Every Day in Tuscany (13 page)

I
THINK OF
two neighbors in Pacific Heights, one carjacked, one robbed and beaten severely with a crowbar. Our garage was jimmied open and the bicycles stolen. Those were San Francisco’s hard crack cocaine years and our gentle Victorian neighborhood a bull’s-eye target. I slept with an electronic panic button beside the bed.

W
HY NOT PLACE
large
X
’s in those white squares on the calendar? Cordon off time—well in advance—and be accommodating to my desires? What do I want on those magic blank days? Not lunch with Julia, not a walk with Michaela, not a yoga class or a movie. I want the mental equivalent of a bottomless black pond surrounded by long grasses and a willow tree. Sitting just
there
. Luxurious are the protected hours to read poetry, to draw, to listen to Ravel, all of Ravel, and read everything I can about my time-warp
fratello
, Luca Signorelli. Self-excused from daily life, I want to practice the art of catering to my own interests. My own steely whims. May I now reclaim my childhood right to explore for myself? To indulge in exploration for its own sake, which is the way I advance my cause. My cause, of course, is wisdom, which comes to some at birth and to some by contemplation.

F
ARTHER BACK, A
peeping Tom raised the white curtain with a coat hanger on an August night when I was newly married. My husband slept. I dropped off the side of the bed and crawled silently into the hall and called the police. They caught him a block away. I learned later it was a boy in my summer school class who’d called me on my wedding day asking me not to marry.
Mea culpa
, I admit I’d flirted even though I was engaged.

Oh, but, as Eduardo Galeano wrote,
Let’s save pessimism for better times
. From my collection of pristine blank books—I have so many I could never fill them in three lifetimes—I open a yellow and white marbled one and write the last line of a Montale poem:

Bring me the sunflower crazed with light
.

I resolve to observe something of the natural world every day, an image or paragraph, and write it here. I know all the boar paths, fire lines, and cart tracks on my side of Monte Sant’ Egidio, where like St. Francis’s followers, I roam and observe, practice sitting still and observing dragonflies and butterflies in the wild heather. I’m fortunate when I see a falcon in the
“Spirito Santo”
position. The bird finds equilibrium between his wing motion and a breeze so that like the Holy Spirit in paintings, he stays poised, hovering over his miserable prey below until the moment he strikes. Although I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt, I may be like the medieval hermits, living my own idiorhythmic day.

Rereading my notes later, will they quickly reconnect me to fresh, startling nature?

• Green lizard flying from the rim of one geranium pot to the next
  

• To
  see
  the perfume of a handful of wild strawberries
  

• To
  feel
  the greeny translucence of a thin slice of fennel
  

• Golden October leaves sticking to a marble statue in the park
  

• Three ancient ladies in dark print dresses, their backs to the view of Santa Maria Nuova, visiting in the winter sun. Immortal
  .
  

• Rolling fields of late June with clumps of late red poppies amid tawny wheat. I noted the purple-black Maltese cross printed inside only a few of the thousands of red poppies volunteering for service. Years of seeing poppies and now I discover the magical hidden cross in the center of the blood-red petals. How life continues to open and amaze
  .
  

In my early Italian years, the natural renewal I experienced came largely from being at home in nature again, playfully as in childhood. As we began hacking brambles from the land and planting gardens—a rose garden, an herb garden, a vegetable garden, a shade garden—I realized that the blistering work, the aches and sweat and scratches of restoration were, like writing, where work and play became the same. As an adult, my feet were accustomed to concrete. Sleeping with the door open, waking with the splendiferous Tuscan dawns, listening to the bees mining the linden, lying in the grass at night watching the falling stars, walking to town instead of driving—all realigned me with my love of the natural world. Circadian rhythms usurped the clock.

For my nature notebook, Thoreau is my inspiration because he looked intimately at the small plot of the world he lived on. Wisdom is packed into his sentence “I have traveled much in Concord.”

• Three tabby cats curled under a lavender plant
  

• Coral geraniums spilling from a baroque balcony
  

• Stonemason soaking his work-sore feet in hot spring water
  

• Cornucopia-shaped eel nets drying on the golden stone street
  

• By a canal in Venice—huge pink panties flapping in the breeze
  

• A ziggurat of ripe peaches at the market
  

• Black morning glory seeds soaking in a glass before I nick off a sliver of each so it germinates
  

What you see, you know. In my notebook (handmade paper, thank you Alberto, and real ink) I arrange these tactile pieces of time, as I might three russet pears on an ochre napkin for a photograph.

C
LOSE CALLS WITH
violence—they’re microcosms. We’re well into the twenty-first century and still resort to barbarian wars. It’s profoundly distressing to realize how we do not go forward but always pick up the stick.

When someone picks up the stick, someone else has less control over life. Post-traumatic stress must be the most underestimated affliction on earth. How people go miraculously on after the Warsaw ghetto, the streets of Baghdad, and other horrors, defies psychology.

But one can’t live by comparing personal experience to historical extremes. If you were spun in the dryer by your brother when you were two, if your home were bombed, if your sister cut off your long braid while you slept, if your parents were blown to smithereens … Against what rod do you measure? Moving along toward a civilized world, isn’t it best to compare experience to a paradigm good instead of a worst scenario?

F
IRST IN MY
personal war-torn series—an ordinary day in May when I was five. A cotton mill employee pushed into my grandfather’s office and shot my father in the side. He’d stepped in front of Daddy Jack, my grandfather, and taken the bullet. I remember hearing later that the man, Willis Barnes, was “disgruntled.” I thought that meant that his stomach was growling too much. Willis Barnes had killed another man inside the mill before he crossed the road to the office. He killed another man after he shot my father.

I was at home with my mother when our friend Royce Williams came to tell her what had happened. She ran to the bedroom, crying, and I followed, jumping up on the canopied bed. I began bouncing, grabbing onto the tester and pulling at the organdy flounces. “Get down,” she shouted, swiping at me and searching her drawers for a handkerchief. “They think he’s going to live,” Royce said, as the mattress dislodged and the bed collapsed.

At the trial, I sat in back of the courtroom in the colored section with our cook, Willie Bell. My father was brought in on a stretcher and was asked to identify the murderer. He rose on his side to point at Willis Barnes. He was never completely well after that and died nine years later. The daughter of Willis Barnes was in my class all through school and spit on me several times. Willis Barnes was electrocuted. I remember hearing people say, “He’s gonna fry,” and he did. Did a party from our town, Fitzgerald, go over to Reidsville to watch the execution? This is part of my memory but I’m not sure it’s true. Still I see them at the glass partition and, how strange, my memory takes Barnes’s point of view, not the perspective of a child standing among grown-ups but how he’d see them if he looked up from the medieval-looking electric chair.

Home from the hospital, my father lifted his pajama top when I asked to see where he was shot. My eyes squeezed closed as I saw the red gash sewn shut with thick black thread. On his back was the puckered hole where the bullet exited.

I
DON’T STEP
on ants. Ed takes scorpions outside under a glass. Spiders in the tub get a chance to crawl up the towel and be taken to the windowsill. I live with a gentle man who always will turn the other cheek, unless brutally attacked on the sidewalk. I walked toward him in the Madrid airport, almost not recognizing his cement-scraped face, bruised cheeks, and split lips. “Don’t worry,” he said right off. “It could have been worse. Much. I am so glad to be here.”

It could have been worse. I am so glad to be here
.

Yeah. And it could have been better.