Intimacy. The feeling of touching the earth as Eve touched it, when nothing separated her.
In paintings, the hilltop town rests in the palm of Mary's hand or under the shelter of her blue cloak. I can walk every street of my Georgia town in my mind. I know the forks in the pecan trees, the glut of water in the culverts, the hog pear in the alley. Often the Tuscan perched villages seem like large castles—extended homes with streets narrow as corridors, and the piazze, like public receptions rooms, teeming with visitors. The village churches have an attitude of privacy; the pressed linen and lace altar cloths and scarlet dahlias in a jar could be in family chapels; the individual houses, just suites in the big house. I expand, as when my grandparents' house, my aunt's, my friends', the walls of home were as familiar to me as the lines in my own palm. I like the twisted streets up to the convent where I may leave a bit of lace to be mended on a Catherine wheel, spin it in to the invisible nun, whose sisters have tatted in this great arm of the castle for four hundred years. I do not glimpse even the half moons of her nails or the shadow of her habit. Outside two women who must have known each other all their lives sit in old wooden chairs between their doorways and knit. The stony street slopes abruptly down to the town wall. Beyond that stretches the broad valley floor. Here comes a miniature Fiat up this ridiculously steep street no car should climb. Crazy. My father would drive through swollen streams that flooded sudden dips in the dirt roads. I was thrilled. While he laughed and blew the horn, water rose around the car windows. Or was the water really that high?
We can return to live in these great houses, unbar the gates, simply turn an immense iron key in the lock and push open the door.
Solleone
SOLLEONE. HOW USEFUL THE -ONE SUFFIX in Italian; the noun expands. Porta, door, becomes portone, and there's no doubt which is the main door. Torre becomes torreone, the name of our part of Cortona, where a great tower must have stood once. Minestrone, then, always is a big soup. Days of the sun in Leone (Leo): Solleone—big sun. Dog days we called them in the South. Our cook told me the name was because it was so hot that dogs went mad and bit people and I would be bitten if I didn't mind her. Eventually, I was disappointed to find the name only meant that Sirius, the dog star, was rising and setting with the sun. The science teacher said Sirius was twice the size of the sun and I thought, secretly, that somehow the heat was augmented by that fact. Here, the expanded sun fills the sky, as in the archetypal child's drawing of house, tree, and sun. The cicadas are in the know—they provide the perfect accompaniment to this heating up. By dawn they're hitting their horizon note of high screech. How a finger-sized insect can make such a racket only by vibrating its thorax, I don't know. As they tune up to their highest pitch, it sounds as though someone is shaking tambourines made from the small bones of the ear. By noon, they've switched to sitars, that most irritating of instruments. Only the wind quiets them; perhaps they must hang on to a limb and can't clutch and vibrate at the same time. But the wind seldom blows, except for the evil appearance now and then of the scirocco, which gusts but doesn't cool, while the sun roars. If I were a cat, I would arch my back. This hot wind brings particles of dust from the African deserts and deposits them in your throat. I hang out the clothes and they're dry in minutes. The papers in my study fly around like released white doves, then settle in the four corners of the room. The tigli are dropping a few dry leaves and the flowers suddenly seem leached of color, although we have had enough rain this summer that we have been able to water faithfully every day. The hose pulls water directly from the old well and they must feel blasted at the end of the hot day by the rush of icy water. Perhaps this has exhausted them. The pear tree on the front terrace has the look of a woman two weeks overdue. We should have thinned the fruit. Branches are breaking under the weight of golden pears just turning ruddy. I can't decide whether to read metaphysics or to cook. The ultimate nature of being or cold garlic soup. They are not so far apart after all. Or if they are, it doesn't matter; it's too hot to think about it.
The hotter the day, the earlier I walk. Eight, seven, six o'clock, and even then I rub my face with number thirty sunblock. The coolest walks start at Torreone. A downhill road leads to Le Celle, a twelfth-century monastery where Saint Francis's minute cell still opens onto a seasonal torrential stream. Many of the first Franciscan monks who lived as hermits on Monte Sant'Egidio started Le Celle in 1211. The architecture, a stacked stone honeycomb up against the hillside, recalls their caves. When I walk there, peace and solitude are palpable. In early summer, the rush of water down the steep canyon makes its own music and sometimes, above that, I hear singing. By now the stream is almost dry. Their vegetable garden looks like a model. One of the Capuchin friars who lives there now trudges uphill barefooted toward town. He's wearing his scratchy brown robe and strange pointed white hat (hence cappuccino), using two sticks to pull himself along. With his white beard and fierce brown eyes, he looks like an apparition from the Middle Ages. When I pass him he smiles and says, “Buon giorno, signora. Bene qua,” nice here, indicating the landscape with a rotation of his beard. He glides by, Father Time on cross-country skis.
But I take the slightly uphill road this morning, passing a few new houses, then a kennel, where dogs go into an uproar until I am about five feet beyond their pen; the road is then just a white track through pine and chestnut forests, no cars, no people. The shoulders look as though someone scattered one of those cans of native wildflowers seeds and they all took root, then flourished. I climb a hill to look at an abandoned house so old that it still has a thick slate roof. Brambles surround the doors and windows. I glimpse dark rooms with stone walls. In front, I look down on a 180-degree view of Cortona in profile and on the entire length of the Val di Chiana, a yellow and green patchwork of sunflower and vegetable fields. The upstairs must have a low ceiling, right for a crude bed made of chestnut limbs, a white goose-down quilt. The terrace should go there—in front of the lilac bushes. A pink rose still blooms its heart out without any care at all. Whose was it? The wife of a silent woodcutter who smoked his pipe and drank grappa in the winter evenings when the tramontana shook the windows on the back of the house? Perhaps she growled at him for sticking her so far in the country. No, she was content with her work embroidering the linens for the contessa.
The house is small—but who would stay inside when there's a broad terrace overlooking the world? The waiting house: all potential. To see one and start dreaming is to imagine being extant in another version. Someone eventually will buy it and perhaps will run all over Tuscany looking for old slate to restore the roof authentically. Or the new owner might rip off the roof and put on flat new tiles. Whatever the predilections, the owner will respond to the aerie's isolation, that and the magnetic pull of the panorama, a place to linger and soothe the restless beast every day.
At the end of the road, a path through the woods leads to our favorite Roman road. I suppose it was laid by slaves. When I first heard about the Roman road near our house, I assumed it was unique. Not long after that I saw a rather thick book on the many Roman roads of this area. Walking alone, I try to think of chariots tearing down the hill, though the only thing I'm likely to meet is a cinghiale, a wild boar, roaming around. One stream still has a trickle of water. Maybe a Roman messenger verging on heat stroke paused here and cooled his feet, as I do, when running south with news of how Hadrian's wall was coming along. There have been more recent visitors; on the grassy bank, I see a condom and a wad of tissue.
When I walk into town, I see a shriveled, pasty man who, clearly, is dying. He has been propped in the doorway with the sun fully on him, his last chance for revival. He spreads out his fingers on his chest, warming everything he can. He has enormous hands. Yesterday I received a shock so hard my thumb went numb for half an hour. I was trying to pull the cord that turns on the overhead light in my study from the inside of the radiator, where it somehow had fallen. The clicker I had hold of split, leaving me with my thumb on the hot wires, my ot
her hand on the metal radiator. I screamed and jumped back. That mindless, animal feeling of shock—I wonder if the man in the doorway feels that way in the sun. His life force siphoning off, the great solar energy coming at him, filling him up. His wife sits beside him and appears to be waiting. She's not mending or pinching back her flowers. She's his guard for his trip to the underworld. Perhaps she'll dry his dead body, then anoint his bones with olive oil and wine. Or maybe the heat is getting to me, too, and he's just recovering from an appendectomy.
WE MUST GO TO AREZZO, ABOUT HALF AN HOUR AWAY, TO pay our insurance for next year. They seem to expect us to turn up rather than send a check. We park in the broiling train station lot. The station's full-sun digital thermometer-clock says it is 36°(97°F). After our pleasant interview with Signor Donati, an ice cream, a stop for Ed to buy a shirt at his favorite store, Sugar, and one for me to buy hand towels at my favorite shop, Busatti, we come back to the car and find the big 40 (104°) flashing over the car. The door handles appear to be on fire. The heat inside slams into us. We air out the car and finally get in. My eyelids and earrings are hot. Ed touches the steering wheel with his thumbs and index fingers. My hair seems to be steaming. Stores are closing; it's the hottest part of the hottest day of the year. At home, I lower myself into a cool bath, wet washcloth over my face, and just lie there until my body takes on the temperature of the water.
Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor. If I am mad enough to take a walk after one-thirty, no one is out, not even a dog. The word torpor comes to mind. All shops close during the sacred three hours. If you need something for bee sting or allergy, too bad. Siesta is prime time for TV in Italy. It's prime time for sex, too. Maybe this accounts for the Mediterranean temperament versus the northern: children conceived in the light and children conceived in the dark. Ovid has a poem about siesta, written before the first millennium turned. He's lying relaxed in sultry summer, one shutter closed, the other ajar, “the half-light shy girls need,” he wrote, “to hide their hesitation.” He goes on to grab the dress, which didn't hide much. Well, everything is always new under the sun. Then, as now, a quick wash in the bidet and back to work.
What a marvelous concept. For three hours in the middle of the day, you are invited to your own interests and desires. In the good part of the day, too, not just the evening after an eight- or nine-hour day slogging away.
Inside the high-roomed, shuttered house, it's completely silent. Even the cicadas have quit. Peaceful, dreamy afternoon. Partly for the pleasure of my feet sliding on soothing cotto floors, I walk from room to room. The classic look—I've seen it eleven times before and now I see it again in the new living room: dark beams, white brick ceiling, white walls, waxy brick floors. To my eye, the rugged textures and the strong color contrasts of the typical Tuscan house create the most welcoming rooms of any architectural style I know. Fresh and serene in summer, they look secure and cozy in winter. Tropical houses with bamboo ceilings and shuttered walls that open to catch every breeze, and the adobe houses of the Southwest, with their banquettes and fireplaces that are rounded like the curves of the human body, impart the same connected sense: I could live here. The architecture seems natural, as if these houses grew out of the land and were easily shaped by the human hand. In Italian, a coat of paint or wax is a mano, a hand of that substance. Before the plastering started, I noticed Fabio's initials scratched in a patch of wet cement. The Poles, I remembered, wrote POLONIA at the base of the stone wall. I wonder if archaeologists find many reminders of the anonymous hands behind enduring work. On the wall of the prehistoric Pech Merle cave in France, I was stunned to see handprints, like ones children make in kindergarten, above the spotted horses. The actual “signature” of the preliterate artist outlined in blood, soot, ashes! When the great tombs of Egypt were opened, the footprints of the last person out before the entrances were sealed remained in the sand: the last work finished, a day's work over.
A butterfly, trapped inside, bats and bats the shutter but does not find the way out. As I fall asleep, the fan drones, a shimmering head looking left and right.
I LOVE THE HEAT. I LOVE THE EXCESSIVE INSISTENCE. SOMETHING in me says yes. Maybe it's only that I grew up in the South, but it feels like a basic yes, devolving back to those old fossil heads of the first people who came into being under a big sun.
The landscape appears cool although it's cooking. The terraces aren't bleached this year, as they sometimes are. Our view to the Apennines is green and forested. In someone's swimming pool at the bottom of the valley, I see a little stick figure jump in.
Since we're up high, nights cool off to a lovely softness. In late afternoon, heaps and piles of clouds cross over, their shadows roving across the green hills. Tonight the Perseids shower, it's San Lorenzo's night of the shooting stars—cause for a celebratory dinner. We've seen them before and we know the gasps, our quick pointing a second too late, the bright cascade of a meteor, so momentary, so long expired. The garlic soup, chosen over Boethius, is chilling in the fridge. Lemon and Basil Chicken, an accidental discovery, and a terra-cotta dish of Gratin Dauphinois, an old Julia Child potato favorite I've made for years, are ready to cook. I have enough ripe pears to peel and slice and improvise a mascarpone custard for them to bake into. I scrub the bird droppings off the yellow table, spread the cloth I made over the winter from leftover fabric I used for the wicker on my Palo Alto patio fifteen years ago. I spent days on the double welting around the cushion for the chaise longue. I could walk out of that dining room door right now, fluff those cushions, tell the dog “Down,” walk into the yard filled with kumquat and loquat, mock orange and olive. Or could I? Everything stays. What chance, when I bought that yellow-flowered bolt at Calico Corners, to think it would end up on a table in Italy, with me in a new life.
Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression “a place in the sun” first come from? My rational thought processes cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. I'm here because I climbed out the window at night when I was four.
ALL THE SUMMER FRUITS OF THE GREAT MEDITERRANEAN SUN have ripened. Beginning with cherries when I arrive, the summer progresses to yellow peaches. Along the Roman road up Sant'Egidio, we pick handfuls of the most divine fruit of all, the minute wild strawberries that dangle like jewels under their jagged leaves. Then come the white peaches with pale and fragrant flesh. Gelato made of these makes you want to dance. Then the plums, all the varieties—the small round gold, the dusky purple-blue, and the pale green ones larger than golf balls. Grapes start to arrive from farther south. A few ruddy apples, then the first pears ripen. The small green ones couldn't be ripe but they are, then the globular speckled yellows. In August, the figs just start to plump up, not reaching their peak until September. But, finally, the blackberries, that heart-of-summer fruit, are ripe.
Days before I go home, at the end of August, I can take out my colander and pick enough for breakfast. Every morning the birds are wild for them but can't manage to eat quite all. Picking blackberries—a back-to-basics pleasure—passing over the ones still touched with a hint of red and those that squish to the touch, pulling off only the perfectly ripe ones until my fingers are rosy. The taste of sun-warmed berries brings me the memory of filling my jar with them in an abandoned cemetery. As a child, I sat down on a heaped mound of dirt, unconsciously eating luscious berries from a plant whose roots intertwined with old bones.
Bees burrow in the pears. Where they've fallen, thrushes feast. Who knows how the wants of our ancestors act out in us? The mellow scents somehow remind me of my mean Grandmother Davis. My father privately called her The Snake. She was blind, with Greek-statue eyes, but I always believed sh
e could see. Her charming husband had lost all the land she inherited from her parents, who owned a big corner of South Georgia. On Sunday rides, she'd always want Mother to drive her by the property she'd lost. She couldn't see when we got there but she could smell peanut and cotton crops in the humid air. “All this,” she'd mutter, “all this.” I'd look up from my book. The brown earth on either side of the car spread flat to the horizon. From there, who could believe the world is round? I first thought of her when we had the terraces plowed and the upturned earth was ready for planting. Fertile earth, rich as chocolate cake. Big Mama, I thought, biscuit-face, old snake, just look at this dirt, all this.
The heat breaks with a fast rain, a pelting determined rain that soaks the ground then quits—gone, finished. The green landscape smears across the windows. The sun bounces back out but robbed of its terror now. Here, the edge of autumn. What is it? The smell of leaves drying. A sudden shift in the air, a slightly amber cast to the light, then a blue haze hanging over the valley at evening. I would love to see the leaves turn, pick up the hazelnuts and almonds, feel the first frost and build a little olive wood fire to take the chill off the morning. My summer clothes go in the duffle under the bed. I make a few wreathes of grape vine and twine them with sage, thyme, and oregano, herbs I can use in December. The fennel flowers I've been drying on a screen go in a painted tin I found in the house. Perhaps the nonna I've grown fond of kept hers here, too.
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 28
