Seven Seasons in Siena (14 page)

Ideally, of course, I'd have met up with Dario on arrival and gone back to his place to freshen up and dump my luggage, but Dario's not here to provide stopover services. In fact, he's been on my home turf, the great Midwest, touring to promote both the latest pressing of his Rasna olive oil and his new memoir,
Too Much Tuscan Wine
.

He's set to return to his native soil this afternoon, and accordingly I booked my flight for the same day, so that I could avail myself again of his hospitality. What I hadn't counted on was him having a later arrival time than me—several hours later, in fact. But that's how it's worked out, and for that reason we've arranged to meet at the contrada tonight, where there's a cena scheduled—a Dinner with the Captain, one of a regular series hosted by Gianni Falciani. Tonight's event is called
Gli Assassini di Gianni
—The Assassins of Gianni, “assassins” being another term applied to the jockeys of the Palio. And in fact there's a pair of special guests scheduled: the fantini who won the last three Bruco victories, Trecciolino and Gingillo. Gingillo's father, who raced for the Caterpillar in 1972, will also be on hand, though more in the position of proud parent than special guest.

But in the meantime, I'm on my own and saddled with my suitcase—which seems to be inexplicably adding heft and weight with each mile I march.

I head for the contrada, remembering the vitality of the street life there; my hope is that I'll run into someone I know. But though a few faces do look either familiar or approachable, I'm suddenly aware of how I myself must appear, bursting unannounced onto these well-ordered thoroughfares, the wheels of my suitcase creating the kind of racket that sends flocks of pigeons into frightened flight.

So instead I take refuge on the Campo, where I won't look at all out of place, since it's inevitably crawling with tourists. It's actually good to be back there; it still strikes me as one of the loveliest,
shapeliest
public spaces in the world, with its masculine outlines softened by the feminine slope of the piazza and its forbidding wall of stone muted by rich earthen colors.
Seated at an outdoor café, I sink into a kind of temporal torpor; I've looked out on this vista so many times, it can feel as though everything I've experienced outside it is just something I've daydreamed while sitting here.

Feeding this illusion is the lack of any intrusion by the natural world. There's a distinct chill in the air; autumn holds full sway. But you'd never know it from outward appearances; there are no trees to shed their leaves, no lawns to run brown. The only visible indications of the season are the jackets and hats being worn by those who've come here.

I order up a prosecco, and the waiter brings me, as an accompaniment, a dish of tiny sandwiches, each about the size of a matchbox and irresistibly good. It occurs to me that more of them may arrive if I order more prosecco. Which is in fact the case—thus sating both my hunger and my thirst as I sit beneath the shade of the umbrella and write at length in my notebook on the subject of how to define “homecoming”—whether the determining factor is whether the place you've returned to
feels
like home, or whether you have to have in fact actually lived there.

By the time the sun has meandered low enough to warrant a return trip to the contrada, I'm feeling pretty good even though my brand-new wallet is distressingly lighter. There it is, the bane of every international traveler: it's at least several days before you can treat those pretty little leaflets as money. Euros are especially problematic because they come in different sizes, so the smaller denominations can get tucked away inside the larger ones; you get to the point where even if you can't see them, you just expect them to be there. Then, later on, you peel away some fifties and twenties and are utterly dejected to find no fives or tens smiling up at you.

Navigating Via del Comune proves unusually harrowing. Every time I return, I'm surprised anew at the steepness of this street, and as I begin my descent, my bag pulls up from behind me and goes skittering on ahead, almost yanking my arm from its socket. I have to wrestle it back under control and continue the journey as though I've got a lion on a leash. I've lately learned that the brucaioli actually do hold a dinner out here—each year on the night before the extraction of the three additional contrade to run the Palio. I can't imagine how they manage it. The tables must be set up on meticulously calibrated stilts. I'd like to see it, someday; though it will certainly be a dinner for which I do
not
volunteer for table service.

The Società's doors are open, and the lights are on. There's a coatrack, so I can finally stow my bag, and once I'm free of it I feel loose and limber and ready to rumble, like a boxer just entering the ring. It's still a bit early to expect Dario to be here, but I don't feel I need him. I can talk to anybody. I don't promise they'll entirely understand me, but I'm up to it.

It's the first time I've been here in autumn; it hadn't occurred to me that the chill night air might not be optimal for dining al fresco. And in fact the garden is empty. But I find rows of tables set up inside, in a large room I've never noticed before, across from the entry to the museum. A lot of women and teenagers are striding purposefully around its perimeter, laying place settings and unfolding chairs, and I feel a momentary impulse to offer my help; but then I see Silvia overseeing the preparations, and the recollection of how I performed the last time she engaged my services steals all my resolve. Instead, I decide to look for a bar.

The place is filling up now, lots of people coming in and
being hailed by friends and colleagues; bear hugs, double kisses … you'd think they hadn't seen each other in months, though they were probably all here just a few days ago. It's wonderful to see, but once again forbidding to encounter from the outside. Coats are shirked, circles are formed; the women seek out tables or sofas where they can sit and confer while the menfolk all make their way around the corner, where there's a TV and … a bar! It's pretty thick in here—thick and loud—but I insert myself into the mix anyway and make my way to the counter, where I hope to buy a little popularity by ordering up a round for myself and whoever might be so fortunate as to be at either elbow. I catch the bartender's eye—and I can see the momentary flicker of
who the hell is that?
before he starts making his way over.…

 … And that's when I get out my wallet. And remember that there's nothing much left in it.

So I melt back into the crowd, slide my way past the various backs and buttocks, grab my coat, and head back outside to find an ATM. As I ascend Via del Comune, I pass little knots of people on their way in to the dinner. I recognize some of their faces, and it's clear that one or two recognize mine—or think they do; but they must then convince themselves they're wrong, because what would a Palio whore like me be doing here in November, and besides I'm going the wrong way. (The Sienese actually have a term for those who turn up only at Palio time:
tregiornisti
, or three-dayers.)

By the time I return, the dining room has begun to fill up. There's no sign yet of Dario, and I become aware that I'm faced with the unenviable prospect of finding someone to sit with. I'd hoped to grease my way into a party at the bar, but returning there now I find everyone tossing back their last
mouthfuls. As I approach the counter I see, at last, a familiar face—that of Dario's friend Luigi, who sees me and furrows his brow. “You're a bit of a lurker, aren't you?” he says.

“How do you mean?”

“Furtive,” he says. “You're here, then you're not here, then you're here again.” He makes an embarrassing little creeping gesture with his hands curled under his chin. Obviously he saw me come in, doff my coat, and enter the bar; then come in again, doff my coat again, enter the bar again. Admittedly odd behavior, especially for someone who's basically an uninvited guest. I decide not even to attempt an explanation; nothing at all would be gained by it. Instead we make small talk for a few minutes—he asks how things are in America, as Italians often do, and I feel a momentary twinge of guilt that I can only really answer for my little corner of it; I've got to start paying more attention to what's going on in, say, Appalachia, or the Pacific Northwest.

Then he finishes his drink and leaves the bar—but does
not
go to the dining room, so I can't follow him to his table and plonk myself down with him and his friends, which had been my diabolical plan. Instead I'm left on my own, looking at the rows of tables, all of whose chairs seem happily filled, and the metaphor of being an outsider seems suddenly, appallingly concrete. I'm just thinking that maybe I'm not really hungry anyway and maybe, if I am, more tiny sandwiches on the Campo would do the trick, when who should appear, like an angel of mercy in a shiny white leather coat, but Luigina, impossibly stylish as ever and still the only person in this city who will actually shout my name with pleasure.

We embrace and kiss and exchange a few pleasantries, and then she says to me, “You need a place to sit?” And she starts
looking around for someone into whose care she might deliver me; but as her eyes scan the room I can see her tally up four or five other people she has yet to greet—and I realize she's the president's wife, she has better things to do than look after me. Plus, I'm a grown man, for God's sake. So I tell her thanks, I'm fine, and send her off to fulfill her duties as hostess.

This suffuses me with a warm feeling of maturity and self-sacrifice but leaves me with my original dilemma. The volunteer waitstaff is in circulation now, serving the antipasti course. It's now or never.

Is there a more formidable task than inserting yourself into a group of tightly knit strangers in a place you don't belong? Yes, as it happens: inserting yourself into a group of tightly knit strangers in a place where you don't belong
and
you're lucky if you understand thirty percent of what anyone says to you. I force myself to put this into perspective: “We live in an expanding universe, rapidly succumbing to thermo-dynamic entropy; in five billion years the sun will go nova and none of this will matter anymore.” So I dive in.

After a quick and increasingly disheartening tour of the room I get lucky and spot an open seat right across the table from Giuliano Ghiselli, the writer and TV host I met a few months back. I'm not at all surprised to find a place opposite him, because that may be the most vulnerable spot in the room; Giuliano is a handsome, silver-haired fellow, outwardly congenial, always smiling; seeing him amble up the street, you'd never think to be on your guard. But even a brief acquaintance is enough to reveal that his intellect is fierce, and he has the eyes of a warrior—they glint with readiness for combat. Fortunately for me, I'm so ill equipped an opponent
he'll almost have to view me as a kind of charity case—like an idiot cousin or a friendly dog.

I reintroduce myself, and he flatters me by remembering me—he's not the type who would pretend otherwise if he didn't—so I'm welcomed to the table and meet the other men flanking him, who are all very welcoming. I've found my place, I can relax for a moment; and even better, there's a heaping platter of tuna bruschette to be dealt with.

Dinner proceeds apace—the next courses are polenta with meat sauce, braised beef, and white beans dressed with olive oil; have I mentioned that they eat
very
well in the contrada?—and Giuliano holds forth in so engaging a manner that it's distressing not to have any idea what he's talking about. He's got everyone around him in stitches. Once I make the mistake of laughing along as though I'm in on the joke, and he directs an additional bit of commentary directly at me, so that I'm forced into a series of ridiculous feints—dropping my food on my thigh, fussing with my napkin, pretending my cellphone is ringing. The problem, I eventually discern, is that Giuliano, being among other things a linguist, incorporates wordplay and witticisms into his everyday patter, which for a nonnative listener can feel a lot like being at the very end of an especially lengthy crack-the-whip. I mean, I really
have
made strides in my Tuscan, but I'm not anywhere near the point where I can twig to double entendres. I'm reminded of the time I took my friend Paola, a native Genovese, to a performance at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater; the play was
Love's Labour's Lost
, which is pretty much three acts' worth of Elizabethan puns, making it a challenge even for native English speakers. But for Paola, it was like slogging through mud into a swarm of bees. Right here, right now, I feel her pain.

After a few mouthfuls of wine I'm feeling quite contented and am even having conversations with some of my neighbors—specifically a dapper, genial fiftysomething named Enrico, who seems amused by not knowing what to make of me. He can't figure out why I'm here, and when I say “This, exactly this,” I can tell he thinks I mean the polenta; so I make a sweeping gesture to take in the entire room and accidentally thwack a passing
nonna
right in the tush.

Before I can make too many such gaffes, everyone's attention is called to the head table. It's time for this Dinner with the Captain to be turned over to the host. Gianni is the opposite of Giuliano: reserved, terse, taciturn. It suits him and suits his role in the contrada—the captain being essentially the head coach, the man responsible for the actual performance at the Palio and thus the steward of the jockeys, the guardian of the horses, the handler of the super-double-secret negotiations, and so on. He needn't dazzle or charm, but he'd better be formidable. And Gianni certainly is; I've yet to dare to speak a word to him.

Gianni makes a few brief opening remarks and then introduces the special guests: Trecciolino, aka Gigi Bruschelli, who won the August 2003 and July 2005 Palii, both times riding the beloved Berio; and Gingillo, aka Giuseppe Zedde, who won last August riding Elisir di Logudoro.