The Reluctant Tuscan (18 page)

Just then the roar of a motorcycle heralded the arrival of Rudolfo. Taking a bounce off of a ravine, he popped a wheelie and executed a flashy state-police stop right at our feet. He dismounted, and disregarding Dino scolding him for being late and needing a haircut, he shook everybody's hand and planted a polite peck on Pia's cheek.

 

 

By the time
we had finished haggling over the price, filling out the paperwork, receiving the temporary registration, and arranging for the insurance, it was dark. It had been a long day, but at last we felt that our lives were moving.

“He doesn't love her,” Nancy said as she downshifted the Popemobile and we whipped around a curve.

“You think?”

“I didn't feel any heat.”

“Well, they've known each other since they were kids,” I said.

“Hey, unless you're jumping out of your skin every time you see somebody, you shouldn't marry 'em.”

“You mean, like us?”

She smiled.

I was struck by how beautiful she looked, illuminated by the dashboard lights. “You know, after all these years I'm still jumping out of my skin.”

“Yeah?”

I moved closer.

“Hey, stop that, I'm driving,”

“Pull over,” I whispered, indicating the wooded area ahead.

“No!”

“Come on, let's do something really sacrilegious in the backseat.”

“Leave me alone, you perve,” she giggled as she flicked on the turn signal.

T
he actual construction on our house began in a most inauspicious way. One morning we were walking up the hill to our
rustico
in the cool hours before the sun burned off the pink baby blanket of fog that lay across the town. As we approached, we began to hear a steady tapping noise that, if we hadn't known better, sounded like a woodpecker that preferred rocks over trees. We spotted the squatting figure of Carlo, one of Umberto's workers, chipping away at a softball-sized stone with a ball-peen hammer. With the dexterity of a Neolithic hunter fashioning a spear point, he was chiseling the stone until it was the perfect shape to fit into one of the many holes in the ancient stone wall that surrounded our property.

We called out to him and he waved. Carlo was a fleshy, wide-bodied guy with warm eyes and a shy grin. He told us that Ivano was also here working, and that after lunch Umberto himself would show up with Silvio, the other member of the crew.

We were elated. True to his word, Umberto was managing to be at two places at once, and how he was able to sneak his guys out from under Vesuvia Pingatore's nose, we had no idea. But work had started and we hoped the house would be finished before we got too old to climb up the hill to get to it.

Over the course of the time it took to restore the house, Umberto and his guys, Carlo, Ivano, and Silvio, became a steady part of our existence. We ate lunch together under the shade of a gnarled old olive tree, met their parents, wives, and children, and attended family weddings, confirmations, and funerals. From the beginning we established a cordial relationship when Nancy asked if we could address one another as
tu
, because, as in many Romance languages, you must be granted permission before you can refer to an Italian in the informal manner. Unlike Americans, who are world famous for our informality, the Italians are very rigid about this, using the more formal
le
to address anyone older, more educated, or in a socially superior position, unless he is the prime minister of their country—and then they speak to him as if he were the Antichrist.

We also gave each other nicknames. I became Fellini because of my penchant for videotaping the progress on the
rustico
. Nancy was
la donna della casa
(the lady of the house), but her confrontational style with the Comune and anyone else who stood in our way quickly earned her the nickname Rompicoglione. The verb
rompere
means “to break” and
coglione
is slang for testicles. The expression these two words form, however, is somewhat less confrontational in Italian than it is in English. Over here, this appellation is most commonly bestowed on those with the ability to make themselves into a real pain in the butt. Either way you translate it, Nancy was so proud of her sobriquet, she often introduced herself by that title.

Of course we also gave as good as we got. We quickly noticed that Carlo and Ivano had decidedly predictable responses to anything that we asked. To the biggest and most complex problem Carlo would nod and say,
“Va bene”
—“Okay”—and to the smallest and most piddling request Ivano would gravely shake his head and reply,
“C'è un problema”
—“There's a problem.” So they became respectively Va Bene and Problema.

Silvio, the third worker, came with his own nickname. Because he was a nice-looking guy in his late twenties with shaggy hair and Don Johnson stubble, who was mildly indifferent to his job and preferred to conserve his energies for club hopping and hustling women, the town had dubbed him Il Vagabondo.

Despite his penchant for coming to work from a different direction every day and nursing a chronic hangover until noon, I enjoyed his insouciant, lounge-lizard attitude and I was delighted when he told me that he wanted to learn English. We came up with a plan where I spoke to him in Italian, he spoke to me in English, and we both learned from each other.

I was impressed with his ambition, thinking that perhaps he wanted to get into computers or do carpentry work for some of the many Brits who had settled around Lucca. But his real need was far more pragmatic. Vagabondo's objective was to meet a rich American woman and become her gigolo. In time she would fall madly in love with him, take him back to the States, and they would live together in a mansion just like the one on the TV show
Dallas
. As a result of his dream my job was to teach him how to tell a woman that she was beautiful, they were meant for each other, and he had a
cazzo
the size of a baby's arm.

There was never
any discernible pattern to the work. Some days nobody showed up. Then suddenly the whole crew would be there with more heavy equipment than Hitler had when he invaded Poland. Mostly, though, when we took the ten-minute walk from the house we were renting from Dino to the
rustico
, we'd discover that Vagabondo was there by himself chucking broken terra-cotta tiles off the roof, or that Problema was using a hand ax to split apart a rotting beam, although he was quick to tell us that he was only doing this because Umberto had told him to, and that our house would probably fall down.

Coincidentally, the issue of our house falling down became a constant topic of conversation with Umberto. He minced no words in suggesting that the
rustico
's collapsing was a distinct possibility. Once he tried to intimate that this could actually be a good thing, since building a new house from scratch would actually be easier, faster, and cheaper. But Nancy shot him one of her
rompicoglione
looks, and the subject was never broached again.

To better understand the construction problem we were facing, try to imagine a two-story structure made of thousands of stones held together by whatever form of mud, sand, and ash they were mixing three hundred years ago. Over the years as the hill above the house eroded, vast amounts of earth slid down and piled up behind and on the sides of the house. So much dirt, in fact, that one could literally jump out the second-story window and only fall six feet. Over the years this earth became hardened and impacted so it, more than anything else, was holding the house together.

You're probably way ahead of me in realizing that in order to restore the house, the tons of earth holding it up would, of course, have to be removed. We began cautiously, with shovels and wheelbarrows, but it soon became apparent that doing the job that way would put us on a time frame comparable to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. So on a fine Sunday morning Umberto drove up in a flatbed truck that was hauling an enormous steam shovel. He somehow got the entire rig up our narrow little road. Climbing into the cab, he fired up the earthmover, drove it off the flatbed, and proceeded to carefully excavate the mound. Nancy and I did our best to haul away wheelbarrow-fulls of earth but the frenetic Umberto picked up his pace and started clearing dirt like he was on a mission from God.

Over the roar of the diesel and the whirring of the power arm came the ominous sound of stones being wrenched apart. Nancy and I gasped as a jagged crack suddenly appeared on our back wall, and for a moment the house quivered as if it were about to collapse into a pile of rocks and rotting beams.

Nancy accused Umberto of doing this on purpose, and he argued that he was just trying to get the job done quickly because they were charging us for the machinery by the hour. All of this was being hollered back and forth as Umberto turned the earthmover around until for a moment it was coming straight at us. We scurried out of the way just as he pivoted the arm so that the flat edge of the bucket rested flush against the sidewall of the house, literally holding the entire structure together.

After a moment to catch our breath in the haze of swirling dust and diesel fumes, the three of us cautiously entered the house. The crack had come completely through a wall that was over twenty inches thick. It ran like a hideous scar from about the middle of the kitchen wall all the way up to the roof. At its narrowest it was pencil thin, but it spread as it climbed until it was wide enough to stick your fist through without scraping your knuckles.

We stood there gazing at it as if we were seeing some vertical Grand Canyon for the first time. Then Umberto, who had been studying the crack up close, beckoned us over. He pointed to a clump of what looked like matted weeds imbedded in caked mud.

His eyes widened in reverence as he explained that we were looking at a mixture of straw and clay that made up a wall
inside
our stone wall. This was how we learned that our house had been built over the shell of a far more ancient structure, a primitive house with daub walls and a thatched roof where serfs had cowered in the darkness from capricious feudal lords and the Black Plague.

According to its cornerstone the oldest church in town was built in 1250 A.D., about a hundred years after Cambione was founded. People were obviously living here even before then, so we had accidentally discovered that our little
rustico
could be over a thousand years old!

Clearly this house had gone though many adaptations over the years, a fact made evident, for instance, by the faint outline of a wide opening that had once existed where one of the kitchen walls now stood. This opening was called the cattle door, and in cold weather the livestock was herded inside through it, so that they would not only be protected from the cold night air, but their bodies could also warm the house for the people sleeping on the floor above them. And all of this was done, mind you, hundreds of years before the invention of the room air freshener.

Another clear indication of its longevity was the four distinct patterns of stonework, one on top of the other, on the walls of the bedroom on the second floor. Each change marked a point where the roof had been raised because people kept getting taller. These renovations seemed to end somewhere around the time Lord Byron came drinking and debauching his way through these parts about two hundred years ago. There is no record, of course, that Lord Byron was ever in our house, since anyone he could have drunk or debauched with was too illiterate to write it down, and the goats weren't talking.

 

 

We were staring
at the crack in our wall when we heard Umberto dialing his cell phone.

“Who are you calling?” Nancy asked in Italian.

“Well, my father, for one. He would be very interested.”

My Italian was good enough to understand that the way Umberto loved to kibitz, the revised age of our house would be all over town before the church bells rang for noon Mass.

“We can't tell anybody about this,” Nancy said, as I nodded in agreement behind her.

“But this is important,” he said, as he reluctantly hung up. “Big news for the town.”

We hadn't shared with Umberto any of our difficulties with the Comune for fear he wouldn't want any part of our troubles, but we had to let him know that this would only make things worse. If the Comune found out the true age of this place, they'd shut us down immediately and turn the whole site over to the Dipartimento di Archeologia.

“You know, Umberto,” Nancy said, “I'll bet even the Pingatores don't know how old this is.”

“That's possible,” he mused.

“Which makes me think that if they did, Vesuvia would get even madder that her brother sold it. She'd yell at him, and who knows what she'd do to you for sneaking over here to work with us.” Nancy made a
malocchio
at him.