The Reluctant Tuscan (21 page)

That's preposterous, we sputtered. Except for making it slightly larger, we were spending a fortune trying to preserve the traditional stonework of the
rustico
. All they had to do was look at all the schematics and blueprints we filed with them, which their own architects had approved!

“What you file and what you build may be two different things,” Marco Mucchi said, giving Nancy a look that was both admiring and a little flirty. “Everybody knows how clever you Americans are.”

“We're not that clever,” Nancy said indignantly. “I mean, we love that old house and we want to honor it.”

“It's a rumor,” I added, happy to finally be able to use the word
chiacchiera
, even though I probably mispronounced it.

“Well, there's a little more to it than that,” he said, nodding gravely.

“Such as?”

He unhooked the wire-rimmed glasses from around his ears, and as he wiped off the sweat with a paper napkin, he looked around to make sure no one was listening. “Well, for one, why does Umberto get so mysteriously quiet when anybody asks him what's going on up at your house?”

Nancy and I looked at each helplessly. We had gotten trapped in the irony of trying to cover up one thing, only to have it come back at us in another form.

“I think he's just tired,” Nancy said. “You know the heat's been so—”

“On any other topic you can't shut him up.” Marco Mucchi held his ears to indicate being barraged by a torrent of Umberto's words. “But when it comes to your house . . .” He zipped his lips shut.

“Chi sa?”
I said, showing off my fluency. Who knows?

“And what about Vesuvia Pingatore?” Marco Mucchi asked. “Why does she suddenly decide, after all these years, to make her stone walls so much higher?”

“She hates us and she doesn't want to look at us,” Nancy countered.

“Or . . . maybe she doesn't want to look out her window every day and have to stare at a three-story aluminum-and-glass California beach house,” he said.

“Look,
signore,
” Nancy said, reverting to the formal tense to let him know that this was all about business. “We have been nothing but nice to that woman. And you cannot believe how rude she's been!”

Marco Mucchi shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“Weeks ago we offered to buy that small olive grove at the top of our hill,” she told him as he nodded. “And she never even had the decency to respond to our offer!”

“Actually, she called and asked if I would tell you that she respectfully declines your offer. She wants to keep that land in her family.”

“And what about the bas relief Nancy made for her?” I asked indignantly. “Did she also want to keep that in her family?”

Marco Mucchi shrugged.
“Boh.”

“Signor Mucchi,” Nancy said, fighting back the tears like Meryl Streep in every movie she'd ever been in, “if we wanted a three-story aluminum-and-glass California beach house, we would have stayed in California. We love it here and we love our
piccolo rustico
. And we would never do anything to violate the tradition of that house. How can we prove that to you?”

 

 

Unfortunately, we couldn't.
The only way we could prove we were honoring the house was to finish it and the only way we could finish it was for the Comune to unblock our funds, which they refused to do. The term
zum zug
came to mind. It's a German expression that's used in chess, and it means every way you move, you lose.

“
O
ooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

I was meditating.
Yeah, really. Sitting cross-legged on the floor with my eyes closed, I was concentrating on closing off my mind to everything but the flow of my own breathing. And according to this book I had ordered through Amazon UK,
Meditation for Morons,
I was well on my way to aligning my chakras, resonating my prana, and wandering serenely through the landscape of my own consciousness. Except the left side of my butt had gone numb, and there was a bird in the backyard making a constant, and I mean constant,
Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo
sound.

I'll admit I don't know much about wildlife, but from watching things like Animal Planet I've learned that ninety-nine percent of everything that animals (and presumably humans) do is to either catch food or procreate. In my wildest imagination I couldn't imagine anything that would allow this damn bird to get close enough to eat it or screw it when he kept going
Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo
24/7/365.

Did I mention that I wasn't supposed to be thinking about anything?

“Oooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmm nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

Aw, the hell with it. This was hopeless, I realized as I unknotted my legs and got up. Look, it's not as if I wasn't trying. I had gotten into this meditation thing when I started going to a yoga class taught by a Swiss lady. Her class was quite popular with Cambione's yuppies (or, as they pronounce it: YOU-pees), and on any given night you might find as many as twenty-five people there. But much to the dismay of our Swiss
professoressa
, the Italians approached this discipline with a rather cavalier attitude. While I was sweating and grunting in a comic attempt to twist my creaking body into shapes that would only be desirable if you wanted to have sex with yourself, the Italians were acting much as if they were in a café, laughing and chatting throughout the entire session. I half expected them to light up cigarettes and start sipping cappuccino.

 

 

My best efforts
to view life through the tranquility of my third eye had been singularly unsuccessful, and I found myself increasingly stressed out over our situation. As if that weren't bad enough, I was also feeling guilty for not being as happy as a loon because I was living in a place that most people can only dream about. Even in the best of times I'm about one broken shoelace away from a nervous breakdown anyway, so this was really taking a toll on me.

You see, the issue of money was ever on our minds, creating a state of
zizzania
(discord) between Nancy and me. With the Comune blocking the funds we had earmarked for remodeling, we had no other resources to draw from. We did our best to shield Umberto from our situation, so he and his guys would keep working as Nancy and I scrambled to turn up some cash.

I barraged my agent with e-mails and kept dreaming up more and more macho catchphrases. He wrote me back with the usual platitudes about being out there every day trying to sell my script, but how tough the market was these days.

The only encouraging thing he ever said was how much he enjoyed that e-mail I had written to him about Tuscany. In spite of the fact that I had chronicled all the charming ways things don't work around here, it made him and his wife even more eager to come. Unfortunately, he was so busy at the office (presumably with the clients he
could
find work for), they probably wouldn't be able to get here until late in the year. And by the way, did I know a cozy little B and B in Siena where he and his wife could enjoy a romantic Christmas?

These e-mails made me feel more like a travel agent than a writer, but at least they had opened a new avenue of communication between us. So I sent him back the names of a few B and Bs, as well as more impressions of Italy, like how every time I came back here from America it took me weeks to reset all my default commands. Expectations had to be lowered and appreciation widened so that I expected to do less in a day, but appreciated each thing more.

Meanwhile, Nancy rented a space at a local marble studio and began carving a statue she thought she might have a buyer for. The marble studio she worked in was a large open space the size of a warehouse. Yet it felt claustrophobic, due to the towering blocks of raw stone and the half-sculpted human figures that were scattered throughout the area like huge oak trees in a forest. There were life-sized angels and nightmarishly proportioned gargoyles. Fluted columns of creamy alabaster and ceiling-high pillars made from a Russian onyx as black as sable.

As many as a dozen sculptors and
artigiani
worked there at one time, and the din of air compressors and hammers striking chisels was thunderous. In the midst of all this glorious confusion and serious concentration, people laughed and shouted over the jet-engine howling of the machines and the unsynchronized clanging of hammers playing a version of the “Anvil Chorus” at warp speed.

One wall of the studio was hung with a collection of body parts . . . arms, legs, torsos, hands, and feet that would have been macabre if they weren't so beautiful. They were plaster models, some dating back to the fifteenth century, and the sculptors, using calipers to scale up or down to whatever size they wanted, used them for reference points when they couldn't get a live model.

I entered and ratcheted down my senses to adjust to the dim light, the mind-throttling noise, and the burning smell of stone being ground into powder. Stepping around a coarse wooden trestle that was cluttered with chisels, mallets, drill bits, and air hammers, I spotted Nancy. I tried to call out, but my throat was already hoarse from the marble dust that hung in the air like a cloud and was rendered in shades of ivory by the sunlight that streamed in through flyspecked skylights that were never opened.

“Hey,” I croaked as I approached.

Nancy smiled as she looked up from the torso she was smoothing with a rasp. I smiled back because she was so covered in marble dust she looked like she had been rolled in powdered sugar.

“You did a lot today,” I said, walking around the statue.

“It's getting there.” She took off her goggles to reveal the face of an albino raccoon.

I put my arm around her, and we walked over to the opened, garage-sized doors where it was a lot quieter.

“I spoke to Ike,” I said.

“Oh, how is he?” she said, unzipping her jumpsuit and letting the top fall around her waist.

“Worried. In all the years he's been doing our books, he's never seen it like this.”

“We're broke?”

“We're getting there.”

“So you, and Ike, think it's time to sell?”

I nodded and turned away to get a drink out of the water fountain, because I didn't want to see the look she was giving me. I swallowed, and with my head still down, I said, “I know it'll mean taking a loss, but in the long run—”

“A loss? That house should be worth a lot.”

I straightened up and faced her with narrowed eyes. “What house are you talking about?”

“Brentwood.”

“You don't want to sell the one here?”

“No! I thought you were talking about—”

“I don't want to sell the one in Brentwood!”

“It's the only thing we got that's worth anything,” she said.

I should have known it would come to this. For the past few weeks she had been talking about refinancing that house and pulling some money out. But I was nervous about taking on large monthly payments when neither of us had a salary coming in. She argued that it would be a short-term loan that we'd pay off when the Comune unblocked our funds . . . but what if that, like everything else in Italy, took years?

Then we started talking about renting it out, long term. That would certainly help with our cash flow, but do little to give us the amount we needed to finish the
rustico
.

“I'm not ready to sell that house,” I said emphatically. If I had been holding one of those sculptor's hammers, I think I would have banged on something.

“I knew it was too good to be true,” she said. “You're still dreaming about Hollywood.”

“That's not it,” I snapped, even though it probably was.

“All right, honey,” she said soothingly. “Let's not get all worked up over it.”

I took a deep prana breath like, yeah, that was going to help.

“I don't know, would it hurt just to find out what that house is worth these days?” she said. “Couldn't we at least look into it?”

“I can't stop you, it's half yours.”

“Aren't you just a little curious about what the housing market's like back there?”

I knew what she was doing. When a frontal assault doesn't work, pull back, and come at it from the flanks. Introduce the idea and get the other person used to it little by little, like boiling them alive by turning up the temperature of the water very slowly. Oh, yeah, I knew what she was doing, because it was something I did all the time.

 

 

It was so beastly hot
that only mad dogs, Englishmen, and fools who owned broken-down houses in Italy were out in the noonday sun. Nancy was inside helping Umberto and the guys tear up the old flooring so we could put in terra-cotta bricks, while I was hauling debris down to where we were dumping it at the bottom of the hill.

I was mopping my brow in between gulps of water, as Vagabondo filled my wheelbarrow with shovelfuls of dirt and broken concrete. We were talking about women, and he was telling me about a girl he had met at the disco. Even though he liked her and they had really hit it off, he suspected that from the wild way she danced she was a
bicicletta
. That's a term the local boys use to describe a woman who's so easy, it doesn't take a car to get her into bed, she'd go off with a guy who only owns a bicycle.

Nancy, Umberto, Va Bene, and Problema drifted outside. They were breaking for lunch, and as they sat down in the shade and unwrapped their sandwiches, Nancy motioned for me to sit beside her. I told her I was just going to take this last load to the bottom of the hill, because I was afraid once I sat down, I'd never get up again.