Under the Tuscan Sun (10 page)

THE FIVE
TIGLIO
TREES, OLD WORLD LINDENS OR LIMES,
bear no fruit. They provide shade along the broad terrace beside
the house when the sun will not allow us on the front terrace.
We have lunch under the
tigli
almost every day. Their
blossoms are like pearly earrings dangling from the leaves, and
when they open—all it seems on the same day—fragrance
envelopes the whole hillside. At the height of bloom, we sit on the
upstairs patio, just adjacent to the trees, trying to identify the
fragrance.
I think it smells like the perfume counter in the dime store; Ed
thinks it smells like the oil his uncle Syl used to slick back his
hair. Either way, it attracts every bee in town. Even at night,
when we take our coffee up to the patio, they are working the
flowers over. Their collective buzz sounds like a major swarm
approaching. It's both lulling and alarming. Ed stays in the
doorway at first because he's allergic to bee sting, but
they aren't interested in us. They have their honey sacs to fill,
their legs to dust with pollen.

Allergic or not, Ed longs for beehives. He tries to get me
interested in being the beekeeper. He takes the fact that I never
have been stung by a bee to mean that they won't sting me. I point
out that I once was stung by a whole nest of wasps but somehow that
doesn't count. He imagines a row of hives at the end of the lime
trees. “You'll be fascinated when you look in the hive,” he says.
“When it's hot, dozens of workers stationed at the door whir their
wings to cool the queen.” I've noticed that he has collected lots
of local honeys. Frequently there's a pot of hot water on the
stove with a jar of waxy, stiff honey softening in it. The acacia
is pale and lemony; the dark chestnut is so thick a spoon will
stand up straight in it. He has a jar of
timo,
thyme
honey, and, of course, the
tiglio.
The wildest is
macchia,
from the salty coastal shrubs of Tuscany.
“The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay
eggs, lay eggs. She takes
one
nuptial flight. That
one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive
forever. The workers—the sexually undeveloped
females—have the best life. They have fields of flowers
to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.” I
can tell he's carried away with the idea. I'm getting interested
myself.

“What do they eat inside the hive all winter?”

“Beebread.”

“Beebread? Are you serious?”

“It's a mixture of pollen and honey. And the worker excretes
gold wax from her stomach for the comb. Those neat hexagons!”

I try to imagine the size of a worker bee's intestinal
system, how many times she must fly from the hive to the
tiglio
to make even a tablespoon of honey. A thousand
times? A jar must represent a million flights of bees carrying a
heavy cargo of honeydew, their legs sticky with pollen. In
The Georgics,
which is sort of an ancient farmer's
almanac, Vergil writes that bees lift small stones to ballast
themselves as they fly through boisterous east winds. He is wise
on the subject of bees but not entirely to be trusted; he thought
they would generate spontaneously from the decayed carcass of a
cow. I like the image of a bee clutching a small stone, like a
football player holding the ball to his chest as he barrels down
the field. “Yes, I can see four hives painted green. I like the
beekeeper's gear, that medieval-looking veil, lifting the dark
combs—we could roll our own candles from the wax.” Now
I'm drawn into this idea.

But he stands up and leans out into the dizzying fragrance.
Practicality has left him. “The wasps are anarchistic, whereas
the bees         .         .         .”

I gather up the coffee cups. “Maybe we should wait until the
house is done.”

FIGS REVEAL WATER. ON THE TERRACES THEY GROW NEAR THE
stone chutes
we discovered. The natural well has webby roots crawling down into
it from the fig above. I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels
spooky. In Italian,
il fico,
fig, has a slangy turn
into
la fica,
meaning vulva. Possibly because of the
famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most
ancient of fruits. Oddest, too—the fig flower is inside
the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive,
infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau. Fig pollination takes
place through an interaction with a particular kind of wasp about
one eighth of an inch long. The female bores into the developing
flower inside the fig. Once in, she delves with her oviposter, a
curved needle nose, into the female flower's ovary, depositing her
own eggs. If her oviposter can't reach the ovary (some of the
flowers have long styles), she still fertilizes the fig flower
with the pollen she collected from her travels. Either way, one
half of this symbiotic system is served—the wasp larvae
develop if she has left her eggs or the pollinated fig flower
produces seed. If reincarnation is true, let me not come back as
a fig wasp. If the female can't find a suitable nest for her eggs,
she usually dies of exhaustion inside the fig. If she can, the
wasps hatch inside the fig and all the males are born without
wings. Their sole, brief function is sex. They get up and fertilize
the females, then help them tunnel out of the fruit. Then they
die. The females fly out, carrying enough sperm from the tryst to
fertilize all their eggs. Is this appetizing, to know that however
luscious figs taste, each one is actually a little graveyard of
wingless male wasps? Or maybe the sensuality of the fruit comes
from some flavor they dissolve into after short, sweet lives.

THE WOMEN IN MY FAMILY ALWAYS HAVE MADE BREAD AND
butter pickles
and muscadine jellies and watermelon rind pickles and peach
preserves and plum butters. I feel drawn to the scalding kettle,
with a flat of rapidly softening raspberries leaking juice on the
counter, to the syrupy clove-scented bowls of sweet peaches about
to be poured into an astringent vinegar bath, to ring-finger-sized
cucumbers. In California, I've cried over rubber sealing rings
that turned to gum, over jams that wouldn't jam, over a cauldron
of guavas that made two dozen jars of gray jelly instead of the
clear exotic topaz I expected. I don't have the gene my mother
had for laying-by rows of crimson and emerald jars of fruit
preserves and the little pickled things called
sottaceto
(under vinegar) here. When I look at the product of a sweating
afternoon, all I can think is “Botulism?”

This long-lost owner who placed the fruit trees on a terrace
so they sweetly dangle over a grassy walk, she, I'm sure, had a
shelf under the stairs for her confitures, and no qualms about
breaking open her spicy plums on a January morning. Here, I
think, I'll master the art my mother should have passed to me as
easily as she passed her taste for hand-painted china and
expensive shoes.

From the Saturday market I lug a box of prime peaches downhill
to the car. They are so beautiful all I really want to do is pile
them in a basket and look at the delicious colors. In the one
cookbook I have here so far, I find Elizabeth David's recipe for
peach marmalade. Nothing could be simpler: The halved peaches
simply are cooked with a little sugar and water, cooled, then
cooked again the next day, until the preserves set when ladled
onto a saucer. Elizabeth David notes, “This method makes a
rather extravagant but very delicious preserve. Unfortunately it
tends to form a skin of mold within a very short time, but this does
not affect the rest of the jam, some of which I have kept
for well over a year, even in a damp house.” I'm a little bothered
by this mold note, and she's vague about sterilizing jars and
never mentions listening for the
whoosh
of the seal I
heard as Mother's green tomato pickles cooled. I remember my mother
tapping the tops to make sure the lid had sucked down. It sounds
as though Elizabeth David just dishes it up into the jars then
forgets it, scraping off mold with impunity before spreading some
on her toast. Still, she says “rather extravagant but very
delicious,” and if Elizabeth David says that, I believe her.
Since I have all these peaches, I decide to make seven pounds
and just eat the rest. We'll use the preserves this summer before
an unappetizing mold can form in this damp house. I'll give some
to new friends, who will wonder why I'm not painting shutters
instead of stirring fruit.

I drop the peaches into boiling water for a moment, watching
the rosy colors intensify, then spoon them out and slide the skins
off as easily as taking off a silk slip. This recipe is simple,
not even a few drops of lemon juice or a grating of nutmeg or a
clove or two. I remember my mother putting in a kernel from
inside the peach pit, an almond-scented secret nut. Soon the
kitchen fills with a fly-attracting sweetness. The next day, I
boil the jars for good measure, while the fruit cooks down again,
then spoon it in. I have five lovely jars of jam, peachy but not
too sweet.

The
forno
in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their
wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times
because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat
to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the
terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of
cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive
terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in
medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl
filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears
on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. I forget my book.
Pear cobbler, pear chutney, pear ice, green figs (would the
wasps already be in green figs?) with pork, fig fritters, fig and
nocciola
tart. May summer last a hundred years.

W
hir of
t
he
S
un

THE HOUSE, ONLY TWO KILOMETERS FROM
town, feels
like a deep country place. We can't see any neighbors, although we
hear the man way above us calling
vieni qua,
come here,
to his dog. The summer sun hits like a religious conviction. I can
tell time by where the sun strikes the house, as though it were
a gigantic sundial. At five-thirty, the first rays smack the patio
door, routing us out of bed and giving us the pleasure of dawn. At
nine, a slab of sunlight falls into my study from the side window,
my favorite window in the house for its framed view over the
cypresses, the groves in the valley, and out into the Apennines.
I want to paint a watercolor of it but my watercolors are awful,
fit only to be stored on a closet shelf. By ten, the sun swings high
over the front of the house and stays there until four, when a cut
of shadow across the lawn signals that the sun is heading toward
the other side of the mountain. If we walk to town that way in late
afternoon, we see a prolonged, grandiose sunset over the Val di
Chiana, lingering until it finally just dissolves, leaving enough
streaked gold and saffron behind to light a way home until
nine-thirty, when indigo dark sets in.

On moonless nights it is as black as inside an egg. Ed has gone
back to Minnesota for his parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. A
shutter bangs; otherwise, the silence reverberates so strongly that
I think I can hear my own blood circulating. I expect to lie awake,
to imagine a drug-crazed intruder with an Uzi creeping up the
stairs in the dark. Instead, in the wide bed with flowered sheets,
I spread my books, cards, and notepaper around me and indulge in the
rare act of writing letters to friends. A second indulgence goes
straight back to high-school days—consuming a plate of
brownies and a Coke while copying paragraphs and verses I like
into my notebook. If only Sister, my black long-haired cat, were
here. She is truly a good companion for solitude. It's far too hot
for her to sleep against my feet, as she likes to do; she would
have to stay on a pillow at the foot of the bed. I sleep like one
newly born and in the morning have coffee on the patio, walk to
town for groceries, work on the land, come in for water, and it is
only ten o'clock. Hours go by without the need to speak.

After a few days, my life takes on its own rhythm. I wake up
and read for an hour at three
A.M.
; I eat small
snacks—a ripe tomato eaten like an apple—at eleven
and three rather than lunch at one. At six I'm up, but by siesta
time, the heat of the day, I'm ready for two hours in bed. Slumber
sounds heavier than sleep, and with the hum of a small fan, it's
slumber I fall into. At last, I have time to take a coverlet
outside at night and lie on my back with the flashlight and the
star chart. With the Big Dipper easily fixed right over the house,
I finally locate Pollux in Gemini and Procyon in Canis Minor. I
forget the stars and here they are, so alive all along, pulsing and
falling.

A French woman and her English husband walk up the
driveway and introduce themselves as neighbors. They've heard
Americans bought the place and are curious to meet those mad enough
to take on this ordeal of restoration. They invite me to lunch the
next day. Since both are writers and are restoring their small
farmhouse, we fall into instant camaraderie. Should they have the
staircase here or there, what to do with this tiny room, would a
bedroom in the animal stall downstairs be too dark? The
comune
won't allow you to cut windows, even in almost
airless farmhouses; exteriors must remain intact on historical
property. They invite me to dinner the next night and introduce me
to two other foreign writers, French and Asian-American. By the
time Ed returns in a week, we're invited to the house of these
writers.

The table is set under a shady grape arbor. Cold salads,
cold wine, fruit, a grand cheese soufflé somehow steamed
on top of the stove. Heat shimmers around the olive trees in the
distance. On the stone patio, we're cool. We're introduced to the
other guests: novelists, journalists, translators, a nonfiction
writer—all older expatriates who've settled in these hills
and restored properties. To live wholly in another country fascinates
me. I'm curious how the trip or assignment to Italy turned into a
lifetime for each of them and I ask Fenella, the international
journalist, on my right, about this. “You can't imagine what Rome
was in the fifties. Magic. I simply fell in love—like you
fall in love with a person—and schemed to find a way to
stay there. It wasn't easy. I got on as a stringer for Reuters.
Look at the old movies and you'll see there were almost no cars.
This was not long after the war and Italy was devastated, but the
life
! It was unbelievably cheap, too. Of course we didn't
have much money but we lived in enormous apartments in grand
palazzi
for nothing. Every time I went back to America,
I just couldn't wait to get back. It wasn't a rejection—or
maybe it was. Anyway, I've never wanted to be anywhere else.”

“We feel the same way,” I say, and then realize that's
not really the truth. I succumb totally to the “magic” of this
place, but I know the appeal to me is partly the balance it
restores to my life in America. I'm not about to leave there, even
if I could. I try to amend what I've said. “My job at home is
hard but I really love it—I'm pushed by it.
And San Francisco is not home at the blood root, but it's a lucky,
very beautiful place to live, earthquakes and all. Spending time
here lets me escape the craziness and violence and downright surreal
aspects of America, and my own overscheduled life. Three weeks after
arrival, I realize I've let down some guard that is so instinctive
to me, living in an American city, that I don't realize I have
it.” She looks at me with sympathy. At this point, the violence
in America is hard for anyone to comprehend. “Literally, my pulse
slows,” I continue. “Even so, I sense that I can best develop
my thinking there—it's my culture, my rough edge, my past.”
I'm not sure I've explained myself well. She raises her glass to
me.

“
Esatto,
my daughter feels the same. You didn't
come along in time to know Rome back then. It's terrible now. But
then it was irresistible.” I suddenly realize they're in double
exile, from the United States and from Rome.

Max joins in. He had to go to Rome last week and the traffic
was horrendous, then the gypsies accosted him, as if he were a
tourist, pressing their cardboard against him in an effort to
distract him while they tried to pick his pocket. “Long ago, I
learned to put the evil eye on them,” he tells Ed and me. “They
scatter then.” They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be.
What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to
be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used
to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now.
All true, but what can you do but live now? Our friends who've
recently bought a place in Rome are wild about the city. We love it.
Maybe living with Bay Bridge traffic and San Francisco prices prepares
us for anything.

One guest is a writer I have long admired. She moved here
about twenty years ago, after living for years in the postwar wild
south of Italy and then in Rome. I knew she lived here and even had
been given her telephone number by a mutual acquaintance in Georgia,
where she now spends a part of every year. Cold calls always have
been hard for me to make and I am a little awed by the woman who
wrote, in luminous, austere prose, about the dark, raucous,
convoluted lives of women down in ravaged Basilicata.

Elizabeth is across the table and down from me. I see her cover
her glass with her hand as Max starts to pour wine. “You know I
never drink wine at lunch.” Ah, the austerity. She wears a blue
cotton shirt with some vaguely religious-looking medallion around
her neck. She has a dead-level blue gaze, fair skin, and a voice I
think has a touch of my own accent.

I lean forward and venture, “Is that a trace of a Southern
accent?”

“I certainly hope not,” she snaps—do I see a hint of
a smile?—and quickly turns back to the famous translator
beside her. I look down into my salad.

By the time Richard serves his lemon gelato made with
mascarpone, the gathering is mellowing. Several empty wine bottles
stand on a side table. The intense sun is now caught in the limbs
of a chestnut. Ed and I join in where we can but this is a lively
group of old friends with years of shared experiences. Fenella
talks about her research trips to Bulgaria and Russia; her husband,
Peter, tells a story about bringing a gray parrot in his coat
pocket when he came back from an assignment in Africa. Cynthia talks
about a family dispute over her famous mother's notebooks. Max
makes us laugh over his unbelievable luck in sitting next to a film
producer on a flight to New York, launching into a description of
his script to this captive, who finally said to send him the script.
Now the producer is coming to visit and has bought the option.
Elizabeth looks bemused.

As the party breaks up she says, “You were supposed to call
me. I've tried to get your number but there's no listing. Irby
[a friend of my sister's] told me you've bought a house here.
In fact, I met your sister at a dinner in Rome—Georgia, that
is.” I make excuses about the confusions of the house, then
impulsively ask her to dinner on Sunday.
Impulsively, because we don't have furniture, dishes,
linen—only the rudimentary kitchen with a few pots and
plates.

I PICK UP A LINEN CLOTH AT THE MARKET TO COVER THE
ramshackle table
left behind in the house, arrange wildflowers in a jar and place it
in a flowerpot, plan dinner carefully but keep it simple: ravioli
with sage and butter, sautéed chicken and
prosciutto
rolls, fresh vegetables and fruit. As
Elizabeth arrives, Ed is moving the table out to the terrace. The
entire top and one leg fall off—either an icebreaker or a
disaster. She helps us piece the table together and Ed pounds in
a few nails. Covered and set, it looks quite nice. We tour the
big empty house and begin to talk drainpipes, wells, chimneys,
whitewash. She completely restored a noble
casa
colonica
when she moved here. As a wall came down the first
day, she found an angry sow left behind by the peasants. Quickly,
it becomes clear that she knows
everything
about Italy.
Ed and I begin what is to become the ten thousand questions.
Where do you get your water tested? How long was a Roman mile?
Who's the best butcher? Can you buy old roof tiles? Is it better
to apply for residency? She has been an intense observer of Italy
since 1954 and knows an astonishing amount about the history,
language, politics, as well as the telephone numbers of good
plumbers, the name of a woman who prepares
gnocchi
with
the lightest touch north of Rome. Long dinner under the moon,
hoping the table won't keel over. Suddenly we have a friend.

Every morning, Elizabeth goes into town, buys a paper, and
takes her espresso at the same café. I'm up early, too,
and love to see the town come alive. I walk in with my Italian
verb book, memorizing conjugations as I walk. Sometimes I take a
book of poetry because walking suits poetry. I can read a few lines,
savor or analyze them, read a few more, sometimes just repeat
a few words of the poem; this meditative strolling seems to free
the words. The rhythm of my walking matches the poet's cadence.
Ed finds this eccentric, thinks I will be known as the weird
American, so when I get to the town gate, I put away my book and
concentrate on seeing Maria Rita arranging vegetables, the
shopkeeper sweeping the street with one of those witch brooms
made of twigs, the barber lighting his first smoke, leaning back
in his chair with a tabby sleeping on his lap. Often I run into
Elizabeth. Without plan, we begin to meet a morning or two
a week.