Under the Tuscan Sun (11 page)

IN TOWN, TOO, ED AND I ARE BEGINNING TO FEEL MORE AT
home. We try
to buy everything right in the local shops: hardware, electrical
transformers, contact lens cleaner, mosquito candles, film. We
do not patronize the cheaper supermarket in Camucia; we go from
the bread store to the fruit and vegetable shop, to the butcher,
loading everything into our blue canvas shopping bags. Maria Rita
starts to go in back of her shop and bring out the just-picked
lettuces, the choice fruit. “Oh, pay me tomorrow,” she says if
we only have large bills. In the post office, our letters are
affixed with several stamps by the postmistress then individually
hand-canceled with vengeance,
whack, whack, “Buon giorno,
signori.”
At the crowded little grocery store, I count
thirty-seven kinds of dried pasta and, on the counter, fresh
gnocchi, pici,
thick pasta in long strands, fettuccine
and two kinds of ravioli. By now they know what kind of bread we
want, that we want the
bufala,
buffalo milk mozzarella,
not the
normale,
regular cow's milk kind.

We buy another bed for my daughter's upcoming visit. Box
springs don't exist here. The metal bed frame holds a base of woven
wood on which the mattress rests. I thought of the slats in my spool
bed when I was growing up, how the mattress, springs and all,
collapsed when I jumped up and down on the bed. But this is
securely made, the bed firm and comfortable. A very young woman
with tousled black curls and black eyes sells old linens at the
Saturday market. For Ashley's bed I find a heavy linen sheet with
crocheted edges and big square pillowcases of lace and embroidery.
Surely these accompanied a bride to her marriage. The condition
is so good I wonder if she ever took them from her trunk. They
have dusty lines where they've been folded, so I soak them in warm
suds in the hip bath, then hang them out to dry in the midday
sun, a natural strong bleach that turns them back to white.

Elizabeth has decided to sell her house and rent the former
priest's wing attached to a thirteenth-century church called Santa
Maria del Bagno, Saint Mary of the Baths. Although she won't move
until winter, she begins to sort her belongings. Perhaps out of
memory of that first dinner, she gives us an iron outdoor table
and four curly chairs. Years ago, when she worked on a TV show about
Moravia, he demanded a place to rest between shoots. She bought
the set then. I give the “Moravia table” a fresh coat of that
blackish green paint you see on park furniture in Paris. We also
are the recipients of several bookcases and a couple of shopping
bags full of books. The fourteenth-century hermits who lived on
this mountain still might approve of our white rooms so far:
beds, books, bookcases, a few chairs, a primitive table. Big
willow baskets hold our clothes.

On the third Saturday of each month, a small antiques market
takes place in a piazza in the nearby castle town of Castiglione
del Lago. We find a great sepia photograph of a group of bakers
and a couple of chestnut coatracks. Mostly we browse around,
astonished at the crazy prices on bad garage sale furniture. On
the way home, we come upon an accident—someone in a tiny
Fiat tried to pass on a curve—the Italian
birthright—and rammed into a new Alfa Romeo. The
upside-down Fiat still has one spinning wheel and two passengers
are being extracted from the crumpled car. An ambulance siren
blares. The smashed Alfa is standing, doors open, no passengers
in the front seat. As we inch by, I see a dead boy, about eighteen,
in the backseat. He is still upright in his seat belt but clearly
is dead. Traffic stops us and we are two feet from his remote
blue stare, the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.
Very carefully, Ed drives us home. The next day, when we are
back in Castiglione del Lago for a swim in the lake, we
ask the waiter at the bar if the boy killed in the accident was
local. “No, no, he was from Terontola.” Terontola is all of
five miles away.

WE'RE EXPECTING THE PERMITS SOON. MEANWHILE, THE MAIN
project we
hope to finish before we go home at the end of August is the
sandblasting of the beams. Each room has two or three large beams
and twenty-five or thirty small ones. A big job.

Ferragosto,
August 15, is not just a holiday for
the Virgin, it is a signal for work to cease and desist all over
Italy both before and after that day. We underestimated the total
effect of this holiday. When we began calling for a
sandblaster, after the wall was finished,
we found only one who would think of taking the job in August. He
was to arrive on the first, the job to last three days. On the
second we began to call and have been calling ever since. A woman
who sounds very old shouts back that he is on
vacanza al
mare,
he's over on the coast walking those sandy beaches
instead of sandblasting our sticky beams. We wait, hoping he
will appear.

Although we can't paint until after the central heating is
installed, we begin to scrub down the walls in preparation. On
Saturdays and odd days when they're not working elsewhere, the
Poles come over to help us. The flaky whitewash brushes off on our
clothes if we rub against it. As they clean the walls with wet
cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most
prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's
blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only
from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now
Afghanistan. Faintly, we see a far-gone acanthus border
around the top of the walls. The
contadina
bedroom used
to be painted in foot-wide blue and white stripes. Two upstairs
bedrooms were clear yellow, like the
giallorino
Renaissance painters favored, made from baked yellow glass,
red lead, and sand from the banks of the Arno.

From the third floor, I hear Cristoforo calling Ed, then he
calls me. He sound urgent, excited. He and Riccardo talk at once in
Polish and point to the middle of the dining room wall. We see an
arch, then he rubs his wet cloth around it and scumbles of blue
appear, then a farmhouse, almond green feathery strokes of what
may be a tree. They have uncovered a fresco! We grab buckets and
sponges and start gently cleaning the walls. Every swipe reveals more:
two people by a shore, water, distant hills. The same blue that's
on the walls was used for the lake, a paler blue for sky and soft
coral for clouds. The biscuit-colored houses are the same colors
we see all around us. Vibrant when wet, the colors pale as they
dry. An electrical line, buried at some point in the wall, mars
a faux-framed classical scene of ruins in a panel over the door.
We rub all afternoon. Water runs down our arms, sloshes on the
floor. My arms feel like slack rubber bands. The lake scene
continues on the adjoining wall and it is vaguely familiar,
like the villages and landscape around Lake Trasimeno. The naive
style reveals no newly discovered Giotto but it's charming. Someone
didn't think so and whitewashed it. Luckily, they didn't use
tougher paint. We will be able to live with this soft painting
surrounding our dinners indoors.

A HUNDRED YEARS MAY NOT BE LONG ENOUGH TO RESTORE
this house and
land. Upstairs I rub the windows with vinegar, shining the green
scallop of the hills along the sky. I spot Ed on the third terrace,
waving a long spinning blade. He's wearing red shorts as bright
as a banner, black boots against the locust thorns, and a clear
visor to shield his eyes from flying rocks. He could be a powerful
angel, coming to announce a late annunciation, but he is only the
newest in an endless line of mortals who've worked to keep this
farm from sliding back into the steep slope it once was, perhaps
long before the Etruscans, when Tuscany was a solid forest.

The ugly whine of the weed machine drowns out the whinnies
of the two white horses across the road and the multicultural birds
that wake us up every morning. But the dry weeds must be cut in
case of fire, so he works in the fiery sun without his shirt.
Each day his skin darkens. We've learned the gravity of the
hillside, the quick springs pulling down dirt and the thrust of
the stone walls which must be sluices and must push back harder
than the downward pull of the soil. He bends and slings olive
prunings to a stack he's building for fires on cool nights. What
a body of work this place is. Olive burns hot. The ashes then are
returned to the trees for fertilizer. Like the pig, the olive
is useful in every part.

The old glass sags in places—strange that glass which
looks so solid retains a slow liquidity—distorting the
sharp clarity of the view into watery Impressionism. Usually, if
I am polishing silver, ironing, vacuuming at home, I am highly
conscious that I am “wasting time,” I should be doing something
more important—memos, class preparation, papers, writing.
My job at the university is all-consuming. Housework becomes
a nuisance. My houseplants know it's feast or famine. Why am I
humming as I wash windows—one of the top ten dreaded chores?
Now I am planning a vast garden. My list includes sewing! At
least a fine handkerchief linen curtain to go over the glass
bathroom door. This house, every brick and lock, will be as known
to me as my own or the loved one's body.

Restoration. I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps
ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full. It's our
zeal for all this work that amazes me. Is it only that once into
the project, what it all means doesn't come up? Or that excitement
and belief reject questions? The vast wheel has a place for our
shoulders and we simply push into the turning? But I know there's
a taproot as forceful as that giant root wrapped around the
stone.

I remember dreaming over Bachelard's
The Poetics of
Space,
which I don't have with me, only a few sentences
copied into a notebook. He wrote about the house as a “tool for
analysis” of the human soul. By remembering rooms in houses
we've lived in, we learn to abide (nice word) within ourselves.
I felt close to his sense of the house. He wrote about the
strange whir of the sun as it comes into a room in which one is
alone. Mainly, I remember recognizing his idea that the house
protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the
ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in
for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell
their dreams. Often the dreams are way-back father or mother dreams.
“I was in this car and my father was driving, only I was the
age I am now and my father died when I was twelve. He was driving
fast         .         .         .         .” Our guests fall into long sleeps, just
as we do when we arrive each time. This is the only place in the
world I've ever taken a nap at nine in the morning. Could this
be what Bachelard meant by the “repose derived from all deep
oneiric experience”? After a week or so, I have the energy of
a twelve-year-old. For me,
house,
set in its landscape,
always has been crypto-primo image land. Bachelard pushed me to
realize that the houses we experience deeply take us back to the
first
house. In my mind, however, it's not just to the
first house, but to the first concept of self. Southerners have a
gene, as yet undetected in the DNA spirals, that causes them to
believe that place is fate. Where you are is who you are. The
further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is
intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the
choice of something you crave.

An early memory: Mine is a small room with six windows, all
open on a summer night. I'm three or four, awake after everyone has
gone to bed. I'm leaning on the windowsill looking out at the blue
hydrangeas, big as beach balls. The attic fan pulls in the scent
of tea olive and lifts the thin white curtains. I'm playing with
the screen latch, which suddenly comes undone. I remember the
feel of the metal hook and the eye I almost can stick my little
finger into. Next, I'm climbing up on the sill and jumping out
the window. I find myself in the dark backyard. I start running,
feeling a quick rush of what I now know as freedom. Wet grass,
glow of white camellias on the black bush, the new pine just my
height. I go out to my swing in the pecan tree. I've just learned
to pump. How high? I run around the house, all the rooms of
my sleeping family, then I stand in the middle of the street I
am not allowed to cross. I let myself in the back door, which never
was locked, and into my room.