Some things are so easy. We'll simply dig holes, fix the iron poles, then fill the holes with cement. We choose a pink climbing rose (“What's its name?” “No name, signora, it's just a rose. Bella, no?”) for either side.
I've had several gardens but never have planted roses. When I was a child, my father landscaped around the cotton mill he managed for my grandfather. With a single-mindedness I can only wonder at, he planted a thousand roses, all the same kind. L'étoile de Holland, a vital heart's blood red rose, is the flower of my father. To put it mildly, he was a difficult man and to complicate that, he died at forty-seven. Until he died, our house always was filled with his roses, large vases, crystal bowls, single silver bud vases on every available surface. They never wilted because he had someone cut a fresh armful every day during seasons of bloom. I can see him at noon coming in the back door in his beige linen suit, somehow not rumpled from the heat. He carries, like a baby in his arms, a cone of newspaper around a mass of red, red buds. “Would you look at these?” He hands them to Willie Bell, who already is waiting with scissors and vases. He twirls his Panama hat on the tip of his finger. “Just tell me, who needs to go to heaven?”
In my gardens I have planted herbs, Iceland poppies, fushsias, pansies, sweet William. Now I am in love with roses. We have enough grass now that I can walk out in the dew barefooted every morning and cut a rose and a bunch of lavender for my desk. Memory cuts and comes again: At the mill, my father kept a single rose on his desk. I realize I have planted only one red one. As the morning sun hits, the double fragrance intensifies.
NOW THAT SO MUCH WORK IS FINISHED, WE TASTE THE FUTURE. Time is coming when we will just garden, maintain (astonishingly, some of the windows inside already need touching up), refine. We have a list of pleasurable projects such as stone walkways, a fresco on the kitchen wall, antique hunting trips to the Marche region, an outdoor bread oven. And a list of less glorious projects: figuring out the septic system, which sends out a frightening turnip smell when lots of people are using the house; cleaning and repointing the stone walls of the cantina; rebuilding sections of stone walls that have collapsed on several terraces; retiling the butterfly bathroom. These would have seemed major once and now just seem like things on a list. Still, days are near when we will work with an Italian tutor, take the wildflower book on long walks, travel to the Veneto, Sardinia and Apulia, even take a boat from Brindisi or Venice to Greece. To embark from Venice, where the first touch of the East is felt!
That time is not yet, however; the last big project looms.
Sempre Pietra
(Always Stone)
PRIMO BIANCHI CHUGS UP THE DRIVEWAY in his Ape loaded with bags of cement. He jumps out to direct a large white truck full of sand, steel I-beams, and bricks as it backs up the narrow driveway, scraping its mirror on the pine trees and pulling off one limb of a spruce with a loud crack. Primo was our choice for remodeling three years ago but was unable to work then because of a stomach operation. He looks the same—like an escapee from Santa's workshop. We go over the project. The yard-thick living room wall will be opened to connect with the contadina kitchen, which will get a new floor, new plaster, new wiring. He nods. “Cinque giorni, signori,” five days. This crude room, totally untouched, serves as a storage room for garden furniture over the winter and as the last bastion for scorpions. Because of earthquake standards, the opening will be only about five feet, not as wide as we wanted. But there will be doors opening to the outside, and the rooms, at last, will be joined.
We tell him about Benito's men running out of the house when they opened the wall between the new kitchen and the dining room. I'm reassured when he laughs. Will they start tomorrow? “No, tomorrow is Tuesday, not a good day for starting work. Work started on Tuesday never ends—an old superstition, not that I believe it but my men do.” We agree. We definitely want the project to end.
On evil Tuesday, we take all the furniture and books out of the living room, remove everything from the walls and fireplace. We mark the center of the wall and try to visualize the expanded room. It's the imagination that carries us through the stress of these projects. Soon we will be happy! The rooms will look as though they've always been one! We'll have lawn chairs on that end of the front terrace and can listen to Brahms or Bird wafting out of the contadina kitchen door. Soon it will not be called that anymore; it will be the living room.
Intercapedine is a word I know only in Italian. My dictionary translates it as “gap, cavity.” It's a big word in the lingo of restoring humid stone houses. The intercapedine is a brick wall constructed part of the way up a humid wall. A gap due dita, two fingers, wide is left between the two so that moisture is stopped by the brick barrier. The contadina kitchen has such a wall on the far end of the house. It looks deeper than is usual. Impatient, Ed and I decide to take down some of it, to see if possibly the intercapedine could be moved farther back toward the wall, thus enlarging the small room. As the bricks fall, we are stunned to find that there is no end wall of the house on the first floor; it was built directly into, onto the solid stone of the hillside. Behind the intercapedine we find Monte Sant'Egidio! Craggy, huge rock! “Well, now we know why this room had a moisture problem.” Ed is pulling out fig and sumac roots. Along the edge of the floor, he uncovers the rubble-filled remains of a moisture canal that must have functioned once.
“Great wine cellar,” is all I can think of to say. Not knowing what else to do, we take a few photos. This discovery definitely doesn't conform to the transcendent dream of a hundred angels.
Auspicious Wednesday arrives and with it, at seven-thirty, Primo Bianchi with two muratori, masons, and a worker to haul stone. They arrive without any machinery at all. Each man carries a bucket of tools. They unload scaffolding, sawhorses, called capretti, little goats, and T-shaped metal ceiling supports called cristi (named for the cross Jesus was crucified on). When they see the natural stone wall we uncovered, they stand, hands on hips, and utter a collective “Madonna mia.” They're incredulous that we took the wall down, especially that I was involved. Immediately, they go to work—first spreading heavy protective plastic on the floor—opening the wall between this room and the living room. Next, they remove a line of stones along what will be the top of the door. We hear the familiar chink, chink sound of chisel on stone, the oldest building song there is. Soon, the I-beam goes in. They pack in cement and bricks to hold it in place. Until the cement dries there's nothing more they can do on the door so they begin to take up the ugly tile floor with long crowbars.
They talk and laugh as fast as they work. Because Primo is a little hard of hearing, they've all learned to converse in a near shout. Even when he's not around, they continue. They're thoroughly neat, cleaning up as they go: no buried telephone this time. Franco, who has glistening black, almost animal eyes, is the strongest. Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than from muscle. I watch him lift a square stone that served as a bottom step for the back stairway. When I marvel, he shows off a bit and hoists it to his shoulder. Even Emilio, whose job it is to haul, actually seems to enjoy what he's doing. He looks perpetually amused. Hot as it is, he wears a wool cap pulled down so far that his hair all around sticks out in a ruff. He looks to be around sixty-five, a little old for a manovale, manual laborer. I wonder if he was a muratore before he lost two fingers. As they lift out the hideous tile and a layer of concrete, they find a stone floor underneath. Then Franco lifts some of these stones and discovers a second layer of stone floor. “Pietra, sempre pietra,” he says, stone, always stone.
True. Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it?
The next day, they open the same cavity along the top of the door on the li
ving room side. They call us in. Primo pokes the end of a major beam with his chisel. “è completamente marcia, questa trava.” He pokes the exposed part. “Dura, qua.” It's completely rotten inside the wall, although the exposed part is sound. “Pericoloso!” The heavy beam could have sheared, bringing down part of the floor above. They support the beam with a cristo while Primo takes a measurement and goes off to buy a new chestnut beam. By noon the I-beam on that side is in. They take no breaks, go off for lunch for one hour, and are back at work until five.
By the third full day of work they've accomplished an amazing amount. This morning the old beam comes down as easily as pulling a loose tooth. With long boards held up by cristi on either side of the beam, they secure the brick ceiling, knock out stones, wiggle the beam a bit, and lower it to the floor. The new one slides right in. What fabulously simple construction. They wedge rocks around it, pack in cement, then pack more cement into the small space between the beam and the ceiling. Meanwhile, two men shovel and dig the floor. Ed, working in the yard just outside the door, hears “Dio maiale!” a strange curse meaning God-pig. He looks in and sees underneath the enormous stone Emilio is propping up with his bar a third layer of stone. The first two layers were of smooth, big stones, burdensome to lug out; this layer is rough—suitcase-sized boulders, some jagged and deep in the ground. From the kitchen, I hear alarming groans as they upend them and roll them up a plank and dump them out the door. I'm afraid they're going to strike water soon. Emilio carts the small stones and dirt to the driveway, where a mountain of rubble is growing. We will keep the giant ones. One has elongated glyphic markings. Etruscan? I look at the alphabet in a book but can't correlate these markings with anything. Perhaps they are a farmer's diagram of planting or prehistoric doodling. Ed hoses off the stone and we look at it sideways. The carving then makes perfect sense. The Christian IHS topped by a cross, with another crude cross off to the side. A gravestone? An early altar? The stone has a flat top and I ask them to drag it aside; we can use it for a small outdoor table. Emilio shows no interest. “Vecchia,” old, he says. But he insists there always will be a use for such stones. All afternoon, they dig. I hear them muttering “Etruschi, Etruschi,” Etruscans, Etruscans. Under the third layer they come to the stone of the mountain. By now they've uncorked a bottle of wine and take gulps now and then.
“Come Sisyphus,” like Sisyphus, I try to joke.
“Esattamente,” Emilio replies. In the third layer, they're uncovering lintels and una soglia, a threshold in pietra serena, the great building stone of the area. Evidently, an earlier house's stones were used in building this house. These they line up along the wall, exclaiming at the fineness of the stone.
OUT ON ONE OF THE TERRACES, WE HAVE A STACK OF cotto for the floor, saved when the new bathroom was built and the upstairs patio was replaced. We hope to salvage enough of them to use in the new room. Ed and I pull the good ones, chip off mortar, wash them in a wheelbarrow, and scrub them with wire brushes. We have a hundred and eighty of them, a few of which are too pitted but may be useful as half bricks. The men are still hauling stones. The floor level is down about two feet now. The white truck maneuvers up the driveway again to deliver long, flat tiles about ten by twenty-five inches, with air channels through them. Regular bricks are laid in ten lines on the dug-out, leveled floor, now mostly bedrock, with some mountain rock locally referred to as piscia, piss, for its characteristic dribble of water in crevices. The bricks form drainage channels. Long tiles are cemented over them. They mix cement as though it were pasta dough—they dump sand into a big mound on the ground, then make a hole and start stirring in cement and water, kneading it with a shovel. On top of the tiles, they spread membrane, something that looks like tar paper, and a grid of thick iron wire reinforcement. On that, a layer of cement. A day's work, I'd say.
We're spared the whining churn of a cement mixer. We laugh to remember Alfiero's mixer in the summer of the great wall. One day he mixed cement, worked awhile, then ran off to another job. When he came back, we saw him beating the mixer with his fists; he forgot the cement, which by afternoon was solid. We laugh now at the other foibles of past workers; these are princes.
Plaster cracks, like the ones in my dining room in San Francisco after the earthquake, have appeared on the second and third floors above where the door is being opened. Some large chunks have fallen. Could the whole house simply collapse into a heap? By day, I'm excited by the project. I dream each night the oldest anxiety dreams—I must take the exam, I have no blue book, I don't know what the course is. I have missed the train in a foreign country and it is night. Ed dreams that a busload of students drives up to the house with manuscripts to be critiqued before tomorrow. In the morning, slightly awake at six, I burn the toast twice.
The wall is almost open. They've inserted a third steel beam over the opening, made the brick supporting column on one side, and have worked on the new double-thick brick wall that will separate us from the mountain. Primo looks over the bricks we've cleaned. As he lifts one, a large scorpion scuttles out and he smacks it with his hammer, laughing when I wince.
Later, reading in my study, I see a tiny scorpion crawling up the pale yellow wall. Usually, I trap them in a glass and escort them outside; this one I just let crawl along the wall. From here, the stone tapping of three masons takes on a strange, almost Eastern rhythm. It's hot, so hot I want to run from the sun, as from a rainstorm. I'm reading about Mussolini. He collected wedding rings from the women of Italy to finance his Ethiopian war, only he never melted them down. Years later, when he was caught trying to escape, he still had a sack of gold rings. In one photo, he has popping eyes, distorted hairless skull, set jaw. He looks demented or like Casper the ghost. The chink, chink sounds like a gamelan. In the last photo, he's hanging upside down. The caption says a woman kicked him in the face. I'm sleepy and imagining the men in an Indonesian dance with Il Duce downstairs.
THE MOUNTAIN OF STONE ON EITHER SIDE OF THE DOOR grows daunting. We must get a start on moving it. Stanislao, our Polish worker, comes at dawn. At six, Francesco Falco's son Giorgio arrives with his new plow, ready to ply the olive terraces, and Francesco follows shortly on foot. As usual, he has his cutting tool, a combination machete and sickle, stuffed into his pants in back. He prepares to help Giorgio by clearing stones from the path of the tractor, holding aside branches, and smoothing out the ground. But our pitchfork is wrong. “Look at this.” He holds it out, prongs up, and it quickly turns over, prongs down. He hammers the metal until it separates from the handle, turns the handle, then reattaches it. He then holds out the pitchfork, which does not flip over. We've used the pitchfork a hundred times without noticing but, of course, he's right.
“The old Italians know everything,” Stanislao says.
Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, we haul stone to a pile out on one of the olive terraces. I lift only the small and medium stones; Ed and Stanislao wrestle with the giants. Low-impact aerobics video, eat your heart out. Drink eight glasses of water a day? No problem, I'm parched. At home, in my burgundy leotard, I lift and lift, and one and two, and lift . . . but this is work versus workout. Bend and stretch—easy when I'm clearing a hillside. Whatever, I'm worn out by this labor and I also like it tremendously. After three hours, we've moved about one fourth of the stones. Madonna serpente! Don't try to calculate how many more hours we're in for—and all the really huge stones are in the other pile. Dirt and sweat run down my arms. The men are bare-chested, smelly. My damp hair is clotted with dust. Ed's leg is bleeding. I hear Francesco above us on a terrace talking to the olive trees. Giorgio's tractor tilts amazingly on one of the narrow terraces but he is too skilled to come tumbling down the mountain. I think of the long, melting bath I will take. Stanislao begins to whistle “Misty.” One stone they can't budge is shaped like the enormous head of a Roman horse. I take the chisel and start to work on eyes and mane. The sun wheels in great struts across the valley. Primo hasn't seen us at hard labor. He's shouting at his men about
it. He has worked on many restorations. The foreign padrone, he says, only stands and watches. He poses with his hands on his hips, a curled lip. As for a woman working like this, he raises his arms to heaven. Late in the afternoon, I hear Stanislao curse, “Madonna sassi,” Madonna-stones, but then he goes back to whistling his theme song, “It's cherry pink and apple blossom white when you're in love . . .” The men come down and we drink beer on the wall. Look at what we've done. This is really fun!
THE WHITE TRUCK IS BACK, DELIVERING SAND FOR PLASTER—plaster, they are nearing the end—and hauling away a mound of rubble. The three workers shout about the World Cup soccer matches taking place in the United States, about ravioli with butter and sage, about how long it takes to drive to Arezzo. Thirty minutes. You're crazy, twenty.
Claudio, the electrician, arrives to reroute the plait of dangling wires that somehow provides electricity for that section of the house. He has brought his son Roberto, fourteen, who has continuous, glorious eyebrows and almond-shaped Byzantine eyes that follow you. He is interested in languages, his father explains, but since he must have a practical trade, he is trying to train him this summer. The boy leans indolently against the wall, ready to hand tools to his father. When his father goes out to the truck for supplies, he grabs the English newspaper that protects the floor from paint and studies it.
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 25
