Under the Tuscan Sun (3 page)

My half-on toenail is hanging half off, ugly purple spreading
underneath. I can't bear to leave it or to pull it off. “I want to
go home,” I say.

He puts a Band-Aid around my toe. “You mean Bramasole,
don't you?” he asks.

THIS SACK OF MONEY IN QUESTION HAS BEEN WIRED FROM CALIFORNIA
but
has not arrived. How can that be, I ask at the bank, money is wired,
it arrives instantaneously. More shrugs. Perhaps the main bank in
Florence is holding it. Days pass. I call Steve, my broker in
California, from a bar. I'm shouting over the noise of a soccer
match on the TV. “You'll have to check from that end;” he shouts
back, “it's long gone from here and did you know the government there
has changed forty-seven times since World War II? This money was well
invested in tax-free bonds and the best growth funds. Those
Australian bonds of yours earned seventeen percent. Oh well,
la dolce vita.
”

The mosquitoes (
zanzare
they're called, just like
they sound) invade the hotel with the desert wind. I spin in the
sheets until my skin burns. I get up in the middle of the night and
lean out the shuttered window, imagining all the sleeping guests,
blisters on their feet from the stony streets, their guidebooks
still in their hands. We could still back out. Just throw our bags
in the rented Fiat and say
arrivederci.
Go hang out on the
Amalfi coast for a month and head home, tanned and relaxed. Buy lots
of sandals. I can hear my grandfather when I was twenty: “Be
realistic. Come down out of the clouds.” He was furious that I
was studying poetry and Latin etymology, something utterly useless.
Now, what am I thinking of? Buying an abandoned house in a place where
I hardly can speak the language. He probably has worn out his shroud
turning over in his grave. We don't have a mountain of reserves to
bale us out in case that mysterious something goes wrong.

WHAT IS THIS THRALL FOR HOUSES
? I come from a long line of women who
open their handbags and take out swatches of upholstery material,
colored squares of bathroom tile, seven shades of yellow paint
samples, and strips of flowered wallpaper. We love the concept of
four walls. “What is her house like?” my sister asks, and we
both know she means what is
she
like. I pick up the free
real-estate guide outside the grocery store when I go somewhere for
the weekend, even if it's close to home. One June, two friends and I
rented a house on Majorca; another summer I stayed in a little
casa
in San Miguel de Allende in which I developed a
serious love for fountained courtyards and bedrooms with
bougainvillea cascading down the balcony, the austere Sierra Madre.
One summer in Santa Fe, I started looking at adobes there,
imagining I would become a Southwesterner, cook with chilies, wear
squash blossom turquoise jewelry—a different life, the chance
to be extant in another version. At the end of a month I left and
never have wanted to return.

I love the islands off the Georgia coast, where I spent
summers when I was growing up. Why not a weathered gray house there,
made of wood that looks as though it washed up on the beach? Cotton
rugs, peach iced tea, a watermelon cooling in the creek, sleeping
with waves churning and rolling outside the window. A place where
my sisters, friends, and their families could visit easily. But I
keep remembering that anytime I've stepped in my own footprints
again, I haven't felt renewed. Though I'm susceptible to the pull to
the known, I'm just slightly more susceptible to surprise. Italy
seems endlessly alluring to me—why not, at this point,
consider the opening of
The Divine Comedy:
What must
one do in order to grow? Better to remember my father, the son
of my very literal-minded, penny-pinching grandfather. “The family
motto,” he'd say, “is “Packing and Unpacking.' ” And also,
“If you can't go first class, don't go at all.”

Lying awake, I feel the familiar sense of The Answer arriving.
Like answers on the bottom of the black fortune-telling eight ball
that I loved when I was ten, often I can feel an idea or the
solution to a dilemma floating up through murky liquid, then it
is as if I see the suddenly clear white writing. I like the charged
zone of waiting, a mental and physical sensation of the bends as
something mysterious zigzags to the surface of consciousness.

What if you did
not
feel uncertainty, the white
writing says. Are you exempt from doubt? Why not rename it
excitement? I lean over the wide sill just as the first gilded
mauve light of sunrise begins. The Arab is still sleeping. The
undulant landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored
farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread
set out to cool. I know some Jurassic upheaval violently tossed up
the hills, but they appear rounded as though by a big hand. As the
sun brightens, the land spreads out a soft spectrum: the green of a
dollar bill gone through the wash, old cream, blue sky like a blind
person's eye. The Renaissance painters had it just right. I never
thought of Perugino, Giotto, Signorelli, et al., as realists,
but their background views are still here, as most tourists discover,
with dark cypress trees brushed in to emphasize each composition
the eye falls on. Now I see why the red boot on a gold and blond
angel in the Cortona museum has such a glow, why the Madonna's
cobalt dress looks intense and deep. Against this landscape and
light, everything takes on a primary outline. Even a red towel
drying on a line below becomes totally saturated with its own
redness.

Think: What if the sky doesn't fall? What if it's glorious?
What if the house is transformed in three years? There will be by
then hand-printed labels for the house's olive oil, thin linen
curtains pulled across the shutters for siesta, jars of plum jam
on the shelves, a long table for feasts under the linden trees,
baskets piled by the door for picking tomatoes, arugula, wild fennel,
roses, and rosemary. And who are we in that strange new life?

FINALLY THE MONEY ARRIVES, THE ACCOUNT IS OPEN. HOWEVER
, they have
no checks. This enormous bank, the seat of dozens of branches in the
gold center of Italy, has no checks to give us. “Maybe next week,”
Signora Raguzzi explains. “Right now, nothing.” We sputter.
Two days later, she calls. “I have ten checks for you.” What is
the big deal with checks? I get boxes of them at home. Signora
Raguzzi parcels them out to us. Signora Raguzzi in tight skirt,
tight T-shirt, has lips that are perpetually wet and pouting.
Her skin glistens. She is astonishingly gorgeous. She wears a
magnificent square gold necklace and bracelets on both wrists
that jangle as she stamps our account number on each check.

“What great jewelry. I love those bracelets,” I say.

“All we have here is gold,” she replies glumly. She is bored
with Arezzo's tombs and piazzas. California sounds good to her. She
brightens every time she sees us. “Ah, California,” she says as
a greeting. The bank begins to seem surreal. We're in the back room.
A man wheels in a cart stacked with gold ingots—actual
small bricks of gold. No one seems to be on guard. Another
man loads two into dingy manila folders. He's plainly dressed,
like a workman. He walks out into the street, taking the ingots
somewhere. So much for Brinks delivery—but what a clever
plainclothes disguise. We turn back to the checks. There will be
no insignia of boats or palm trees or pony express riders, there
will be no name, address, driver's license, Social Security
number. Only these pale green checks that look as though they were
printed in the twenties. We're enormously pleased. That's close to
citizenship—a bank account.

Finally we are gathered in the
notaio's
office for
the final reckoning. It's quick. Everyone talks at once and no one
listens. The baroque legal terms leave us way behind. A jackhammer
outside drills into my brain cells. There's something about two
oxen and two days. Ian, who's translating, stops to explain this
archaic spiral of language as an eighteenth-century legal
description of the amount of land, measured by how long it would
take two oxen to plow it. We have, it seems, two plowing days worth
of property.

I write checks, my fingers cramping over all the times I write
milione.
I think of all the nice dependable bonds and
utility stocks and blue chips from the years of my marriage
magically turning into a terraced hillside and a big empty house.
The glass house in California where I lived for a decade, surrounded
by kumquat, lemon, mock orange, and guava, its bright pool and
covered patio with wicker and flowered cushions—all seem to
recede, as though seen through the long focus in binoculars.
Million
is such a big word in English it's hard to treat
it casually. Ed carefully monitors the zeros, not wanting me to
unwittingly write
miliardo,
billion, instead. He pays
Signor Martini in cash. He never has mentioned a fee; we have found
out the normal percentage from the owner. Signor Martini seems
pleased, as though we've given him a gift. For me this is a
confusing but delightful way to conduct business. Handshakes all
around. Is that a little cat smile on the mouth of the owner's wife?
We're expecting a parchment deed, lettered in ancient script, but no,
the
notaio
is going on vacation and she'll try to get to
the paperwork before she leaves.
“Normale,”
Signor
Martini says. I've noticed all along that someone's word is still
taken for that. Endless contracts and stipulations and
contingencies simply have not come up. We walk out into the
brutally hot afternoon with nothing but two heavy iron keys longer
than my hand, one to a rusted iron gate, the other to the front door.
They look nothing like the keys to anything I've ever owned. There
is no hope for spare copies.

Giuseppe waves from the door of the bar and we tell him we
have bought a house. “Where is it?” he wants to know.

“Bramasole,” Ed begins, about to say where it is.

“Ah, Bramasole,
una bella villa!
” He has picked
cherries there as a boy. Although it is only afternoon, he pulls
us in and pours a
grappa
for us. “Mama!” he shouts.
His mother and her sister come in from the back and everyone toasts
us. They're all talking at once, speaking of us as the
stranieri,
foreigners. The
grappa
is blindingly
strong. We drink ours as fast as Signora Mantucci nips her espresso
and wander out in the sun. The car is as hot as a pizza oven. We sit
there with the doors open, suddenly laughing and laughing.