The Reluctant Tuscan (13 page)

“I'm trying to tell you that we've searched everywhere and there's no indication that your house was ever registered.”

“What? What?” I demanded.

“He's saying that there's absolutely no proof our house ever existed.”

“Huh?” I turned and glared down at him. “What are you talking about, people have been living there for hundreds of years.”

“He can't understand you,” Nancy said.

“I think he can and I think he's speaking Italian just to piss me off.”

Nancy closed her eyes and bobbed her head back and forth, as if she were smashing her forehead into a brick wall.

“Just tell him what I said,” I hissed.

Nancy flicked her smile back on and spoke to him in Italian, until I stopped her.

“Wait a minute, you just used the words
mio marito
. What are you saying about ‘your husband'?”

“That you don't mean to be an asshole, but you missed lunch.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

She went on to ask how people could have been living in the
rustico
for hundreds of years if it didn't exist.

“Back then it was common to build a structure and not register it,” he explained in Italian, “and over the years no one's ever bothered. So according to law, if it's never been registered it doesn't exist.”

“Why hasn't this come up before?” Nancy asked.

“No one's ever tried to remodel it,” he replied.

“Come on, man, how can it not exist?” I said, elbowing Nancy out of the way. “Everybody in town knows it's there!”

He said something to me in Italian that was so indignant, he jerked his head and his hat went askew.

I dug a paper out of our folder and handed it to her. “Show him the title. Doesn't that prove something?”

He didn't even look at it, replying to Nancy, who turned to me and said, “Their position is: a title signed over to us is only a bill of sale. Nothing more.”

“Well, if it doesn't exist,” I said to Nancy, “ask him what difference does it make what we do to it?”

Nancy asked and was answered. Holding her throbbing temples, she told me that the law says it's illegal to alter or change an unregistered property.

“Well, it's
immoral
to approve the sale of something when you know damn well you're not going to allow any improvements,” I said.

“Honey . . .” Nancy said, tugging on my arm.

“We're only trying to make something nice out of a place no one can live in!” I cried. “Improve the neighborhood, build up the tax base and—and . . . wait till the
Los Angeles Times
hears about this!”

Nancy dragged me away before I could finish my indictment of how they ran things in this Tuscan Hooterville.

“You can't get anywhere arguing with them,” she said as we stepped over a trough of wet plaster.

“The hell you can't! Goethe lived here, you know. In Italy for three years. And he once said, ‘Be bold and great forces will come to your aid.' ”

“Listen, honey, they've been here two thousand years and they never invited you, me, or Goethe. So forget bold, that doesn't work. Let's just relax and try to figure out how to do things their way, okay?”

I
have no trouble lying to the Italians, because they're a highly imaginative people who have an ethereal relationship with the truth. They are a nation of natural-born story-tellers who love to wrap you up in their yarns. Interestingly, they tend to label such a narrative as “
una storia
,” which implies that what they are telling you can be true, made up, or a combination of the two. Often these anecdotes are long and quite intricate, carefully crafted to elicit your sympathies, or, failing that, exhaust you so you'll go away.

For instance, we have an English friend in Italy who once called a repairman because he wasn't getting any heat in his house. After examining the furnace the repairman blithely told him it was working perfectly. Trouble was the outside air was too cold.

We had a similar experience after we moved into the
rustico
and had a satellite dish installed by
Telepiù Italia
so we could watch CNN and the BBC World Service (which, incidentally, aired a documentary on the Phillips screwdriver that was quite fascinating). A few days later, however, something malfunctioned and we couldn't get any reception at all.

After many phone calls, with me screaming in Nancy's ear, a cable guy finally showed up. He looked at our equipment, jiggled a few wires, and concluded that everything was working fine. But, as I pointed out, we still had no picture or sound, strongly suggesting that he climb up on the roof and try repositioning our dish.

Since he didn't want to do that, he told us that the problem was with the transmission of our signal. Being in the communication business myself, I pressed him for specifics. He was vague and evasive enough to make me think he was vamping, so I kept grilling him because I didn't want to go another day without TV.

Finally, he leaned in close and in a confidential tone told us that the company didn't want their customers to know this, but they were having trouble with their satellite. I asked him what they were doing about it, and as he packed up his tools, he told me to just be patient. The satellite would soon be functioning again because
Telepiù Italia
had the best technicians in the world.

I immediately pictured
Telepiù Italia
's secret launching pad high in the Alps. A rocket blasts off with two Pasta-nauts and they dock with the satellite. The hatch pops open and Luigi says to Giovanni, “Okay, pass me the wrench.”

Giovanni says, “Hey, I thought you brought the wrench.”

“Doh!”

 

 

We didn't want
Umberto to know the real reason that our building permits were delayed, so in the grand tradition of
una storia
, we informed him that there'd be a slight holdup because the paperwork had to be routed to the city of Lucca for somebody's signature. It was a lie, of course, but it was a good explanation because this kind of a delay could take anywhere from two weeks to two years to resolve.

Truth was, we had made repeated appeals to the Comune to issue us an address, but we had been flatly turned down each time. We realized that we needed help, so we sought out a lawyer. After sifting through a number of recommendations, we settled on one who had the exact qualifications I always seek in an attorney: He was cheap and he spoke English. But despite his reasonable rates, when we drove up to the office of Avvocato Bonetti, I found myself agitated about paying good money to somebody whose title sounded like the key ingredient in guacamole.

The office itself was on a run-down commercial street sandwiched between a shoe repair shop and a store selling clocks. The walls were thin, so as you sat in his office, you had to conduct your business with the steady tapping of the shoemaker's hammer in one ear and the constant barrage of bells, gongs, and cuckoos in the other. If this weren't enough, Avvocato Bonetti had three cell phones on his desk, one of which was always ringing. The constant barrage of phone calls was all from members of his family. His wife called (twice), followed by his daughter, his brother-in-law, and of course his mamma.

“You think you have problems?” he said, picking up one of his cell phones. “It's nothing compared to what I have with my family. Excuse me.”

“Of course,” I said as a clock next door bonged eleven times, even though it was only twenty after two.

Each time he spoke to someone, I noticed that
l'avvocato
propped his cell phone under his chin, freeing up both hands so he could make hand gestures that the other party would never see. And he had good reason to gesture emphatically, for, as we were to learn in the course of that hour, he was struggling to find a job for a brother-in-law who hadn't worked in two years, cart around a teenage daughter who had to be driven to a clinic in Siena three times a week for an eating disorder, and console an elderly mother who kept waking him in the middle of the night to find a Siamese cat that had been dead for twenty years.

“You seem awful busy,” I said, getting up and gesturing for Nancy to follow. “Maybe we should come back some—”

“No, no, no,” he assured me, opening a desk drawer and sweeping all of his cell phones into it. “You have my complete and undivided attention.”

Nancy tugged on my shirtsleeve until I sat back down, and we proceeded to lay out our story. Avvocato Bonetti listened intently, never once distracted by the muffled rings of the various cell phones from inside his desk drawer. Then he leaned back in his chair, rubbed his chin, and told us that the problem we were facing could take months to resolve. Maybe years. But not to worry, over the course of three centuries our house must have been identified in some surveyor's report or perhaps a geological survey. There had to be a record of it. And once we had that, we'd have enough evidence to file an appeal, which we could win!

By now I had the makings of a fine headache brewing behind my eyes, and with the few brain cells I had left, I was ready to summon my arm to throw in the towel. But Nancy was smiling, her eyes glinting like a bird of prey's at the prospect of proving that, at least in this part of Tuscany, you
can
fight City Hall.

Avvocato Bonetti buzzed his intercom, and a moment later a young lady entered. This was his sister, Avvocatessa Bonetti, apparently the only person in his family he wasn't at odds with. She would help us search the old city records to find any trace of such a transaction. Meanwhile, Avvocato Bonetti told us that he would speak to the head of urban planning for the entire Frazione di Lucca. Perhaps he could be persuaded to look the other way.

We were perplexed. Was he suggesting a bribe? And if so, did they take American Express? He was vague, even though influence peddling is not illegal in Italy. The only crime associated with such an action is if you take money on the promise you can fix something and you fail to do so.

We arranged to meet Avvocatessa Bonetti at the Comune archives, thanked them both, and said our good-byes.

My head was ringing louder than Big Ben at high noon, but as we headed for the car I was determined to tell Nancy how ready I was to dump the house. I decided to soften her up by first telling her about my headache, but before I could get to the part where it was most likely an inoperable brain tumor, she suddenly wrapped her arms around me.

“Do you know how great it is that you're here with me?” she said.

“Me? What do I do?”

“A lot, and even if you did nothing, just you being with me makes me feel like I'm not fighting everybody all by myself. I know this is hard on you, but I just want you to know how much I really appreciate you being on my side.”

“Hey, that's what being a couple's all about,” I said.

She smiled and my brain tumor was miraculously healed.

M
y behavior at the Dipartimento della Licenza and the lawyer's office made Nancy feel that I was becoming as stressed-out here as I had been in Hollywood, and she worried that I was in danger of missing all the joys of living in Italy. A change of scenery might help, so when I managed to scorch the Teflon off our favorite frying pan, it gave us the perfect excuse. We decided to splurge and buy a new one in
rame
, copper. And when you buy copper, everybody knows that you must take a
giro
(a trip) to Montepulciano and buy from Signor Mazzetti.

The drive to Montepulciano took us through some of the most serenely beautiful wine country in all of Chianti. Soft, rolling hills, as sublimely curved as a Stradivarius violin, spread out before us as the land pulsed with the greening of early summer growth. Rigid rows of grapevines ran like spokes to the horizon. Tall, spindly cypress trees swayed in the wind, and from everywhere at once came the smell of sun-warmed earth and budding Sangiovese grapes.

I was trying to let the palpable sensations of the land wash through me and sweep away my cares, but the very vehicle we were sitting in reminded me of our problems. Without an address to register it, we couldn't buy a car. So for the past two months we had been renting a Fiat Punto at twenty-four euros a day. Do the math and you'll quickly discover why Avis owns a sixty-seven-story high-rise in Manhattan and you don't.

A more imminent threat, however, was not money but death. Italians drive with a ferocity usually connected to a blood sport—horns blasting, brakes screeching, gears grinding—and that's just getting out of the driveway. Two thousand years ago these maniacs would have been racing chariots around the Circus Maximus, but today all their horses are under their hoods, as they roar past each other in pursuit of a laurel wreath from some long-forgotten past.

I was grateful that Nancy was behind the wheel and not me. Being far more familiar with both the terrain and the temperament, she did the driving and navigating, while I was charged with the all-important tasks of selecting the appropriate CD and turning off the air conditioner when she went to pass somebody on a hill.

The problem with driving in Italy is basically this: Cars and Vespas come at you so suddenly and from such unexpected angles that a driver all by himself is easily overwhelmed. My theory is, to drive safely in this country requires at least two other people in the car, a tail gunner and a wingman. Even then, it's precarious because eighty-five percent of the drivers in Italy drive much too fast, while fifteen percent drive much too slow. Of course, the too-fast drivers are obsessed with passing the too-slow drivers on roads that are ancient, narrow, and winding. This would be dangerous enough, but throw in the inordinately large number of huge trucks and those odd little three-wheeled putt-putts, comically overloaded with bales of hay and various farm implements, and you begin to get a sense of the peril.