Living in a Foreign Language (26 page)

Bruce as our pizzaiolo

Everyone, of course, had an opinion as to which crust was the best. For me, the combination of “0” and “00” was the clear winner. Bruce thought so, too, and said that the perfect crust should be two-thirds “0” and one-third “00.” But his taste (and mine) runs to a more Napolitano crust—a little chewy, crunchy and slightly charred in parts. Bruno, of course, prefers a Roman crust, which is thinner and a bit more like a cracker. Best pizza? Bruce's again—paper-thin slices of potato, topped with olive oil and fresh rosemary. When it hit the heat, the potato crisped up in an instant in the rosemary-infused oil.

We made pizza for five hours or so. The party was half inside, half out. It was an autumn day and it rained a little here and there, but nobody minded. The oven is sheltered—like a little house—so that the
pizzaiolo
and his trusty assistants don't get wet. We finished up with the whole-wheat crust. We put a combination of pears and Gorgonzola cheese on it—sort of a dessert pizza. After that, Jill and Caroline brought out salad, but no one could eat any more. We had pigged out to the max. That's when the serious drinking started.

Bruno, Bruce, and me at the forno

A few hours later—the sun had long since set—a few people brought chairs into the sheltered area in front of the oven door and sat around it like it was a hearth, which, of course, it is. I pulled a chair up and joined them, and within minutes there were ten or twelve of us packed in there, talking, drinking, swapping stories, warming our bodies and hearts with the glow of the oven. I felt a huge release inside my chest. It had been a long day—a long two days; and I realized that I had been carrying a lot of tension, anxiety even, about this oven, this
forno a legno
. The day we first saw the
house, the oven grabbed my attention. I craved it. When we went back to the States, I longed for it. I couldn't get it out of my mind. Sure, I wanted the little cottage, the Rustico; the land and olive trees; the view. It was all desirable. But the oven was the prize, the real motivating factor in buying the house, moving to Italy and changing our lives forever. That's a lot of pressure to put on an old pile of stones. What if it didn't work? What if there was a hole in it or something? What if it wasn't really ancient but had been thrown together from an old Sears catalog?

It's a beautiful oven. It's been standing on this spot since the early 1600s—long before there was a house—and was the community oven, where the local peasant women (dressed in wimples, no doubt) came to bake bread for the week. It's quite large. It fed, I'm sure, a lot of peasants. It looks like a little stone house, sheltered by an oak tree, only steps away from our kitchen door, just on the other side of the vine-covered pergola that shades our outdoor table. Sitting there in the dark, with all those wonderful people crowded in around me, I peered into the glowing oven chamber to really get a look at it. The vaulted bricks were still white; it seemed so amazingly large, commodious; some medieval peasant family could have all curled up and been quite comfortable in there.

Later, the diehards—JoJo and Bruce, of course; Martin and Karen; Bruno and Mayes; Jill and I; Judith and Caroline's dad—gathered in the kitchen and started singing. We went through swing songs from the thirties and forties and old camp songs; Kurt sang some Swiss-German ditties, and a translation of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” that brought the house down; JoJo did her version of “You Made Me Love You,” which was very fetching; and then she and Bruce sang
a parody of “La Donne E Mobile” called “La Scale Mobile”—about the escalator in Perugia.

After the singing, we got into a major political discussion. We were down to the
real
diehards at this point. I don't know what the hell we were arguing about—I think everybody was pretty much on the same side of things—when Martin said something, I don't remember what, and JoJo ripped into him about the Germans and the French, who had turned a blind eye to genocide at their very front door, in the Balkans, and they were off. I think these two just like to yell at each other.

The next morning, on my way to the
alimentari
for yogurt and bread, I put my hand on the oven door. It was still warm.

W
E CAME BACK TO
M
ILL
V
ALLEY
a week or so before the 2004 presidential election. Flagrant Democrats that we are, we flew home to make our vote count against the war in Iraq and the administration in general. When it turned out that more than half the country went the other way, supporting the powers that be, we were caught totally off balance. How could we be so completely, diametrically, passionately disassociated from half the population of our country? We read about people—other disheartened liberals—threatening to leave, to go to Canada or Mexico, and we thought about our house in Italy and that we already had a place to go if our feeling of alienation got any more intense. Not that Silvio Berlusconi's government was a model of integrity and righteousness; whenever he was indicted—which was fairly regularly—he'd pass a law that decriminalized whatever crime he'd just committed. But I didn't feel responsible for his government—just ours.

A month or so later, we took a trip to New York to meet an agent and a manager, both of whom had been
recommended to us by our old friend and former publicist Judy Katz. The meeting was to be a mutual sniffing out, in that we had to convince them they wanted to represent actors who lived three thousand miles from the next audition. But we met with all concerned, did the obligatory lunches and agreed to go into business with each other on a trial basis. We severed ties with our former agent and now had all our representation coming out of New York.

Back in Mill Valley, we saw an article about an Italian film festival in San Francisco, and that Lina Wertmuller was to be honored on opening night. It had been twenty-seven years since we had worked with her in Rome, and we decided to wangle ourselves an invitation.

The event, an elegant cocktail party before the screening of her newest film, was staged at the Italian Embassy in San Francisco. When we arrived we saw Lina—her friend / interpreter by her side—surrounded by an adoring throng in the middle of the room. We inched our way closer and listened to her respond—in pretty much the only English she could speak—to the compliments coming her way.

“Thank you so much; that's very kind of you; it's so nice to be here in my favorite city in America.”

I leaned over and whispered in her ear.

“
Lina, ti ricordi di me?
Micky; Micky Tucker.”

She turned with a confused look on her face and stared at me. Then her jaw dropped.

“
No. Non é possible!”

And then she laughed her wonderful, gravelly bark of a laugh and embraced me tightly.

“Micky! Micky! I don't believe!”

Then she saw Jill and beamed. She embraced her, too.

“
Cosí bella!
Still so beautiful, my darling.”

The rest of the evening we were hers. She wouldn't let go of us. Literally. We made a dinner date for the following night.

At dinner we tried to speak only in Italian, which went pretty well until I couldn't find the word for something and tried to talk around it with other words I couldn't find, at which point Lina put her hand on my arm, looked at me with a tired expression and said, “Micky, Micky; spikka English.”

She told us she had a friend, an actors' agent in Rome. When we returned in February, she would get us together with her. She thought there was a good chance we could work over there. This brought a whole new aspect into play; the axis of New York / Rome / Umbria danced in our imaginations while beautiful Mill Valley receded, no longer making much sense to us at all.

Then a week or two before we left in February for the birthday trip to Rome, Jill got a call from our new agent. There was an “inquiry” from the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York about a new play they were doing in March—was Jill interested? Yes, Jill was very interested. The play was being directed by Joey Tillinger, an old friend who also happens to have a house in Umbria, whom we visited our last time there. He had mentioned the play and that he was still looking to cast the woman's role, which piqued Jill's interest. She privately asked JoJo to serve as her agent and prod Joey to consider her for the part. These are the kind of confluences that Jill thrives on. The “universe” was telling her that this was the direction her life was about to travel and, as always, Jill put a lot of stock in what the universe had to say. But by the time we were ready to leave for Rome, the voice of the universe had obviously gone off to talk to somebody
else and our agent and manager both said they didn't think it was going to happen. So we wrote the play off as a possibility; this kind of thing happens all the time in our business.

Caroline helped us pack—as always. She can artfully arrange a suitcase so that it reaches its full capacity, fitting in at least 50 percent more crap than we would ever get in there. The only problem being that the moment I open it—to get a toothbrush or something—I somehow disarrange the design and can't fit half the things back in.

Caroline helped lug the suitcases to the waiting taxi and we said good-bye to her and the dogs. We told her that we'd call her when we got to Rome and that she should have a great time while we were gone and that we'd see her in three weeks with our Italian much improved. Jill and I got in the cab and waved as it pulled away, not knowing that we were leaving our Mill Valley house for the last time, never again to live in it, nor with Caroline.

First we flew to Zurich, where we'd found a guy who sold good used cars at decent prices; we had negotiated the deal by e-mail. It was another commitment to living more in Italy—rental cars are very expensive in Europe, and having our own car was an investment in our future. We picked up our brand-new three-year-old VW Golf, drove down through the Alps, went around Milano and stopped for one night in Modena, the home of the real balsamica and some of the best food in Italy. That night I ordered fettucini Bolognese, Bologna being only a few miles up the road, and realized that what makes this one of the world's great dishes is not so much the eponymous meat sauce—which was superb, by the way—but the pasta itself. Freshly made before our eyes, rolled out and cut by the hand of a woman who had been making fresh pasta since before she could walk, the
fettucini was the star of the dish. The sauce was carefully spooned over as a complement, a support to the pasta, not slathered on top as is done in the States, drowning its subtle flavor and texture in a sea of tomatoey goop. I was feeling very anti-America at that point—that belligerent country, arrogant and myopic, and it oversauced its pasta.

It was wonderful to drive up to our house and see the improvements that had been made since we left in September, although construction had now ground to a halt because of the freezing temperatures. Martin assured us, however, that they would be finished on schedule—and in time for the birthday party when we arrived back in June. Sophie swore that if the landscaping was not perfect and the
bocce
court not finished, I could roast her in the oven along with the suckling pig that we had planned for the party. I got this in writing.

Two nights later we were on the train to Rome. We checked into our hotel and sped off to Maccheroni, a wonderful trattoria just a stone's throw from the Piazza Navona, and then walked the streets, digesting, appreciating Rome in the winter, when it was filled with Romans and not too much more.

At eight the next morning, I went around the corner to a bustling bar filled with people on their way to work. I waited my turn at the counter and then ordered a
cappuccino caffé do-pio
, which became my eye-opener for every morning of the intensive. It's the well-known frothy, delicious cappuccino but with a double shot of espresso. I sipped it while I scanned the front page of
La Repubblica
, my favorite lefty / Commie Italian newspaper, and I realized as I circled words to look up
in my dictionary that I didn't really know much Italian at all. I took a toasted ham and cheese sandwich back to Jill, who was doing her yoga and meditation in our chilly hotel room (the heat was on the night we checked in, then never again). We took a collective deep breath, put on our winter coats and trundled off to our first day of school.

First thing, we had to take a placement test—to see which level we'd be put into. I have never been good at tests. Well, I've never been very good at school in general. So I gave the test a quick once-over, figured I knew pretty much all this stuff, finished it in five minutes and handed it in. Jill took the full forty-five minutes they had allotted.

Then they called us in individually to see what our conversation skills were. I engaged the instructor in what I thought was a very interesting and charming discussion and she told me my verbal skills were better than my written test results. She told me to go off to room number four, where I would join a class that was already in progress.