Under the Tuscan Sun (29 page)

NOW THAT SO MUCH WORK IS FINISHED, WE TASTE THE
FUTURE.
Time is
coming when we will just garden, maintain (astonishingly, some of the
windows inside already need touching up), refine. We have a list of
pleasurable projects such as stone walkways, a fresco on the kitchen
wall, antique hunting trips to the Marche region, an outdoor bread
oven. And a list of less glorious projects: figuring out the septic
system, which sends out a frightening turnip smell when lots of
people are using the house; cleaning and repointing the stone walls
of the cantina; rebuilding sections of stone walls that have
collapsed on several terraces; retiling the butterfly bathroom.
These would have seemed major once and now just seem like things
on a list. Still, days are near when we will work with an Italian
tutor, take the wildflower book on long walks, travel to the
Veneto, Sardinia and Apulia, even take a boat from Brindisi or
Venice to Greece. To embark from Venice, where the first touch of
the East is felt!

That time is not yet, however; the last big project
looms.

S
empre
P
ietra
(Always Stone)

PRIMO BIANCHI CHUGS UP THE DRIVEWAY
in his Ape loaded with bags of cement. He jumps out to direct a large white truck
full of sand, steel I-beams, and bricks as it backs up the narrow
driveway, scraping its mirror on the pine trees and pulling off one
limb of a spruce with a loud crack. Primo was our choice for
remodeling three years ago but was unable to work then because of a
stomach operation. He looks the same—like an escapee from
Santa's workshop. We go over the project. The yard-thick living
room wall will be opened to connect with the
contadina
kitchen, which will get a new floor, new plaster, new wiring. He
nods.
“Cinque giorni, signori,”
five days. This crude
room, totally untouched, serves as a storage room for garden
furniture over the winter and as the last bastion for scorpions.
Because of earthquake standards, the opening will be only about
five feet, not as wide as we wanted. But there will be doors
opening to the outside, and the rooms, at last, will be joined.

We tell him about Benito's men running out of the house
when they opened the wall between the new kitchen and the dining
room. I'm reassured when he laughs. Will they start tomorrow? “No,
tomorrow is Tuesday, not a good day for starting work. Work started
on Tuesday never ends—an old superstition, not that I believe
it but my men do.” We agree. We definitely want the project to
end.

On evil Tuesday, we take all the furniture and books out of
the living room, remove everything from the walls and fireplace.
We mark the center of the wall and try to visualize the expanded
room. It's the imagination that carries us through the stress of these
projects. Soon we will be happy! The rooms will look as though they've
always been one! We'll have lawn chairs on that end of the front
terrace and can listen to Brahms or Bird wafting out of the
contadina
kitchen door. Soon it will not be called that
anymore; it will be the living room.

Intercapedine
is a word I know only in Italian.
My dictionary translates it as “gap, cavity.” It's a big word in
the lingo of restoring humid stone houses. The
intercapedine
is a brick wall constructed part of the way up a humid wall. A gap
due dita,
two fingers, wide is left between the two so
that moisture is stopped by the brick barrier. The
contadina
kitchen has such a wall on the far end of the house. It looks
deeper than is usual. Impatient, Ed and I decide to take down some of
it, to see if possibly the
intercapedine
could be moved
farther back toward the wall, thus enlarging the small room. As
the bricks fall, we are stunned to find that there
is
no
end wall of the house on the first floor; it was built directly
into, onto
the solid stone of the hillside. Behind the
intercapedine
we find Monte Sant'Egidio! Craggy, huge
rock! “Well, now we know why this room had a moisture problem.”
Ed is pulling out fig and sumac roots. Along the edge of the floor, he
uncovers the rubble-filled remains of a moisture canal that must have
functioned once.

“Great wine cellar,” is all I can think of to say. Not knowing
what else to do, we take a few photos. This discovery definitely
doesn't conform to the transcendent dream of a hundred angels.

Auspicious Wednesday arrives and with it, at seven-thirty,
Primo Bianchi with two
muratori,
masons, and a worker to
haul stone. They arrive without any machinery at all. Each man
carries a bucket of tools. They unload scaffolding, sawhorses,
called
capretti,
little goats, and T-shaped metal
ceiling supports called
cristi
(named for the cross
Jesus was crucified on). When they see the natural stone wall we
uncovered, they stand, hands on hips, and utter a collective
“Madonna mia.”
They're incredulous that we took the wall
down, especially that I was involved. Immediately, they go to
work—first spreading heavy protective plastic on the
floor—opening the wall between this room and the living
room. Next, they remove a line of stones along what will be the
top of the door. We hear the familiar
chink, chink
sound
of chisel on stone, the oldest building song there is. Soon, the
I-beam goes in. They pack in cement and bricks to hold it in
place. Until the cement dries there's nothing more they can do on
the door so they begin to take up the ugly tile floor with long
crowbars.

They talk and laugh as fast as they work. Because Primo is a
little hard of hearing, they've all learned to converse in a near
shout. Even when he's not around, they continue. They're thoroughly
neat, cleaning up as they go: no buried telephone this time. Franco,
who has glistening black, almost animal eyes, is the strongest.
Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come
more from will than from muscle. I watch him lift a square stone
that served as a bottom step for the back stairway. When I marvel,
he shows off a bit and hoists it to his shoulder. Even Emilio,
whose job it is to haul, actually seems to enjoy what he's doing.
He looks perpetually amused. Hot as it is, he wears a wool cap
pulled down so far that his hair all around sticks out in a ruff.
He looks to be around sixty-five, a little old for a
manovale,
manual laborer. I wonder if he was a
muratore
before he lost two fingers. As they lift out
the hideous tile and a layer of concrete, they find a stone floor
underneath. Then Franco lifts some of these stones and discovers
a second layer of stone floor.
“Pietra, sempre pietra,”
he says, stone, always stone.

True. Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant
any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan
sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic,
living poses must have come out of the most natural transference
into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone,
why not, in death, turn into it?

The next day, they open the same cavity along the top of the
door on the living room side. They call us in. Primo pokes the end of
a major beam with his chisel.
“è completamente marcia,
questa trava.”
He pokes the exposed part.
“Dura,
qua.”
It's completely rotten inside the wall, although the
exposed part is sound.
“Pericoloso!”
The heavy beam
could have sheared, bringing down part of the floor above. They
support the beam with a
cristo
while Primo takes a
measurement and goes off to buy a new chestnut beam. By noon the
I-beam on that side is in. They take no breaks, go off for
lunch for one hour, and are back at work until five.

By the third full day of work they've accomplished an amazing
amount. This morning the old beam comes down as easily as pulling
a loose tooth. With long boards held up by
cristi
on
either side of the beam, they secure the brick ceiling, knock out
stones, wiggle the beam a bit, and lower it to the floor. The new
one slides right in. What fabulously simple construction. They wedge
rocks around it, pack in cement, then pack more cement into the
small space between the beam and the ceiling. Meanwhile, two men
shovel and dig the floor. Ed, working in the yard just outside the
door, hears
“Dio maiale!”
a strange curse meaning
God-pig. He looks in and sees underneath the enormous stone Emilio
is propping up with his bar a third layer of stone. The first two
layers were of smooth, big stones, burdensome to lug out; this
layer is rough—suitcase-sized boulders, some jagged and
deep in the ground. From the kitchen, I hear alarming groans as they
upend them and roll them up a plank and dump them out the door.
I'm afraid they're going to strike water soon. Emilio carts the small
stones and dirt to the driveway, where a mountain of rubble is
growing. We will keep the giant ones. One has elongated glyphic
markings. Etruscan? I look at the alphabet in a book but can't
correlate these markings with anything. Perhaps they are a farmer's
diagram of planting or prehistoric doodling. Ed hoses off the stone
and we look at it sideways. The carving then makes perfect sense.
The Christian IHS topped by a cross, with another crude cross off
to the side. A gravestone? An early altar? The stone has a flat
top and I ask them to drag it aside; we can use it for a small
outdoor table. Emilio shows no interest.
“Vecchia,”
old, he says. But he insists there always will be a use for
such stones. All afternoon, they dig. I hear them muttering
“Etruschi, Etruschi,”
Etruscans, Etruscans. Under the
third layer they come to the stone of the mountain. By now they've
uncorked a bottle of wine and take gulps now and then.

“Come Sisyphus,”
like Sisyphus, I try to joke.

“Esattamente,”
Emilio replies. In the third layer,
they're uncovering lintels and
una soglia,
a threshold in
pietra serena,
the great building stone of the area.
Evidently, an earlier house's stones were used in building this
house. These they line up along the wall, exclaiming at the fineness
of the stone.

OUT ON ONE OF THE TERRACES, WE HAVE A STACK OF
cotto
for the floor, saved when the new bathroom was built and the upstairs
patio was replaced. We hope to salvage enough of them to use in
the new room. Ed and I pull the good ones, chip off mortar, wash
them in a wheelbarrow, and scrub them with wire brushes. We have
a hundred and eighty of them, a few of which are too pitted but
may be useful as half bricks. The men are still hauling stones.
The floor level is down about two feet now. The white truck
maneuvers up the driveway again to deliver long, flat tiles about
ten by twenty-five inches, with air channels through them. Regular
bricks are laid in ten lines on the dug-out, leveled floor, now
mostly bedrock, with some mountain rock locally referred to as
piscia,
piss, for its characteristic dribble of water in
crevices. The bricks form drainage channels. Long tiles are cemented
over them. They mix cement as though it were pasta dough—they
dump sand into a big mound on the ground, then make a hole and start
stirring in cement and water, kneading it with a shovel. On top of
the tiles, they spread
membrane,
something that looks
like tar paper, and a grid of thick iron wire reinforcement. On
that, a layer of cement. A day's work, I'd say.

We're spared the whining churn of a cement mixer. We laugh
to remember Alfiero's mixer in the summer of the great wall. One day
he mixed cement, worked awhile, then ran off to another job. When
he came back, we saw him beating the mixer with his fists; he forgot
the cement, which by afternoon was solid. We laugh now at the other
foibles of past workers; these are princes.

Plaster cracks, like the ones in my dining room in San
Francisco after the earthquake, have appeared on the second and
third floors above where the door is being opened. Some large
chunks have fallen.
Could
the whole house simply collapse
into a heap? By day, I'm excited by the project. I dream each night
the oldest anxiety dreams—I must take the exam, I have no
blue book, I don't know what the course is. I have missed the
train in a foreign country and it is night. Ed dreams that a busload
of students drives up to the house with manuscripts to be critiqued
before tomorrow. In the morning, slightly awake at six, I burn
the toast twice.

The wall is almost open. They've inserted a third steel beam
over the opening, made the brick supporting column on one side, and
have worked on the new double-thick brick wall that will separate us
from the mountain. Primo looks over the bricks we've cleaned. As he
lifts one, a large scorpion scuttles out and he smacks it with his
hammer, laughing when I wince.

Later, reading in my study, I see a tiny scorpion crawling up
the pale yellow wall. Usually, I trap them in a glass and escort them
outside; this one I just let crawl along the wall. From here, the
stone tapping of three masons takes on a strange, almost Eastern
rhythm. It's hot, so hot I want to run from the sun, as from a
rainstorm. I'm reading about Mussolini. He collected wedding rings
from the women of Italy to finance his Ethiopian war, only he never
melted them down. Years later, when he was caught trying to escape,
he still had a sack of gold rings. In one photo, he has popping
eyes, distorted hairless skull, set jaw. He looks demented or like
Casper the ghost. The
chink, chink
sounds like a gamelan.
In the last photo, he's hanging upside down. The caption says a
woman kicked him in the face. I'm sleepy and imagining the men in
an Indonesian dance with Il Duce downstairs.