When we get home, we find them waiting, six bottles of Brunello lined up on the wall as a welcome home for us, and right in the middle of the front yard, two toilets, two sinks, a tub, a shower basin, and a four-foot stack of boxes. The scarred tub from il brutto has been brought outside and someone has put a large box turtle inside it. He climbs the slope then slides down again, frantic claws dragging the porcelain. I know just how he feels. From around the corner in the Lime Tree Bower, we hear the unmistakable sound of shovels striking rock and the voices of Franco and Emilio starting their litany of Madonna curses. It looks as if they're digging a grave for a behemoth. They're up to their waists. Zeno's trench has miles to go. Ed places the turtle in the strawberry patch, Sheila and I shell peas, Rob puts on a Righteous Brothers CD and turns up the volume of “Unchained Melody.” The men fire up their portable gas to heat the pasta they've brought for lunch. Zeno turns the hose on his filthy legs. I'm completely happy. We're sitting on the stone wall in the sun. Our neighbor Placido calls up from the road, “Edward, Frances, I have a new name for your house. You should change to Villa delle Farfalle [House of the Butterflies] because it is a miracle there are so many all over the lavender. They are like confetti—there's a big party going on every day.” Wasps have taken up residence in the old terra-cotta urn next to me. It's missing a handle, cemented in ages past to the wall so the wind does not blow it over. The busy wasps exit from a small opening like helicopters angling off a pad. Rob pops the cork of a Brunello. I hear the urn humming. Rob pours, telling us about circling Rome twice on the ring road. Ed the poet speaks truly in my ear: Don't you love it—this urn is like our house. He cups my hand around the side and I feel the buzz.
Cynthia, an English friend who has lived in Tuscany for forty years, has invited us for dinner the night Sheila and Rob, our last house guests of the summer, have departed. Right now, I'm facing the arrival of my former colleague at the hotel next week. Our house is so full of construction dust today that we found it between our toes and on our eyelids. No sign of the tile's arrival, but otherwise the project is going without a hitch.
We find other stranieri, all English friends, at the table. When Ed mentions that we haven't had anyone over because we've had nonstop people at the house, the conversation erupts. “Guests come in two sizes: excellent and terrible. Most are the latter. Do you know that expression about house guests, like fish, are good for three days? It exists in every language, the remote Pacific islands, Siberia, everywhere.” Max always has guests.
Cynthia happens to be serving a large fish decorated all over with sliced olives arranged like scales. “Do you know my stepbrother arrived with two children with colds—and he had car trouble. He hoisted his dirty suitcase onto the white bedspread and began tossing their underwear into a pile. Mind you, I haven't even seen him in fifteen years. He stayed ten days—never brought home a flower, a bottle of wine, or a hunk of cheese, and never even wrote a thank-you. He left a hundred thousand lire note [about sixty dollars] inside the fridge with a note saying ‘for food.' Is that not the limit? No one can top that.” Her eyes flash. “And I was afraid I'd misjudged the poor boy all those years.” She lops off the fish's head and pushes it aside.
Her friend Quinton, a mystery writer, pours the wine. “I never have guests. Too disrupting.”
“Isn't it just?” Peter agrees. “Some friends were arriving by train and I popped down to meet the 1:05 from Florence. They didn't get off. I waited until the 2:14. I gave up. Finally, around 4, quite hot and miffed, they called from the station.”
“One guest came bearing all the tiny jam jars, plastic shower caps, and shoeshine cloths from hotels along her way and presented them to me as a gift. Some of the jam jars had been opened and had a touch of butter stuck to the lid,” I tell them.
“That's rather sweet,” Cynthia says.
“Rubbish,” Quinton laughs. “These people never would behave this way at home.”
“She kept the nice soaps for herself,” I add.
“Something cuts loose when people travel to a foreign country,” Ed says. “The words, ‘We're going to be in Italy . . . ,' release them. It's as if we're bonded by being miraculously in this alien place at the same time.”
Quinton agrees. “We man the campfire and they're the wanderers in the lonely outback who arrive safely.”
“The concept that we have work in progress doesn't stick. If you are in Italy, you are on vacation. Period.” Peter glances at his watch. “Actually, an old friend is arriving tomorrow.”
Our neighbor Placido comes over to ask if we want town water. We could split the cost of bringing a connection from Torreone. His water supply by midsummer is low and he has just put in a new lawn he doesn't want to lose. We'd investigated bringing town water here when we bought the house and found it to be outrageously expensive. Anselmo had a new well dug for us, a 300-foot-deep well he guarantees never will go dry. But Placido has a friend; the cost we were quoted is now quartered. It seems a neighborly thing to do, and if there's a severe drought, we'd be protected. Why not? We can just have the line brought in, cap it, and leave it until we need it. Fortuitous that we have a trench in progress.
The next thing we know, we are in the middle of an immense project adjacent to our other immense project. A gargantuan yellow backhoe digs a ditch from Torreone, a kilometer away, all the way to our house. All day it scrapes and dumps dirt into the road. Shirtless men lay tubing and shout. Heat is on us like the hot breath of a dog who has run all the way home. The men here are hauling rubble, digging, chiseling into rock. We flash on the layers they jimmied out from the living room floor two years ago; but here they're hitting the solid rock of the mountain. The hole for the new tank could accommodate a Fiat 500. They loop the tank with ropes and the four men edge the tank near the hole, then lower it in a controlled fall. After that, the tubes connect quickly. The men all join into Zeno's trench digging. They're at the melting point. Septic and water pipes are laid running out from the house. The electricians connect tubes for wires, in case we ever want electricity farther out. Other tubes are installed for a gas line so we can move the enormous green tank out of the limonaia and reclaim space for the lemons.
On the third day of digging along the road, the backhoe reaches us, claws out a path up the hill, and the water line, too, is laid in the trench. We just stand and watch with awe. Did we ever imagine we'd dig a half-mile ditch?
This is Anselmo's first day back. He's pale under his red beret and gingerly climbs the steps to the garden terraces. He surveys the havoc we've caused in his garden. We have not directed the sprawling of the melon vines; they're tangled. We have not removed the proper lateral branches of the tomatoes. Obviously, the carrots have not been watered enough because the ground is hard as bone, stunting their growth. I'm the good student, nodding and asking questions. We've come to see that he's always right. He pokes at the weeds around the artichoke plants, clips the blue thistles of those that went to seed. He agrees with Primo—we're foolish to install another entire septic system, and of course the drainage should have been elsewhere.
Nine men are working here. Our tutor, Amalia, comes out for our Italian lesson because we can't get away to go into Cortona. We're gratified when she leans over the upstairs terrace and listens to the workers talking. “I don't know how you do this. I can't understand half of what they're saying. Do you realize that you've got four dialects going on down there.” Meanwhile, plaster is drying in the little bath. Recessed lighting and the tub are in place. Primo's tiler arrives tomorrow.
In July, the garden looks glorious. Everything we planted becomes its ideal self. Vita Sackville-West spoke of her garden in “full foison.” This one, too, is abundant, outpouring. Only the dahlias languish. Powdery mildew spots the leaves and the flowers rot before they open. Everything else has spread or sprung and blooms outrageously. From the upstairs windows, I look out and think of Humphrey Repton, who might approve of this Italian marriage to a basic English scheme. Even the s
pilling pots of geraniums on all the walls have a Humphrey touch. In the corner of each one I planted a morning glory seed. The vines fall down the wall, twine around the outdoor lights or crawl along the stones. They open their pure pink faces to the morning sun. I have found an old stone statue of a woman holding a sheaf of wheat. She stands among hydrangea pots, a nod to the Italian tradition of garden ornaments. Not only has Egisto, master fabbro at Ossaia, repaired the house's original gate, he is making iron arches for a pergola of grape vines at the entrance to the Lake Walk. We're still looking for our water inspiration—a small pond, a fountain? At an antique warehouse in Umbria, I sighted a rusted, curvy iron bench shoved up against a fence with some equally rusted iron gates and beds. When we asked the price, the store owner was clearly dumbfounded; he never expected to sell that wreck. We wove back through the mountains with the bench tied to the top of the car. With my arm outside the window, I held on to a leg: at least if it started to slip, we could stop.
Anselmo's lemon pots in the garden are purely Italian. He has shaped them to bamboo supporting cages. “Pick them, pick them,” he urges. I wait, loving the look of the yellow fruit dangling among the leaves. After their initial spurts, the two Mermaids calmed down and sent out a few creamy yellow flat roses. Each Sally Holmes rose we planted among the lavender, cheerleader that she is, gives us white pompom armfuls constantly. They've choked out the decadent lilac-colored rose, a weak sister anyway. Ed comes across a photo of the wild garden taken when we bought the house, and another from a couple of summers later, when it was nothing but a blank stretch of dirt bordered by the boxwood hedge. If I could have had a glimpse then of what we could do, my nights of wide-eyed anxiety would have been fewer. I love the garden transformation as much as the restoration of the house. This green and blooming swath is where the house combines sweetly with nature. Beyond it, the cultivation of olives, grapes, cypresses, and lavender creates a lighter link with nature, before the natural scrub and broom, the wild asparagus and roses. I love the space for these levels of connection, these cruxes between home and the wider world. “Every olive has its own story,” Anselmo tells us.
“The roses do, too. They're speaking to me all the time,” I joke.
But he does not care about the roses. “Mah,” he replies and turns back to the orto.
The five-inch-square stones look as though they always belonged to il brutto. Gone is the floor of black and dun concrete squares. The sink was set into the stone wall. The hollow above it testified to the height of the first owner. Even I, at 5'4" had to stoop a little to see in the mirror. Primo raised and arched the hollow, and I found an old foxed mirror that perfectly fit the space. Just that one change made the cramped sense of cat-inside-a-dollhouse disappear. Antonio arrives with his partner, Flavia. Making frames is the bread and butter of their shop but they love most the decorative finishes and designs. They have made a mock-up of the blue Etruscan wave which will run around the wall. We sit outside drinking tea and experimenting with paints for the exact milky blue, the exact rosy color for the border. Flavia should be painted, with her expressive brown eyes and almond skin. She ties her long hair up and covers it with a scarf, looking more and more like the Madonna about to mount a donkey for the long journey. Still, a strand escapes and trails through the blue paint. Antonio looks nothing like a Joseph. Too full of fun and irony. After a heated discussion about proportion, they make a plastic stencil for the wave. The painting goes quickly. They draw the border lines in pencil then paint them freehand. We've kept the original wooden window with a wide sill where thrushes hatched in June. We've kept the hip-bath–sized tub, although the original had to be replaced. “Who would buy one of those?” Paolo asked dismissively, when we asked if they still were made. “I would,” I answered. “It seems to belong in the house.”
Antonio comes to get me every few minutes. “Do you like it? Do you completely like it?” He lights a cigarette and Flavia and I both fan smoke from our faces with excessive gestures, which prompts him to rub it out in a paint can.
“Yes, will you paint something in every room in the house?”
Going upstairs, I open the door just to look. “Dear Ashley,” I write. “Il brutto has become il carino, the darling. The tiniest bathroom possible but equipped with mimosa bath salts, the thickest American towels, tuberose soap, and a deserted bird nest on the windowsill. When will you come bathe here?” She is so slender she can slip into the basin half of the tiny tub.
While Antonio is here, I sketch a shelf I would like in the kitchen, one running the width of the room above the brick ledge, where I prop all the serving platters I've collected. A second row, then I can just grab one for whatever I'm about to serve. He takes a measurement; we walk around the house until I identify the exact stain color I'd like. “Ecco fatto,” he says, it's done.
What's not done, as July comes to a close, is the butterfly bath. The tile is on its way but will not arrive until after Primo's men are on August holiday. Since we must leave at the end of August, we store the fixtures in the limonaia and make room for the boxes of tiles. “Pazienza, signora,” Primo says, patience. “Next year, another new set of problems.” Zeno covers the trench. Tools are cleaned and loaded into the Ape. My colleague does not arrive, explaining he'll come back when he can stay with us. Anselmo hangs braids of onions and garlic in the cantina. Antonio installs the beautiful shelf—some things happen like magic. I lower my tired frame into the new tub, baptizing myself in the cold water that will run out through tubes and rocks and sand, harmlessly, harmlessly, onto the land.
Lost in Translation
AT AN EARLY STAGE IN THE HUMAN EMBRYO, traces of gill slits appear near the throat, faint reminders that once we were finny and swam freely through the streams and seas. Often I feel in myself another vestigial trait—being locked in one language. Multilingual friends assure me that a new personality emerges when one acquires a new language. This is something to look forward to. I would like a personality that includes flowing hair to toss at appropriate syntactical pauses, perhaps those tinted Italian glasses, which manage to look sexy and intellectual. I'd like for my natural reserve to fall away when fluency allows me all the gestures and rhythms of Italian. Meanwhile, I can say, “Have you washed yourself well?” and “Sir, you have insulted me! I demand satisfaction”; “Sooner or later I am going to have a nervous breakdown”; “Catherine, have you been to see if the barometer has fallen?”; “Where we come from, we don't have a party when someone dies,” and many other useful sentences my textbooks have taught me. These phrases are not the pertinent rejoinders when
Primo Bianchi discusses with us the intricacies of a fossa biologica, a biological pit, otherwise known as a septic tank.
Twice a week for two hours, I report to a white room in a palazzo in Cortona. I go with anticipation and dread. En route, I pass Caruso, the mynah bird who lives in a cage outside an antique shop. “Ciao,” the bird says, and I hear the exact, chomped-on inflection of the local ciao. Even the bird has a better ear than I. Amalia is waiting, a pile of photocopied exercises for me to complete in front of her. She plans to make clear to me, finally, the differences among the simple past, the imperfect, and the past definite. I think it goes like this: I shopped; I shopped and continue to shop; and I've shopped until I've dropped. The room's three enormous windows overlook the rooftops of Cortona. We sit at a long table, facing a blackboard. Nothing distracts from the intense study of Italian. We begin with conversation. At half her normal speed, she speaks clearly of a Benigni film, a politician on trial, a local custom. We discuss where we have been, and what we have done since the last lesson.
I am halting, I am corrected frequently, I do not hear the difference in the way she says oggi, today, and the way I say it. Because the ceilings are so high, everything we say echoes slightly, amplifying the trauma. With verbs, I hear my own blunders as soon as I make them. Odd—sometimes I understand almost everything she says. We discuss the death penalty, ravioli, or the Mafia. I congratu
late myself on a clever question—maybe she can see that I'm not as stupid as I must sound. Other times I feel that my brain is a big potato gnocco or a ball of mozzarella di bufala, and I'm not hearing half. Worse, I sometimes tune out. She could be speaking double Dutch. I want to cry or run out of the room.
Still, taking on a new language is enormous fun. While waiting for a transaction at the bank or sitting in front of the gas station while the car is washed, I take out my list of past participles. During the afternoon riposo, I sometimes close the shutters and listen to conversation tapes. Mine focus on cooking. In the heat, with the cicadas clacking outside, I lie back and hear blow-by-blow instructions on how to make rice fritters and cherry soup. Listening is a thrill because I start to think that I spoke Italian in another life; way inside, I know this language. In his fine World War II novel, The Gallery, John Horne Burns was on to something when he said, “Italian can soon be understood because it sounds like what it's saying. Italian is a language as natural as the human breath. . . . It keeps in motion by its own inherent drive. . . . It's full of bubble-like laughter. Yet it's capable of power and bitterness. It has nouns that tick off a personality as neatly as a wisecrack. It's a language in which the voice runs to all levels. You all but sing, and you work off your passion with your hands.”
One of those evocative nouns fascinates us. Galleggiante. We love the sound—a mixture of “gallant,” “gigantic,” and “elegant.” Ed says, “You're looking so, how shall I say it, so galleggiante this evening.” I say, “I love Parma. It's galleggiante.” We admire the antique iron bench we have bought; truly galleggiante in the garden. The real galleggiante first entered our vocabularies more practically. When the toilet kept running water, Ed stood on a ladder and looked inside the tank. Lifting the floating ball made the noise stop. There's no way to look up “floating ball inside toilet” in the dictionary so he went to the building supply store for the thingamajig and endured the charade of gestures and sketches. “Ah,” the clerk caught on. “You want a galleggiante.” Yes, we did.
Bella Tuscany Page 21
