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suppose are the sum of it. I shall not take on new guises in the hopes of passing on more nobly. What and who I love, and what and who I don’t, have been fixed for a while now. And so the categories shall remain. I have no wish to walk along The Great Wall nor to see the sun rise over a pyramid. Above that meadow out there, day breaks red and yellow like the cleaved heart of a peach and, when the ewes have lambed, the spectacle is accompanied by their squealing and baa-ing and it’s then that I wish the whole world could be sitting here with me on this hill. I want a year of ordinary days, Chou. October days, November days. Rain in great fat splashes beating tunnels into the earth when it’s dry, thunder so fierce it stops your heart, I want to hold the new leaves on the vines in the palm of my hand. I don’t want different than what I have now. I don’t even want more. I’ve always thought the gods have been just with me. Always liked my portion of things. I shall receive this last one with open arms.
    No, I won’t let you go. How I miss you. And, yes, how I love you.
    â€¢
    Later that same day, Miranda and I meet at the rustico. The once cracked and sagging floor tiles have been torn up to reveal a foundation of packed earth and stones, which Miranda’s nephews have covered, in part, with paint-dripped tarps and plastic sheeting and decorated, strategically, with buckets to catch the almost daily autumn rains that seep through the newly completed roof repairs. The cosy wreckage that was the rustico seems a desolate, ravaged place as we high-step through the tiny precinct, intent on conserving a windfall of pears from Ninuccia’s trees.
    â€˜We’ll put everything right, you’ll see,’ Miranda chirps at me over her shoulder as I go about lighting fires in the hearth and the iron stove.
    Having stripe-peeled and poached four bushels of brown-skinned Boscs and bathed them in spiced red, Miranda and I are wiping down one-litre jars of the rubied fruit, stacking them on the shelves along with the fifty or so jars of other fruits and vegetables already saved for winter and spring Thursday suppers. Smoothing her pinafore, patting the pearly sweat from her forehead, she moves from the pantry back into the kitchen, and takes up a cleaver. She says, ‘Let’s get to the
violenza
.’
    In a basket on the work table there are perhaps a dozen heads of garlic, the purple colour of the cloves bright beneath papery skins. Slapping head after head with the flat of the cleaver, she scrapes the smashed, unpeeled cloves into a five-litre jug of new oil in which she’d earlier stuffed leaves of wild sage, wild fennel flowers, rosemary, a fistful of crushed, very hot chillies. She is building one of her famous potions. Violence, she calls it. She uses it to gloss vegetables before tumbling them into the roasting pan, to massage loins of pork and the breasts and thighs of her own fat chickens, to drizzle over burning hot charcoaled beef and veal.
    â€˜It’s good for everything but lamb and wild birds and the aches and pains of most men; though, more than once, I’ve rubbed it into a cut or a scrape, disinfecting the wound better than straight alcohol could and leaving a much more pleasing perfume on the skin.’
    â€˜The aches and pains of most men? The ones they inflict or the ones they suffer?’
    â€˜I guess I was thinking more about the ones they inflict.’
    â€˜Is that why you’ve never married again?’
    Anticipating that Miranda would resume her talk of Barlozzo, I am prepared. I play offence. Her eyes cast downward, she tears the leaves off a branch of sage, pushes them through the neck of the bottle. I try again.
    â€˜Is it? Is that why you’ve never married again?’
    â€˜Could be.’
    â€˜Have you even considered it?’
    â€˜Are you about to punish me for my ranting at you about Barlozzo? Is that