Under the Tuscan Sun

by Frances Mayes

  I PICK UP A LINEN CLOTH AT THE MARKET TO COVER THE ramshackle table left behind in the house, arrange wildflowers in a jar and place it in a flowerpot, plan dinner carefully but keep it simple: ravioli with sage and butter, sautéed chicken and prosciutto rolls, fresh vegetables and fruit. As Elizabeth arrives, Ed is moving the table out to the terrace. The entire top and one leg fall off—either an icebreaker or a disaster. She helps us piece the table together and Ed pounds in a few nails. Covered and set, it looks quite nice. We tour the big empty house and begin to talk drainpipes, wells, chimneys, whitewash. She completely restored a noble casa colonica when she moved here. As a wall came down the first day, she found an angry sow left behind by the peasants. Quickly, it becomes clear that she knows everything about Italy. Ed and I begin what is to become the ten thousand questions. Where do you get your water tested? How long was a Roman mile? Who's the best butcher? Can you buy old roof tiles? Is it better to apply for residency? She has been an intense observer of Italy since 1954 and knows an astonishing amount about the history, language, politics, as well as the telephone numbers of good plumbers, the name of a woman who prepares gnocchi with the lightest touch north of Rome. Long dinner under the moon, hoping the table won't keel over. Suddenly we have a friend.

  Every morning, Elizabeth goes into town, buys a paper, and takes her espresso at the same café. I'm up early, too, and love to see the town come alive. I walk in with my Italian verb book, memorizing conjugations as I walk. Sometimes I take a book of poetry because walking suits poetry. I can read a few lines, savor or analyze them, read a few more, sometimes just repeat a few words of the poem; this meditative strolling seems to free the words. The rhythm of my walking matches the poet's cadence. Ed finds this eccentric, thinks I will be known as the weird American, so when I get to the town gate, I put away my book and concentrate on seeing Maria Rita arranging vegetables, the shopkeeper sweeping the street with one of those witch brooms made of twigs, the barber lighting his first smoke, leaning back in his chair with a tabby sleeping on his lap. Often I run into Elizabeth. Without plan, we begin to meet a morning or two a week.

  IN TOWN, TOO, ED AND I ARE BEGINNING TO FEEL MORE AT home. We try to buy everything right in the local shops: hardware, electrical transformers, contact lens cleaner, mosquito candles, film. We do not patronize the cheaper supermarket in Camucia; we go from the bread store to the fruit and vegetable shop, to the butcher, loading everything into our blue canvas shopping bags. Maria Rita starts to go in back of her shop and bring out the just-picked lettuces, the choice fruit. “Oh, pay me tomorrow,” she says if we only have large bills. In the post office, our letters are affixed with several stamps by the postmistress then individually hand-canceled with vengeance, whack, whack, “Buon giorno, signori.” At the crowded little grocery store, I count thirty-seven kinds of dried pasta and, on the counter, fresh gnocchi, pici, thick pasta in long strands, fettuccine and two kinds of ravioli. By now they know what kind of bread we want, that we want the bufala, buffalo milk mozzarella, not the normale, regular cow's milk kind.

  We buy another bed for my daughter's upcoming visit. Box springs don't exist here. The metal bed frame holds a base of woven wood on which the mattress rests. I thought of the slats in my spool bed when I was growing up, how the mattress, springs and all, collapsed when I jumped up and down on the bed. But this is securely made, the bed firm and comfortable. A very young woman with tousled black curls and black eyes sells old linens at the Saturday market. For Ashley's bed I find a heavy linen sheet with crocheted edges and big square pillowcases of lace and embroidery. Surely these accompanied a bride to her marriage. The condition is so good I wonder if she ever took them from her trunk. They have dusty lines where they've been folded, so I soak them in warm suds in the hip bath, then hang them out to dry in the midday sun, a natural strong bleach that turns them back to white.

  Elizabeth has decided to sell her house and rent the former priest's wing attached to a thirteenth-century church called Santa Maria del Bagno, Saint Mary of the Baths. Although she won't move until winter, she begins to sort her belongings. Perhaps out of memory of that first dinner, she gives us an iron outdoor table and four curly chairs. Years ago, when she worked on a TV show about Moravia, he demanded a place to rest between shoots. She bought the set then. I give the “Moravia table” a fresh coat of that blackish green paint you see on park furniture in Paris. We also are the recipients of several bookcases and a couple of shopping bags full of books. The fourteenth-century hermits who lived on this mountain still might approve of our white rooms so far: beds, books, bookcases, a few chairs, a primitive table. Big willow baskets hold our clothes.

  On the third Saturday of each month, a small antiques market takes place in a piazza in the nearby castle town of Castiglione del Lago. We find a great sepia photograph of a group of bakers and a couple of chestnut coatracks. Mostly we browse around, astonished at the crazy prices on bad garage sale furniture. On the way home, we come upon an accident—someone in a tiny Fiat tried to pass on a curve—the Italian birthright—and rammed into a new Alfa Romeo. The upside-down Fiat still has one spinning wheel and two passengers are being extracted from the crumpled car. An ambulance siren blares. The smashed Alfa is standing, doors open, no passengers in the front seat. As we inch by, I see a dead boy, about eighteen, in the backseat. He is still upright in his seat belt but clearly is dead. Traffic stops us and we are two feet from his remote blue stare, the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Very carefully, Ed drives us home. The next day, when we are back in Castiglione del Lago for a swim in the lake, we ask the waiter at the bar if the boy killed in the accident was local. “No, no, he was from Terontola.” Terontola is all of five miles away.

  WE'RE EXPECTING THE PERMITS SOON. MEANWHILE, THE MAIN project we hope to finish before we go home at the end of August is the sandblasting of the beams. Each room has two or three large beams and twenty-five or thirty small ones. A big job.

  Ferragosto, August 15, is not just a holiday for the Virgin, it is a signal for work to cease and desist all over Italy both before and after that day. We underestimated the total effect of this holiday. When we began calling for a sandblaster, after the wall was finished, we found only one who would think of taking the job in August. He was to arrive on the first, the job to last three days. On the second we began to call and have been calling ever since. A woman who sounds very old shouts back that he is on vacanza al mare, he's over on the coast walking those sandy beaches instead of sandblasting our sticky beams. We wait, hoping he will appear.

  Although we can't paint until after the central heating is installed, we begin to scrub down the walls in preparation. On Saturdays and odd days when they're not working elsewhere, the Poles come over to help us. The flaky whitewash brushes off on our clothes if we rub against it. As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan. Faintly, we see a far-gone acanthus border around the top of the walls. The contadina bedroom used to be painted in foot-wide blue and white stripes. Two upstairs bedrooms were clear yellow, like the giallorino Renaissance painters favored, made from baked yellow glass, red lead, and sand from the banks of the Arno.

  From the third floor, I hear Cristoforo calling Ed, then he calls me. He sound urgent, excited. He and Riccardo talk at once in Polish and point to the middle of the dining room wall. We see an arch, then he rubs his wet cloth around it and scumbles of blue appear, then a farmhouse, almond green feathery strokes of what may be a tree. They have uncovered a fresco! We grab buckets and sponges and start gently cleaning the walls. Every swipe reveals more: two people by a shore, water, distant hills. The same blue that's on the walls was used for the lake, a paler blue for sky and soft coral for clouds. The biscuit-colored houses are the same colors we see all around us. Vibrant whe
n wet, the colors pale as they dry. An electrical line, buried at some point in the wall, mars a faux-framed classical scene of ruins in a panel over the door. We rub all afternoon. Water runs down our arms, sloshes on the floor. My arms feel like slack rubber bands. The lake scene continues on the adjoining wall and it is vaguely familiar, like the villages and landscape around Lake Trasimeno. The naive style reveals no newly discovered Giotto but it's charming. Someone didn't think so and whitewashed it. Luckily, they didn't use tougher paint. We will be able to live with this soft painting surrounding our dinners indoors.

  A HUNDRED YEARS MAY NOT BE LONG ENOUGH TO RESTORE this house and land. Upstairs I rub the windows with vinegar, shining the green scallop of the hills along the sky. I spot Ed on the third terrace, waving a long spinning blade. He's wearing red shorts as bright as a banner, black boots against the locust thorns, and a clear visor to shield his eyes from flying rocks. He could be a powerful angel, coming to announce a late annunciation, but he is only the newest in an endless line of mortals who've worked to keep this farm from sliding back into the steep slope it once was, perhaps long before the Etruscans, when Tuscany was a solid forest.

  The ugly whine of the weed machine drowns out the whinnies of the two white horses across the road and the multicultural birds that wake us up every morning. But the dry weeds must be cut in case of fire, so he works in the fiery sun without his shirt. Each day his skin darkens. We've learned the gravity of the hillside, the quick springs pulling down dirt and the thrust of the stone walls which must be sluices and must push back harder than the downward pull of the soil. He bends and slings olive prunings to a stack he's building for fires on cool nights. What a body of work this place is. Olive burns hot. The ashes then are returned to the trees for fertilizer. Like the pig, the olive is useful in every part.

  The old glass sags in places—strange that glass which looks so solid retains a slow liquidity—distorting the sharp clarity of the view into watery Impressionism. Usually, if I am polishing silver, ironing, vacuuming at home, I am highly conscious that I am “wasting time,” I should be doing something more important—memos, class preparation, papers, writing. My job at the university is all-consuming. Housework becomes a nuisance. My houseplants know it's feast or famine. Why am I humming as I wash windows—one of the top ten dreaded chores? Now I am planning a vast garden. My list includes sewing! At least a fine handkerchief linen curtain to go over the glass bathroom door. This house, every brick and lock, will be as known to me as my own or the loved one's body.

  Restoration. I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full. It's our zeal for all this work that amazes me. Is it only that once into the project, what it all means doesn't come up? Or that excitement and belief reject questions? The vast wheel has a place for our shoulders and we simply push into the turning? But I know there's a taproot as forceful as that giant root wrapped around the stone.

  I remember dreaming over Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, which I don't have with me, only a few sentences copied into a notebook. He wrote about the house as a “tool for analysis” of the human soul. By remembering rooms in houses we've lived in, we learn to abide (nice word) within ourselves. I felt close to his sense of the house. He wrote about the strange whir of the sun as it comes into a room in which one is alone. Mainly, I remember recognizing his idea that the house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams. Often the dreams are way-back father or mother dreams. “I was in this car and my father was driving, only I was the age I am now and my father died when I was twelve. He was driving fast . . . .” Our guests fall into long sleeps, just as we do when we arrive each time. This is the only place in the world I've ever taken a nap at nine in the morning. Could this be what Bachelard meant by the “repose derived from all deep oneiric experience”? After a week or so, I have the energy of a twelve-year-old. For me, house, set in its landscape, always has been crypto-primo image land. Bachelard pushed me to realize that the houses we experience deeply take us back to the first house. In my mind, however, it's not just to the first house, but to the first concept of self. Southerners have a gene, as yet undetected in the DNA spirals, that causes them to believe that place is fate. Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

  An early memory: Mine is a small room with six windows, all open on a summer night. I'm three or four, awake after everyone has gone to bed. I'm leaning on the windowsill looking out at the blue hydrangeas, big as beach balls. The attic fan pulls in the scent of tea olive and lifts the thin white curtains. I'm playing with the screen latch, which suddenly comes undone. I remember the feel of the metal hook and the eye I almost can stick my little finger into. Next, I'm climbing up on the sill and jumping out the window. I find myself in the dark backyard. I start running, feeling a quick rush of what I now know as freedom. Wet grass, glow of white camellias on the black bush, the new pine just my height. I go out to my swing in the pecan tree. I've just learned to pump. How high? I run around the house, all the rooms of my sleeping family, then I stand in the middle of the street I am not allowed to cross. I let myself in the back door, which never was locked, and into my room.

  That pure surge of pleasure, flash flood of joy—to find the electric jolt of the outside place that corresponds to the inside—that's it.

  In San Francisco, I go out on the flower-filled tiny back deck of my flat and look three stories down at the ground—a city-sized terrace surrounded with attractive low-maintenance flower beds on a drip system, cared for by a gardener. It does not lure me. That the jasmine on the high fences has climbed to my third floor and blooms profusely around the stair railing, I am thankful for. At night after work, I can step out to water my pots and watch for stars and find the tumbling vines sending out their dense perfume. Such flowers—jasmine, honeysuckle, gardenia—spell South, metabolic home, to my psyche. A fragmental connection though—my feet are three stories off the earth. When I leave my house, concrete separates my feet from the ground. The people who have bought the flats on the first and second floors are friends. We have meetings to discuss when to repair the steps or when to paint. I look into or onto the tops of trees, wonderful trees. My house backs onto the very private gardens unhinted at by the joined fronts of Victorian houses in my neighborhood. The center of the block is green. If all of us took down our fences, we could wander in a blooming green sward. Because I like my flat so much, I didn't know what I missed.

  Was there really a nonna, a presiding spirit who centered this house? This three-story house rooted to the ground restores some levels in my waking and sleeping hours. Or is it the house? A glimmer: Choice is restorative when it reaches toward an instinctive recognition of the earliest self. As Dante recognized at the beginning of The Inferno: What must we do in order to grow?

  At home I dream of former houses I've lived in, of finding rooms I didn't know were there. Many friends have told me that they, too, have this dream. I climb the stairs to the attic of the eighteenth-century house I loved living in for three years in Somers, New York, and there are three new rooms. In one, I find a dormant geranium, which I take downstairs and water. Immediately, Disney-style, it leafs and breaks into wild bloom. In house after house (my best friend's in high school, my childhood home, my father's childhood home), I open a door and there is more than I knew. All the lights are on in the New York house. I am walking by, seeing the life in every window. I never dream of the boxy apartment I lived in at Princeton. Nor do I dream of my flat I am so fond of in San Francisco—but perhaps that is because I can hear from my bed before I fall asleep foghorns out on the bay. Those deep voices displace dreams, calling from spirit to spirit, to some underlying voice we all have but don't know how to use.
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  In Vicchio, a house I rented a few summers ago brought the recurrent dream to reality. It was a huge house with a caretaker in a side wing. One day I opened what I'd assumed was a closet in an unused bedroom and found a long stone corridor with empty rooms on either side. White doves flew in and out. It was the second floor of the housekeeper's wing and I hadn't realized it was uninhabited. In many waking moments since, I've opened the door to the stony light of that hallway, oblong panels of sunlight on the floor, caught a glimpse and flutter of white wings.

  Here, I am restored to the basic pleasure of connection to the outdoors. The windows are open to butterflies, horseflies, bees, or anything that wants to come in one window and out another. We eat outside almost every meal. I'm restored to my mother's sense of preserving the seasons and to time, even time to take pleasure in polishing a pane of glass to a shine. To the house safe for dreaming. One end of the house is built right against the hillside. An omen of reconnection? Here, I don't dream of houses. Here, I am free to dream of rivers.

  THOUGH THE DAYS ARE LONG, THE SUMMER IS SOMEHOW short. My daughter, Ashley, arrives and we have mad, hot days driving around to sights. When she first walked up to the house, she stopped and looked up for a while, then said, “How strange—this will become a part of all our memories.” I recognized that knowledge we sometimes get in advance when travelling or moving to a new city—here's a place that will have its way with me.

  Naturally, I want her to love it but I don't have to convince her. She begins talking about Christmas here. She chooses her room. “Do you have a pasta machine?” “Can we have melon every meal?” “A swimming pool could go up on that second terrace.” “Where's the train schedule to Florence? I need shoes.”