Under the Tuscan Sun

by Frances Mayes

  AS IT TURNS OUT, THE FORMER OWNER WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE water. If the water setup doesn't exactly rival the gardens of the Villa d'Este, it is ingenious enough to keep us digging and exploring for many days. The elaborate underground system makes us understand precisely how precious water is in the country. When it flows, you figure out ways to save it; when it is plentiful, as now, you must respect it. St. Francis of Assisi must have known this. In his poem “The Canticle of the Creatures,” he wrote, “Be praised, O Lord, for Sister Water, the which is so useful, humble, precious and chaste.” We convert instantly to short showers, to turning off the water quickly when washing dishes and brushing our teeth.

  Interesting that this oldest well has channels on either side of it to divert runoff so that any extra water flows into the cistern. As we clean around the cistern, we find two stone tubs for washing clothes and more hooks in the stone wall above it, where another pump must have hung. Do not waste a drop. And there, not five feet away from the natural well, the old one that went dry last summer—now replenished fully by the winter rains. The hand pump for potted plants, Ed decides, the old well for the grass, and for the house, our fine new pozzo, a hundred meters deep, drilled through solid rock.

  “Wonderful water,” the pozzaiolo, the well driller, assures us as we pay him a fortune, “down to inferno but cold as ice.” We count out the cash. He does not want a check; why would anyone use a check unless they didn't actually have the money? “Acqua, acqua,” he says, gesturing over the entire property. “Enough water for a swimming pool.”

  WE NOTICED, VAGUELY, WHEN WE BOUGHT THE HOUSE THAT A stone wall perpendicular to the front had tumbled down in a few places. Weeds, sumac, and fig sprouted along the fallen rocks. The first time we saw the house the section of the yard above that wall was topped with forty feet of rose-covered pergola lined with lilacs. When we returned to negotiate for the purchase, the pergola was gone, torn down in a zeal to clean up the place. The roses and lilacs were leveled. When I lifted my eyes from that debacle to the house, I saw that the faded green shutters were repainted a glossy dark brown. Stunned, we hardly noticed the heaps of stones. Later, we realized that a 120-foot-long wall of immense stone would have to be rebuilt. We forgot about the romantic pergola with its climbing roses.

  During those few weeks here last summer after buying the house, Ed started to take down parts of the wall adjacent to the tumbled sections. He thought stone building sounded gratifying—finding just the right stone to slide into place, tapping it in with a mallet, scoring stone surfaces, hitting them precisely to direct the split. The ancient craft is appealing; so is the good hard labor. An alarming pile of stones grew daily, as did his muscles. He became a little obsessed. He bought thick leather gloves. Big rocks went in one line, small ones in another, and flat ones in another. Like all the terrace walls on the property, this was drywall, with a depth of more than a yard: nicely fitted and stacked stones in front, neat as a jigsaw, with smaller ones behind. The structure leaned backward, to counteract the natural downward heave of the hillside. Unlike the lovely stone fences of New England, which cleared the fields of stone, these actually are structural; only with braced terraces is a hillside like ours an olive farm or vineyard. On one terrace where the stones fell, a large almond tree also toppled.

  When we had to leave, about thirty feet of the wall lay in orderly piles. Ed was enthusiastic about stonework, though slightly daunted by the excavation and the surprising depth of stonework behind the facade of the wall. But instead of the miles to go, we noticed the huge heaps of stones he'd stacked.

  Over the winter we read Building with Stone by Charles McRaven. Ideas such as sealing out moisture and foundations and frost lines started to crop up. The height of the remaining wall was not the actual height the rebuilt wall would have to be to support the broad terrace leading up to the house. Besides being 120 feet long, the wall must be fifteen feet high, buttressed from behind. As we read about packed fill, thrust, balance, and all the ways the earth shifts when it freezes, we began to think we had the Great Wall of China on our hands.

  We were absolutely right. We've just had several experienced muratori, masons, out to view the remains. This job is a monster. Restoration work inside seems dwarfed beside this project. Still, Ed envisions himself apprenticed to a rugged man in a cap, a stone artist. Santa Madonna, molto lavoro, much work, each muratore exclaims in turn. Molto. Troppo, too much. We learn that Cortona recently adopted codes for walls such as this one because we're in an earthquake zone. Reinforced concrete will be required. We are not prepared to mix concrete. We have five acres of blackberry and sumac jungle to deal with, trees that need pruning. Not to mention the house. The wall estimates are astronomical. Few even want to tackle the job.

  This is how in Tuscany we build the Great Wall of Poland.

  Signor Martini sends a couple of his friends by. I forewarn him that we are interested in getting the work done immediately and that we want a price for fratelli, brothers, not for stranieri, foreigners. We are recovering from the new well and still awaiting permits so the major house work can begin. His first friend says sixty days of labor. For his price we could buy a small steamer and motor around Greece. The second friend, Alfiero, gives a surprisingly reasonable estimate, plus has the terrific idea that another wall should run along the row of linden trees on an adjacent terrace. When you don't speak a language well, many of your cues for judging people are missing. We both think he is fey—an odd quality for a mason—but Martini says he is bravo. We want the work done while we are in residence, so we sign a contract. Our geometra doesn't know him and cautions us that if he's available he probably is not good. This kind of reasoning doesn't sink in with us.

  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 immi
grants 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 w
ears 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.