Under the Tuscan Sun Page 3

  FINALLY THE MONEY ARRIVES, THE ACCOUNT IS OPEN. HOWEVER , they have no checks. This enormous bank, the seat of dozens of branches in the gold center of Italy, has no checks to give us. “Maybe next week,” Signora Raguzzi explains. “Right now, nothing.” We sputter. Two days later, she calls. “I have ten checks for you.” What is the big deal with checks? I get boxes of them at home. Signora Raguzzi parcels them out to us. Signora Raguzzi in tight skirt, tight T-shirt, has lips that are perpetually wet and pouting. Her skin glistens. She is astonishingly gorgeous. She wears a magnificent square gold necklace and bracelets on both wrists that jangle as she stamps our account number on each check.

  “What great jewelry. I love those bracelets,” I say.

  “All we have here is gold,” she replies glumly. She is bored with Arezzo's tombs and piazzas. California sounds good to her. She brightens every time she sees us. “Ah, California,” she says as a greeting. The bank begins to seem surreal. We're in the back room. A man wheels in a cart stacked with gold ingots—actual small bricks of gold. No one seems to be on guard. Another man loads two into dingy manila folders. He's plainly dressed, like a workman. He walks out into the street, taking the ingots somewhere. So much for Brinks delivery—but what a clever plainclothes disguise. We turn back to the checks. There will be no insignia of boats or palm trees or pony express riders, there will be no name, address, driver's license, Social Security number. Only these pale green checks that look as though they were printed in the twenties. We're enormously pleased. That's close to citizenship—a bank account.

  Finally we are gathered in the notaio's office for the final reckoning. It's quick. Everyone talks at once and no one listens. The baroque legal terms leave us way behind. A jackhammer outside drills into my brain cells. There's something about two oxen and two days. Ian, who's translating, stops to explain this archaic spiral of language as an eighteenth-century legal description of the amount of land, measured by how long it would take two oxen to plow it. We have, it seems, two plowing days worth of property.

  I write checks, my fingers cramping over all the times I write milione. I think of all the nice dependable bonds and utility stocks and blue chips from the years of my marriage magically turning into a terraced hillside and a big empty house. The glass house in California where I lived for a decade, surrounded by kumquat, lemon, mock orange, and guava, its bright pool and covered patio with wicker and flowered cushions—all seem to recede, as though seen through the long focus in binoculars. Million is such a big word in English it's hard to treat it casually. Ed carefully monitors the zeros, not wanting me to unwittingly write miliardo, billion, instead. He pays Signor Martini in cash. He never has mentioned a fee; we have found out the normal percentage from the owner. Signor Martini seems pleased, as though we've given him a gift. For me this is a confusing but delightful way to conduct business. Handshakes all around. Is that a little cat smile on the mouth of the owner's wife? We're expecting a parchment deed, lettered in ancient script, but no, the notaio is going on vacation and she'll try to get to the paperwork before she leaves. “Normale,” Signor Martini says. I've noticed all along that someone's word is still taken for that. Endless contracts and stipulations and contingencies simply have not come up. We walk out into the brutally hot afternoon with nothing but two heavy iron keys longer than my hand, one to a rusted iron gate, the other to the front door. They look nothing like the keys to anything I've ever owned. There is no hope for spare copies.

  Giuseppe waves from the door of the bar and we tell him we have bought a house. “Where is it?” he wants to know.

  “Bramasole,” Ed begins, about to say where it is.

  “Ah, Bramasole, una bella villa!” He has picked cherries there as a boy. Although it is only afternoon, he pulls us in and pours a grappa for us. “Mama!” he shouts. His mother and her sister come in from the back and everyone toasts us. They're all talking at once, speaking of us as the stranieri, foreigners. The grappa is blindingly strong. We drink ours as fast as Signora Mantucci nips her espresso and wander out in the sun. The car is as hot as a pizza oven. We sit there with the doors open, suddenly laughing and laughing.

  WE'D ARRANGED FOR TWO WOMEN TO CLEAN AND FOR A BED to be delivered while we signed the final papers. In town we picked up a bottle of cold prosecco, then stopped at the rosticceria for marinated zucchini, olives, roast chicken, and potatoes.

  We arrive at the house dazed by the events and the grappa. Anna and Lucia have washed the windows and exorcised layers of dust, as well as many spiders' webs. The second-floor bedroom that opens onto a brick terrace gleams. They've made the bed with the new blue sheets and left the terrace door open to the sound of cuckoos and wild canaries in the linden trees. We pick the last of the pink roses on the front terrace and fill two old Chianti bottles with them. The shuttered room with its whitewashed walls, just-waxed floors, pristine bed with new sheets, and sweet roses on the windowsill, all lit with a dangling forty-watt bulb, seems as pure as a Franciscan cell. As soon as I walk in, I think it is the most perfect room in the world.

  We shower and dress in fresh clothes. In the quiet twilight, we sit on the stone wall of the terrace and toast each other and the house with tumblers of the spicy prosecco, which seems like a liquid form of the air. We toast the cypress trees along the road and the white horse in the neighbor's field, the villa in the distance that was built for the visit of a pope. The olive pits we toss over the wall, hoping they will spring from the ground next year. Dinner is delicious. As the darkness comes, a barn owl flies over so close that we hear the whir of wings and, when it settles in the black locust, a strange cry that we take for a greeting. The Big Dipper hangs over the house, about to pour on the roof. The constellations pop out, clear as a star chart. When it finally is dark, we see that the Milky Way sweeps right over the house. I forget the stars, living in the ambient light of a city. Here they are, all along, spangling and dense, falling and pulsating. We stare up until our necks ache. The Milky Way looks like a flung bolt of lace unfurling. Ed, because he likes to whisper, leans to my ear. “Still want to go home,” he asks, “or can this be home?”

  A House and the

  Land It Takes Two

  Oxen Two Days to Plow

  I ADMIRE THE BEAUTY OF SCORPIONS. THEY look like black-ink hieroglyphs of themselves. I'm fascinated, too, that they can navigate by the stars, though how they ever glimpse constellations from their usual homes in dusty corners of vacant houses, I don't know. One scurries around in the bidet every morning. Several get sucked into the new vacuum cleaner by mistake, though usually they are luckier: I trap them in a jar and take them outside. I suspect every cup and shoe. When I fluff a bed pillow, an albino one lands on my bare shoulder. We upset armies of spiders as we empty the closet under the stairs of its bottle collection. Impressive, the long threads for legs and the fly-sized bodies; I can even see their eyes. Other than these inhabitants, the inheritance from the former occupants consists of dusty wine bottles—thousands and thousands in the shed and in the stalls. We fill local recycling bins over and over, waterfalls of glass raining from boxes we've loaded and reloaded. The stalls and limonaia (a garage-sized room on the side of the house once used for storing pots of lemons over the winter) are piled with rusted pans, newspapers from 1958, wire, paint cans, debris. Whole ecosystems of spiders and scorpions are destroyed, though hours later they seem to have regenerated. I look for old photos or antique spoons but see nothing of interest except some handmade iron tools and a “priest,” a swan-shaped wooden form with a hook for a hanging pan of hot coals, which was pushed under bedcovers in winter to warm the clammy sheets. One cunningly made tool, an elegant little sculpture, is a hand-sized crescent with a worn chestnut handle. Any Tuscan would recognize it in a second: a tool for trimming grapes.

  When we first saw the house, it was filled with fanciful iron beds with painted medallions of Mary and shepherds holding lambs, wormy chests of drawers with marble tops, cribs, foxed mirrors, cradles, boxes, and l
ugubrious bleeding-heart religious pictures of the Crucifixion. The owner removed everything—down to the switchplate covers and lightbulbs—except a thirties kitchen cupboard and an ugly red bed that we cannot figure out how to get down the narrow back stairs from the third floor. Finally we take the bed apart and throw it piece by piece from the window. Then we stuff the mattress through the window and my stomach flips as I watch it seem to fall in slow motion to the ground.

  The Cortonese, out for afternoon strolls, pause in the road and look up at all the mad activity, the car trunk full of bottles, mattress flying, me screaming as a scorpion falls down my shirt when I sweep the stone walls of the stall, Ed wielding a grim-reaper scythe through the weeds. Sometimes they stop and call up, “How much did you pay for the house?”

  I'm taken aback and charmed by the bluntness. “Probably too much,” I answer. One person remembered that long ago an artist from Naples lived there; for most, it has stood empty as far back as they can remember.

  Every day we haul and scrub. We are becoming as parched as the hills around us. We have bought cleaning supplies, a new stove and fridge. With sawhorses and two planks we set up a kitchen counter. Although we must bring hot water from the bathroom in a plastic laundry pan, we have a surprisingly manageable kitchen. As one who has used Williams-Sonoma as a toy store for years, I begin to get back to an elementary sense of the kitchen. Three wooden spoons, two for the salad, one for stirring. A sauté pan, bread knife, cutting knife, cheese grater, pasta pot, baking dish, and stove-top espresso pot. We brought over some old picnic silverware and bought a few glasses and plates. Those first pastas are divine. After long work, we eat everything in sight then tumble like field hands into bed. Our favorite is spaghetti with an easy sauce made from diced pancetta, unsmoked bacon, quickly browned, then stirred into cream and chopped wild arugula (called ruchetta locally), easily available in our driveway and along the stone walls. We grate parmigiano on top and eat huge mounds. Besides the best salad of all, those amazing tomatoes sliced thickly and served with chopped basil and mozzarella, we learn to make Tuscan white beans with sage and olive oil. I shell and simmer the beans in the morning, then let them come to room temperature before dousing them with the oil. We consume an astonishing number of black olives.

  Three ingredients is about all we manage most nights, but that seems to be enough for something splendid. The idea of cooking here inspires me—with such superb ingredients, everything seems easy. An abandoned slab of marble from a dresser top serves as a pastry table when I decide to make my own crust for a plum tart. As I roll it out with one of the handblown Chianti bottles I rescued from the debris, I think with amazement of my kitchen in San Francisco: the black and white tile floor, mirrored wall between cabinets and counter, long counters in gleaming white, the restaurant stove big enough to take off from the San Francisco airport, sunlight pouring in the skylight, and, always, Vivaldi or Robert Johnson or Villa Lobos to cook to. Here, the determined spider in the fireplace keeps me company as she knits her new web. The stove and fridge look starkly new against the flaking whitewash and under the bulb hanging from what looks like a live wire.

  Late in the afternoons I take long soaks in the hip bath filled with bubbles, washing spiderwebs out of my hair, grit from my nails, necklaces of dirt from around my neck. I have not had a necklace of dirt since I used to play Kick the Can on long summer evenings as a child. Ed emerges reborn from the shower, tan in his white cotton shirt and khaki shorts.

  The empty house, now scrubbed, feels spacious and pure. Most of the scorpions migrate elsewhere. Because of the thick stone walls, we feel cool even on the hottest days. A primitive farm table, left in the limonaia, becomes our dining table on the front terrace. We sit outside talking late about the restoration, savoring the Gorgonzola with a pear pulled off the tree, and the wine from Lake Trasimeno, just a valley away. Renovation seems simple, really. A central water heater, with a new bath and existing baths routed to it, new kitchen—but simple, soul of simplicity. How long will the permits take? Do we really need central heat? Should the kitchen stay where it is, or wouldn't it really be better where the ox stall currently is? That way, the present kitchen could be the living room, with a big fireplace in it. In the dark we can see the shadowy vestiges of a formal garden: a long, overgrown boxwood hedge with five huge, ragged topiary balls rising out of it. Should we rebuild the garden with these strange remnants? Cut them out of the hedge? Take out the ancient hedge altogether and plant something informal, such as lavender? I close my eyes and try to have a vision of the garden in three years, but the overgrown jungle is too indelibly imprinted in my brain. By the end of dinner, I could sleep standing up, like a horse.

  The house must be in some good alignment, according to the Chinese theories of Feng Shui. Something is giving us an extraordinary feeling of well-being. Ed has the energy of three people. A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name.

  THE BOTTLES ARE GONE. THE HOUSE IS CLEAN. THE TILE FLOORS shine with a waxy patina. We hang a few hooks on the backs of doors, just to get our clothes out of suitcases. With milk crates and a few squares of marble left in the stall, we fashion a couple of bedside tables to go with our two chairs from the garden center.

  We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the geometra. The translations “draftsman” or “surveyor” don't quite explain what a geometra is, a professional without an equivalent in the United States—a liaison among owner, builders, and town planning officials. Ian has assured us that he is the best in the area, meaning also that he has the best connections and can get the permits quickly.

  The next day Ian drives out with Signor Rizzatti and his tape measurer and notepad. We begin our cold-eyed tour through the empty house.

  The bottom floor is basically five rooms in a row—farmer's kitchen, main kitchen, living room, horse stall, another stall—with a hall and stairs after the first two rooms. The house is bisected by its great stairwell with stone steps and handwrought iron railing. A strange floor plan: The house is designed like a dollhouse, one room deep with all the rooms about the same size. That seems to me like giving all your children the same name. On the upper two floors, there are two bedrooms on either side of the stairs; you must go through the first room to get to the other. Privacy, until recently, wasn't much of an issue for Italian families. Even Michelangelo, I recall, slept four abed with his masons when he worked on a project. In the great Florentine palazzi, you must go through one immense room to get to the next; corridors must have seemed a waste of space.

  The west end of the house—one room on each floor—is walled off for the contadini, the farm family who worked the olive and grape terraces. A narrow stone stairway runs up the back of that apartment and there's no entrance from the main house, except through that kitchen's front door. With their door, the two doors going into the stalls, and the big front door, there are four French doors across the front of the house. I envision them with new shutters, all flung open to the terrace, lavender, roses, and pots of lemons between them, with lovely scents wafting into the house and a natural movement of inside/outside living. Signor Rizzatti turns the handle of the farm kitchen door and it comes off in his hand.

  At the back of the apartment, a crude room with a toilet cemented to the floor—one step above a privy—is tacked onto the third floor of the house. The farmers, with no running water upstairs, must have used a bucket-flush method. The two real bathrooms also are built off the back of the house, each one at a stair landing. This ugly solution i
s still common for stone houses constructed before indoor plumbing. Often I see these loos jutting out, sometimes supported by flimsy wooden poles angling into the walls. The small bath, which I take to be the house's first, has a low ceiling, stone checkerboard floor, and the charming hip bath. The large bathroom must have been added in the fifties, not long before the house was abandoned. Someone had a dizzy fling with tile—floor-to-ceiling pink, blue, and white in a butterfly design. The floor is blue but not the same blue. The shower simply drains into the floor, that is to say, water spreads all over the bathroom. Someone attached the showerhead so high on the wall that the spray creates a breeze and the angled shower curtain we hung wraps around our legs.

  We walk out onto the L-shaped terrace off the second-floor bedroom, leaning on the railing for the stupendous view of the valley from one direction and of fruit and olive trees from the others. We're imagining, of course, future breakfasts here with the overhanging apricot tree in bloom and the hillside covered with wild irises we see the scraggly remains of everywhere. I can see my daughter and her boyfriend, slathered in tanning oil, reading novels on chaise longues, a pitcher of iced tea between them. The terrace floor is just like the floors in the house, only the tile is beautifully weathered and mossy. Signor Rizzatti, however, regards the tiles with a frown. When we go downstairs, he points to the ceiling of the limonaia, just underneath the terrace, which also is caked with moss and is even crumbling in some spots. Leaks. This looks expensive. The scrawls on his notepad cover two pages.

  We think the weird layout suits us. We don't need eight bedrooms anyway. Each of the four can have an adjoining study/sitting room/dressing room, although we decide to turn the room next to ours into a bathroom. Two bathrooms seem enough but we'd love the luxury of a private bath next to the bedroom. If we can chop out the farmer's crude toilet attached to that room, we'll have a closet off the bath, the only one in the house. With his metal tape, the geometra indicates the ghost of a door leading into the farmer's former bedroom from the bedroom we'll have. Reopening it, we think, will be a quick job.