Under the Tuscan Sun (8 page)

The schedule calls for work to begin the following Monday.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday pass. Then a load of sand arrives.
Finally, at the end of the week, Alfiero appears with a boy of
fourteen and, to our surprise, three big Polish men. They set to
work and by sundown, amazingly, the long wall is down. We watch
all day. The Poles lift one-hundred-pound stones as though they
were watermelons. Alfiero speaks not a word of Polish and they speak
about five words of Italian. Fortunately, the language of manual
labor is easy to act out.
“Via, via,”
Alfiero waves
at the stones and they have at them. The next day they excavate
dirt. Alfiero exits, to go to other jobs, I suppose. The boy,
Alessandro, purely pouts. Alfiero is his stepfather and evidently
is trying to teach the boy about work. He looks like a little Medici
prince, petulant and bored as he stands around listlessly kicking
stones with the toe of his tennis shoe. The Poles ignore him. From
seven until twelve they don't stop. At noon they drive off in their
Polski Fiat, returning at three for five more solid hours of
labor.

The Italians, who have been “guest workers” at many times
and in many countries, are thrown by the phenomenon happening in
their own country. During this second summer at Bramasole, the
newspapers are tolerant to indignant about Albanians literally
washing up on the shores of southern Italy. Living in San Francisco,
a city where immigrants arrive daily, we cannot get excited about
their problem. Americans in cities have realized that migrations
are on the increase; that the whole demographic tapestry is being
rewoven on a vast scale in the late twentieth century. Europe is
having a harder time coming to grips with this fact. We have our
own poor, they tell us incredulously. Yes, we say, we do, too.
Italy is amazingly homogeneous; it is rare to see a black or Asian
face in Tuscany. Recently, Eastern Europeans, finding the German
work force at last full of people like themselves, began arriving
in this prosperous part of northern Italy. Now we understood
Alfiero's estimate for the work. Instead of paying the normal Italian
twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand lire per hour, he is able to
pay nine thousand. He assures us they are legal workers and are
covered by his insurance. The Poles are pleased with the hourly
wage; at home, before the factory went kaput, they barely earned
that much in a day.

Ed grew up in a Polish-American Catholic community in
Minnesota. His parents were born of Polish immigrants and grew up
speaking Polish on farms on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. Of
course, Ed knows no Polish. His parents wanted the children to be
All American. The three words he tried out with the Poles they
couldn't understand. But these men he can't understand seem very
familiar. He's used to names like Orzechowski, Cichosz, and
Borzyskowski. Passing in the yard, we nod and smile. The way we
finally make contact with them comes through poetry. One afternoon
I come across a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, long exiled in America but
quintessentially a Polish poet. I knew he'd made a triumphant
journey back to Poland a few years ago. When Stanislao crossed the
front terrace with the wheelbarrow, I asked, “Czeslaw Milosz?”
He lit up and shouted to the two others. After that, for a couple
of days, when I passed one or the other of them, he would say,
“Czeslaw Milosz,” as though it were a greeting, and I would
answer,
“Sì,
Czeslaw Milosz.” I even knew
I was pronouncing the name correctly because I'd once practiced his
name when I had to introduce the poet at a reading. For several
days before that, I'd referred to him to myself as “Coleslaw”
and had anxiety that I would stand up before the audience and
introduce him that way.

Alfiero becomes a problem. He lights like a butterfly on one
project after another, starting something, doing a sloppy job, then
taking off. Some days he just doesn't show up at all. When
reasonable questioning doesn't work, I revert to the old Southern
habit of throwing a fit, which I find I still can do impressively.
For a while, Alfiero straightens up and pays attention, then like
the whimsical child that he is, he loses his focus. He has a charm.
He throws himself into playful descriptions of frog races, fast
Moto Guzzis, and quantities of wine. Patting his belly, he speaks
in the local dialect and neither of us understands much of what
he says. When it's time to throw a fit, I call Martini, who does
understand. He nods, secretly amused, Alfiero looks abashed, the
Poles let no expression cross their faces, and Ed is mortified. I
say that I am
malcontenta.
I use waving gestures and
shake my head and stamp my foot and point. He has used rows of
tiny stones under rows of big stones, there are vertical lines in
the construction, he has neglected to put a foundation in this
entire section, the cement is mostly sand. Martini begins to shout,
and Alfiero shouts back at him, since he dares not shout at me.
I hear the curse
“Porca Madonna”
again, a serious thing
to say, and
“Porca miseria,”
pig misery, one of my
favorite curses of all times. After a scene, I expect sulking but,
no, he turns up sunny and forgetful the next day.

“Buttare! Via!”
Take it down, take it away. Signor
Martini starts to kick at Alfiero's work. “Where did your mother
send you to school?
Where did you learn to make cement like sand castles?” Then they
both turn and shout at the Poles. Now and then Martini rushes in the
house and calls Alfiero's mother, his old friend, and we hear him
shouting at her, then subsiding into soothing sounds.

They must think, privately, that we are brilliant to know so
much about wall building. What neither Signor Martini nor Alfiero
realizes is that the Poles let us know when something is not right.
“Signora,”
Krzysztof (we call him Cristoforo, as he
wishes) says, motioning to me,
“Italia cemento.”
He crumbles too-dry cement between his fingers.
“Polonia
cemento.”
He kicks a rock-hard section of the retaining wall.
This has become a nationalistic issue. “Alfiero.
Poco
cemento.
” He puts his fingers to his lips. I thank him.
Alfiero is using too little cement in his mixture. Don't tell. They
begin to roll their eyes as a signal, or, after Alfiero departs,
which usually is early in the day, to show us problems. Everything
Alfiero touches seems bad, but we have a contract, they work for
him, and we are stuck with him. However, without him, we would not
have met the Poles.

Near the top of the wall, they uncover a ground-level stump.
Alfiero maintains it is
non importa.
We see Riccardo shake
his head quickly, so Ed says authoritatively that it will have to
be dug out. Alfiero relents but wants to pour on
gasolio
to kill it. We point to the pristine new well not twenty feet away.
The Poles began to dig and two hours later are still digging.
Beneath the exposed stump, a mammoth three-legged root has wrapped
itself around a stone as big as an automobile tire. Hundreds of
inveigling roots shoot out in all directions. Here is the reason
much of the wall had fallen in the first place. When they
finally wrench it out, they insist on evening the legs and top,
the stone still entwined. They load it in a wheelbarrow and take
it up to the lime tree bower, where it will remain, the ugliest
table in Tuscany.

They sing while they heave stone and their voices begin to
sound like the way the work of the world should sound. Sometimes
Cristoforo sings in a falsetto, a strangely moving song, especially
coming from his big brown body. They never skimp on a minute's
work, even though their boss is gone all the time. On days when their
supplies are gone because Alfiero forgets to reorder, he capriciously
tells them not to work. We hire them to help clear the terraces of
weeds. Finally we have them sanding all the inside shutters. They
seem to know how to do everything and work about twice as fast as
anyone I've ever seen. At the end of the day, they strip and rinse
off with the hose, dress in clean clothes, then we have a beer.

Don Fabio, a local priest, lets them live in a back room of
the church. For about five dollars apiece, he feeds all three of
them three meals a day. They work six days a week—the priest
does not allow them to work on Sunday—exchanging all the
lire they make into dollars and stashing it away to take home for
their wives and children. Riccardo is twenty-seven, Cristoforo
thirty, and Stanislao forty. During the weeks they work, our Italian
deteriorates. Stanislao has worked in Spain, so our communication
begins to be an unholy mixture of four languages. We pick up Polish
words:
jutro,
tomorrow;
stopa,
foot;
brudny,
dirty;
jezioro,
lake. Also something
that sounds like
grubbia,
which was their name for Signor
Martini's sloping stomach. They learned “beautiful” and “idiot”
and quite a few Italian words, mostly infinitives.

Despite Alfiero, the wall is strong and beautiful. A curving
flight of stairs, with flat tops on either side for pots of flowers,
connects the first two terraces. The well and cistern have stone
walls around them. From below, the wall looks immense. It's hard
to get used to, since we liked the tumbled look, too. Like the
other walls, soon it will have tiny plants growing in the cracks.
Because the stone is old, it already looks natural in the landscape,
if a bit tall. Now comes the pleasure of planning the walkway
from the driveway around the well to the stone steps, the flowers
and herbs for the border, and the flowerings and shadows of small
trees along the wall. First we plant a white hibiscus, which
pleases us by blooming immediately.

On a Sunday morning the Poles arrive after church, dressed
in pressed shirts and trousers. We've seen them only in shorts.
They've bought identical sandals at the local supermarket. Ed and I
are clipping weeds when they arrive. We're dirty, wearing shorts,
sweaty—reversed roles. Stanislao has a Soviet Union camera
that looks to be from the thirties. We have Coca-Cola and they
take several pictures. Anytime we serve them Coke, they always say,
“Ah, America!” Before changing for work, they take us down to
the wall and dig the dirt away from a few feet of the foundation.
In large letters, they've written
POLONIA
in the
concrete.

BRAMASOLE'S STAIRCASE ASCENDS THREE FLOORS WITH A HANDMADE
wrought-iron railing, whose symmetrical curves add a little
rhythm to climbing. The fanlight, the bedroom terrace railing,
only slightly rusted, and the railing around the balcony above the
front door all employed some blacksmith for a long winter. The
gate at the bottom of the driveway once was a stately entrance but
like most things here, has been left to time far too long. The
bottom bulges where lost tourists banged into it while turning
around, after realizing they were on the wrong road to the Medici
fortress. The lock has long since rusted and the hinges on one
side have given way at the top, letting the gate drag.

Giuseppe has brought a friend, a maestro of iron, to see if our
front gate can be salvaged. Giuseppe thinks not. We need something
more suitable for the
bella villa.
The man who unfolds
from Giuseppe's
cinque cento
could have stepped from
behind a time shield of the Middle Ages. He is as tall and gaunt
as Abraham Lincoln; he wears black overalls and his unusually black
hair has no gleam. Hard to account for his strangeness; somehow he
looks as though he's made out of something else. He uses few words
but smiles shyly. I like him at once. Silently, he fingers the gate
all over. Everything he has to say runs through his hands. It's
easy to sense that he has given his life to this craft out of
love. Yes, he nods, the gate can be repaired. The question is time.
Giuseppe is disappointed. He envisions something grander. He draws
shapes in the air with his arms, an arching top with arrows. A new
one, more elaborate, with lights and an electronic device so we can
be buzzed in the house and merely press a button for the gate to
swing open. He has brought us this artist and we want him to
repair
?

We go to the shop to see the possibilities. En route, Giuseppe
careens to the roadside and we leap out to see other gates this
maestro has made. Some with swordlike designs, some with complex
interlinking circles and wheat sheaves. One is topped with the
initials of the owner, one, oddly, with a crown. We like the curved
tops, the hoops and rings more than the more formidable arrow-topped ones, which seem like remnants of the time when
the Guelfs and Ghibellines were looting and burning each other.
All are obviously made to last forever. He rubs each one, saying nothing, letting the quality of his work speak for itself. I begin
to imagine a small stylized sun at the center of ours, with
twisted rays.