The Reluctant Tuscan (28 page)

I also liked it because when some bloodthirsty
tafano
tried to bite me on the cheek I could drive it away by turning the hose on myself with a delicate cooling spray instead of a blast of water powerful enough to rip off my eyebrows.

I had also convinced myself that my favorite nozzle was more economical than the other. With two straight months of temperatures in the nineties (thirties, Centigrade) and no rain for weeks, we were forced each night to soak the garden down till it was as flooded as a rice paddy. By midmorning, as the water evaporated, the ground was caked hard enough to dribble a basketball on.

The Comune hadn't sent us our first water bill yet, but judging by how people complained about theirs, I was figuring that each tomato we grew was costing us at least thirteen dollars.

 

 

By the time
we got to the beach at the Lido di Cambione, traffic was backed up all the way to Sicily. I dropped Nancy off in the shade of a tall umbrella pine and left her sitting on our cooler as I drove around in our rented Fiat Punto looking for a parking space. I considered myself luckier than had I been born Ringo Starr when I found a spot a mere two and half miles from the Bagni Veronica, where each year Dino and his family celebrate the holiday.

This is a routine of Ferragosto that Italians slavishly follow. Unlike in America, where we are accustomed to public beaches, here, they are few and far between. Instead, the entire coastline, it seems, is lined with private
bagni
, which is the plural of
bagno
, meaning “bath” or “bathhouse.” In layout they're all pretty much the same. The fancier ones have swimming pools and video machines for the kids, but they all have a restaurant/snack bar, rows of small changing rooms, and walkways that lead you to a fenced-off area of the beach. These walkways are lined with clusters of beach chairs and chaise longues, each under the cover of either
un ombrello
or
una tenda
, a tent.

Dino had rented one of the largest
tende
they had, and it was barely sufficient to shade him; his wife, Flavia; their son, Rudolfo, and his girlfriend, Pia Tughi; cousins Faustino, Spartaco, Turrido, and Aldo; along with Aldo's mamma, plus the “pious” Cousin Monica, with her “mythically gifted” children, Leonardo, Rafael, and
la bimba
Artemisia. And, of course, no family gathering would be complete without aunts Nina, Nona, and Nana, who were covered in so much black they looked like they were dating a Muslim cleric.

Mercifully, Dino had not brought along all twelve of his dogs, selecting only two—Torpedo and Luna—to take up space on the blanket, their tongues hanging out and their furry bodies casting off more heat than a pair of Franklin stoves.

The population density under the tent was no worse than that on the rest of the beach, since the month of August signals the time when all the large Italian cities empty out and everyone with the time, the money, or a relative living anywhere near the Med comes to the coast. This is also the time of year that the fair-skinned people of Northern and Eastern Europe begin their annual invasion of Italy. This onslaught was first begun by Attila the Hun, but has now been continued by the Swedes, the Danes, the Brits, and, more recently, the Russians, the Hungarians, and the Poles.

It was, in fact, this collection of long-legged blond women in bikinis that distracted Cousin Spartaco, who had been sent out to find us. As a result, Nancy and I had to wander up and down a crowded beach looking for Dino and his brood. This was not easily negotiated, since Nancy's arm was in a cast and I was limping across the scalding hot sand as I struggled to carry a cooler full of victuals. In contrast to all the robust sun-worshipers, we looked like a pair of refugees from an orthopedic ward who had been taken to the seaside to air out.

“Hey, hey, over here!” somebody yelled.

I heard English over the babble of a United Nations worth of voices, and I turned to see Rudolfo waving his arms at us.

We slogged off in their direction as Dino, Flavia, and an assortment of cousins and dogs came out from under their shade to hug us, kiss us, and lick our hands. Our cooler was taken and combined with an already belly-bursting collection of edibles, and space was somehow found for us under the tent, which was now as hot and crowded as any back alley in Calcutta.

And like any back alley in Calcutta, it was also teeming with intrigue. Cousin Aldo was fretting with his mamma over his bathing attire. Though I'm all for self-expression, I could well understand her aggravation over a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound man with a huge gut wearing a skimpy red Speedo that barely covered his butt and showed his penis sticking out like one of those little pencils they give you when you play miniature golf.

At the same time Nina, Nona, and Nana were berating Cousin Fausto for leaving the family for long stretches of time to sit in the snack bar listening to a motorcycle race on the radio; Cousin Turrido was hollering at Leonardo and Rafael for kicking sand on his
insalata con funghi
while they played Marco Polo; and Flavia was accusing Monica of being a negligent mother because she was too involved in her trashy novel to notice that
la bimba
Artemisia had crawled over to Torpedo, stuck the dog's tail in her mouth, and was sucking on it like a pacifier.

But the main event was what was going on between Rudolfo and Pia. More accurately, what was
not
going on between them. They sat on the blanket with their backs to each other, hardly like boyfriend-girlfriend. Dino cast me a sharply pointed look urging me to intervene. When I blankly stared back at him, he resorted to a hand gesture, putting his flattened hand, palm down, in his mouth and biting down on it, to let me know how much he hated what was going on.

“Yo, dude, let's go check out the water,” I said to Rudolfo, more to get away from Leonardo and Rafael, who had managed to step on my swollen ankle three times already.

Rudolfo needed no more coaxing than that to spring to his feet.

“L'acqua fa male,”
Flavia scolded, reminding him that he had just eaten and any contact with the water would bring about his instant death.

Rudolfo kissed his mamma and assured her that we were just going to look at the sea and maybe stick in a toe.

But Flavia wasn't convinced. She urged Pia to go along and make sure we two boys didn't do anything foolish. I was happy to note that no one had referred to me as a boy for twenty years, but Pia looked peeved. She flashed an angry look at Rudolfo and commented that he was old enough to take care of himself . . . or at least, he should be.

Rudolfo's eyes went hard and he stormed off. I caught up with him, and as we threaded our way through the throng, I tried to engage him in conversation, even though it was difficult to hear over the clamor of a beachful of Italians laughing and talking with their usual exuberance.

“Everything okay with you guys?” I said.

He shrugged.

“Seems like Pia's on your case.”

He flicked three fingers under his chin, which means “I could care less.”

“Yeah, women,” I clucked, allowing my focus to settle on a magnificent Italian girl who was sunbathing topless.

“Why is she never happy with the way I am?” he finally said. “If she loves me, why is she always trying to change me into something else?”

“Beats me.”

“They're so complicated. They say one thing and do another.”

As if to underscore the mixed messages we get from them, the girl I had been watching raised her arm to reveal an un-shaved armpit that looked like it belonged to Charles Bronson.

“Why is it I can be with a man and he's okay with me just how I am, but every time I'm with her we get into a fight?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Sometimes it feels like we're from two different tribes.”

“And yet, we're expected to pick one and live with them for the rest of our lives.”

“Crazy, isn't it?”

“I can't do it,” he said, stopping an errant soccer ball with his foot and kicking it back to the players. “I can't marry her.”

“Okay . . .”

“I mean, I love her. But more like a friend and—and, look, I met somebody.”

“Oh, man, you got to tell her.”

“Telling
her
is not the problem,” he said. “My father's going to freak. And Mamma . . .”

“You know what? They're going to scream and holler and it may get ugly for a while, but eventually they'll get used to it.”

He started to say something, but whatever he was about to tell me got swept away by the sudden uproar of electrified cheering, hooting, and laughing. And as loud as that was, it was all but drowned out by the commanding sound of a thunderous drumbeat. The source of this raucous euphoria was a vast army of young men, maybe two or three hundred, marching down the beach in lockstep, each holding a red plastic bucket upside down under one arm as they pounded out a beat on it with the flat of their hands. The actual moving mass of humanity was almost double that size when you included the giggling young girls and excited little kids cheering them on.

I was witnessing the spectacle the Italians call
gavettone
, and for reasons no one's quite sure of, it's only played out on this day, on beaches and piazzas,
maggiore
and
minore
, all over the country.

This particular army proceeded up the beach until it encountered another army heading in the opposite direction. Then, the two opposing legions broke into a furious water fight, hurling buckets of seawater at each other in a pitched battle that lasted over an hour. After everyone was sopping wet and laughing, the armies disengaged, reassembled, and continued their drumbeat march in opposite directions.

As this was going on, people all over the beach were also deploying their buckets, either individually or in small groups. There is particular pleasure in sneaking up on someone reading a book, or taking a nap, and dousing him. Some more aggressive males have perfected the art of dashing their bucket of water with sufficient force and at the proper angle to take down the bottom of a girl's two-piece bathing suit.

But that's about as aggressive as it gets. As I witnessed this, and got hit by more than one bucket of cold water, I couldn't help marveling at what a joyous, fun-loving way this was to channel natural male aggression in a ritualized mockery of how, for centuries, rival city-states and religious factions had slaughtered each other with pike and musket.

Rudolfo and I
borrowed some buckets, and while we were joining in on the madness, Nancy was getting Pia's thoughts on their relationship. When their conversation became the interest of too many ears, they left the
tenda
and took a walk to the snack bar. Pia confided that she loved Rudolfo but she wasn't sure about marrying him. He could be sweet, but he was such a
mammaiolo
, a mamma's boy. In a society of forty-year-old men who routinely live with their mothers, it's a sad indictment of anybody who can earn such a distinction as being singled out as a
mammaiolo
.

But Nancy's advice was to try and be more understanding. Men are immature by nature, she counseled, citing numerous examples of my behavior for the record. But the good news was, with the right woman, a guy can sometimes learn to get it right. They talked like this for a long while, and as they headed back to the
tenda
, Pia was beginning to feel that with enough patience and love, Rudolfo could possibly become a stable, responsible adult.

Needless to say, Rudolfo chose that exact moment to sneak up from behind and dump a bucket of water on her head.

I
f you're ever going to spend any amount of time in Italy, there is an expression you should know that comes up with greater frequency than
grazie
and
arrivederci
. The phrase
ritorno subito
is not usually spoken but is more commonly rendered on a homemade sign hanging on the door of a store or an office. It means “be back soon,” and the chances of that sign appearing will be in direct proportion to how urgently you need to get inside the establishment. It is also relevant to consider how the Italians define the concept of
soon
. Long before Einstein, the Italians proved not only that time was curved, but in the right hands it could be bent into more shapes than elbow macaroni.

And so it was that we found ourselves staring at yet another
Ritorno Subito
sign, this one hanging on the door of the office of Avvocatto Bonetti. We hadn't started the day by planning to be tapping our feet in front of our lawyer's office, but this is how events unfolded.

Earlier that morning we had driven over to Tito Tughi's Auto Mundo Repair Shop to see what was going on with our VW. There wasn't much to see, since it was in the exact same state as it had been on the night that gentleman from Massa T-boned our car and turned it into so much scrap iron. Signor Tughi was not around, and the Tughi brothers didn't seem to know anything about it, so I demanded to see Pia, getting so aggravated that my swollen ankle began to throb.