Under the Tuscan Sun (31 page)

During the Renaissance, it was a custom to open Vergil at
random and place a finger on a line that would foretell the future
or answer a burning question. In the South, we used to do this with
the Bible. People always have had ways to grasp for revelation:
The Etruscans' haruspication, reading omens from sacrificed animals'
livers, is no stranger than the Greeks' finding significance in the
flight patterns of birds and the droppings of animals. I open Vergil
and put my finger down on “The years take all, one's wits included.”
Not very encouraging.

TUSCANY IS A XERIC LAND IN SUMMER BUT THIS YEAR IT IS
deeply green.
From the patio the terraces seem to ripple down the hill. No use
moving today. Under the barbed sun, I'm reading about saints,
admiring especially Giuliana Falconieri, who asked, when dying, to
have the host placed on her breast. It dissolved into her heart and
disappeared. A pheasant is pecking away at my plot of lettuces. I
read on about Colomba, who ate only hosts, then vomited them into
a basket, which she stored under her bed. I'm enchanted with
Veronica, who chewed five orange seeds in memory of Christ's five
wounds. Ed brings up enormous sandwiches and iced tea with a little
peach juice in it. I'm progressively more fascinated with the women
saints, their politics of denial. Perhaps it's a corrective for the
voluptuousness of Italian life. There's always a mystery within a
sudden attraction to a subject. Why is one suddenly lugging home
four books on hurricanes or all the operas of Mozart? Later, much
later sometimes, the reason for the quest emerges. What will I come
to realize from these quirky women?

Primo arrives with still more old bricks and Fabio starts
cleaning them. He's working in spite of toothache and shows us
the rotting lower left area of his mouth. I bite my lip to keep
from looking startled. He's having four pulled next week, all at
once.

Primo's tools for laying out the floor are some string and
a long level. His skill is sure and quick; he knows instinctively
where to tap, what fits where. After all the stone is hauled out,
the floors between the two rooms are almost even; he builds in a
slight rise, barely noticeable, in the doorway. They begin tamping
down and leveling. Fabio cuts through bricks with a high wheezing
machine that sends up a cloud of red dust. His arms are brick-colored
up to his elbows. Laying brick looks fun. Soon the floor is down,
matched to the interlocking
L
pattern of the adjoining room.

Houseguests arrive, despite the plastic-covered piles of lamps,
baskets, books in the hallways, the living room furniture scattered
around the house. Simone, a colleague of Ed's, is celebrating her
Ph.D. with a trip to Greece, and Barbara, a former student who is
just finishing a two-year stint in Poland with the Peace Corps,
is en route to Africa. I suppose Italy always has been a crossroads.
Pilgrims to the Holy Land skirted Lake Trasimeno in the Middle Ages.
Latter pilgrims of all sorts traverse Italy; our house is a good
spot to rest for a few days. Madeline, an Italian friend, and her
husband, John, from San Francisco are coming for lunch.

We're running back and forth between guests and decisions
that need to be made. The workers are finishing today! The well-timed
lunch is a double celebration. We've ordered
crespelle
from
Vittorio, who makes fresh pasta in town. His crêpes are air.
Though we are only six, we've ordered a dozen each of the
tartufo
(truffle), the pesto, and, our favorite,
piselli e prosciutto
(peas and cured ham). Before that,
caprese
(tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad dribbled
with oil) and a platter of olives, cheeses, breads, and slices of
various local salami. We're able to make the salad from the arugula
in our garden. The wine we bought at Trerose, a chardonnay called
Salterio, may be the best white I've tried in Italy. Many chardonnays,
especially California ones, are too oaky and syrupy for my taste.
This one has a peach-tinged, flinty taste with just a faint hint
of oak.

The long table under the trees is set with yellow checked
linen and a basket of sun-colored broom. We offer wine to the
workmen but no, they're pressing into the final hours. They've
spread cement over the floor to fill in the narrow cracks between
bricks. To clean up, they wash down the floor, then sprinkle sawdust
and sweep. They build two columns against the outside of the house
for the stone sink we discovered in the dirt. It has rested these
two years in the old kitchen. Primo calls to Ed to help move the
monstrous stone. Two men “walk” it across the front terrace and up
the three steps into the shady area where we are having lunch. Our
guest, John, jumps up to help. Five men lift.
“Novanta chili,
forse cento,”
Primo says. The sink weighs around two hundred
pounds. After that, they load their
cristi,
their tools, and
that's it—the room is finished. Primo stays to make a few
repairs. He takes a bucket of cement and patches minor cracks in the
stone wall, then goes upstairs to secure a few loose floor tiles.

Doesn't everything reduce in the end to a poetic
image—one that encapsulates an entire experience in one
stroke?

Not only this project but the whole major restoration that has
stretched over three years is ending today. We're entertaining
friends in the sun-dappled bower, just as I envisioned. I go into
the kitchen and begin arranging a selection of local cheeses on
grape leaves. I'm flushed and excited in my white linen dress with
short sleeves that stand out like little wings. Above me, Primo
is scraping the floor. I look up. He has removed two tiles and
there is a hole in the ceiling. Just as I look back at my cheese
platter, Primo accidentally kicks over his bucket and cement pours
onto my head! My hair, my dress, the cheese, my arms, the floor!
I look up and see his startled face peering down like a cherub
in a fresco.

The humor is not entirely lost on me. I walk out to the table,
dribbling cement. After dropped jaws and stunned looks, everyone
laughs. Primo runs out, hitting the heel of his hand to his
forehead.

The guests clear up while I shower. With Primo, they're all
sitting along the sun-warmed wall when I come down. Ed is asking
about Fabio's dental surgery. He only missed two days of work and
will get new teeth in a month. Now Primo
will
join us in
a toast. The guests are toasting an amusing day and the end of the
project. Ed and I, having been literally doused in this restoration,
raise our glasses, too. Primo just enjoys himself. He launches into
a history of his own teeth and shows us big gaps in his mouth.
Five years ago he had such a toothache—he holds his head
and leans over moaning—that he pulled out his own tooth with
the pliers.
“Via, via,”
he shouts, motioning the tooth
out of his jaw.
Via
somehow sounds more emphatic than
“go.”

I DON'T WANT HIM TO GO. HE HAS BEEN SUCH A CHARMER
and so careful as
a
muratore.
The work is impeccable as well as miraculously
reasonable. Yes, I do want him to go! This project was estimated
to last five working days; this is day number twenty-one. No way,
of course, to predict three levels of stone floor and a rotten beam.
He'll be back next summer—he will retile the butterfly
bathroom and repoint the stones in the cantina. He hoists his
wheelbarrow into the Ape. Those are small projects,
cinque
giorni, signori,
five days.         .         .         .

R
elics of
S
ummer

THE FONTS IN ALL THE CHURCHES ARE DRY.
I run my
fingers through the dusty scallops of marble: not a drop for my hot
forehead. The Tuscan July heat is invasive to the body but not to
the stone churches that hold on to the dampness of winter,
releasing a gray coolness slowly throughout the summer. I have a
feeling, walking into one, then another, that I walk into palpable
silence. A lid seems to descend on our voices, or a large damp
hand. In the vast church of San Biagio below Montepulciano, there is
an airy quiet as you enter. Right under the dome, you can stand in
one spot and speak or clap your hands and far up against the inner
cup of the dome an eerie echo sends the sound rapidly back. The
quality of the sound is not like the hello across a lake but a
sharp, repeated return. Your voice flattened, otherworldly. It is
hard to think a mocking angel isn't hovering against the frescoes,
though more likely a pigeon rests there.

Since I have been spending summers in Cortona, the major
shock and joy is how at home I feel. But not just at home,
returned
to that primal first awareness of home. I feel
at home because dusty trucks park at intersections and sell
watermelons. The same thump to test for ripeness. The boy holds up
a rusty iron scale with discs of different sizes for counterweight.
His arm muscle jumps up like Popeye's and the breeze brings me a
whiff of his scent of dry grasses, onions, and dirt. In big storms,
lightning drives a jagged stake into the ground and hailstones
bounce in the yard, bringing back the smell of ozone to me from
Georgia days when I'd gather a bowlful the size of Ping-Pong balls and
put them in the freezer.

Sunday is cemetery day here, and though our small-town
Southern plots are austere compared to these lavish displays of
flowers on almost every grave, we, too, made Sunday pilgrimages to
Evergreen with glads or zinnias. I sat in the backseat, balancing
the cool teal vase between my knees while my mother complained
that Hazel never turned her hand to pick one stem and it was
her
own mother lying there, not just a mother-in-law.
Gathered around Anselmo Arnaldo, 1904–1982, perhaps these
families are saying, as mine did, Thank God the old goat's lying here
rather than still driving us crazy.

Sweltering nights, the air comes close to body temp, and
shifting constellations of fireflies compete with stars. Mosquito
nights, grabbing at air, the mosquito caught in my hair. Long
days when I can taste the sun. I move through this foreign house
I've acquired as though my real ancestors left their presences in
these rooms. As though this were the place I always came home to.

Living near a small town again certainly is part of it. And
living again with nature. (A student of mine from Los Angeles
visited. When I walked him out to the end of the point for the
wide-angle view of lake, chestnut forests, Apennines, olive groves,
and valleys, he was unprepared. He stood silently, the first time
I'd known he could, and finally said, “It's, uh, like nature.”)
Right, nature: Clouds swarm in from over the lake and thunder
cracks along my backbone, booms like waves boom far out at sea. I
write in my notebook: “The dishwasher was struck. We heard the
sizzle. But isn't it good, the gigantic storm, the flood of terror
they felt beside fires in the cave? The thunder shakes me like a
kitten the big cat has picked up by the neck. I ricochet home,
heat lightning; I'm lying on the ground four thousand miles from
here, letting rain soak through me.”

Rain flays the grapes. Nature: What's ripe, will the
driveway wash away, when to dig potatoes, how much water is in
the irrigation well? Early life reconnects. I go out to get wood; a
black scorpion scuttles over my hand and suddenly I remember the
furry tarantulas in the shower at Lakemont, the shriek when my
barefooted mother stepped on one and felt it crunch, then squash up
soft as a banana between her toes.

Is it the spill of free days? I dream my mother rinses my
tangle of hair with a bowl of rainwater.

Sweet time, exaggerated days, getting up at dawn because
when the midsummer sun tops the crests across the valley, the
first rays hit me in the face like they strike some rock at
Stonehenge on the solstice. To be fully awake when the sky turns
rose-streaked coral and scarves of fog drift across the valley and
the wild canaries sing. In Georgia, my father and I used to get up
to walk the beach at sunrise. At home in San Francisco what wakes
me is the alarm at seven, or the car pool horn blowing for the child
downstairs, or the recycle truck with its crashing cascade of glass.
I love the city and never have felt really at home there.

I was drawn to the surface of Italy for its perched towns,
the food, language, and art. I was pulled also to its sense of lived
life, the coexistence of times that somehow gives an aura of
timelessness—I toast the Etruscan wall above us with my
coffee every morning—all the big abstracts that act out in
everything from the aggression on the
autostrada
to the
afternoon stroll through the piazza. I cast my lot here for a few
short months a year because my curiosity for the layered culture
of the country is inexhaustible. But the umbilical that is totally
unexpected and elides logic reaches to me through the church.

To my surprise I have bought a ceramic Mary with a small
cup for home use of holy water. As a fallen-away Methodist, then a
fallen-away Episcopalian, I suppose my holy water is a sham. However,
I have taken it from the spring I discovered near the house, the
artesian spring where clear water rises in a declivity of white stone.
This looks like holy water to me. It must have been the house's
original source. Or it's older than the house—medieval, Roman,
Etruscan. Though some interior juggling is going on, I do not
expect to emerge as a Catholic, or even as a believer. I am
essentially pagan by birth. Southern populism was boiled into my
blood early; the idea of a pope with the last word gives me hives.
“Idolatrous,” our minister called the worship of Mary and the
saints. “Mackerel snapper,” my classmates teased Andy Evans, the
lone Catholic in our school. Briefly, in college, I was drawn to the
romance of the Mass, especially the three
A.M.
fishermen's
Mass in St. Louis's Cathedral in New Orleans. I lost interest in
the whole show when my good friend, a New Orleans Catholic, told
me in complete seriousness that mortal sin began if you kissed
longer than ten seconds. A ten-second French kiss was O.K., but a
dry twenty-second kiss would land you in trouble. Though I still like
rituals, even empty ones, what magnetizes me here feels more
radical.

Now I love the quick Mass in tiny upper Cortona churches,
where the same sounds have provided a still point for the residents
for almost eight hundred years. When a black Labrador wandered in,
the priest interrupted his holy spiel to shout, “For the love of
God, somebody get that dog out of here.” If I stop in on a weekday
morning, I sit there alone, enjoying the country Baroque. I think:
Here I am.
I love the parade of relics through the streets,
with gold-robed priests travelling along in a billow of incense,
their way prepared by children in white, scattering the streets
with petals of broom, rose, daisy. In the noon heat, I almost
hallucinate. What's in the gold box held aloft with
banners—a splinter from the cradle? Never mind we thought
Jesus was born in a lowly manger; this is the splinter of the true
cradle. Or am I confused? It's a splinter of the true cross. It is
on its way through the streets, brought out into the air one day
a year. And suddenly I think, What did that hymn mean,
cleft
for me,
rising years ago, perpendicular from the white board
church in Georgia?

IN MY SOUTH, THERE WERE SIGNS ON TREES THAT SAID
“repent.” Halfway
up a skinny pine, up beyond the tin trough that caught the resin,
hung a warning, “Jesus is coming.” Here, when I turn on the car
radio, a lulling voice implores Mary to intercede for us in
purgatory. In a nearby town, one church has as its relic a phial
of Holy Milk. As my student would say, that's from, like, Mary.

On the terrace at noon, I'm tanning my legs as I read about
early martyrs and medieval saints. I'm drawn to the martyred
San Lorenzo, who was put on a grill for his troublesome faith and
seared until he reportedly said, “Turn me over, I'm done on this
side,” and thereby became the favorite saint of chefs. The virginal
young women martyrs all were raped, stabbed, tortured or locked
away because of their devotion to Christ. Sometimes the hand of
God reached down and swept one away, like Ursula, who did not wish
to marry the barbarian Conan. With her ten thousand virgins (all
avoiding men?) loaded into boats, she was lifted miraculously by
God and sailed across the unfriendly skies, then deposited in Rome,
where they all bathed in lime-scented water and formed a sacred
order. Stunning, the prevalence of the miracle. In the Middle Ages,
some of the venerated women found the foreskin of Jesus materialized
in their mouths. I don't know if there exists a relic of that.
(Would it look like a chewed rubber band? A dried wad of bubble
gum?) The foreskin stops me for a good ten minutes and I stare out
at the bees swarming the
tigli
trees, trying to imagine
that event happening, and not just once. The moment of recognition,
what she said, what the reaction was—a boggling speculation.
Somehow, I'd never heard of these kinkier saints in America, although
someone once sent me a box of new books, each one about a saint's
life. When I called the bookstore, they told me my benefactor
wished to remain anonymous. Now I read on and find that some had
“holy anorexia” and lived on the wafer alone. If a saint's bones
were dug up, a flowery fragrance filled the town. After Saint
Francis preached to the birds, they flew up into the shape of a cross
then separated into the four directions. The saints would eat the
pus and lice of the poor to show their humility; in turn, the
faithful liked to drink the bathwater of a holy person. If, after
a death, a saint's heart was cut out, perhaps an image of the Holy
Family carved in a ruby would be found inside.
Oh,
I
realize,
here's where they put their awe. I understand
that.

I understand because this everyday wildness and wonder
come back so naturally from the miracle-hungry South. They almost
seem like memories somehow, the vertebrae of the Virgin, the
toenail of San Marco. My favorite, the breath of San Giuseppe, foster
father of Christ. I imagine an opaque green glass bottle with a
ground stopper, the swift exhaling of air as it opened. At home when
I was small, our seamstress kept her jar of gallstones on the
windowsill above her Singer. Marking my hem, her mouth full of
pins, she'd say, “Lord, I don't want to go through nothing like that
again. Now you turn round. Those things won't even dissolve in
gasoline.” Her talisman against sickness. Emblems and omens.

Santa Dorotea immured in her cell for two years, against a
high-walled pit in the dank cathedral. Communion through a grate
and a diet of bread and gruel. I hated visiting Miss Tibby, who
treated the corns on my mother's little toes, shaving yellow curls
of skin off with a vegetable peeler, then rubbing her feet with
thick lotion that smelled like crank case oil and Ovaltine. The
bare bulb lit not only my mother's foot on a cushion but also a
coffin where Miss Tibby slept at night so there would be no
surprises later.

In high school my friends and I parked a block away and
secretly peered in the windows of the Holy Rollers, who spoke in
tongues, sometimes screaming with a frightening ecstatic look on
their faces and falling to the floor writhing and jerking. We
were profane, smothering our laughter at the surely sexual
fervor and the contorted postures. Later we'd sit in the car, Jeff
smoking, and watch them file out of the peeling church, looking as
normal as anyone. In Naples, the phial of San Gennaro's congealed
blood liquifies once a year. There's also a crucifix that used to
grow one long hair of Jesus that would have to be barbered once a
year. That one seems particularly close to Southern
sensibilities.

In the United States, I think there is no
sanctioned
place to put such fixated strangeness so it just jumps out when it
has to. Driving through the South recently, I stopped near Metter,
Georgia, for a barbecue sandwich. After the sweet salty pork and
iced tea, I was directed out back to the bathroom by the owner;
pork-bellied, sweating over his pit, he merely nodded toward the
rear. No sign at all that as I opened the screen door I would
encounter two molting ostriches. How they came to be in that
remote town in South Georgia and what iconographical necessity led
the family to gaze on and house these dusty creatures is a
philosophical gift I've been given to ponder in nights of
insomnia.