Every Day in Tuscany (11 page)

We were trying to swallow the lesson. Not only had the residents in our area been afraid to sign, they didn’t even stand up for us when we were unfairly attacked for a cause they believed in. They gave the situation the royal brush-off.
“No one reads that paper. No one believes anything in that paper.”
And weirdest of all:
“This just shows how important you are.”
Well, thanks, but I’d rather be less important if this is the benefit. To some, it was something to shrug off. Others became amnesiacs. Later, I understood. Not then.

All those fearful repetitions of
ritorsione, punizione, castigo, rappresaglia
I had heard when we passed around the petition—retribution. Oh, yes. Now I could see why everyone stayed shut up.

After the petition faded, and the brutal letter became almost a joke, the pool complex went forward. Construction was under way at the time the grenade landed in my garden. So, I’d already lost my case. Why terrorize me? Later we understood another layer of the petition issue. We learned that such an approach is simply ineffective. We learned that a letter back to the editor was similarly regarded as a waste of time. Resolution takes other paths.

“How could we not know these things?” I’d asked Ed over and over.

“Because we’ve never made waves. We’ve been happy as peas in a pod.”

“You’re mixing metaphors. And clichés. And you’re absolutely right.”

A
CROWD GATHERS
in the road. Our houseguests, who left before us, and several friends have walked down to Bramasole from Corys to see why we are late. They expected us a half hour after they arrived so they’d be ready for Ed’s entrance. Passing cars stop to see what is going on. This feels disorienting. Everyone in summer party clothes, standing solemnly in the road. As I’m thinking the same thing, Ashley says, “Can’t we rewind? Replay?” For once the Italians are speechless. Or they weigh in on the joke side—but no one touches the gravity of the grenade.

Ashley, with a small child in the house, insists that the
carabinieri
search the grounds. As a forensic psychologist, with a lot of experience with the criminal mind, she’d looked at the note and immediately said, “This is a hideous threat. And that it’s amateur doesn’t make it less serious.” We take the baby and the sitter to the Cardinalis’ house. Thinking back, I’m amazed that the babysitter didn’t say, “I am definitely out of here.
Buona notte
.”

The grenade, untouched, waits in the grass. Claudio calls the bomb squad in Florence. He promises that the men will stay overnight in the driveway and for as long as we want them. Doug, one of our guests, another forensic expert, calls a friend at the FBI and describes the event and note. The agent asks about anti-American sentiment in the area. She talks about tracing the handwriting; she reiterates that many terrorist acts are committed by the manipulated ignorant.

We telephone the consul in Florence, with whom we’ve shared a few dinners in castles and villa gardens. He says he’s never heard of such an event and asks if we want intervention. We say we’ll leave it with the local police for now, and that the bomb squad arrives tomorrow to determine if the grenade is live. We decide to send Ashley and Willie with our guests to the mountain house to sleep, if anyone can. Ed and I feel quite stalwart about staying in our house. Scared, yes, but someone out there in idyllic Cortona would be too pleased if we were driven out tonight.

There seems nothing more to do, surreal as it seems. We pick up our handbags and camera and go to the party.

On the way, I think,
I never ever will get beyond this
. I think,
Is it over for me here?
I struggle with the urge to
go, just go
. Right then. Night train to Rome, early flight to the United States.

But then we are pulling up our chairs at the long table under the awning on a brilliant summer evening. Our friends applaud us, embrace us, speculate about the perpetrator. Giuseppe pours the prosecco liberally. I remember Lina in a bronze satin dress with spaghetti straps, Chiara with her hair up, and Renato going on about fascists and fools. I remember the word
joke
bouncing from chair to chair. I begin to understand that our friends are only trying to shield us. Still it annoys, as in saying “You’re going to be fine in no time” to the ashen patient whose sands are free-falling through the hourglass.

A
SHLEY REMEMBERS THAT
the dinner was splendid. I, who remember divine meals as far back as third grade, recall nothing. I know everyone was very charged, many toasts were raised, and Ed truly did not know what the key in the little box was for. Chiara and I led him to the street where the Vespa was parked. She had tied red, green, and white bows to the handlebar, Italian flag colors. The metallic white paint shone incandescent under the streetlight, as though a lightbulb burned inside the trim form. Everyone cheered. Ed hopped on, fired up, and raced off, his white spiky hair, white suit, and white Vespa conspiring to look like an ad in the Italian
GQ
. He looked as carefree as he’d felt four hours ago. I felt a sudden sting of tears. He is the finest person; he does not deserve this. Then a surge of hot anger.

The Vespa—Fellini’s Italy. Romance and freedom. If there’s reincarnation, let me be sixteen, hair flying behind me, as I take off from the piazza. I loved giving one to Ed.

He made a U at the fork and returned, crossing an invisible border between
before
and
after
.

After

I WONDERED WHAT THE TWO
CARABINIERI
dreamed. From my study window at six, I saw them in the car below, still sleeping. Did last night really happen? The early sky, streaked with lilac light and pink-gold clouds, proclaimed its daily innocence. I spotted Ed on an upper terrace clipping something that probably did not need clipping. He was awake when it was still dark, having kicked off the sheet and several times performed a kind of turning over that seems acrobatic—levitate and flip. I probably thrashed too, flashing a thousand times on the threatened other bombs mentioned in the note.

As the
carabinieri
backed out of the drive—surely seeking espresso and a bathroom—I felt an irrational conviction: They’re gone; it’s over; erase; delete. I considered the colors of the sky, now brightening to a blue like the veins inside my grandmother’s wrist. Violet. Violence. I curled my hand into a fist, still feeling the weight of the grenade. Some things are heavier than their size suggests. I imagined heaving the grenade myself, but at what? Violence begets.
You kill one of mine, I kill ten of yours
.

By ten, the parade began at Bramasole. Everyone casually passing by stopped to chat with the
carabinieri
posted below. The chief arrived with Claudio and another handsome, fearsome specimen whose adze jaw contrasted with pouty lips. This time they’d changed from the informal summer uniform to the red-trimmed black one, signifying the formality of the visit. The chief described how the fingerprinting and handwriting analysis would be sent to Rome. “How long will it take to get the results?” Ed asked.

“Maybe two months,” the chief admitted. We nodded, dumbfounded. We didn’t say, “Christ Almighty, man, two months! Why not two days?”

“Meanwhile?”

“We will be investigating and interviewing.”

“Is there any way we can keep this out of the papers, out of the news? With all the people stopping in the road, I doubt that. But my wife would hate the publicity …” Ed stood behind my chair, his hands on my shoulders.

“We’ll do what we can.”

“Do you have any idea who did this?” I already knew he wouldn’t say, if he did know, but I wanted to see his face as he answered.

“Mmmnn. No.” He maintained eye to eye. The furrow of his frown merged his eyebrows. He didn’t even twirl the hat he held on his lap. They stood, again expressing their regret. Cortona has little crime and certainly nothing remotely like this, ever. I knew they were mortified and I was sorry to be the troublesome foreigner who attracted such an event.

Next came the young mayor, Andrea, smoking furiously, and his assistant, also Andrea. Somehow, we always laugh together. He gestures wildly, paces, acts out whatever he’s saying, and when he leaves, I’m never quite sure what actually has happened. The mayor was concerned, rightly, about negative publicity for the town. We all had visions of articles: “American Writer and Family Evacuated by CIA.” What a disaster for the hotels, the restaurants, the merchants. “Goof-ball Terrorist Lobs Grenade at Americans.” Tour buses gunning out of Piazza Garibaldi. Camera crews rolling in. He hoped the incident was a joke, although when he looked at the note, he dropped that line of thinking. No
ragazzo
, young man, in the fine Cortona schools wrote that badly. Simply impossible. But. No. Need. To worry. Everything is under control.

After friends stopped by with melons and beans, after the cicadas provided their screeching background music, after everyone stepped around the grenade in the grass and paused at the top of the driveway to admire the white Vespa, after a call to Ashley urging them to take a day trip, after expat friends asked if one of the five thousand Muslims in the province were involved in an anti-American gesture, after I stood with my back against a tree and stared into the valley below, after a morning that lasted a week, the Florence squadron arrived.

Five men in high black boots, black shirts, tight gabardine pants, and shoulder holsters stepped out of a menacing black sedan. They’d closed the road at Corys and asked us to stay inside. Good. They meant business.

After about fifteen minutes, one came to the door and told us the grenade was not live. We took some bottles of water down where they were gathering their evidence. Soon they were joking, asking about the olive trees, asking about the movie of my book. Under their fierce demeanor and serious outfits, they’re like most Italian men—gregarious, ribald, warm. I wish they would stay in the driveway all summer.

That the grenade was stripped made us feel slightly better. Gilda had her theories. Giorgio, too, but never mind. Gilda made a soup. Giorgio, who helps us here, walked the land. Usually we have fun together; I felt sorry that they had to be concerned. Ed took a rag and wiped a film of dust off his sweet Vespa until it glowed white as the moon and immaculate.

I went into town once that week and faced a repeat of the famous petition aftermath. Quite a few people, though, seemed not to have heard—or perhaps preferred to pretend. The guesses about the perpetrator, the repetition of
“fascisti,”
the arousal of old left-right political feuds going back a century (memory is long in Italy), the cynical shrugs, the certainty that someone had been hired—it was all interesting. Secret. Nothing in the open. No one spoke to us in the piazza about the grenade. We were called into tiny shops, spoken to in doorways, smiles on the faces seemingly speaking everyday greetings but really recounting an uncle’s dealings with a certain unsavory person, World War II grudges from when someone turned in a partisan, dreams of revenge over a broken rental agreement. Bewildering. “Ed, maybe it’s the architecture of the town—all the steep, dark
vicoli
[tiny streets] leading off the main street, winding into nether Cortona.”

“Really. The city as a metaphor for the collective brain.” We were in a trance all week.

The algebra we were learning: Equations that balanced to our American ways of thinking were all x’s equaling other x’s here. A small notice appeared in the Arezzo paper. Astonishing, astonishing. It said:

BOMB THREATS AT A BUILDING SITE

It didn’t explode and wasn’t able to explode: It was an old reminder of the war, an empty casing found frequently in the stalls at flea markets. Moreover, it was also without powder. That does not mean that the message wasn’t still disturbing: a hand grenade, “pineapple-type,” placed in the construction site for the building of a new sports center of the Parterre, already the focus of a thousand arguments. This particular rift has divided Cortona. The construction of the pool seems to be connected to the discovery on Saturday. It was the
carabinieri
who discovered the bomb, which was lying next to a threatening handwritten sign.

The surveys conducted by the
carabinieri
have just started and may continue: The fact is that someone made a serious gesture, someone who has decided to continue the battle against sports center by other means, other than mere words, from mountains of paper that have been filled in recent months, the mountains of speeches, pros and cons, which characterize since the beginning of the year the controversy in the city.

We couldn’t help but laugh. Our very own grenade transferred to the
pool site
. Discovered not by me in my summer party clothes but by the
carabinieri
. Not against us but against them. Oh,
mamma mia!

Who managed this and why?

T
HE SUMMER RESUMED
. I reclaimed the
centro
of my heart for my own.

What became clear over the ensuing months was that our relationship to the town changed. From the day we arrived, we were overwhelmed by friendliness and hospitality. We’d always felt totally welcome. But while we’d felt a belonging before, we got the sense that the people just now knew we really belonged, that we were here to stay, and that since we knew the worst, we could become not just
residenti elettivi
, elective residents, but familial.
“Cari, siete cortonesi.”
My dears, you’re of Cortona. Two people gave me a
corno
, the coral horn-shaped ornament that even tiny babies wear to protect them from the evil eye. One
barista
said, “I thought you only had good luck.”

Previously, I’d often been pulled aside and told a personal story. “You can write about that,” the teller would say proudly. Always there was plenty of news of liver problems, adultery, the secret nicknames that bounce around town, occult tumors, family histories, proud moments, and jokes.
After
—the level of confidences didn’t double, it cubed. I didn’t even know I was on the outside looking in until I was suddenly on the inside looking out.

W
ILLIE HAD A
fine summer. Ashley was wary of every car that passed. Me, too. Ed was reluctant to leave us alone, even to go out with Placido and the falcon. We spent more and more time at the mountain house. I began my wanderings on paths in the chestnut forest, emulating the followers of St. Francis. I often thought of Neruda’s lines:

I have to go much farther
and I have to go much closer …

Ed devoted himself to cooking. He bought me a dark red helmet and we explored back roads, bumping along on the Vespa.

Someone handed me another minute newspaper article. A large stone was heaved at night onto the vinyl bottom of the new pool, ripping it. Later, there was a false rumor that a girl was raped there. The drama continued without us. I found the clandestine workings-out of the situation very disturbing. Miss Insomnia was my permanent houseguest.

L
ONG AFTER—THE
pool was a flop. Too small. Too chilly under the majestic cypresses. I liked to think that the memorialized World War I soldiers cast a cold spell on the whole project. Mainly, too out of town, too
scomodo
, inconvenient. Ah, Sherlock Holmes, what a discovery. Ditto the pool restaurant and plans for theatrical events. The damage was done to the dreamy hillside. What everyone must live with: horrid lights like an airport (and electricity is exorbitant in Italy) and an ugly gash of turquoise on the hill that formerly resembled the landscape behind a Signorelli Crucifixion. We can’t see the site from Bramasole, but many can.