Tartufo

by Kira Jane Buxton

“Grief is a tax. One you pay if you were lucky enough to love.”

In her blindness, a myopic hunt for her father’s affection, she didn’t see that she’d had it from her stepmother. Spiny Ludovica. Prickly, in pain. Treading in a sea of self-preservation. Afraid of failure. Delizia sighs. Family has always felt like a forced entanglement. Her stepmother became a stranger to her. So easy to sever the thin threads connecting them. But they still have time to reach out to each other. Commit to the tiny act of drinking one coffee together. The beginnings of a mutual relationship.

Hope wraps its tentacles around her and lifts her to the stars.

“Loss brings everything into focus, doesn’t it? The fragile beauty of life. A desire to live fiercely. It sweeps away the dirt of anything unimportant, exposes the truth. The wolves know how to live in harmony with the land that nurtures them. They are thriving.”

Vittoria and Giorgio only recently met but became fast friends, bonding over animals and art and having a nonna who is made of magic. Just two old souls remembering how to be young again.

These things are delicate. He has to pick the right moment to have a heart-to-heart with his brother. To apologize for using money that was meant for both of them to build an empire. For stealing recipes from Lorenzo and Nonna Amara, running off to culinary school, and leaving his brother to pick up the pieces. Apologies are difficult for Umberto Micucci. They smell pickled and briny, that sometimes sewage stink of the sea. But he will do it. He can do it. Apologize first and then make the first steps to rekindling their relationship.

Delizia believes the truffle did not die in vain. Its end as humble as its beginning, it still managed to beautifully manipulate humans into protecting the land of its birth. Taught the village to embrace its nature. That is its legacy.

“I’m here because I think the most fascinating thing about this village is the village itself, the relationships that make it rich. I’d like, with your permission, to write about it. I think… and apologies if I sound glib… that your village might be the true truffle.”

In a bar nestled on top of a Tuscan hill, friends celebrate the passage of time. They are surrounded by the stone of old walls made rich and rustic over many seasons. By other charming little towns and villages, tucked away like truffles. Beyond the labyrinths of steep, cobbled paths and centuries-old houses, wheat fields rustle with maddening mountain air. Wheat waited upon—fed, fertilized, watered, and weeded—by the doting hands of farmers. Wheat fields give way to groves of olives. Where poor-postured trees are pruned, watered, and worshipped by humans. Neighboring the olive groves are bewildering beautiful vineyards. Vines planted in tiny lines like library books. Each a pulpit for a person to kneel before. Farther out still are the forests. As archetypal and mysterious as an ancestor. Beech. Oak. Fir. Chestnut. Chestnuts are swelling to peak sweetness. Ripening, dropping, humans on their hands and knees to gather these little gemstones of Christmas culture. And everywhere, the shiny skulls of mushrooms erupting from the earth. Each is a masterpiece. Porcinis with their bread bun hats. Frilly yellow petticoats of chanterelles. Tiny trumpets of oyster mushrooms. Slimy little sirens who quicken the hearts of fungiatt—the mushroom hunters.

The forest performs an irresistible earthen symphony. Humans have always done the bidding of biota. As above, so below. A sink into the soil. The rum-dark rhizosphere is breathless and bursting with activity. Hidden sagas of creation and destruction. Sugar-pink earthworms. A starburst of springtails. Giant bus body of an ant. Fungal fingers—thin and strange—spidering through the dark. Hunting. Fungi are the forgotten alchemists. They are king and scavenger in the vast kingdom that humbles a human eye. Here is the base of an ancient oak. This oak has watched little boys become blue-eyed nonnos. A fungus found this oak. Fungus and a tree forming an alliance. In secret, they swap sugar and water. These clandestine dealings have borne fruit. A truffle has swollen to a never-before-seen-size. Muscular and monstrously overgrown. Deep below the footfalls of fallow deer and porcupine and wolf, it has ripened in the dark. Thickened and thriving in the land of love and lemons. It is time. The truffle recites a sonnet made of scent. A call for an animal to come and find it. An olfactory dare.