Under the Tuscan Sun (30 page)

THE MOUNTAIN OF STONE ON EITHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
grows daunting. We
must get a start on moving it. Stanislao, our Polish worker, comes at
dawn. At six, Francesco Falco's son Giorgio arrives with his new
plow, ready to ply the olive terraces, and Francesco follows shortly
on foot. As usual, he has his cutting tool, a combination machete
and sickle, stuffed into his pants in back. He prepares to help
Giorgio by clearing stones from the path of the tractor, holding
aside branches, and smoothing out the ground. But our pitchfork is
wrong. “Look at this.” He holds it out, prongs up, and it quickly
turns over, prongs down. He hammers the metal until it separates
from the handle, turns the handle, then reattaches it. He then holds
out the pitchfork, which does not flip over. We've used the pitchfork
a hundred times without noticing but, of course, he's right.

“The old Italians know everything,” Stanislao says.

Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, we haul stone to a pile out
on one of the olive terraces. I lift only the small and medium stones;
Ed and Stanislao wrestle with the giants. Low-impact aerobics video,
eat your heart out. Drink eight glasses of water a day? No problem,
I'm parched. At home, in my burgundy leotard, I lift and lift, and
one and two, and lift .         .         . but this is work versus
workout. Bend and stretch—easy when I'm clearing a hillside.
Whatever, I'm worn out by this labor and I also like it tremendously.
After three hours, we've moved about one fourth of the stones.
Madonna serpente!
Don't try to calculate how many more
hours we're in for—and all the really huge stones are in
the other pile. Dirt and sweat run down my arms. The men are
bare-chested, smelly. My damp hair is clotted with dust. Ed's
leg is bleeding. I hear Francesco above us on a terrace talking to
the olive trees. Giorgio's tractor tilts amazingly on one of the
narrow terraces but he is too skilled to come tumbling down the
mountain. I think of the long, melting bath I will take. Stanislao
begins to whistle “Misty.” One stone they can't budge is shaped
like the enormous head of a Roman horse. I take the chisel and
start to work on eyes and mane. The sun wheels in great struts
across the valley. Primo hasn't seen us at hard labor. He's shouting
at his men about it. He has worked on many restorations. The foreign
padrone,
he says, only stands and watches. He poses with
his hands on his hips, a curled lip. As for a woman working like
this, he raises his arms to heaven. Late in the afternoon, I hear
Stanislao curse,
“Madonna sassi,”
Madonna-stones, but
then he goes back to whistling his theme song, “It's cherry pink and
apple blossom white when you're in love         .         .         .” The men
come down and we drink beer on the wall. Look at what we've done.
This is really fun!

THE WHITE TRUCK IS BACK, DELIVERING SAND FOR PLASTER—
plaster,
they are nearing the end—and hauling away a mound of rubble.
The three workers shout about the World Cup soccer matches taking
place in the United States, about ravioli with butter and sage,
about how long it takes to drive to Arezzo. Thirty minutes. You're
crazy, twenty.

Claudio, the electrician, arrives to reroute the plait of
dangling wires that somehow provides electricity for that section
of the house. He has brought his son Roberto, fourteen, who has
continuous, glorious eyebrows and almond-shaped Byzantine eyes that
follow you. He is interested in languages, his father explains, but
since he must have a practical trade, he is trying to train him
this summer. The boy leans indolently against the wall, ready to
hand tools to his father. When his father goes out to the truck for
supplies, he grabs the English newspaper that protects the floor
from paint and studies it.

Canals for wire must be dug in the stone walls before the
plastering. The plumber must move the radiator we had installed
when the central heating went in. I've changed my mind about the
location. So much action. If they hadn't had days of excavating
those levels of stone floor, the primary work would be finished.
The Poles, who were in Italy working the tobacco fields, now have
gone home. Only Stanislao stayed. Who will move all those great
stones? Before the masons leave, they show us a neatly woven swirl
of grass and twig they found in the wall, a
nido di topo,
so much nicer in Italian than rat's nest.

They're slinging the base for the plaster, literally slinging
so it sticks to the wall, then smoothing it out. Primo brought old
cotto
for the floor from his supply. Between his and ours,
we must have enough. Since the floor is last, surely we're nearing
the end. I'm ready for the fun part; it's hard to think of the
furniture when the room looks like a gray solitary confinement
space. Finally, we're treated to the first machine noise of the
project. The electrician's son, with some uncertainty, attacks the
walls with a drill, making channels for the new wiring. The
electrician himself left, after receiving a shock when he touched
one of the frayed wires. These
must
be among the sorriest
wires he's ever come across.

The plumber who installed the new bath and the central heating
sends out two of his assistants to move the radiator pipes they
disconnected last week. They, too, are extremely young. I remember
that students not on an academic track finish school at fifteen.
Both are plump and silent but with ear-to-ear grins. I hope they
know what they're doing. Everyone talks at once, most of them
shouting.

Maybe all will come together quickly now. At the end of each
day, Ed and I drag in yard chairs and sit in the new room, trying to
imagine that soon we will sit there with coffee, perhaps on a blue
linen loveseat with an old mirror hanging above it, music playing,
discussing our next project.         .         .         .

BECAUSE THE UNDERCOAT FOR THE PLASTER HAS TO DRY,
Emilio is working
alone, scratching off the old plaster in the back stairwell, carting
off fuming loads of it to the rubble mountain.

The electrician can't finish until the plaster is on. I can
see the boon of the invention of wallboard. Plastering is an arduous
business. Still, it's fun to see the process, which hardly has
changed since the Egyptians slathered the tombs. The plumber's boys
didn't cut off the water line as far back as they should have and
we have to call them to come back. To escape, we drive over to
Passignano and have an eggplant pizza by the lake. The five-day
estimate! I'm longing for days of
dolce far niente,
sweet
to do nothing, because in seven weeks, I must go back. I hear the
first cicada, the shrill yammering that alerts us that deep summer
is here. “Sounds like a duck on speed,” Ed says.

Saturday, and a scorcher. Stanislao brings Zeno, who recently
arrived from Poland. They dispense with shirts right away. They're
used to heat; both are laying pipes for methane during the week. In
less than three hours, they've hauled away a ton of stone. We've
separated the flat ones for paths and for large squares of stone
around each of the four doors along the front to prevent tracking
in. They set to work after lunch digging, laying a sand base,
chipping and fitting stone, filling in the cracks with dirt. They
easily pull up the puny semicircles we laid out last year from
stones we found on the land. The stones from the floor they're
choosing are as big as pillows.

I'm weeding when I brush my arms against a patch of nettles.
Those plants are fierce. They “sting” immediately, the hairy
leaves letting out an irritating acid on contact. Odd that the tiny
ones are good in risotto. I run in the house and scrub down with
a skin disinfectant but my arms feel alive, as though hot electric
worms are crawling on me. After lunch, I decide to bathe, put on my
pink linen dress, and sit on the patio until the shops open. Enough
work. I find a breeze there and pleasantly waste the afternoon
looking at a cookbook and watching a lizard, who appears to be
watching a parade of ants. It's a magnificent little creature in
sparkling green and black with deft and intricate feet, palpitating
throat, and an inquisitive head that jerks. I would like for it to
crawl on my book so I could see more, but my every move sends it
scuttling. It keeps coming back to look over the ants. What the
ants watch, I don't know.

In town, I buy a white cotton dress, navy linen pants and
shirt, some expensive body cream, pink nail polish, a bottle of
great wine. When I get back, Ed is showering inside. The Poles have
slung the hose over a tree limb and opened the nozzle to spray. I
glimpse them stripping down for a rinse-off before changing their
clothes. The four doorways are now protected by well-fitted
entrances of stone.

FRANCO BEGINS THE SMOOTH FINAL COAT OF PLASTER. THE
owner of the
plumbing company, Santi Cannoni, arrives in blue shorts to inspect
the work his boys have done. We have known him since his company
installed our central heating—but only fully dressed. He
looks as though he simply forgot his pants. His hairless, moon-white
legs so far below his pressed shirt, distinguished tanned face,
and gray coifed hair keep drawing my eye. That he has on black
silky socks and loafers contributes to his obscene look of undress.
Since his boys moved the radiator, the one in the next room has
begun to leak.

Francesco and Beppe pull up in the Ape with their weed
machines, ready to massacre wild roses and weeds. Beppe speaks
clearly and we understand him better, mainly because Francesco
still refuses to wear his teeth. Since he loves to talk, he gets
mad when Beppe interprets for him. Naturally, when Beppe sees that
we don't understand, he explains. Francesco starts calling Beppe
maestro,
teacher, with heavy sarcasm. They argue about
whether Ed's blades need to be sharpened or turned over. They argue
about whether the stakes in the grape stones should be iron or wood.
Behind Beppe's back, Francesco shakes his head at us, eyes turned
to heaven: Can you believe this old coot? Behind Francesco's back,
Beppe does the same.

A load of sand arrives for the floor but Primo says his old
bricks are not the same size as ours and that he must locate another
fifty before the floor can be laid.

Piano, piano,
the watchword of restoration, slowly,
slowly.

More plastering. The mixture looks like gray gelato. Franco
says he has a tiny old house and it's all he wants; these big
houses, always something wrong. He patches the walls upstairs that
cracked when the living room stones were removed, and I ask him to
break the plaster and look at what holds up the doors Benito
reopened. He finds the original long stones. No sign of the steel
I-beams he was supposed to install. Franco says not to worry,
stone is just as good on a regular-sized door.

The walls look dry to me but not to them. Another day off.
We're anxious to get in there, scrub down the walls, stain the beams,
scrape and paint the brick ceiling. We're ready, past ready, to
move in. Four chairs have gone to the upholsterer with yards of
blue and white checked linen my sister sent for two, and a blue
and yellow striped cotton I found in Anghiari for the others. We
have ordered the blue loveseat and two other comfortable chairs.
The CD player has been in a pile of boxes and books, the chairs
and bookcase stuffed into other rooms. Will this go on forever?