by Phil Doran
She finished patting her face dry, heaved a loose-shouldered sigh, and began to pour out the details of how we had come to be enmeshed in this intractable web of Italianate perfidy. She began by reminding me how we had often discussed finding a little house here where we could one day retire. Apparently, I had forgotten all about it but she hadn’t, having spent months looking before she stumbled upon il piccolo rustico. And the first time she saw it, she knew it was the place for us to spend our Golden Years, a term I incidentally hate because I consider my Golden Years the ages sixteen though seventeen and a half when I spent most of my time making out with Carol Ann Stivic in the backseat of my father’s Buick.
At any rate, Nancy entered into negotiations with the owners, the Pingatore family, who owned all the property surrounding the house in question, giving them home field advantage. The family was a large multigenerational sprawl of relatives, in-laws, and assorted kith and kin scattered all over this area, but whose interests in this house were essentially represented by brother Mario, who did all the negotiating in his faux British accent, and sister Vesuvia, last seen hurling curses of eternal suffering and damnation upon all our deceased relatives and yet-unborn children.
The Pingatores were a troublesome brood. The fact that the house was for sale was the result of years of painful bickering over which one of them was actually going to own it. Unable to come up with a solution, Nonno (Grandpa) Pingatore had made a decision. The house would be sold and the entire family would split the profits.
Nancy caught wind of this, and even before the vendesi sign went up, she made an offer. Mario made a counteroffer that Nancy laughed at as being ridiculous for a house that had no road. After much bargaining and half a bottle of Chianti, all principals agreed that perhaps the price was fair, if the house had a road. A few days later a road magically appeared, and Nancy bought it. To anyone who asked, both parties insisted that it was the other side that had put it in.
The reason for such subterfuge was the impossibility of making any home improvements in a region where nearly every property of value had been classified either agricola or storico. These designations were zealously defended by the pro-Green party Comune, whose principles, by the way, I wholeheartedly support, unless, of course, they infringe upon my constitutional rights to air conditioning and one hundred and twenty-five channels of cable TV.
But this “he said/she said” defense promptly crumbled when Vesuvia Pingatore denounced us and caused the Comune de Cambione to rise up in wrathful indignation.
“So what happens next?” I said, sliding into bed with her.
She thought a moment, puffing out her cheeks in concentration. “Well, we can’t do any work on the house while the denuncia is pending. And if the Comune upholds it, we’ll have to pay a fine.”
“Okay.”
“And they could possibly throw me in jail.”
“Oh, that’s it! We’re getting the hell—”
“We can’t! If we leave, it’ll look like we’re guilty.”
“Which we . . . ?”
“Aren’t! I swear I did not put in that road.” Her face looked so innocent, it rivaled the Lorenzetti fresco of the Virgin in the vestibule of the local church.
We turned away from each other, lying as far apart as we could on that narrow bed. That night I dreamt of doors being axed open by a blood-crazed Vesuvia Pingatore, while Nancy had nightmares about the large Sicilian woman who wanted to become her jailhouse bone daddy.
The next morning we agreed that, at least for the moment, we needed to stay and demonstrate a show of innocence while we ascertained the depth of the merda we found ourselves in.
Nancy had finished her commission, which meant that the art dealer who had ordered it would no longer be paying for her hotel room. So on a bright but chilly morning we set off looking for a place to live. After visiting a couple of rental agents, we stopped at a sun-splashed osteria, where we took the nip out of the air with steaming bowls of papa al pomodoro , a thick-as-pudding soup of tomatoes, garlic, basil, and yesterday’s bread. The waiter drizzled a C of olive oil on the surface of my soup, and the combined aromas gave new meaning to the term comfort food. We washed down our papa with a lustrous Chianti from Montepulciano, and as good as the wine was, I think I almost preferred the little bottles of homemade apple juice they served us—juice that was almost thick enough to pass for apple sauce.
Lunch, which I have been known to inhale while pulling out of a Jack in the Box drive-through lane, lasted two and half hours. My soul was at peace and my body serene, harboring the perfect balance of espresso to perk me up and grappa to mellow me out. Needless to say, I had eaten everything put in front of me, eliminating any need for a doggie bag.
We dragged ourselves out of the restaurant, prompted by the yawning of the waiter, who clearly wanted his pausa, or afternoon nap. We followed the meanderings of a narrow creek until we came upon a woodsy section of houses painted in deep shades of melon and tangerine. This little stretch of houses was so unself-consciously charming, we felt as though we had wandered onto a movie set. We continued down the narrow cobbled street until we spotted a vacant stucco cottage painted the pastel pink of an Easter egg.
I was trying to peer inside when a wide, beefy guy with a red face and an overgrown crew cut appeared. This was Dino, who traveled everywhere with a mangy pack of dogs named Ninja, Luna, Torpedo, Cosimo, Scheherazade, Pipistrello, Puccini, and Tiberius. The dogs swarmed around him peeing, pooping, snarling, and fornicating, while Dino, oblivious, went about his business.
“You own this house?” I asked, hoping he spoke English.
“You want maybe to buy?” Dino said, finally grabbing Cosimo by the scruff of the neck to stop him from tearing off Puccini’s ear.
“Just renting.” I looked down to see Luna sniffing my leg.
“You English?”
“Americani,” Nancy said.
“I knew you were stranieri, but I figure you for English. They only rent.”
“We already bought.” Nancy pointed up the hill.
“Oh, you the lady with the road.” Dino stared at her like she was Ma Barker.
“Can we look inside?” Luna continued to sniff my leg, undisturbed that Torpedo had just mounted her.
“Yeah, yeah, no problem, is open.” Dino took some scraps of raw meat out of his pocket and tossed them on the ground. The dogs suddenly stopped their various activities and began fighting over it like, well, a pack of dogs.
“Only, I better call my cousin Spartaco to make sure he don’t need it no more.” Dino pulled out his cell phone. The phone slipped out of his hand and clattered to the ground, only to be snatched up by Ninja, who ran off with it in his mouth. Dino set off in pursuit, hollering at the errant hound, but by now the dog was across the yard, digging a hole to bury his newfound treasure.
As this classic struggle between man and beast played out, Nancy and I wandered inside. The living room was as dark as a catacomb, owing to the Italian practice of keeping all the shutters tightly closed even on the sunniest of days. We found a lamp and turned it on. The bulb was as dim as a votive candle, and the darkness of the room easily swallowed up its feeble glow. I opened one of the shutters, and a slab of white sunlight illuminated an arrangement of dark, funereal furniture and a candelabra the Addams family would have loved.
Our eyes skittered around the room, finally resting on walls completely covered with pinups of naked women, alternating with images of Jesus Christ.
“Cousin Spartaco seems to be a rather conflicted chap,” I commented as we split apart and proceeded to explore.
After a few moments Nancy called out, “What do you think?”
“Well, the kitchen’s a muck hole, the bedroom reeks from mildew, and the bathroom—”
“Did you look back here? There’s a pizza oven and a swimming pool!”
“We’ll take it,” I said to Dino as he walked in, wiping dog spittle off his cell phone.
“You will love this house!�
� Dino said with an expansive wave. “I was born here, you know. Mamma gave birth to me right here on this kitchen table.”
“How appetizing,” I said.
Dino suddenly made a face and hastened to the window, where he closed the shutter I had just opened. “Have to keep these always shut. Sunlight fades the furniture.”
“Well, we can’t have that,” I said, feeling for the couch.
Nancy entered, blowing into her cupped hands. “Kinda nippy in here, isn’t it?”
“Not to worry, I put in this brand-a-new heating system. German, works perfect!”
Dino pointed to a control panel on the wall. With its imposing bank of lighted buttons, it would have looked more at home on the space shuttle than in a humble pink cottage in Tuscany.
“How do we turn it on?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t know,” Dino said. “But my son can work it.”
“Let’s see if we can’t figure it out.” I cocked my head to the side to study the array of lighted buttons.
“Honey,” Nancy said, as if she had caught me running with surgical scissors.
“Gimme a minute here.” I started pushing a series of buttons, at first methodically, and then at random. Lights on the control panel blinked and there was a faint electronic hum, but otherwise nothing happened. In fact, no combination of buttons, dials, or gauges, no matter how I pushed, twisted, or turned them, did anything even remotely connected with the manufacture or delivery of heat. But feeling I was on the right track, I kept pushing buttons now two and three at a time, until we heard a faint fizzle from down the basement and the one lamp that was burning went out.
“Ooops.”
“Damn circuit breaker,” Dino muttered as he steamed toward the door to the cellar. “Of course, that’s Italian.”
“How soon can your son get over here?” Nancy asked.
“Oooofff!” Dino replied, as he barked his shin on a coffin-shaped coffee table.
“We’d like to bring our stuff over this afternoon,” I said, “if we can agree on a price.”
“I can’t get ahold of Rudolfo till maybe Friday,” Dino said, rubbing his shin.
“Friday?” Nancy said through chattering teeth.
“He’s up at his Buddhist retreat all week.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Throw in a cord of firewood and a couple of miner’s helmets and we’ll move right in.”
I was trying to lighten the moment, but Dino was not amused. He proceeded to share his bitter disappointment over a son who had turned away from the One True Church to become a Buddhist. The fact that Rudolfo was thirty-four years old, lived at home, and had no job or education didn’t seem to bother him. But this Buddhist thing . . .
Dino broke down and wept, sobbing through his nose with big theatrical gasps like a clown in a Verdi opera. I was constantly unnerved by the penchant Italian men have for spontaneously bursting into tears. The last time I remember crying I was nine years old and Bud Thomas had just split my lip for calling his sister a skank. I didn’t even know what a skank was. It was something I had heard on Mod Squad.
“Look, Dino,” Nancy said, as she rubbed his heaving shoulders, “we need to check out of our hotel. How much do you want?”
“Un milione tre,” Dino said with sudden dry-eyed clarity, all thoughts of errant Buddhist sons forgotten.
I winced at the word million, but Nancy explained that many Italians still give you a price in lira. She then countered, saying that it was a little steep for a house that was cold and dark enough to grow mushrooms. We went back and forth, and after half a bottle of Chianti, we agreed on a price.
What seemed to cap the deal was Dino’s unexpected offer to pay for all the phone charges. And considering how much long distance and Internet we used, that could be considerable. We shook hands, and I counted out cash in the darkness. Dino handed us the keys and left, banging into the table he was born on with a painful yet cheery “Oooofff.”
But as were gloating over the deal, we discovered that the house had no phone, nor any outlets to plug one in.
“It’ll be okay.” Nancy flashed her best Jiminy Cricket smile. “We’ll buy an Italian cell phone and use the Internet café in the piazza.”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine,” I said, casting a wary eye at Scheherazade, who had suddenly appeared in our doorway with a dead bird in his mouth.
4
Castagne
Whatever visions of sunny Italy you harbor, I humbly ask you to put them aside as I testify that in the days that followed, Nancy and I endured a bone-penetrating cold so relentless that no amount of wool socks, thermal blankets, or space heaters could make a dent in it.
The house we rented from Dino was essentially an uninsulated stone box sitting on a concrete slab. Without central heating, the interior was a full fifteen degrees colder than it was outside. And even though it was the middle of May, it was plenty cold outside. I was uncomfortable but surviving, thanks to the ancestral layer of body fat gifted to me by my midwestern forebears. But Nancy was suffering. Growing up in southern California, her blood had turned to orange juice, and she was physically incapable of surviving cold weather unless she was on a ski trip.
The nights were the worst. I awoke once at three in the morning with leg cramps from knotting myself into a ball. I looked over to Nancy, who was lying on her back. She had completely covered herself in a dense layer of blankets. The only opening was a hole for her mouth, where puffs of vaporized breath were coming out making it look like I was sharing my bed with a steam engine.
I was hoping that she would grow disenchanted, and give up, and we could go back to L.A., sit in our hot tub, and defrost. So I rarely missed an opportunity to point out the difficulties of living in Italy, the insoluble problems with the Pingatores, and, of course, Dino’s having huckstered us into renting this igloo. The last I was careful to frame around my concern for her comfort, which would have scored me enough points to merit some serious lovemaking if it had only been warm enough to take off our clothes.
The morning after my leg cramps, Nancy and I were trying to eat breakfast with our mittens on when we heard two of Dino’s dogs, Pipistrello and Tiberius, scratching at our door.
Nancy peered out the window. “Dino’s bringing us firewood.”
“Oh, good, we’re rescued.”
“Be nice,” Nancy hissed at me as she scurried around the room, closing all the shutters we had opened. “And don’t say anything about the cold.”
“Buon giorno, signore, signora,” Dino called out. “Permesso.”
“Salve, Dino.” Nancy opened the door to Dino holding an armful of logs. “Here, let me help you with that.”
“No, no, I got it.” Dino entered, followed by Scheherazade gifting us with another dead bird.
“Oh, Dino, how kind of you to bring us wood,” I said with such Old World graciousness, Nancy glared at me for being an asshole.
“Is no problem.” Dino tossed a couple of logs into the fireplace, which startled the dogs into a frenzy of barking. “I come by yesterday but you no home.”
“If we had a phone, you could have called first,” I shouted over the barking.
“Stai zitta!” Dino screamed at his dogs, urging them to shut up. “I molto sorry for the phone. I talk to Telecom Italia, che idioti! They promise they install in two days but then they go on strike.”
“And how are we able to tell when they’re on strike?” I asked as I picked up the dead bird Scheherazade had brought us and tossed it out the door.
“The thing is,” Nancy said in her gentlest tone, “my husband’s concerned that I’m not very comfortable in the cold, and—”
“Cold? È maggio. Primavera. Even in winter nobody uses heat.”
“Look, Nancy’s prone to bronchitis,” I said, “and this kind of damp cold—”
“Ai, you should have seen how it was during the war. I was just a baby. Nine months old. We hid up in the hills with the partisans when the Germans attack! My grandmother wrap
me in leaves because we had no blankets and she carry me down the mountain with the Germans shooting at us from one side and the Americani dropping bombs on us from above!”
“My goodness,” Nancy said, cupping her hands over the coffeepot for warmth.
“And no food!” Dino squatted in front of the fireplace and struck a match to the kindling. “Just how you say . . . castagne?”
“Chestnuts,” Nancy said.
“Yes, chest-a-nuts. And we had to fight the squirrels for them!”
“We can’t go on like this,” I blurted. “That fireplace is totally inadequate and unless we get some real heat—”
“That’s what I’m here to tell you. Rudolfo come home tomorrow and he get your heater working.”
“Tomorrow?” I was, of course, skeptical.
“Sì, I invite you over to our house for dinner,” Dino said, shooing Cosimo away before the dog could pee on the firewood. “I make a party for my son and you come and meet the whole family.”
“Grazie, Dino,” Nancy said.
“Yes, thanks for the invitation,” I said, “but I don’t see why you can’t—”
“O Dio, mia nonna!” Dino suddenly remembered that he needed to put flowers on the grave of the grandmother who had carried him down the mountain wrapped in leaves. I fired off a look at Nancy that strongly suggested she say something either in English or Italian before he got out the door.
“Can we bring anything?” she called out as Dino departed in a cloud of dog dust.
“Can we bring anything?” I said, mocking her. “You’re such a wimp. If he pulled this in America, we’d throw him in jail for being a slumlord.”
“We’re not in America,” she said. “And you don’t even try to understand how things work around here!”
“Oh, I’d love to understand how things work around here. But as hard as I try, I still can’t figure out why every store and office in this country closes up for a four-hour lunch break in the middle of the afternoon. Why our ingegnere doesn’t have an answering machine. Why two Italians’ll block traffic by sitting in their cars in the middle of the road having a conversation. Why their houses have three different-sized electrical sockets and yet whenever I go to plug something in, it doesn’t fit in any of them. Why every restaurant but McDonald’s can’t be open for dinner before eight o’clock at night. Why it’s impossible to make an appointment with anybody, and when you finally get one, they’re always late. And finally, how come when you question an Italian about any of these things they look at you like you’re crazy?”
