now. Not yet. I notice the breadstick still in my hand and so eat the limp, wet thing without tasting it. I ask for another glass of wine, move to a table closer to the farmers, all the better to take in the smoke of their
Toscanelli
. I let myself remember him saying:
    I stood up and began buttoning my jacket as he was looking down at some piece of paper, running his finger along a line of numbers and droning about statistics and therapies for multiple metastasis. In a voice louder than I’d meant to use I asked the doctor to tell me, plain and simple, how much time I would have if I just let things be. At first he seemed not to understand. He raised his head, sat back in his chair, stared at me as though wondering who I was. As though he was seeing me for the first time. Not a morbid festering mass of blood and bones but a man. Still a man. He waited a long time before he answered. ‘A year. More or less. I’d estimate a year, Signor Barlozzo.’
    The old duke had arranged two kitchen chairs under the stand of oaks behind his ruin of a house, his facing into the hot light of a straight-up sun, mine looking at him. Looking at him, I hear him, too, the soft baritone broken by a sigh now and then or a drag on his cigarette. At some point a while ago I’d stopped hearing the words, though. Stopped consenting to them. Silver swam in his great dark eyes and the long taut length of him was slouched, slanted in the chair, his spider legs crossed at the knee. He crushed the stub of a Camel against the green tin of an ashtray decorated with the Martini vermouth label. ‘I’ve never liked vermouth. Just ruins the good clean taste of gin,’ he would always say. He lit another cigarette.
    No noxious drenches, no carving away at my innards, no withering burns. Nothing. It’s not that I shall lie still and make it easy for the old Horseman. I shall fight him to the death, you see, duel with him, give him a fine game and, when I must, I shall surrender to him. But meanwhile I would like nothing better than to live this year in company with you and Fernando. Not in grief, mind you, not in mourning, not with you stepping lightly, pacifying desires and avoiding words and deeds which you deem unseemly. It is not a year in which I shall practise to die but one in which I shall live the rest of my life. Complete with all the sentiments and emotions and frailties and impulses which I