by Phil Doran
But she knew. She opened her arms and hugged me in a way that always calms me when I’m going through life like my hair’s on fire. We held each other for a long time, prompting ill-tempered shouts from the taxi driver waiting for us to leave. Nancy broke off our embrace to holler back at him. I feared that the whole thing would spiral into an opera buffa as can only be performed by the Italians. Or at least one Italian and one Italian-speaking girl from Santa Monica.
But as we were getting into the car, I noticed that the taxi driver had stopped yelling and was now blowing kisses at Nancy and muttering, “Che bella,” his face contorted in pain as if her beauty had stung his eyes like smoke.
“No wonder you like it here,” I said as she started the car.
“I like it here because they know how to treat an artist.” She showed me a check.
“Oh, you finished. How’d it come out?”
“Vulgar bordering on the pornographic,” she said.
“I’m sure it’s beautiful.”
“It would have been if he had let me sculpt her the way I wanted. But while I’m carving, he’s screaming, ‘Make the tits bigger, make her waist smaller.’ I finally said to him, ‘Hey, you don’t want a statue, you want a copy of Penthouse.’ ”
We pulled out of the airport, and Nancy used her horn and her lungs to bully us through an onslaught of traffic that seemed to be moving in absolutely no relationship to traffic signals or stop signs.
“Is this the way to the hotel?”
“We’re all meeting up at the house first.” Nancy whipped onto the Autostrada, executing a suicide squeeze into a lane of cars moving at a Grand Prix clip.
“Who’s we all?” I said. Actually, I had to yell it over the sonic boom of the red Ferrari that roared past us, reminding me that I was now in Italy, where everybody has to drive at twice the speed of sound so they can get to a café and sit for three hours.
“We’re meeting with Vincenzo, the ingegnere, Maurizio, the geologo, and Umberto, our muratore . . . that’s stonemason to you, gringo.”
I clucked, calculating the cost of such an entourage.
“Actually, it’s not going to be that bad. I paid most of their fees when the dollar was strong against the euro.”
“And what happens now that the dollar’s weak?”
“Boh,” she said, which isn’t exactly a word but more of a sound a Tuscan makes when he wants to say, “Who the hell knows? Stop bothering me!”
Cutting off an Alfa full of fat people who responded with rude hand gestures, we exited the Autostrada and merged onto a narrow road choked with Fiats and Lancias creeping behind sputtering tractors and overloaded produce trucks. Occasionally an impatient driver drifted over the nonexistent yellow line to pass, only to be pushed back into his place, muttering and cursing, by the unbroken line of oncoming vehicles. Only the two-wheelers made progress, from the souped-up motorcycle with its space-suited driver to the Vespa carrying two middle-aged women in housecoats and aprons, chatting and laughing.
We inched past groves of fruit trees and sprouting fields of new spring wheat, eventually reaching a sign that welcomed us to the village of Cambione in Collina. Even though I’d been to this country before, here’s how I had pictured an Italian village: a desolate piazza, sun-baked to a ghostly white and dominated by a crumbling but implacable cathedral. Mandolin music played in the background as unemployed men in dark suits smoked unfiltered cigarettes while their wives scrubbed laundry in the fountain with a soap stick.
But my first approach into Cambione changed all that, as farmland surrendered to a loose alignment of houses, gas stations, goat pens, factories, and produce markets jammed next to each other with absolutely no sense of congruity. There seemed to be no such thing as a purely residential street, or a commercial one for that matter. When you did find a stretch of houses, each was a different height and seemingly angled in its own peculiar direction, as centuries-old palazzi sat next door to squat, shoe-box-shaped dwellings that looked as though they had just been built for the Festival di Cement.
There was, indeed, a main piazza with a church, a faded war memorial, and a fountain. But far from being desolate, it reverberated with the chaos of people shouting, whistling, swearing, and singing. Clumps of teenagers joked and jostled each other as mothers called out to their children from second-story windows. Groups of men in shirtsleeves, all talking at once, debated the key issues of the day at such volume that the veins in their necks stuck out.
We circled the piazza so Nancy could point out the fish market where we would buy the freshest branzino and the kiosk where she had already talked to the woman about saving me the Herald Tribune each day. I thanked her, then winced as she whipped down a side street that, because there was no sidewalk, was essentially a blind corner.
Darting through a warren of one-way backstreets and alleys so narrow that I found myself gasping, we roared past an abandoned stone quarry and turned onto a freshly paved asphalt road that led us uphill.
“Hey, I thought you said there was no road.”
“Shhh,” she cackled.
“Lucy, what have you done?” I said in an exasperated Cuban accent.
“I told you there’s always a way.” Nancy slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting an ancient Italian woman dressed in black down to her knuckles except for the large white handkerchief on her head.
“That’s our neighbor, Annamaria,” Nancy said. “She told me all about the history of our house.” Then, by way of introducing me, Nancy called out, “Signora, voglio presentare il mio marito.”
The old woman poked a leathery face into my window.
“Buon giorno, signora. Piacere,” I said, using up ten percent of my Italian vocabulary.
“She told me that no one’s lived in there for years,” Nancy said. “The farmers used it to store equipment and keep their goats inside during the winter. But get this, during the war people called it the Bunker because the Germans set up a machine gun right in our kitchen!”
“Hmm.” I nodded, wondering how many Cambionians one could pick off from up here.
“She was just a little girl then, but she remembers,” Nancy said.
Annamaria’s face contorted into a dark scowl and she flicked her thumbnail against her front tooth, a gesture, no doubt, she used with regularity on every passing busload of German tourists.
We got out of the car and walked the old lady to where her goat was grazing in some tall weeds. Between expressions of “Arrivederla” and “Troppo gentile” she told us that when we were ready to move in, she’d come over with bread and salt. Then, wetting the side of her thumb and making a cross on her forehead, she also promised to bring us the other necessity of life, a statue of Maria Santissima.
Walking uphill, we began to hear an overture for cement mixer and earthmover accompanying a powerful baritone oratorio. The voice belonged to Umberto, the muratore, a stout, ruggedly built man, shirtless in shorts, construction boots, and a battered straw cowboy hat—which made him look like a slightly paunchy member of The Village People.
I soon learned that Umberto Baccarelli had dedicated his life to single-handedly disproving the cliché that the average Italian laborer has the work ethic of a third-generation welfare recipient. He whirled around the construction site like a dervish on amphetamines, screaming at anybody who dared slacken his breakneck pace. As a result, the rebuilding of our retaining walls was being done with such fanatical urgency that if the Italians had behaved this way during World War II, Mussolini would have been sitting in the White House.
Umberto stopped flagellating his crew to explain in fractured English that Vincenzo, the engineer, was not coming because, frankly, he wasn’t very good in the mornings, and that Maurizio, the geologist, had just not shown up, lacking even the decency to come up with a shoddy excuse like Vincenzo’s. He took a last drag off his cigarette, tossed it over his shoulder, and Hacky Sack-kicked the butt into a pile of gravel. Then while Umberto and Nancy launched into a lengthy conversat
ion about some aspect of construction that I wouldn’t have been able to follow even if it were in English, I wandered off to take a close-up look at my new house.
It was a small, two-story affair that had fallen into such disrepair, it was closer to a ruin than a dwelling. Wood planks lay rotting in the uncut grass, and there was so much debris scattered around, it looked as if the remains of a shipwreck had washed ashore. I was shaking my head at this folly, when I found myself walking under a canopy made of cut branches that abutted the side of the house. Glancing up at the tangle of vines snaking around the trellis, I spotted a glorious cluster of cobalt-blue grapes as perfect as wax fruit and succulent enough to adorn the brow of Bacchus. I picked one and popped it in my mouth. The sweetness was so pure it staggered me. For a long time afterward I could taste the sun on my tongue.
Oh, no. I had only been here a few hours, and Tuscany was already beginning to work its magic. Its insidious charm and inexhaustible natural beauty were seducing me, and if I wasn’t careful, I was going to find myself feeling happy for absolutely no reason.
I shook aside such subversive thoughts and pushed open the splintery wooden door. I entered and was immediately struck by the coolness and quiet inside the half-meter-thick walls. The house was small, built to the measure of a man. Essentially just a kitchen on the ground floor connected by a rickety ladder to a bedroom above.
As I batted away the cobwebs, my eyes were drawn to the hearth, which was nothing more than a knee-high platform for firewood. Over this, somebody had fashioned a mortared hood so misaligned, it had allowed a black finger of soot to miss the flue and meander up the wall, where it found refuge in the methodical blackening of the center beam. I studied the thick accretion of inky residue and pondered the dramas that had played out inside these four walls.
The births, the deaths, the quarrels, the passions. And that was just the goats.
As for the human chronicle, I could not even fathom the complexities and the vagaries of a dozen generations playing out their tragedies and comedies upon this tiny stage. Of people living continuously inside a structure built when America was a colony. A house that had stood in silent witness to every famine, flood, and forest fire to be hurled at it over the past three hundred years, its very survival a living testament to the sturdiness of its construction and the indestructibility of its macigno stone walls, a quartz-bearing limestone hard enough that craftsmen in the Middle Ages had used it for grindstones.
The door swung open and Nancy entered.
“I’m so pissed,” she said, too angry to stop walking even though she was halfway inside the room. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“The Germans are back with their machine gun?”
“Umberto’s quitting.”
“Didn’t he just start?”
“He got offered another job.”
“And it didn’t occur to him to finish ours first?”
“He got offered another job so he couldn’t finish ours.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“Who? The Pingatores, that’s who.”
“Wait, aren’t those the people you bought this from?”
“Bastardi!”
“I’m sorry to be making a wrinkle in the fabric of your alternate universe, but I’m not following this.”
“Don’t you get it? They want their house back.”
“Why did they sell it to us in the first place?”
“Because nobody else would buy it, because it didn’t have a road.”
“Speaking of that, where did that road—?”
The door flew open with a bang, and a wild-looking woman with flyaway hair and the deranged look of a spree killer stood in our doorway.
“Puttana!!” she screamed, her eyes glaring a malocchio so fierce, it would calcify flesh. Nancy rose to protest, which only prompted the old woman to hurl curses and threats at us, building to a shriek of “Porca miseria!” and all punctuated with the slamming of the door.
“What was that?
“Vesuvia Pingatore.”
“Who?”
“Mario Pingatore’s sister. She seems to think that whoever put in that road tore down some of her trees and generally desecrated the sacred grounds of her childhood.”
“Great, now we have a neighbor who hates us.”
“Actually, it’s a little worse than that. See, the road was put in abusivo, which means illegally, which is done all the time and is perfectly fine as long as nobody kicks up a fuss.”
“Well, that looked like some big-time fuss-kicking to me.”
“Yeah, she just went to the Comune de Cambione and issued a denuncia against us.”
“That sounds serious. Are we in trouble?”
“Boh.”
3
Stranieri in Paradise
It was getting dark, and since our new house had no heat, electricity, or bathroom facilities other than an oleander bush, we drove down the hill and parked in Cambione’s piazza maggiore. The restaurants had not yet opened for dinner, but we were just in time for the passeggiata. A common custom in most Mediterranean societies, it’s the time of day when the citizens of the town parade up and down the main walking street. Young people are looking for romance, the middle-aged are trading gossip, and the elderly are just making sure they’re all still alive for another day.
In the midst of such cordiality, I felt Nancy’s shoulders tighten under my arm. The cause of her tension was the approach of Mario Pingatore. He was a small man with the underslung jaw of a Hapsburg, which he thrust forward in the manner of one more at home in the sixteenth century than in the twenty-first. He was dressed in military-cut hunting tweeds with tall riding boots. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back as he sucked on a briar pipe that curled down his chin.
“What the hell is your sister doing?” Nancy said, without so much as a greeting.
“Bit of a sticky wicket, eh, what?” Mario prided himself on his English, which he seemed to have learned from watching British movies from the 1930s.
“Can’t you talk to her?” Nancy cried.
“Afraid the old girl’s got her mind made up,” Pingatore harrumphed as he banged the bowl of his pipe on his boot heel. “What can I say, my dear, but stiff upper lip.”
Every time he spoke I expected Ronald Colman to walk in wearing an ascot.
“I had a deal with you,” Nancy pleaded.
“But you didn’t have one with her, and she’s molto flummoxed over this cock-up.”
Nancy was so molto flummoxed over this cock-up, words failed.
“By Jove, look at the time.” Mario glanced at his pocket watch. “Ta.”
He sauntered off with a backhanded wave as Nancy turned her wrath on me.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Cheerio, old swot, which way to the fox hunt?’ ”
The piazza was now empty. As if on signal everyone had retreated behind their massive, carved doors for elaborate multicoursed dinners. Having no massive carved doors to retreat behind, we supped at a small family-run trattoria on the square, where we ordered a traditional Tuscan dish, pici a braciole . This is a hand-rolled pasta about the thickness of a shoestring potato, coated in olive oil and seasoned bread crumbs. When Nancy described it to me, it sounded dry and tasteless, but this simple peasant dish had a creamy, nutty texture that far transcended its humble ingredients.
My serving was enormous and, try as I might, I just couldn’t finish. I signaled our waitress for a container, but she was preoccupied trying to balance several steaming bowls of pasta on her arm as her five-year-old son clutched her knees and urgently proclaimed, “Mamma, ho bisogno di un bacio!” which Nancy translated to mean, “Mama, I need a kiss!”
“I don’t understand why they don’t have doggie bags,” I said as I followed Nancy into our hotel room.
“Italians don’t believe in leftovers.” She sat on the bed and massaged her toes through her open sandals. “Food s
hould be fresh.”
I wheeled my suitcase across a wooden floor that creaked like the deck of an old sailing ship. “So, what? Their dogs just starve to death?”
“Does it look like anybody’s starving to death around here?”
I opened a hand-carved wardrobe to the whiff of moth-balls and the jangling of wire coat hangers. I slid Nancy’s clothes aside to make room for mine.
“I’m just saying I don’t know why anybody would want to live in a country that doesn’t have doggie bags.”
“That’s right, I studied the entire globe to find the only place on earth where my husband could have an anxiety attack because for once in his life he left some food on his plate.”
I winced at the mention of anxiety attacks. Even though she’d said it as a joke, I flashed on my last meeting with a twenty-six-year-old development executive at the WB network. I was right in the middle of my pitch, when the glands in the side of my neck grew warm and my left eye started to twitch.
I opened my suitcase and started to unpack. Outside a treeful of jays screamed at the noisy children playing stoop tag in the piazza even though it was nearly midnight.
“Lest you think I’m a complete philistine,” I said, “I really do like Italy.”
“But you don’t want to live here.” She pulled her dress off over her head and slipped into a T-shirt.
“It’s just that it’s so rural,” I said, following her into the bathroom. “And you know how nature makes me nervous.”
She stood at the sink washing her face, spitting water out with each word. “I think if you just gave it a chance . . .”
“Nancy, it’s a mess. The house is a mess, the deal’s a mess. I don’t understand how you got us into this.”
“Well . . . it’s kind of the way things are done around here,” she said with a helpless little shrug.
“Oh, come on. Anyplace else on earth, from a Turkish bazaar to a Filipino fish market, you see something you want, you agree on a price, end of story. What is it about Italy that we have to play all these games?”
