The Reluctant Tuscan (33 page)

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, as Nancy translated so nothing would be missed, “but I was wondering if you could spare me a moment.”

Mario cocked his head at us like a spaniel.

“I've been working on this article on Cambione. . . .”

“Bully for you,” Mario said with hollow cheer. “Not even a car accident or the Holy Sabbath can keep you Yanks from making a buck.”

I gave him an accommodating smile as I took out my notepad and flipped it open. “It's going to feature some of the town's most prominent citizens, which, of course, must include the Pingatores.”

Mario translated for Vesuvia, who responded with a suspicious smile.

“So I need you to help verify a story I heard about you . . . and your
zia
Teresa.”

The mention of their aunt, who had gone off to live in America, caught them both short. They turned to us with expressions that ranged from guarded to contemptuous.

“Apparently, when you were kids—during the hard years after the war—your family was pretty much kept alive by regular shipments of food from your
zia
Teresa.”

“We received a leg up from many relatives,” Mario said, nervously glancing around to see who was in hearing distance.

“Seems these shipments from America continued for a number of years,” I said, as Nancy and I sat down at their table. “Every month she'd send you a packageful of Hershey bars, Spam—”

“Eh, it was so long ago, who remembers?” Vesuvia suddenly said in Italian, her jaw clenched in anger.

“Even after Zia Teresa died, her son kept on sending you packages like clockwork. Then, one day, a box arrived like no other. When your mamma opened it, it was filled with a strange, dry powder.”

“Who told you this?” Mario signaled the waiter for their check. “They don't know bugger-all!”

“There was a note inside, but since it was in English, nobody could read it. After much discussion your parents decided that it was powdered milk. So they mixed it with water, and you kids drank it.”

“You don't know what you're talking about!” Mario said.

“Well, other people think I do. See, your parents generously shared it with some of the other kids in the village . . . like the mayor.”

“Bollocks!” Mario hissed. “We knew what it was and we didn't eat it!”

“According to my source, which I can't reveal, you didn't find out what it was until years later when Zia Teresa's son showed up, wanting to see where you were keeping his mother's ashes.”

“This is utter rubbish!” Mario started to rise, but I put my hand on his arm.

“So you're saying that a box of strange-looking powder arrived with a note that you couldn't read, and you instantly knew what it was?”

“Okay, maybe at first mamma thought it was some kind of yeast.”

“Too bad she didn't bake it up in a loaf of bread,” I said. “Because then the dead could have risen again.”

“Why are you spreading lies about us?” Vesuvia said to Nancy in Italian.

“Why were you spreading lies about us?” Nancy fired back. “Telling the Comune we were putting up a three-story aluminum-and-glass California beach house!”

“We did no such thing!” Vesuvia said, her voice biting like a rusty saw.

Nancy cupped her hands to the heavens, making the Italian gesture that implores the other person to be honest.

“If we did say anything,” Vesuvia muttered, “we were only repeating what somebody told us.”

“That's exactly what I'm doing,” I said waving my notebook in their face.

“How dare you!” Mario's voice strained as he struggled to keep it to a whisper. “Don't you know my sister already feels bad that the whole town is blaming her for your accident?”

“Well, let's see how bad she feels when the whole world reads that you're a pack of ghouls who eat their own dead.”

“If anybody has the right to feel bad, it's us,” Nancy said. “After I made you that bas relief, and you never even acknowledged it!”

Vesuvia's face twisted into a sardonic expression. Her left eye bulged out so far, her eye shadow cracked. Just then, Marco Mucchi approached our table, beaming at the sight of the four of us sitting together.

“Un miracolo,”
he declared. A miracle.
“Il leone e l'agnello.”
The lion lying down with the lamb.

But his delight was short lived. Mario shot out of his chair so abruptly that he momentarily lost his balance and wheeled like a spooked horse. He regained his composure and signaled to his sister that they were leaving. Thinking he might have caused the problem, Marco lavishly apologized. Vesuvia ignored him as she rose and gathered up her purse, but Marco kept explaining that he had only come over because she had forgotten to initial one of the pages.

“Criminale!”
Vesuvia screamed, grabbing the pages out of Marco's hand and ripping them up.
“Farabutti!”

“We'll take you scoundrels to court and sue your pants off!” Mario echoed as they steamed toward the door.

Marco looked at us dumbfounded. When we explained what happened, his face turned as ashen as Zia Teresa's remains.

“How could you do this?” he said. “You've ruined everything.”

“Look, I really wasn't going to write the story,” I explained. “We were just trying to scare them into dropping all claims on the house and accepting us as the rightful owners.”

“And to make them stop harassing us.”

Marco picked up the ripped pages and handed them to us. “See this? It's a document she asked me to file with the Comune. It transfers the ownership of the property at the top of the hill to you.”

“What?”

“She felt so bad the town was blaming her, she wanted to give you the land as a peace offering.”

Nancy and I looked at the shredded document and then at each other in stunned silence.

“But why didn't she just respond to our offer?” Nancy said. “That was months ago.”

“She told me that when she was opening the package, your bas-relief fell on the floor and broke. She was so embarrassed, she didn't know how to tell you.”

“Oh, that's crazy,” Nancy said. “I probably could have fixed it, or made her a new one. I wish she would have said something.”

“I think she wanted to surprise you,” Marco Mucchi said, looking mournfully at the ripped pages. “This was going to be your wedding present.”

T
he only thing worse than feeling bad is feeling bad on a day when everybody else is feeling so damn good. And the source of such universal good cheer was the time of year known as
il raccolto
, the harvest.

By late October the grapes and olives had ripened. From all over the area, vineyards and olive groves were reverberating with the collective joy of gathering in the land's bounty. It was the time of year when one could safely say that the only places on earth where Communism was still practiced were North Korea, Cuba, and this little corner of Tuscany. Friends, neighbors, in-laws, passing acquaintances, and occasionally even a pair of
stranieri
, all pulled together to help bring in the harvest.

We had spent the past few days recoiling from the fiasco we had created with the Pingatores. Nancy and I moved around the house like a pair of ghosts, as if dazed by the hurt we had caused. Even the sight of Pepe frolicking in the heather or eating one of my brand-new Nike running shoes failed to cheer us.

The weather outside matched our mood. The all-powerful sun had faded into a pale white ball that was constantly obscured by gray skies until it looked like just another feature of the landscape. Cold, wet winds howled through hairline cracks in the walls, as people packed up the citrus-colored linens of summer and donned thick wools and heavy cottons in somber shades of navy and brown.

I think no country on earth benefits from the sunshine more than Italy. When it's overcast and dreary, the gray seems to accentuate how everything is slightly threadbare and the villages have an almost shabby, Eastern European feel. But when the sun shines, the ordinary becomes remarkable and the remarkable becomes transcendent.

We might have stayed in this wintry funk forever if the ham-sized fist of Gigi hadn't pounded on our door one morning, rousing us out of our malaise. What were we doing lying around the house? he demanded. Hadn't we seen the gathering storm clouds? We needed to harvest our olives right now before it started to pour. A hard, cold rain like this could decimate our crop.

We had been so preoccupied with construction problems and the internecine warfare with the Pingatores that we had neglected to notice that our olives had, in the last week or so, grown much fatter. Had we been more attentive, we would have seen how the hard, dark-green berries had morphed through a hundred shades of purple as they swelled into jellybean-shaped pods so saturated, they were almost sweating oil.

There was no time to waste, Gigi proclaimed, pointing to a swirl of leaves caught in the jaws of a cold wind, a sure augury of a big storm. We craned our necks to look around his shoulders and saw a flatbed truck jammed with many familiar faces. Climbing out of the truck were Va Bene and Problema, cousins Spartaco and Faustino, Signora Cipollini and Annamaria, along with a collection of grandmothers, wives, children, chickens, and dogs. They had been going from house to house harvesting, and we were next.

We threw on our grubbiest jeans, grabbed some gloves, and reported for duty, only to be scolded for not having put up our nets. We were supposed to have hung sheets of netting, as fine as cheesecloth, between our trees by securing them to the trunks so that they didn't touch the ground but gently sagged like a safety net under a trapeze artist.

Our netting should have been hung days ago, and here we were clearly negligent. Cousin Faustino reminded us that he had kept offering to do it for us, but we never got back to him. Nancy and I looked at each other sheepishly. We remembered him explaining that the nets needed to be in place early because, as the olives ripened, they became so heavy that gravity begans the harvest far ahead of the first human hand.

Nancy and I were now ready to make up for lost time and pick olives, but the first thing we had to learn was that olives are not picked. The actual harvesting is done by shaking and beating on the trees. Nothing subtle or romantic about it, the big guys shake the trunk while the others stand on ladders and beat on the branches with bamboo sticks until the olives come raining down. This is a method that's remained essentially unchanged in over two thousand years, and back then it was probably the best show in town when they couldn't find a martyr to burn or an adulterer to stone.

The only concession to modernity was Va Bene kicking on his gas-powered leaf blower to separate the leaves and twigs that got mixed in with the olives. That done, the olives were gathered up and gently poured into baskets with a loose enough weave to allow them to breath. Everybody exercised great care not to let a single olive touch the ground, or it would be declared damaged and be quickly discarded before it could spoil the whole batch.

Like everyone else we didn't have enough to process individually at the
frantoio
(olive mill), but by combining our crop with our neighbors', we would all come away with more than enough oil to last until the next harvest.

The truck was loaded, everybody hopped on board, and we chugged away like something out of
The Grapes of Wrath
, itinerant farm workers bouncing down a bumpy road in a junky old truck. Any minute I feared we might break into a Woody Guthrie song. But it was not all merriment. The black clouds churning on the horizon gave a real urgency to our mission. If a big storm washed out the roads, we wouldn't be able to get to the mill. This delay could be fatal, because olives start to ferment the moment they're picked, and that would ruin the flavor.

 

 

Thunder boomed
and lightning hissed across the sky. Those of us bouncing around in the back of the truck covered our heads with everything from newspapers to burlap sacks. Va Bene gave us a little horseshoe of a smile as he flipped up the hood of his sweatshirt, while Problema blew on his hands and cursed. Annamaria fished out a crucifix from under the five sweaters she was wearing and Mrs. Cipollini threw on a raincoat that looked like something she had made out of a shower curtain.

On both sides of the road lay somber evidence that everything of value had been harvested. Fields of earth glistened where plows had freshly turned dirt so it could breathe over the winter. Vineyards were plucked clean and cornfields were leveled bare, but nothing was more desolate than the sunflowers.

The Italians call them
girasole
, which means “turns to the sun.” In summer they burst into an eye-blinding yellow so brilliant that the very sun they turn to must burn with envy. But in the fall the seeds are gathered, leaving the dead sunflowers standing parched brown, their heads eerily bowed in the same direction like an army of mendicant monks.

Our truck lurched up a steep mountain road. Nancy and I had to hold on tight to keep from flying out. The flatbed was so overloaded and top heavy, it felt as if we were on a boat threatening to capsize at every turn. Fast cars whipped around us, blasting horns and shaking fists as we cheered their bravado. We were laughing and squinting at the raindrops that were slanting sideways into our faces. It was scary and crazy and exhilarating beyond description.

We finally came to a narrow mud-and-gravel driveway that was overgrown with foliage to the point where we could have lived in Cambione in Collina for the rest of our lives and never have found it. We turned onto that road and the rain stopped pelting us, thanks to an arch of overhanging branches and leaves that formed a lush green tunnel dense enough to compel a driver to use his headlights on even the sunniest of days. This canopy began to thin as we approached a two-story stucco villa that was painted a soft reddish pink. Our truck rolled to a stop under one of the low-hanging eaves and we climbed out, to be greeted by Roberto and Roberta, the owners of the
frantoio
.