Under the Tuscan Sun (23 page)

Sagra
is a wonderful word to look for in Tuscany.
Foods coming into season often cause a celebration. All over the
small towns, signs go up announcing a
sagra
for cherries,
chestnuts, wine,
vin santo,
apricots, frog legs, wild
boar, olive oil, or lake trout. Earlier this summer, we went to the
sagra della lumaca,
the snail, in the upper part of
town. About eight tables were set up along the street and music
blared over them, but because of no rain the snails had disappeared
and a veal stew was served instead. At the
sagra
in a
mountain
borgo,
I came within one number of winning a
donkey in the raffle. We ate pasta with
ragù,
grilled lamb, and watched a dignified old couple, him in a starched
collar and her in black to her ankles, dance elegantly to the
accordion.

Preparations for Cortona's two-day feast start several days in
advance. Town employees construct an enormous grill in the
park—a knee-high brick foundation about six by twenty feet
and a foot high, with iron grills placed over the top, somewhat
like the barbecue pits I remember from home. On the same spot, the
grill is used later in the year for the town's
festa
for
the autumn
porcini.
(Cortona claims to use the largest
frying pan in the world for the mushrooms. I've never been here
for that
festa
but can imagine the savory aroma of
porcini
filling the whole park.) The men arrange tables
for four, six, eight, twelve under the trees and decorate with
lanterns. Little booths for serving go up near the grill, then the
ticket booth is taken out of a shed, dusted off, and set up at the
entrance to the park. Walking through, I glimpse stacks of charcoal
in the shed.

The park, normally closed to cars, is opened these two days
of the year to accommodate all the people arriving for the
sagra.
Bad news for our road, which links to the park.
Traffic pours by starting at around seven, then pours by again from
eleven on. We decide to walk in over the Roman road to avoid clouds
of white dust. Our neighbor, one of the grill volunteers, waves.

Big steaks sizzle over the huge bed of red coals. We join the
long line and pick up our
crostini,
our plates and salad
and vegetables. At the grill, our neighbor spears two enormous
steaks for us and we lurch to a table already almost full. Pitchers of
wine pass round and round. The whole town comes out for the
sagra
and, oddly, there seem to be no tourists here,
except for a long table of English people. We don't know the
people we're with. They're from Acquaviva. Two couples and three
children. The baby girl is gnawing on a bone and looks delighted.
The two boys, in the well-behaved way of Italian children, focus
on sawing their steaks. The adults toast us and we toast back.
When we say we're Americans, one man wants to know if we know
his aunt and uncle in Chicago.

After dinner, we walk through town, along with throngs of
people. The Rugapiana is jammed. The bars are jammed. We manage
to obtain hazelnut ice cream cones. A bunch of teenagers is singing
on the steps of the town hall. Three small boys toss firecrackers,
then try to look innocent of the act without succeeding. They double
over with laughter. I wait outside listening to them while Ed goes
in a bar for a shot of the black elixir he loves. On the way home,
we pass back through the park. It's almost ten-thirty and still
the grill is smoking. We see our neighbor dining with his gorgeous
wife and daughter and a dozen friends. “How long has the town
had this
sagra
?” Ed asks them.

“Always, always,” Placido answers. Scholars think the first
commemoration of Mary's feast day was celebrated in Antioch back in
370
A.D.
That makes this year's the 1,624th event for her.
Old as Cortona is, perhaps killing the white cow and serving it
forth in honor of some deity goes back even farther than that.

AFTER
FERRAGOSTO,
CORTONA IS UNUSUALLY QUIET FOR A FEW
days. Everyone who was coming to town has been. The shopkeepers sit
outside reading the paper or looking absently down the street. If
you've ordered something, it won't be coming until September.

OUR NEIGHBOR, THE GRILL MASTER, IS ALSO THE TAX COLLECTOR.
We know
the time by when he passes our house on his Vespa in the morning,
at lunch, after siesta, and as he comes home at night. I have begun
to idealize his life. It is easy for foreigners to idealize,
romanticize, stereotype, and oversimplify local people. The drunk
who staggers down the road after unloading boxes at the market in
the mornings easily falls into the Town Drunk character from central
casting. The hunched woman with blue-black hair is known as The
Abortionist. The red and white terrier who visits three butchers
to beg for scraps each morning turns into Town Dog. There's the Mad
Artist, the Fascist, the Renaissance Beauty, the Prophet. Once
the person is really known, of course, the characterization
blessedly fades. Placido, the neighbor, however, owns two white
horses. He sings as he rides by on his Vespa. We hear him clearly
because he coasts by our house on his way in. Starts the motor down
the road where the hill levels out. He keeps peacocks and geese and
white doves. In early middle age, he wears his light hair long,
sometimes tied with a bandanna. On horseback, he looks totally at
home, a born rider. His wife and daughter are unusually pretty. His
mother leaves flowers in our shrine and his sister refers to Ed as
that handsome American. All this—but what I idealize is that
Placido seems utterly happy. Everyone in town likes him. “Ah,
Plary,” they say, “you have Plary for a neighbor.” He walks
through town to greetings from every door. I have the feeling that he
could have lived in any era; he is independent of time there in his
stone house on the olive terraces with his peaceable kingdom. To
reinforce my instinct, he has appeared, my Rousseau paradigm
neighbor, at our door with a hooded falcon on his wrist.

With my bird phobia, left from some forgotten childhood
transference, the last thing I want to see at the door is a
predatory bird. Placido has a friend with him and they are
beginning to train the falcon. He asks if they can go out on our
land to practice. I try not to show the extent of my fear.
“Ho paura,”
I admit, thinking how accurate the Italian
is: I
have
fear. Mistake. He steps forward with the
twitchy bird, inviting me to take it on my arm; surely I won't be
afraid if I see the magnificence of this creature. Ed comes
downstairs and steps between us. Even he is somewhat alarmed. My
phobia gradually has rubbed off on him. But we are happy that our
Placido feels neighborly enough toward the
stranieri
to
come over, and we walk out to the far point of land with him. His
friend takes the bird and stands about fifty feet away. Placido
removes something from his pocket. The falcon extends its
wings—a formidable span—and flaps madly, rising up
on his talons.

“A live quail. Soon I'll take pigeons from the piazza,” he
laughs. The friend unfastens the cunning little leather hood and
the bird shoots like an arrow to Placido. Feathers start to fly. The
falcon devours quickly, making bloody work of the former quail. The
friend signals with a whistle and the falcon flies back to his
wrist and takes the hood. A chilling performance. Placido says there
are five hundred falconers in Italy. He has bought his bird in
Germany, the little hood in Canada. He must train it every day. He
praises the bird, now immovable on his wrist.

This sport certainly does nothing to subtract from my
impression that Placido lives across time. I see him on the white
horse, falcon on his wrist, and he is en route to some medieval
joust or fair. Walking by his house, I see the bird in its pen.
The stern profile reminds me of Mrs. Hattaway, my seventh-grade
teacher. The sudden swivel of its head brings back her infallible
ability to sense when notes were tossed across the room.

I'M PACKING FOR MY FLIGHT HOME FROM ROME WHEN A
stranger calls me
from the United States. “What's the downside?” a voice asks on the
telephone. She's read an article I wrote in a magazine about buying
and restoring the house. “I'm sorry to bother you but I don't
have anyone to discuss this with. I want to do
something
but I don't know exactly what. I'm a lawyer in
Baltimore. My mother died and         .         .         .”

I recognize the impulse. I recognize the desire to surprise your
own life. “You must change your life,” as the poet Rilke said. I
stack like ingots all I've learned in my first years as a part-time
resident of another country. Just the satisfaction of feeling
many Italian words become as familiar as English would be pleasure
enough:
pompelmo, susino, fragola—
the new names of
everything. What I feared was that with the end of my marriage, life
would narrow. A family history, I suppose, of resigned disappointed
ancestors, old belles of the country looking at the pressed roses in
their world atlases. And, I think, for those of us who came of age
with the women's movement, there's always the fear that it's not
real, you're not really allowed to determine your own life. It
may be pulled back at any moment. I've had the sensation of surfing
on a big comber and soon the spilling wave will curl over, sucking
me under. But, slow learner, I'm beginning to trust that the gods
are not going to snatch my firstborn if I happen to enjoy my life.
The woman on the other end of the line has somehow, through the
university, obtained my number in Italy.

“What are you thinking of doing?” I ask this total
stranger.

“The islands off the coast of Washington, I've always loved
them. There's this place for sale, my friends think I'm crazy
because it's all the way across the country. But you go by
ferry         .         .         .”

“There's no downside,” I say firmly. The waterfall of
problems with Benito, the financial worries, the language barriers,
the hot water in the toilet, the layers of gunk on the beams, the
long flights over from California—this is
nothing
compared to the absolute joy of being in possession of this
remarkable little hillside on the edge of Tuscany.

I have the impulse to invite her over to visit. Her desire
makes her familiar to me so that we would immediately be friends and
talk long into the night. But I'm leaving soon. As I speak to her
in her highrise office, the half moon rises above the Medici
fortress. Way up, I see the bench Ed made for me under an oak tree.
A plank over two stumps. I like to zigzag up the terraces and sit
there in late afternoons when the gilded light starts to sift over
the valley and shadows stretch between the long ridges. I was
never a hippie but I ask her if she ever heard the old motto
“Follow your bliss.”