T A B L E_T A L K Have you ever seen a passenger go berserk on a plane? Share your tales of air rage in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The belles of St. Mary's By Jennifer Moses A Jewish writer learns about the Old South, and herself, in the most unlikely of places (12/01/98) Afoot in the South African bush By Lance Gould A New Yorker ventures on a walking safari into the wild world of wildebeest, Cape buffalo and dung beetles (11/30/98) The Khan men of Agra By Pamela Michael In India, a moment of trust opens the door to a traveler's richest reward (11/25/98) The rabbis of Bangkok, Part Two By Douglas A. Konecky A live sex show reveals more than flesh to an American musician in Thailand (11/24/98) The rabbis of Bangkok By Douglas A. Konecky A traveling Jewish band from California meets a trio of Hasidic Jews in the teeming city of Live Sex Shows and Thai Full Body Massage (11/23/98) Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		AT HOME IN TUSCANY | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Thirsts and hungers quenched, we hit the street again. We still needed the butcher, the baker and a place to buy cheese. We saw a lady carrying a big round loaf in a paper bag, and Candace asked her where she'd bought her pane, and she pointed down the twisty street past the little piazzetta where on top of a building some huge ancient figure in a carnival outfit swung every half hour and struck the world's dullest bell. We searched the curved little street awash with fresh-bread fragrance, but we found no baker, and ended up back on the corso again. Breadless. But oh that fragrance. So we looked and looked, and by that point I would have settled for a loaf of Wonderbread for it was getting close to noon and we were nowhere near done shopping. We had seen three grocery stores on the way, miraculously small, wedged into nooks, all of which had a couple of loaves of bread, but Candace was going to find The Baker, by God, or eat no bread at all. There was something wonderfully personal about those hole-in-the-wall grocery stores. They all sold the same few things: pasta, milk, the inescapable tomato sauce, a bit of prosciutto and salami, fresh mozzarella, cheeses and eggs, and a few household goods -- that's all there is room for in a store the size of a closet. But they all had at least a few clients at a time, who came to do more than just shop: they were there to linger. It seemed to me -- and this was confirmed through the years -- that they, just like the old boys at the cobbler, were in the small stores for company. There was an impersonal supermarket near town, but they -- just as we -- avoided it like the plague. And so they would spend twice the time, going from butcher to grocer to baker, waiting their turn, and enjoying a bit of gossip about the weather, or the kids, or how bad the school is, or how lazy the mayor, or how if the vigile gives you one more parking ticket you'll make him eat it, or how's your back, or what did you do Sunday, or how can you be so stupid as to step off your own stoop and break your ankle. Perhaps small things, but small things make a life, and a town, and a livable society. So anyway, there we were with all the bells tolling, up the corso without bread. We panicked. We slipped into the first small shop and bought two kinds of cheese and asked for the most common of objects: matches. No matches here, the lady said, you have to go to the tabbaccaio. But as we stood there speechless that a grocery store has no matches, in came, of all people, The Baker, talking away, with a wicker basket of bread that he dumped unceremoniously into a wooden bin. Still chatting away, he departed. "Follow him!" Candace ordered. "I'll catch up with you." "How the hell will you find me?" "It's a small town." So I tracked the baker. We passed the bell twanger and twisted down the side street where we had been before, and there was his little store, behind a door with a curtain over it. Heaven. Crates full of big round Tuscan loaves, and bean-shaped Tuscan loaves, and whole wheat loaves, and flat things that looked like crushed slippers and hence were called just that, ciabatta, and ciaccia that crispy hard-baked wonder, slick with olive oil, and buns. And that fragrance. I kept buying things just so I could stay and inhale. Then we raced to the butcher. And waited. Italians don't buy meat; they extract it like dentists do teeth; slowly and painfully. Now it's true that the gleaming white-tiled butcher shops are a place of wonder, with great shanks of prosciutto, and miles of coiled sausages, and tiny moldy sausages of cinghiale hanging there, and skinned rabbits dangling with a bit of fur left around their bunny feet and tail, only -- so I was told -- to prove they're not the neighborhood's stray cats, and long, skinny-legged, racing chickens called ruspante that spend their lives happily in the great outdoors, running from dunghill to dunghill and back again. They dangled there with feet and legs still attached, their crests cavalierly to one side. And of course there are slabs of lamb and veal and pork-ribs, pigeons and quail. So it is hard to choose and easy to stare, but the most time is consumed not in silent contemplation, but in the interminable exchanges between the average client and the butcher, one of which I noted years later: Butcher: Carlotta, what do you say? Carlotta: I'm not saying a word. Every time I say a word I'm wrong. Ask my husband. Butcher: How is he doing? Carlotta: Top of his form. Lungs strong as ever. After I left, I could hear him yelling at me even past the church. Butcher: Cook him something good. Old Lady Bystander (butting in): Cook him some rat poison with castor oil. Then when he's back on his feet he'll be thankful he's alive. Carlotta: I'll probably overcook it and he'll throw it in my face and I'll end up on my back. Give me something, Augusto. Butcher: A nice guinea hen. Carlotta: I made that yesterday. Butcher: Roast pork. Carlotta: Hates pork. Says it reminds him of my mother. Butcher: Veal then. Carlotta: How much veal? Butcher: A couple of nice slices like this. Carlotta: That's too much. Thinner. Butcher: Like this. Carlotta: It'll break his dentures and he'll blame me for that too. Thinner. Butcher: How thin? Carlotta: Just chick enough to fold over the rat poison. By the time our turn came, we were weak with hunger, so we bought up what was left in the store, and just in time, because the bells tolled one, and Tuscany ran for the shelter of the kitchen table. The Matra creaked under the load. Candace lost all self control and began gnawing on a sausage and a loaf of warm bread. At home, we unloaded and quickly set the garden table under the trellis, where the honeysuckle climbed and a few now even bloomed, and great bumblebees buzzed among the blue flowers of the rosemary on the slope. And we poured the olive oil over tomatoes and slices of mozzarella and basil, and attacked the sausages and olives, and drank Bazzotti's wine. Then we carried the mattress back up to the pitched-ceiling bedroom, opened the shutters so the sun blazed in, and with the sunlight all over us, had our first big, festive, soon to be traditional pisolino. Nap. I awoke in the kind of daze that says please let me sleep on for another hundred years. Candace was wide awake staring at the enormous beam and the clay tiles overhead. The sun was low, the walls of the town already aglow. I tried to snuggle and drift off again, when her voice of reason announced, "Someone has to go and hunt down the furnace." It was true. We were sure that it existed, we had seen the radiators, even opened their little valves and saw some water drool out, so we knew they weren't just fake, installed to impress company. But we had searched every nook in the house and had found everything larger than an ant -- everything but the fugitive furnace. So we rose and hunted. We moved rugs and furniture to see if something lay in waiting beneath the floors; we searched for an attic but of course there was no attic, the sloped ceilings were in fact the roof; and we fought. We fought because Candace had the preposterous idea that we go look in the outbuilding sixty feet from the house, where no one in their right mind would ever put a furnace, and where -- bloody hell -- it in fact turned out to be. There was a little room cut into the hill, with a steel door, which at first glance held crumbling garden furniture, but beneath that deceptive façade lurked a huge German monster of a furnace. We flicked an industrial-looking switch on the wall. The furnace roared like some U2 rocket lifting off for Coventry, and Candace yelled, "Run for the shelters!" That night we had heat. And later that night as we sat in the warm and silent house, we had to admit that whoever restored the house had class, for keeping that roaring beast at a good distance. After we lit the furnace, we began a sunset walk around the garden when on the piazzetta we ran into another visitor -- a pretty blond girl of eleven. She stood holding a plate, covered by a fresh cloth. I recognized her from the house right on the road, where I had seen her wobbling on a much-too-big bicycle. She held the plate out to us and said in a tiny voice, "Sono Eleonora Paolucci. Lo manda la nonna." I'm Eleonora Paolucci. Granny sends it. Candace took the gift. Without a further word and not listening to our thanks, she said "Arrivederci" and scurried up the steps and hurried, sometimes skipping, home along the road. We laid the plate on a stone wall and took off the cover. There was a great fig leaf below it and below the leaf a slab of very soft, very fresh goat cheese, blinding white, sitting on another fig leaf. This was the most moving gift of all. So simple. By a child, from a grandma, whom we had never even met, and smiled at only once from a distance, the one with the chickens in her arms. SALON | Dec. 2, 1998 Ferenc Máté is the author of "Autumn," "A Reasonable Life" and other books. He lives with his wife and young son, tending his olives and vineyard, in the hills of Tuscany. © Ferenc Máté. Used with permission of the author.