Bella Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

  My original desire to live here came partly from a belief that Italy is endless and could never be exhausted—art, landscape, food, language, history. Changing the direction of my life by buying and restoring this forsaken house, committing a portion of every year to life in a foreign country, seemed like acts of high risk if not madness. At that time, I wanted to accomplish something I did not know how to do. I thought—and now know—that Italians claim more time for their lives. After a long marriage and a horrid divorce, I thought Italy certainly would be a more than adequate replacement for just one man. I wanted a big change.

  I had no concept of just how lucky my primary instinct was. At home in California, time often feels like a hula-hoop, a ceaseless whirl on a body fixed but rocking in place. I could kiss the ground here, not to feel myself in that tight space where the past gnaws the future but in the luxuriant freedom of a long day to walk out for a basket of plums under the great wheel of the Mediterranean sun. At the tail end of the century, continual splashes of newness: Eight summers here and still we're babes. What luck.

  I stuff two shopping bags with potatoes, onions, chard, melon, tomatoes and drive them down to Donatella in the valley. Earlier this summer, the boars destroyed her garden in one full-moon orgy. She's not home so I leave the bags under her arbor of Virginia creeper, just on the edge of a carefully tended olive orchard. Crossing the valley floor as I leave her place, I look up and catch a glimpse of Bramasole. I stop, amazed to see the house as a peach-colored smudge against the steep hillside, with the Etruscan and Medici walls above it. Far away, it stands totally within its own green landscape of terraces and trees, clouds and sky. No sign at all that we have been there or will be there. As I drive on, a spur of hillside suddenly cuts away the view.

  Cold

  ON AN EARLY OCTOBER MORNING IN SAN FRANcisco, Ed puts aside a stack of student papers and begins to look through an Italian guidebook. I am busy, super-busy, in my study—eleven graduate theses, memos, letters of recommendation, and a pile of overdue correspondence. Tomorrow, meetings of the laborious sort and appointments in three corners of the city. These madhouse weeks seem both to stretch endlessly and to fly. Ed turns on the espresso machine, still reading. My study is across the hall from the kitchen, which is why I don't get as much done as I could. Anyone cooking or wandering in for a snack naturally visits with me. Kitchens develop powerful magnetic fields around them and pull all humans and animals within the four walls their way. My theory is proven by my black cat, Sister, who perpetually lies on the black-and-white kitchen tiles right in the center of the floor.

  “Don't you think it would be a perfect gift to go back to Venice for Christmas?” For several years, since we bought Bramasole, we've endured the twenty-hour trip from California

  across the waters for the brief winter season at Bramasole, when we harvest our olives, feast with our friends, and escape the frenetic pace of our usual holidays.

  “Um, oh, yes,” I answer. Soon I hear him dial a long telephone number, then request a room with a balcony on the Grand Canal for December 23, 24, and 25. The heaps of paper start to look less and less formidable.

  We arrived in Cortona early this morning from Rome. We are spending a week here, just enough time for our favorite December activities, then we'll drive to Venice. Arrival at Bramasole is easy now. What a marvel, everything works (for now); heat, hot water—what luxury. We even have neatly stacked firewood—one of the bonuses of pruning olive trees.

  While I unpack, Ed starts right in picking olives, a wicker basket strapped around his red wool sweater. After the sun drops behind the hill around 4 P.M., a chilly wind comes up. He drags a sack into the cantina then runs hot water over his hands a long time to warm them. “Two more days,” he says, “with both of us working. There are a lot of olives.” We make a quick supper of tagliatelle con funghi porcini, thin pasta with mushrooms sautéed in our oil. Ed builds a fire and we sit in front of it, eating on trays. Tomorrow we will pick all day then go up the mountain to a favorite trattoria for pasta with wild boar sauce. The day we take the olives to the mill for pressing, we'll celebrate the new oil with a feast for friends. We feel compelled to drive over to Assisi to find out how the violent earthquake has changed that place of peace. Then it will be time to get ready for Venice, where it may be colder. We have coats, boots, gloves, and I bought a delicious cut-velvet scarf in dark, dark green, as green as a Venetian lagoon. I hope for snow in Piazza San Marco. Ed has a special wine to take. I have ginger-lily soap, and lilac-scented candles to burn in our room. We promised to buy only one gift for each other since the main gift will be Venice. I have a sumptuous yellow cashmere sweater for Ed, with a volume of W. S. Merwin's poems tucked under the sleeve. His box for me, glimpsed in his luggage, looks intriguingly small.

  Around eleven the phone rings. Since we've bought this house I've hated the sound of the telephone. It reminds me of workers calling to say a pump did not arrive or the sandblaster is extending his vacation at the beach. In bed, cozy in flannel sheets, with jet lag just about to pull me under, I'm finishing the novel I started on the plane. I hear Ed answer “Hey, how are you?” enthusiastically, then his voice drops. “When? No. No. How long?”

  He sits down on the end of the bed, frowning, his shoulders hunched. His mother has been taken to the hospital and is in grave condition. “I don't get it. Two weeks ago she was baking bread. She's strong. My sister said myo-something, a blood disease. I got the doctor's number.”

  In the morning, we repack and take the train back to Rome. Beppe and Francesco will pick the olives for us and take them to the mill. The doctor was more definite than Ed's sister. “Come at once,” he said when Ed called him. “It could be anytime. Today, a week, could be a month.” Reboarding and flying, practically meeting ourselves coming over, seems surreal. Sometimes the weather has a way of reflecting emotional states. When the skies neatly express emotions in my students' poems I always write, Beware of the pathetic fallacy; it's a weak gesture, but here we are tossing across the Atlantic, seatbelt sign blazing. The storm finally grounds us in Philadelphia. All connecting flights into Minnesota are canceled. We load our luggage onto a cart and walk through malls to an airport hotel. We spend a long night watching the storm worsen on the TV weather station. Why do people die at Christmas? A strange call to pull the family home again? My father died on a December 23, when I was fourteen. The pink net dress I was to have worn to the dance that night hung on the back of the closet door until it looked limp. The Christmas tree was taken down.

  During a break in the storm, we fly out and are greeted in Minneapolis by the coldest temperature on record for that day. At the rental car desk we run into Ed's sister Sharon and her husband and daughter, just in from southern California. They're heading straight for the hospital, too. His brother, Robert, and other two sisters, Anne and Mary Jo, already are there. We step out of the airport into crusty snow and ferocious wind chill, a cut-glass air. My thin boots seem like no more than socks. Ed has to chip the car out of a block of ice. We take off for Winona, two hours south, on plowed roads through snowy fields which look to my new eyes like the absence of everything. I do not know Ed's mother well, only through one visit and through telephone chats on Sundays. I know that she raised Ed to be the person he is and therefore I feel immensely grateful to her.

  She has rallied with the excitement of all her children returning at once. Mary Jo has put lipstick on her and she's sitting in a chair. Seeing her is easy; unbelievable that she is in danger. But she tires and, back in bed, her long frame looks gaunt, her breathing sounds scary. The children set up a rotation so that someone always is with her. His sisters are staying at his mother's house so we go to a generic motel. Ed keeps flashing on the unreality of Venice—how we had expected, at this moment, to be reading aloud from Shelley or Mann in a great bed above the immortal waters. Now his mother, whom he loves easily and unequivocally, is sliding by the moment away from him.

  Days are long. Back and forth to the ho
spital. Visitors tiptoeing in, the I.V. tubes, the imperial visits of the doctor, the little errands. The sisters are busy with the house, trying to give away, sort, and deal with the contents so the work won't be left to Mary Jo and Robert who live there. Not that there is much. Opening drawers and cupboards, I see how clearly his mother's life was not about acquiring things. Her name is Altrude, one I've never heard. The connotations of altruism fit well; she is a woman given to her five children. In the afternoons, we take long drives. Ed knows the weather intimately, having grown up loving winter camping, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing, and all those foreign—to me—activities of a cold climate. With absolute wonder, I keep asking him, “Why would anyone choose to live here? It hurts.”

  “No, you just have to get into the rhythm of it. Watch—if it ever gets above freezing, there's a Minnesotan obligation to put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and pretend it's warm.”

  Ed is driving, the mid-sized heater blaring. I'm looking out the window. In Venice, the aroma of fried calamari drifting from a window, a dusting of snow on the lions of San Marco, a thick hot chocolate at Florian's where they're playing schmaltzy music. But no, here's the purity of an emptier landscape. A rust-red barn etched against a faint sky, a forest of iced birch trees glittering fantastically, a deer running across a frozen lake, his hooves sending up puffs of snow. We pass small huddled towns, the farms where his parents grew up. His family's place, the place that formed him. He saw fish swimming under clear ice. His life before he knew who he is. A place of overwhelming winter, a death-grip that releases a poignant, intense spring.

  “What will you do for Christmas?” his mother asks. “You're all together.” She does not say probably for the last time but everyone knows that. Mary Jo, a nun for thirty years, gives her communion every day and they talk bluntly about death. Seeing Ed at her bedside gives me new glimpses of the sweetness of his character. He is simply there. He feeds her, washes her face, talks about her graham cracker pie, her ritual of putting up beets, about the neighbors' ugly garage, and about his father, who died two years ago.

  In the closet of Ed's old room, the sisters pull out a box of his books and Anne holds out a dusty copy of Mann's Death in Venice. “What's it like?” she asks. Italy has become interesting to them by osmosis. And they've learned, from reading what I wrote about our lives there, things about us they never knew. Living in scattered places with vastly different lives, these five have grown apart, after a childhood intensely close together in this small house. Now the walls come alive; synapses reconnect; everyone tells their stories. Mary Jo's reinvention of a life outside the order, Sharon's complex family, Anne's relocation to Stillwater and her juggling of job and mother to two boys dressed in grunge with earphones perpetually beating into their ears, Robert's unconventional life of refusal “to work for The Man.” The whispers, She was prom queen, he tiled his bathroom with rejects of all colors, she wants the sofa but he doesn't want her to have it, look at how dignified Mom looked in her wedding dress, we only got one game at Christmas, how could you have married that creep, I don't remember it that way at all.

  Ed goes to the hospital at six-thirty every morning, cherishing quiet hours with his mother. And “What will you do for Christmas?” she had worried. When in doubt, cook. On Christmas Eve morning, Ed and I scour the grocery stores of Winona, buying olive oil and wine, garlic, a mounded cart we push through the frozen ruts of the parking lot. His mother is remote today, far into her dying. We visit the lawyer; the family puts the house on the market. We rush into the florist's, stunned by the humid warmth and the perfume of roses and lilies. Candles and flowers for her room. There is so little to do. The temperature falls; how low can it go? Another new record. We take a two-block walk and I am afraid we won't get back without lost fingers and toes.

  The one luxury in the plain motel is the Jacuzzi tub. Ya-coot-see, the Italians say. Back in the room, after a last late visit to the hospital, we empty the complimentary vial of bubble bath into the water, light a candle and lie in the swirling hot water, finally warm.

  On Christmas morning, Ed's mother feels well enough to be wheeled to the lobby to watch the thumb-sized yellow birds in the aviary. I wonder what it is like for her to see gathered around her bed the five children she raised, all now forty to fifty years old, living their lives, health all over each of them, and strong good looks and bodies.

  Too cold to go anywhere. Most of us are at the house all afternoon. Going through kitchen drawers, the sisters find the famous family recipe for graham cracker pie and the three—all self-proclaimed non-cooks—launch into baking, consulting with each other over the consistency of the custard and when to stop beating the egg whites. Meanwhile, Ed and I make little pasta rolls with spinach and cheese, a grand beef stew with carrots, potatoes, and red wine. We make broccoli (one of the few fresh vegetables we could find) purée, and, for an Italian note, we'll serve bruschette, grilled slices of bread rubbed with garlic.

  At dark, we take Ed's mother's dinner on a tray to the hospital. She eats most of the slice of graham cracker pie, giving it high praise, even though we all know the custard could have been a little firmer. As we drive back, snow starts again, bringing down its dazzling silence.

  At dinner Ed puts on a tape of Puccini arias. Everyone gathers around Altrude's table. I look out the window at the lights of the house falling in gold squares on the snow, a scene repeated all over the white town. We pour the wine. “Cheers.” “To Mother.” “Salute.” The parents are absent and the house is poised to roll under into memory. Dinner is ready. We are hungry and we eat.

  Graham Cracker Pie

  This favorite pie in Ed's family is a mid-century classic. In my family the same pie was flavored with lemon.

  — Crush 12 graham crackers into fine crumbs with a rolling pin. Mix with 1 t. of flour, 1 t. of cinnamon, and 1/3 c. of sugar. Melt 1/3 c. of butter and mix with the crumbs. Press into pie plate.

  — For the custard, blend 1/2 c. of sugar with 2 T. of cornstarch. To 2 c. of milk, add 3 beaten egg yolks. Mix with sugar and cook on moderate heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. Whisk in 2 t. vanilla. Beat 3 egg whites until stiff. Whisk in 1 T. sugar. Pour custard into the pie shell, top with meringue and bake at 350 degrees until meringue has toasted.

  Ritmo: Rhythm

  IN THE MIDST OF THE TORRENTIAL EL NIñO winter in San Francisco, we decided to move. I was reading the paper one Sunday and saw a small drawing of a Spanish/Mediterranean house with two balconies and what looked like a tall palm in front. “Look at this house—doesn't it remind you of Bramasole?”

  Ed stared. “I like it. Where is it?”

  “It doesn't say. Isn't the balcony nice? You could line it with those yellow orchids that seem to grow everywhere in San Francisco.” Ed called the listing agent and found out the house was sold.

  Living at Bramasole makes us want to import into our American lives as many Italian elements as we can. More urgently, the death of Ed's mother in January heightened our sense of carpe diem. Our flat, which I bought as my former marriage slowly dissolved, is the third floor of a large Victorian house. I loved the coved ceilings and moulding and all the light flooding through skylights and thirty windows. The dining room looks out into trees and then onto a city view, with a slice of the bay in the distance. After years there, every room reflected the way we live. The kitchen I'd remodeled the year we bought Bramasole. Black and white tile, mirror between the glass-fronted cabinets and counters, and a six-burner restaurant stove with an oven where I easily could roast two geese and a turkey. What we began to miss was living outdoors. Stepping outside as though it were inside, stepping inside as though it were outside. Suddenly, I needed herbs in the ground and a table under a tree. Besides, it's good to move. I throw away all the accumulated junk—jars, papers, shoes in the back of the closet, black-splotched cookie sheets, tired towels. Remembering every move, I see that a new period of my life began with each change of house. Is the irrational instinct to
move now (the flat is large and pretty and in a great location) also a pre-knowledge of change, or a readiness for the new?

  We began to circle ads for houses in the paper, to drive around on Sunday afternoons to open houses, to look at neighborhoods we hardly knew, since our own Pacific Heights neighborhood was not remotely affordable, given what we wanted. The real estate market was wild: Asking price turned out to be a base in what quickly became an auction. Houses were selling for up to a hundred thousand dollars over the list price. Confusing. John, our agent, agreed. And we weren't finding anything we especially liked. I wanted the this is it feeling I experienced when I first saw Bramasole.

  We'd give up for a couple of weeks, then John would call and say we might drive by a certain address, we might like this ranch house with a large garden with redwoods and a greenhouse. As we were driving toward the peninsula one day to see a Carmel-type cottage, we followed an open house sign and turned into a wooded area of San Francisco originally landscaped by the Olmstead firm, designers of Central Park. The houses live among trees and lawns. The Tudor house for sale was in “original” condition, meaning every plank and pane needed attention. We started talking to the agent, and told him we were about to give up for a year or so, until things calmed down. “I have a house I think you might like. Meet me at four and I'll show you.” We drove on to see the overly charming cottage, where multiple offers were being made during the first hour.

  When we pulled up at the address the agent had given us, I recognized the house I'd seen in the paper, the one that had set me dreaming about moving. “We saw this house advertised and called about it. We thought it was sold.”