“I was into Capture the Flag. Girls played those singing games.”
“I always liked it at the end when we boomed out, “The cheese stands alone,' emphasizing every syllable. It's sad to leave, knowing the house will just stand there all winter and we'll be busy and won't even think about it.”
“Are you crazy—we'll be thinking every day about where we want things, what we'll plant—and how much we're going to be robbed.”
At Menton, we check into a hotel and spend the late afternoon swimming in the Mediterranean. Italy is now that far off arm of land in the hazy twilight. Somewhere, light years away, Bramasole is now in shadow; the afternoon sun has dipped below the crest of the hill above us. Further light years away, it's morning in California; light is spilling into the dining room where Sister the cat is warming her fur on the table under the windows. We walk the long promenade into town and have bowls of soupe au pistou and grilled fish. Early the next day we drive to Nice and fly away. As we speed down the runway, I glimpse a fringe of waving palms against the bright sky; then we lift off and are gone for nine months.
Sister Water,
Brother Fire
JUNE. WE'RE TOLD THAT WINTER WAS fierce and spring was unusually profligate with bloom. Poppies have lingered and the fragrance of spiky yellow broom still fills the air. The house looks as if more sun soaked in during these months I've been gone. The finish that faux painters all over creation are trying to perfect, the seasons have managed admirably. Otherwise, all is the same, giving me the illusion that the months away were only a few days. A moment ago I was hacking weeds and now I'm at it again, though frequently I stop. I am watching for the man with the flowers.
A sprig of oleander, a handful of Queen Anne's and fennel bound with a stem, a full bouquet of dog roses, dandelion puffs, buttercups, and lavender bells—every day I look to see what he has propped up in the shrine at the bottom of my driveway. When I first saw the flowers, I thought the donor was a woman. I would see her soon in her neat navy print dress with a market bag hung over the handlebars of a battered bicycle.
A bent woman in a red shawl does come early some mornings. She kisses her fingertips, then touches them to the ceramic Mary. I have seen a young man stop his car, jump out for a moment, then roar off. Neither of these brings flowers. Then one day I saw a man walking down the road from Cortona. He was slow and dignified. I heard the crunch of his steps on the road stop for a moment. Later, I found a fresh clump of purple sweet peas in the shrine, and yesterday's wild asters thrown down into the pile of other wilting and dead bundles.
Now I wait for him. He examines what wildflowers the roadside and fields offer, leans to pick what he fancies. He varies his selection, bringing new blooms as they spring up. I'm up on a high terrace, hacking ivy off stone walls and chopping off dry limbs of neglected trees. The profusion of flowers stops me every few minutes. I don't know enough of the English names, much less the Italian. One plant, shaped like a little tabletop Christmas tree, is spiked all over with white flowers. I think we have wild red gladioluses. Lusty red poppies literally carpet the hillsides, their vibrancy cooled by clusters of blue irises, now withering to an ashy gray. The grass brushes my knees. When I stop just to look, the pilgrim is approaching. He pauses in the road and stares up at me. I wave but he does not wave back, just blanky stares as though I, a foreigner, am a creature unaware of being looked at, a zoo animal.
The shrine is the first thing you see when you come to the house. Cut into a curved stone wall, it's an ordinary one in these parts, a porcelain Mary on a blue background, in the Della Robbia style, centered in an arched niche. I see other shrines around the countryside, dusty and forgotten. This one is, for some reason, active.
He's an old man, this wayfarer with his coat draped over his shoulders and his slow contemplative walk down the road. Once I passed him in the town park and he gravely said, “Buon giorno,” but only after I spoke first. He had taken off his cap for a moment and I saw a fringe of white hair around his bald crown, which is bright as a lightbulb. His eyes are cloudy and remote, a stony blue. I also have seen him in town. He is not gregarious, does not join friends for coffee at bars, does not stop his stroll through the main street to greet anyone. I begin to get the idea that he is possibly an angel, since his coat always hangs around his shoulders, and since he seems to be invisible to everyone but me. I remember the dream I had the first night I spent here: I would discover one hundred angels one by one. This angel, though, has a body. He wipes his forehead with his handkerchief. Perhaps he was born in this house, or he loved someone here. Or the pointed cypresses that line this road, each one commemorating a local boy who died in World War I (so many from such a small town), remind him of friends. His mother was a great beauty and stepped into carriages on this spot, or his father was tight as a whip and forbade him to enter the house ever again. He thanks Jesus daily for saving his daughter from the perils of surgeons in Parma. Or perhaps this is just the far point of his daily walk, a pleasant habit, a tribute to the Walk God. Whatever, I hesitate to wipe the road dust from Mary's face, or shine the blue to gloss with a cloth, even to disturb the mound of stiff bouquets piled on the ground, still intact. There's a life in old places and we're always passing through. He makes me feel wide circles surrounding this house. I will be learning for years what I can touch and what I can't, and how I can touch. I imagine the five sisters of Perugia who held this family property, letting the closed stone rooms grow coats of fluffy white mold, letting vines strangle the trees, letting plums and pears thud to the ground summer after summer. They would not let go. As girls here, did they wake at the same moment in the mornings, push open the shutters of five bedrooms, and draw the same breath of new green air? Some such memory held the house to them.
Finally they let go and I, who simply happened by, now hold eighteenth-century maps showing where the property ends. At a triangular point below that, I discover cantilevered steps jutting out of a stone wall that was put together as neatly as a crossword puzzle. The sculptural integrity of limestone stairs extending into the air was only some farmer's ingenious method of stepping up to the next terrace. Lacy blue and gray lichen over the years erased the evidence of a foot, but when I run my hand over the step, I feel a slight dip in the center.
From this high terrace I look down on the house. In places where the plaster is broken, the stone called pietra serena, square and solid, shows. In front, the two palm trees rising on either side of the front door make the house look as though it should be in Costa Rica or Tangier. I like palms, their dry rattle in the wind and their touch of the exotic. Over the double front door, with its fanlight, I see the stone and wrought-iron balcony, just large enough to step out on and admire the spilling geraniums and jasmine I will plant.
From this terrace, I can't see or hear the workers' chaos going on below. I see our olive trees, some stunted or dead from the famous freeze of 1985, others flourishing, flashing silver and green. I count three figs with their large improbable leaves, visualizing yellow lilies beneath them. I can rest here marveling over the hummocky hills, cypress-lined road, cerulean skies with big baroque clouds that look as if cherubs could peer from behind them, distant stone houses barely brushed in, neat (will ours ever look like that?) terraces of olive and grape.
That I have acquired a shrine amazed me. What amazes me more is that I have taken on the ritual of the man with the flowers. I lay the clippers down in the grass. He approaches slowly, the bouquet almost behind him. When he is at the shrine I never watch. Later, I will walk down the terrace, down the driveway to see what he left. The brilliant yellow broom called ginestra and red poppies? Lavender and wheat? I always touch his blade of weed tying that ties them together.
ED IS TWO LEVELS UP, CHOPPING RAMPAGING IVY OUT OF A black locust tree. At every ominous crack or snap I expect to see him careening down the terraces. I pull at tough runners in a stone wall. Ivy kills. We have miles of the stuff. It causes stone walls to fall. Some of the trunks are as bi
g as my ankle. I think of the ivy I have in pretty jardinières on my mantle in San Francisco, imagine that in my absence they will bolt, strangle the furniture, cover the windows. As I move along this wall, my footing becomes more canted because the terrace starts to angle down. The cool scents of crushed lemon balm and nepitella, tiny wild mint, rise from around my feet. I lean into the wall, cut a runner of ivy, then rip it out. Dirt flies in my face and little stones crumble out, hitting my shoes. I disturb not at all a long snake taking a siesta. Its head is (how far?) in the wall, tail dangling out about two feet. Which way would he exit—back out or go farther in and U-turn? I skip ten feet on either side and begin to snip again. And then the wall disappears and I almost disappear into a hole.
I call Ed to come down. “Look—is this a well? But how could there be a well in the wall?” He scrambles down to the terrace just above me and leans over to look. Where he is, both ivy and blackberries are unnaturally dense.
“It looks like an opening up here.” He turns on the weed machine then, but when blackberries keep choking the filaments, he resorts to the grim-reaper scythe. Slowly, he uncovers a chute lined with stones. The immense back stone curves down like a playground slide and disappears underground, opening in the wall I'm trimming. We look at the terrace above him—nothing. But two terraces up, in a line from here, we see another unnaturally large blackberry clump.
Perhaps we just have water and wells on the brain. A few days before, when we arrived for the summer, we were greeted by trucks and cars along the road and a pile of dirt in the driveway. The new well, drilled by a friend of Signor Martini, was almost finished. Giuseppe, the plumber who was installing the pump, somehow had driven his venerable cinque cento over a low stone edge of the driveway. He introduced himself to us politely, then turned to kick and curse the car. “Madonna serpente! Porca Madonna!” The Madonna is a snake? A pig? He raced the engine but the three wheels remaining on the ground couldn't get enough traction to spin his axle off the stone. Ed tried to rock the car and dislodge it. Giuseppe kicked his car again. The three well drillers laughed at him, then helped Ed literally lift the toy-sized car off and over to level ground. Giuseppe hoisted the new pump out of the car and headed for the well, still muttering about the Madonna. We watched them lower it the three hundred feet down. This must be the deepest well in Christendom. They had hit water quickly but Signor Martini told them to keep going, that we never wanted to run out of water again. We found Signor Martini in the house, overseeing Giuseppe's assistant. Without our even thinking of it, they have moved the water heater from the older bathroom to the kitchen so we'll have hot water in our improvised kitchen this summer. I'm touched that he has had the house cleaned and has planted marigolds and petunias around the palm trees—a touch of civilization in the overgrown yard.
He looks tanned already and his foot is healed. “How is your business?” I ask. “Sell many houses to unsuspecting foreigners?”
“Non c'è male,” not bad. He beckons for us to follow. At the old well, he pulls a weight out of his pocket and plunks it down the opening. Immediately we hear it hit water. He laughs. “Pieno, tutto pieno.” Over the winter the old well has completely filled.
I read in a local history book that Torreone, the area of Cortona where Bramasole sits, is a watershed; on one side of us, water runs to the Val di Chiana. On the other, water runs down to the valley of the Tiber. We already are intrigued by the underground cistern near the driveway. Shining a light down the round opening, we've contemplated the stone arch tall enough to stand under and a deep pool our longest stick can't measure. I remember a Nancy Drew I liked at nine, The Mystery in the Old Well, though I don't recall the story. Medici escape routes seem more dramatic. Looking down into the cistern taps my first memory of historical Italy—Mrs. Bailey, my sixth-grade teacher, drawing the soaring arches of a Roman aqueduct on the board, explaining how ingenious the ancient Romans were with water. The Acqua Marcia was sixty-two miles long—that's two thirds of the way from Fitzgerald, Georgia, to Macon, she pointed out—and some of the arches still exist from the year 140. I remember trying to grasp the year 140, meanwhile overlapping the arches onto the Ben Hill County highway north.
The cistern opening seems to disappear into a tunnel. Though there is footing on either side of the pool, neither of us is brave enough to lower ourselves the fifteen dank feet underground to investigate. We stare into the dark, wondering how large the scorpions and vipers are, just out of sight. Above the cistern a bocca, a mouth, opens in the stone wall, as though water should pour into the cistern.
As we strip the ivy's thick roots and webs off the stone walls, we realize that the chute we're uncovering must be connected to the opening above the cistern. Over the next few days we discover four stone chutes running downhill from terrace to terrace and ending at a large square mouth that goes underground for about twenty-five feet, then reappears on the lowest terrace above the cistern, just as we suspected. The backs of all the chutes have the big single stone curved for the water to flow down. When the channels are cleaned out, water will cascade into the cistern after rains. I start to wonder if, with a small recirculating pump connected to the cistern, perhaps some of the water can fall all the time. After the experience of the dry well, the trickle and splash of falling water would be music indeed. Fortunately, we didn't stumble into these chutes last year as we blithely meandered the terraces admiring wildflowers and identifying fruit trees.
On the third-level terrace wall, a rusted pipe crumbles off as we hack at thorny blackberries. At the base, we discover a flat stone. As we shovel off dirt and pour on water, it grows. Something gigantic is buried here. Slowly, we uncover the roughly carved stone sink that once was used in the kitchen, before the “improved” concrete sink was installed. I'm afraid it's broken but we scrub mud away, wedge it out of its hole with a pick, and find intact the single stone, four feet long, about eighteen inches wide and eight inches thick, with a shallow indented basin for washing and with drainage ridges chipped out on either side. The corner drain is clogged with roots. We've been sorry our house didn't have this original and very characteristic object. Many old houses have similar sinks in place, draining directly out the kitchen wall and off a scallop-shaped stone shelf into the yard. I would like to wash my glasses in this prototype sink. We'll put it against the house outside under the trees, a place to keep ice and wine for parties and to wash up after gardening. It has been used to scrub enough crusty pots in its day; from now on: an honored place to fill a glass, a place for a pitcher of roses on the stone. It will be returning to good use after many years buried in dirt.
After a few more minutes of chopping, I'm about twelve feet down from the stone sink when two rusted hooks appear under the leaves. Beneath them, again we see a glimpse of flat stone. Ed shovels off a mound of dirt. In the middle, he hits a latch, around which is twisted a rusty coil of wire. We make out a circular opening. He has to angle the shovel in the crack to pry up the long-covered stone lid.
It is late afternoon, just after a thunderstorm, when the light turns that luminous gold I wish I could bottle and keep. Off comes the lid and the light that falls down strikes clear water in a wide natural cleft of white stone. We can see another undulation of the stone, too, where the water becomes aqua. We lie on our stomachs on the ground, taking turns sticking our heads and the flashlight down the hole. Fig roots seeking moisture slither down the rock wall. On the bottom, we see a big can on its side and easily read the magnified green words Olio d'Oliva. Not exactly like finding a Roman torso or amphora with dancing satyrs. A rusty pipe leans against the back of the white stone and we notice that it emerges just below the two hooks—someone stopped it up with a wine cork. It now seems obvious that the hooks once secured a hand pump and that this is a lost natural spring, hidden for years. How long? But wait. Just beneath the stone covering lies a remnant of another opening. What appears to be a corner of two layers of carved travertine lintel angles for a couple of feet, then disappears into ro
ck. If the top were dug away, would this be an open pool? I read about a man nearby who went in his backyard on Christmas Eve to pick lettuce for dinner and caved into an Etruscan tomb with elaborate sarcophagi. Is this simply a fortuitous opening in rock that supplied water for farming? Why the carving? Why was the carving recovered with a plainer stone? This must have been covered when the second well nearby was dug. Now we have a third well; we're the latest layer of water seekers, our technology—the high-whining drills able to pierce any rock—long removed from that of the discoverer of this secret opening in the earth.
We call Signor Martini to come see this miraculous finding. Hands in pockets, he doesn't even lean over. “Boh,” he says (boh is an all purpose word, sort of “Well,” “Oh,” “Who knows?” or dismissal), then he waves a hand over it. “Acqua.” He regards our fascination with abandoned houses and such things as ancient wells as further evidence that we are like children and must be humored in our whimsies. We show him the stone sink and explain that we will dig it out, clean it, and have it put up again. He simply shakes his head.
Giuseppe, who has come along, gets more excited. He should have been a Shakespearean actor. He punctuates every sentence with three or four gestures—his body totally participates in every word he speaks. He practically stands on his head looking down the hole. “Molta acqua.” He points in both directions. We thought the well opened only in one, but because he is dangling upside down, he sees that the natural declivity of the rock extends in the opposite direction also. “O.K., yes!” These are his only English words, always uttered with arms wide apart, embracing an idea. He wants to install a new hand pump for garden use. We already have seen bright green pumps in the hardware store out in the Val di Chiana farm country. We buy one the next day, uncork the pipe, and place the pump right on the old hooks. Giuseppe teaches us to prime the pump by pouring water into it while pumping the handle rhythmically. Here's a motion long lost to my gene pool, but the creaky-smooth movement feels natural. After a few dry gulps, icy fresh water spills out into the bucket. We do have the presence of mind not to drink untested water. Instead, we open a bottle of wine on the terrace. Giuseppe wants to know about Miami and Las Vegas. We're looking out over the jungle growth on the hills. Giuseppe thinks the palm trees are what we really need to tend to. How will we ever trim them? They're taller than any ladder. After two glasses, Giuseppe shimmies up to the top of the taller one. He has the biggest grin I've ever seen. The tree leans and he slides down fast, too fast, lands in a heap on the ground. Ed quickly opens another bottle.
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 5
