Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  I couldn’t argue with her. An afternoon at Kempton Park—including racing paper, train ticket, admission, lunch, and drinks—put you about twenty dollars out of pocket before you’d even made a wager. This was about double the cost of an afternoon at an American track, but you got far better quality racing for your money. The horses were not drugged or crippled, and the racecourse management wasn’t always trying to manipulate you. If you bought a wedge of steak-and-kidney pie, you tasted real steak and kidneys; I’d eaten so many plastoid pizzas at tracks in the States that my body was probably permanently damaged. But you couldn’t blame the racecourses for charging so much—not when the gambling action was controlled by the bookies and the government. They were hurt by television, too. Most major races are shown on TV, so a lot of people stay at home to watch them, or go to the local pub, making their wagers at one of the twelve thousand betting shops around. I’d read somewhere that quite a few of the courses were in financial trouble, and I hoped that somebody would devise a plan to help support them. It seemed to me that jump racing was a sort of museum piece, small-scale and rather pure in its intentions, and that it ought to be preserved, in one form or another, so that the slowed-down, country way of life it represented would continue to be available. The races made you feel good, win or lose, and that was reason enough to care about what happened to them.

  As we drank our Guinness, I asked Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler if she’d read much of Thomas Hardy.

  “Almost all of him, I should think,” she said. “Did you know that Devon is part of Hardy’s Wessex? Well, it is. I used to use Jude the Obscure in some of my classes. That’s such a sad book. Why is Hardy so sad, I wonder. Do you know the saddest thing in all of Hardy? It’s when Tess and her brother have the accident with the mail cart. Her entire life changes after that. It gave me nightmares when I read it as a child. To think of a horse impaled on the shaft of a cart!”

  We watched the sixth, and last, race of the afternoon down by the rail. The sound of the approaching horses was muted, like a bass drum wrapped in cotton. Every now and then, we could hear a horse’s hooves clipping the top of a hedge. Neither of us had the winner, so we didn’t have to wait around to collect. We walked back to the station through falling light that brought out the green in the winter grass and found an empty train compartment and settled in. Around us, the silent men tramped to seats and unbuttoned their topcoats or raincoats and began reading the evening paper. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler and I exchanged addresses. I promised to send a copy of a new Ginsberg book when I got back to California, and she promised to study it carefully. She said that she would not be offended if Ginsberg still used nasty words. Then we talked some more about Hardy, and about Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler’s reluctant husband. When we reached Waterloo, we stepped down onto the platform and shook hands. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler’s grip was very firm.

  Tuscan Spring

  The train from Rome to Florence passes through beautiful country. I rode it in March, after our long, cold winter in London. My wife was tired from traveling and had fallen asleep in her seat, so I bought a can of Peroni beer from a vendor, walked to the rear of the car, and looked out an observation window at vineyards and farms. Every now and then, a river came into view. It was high and muddy, carrying its spring payload of melted snow. I was considering whether or not I could afford to buy a fishing rod when a conductor in a neatly pressed uniform asked for my ticket. He did this casually, with the nonchalance that many Italians reserve for dispatching their duties. I asked him if there were trout in the river, and he said that of course there were trout. He spoke not like a fisherman but like a person who was proud of the rivers of Italy, certain that they could not be lacking in anything a tourist from America might desire.

  “Are we in Tuscany yet?” I asked.

  “No. Still Latium.” He consulted a schedule of tariffs. “I’m sorry, signore, but you must pay a supplement for the rapido.”

  The rapido was the train we were on, the fastest in Italy. It cost a bit more to ride than other trains. It rocked from side to side as it sped along the tracks. At first, the rocking was bothersome, but once you got used to it, it made you as secure and comfortable as a baby. My wife was not the only passenger it had put to sleep. I took some lira notes from my pocket. The notes were old. Several of them were held together with tape.

  “Do you know what kind of grapes they grow here?” I asked.

  “Nothing special.”

  “The wine from them is no good?”

  “Non c’è male,” he said, meaning “not so bad.” “You can drink any wine when you’re thirsty, but that won’t make it chianti. “

  I realized then that he must be Tuscan. There are some fine wines—Frascati, Colonna—produced in southern Latium, below Rome, but Tuscans don’t like to admit it. For them, only chianti will do—preferably chianti from the rocky Classico district between Florence and Siena. The soil there is ancient clay-schist covered with flint, limestone, and pebbly sand. It is not duplicated anywhere else in Italy.

  “Have you visited Florence before?” the conductor asked.

  “Almost twenty years ago,” I said. “I was a student there.”

  He nodded. “Many students in Florence. This time, will you stay?”

  “If we can find a place to live.”

  “You will stay long?”

  “Until the money runs out.”

  The conductor wrote something on his pad. “A restaurant,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “The best for eating. My cousin Angelo works there.” I thanked him for the information. He smiled, gave me a mock salute, and moved on to the next car.

  The vineyards and farms finally gave way to the outskirts of Florence. I saw two- and three-story apartment houses with small yards that contained the universal junk of the poor. The city looked cramped and inconsequential after the warm expansiveness of Rome. The people in the train station seemed to be trying to become invisible by drawing into themselves. They had none of the blatant narcissism of Romans, who treat Rome as an extension of their bodies, gliding through it at their ease.

  We took a taxi to our pensione in the Santa Croce district. It was on the fourth floor of an old palace. The ceiling in the foyer had a mural of cherubim and seraphim blowing trumpets, but the rates were still cheap, less than thirty dollars a night. The manager was a slight, elegant, friendly man who had the impeccable manners of a true Florentine. In the crowded streets, these manners are often disguised, or transformed into brutal aggressiveness, but in the sanctity of a home—a good pensione is like a home—the graciousness of Florentines is manifest.

  “Okay?” the manager asked, showing us a very clean room with two metal-frame cots like the cots you see in monasteries.

  “Breakfast is included?”

  “Of course,” he said, sounding hurt.

  I lay awake that night listening to the traffic and wondering if Florence would be able to live up to the version of it I’d imagined over the years. In my mind, it was a golden city, probably because I’d come to it when I was young and inexperienced, before I knew anything about suffering. Ever since my student days, I had wanted to return, but I’d never had the cash until quite recently, so I’d contented myself with talking schoolboy Italian to delicatessen clerks and staring at reproductions of Renaissance art in oversize books I borrowed from the library. The books were always missing a key plate, since anybody who has been touched by Italy is always trying to steal a piece of it. All around California there were stolen madonnas tacked up on apartment walls. I had a madonna on my bedroom wall, and also a print that I’d bought on that first trip—a Giotto fresco that shows some anguished monks gathered at the deathbed of St. Francis. The monks kiss his fingers and toes, they weep and moan, they throw their arms toward the sky in an outraged way. Now the fresco was just across the street from me, in the Church of Santa Croce, but I wasn’t ready to look at it yet. I didn’t want to be measuring things, making comparisons, not so soon.

  Every morning, we
ate breakfast in the dining room of the pensione. A maid in a blue housecoat brought us coffee and hot milk, fresh rolls, butter, marmalade, and packets of cherry jam. The manager always waved to us. He sat at a table by a window, feeding spoonfuls of sugar into his espresso. This is the Florentine vice—not sex or drink, but sugar, a palliative sweetness, a tiny secret on the tongue. I would linger awhile to read the daily paper in hopes of finding a short-term rental, but none were ever advertised. The Italian government has enacted strict rent control laws, and vacancies are rare, except in summer, when people escape the heat by going to the seashore.

  A friend in the States had given me the name of a woman who knew about things—real estate things. When I phoned her, she told me that she did not in fact know of anything in the city proper, but that there was a villa to rent in Arcetri, a hilly suburb south of Florence, a few miles from the Arno River. We went to look at it the next evening. It belonged to an elderly Austrian couple, but they were out of the country. A Swiss hotelier took care of it for them, because it was on his property—about three acres that formed a compound behind walls and fences.

  The hotelier was generous, soft-spoken, with a polyglot’s sensitivity to nuance. He led us downhill from his own house through a field strewn with wildflowers. In the distance we could see the villa—a boxy, three-story structure with a fieldstone exterior. The stones were tan and light gray, set off by brown window shutters. Olive trees were planted around the villa, along with cypresses and fruit trees. The rooms inside were furnished with heavy pieces in oak and mahogany. There was a stale fragrance of inoccupancy, of dust and history. The hotelier told us we could have the place for five hundred dollars a month, half the usual price, since it was not yet the season for tourism, and, besides, the house needed some repairs.

  Almost as soon as we moved in, the repairs began to reveal themselves. The tiles on the terrace off the master bedroom were broken, and so was the furnace, and so were two of the four burners on the stove, and so was the oven in the stove. The wooden angel in the guest bedroom had two broken wings. The oil paintings in the living room, a cardinal and a madonna, had scratches and tears. The 1950s hi-fi console didn’t work, and the television set worked only intermittently. The fireplace flue was broken. Several volumes of the complete Thomas Mann, in German, had suffered water damage and seemed about to burst with immemorial prose. The five bathrooms were in fair shape, but three of the six escritoires were wobbly. The door that was supposed to open from the third-floor study onto another terrace was stuck, so we had to climb out a window if we wanted to take in the view.

  I must have climbed out the window about a dozen times while we were there, and my wife climbed out it once, on a warm, sunny, brilliantly clear afternoon just after we’d arrived. We sat together not on the terrace but on the orange-brown ceramic tiles of the roof. There were hundreds of bees buzzing around the lavender blossoms on our rosemary bushes. The olive trees were silvery green, almost iridescent. The cypresses among them had the stern, dignified presence of sentinels. All the wildflowers were open, a sea of color in waving grass. Beyond them, on the city plain, the buildings of Florence stretched out in shades of yellow ocher toward the mountains. If you can picture that moment, and how it pierced us, then you will understand how we were able to live quite happily in the villa all that spring without ever being troubled by its many imperfections, thinking what a fine bargain we’d got.

  Arcetri is a quiet district of narrow, winding streets and lush vegetation. Almost every lane and path discloses a panoramic view, and that’s part of the reason why Florentines think so highly of it. Many of them prefer it to Fiesole, the more famous hill to the north. Arcetri is closer to the centro, the city center, less rugged and agricultural. In Fiesole, you still get hints of wildness and mystery, of something inexpungibly weird, but Arcetri has been tamed. You can go for weeks without seeing a trace of animal life—no deer, no rabbits, no squirrels. The birds in the fields are common and domestic—blackbirds, sparrows, chickadees, pigeons. There are still vineyards and olive groves, but a few of them are rank and untended, marking a change from the old days in Tuscany, when nothing was ever wasted. Florentines ignore such faults and value Arcetri for its beauty and silence, for its fresh air. “Ah, aria fresca,” they say whenever the hill is mentioned, gesturing with their arms to show how the gentle breezes blow. On Sundays, after Mass and a big meal, they drive up to Arcetri from the smog-laden centro and stroll along Pian dei Giullari, the district’s main street, taking in the sunshine, the leaves, and breathing deeply.

  Although there are a handful of cottages and apartments in Arcetri, villas are the primary dwelling unit. The word “villa” simply means a house with a plot of land, but in Tuscany it also carries a connotation of “country place.” Florentines did not start building villas in the countryside until the fourteenth century. Before then, the hills were the province of robbers, murderers, and renegade soldiers from various warring communes. Wealthy citizens were safer in town, behind locked gates and the walls of the city. The Florentine police were very efficient. They imposed a curfew at sunset, and nocturnal crime was rare. Florence was the fifth most populous city in Europe at the time—larger than London, Athens, or Munich. According to the chronicle of Giovanni Villani for 1338, more than a hundred thousand people were jammed in among the damp stones and filthy running gutters. They formed an excellent culture for the breeding of infectious diseases, like the plague. The Black Death struck Florence in 1348 and killed off about forty thousand souls, but it was unique only in its numbers. Other plagues had preceded it, and others would follow, on the average of once every decade. Areas like Arcetri and Fiesole became increasingly attractive as an escape from contagion and social unrest.

  Early villas in Arcetri resembled fortresses. Their towers and battlements were functional, and so were the strategic hillside sites on which families liked to build. Gradually, the need for protection decreased, and architects had more freedom to experiment. They began to evolve the basic design that you still find throughout Tuscany—plaster walls almost three feet thick, a tile roof, high-beamed ceilings, and red-brick floors. Leon Battista Alberti, who wrote a classic treatise on architecture during the Quattrocento, offered a detailed analysis of villa construction, down to minutiae, including the wine cellar. It ought to face north, he said, so that the tramontane winds would ventilate it and keep the wine casks dry. Alberti also praised the educational properties of a villa, its capacity for moral suasion. He believed that it was a wonderful place to bring up children, because they worked and played in the sun and grew up stronger than children who were left to languish in the city shade. For adults, a villa was a sanctuary from the evils that were always brewing in Florence. “You can hide yourself to avoid seeing . . . the great quantity of wicked mankind,” Alberti said.

  The best seasons to be “in villa” were spring and fall, when the weather was neither too hot nor too cold. Villa life was a contemplative affair, involving study, meditation, learned conversation, and long healthy walks. Florentines at their pastoral leisure played chess and other board games. They strummed lutes and sang popular songs. They watched fish swimming in ponds and streams. They sat in gardens. They kicked around soccer balls. They read Pliny and Cicero, and composed epigrams, ballads, and elegiac verses. They talked to nightingales. Sometimes there was a party with food and wine and dancing, and perhaps a lecture by a renowned scholar, but most villa residents were satisfied with their isolation, since they did plenty of socializing in the city. A notable exception was Niccolò Machiavelli, who lived in exile at San Casciano. He thought the countryside was dumb, tedious, positively rural. He called his farmhouse L’Albergaccio, “The Wretched Hotel,” and said that he had nothing better to do than to indulge in games of cards and backgammon with a butcher, a miller, two bakers, and the innkeeper at his local inn. “Thus wrapped up with these fleas,” he wrote, “my brain is steeped with mold. . . .”

  We had trouble settling into the villa. Ten
rooms, five baths—all the space and grandeur intimidated us. Ordinary conversations of married life turned into shouting matches.

  “Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  “Where?”

  “Here!”

  Too many echoes, too many potential ghosts. I think it helped us most to work in the kitchen—a small kitchen, meant for a maid—washing the pots and pans and making a list of necessary provisions. Food tends to center a person, to serve as a point of reference. We had no car, so we rode a rickety old bus from Pian dei Giullari down to the city to buy what we needed. Again, there were the views, the hazy air, the muted golds and yellows. Our shopping was parceled out among several merchants—one for produce, one for fish, one for poultry, one for staples. Everything was expensive, except for the most basic items—bread, coffee—whose prices are controlled by the government.

  We bought bottles of extra virgin olive oil pressed not far from Piazzale Michelangelo. It was thick, dark green, redolent of olives. When it coated lettuce leaves or thin slices of fennel, it elevated them from the rank of mere vegetables into the realm of gastronomy. Tuscan cuisine is based on just such transfigurations of the patently simple. A new artichoke is nothing special if you steam it and eat it with lemon butter, but if you break off the raw leaves and dip them in pinzimonio—olive oil, coarse salt, freshly ground pepper—you discover subtleties you’ve never tasted before. The same is true of fava beans. In season, bowls of them are available in every trattoria. You grab a bunch of pods, split the seams with a nail, then dip the beans in sauce and pop them into your mouth, one by one. Each seed strikes the palate like a revelation.