Bella Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

  Margherita lived at Bramasole as a child, when the palm was small. I am stirred to hear that she still dreams of the rooms and land she knew at four years old. From my first glance, Bramasole always has been a house of dreams. Coming upon it now, I see that it belongs to the Etruscan Bramasole wall, to Torreone, to Cortona, to Tuscany. Beyond my possession, still it is mine—the contraries meet—and transitory as my tenure may be, it is a fierce and primitive tenure. “Don't give up the house, no matter what happens,” I recall a friend advising another friend, who was divorcing. “You're discovering the irrational power of a woman's domesticity,” my friend Josephine tells me. “Possession always has a secret root.”

  I don't say any of this to Margherita. Since I've just met her I don't want her to think I'm some sibyl of the mountain. While Ed and Beppe cart away the carcass, she tells me that her mother stays out for six or eight hours some days. Not only does she gather lettuces, asparagus, snails, and mushrooms, she cuts greens for her rabbits. “She's a person who likes to live outside,” she explains. “We don't know where she goes—sometimes she's just roaming the hills. She's been roaming this mountain for a lifetime.”

  I understand the impulse. Walking the ridge road toward the Porta Montanina gate to town, I'm reading Keats's ode “To Autumn” and feeling how closely his words anneal to the subject. Of all the poems about the season, his brings me the closest to the unsayable sensation I experience as summer circles toward the autumnal equinox. The internal clock turns, too, a visceral knowledge of change. Earlier, the pale dog-roses bloomed along the road; today the branches are studded with bright orange rose hips. The air seems to hold a calming sense of peace as the landscape turns toast, amber, wheat, and the grasses dry to—what? The shade of lion's fur, the tawny crust of bread, the gold of a worn wedding ring. A moment ago the grasses were a fervent green. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” Keats writes, and I see the valley mists and laden branches of pear blotched and gnawed and bumbled by birds, bees, and worms. I like the idea of the season conspiring with the sun to “load and bless” the fruit and vines. I taste his phrases: “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,” the furrows “drowsed with the fume of poppies,” “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” And yes, we do think “warm days will never cease,” that first moment in the poem when the innocence of the perspective gently darkens. The resonant hint of change and cold trip easily along the tongue. And that's his skill, to tinge the mind with knowledge, while simultaneously reveling in the season when gold ingots of light fall across the road. Entering the Etrus-can gate into upper Cortona's immaculate streets, I see a woman setting out small cyclamen plants in a pot by her front door. Pink, white, magenta, she's mixed all the colors into a little blaze to warm her during the cold months. Beautiful, I tell her, and she points to dark green spikes and a tight yellow bud pushing through the ground. “This kind of crocus comes back in autumn, but only briefly, only a few.” We're riding the earth, she and I. Sitting on the front steps of San Francesco, listening to the bells early Sunday morning, I don't want anything more than this poem rolled in my hand, 5000 lire in my shirt pocket for coffee and pastry, my new red loafers which navigate the stony streets so well.

  I wander at night, too. Ed and I have walked into town for a gelato and he starts a long conversation with Edo about installing lawn irrigation. Our wild-herb lawn has not survived the summer drought, though fall rains will bring back the green hills. Out of chat, I start back, walking over the Roman road with a flashlight, then down onto the cypress-lined road toward home. Before it was paved, the white pebble strada bianca used to reflect the moonlight. Now with the asphalt and the luna nera, black moon, the road is dark, the cypress trees seeming to gather into their massive shapes all the light from the stars. I have the ambition to see every cypress tree in Tuscany. Like the California oaks in the Bay Area countryside, the cypresses seem to speak for the landscape. The bare oaks of California interact with light, giving their skeletal shadows to the hills and their silhouettes to the sky.

  But the cypresses play no games with light. If they were in the sky they would be the black holes and if I were in America, I would be petrified to be alone on a deserted road at night. Because each of these trees was planted for a local boy who died in World War I, they are huge presences, not only in form but in a silence stopped inside their fixed curves, something of the unlived life of each boy. The tips, pointed like sable paintbrushes, wave back and forth against the stars.

  Hot from the climb over the hill, I unbutton my blue linen dress all the way down and let it lift behind me. Oh, for a life of sensation, our friend Keats also told us. The cypress trees are grand companions. If anyone were coming, I would hear them because sound carries along the mountain, like the last sigh of the gladiator in the amphitheater heard on the last row. Around the curve, the house rises above the road, a rough translation of my body into a mute language of windows, doors, and stone. Ed, I think, is translated by the olive trees and vines, which now droop with dusty purple grapes.

  From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon's wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside. I recognize the cadence of Ed's step below in the road. “Are you home?” he calls up to me. Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one.

  Frances Mayes is also the author of Under the Tuscan Sun, a companion volume to Bella Tuscany; The Discovery of Poetry, a text for readers; and five books of poetry, most recently Ex Voto. A frequent contributor to food and travel publications, she divides her time between Cortona, Italy, and San Francisco.

  Acclaim for

  Bella Tuscany

  This new book by the author of Under the Tuscan Sun charts the transformation of a house into a home, a process that has less to do with stones and paint and plants and arbor than it does with the spirit settling into a place, weaving itself into the fabric of a place . . . [Mayes] ponders secret gardens and language and Italian food and family . . . and the nature of happiness. (I think we all like reading her because she seems, quite simply, to have a knack for happiness.)”

  —Los Angeles Times

  [Mayes's] mind is exquisitely in tune with Italy . . . And that makes for, undoubtedly, sweet reading.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  Here is the ideal book to have with you when trapped in an unpleasant atmosphere . . . Inside its pages is where you'd rather be, transported to the sunlight, hills, gardens, local people and, especially, the food of Cortona, Italy.”

  —Courier-Journal, Louisville

  Mayes forms tantalizing connections between culinary experiences in her rich childhood in rural Georgia, her adult life in San Francisco, and the senses and tastes discovered in vineyards, farmhouses, and trattorias. With an engaging breathlessness, she guides readers through spring and summer when Italy is lusty and voluptuous.”

  —Tampa Tribune and Times

  Mayes's extraordinary sense of visual detail, her veritable hoarding of images, is spiced by her equally acute flair for language.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  Who could fail to affirm this poet's lush descriptions of the rolling Tuscan hills with their timeless olive trees and patient oxen . . . Lovely, and no small consolation to anyone who's far from Tuscany.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  For people who have had too many ‘order out for Chinese nights,' and ‘seventeen-messages-on-the-machine nights,' here's proof that there's a place where one can live slowly and fully, enjoying the ‘daily rhythms of life'.”

  —Condé Nast Traveler

  Mayes writes with a poet's attention to sensuous detail, whether describing a six-course meal, a fresco in a little known church, or the challenges of learning Italian. She describes village life with all its warmth, friendliness, and individuality, in sharp contrast to the growing homogeneity of America.”

 
; —Library Journal

  It's easy to understand why [Mayes] has become a kind of cult figure for seekers of The Good Life. She not only inspires us to seize the moment, sip the wine and smell the roses, she also makes us feel it is quite possible to transform our lives, just as she did.”

  —Lexington Herald-Leader

  Read on for an excerpt from New York Times bestselling author Frances Mayes’s latest memoir,

  Under Magnolia

  Crown Publishers

  Available wherever books are sold

  A SILVER GLOBE IN THE GARDEN

  As I open a book that I once pulled from the ashes of my grandparents’ house, the dusty, mildewed scent catapults me to their back hallway.

  Through the double door, made of tiny mullioned panes, I see the entrance hall waver, a quivering of claret and sunlight from the front door. Wafting from the kitchen, the smell of chicken smothered in cream and pepper until it’s falling off the bone. I’m playing an ancient wind-up record left over from when my father was a boy; “K-K-K-Katy” crackles in my ear. Through my grandmother’s open bedroom door, I glimpse chintz dust ruffles, hatboxes, the slender oval mirror over the dressing table, where she leans, and I see her dab the fluffy puff between her legs.

  That’s it: brief cloud of bath powder, grinding consonant K-K-K-Katy (I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door), warped light throwing rainbows back through the door. And I wonder, always, why do such fragments remain forever engraved, when, surely, significant ones are lost? The kitchen fragrance, no mystery. For who, ever, could forget Fanny’s smothered chicken?

  An early memory of my father: He opens his buff hunting coat, and in all the small interior pockets, doves’ heads droop. He and his friends Bascom and Royce break out the bourbon. From my room in the back of the house, right off the kitchen, I see through the keyhole (keyholes are a large part of childhood) the doves he’s killed piled on the counter, and someone’s hand cleaning a shotgun barrel with a dishrag. The terrible plop-ploop sound of feathers being plucked makes me bury my face under the pillow. When his friends go, my father stays at the table with his tumbler of bourbon. I’m reading with a flashlight under the covers. My specialty is orphans on islands where houses have trapdoors into secret passageways that lead to the sea. Rowboats, menace, treasure, and no parents in the story. As the water darkens and danger grows, I hear my father talking to himself. When I quietly crack the door, I see his head in his hands, his bloodstained coat hung on a hook. Very late, he hits the wall with his fist, and says over and over, “Beastly, Christly, beastly, Christly.” I put the palm of my hand over the spot where he is pounding with his fist and feel the vibration all the way up my arm. I press my nose to the window screen and look out at the still backyard.

  A tea olive tree grows outside my bedroom window, its scent airy, spicy, and I prefer it to the dizzy perfume of the gardenias and magnolias that rule the neighborhood. Tough ovoid leaves scrape the screen; the tiny flower clusters are fit only for dollhouse bouquets. Then the back door slams and the car screeches out the driveway.

  My father’s parents live two blocks away. I like to gaze into the silver globe under the giant oak in their backyard. My face looks distorted and moony, especially when I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue. In the mirrored sphere, the yard curves back, foregrounded with oak branches like enormous claws. On the latticed back porch, my grandmother Mayes washes a bowl of peaches with her maid, Fanny Brown. Mother Mayes’s hair is as silvery as the garden globe, and her crepey skin so white she’s almost blue. She looks as though she might dissolve or disappear—her pale eyes always seem fixed on somewhere just beyond me.

  Late in the afternoon, she puts up her bare feet on an ottoman. With the lamp haloing her hair, she’s ethereal, but then I see crude, tough yellow corns on the last two toes of each foot. They’re translucent in the lamp’s glow, as she relaxes with The Upper Room, a church book of devotional reading, open on her lap.

  Dove heads, tea olive, silver globe, bowl of peaches, church books. Images are the pegs holding down memory’s billowing tent. From them, I try to figure out who my people were and where we lived, what they did and what they could have done.

  South Georgia, where I was born, may look to a stranger speeding down I-75 like lonesome country where you can drive for miles without seeing more than a canebrake rattlesnake cross the road. At the city limits of our town a sign said IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME NOW. The logic is irrefutable. Thin roads shimmering in the heat lead into Fitzgerald from Ocilla, Mystic, Lulaville, Osierfield, Pinetta, Waterloo, Land’s Crossing, Bowen’s Mill, and Irwinville, where Jefferson Davis was captured by the Yankees. Then, no I-75 existed.

  To those whose ribs were formed from red clay, the place is complex, exhilarating, charged, various: mighty brown rivers to float along, horizons drawn with an indigo pen, impossibly tall long-leaf pines, virulent racism (then, and not all erased now), the heat that makes your heart beat thickly against your chest, the self-satisfaction of those of us who have always lived there, tornadoes twirling in a purple sky, the word “repent” nailed to trees. A place of continuous contradiction, a box with a false bottom. A black rag doll becomes a white doll when I turn her upside down. I jump onto soft green moss behind the cotton mill and sink into sewage. Daddy in his white suit fishes me out, shouting curses. I’m born knowing that the place itself runs through me like rain soaking into sand.

  We are fabric people, as others are the Miwok people, circus people, lost people. In the cotton mill—my father’s business—the light is gray because lint catches in the screened windows. Oily black machines, gigantic strung looms as beautiful as harps, their shuttles pulled by lean women. Bins to climb and then dive from into piled raw cotton. In the tin cup of the scale over the bin I ride, the needle jerking between fifty and fifty-five pounds, then fly out, the landing not as gentle as I expect. Rayon is softer, and squeaks as I fall in. But to fly, actually, as in dreams. A natural act, as later I would swing out over the spring on vines at night, dropping into cold black water below, crawl up the slippery bank, grabbing roots, then swing out again and again for that moment of falling. Water moccasins, thick as my leg, thirty-pound rockfish with primitive snouts, even crocodiles lived in these deep streams I dove into, pushing my fist into the icy “boils,” that bubbling force at the bottom.

  While my father ran the cotton mill and hunted birds, my mother gathered, and created perfect bridge luncheons, with the aid of Willie Bell. The house pulsated with cleanliness. My two sisters were both in college by the time I was eight, but I stayed in my room at the back of the house instead of moving into theirs. Often I rifled through their scrapbooks and high school notebooks in their closet, and tried on their left-behind dresses that had more flounces than mine, and the flowery scent of White Shoulders lingering in the tucks and pleats.

  I loved the square brick Carnegie library, the quiet that engulfs you as you gently close the door, the globe to spin and stop, with a finger on Brazil or China, the cold light in the high windows in winter, the way the bookcases jut out to make little rooms, my yellow card with due-date stamps, the brass return slot, the desk where presides the librarian, who looks like a large squirrel. Before kindergarten, my sisters showed me the low bookcase for my age. I moved year by year to a different section of the back room. So much later, I may cross the threshold into the main library where I can check out only two, then four books.

  Other literature was mail order. I never had seen a real bookstore. We had Book of the Month. We subscribed to Harper’s Bazaar, for copying dresses, Reader’s Digest, required for school, and, for some reason, Arizona Highways.

  Fitzgerald, where I might have lived forever, was as rigidly hierarchical as England. We had our aristocracy, with dukes, bar sinisters, jokers, local duchesses in black Cadillacs, many earls, and, of course, ladies, ladies, ladies, many of them always in waiting. Everything and everyone had a place and everything and everyone was in it. It was a cloying, marvelous, myste
rious, and obnoxious world, as I later came to know, but fate placed me there and, although the house was not lilting, I was happy as the grass was green.

  We were not normal. We lived next door to normal people, so I knew what normal was. The father worked for the state agriculture department, the mother gave a perm called a “Toni” to her sisters and friends, and they laughed and had fun as they breathed in ammonia fumes. Their boy sang in the choir, and the daughter, Jeannie, with wild hair, was my playmate. We found house-paint cans in the barn and brushed black and white enamel over each other. Our irate mothers scoured us with kerosene, and Jeannie seemed to be lifted in the jaws of her mother like a kitten and taken home. Her father built a swing set with a pair of rings that we learned to grip, push off into a somersault, vault up on our feet, and hang upside down. On the swings we could pump so high we’d almost flip over the top. He took us to farms in his truck and we sat in back eating raw peanuts we’d pulled from the ground. They tasted like dirt. Jeannie and I made hideouts in the vacant lot next to her house, elaborate setups of pallets and cardboard boxes, with tin doll dishes and stolen kitchen knives. We sat on a pile of sour grass weed poring over the Sears, Roebuck catalog. What would you choose if you could choose anything on this page? After pelting rains, our walls sagged. On Christmas mornings, she and I ran back and forth between our houses, looking at what Santa left, long before anyone awoke. We strung tin cans with string between our bedrooms, but never could hear a thing. Her mother, Matrel, had lively sisters named Pearl, Ruby, and Jewel. Her uncle always called us “Coosaster Jane,” which we thought was German he’d learned in the war. She called her daddy “Pappy.” He was strong, redheaded, and sweet. I wonder why I did not envy them. I think small children may have no imagination for a life that is not their own lot.