Under the Tuscan Sun (2 page)

Meanwhile, as we sip, the dollar is falling fast. We rouse
ourselves from the piazza every morning to run around to all the
banks, checking their posted exchange rates. When you're cashing
traveler's checks for a last-minute spree at the leather market, the rate doesn't matter that much, but this is a house with five acres and every lira counts. A slight drop at those multiples makes the stomach drop also. Every hundred lire it falls, we calculate how much more expensive the house becomes. Irrationally, I also calculate how many pairs of shoes that could buy. Shoes, before, have been my major purchase in Italy, a secret sin. Sometimes I'd go home with nine new pairs: red snakeskin flats, sandals, navy suede boots, and several pairs of black pumps of varying heels.

Typically, the banks vary in how much commission they bite
when they receive a large transfer from overseas. We want a break.
It looks like a significant chunk of interest they'll collect,
since clearing a check in Italy can take weeks.

Finally, we have a lesson in the way things work. Dr. Carta,
anxious to close, calls his bank—the bank his father and
his father-in-law use—in Arezzo, a half hour away. Then
he calls us. “Go there,” he says. “They won't take a commission
for receiving the money at all, and they'll give you whatever the
posted rate is when it arrives.”

His savvy doesn't surprise me, though he has seemed
spectacularly uninterested in money the entire time we have
negotiated—just named his high price and stuck to it. He
bought the property from the five old sisters of a landowning
family in Perugia the year before, thinking, he said, to make it a
summer place for his family. However, he and his wife inherited
property on the coast and decided to use that instead. Was that the
case, or had he scooped up a bargain from ladies in their nineties
and now is making a bundle, possibly buying coast property with our
money? Not that I begrudge him. He's smart.

Dr. Carta, perhaps fearing we might back out, calls and asks
to meet us at the house. He roars up in his Alfa 164, Armani from
stem to stern. “There is something more,” he says, as though
continuing a conversation. “If you follow me, I will show you
something.” A few hundred feet down the road, he leads us up a
stone path through fragrant yellow broom. Odd, the stone path
continues up the hill, curving along a ridge. Soon we come to a
two-hundred-degree view of the valley, with the cypress-lined road
below us and a mellow landscape dotted with tended vineyards and
olive groves. In the distance lies a blue daub, which is Lake
Trasimeno; off to the right, we see the red-roofed silhouette of
Cortona cleanly outlined against the sky. Dr. Carta turns to us
triumphantly. The flat paving stones widen here. “The
Romans—this road was built by the Romans—it goes
straight into Cortona.” The sun is broiling. He goes on and on
about the large church at the top of the hill. He points out where
the rest of the road might have run, right through Bramasole's
property.

Back at the house he turns on an outside faucet and splashes
his face. “You'll enjoy the finest water, truly your own abundant
acqua minerale,
excellent for the liver.
Eccellente!
” He manages to be at once enthusiastic
and a little bored, friendly and slightly condescending. I am
afraid we have spoken too bluntly about money. Or maybe he has
interpreted our law-abiding American expectations about the
transaction as incredibly naive. He lets the faucet run, cupping
his hand under the water, somehow leaning over for a drink without
dislodging the well-cut linen coat tossed over his shoulders.
“Enough water for a swimming pool,” he insists, “which would be
perfect out on the point where you can see the lake, overlooking
right where Hannibal defeated the Romans.”

We're dazzled by the remains of a Roman road over the hill
covered with wildflowers. We will follow the stone road into town for
a coffee late in the afternoons. He shows us the old cistern. Water
is precious in Tuscany and was collected drop by drop. By shining a
flashlight into the opening, we've already noticed that the
underground cistern has a stone archway, obviously some kind of
passageway. Up the hill in the Medici fortress, we saw the same
arch in the cistern there and the caretaker told us that a secret
underground escape route goes downhill to the valley, then to Lake
Trasimeno. Italians take such remains casually. That one is allowed
to own such ancient things seems impossible to me.

WHEN I FIRST SAW BRAMASOLE, I IMMEDIATELY WANTED TO
hang my summer
clothes in an
armadio
and arrange my books under one of
those windows looking out over the valley. We'd spent four days with
Signor Martini, who had a dark little office on Via Sacco e Vanzetti
down in the lower town. Above his desk hung a photo of him as a
soldier, I assumed for Mussolini. He listened to us as though we
spoke perfect Italian. When we finished describing what we thought
we wanted, he rose, put on his Borsolino, and said one word,
“Andiamo,”
let's go. Although he'd recently had a foot
operation, he drove us over nonexistent roads and pushed through
jungles of thorns to show us places only he knew about. Some were
farmhouses with roofs collapsed onto the floor, miles from town
and costing the earth. One had a tower built by the Crusaders, but
the
contessa
who owned it cried and doubled the price on
the spot when she saw that we really were interested. Another was
attached to other farmhouses where chickens were truly free
range—they ran in and out of the houses. The yard was full
of rusted farm equipment and hogs. Several felt airless or sat
hard by the road. One would have required putting in a road—it
was hidden in blackberry brambles and we could only peer in one
window because a coiled black snake refused to budge from the
threshold.

We took Signor Martini flowers, thanked him and said good-bye.
He seemed genuinely sorry to see us go.

The next morning we ran into him in the piazza after coffee.
He said, “I just saw a doctor from Arezzo. He might be interested in
selling a house.
Una bella villa,
” he added emphatically.
The house was within walking distance of Cortona.

“How much?” we asked, although we knew by then he
cringes at being asked that direct question.

“Let's just go take a look,” was all he said. Out of Cortona,
he took the road that climbs and winds to the other side of the hill.
He turned onto the
strada bianca
and, after a couple of
kilometers, pulled into a long, sloping driveway. I caught a glimpse
of a shrine, then looked up at the three-story house with a curly
iron fanlight above the front door and two tall, exotic palm trees
on either side. On that fresh morning, the facade seemed radiant,
glazed with layers of lemon, rouge, and terra-cotta. We both
became silent as we got out of the car. After all the turns into
unknown roads, the house seemed just to have been waiting all
along.

“Perfect, we'll take it,” I joked as we stepped through the
weeds. Just as he had at other houses, Signor Martini made no sales
pitch; he simply looked with us. We walked up to the house under
a rusted pergola leaning under the weight of climbing roses. The
double front door squawked like something alive when we pushed it
open. The house's walls, thick as my arm is long, radiated coolness.
The glass in the windows wavered. I scuffed through silty dust and
saw below it smooth brick floors in perfect condition. In each room,
Ed opened the inside window and pushed open the shutters to one
glorious view after another of cypresses, rippling green hills,
distant villas, a valley. There were even two bathrooms that
functioned. They were not beautiful, but
bathrooms,
after
all the houses we'd seen with no floors, much less plumbing. No one
had lived there in thirty years and the grounds seemed like an
enchanted garden, overgrown and tumbling with blackberries and vines.
I could see Signor Martini regarding the grounds with a countryman's
practiced eye. Ivy twisted into the trees and ran over fallen terrace
walls.
“Molto lavoro,”
much work, was all he said.

During several years of looking, sometimes casually, sometimes
to the point of exhaustion, I never heard a house say
yes
so completely. However, we were leaving the next day, and when we
learned the price, we sadly said no and went home.

During the next months, I mentioned Bramasole now and
then. I stuck a photo on my mirror and often wandered the grounds
or rooms in my mind. The house is a metaphor for the self, of course,
but it also is totally real. And a
foreign
house
exaggerates all the associations houses carry. Because I had ended
a long marriage that was not supposed to end and was establishing
a new relationship, this house quest felt tied to whatever new
identity I would manage to forge. When the flying fur from the
divorce settled, I had found myself with a grown daughter, a full-time
university job (after years of part-time teaching), a modest
securities portfolio, and an entire future to invent. Although
divorce was harder than a death, still I felt oddly returned to
myself after many years in a close family. I had the urge to examine
my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew. I wanted
something of a
physical
dimension that would occupy the
mental volume the years of my former life had. Ed shares my passion
for Italy completely and also shares the boon of three-month summer
breaks from university teaching. There we would have long days for
exploring and for our writing and research projects. When he is at
the wheel, he'll
always
take the turn down the intriguing
little road. The language, history, art, places in Italy are
endless—two lifetimes wouldn't be enough. And, ah, the foreign
self. The new life might shape itself to the contours of the house,
which already is at home in the landscape, and to the rhythms
around it.

In the spring, I called a California woman who was starting a
real-estate development business in Tuscany. I asked her to check on
Bramasole; perhaps if it had not sold, the price had come down. A
week later, she called from a bar after meeting with the owner.
“Yes, it's still for sale, but with that particular brand of
Italian logic, the price has been raised. The dollar,” she reminded
me, “has fallen. And that house needs a lot of work.”

Now we've returned. By this time, with equally peculiar logic,
I've become fixed on buying Bramasole. After all, the only thing
wrong is the expense. We both love the setting, the town, the
house and land. If only one little thing is wrong, I tell myself,
go ahead.

Still, this costs a
sacco di soldi.
It will be an
enormous hassle to recover the house and land from neglect. Leaks,
mold, tumbling stone terraces, crumbling plaster, one funky bathroom,
another with an adorable metal hip bathtub and a cracked toilet.

Why does the prospect seem fun, when I found remodeling my
kitchen in San Francisco a deep shock to my equilibrium? At
home, we can't even hang a picture without knocking out a fistful of
plaster. When we plunge the stopped-up sink, forgetting once again
that the disposal doesn't like artichoke petals, sludge seems to rise
from San Francisco Bay.

On the other hand, a dignified house near a Roman road,
an Etruscan (Etruscan!) wall looming at the top of the hillside, a
Medici fortress in sight, a view toward Monte Amiata, a passageway
underground, one hundred and seventeen olive trees, twenty plums,
and still uncounted apricot, almond, apple, and pear trees. Several
figs seem to thrive near the well. Beside the front steps there's a
large hazelnut. Then, proximity to one of the most superb towns
I've ever seen. Wouldn't we be crazy not to buy this lovely house
called Bramasole?

What if one of us is hit by a potato chip truck and can't
work? I run through a litany of diseases we could get. An aunt died
of a heart attack at forty-two, my grandmother went blind, all the
ugly illnesses … What if an earthquake shakes
down the universities where we teach? The Humanities Building is on
a list of state structures most likely to fall in a moderately severe
quake. What if the stock market spirals down?

I leap out of bed at three
A.M.
and step in the
shower, letting my whole face take the cold water. Coming back to bed
in the dark, feeling my way, I jam my toe on the iron bed frame.
Pain jags all the way up my backbone. “Ed, wake up. I think I've
broken my toe. How can you sleep?”

He sits up. “I was just dreaming of cutting herbs in the
garden. Sage and lemon balm. Sage is
salvia
in Italian.”
He has never wavered from his belief that this is a brilliant idea,
that this is heaven on earth. He clicks on the bedside lamp. He's
smiling.