Under the Tuscan Sun (32 page)

Growing up in the God-fearing, faith-healing,
end-of-the-world-is-at-hand South gave me many chances to visit
snake collections beside gas stations when my parents stopped to
fill up; to drive past roadside religious ceremonies in which
snakes were ecstatically “handled”; to see shabby
wonders-of-the-world exhibits—reliquaries of sorts—in
the towns bordering the swamps. I know a box of black cat's bones
makes a powerful conjure. And that a bracelet of dimes can ward it
off. I was used to cages of baby alligators crawling on the back of
the mother of all, a fourteen-foot beauty who opened her jaws wide
enough that I could have stood in them. The sagging chicken-wire
fences couldn't save you if those sleeping logs rose up and
decided to take off after you—alligators can run seventy
miles an hour. Albino deer covered with ticks that leapt on my
hand when I petted their mossy noses, a stuffed painter (panther)
with green marbles for eyes, a thirty-foot tapeworm in a jar. The
owner explains that it was taken from the throat of his
seventeen-year-old niece when the doctor lured it out of her
stomach with a clove of garlic on a toothpick. They waited until
it showed its head, lured it out further, then grabbed, chopped
off its head with a straight razor while hauling the thing out of
Darleen's stomach like a rope out of the river.

Wonders. Miracles. In cities, we're less and less capable
of the imagination for the super real, ground down as we are by
reality. In rural areas, close to the stars and groves, we're
still willing to give it a whirl. So I recover the cobra, too, so
much more impressive with his flattened head than rattlesnakes,
whose skins paper the office of the owner of the Eighth Wonder of
the World, where we have stopped for gas at the Georgia border. We
are close to Jasper, Florida, where my mother and father were
married in the middle of the night. I am amazed, despite my
mother's warning that the owners are carnival people and it is not
worth seeing and I have exactly ten minutes or they will go on to
White Springs without me. The slight thrill at the possibility of
being left behind on this curve of road lined with moss-draped oaks,
the silverbullet trailer set up on concrete blocks, a woman glimpsed
inside, washing her hair over a tin bowl and the radio blaring “I'm
So Lonesome I Could Cry.” I knew then and still know that the man
with the phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark torch tattooed on his
back and the full-blown roses tattooed on his biceps believed his
wonders were real. I follow him to the bamboo hut, where the cobra
from darkest Calcutta rises to the song made by blowing on a comb
covered with cellophane. The cobra mesmerizes the mangy dog
thumping his tail in the doorway. The peacock gives a powerful
he-haw, shakes himself into full regalia, the blues in his fan of
feathers more intense than my own or my mother's eyes, and, as
everyone knows, we have the purest sky-blue eyes. The peacock's
eyes look exactly like the snake's. The owner's wife comes out of the
trailer with a boa constrictor casually draped around her neck. She
checks on another snake, to whom she has fed a large rat without
even cutting it up. The rat is simply disappearing, like a fist
into a sweater sleeve. I buy a Nehi and an oatmeal cookie sandwich,
run out to the Oldsmobile vibrating in the heat. My father
scratches off; gravel spumes behind us. “What have you got?”
My mother turns around.

“Just a cold drink and this.” I hold up the large cookie.

“Those things have lard in the middle. That's not
icing—that's pure-T lard with enough powdered sugar to
make your teeth crack.”

I don't believe her but when I break open the cookie, it is
crawling with maggots. I quickly throw it out the window.

“What did you see in that awful gyp joint?”

“Nothing,” I answer.

Growing up, I absorbed the Southern obsession with place,
and place can seem to me somehow an extension of the self. If I
am made of red clay and black river water and white sand and moss,
that seems natural to me.

However, living as a grown woman in San Francisco, I never
have that belonging sensation. The white city with its clean light on
the water, the pure, heart-stopping coast, and the Marin hills with
the soft contours of sleeping giants under blankets of
green—I am the awed tourist, delighted to have made this
brief escape, which is my adult life. My house is just one of
thousands; my life could be just another story in the naked city.
My eye looks with insouciance at the scissors point of the
Transamerica pyramid and jagged skyline I can see from my dining
room window. Everyone seems to have cracked the door two inches
to see who's there. I see you through my two inches; you see me
through yours. We are monumentally self-reliant.

I NEVER TIRE OF GOING INTO ITALIAN CHURCHES. THE
vaulted arches and
triptychs, yes. But each one also has its characteristic blue dust
smell, the smell of time. The codified Annunciations, Nativities, and
Crucifixions dominate all churches. At the core, these all struggle
with the mystery of the two elementals—birth and death.
We are frangible. In the side altars, the high arches, the glass
manuscript cases in the crypts, the shadowed curves of the apse,
these archetypal concerns and the dreamland of religious fervor lock
horns with the painterly subject matter in individualized ways. I'm
drawn to a bizarre painting that practically leaps off the wall. In
a dark, high panel close to the ceiling in San Gimignano, there's
Eve rising boldly out of supine Adam's open side. Not the
whoosh
of instantaneous creation I've imagined from
reading Genesis, when she appeared as easily as “Let there be
Light.” This is graphic, someone's passion to be
present
at the miracle. As graphic as the wondrous cobra of Calcutta
spiraling up in the humid air of South Georgia before my very eyes.
Adam is meat. The vision grabs the viewer like the
glow-in-the-dark torch. Now hear this, loud and clear. In Orvieto's
Duomo, Signorelli's humans, just restored to their flesh on
Judgment Day, stand grandly and luxuriously beside the grinning
skeletons they were just moments before. Parts of the body still
glow with the aura of the bare bone, a gauzy white light emanating
from the firm, new flesh in its glory. A strange turn—we're
used to thinking of the decay of the flesh; here's the dream of
rejuvenation. Flitting around in the same arena of that cathedral
are depictions of hell, green-headed devils with snaky genitals.
The damned are twisted, poked, jabbed, while one voluptuous blonde
(no doubt what
her
sins were) flies away on the back of a
devil with stunted, unaerodynamic wings. Clearly we are in someone's
head, midnight imaginings of the descent, the fall, the upward turn.
The paintings can be sublime but there is a comic book aspect to
much church painting, a wordless progression of blunt narrative
very close to those of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists who
still hold forth in the South. If there was more than one word,
Repent, hanging on those Southern pines, it was
bound to be Doomsday.

Wandering around in churches, I see over and over San
Sebastiano pierced with arrows, martyred Agata holding out her
breasts on a plate like two over-easy eggs, Sant'Agnes kneeling
piously while a lovely youth stabs her in the neck. Almost every
church has its locked relic box like a miniature mausoleum, and what
does this mean? Thorn from the crown. Finger digits of San Lorenzo.
The talismans that say to the viewers, “Hold on; like these, have
faith.” Standing in the dim crypt in a country church where a
handful of dust has been venerated for several hundred years, I see
that even today, toward the end of the century, the case is
remembered with fresh carnations. I uncover my second realization:
This is where they put their memories and wants.
Besides
functioning as vast cultural repositories, these churches map
intimate human needs. How familial they begin to seem (and how
far away from the historical church, the bloody history of the
Papacy): the coarse robe of St. Francis, another phial of Mary's,
this one filled with tears. I see them like the locket I had,
with a curl of light brown hair, no one remembered whose, the box
of rose petals on the closet shelf behind the blue Milk of Magnesia
bottle and the letters tied with frayed ribbon, the translucent white
rock from Half Moon Bay.
Never forget.
As I wax the floor
tiles and wring out the mop, I can think of Santa Zita of Lucca,
saint of housekeeping, as was Willie Bell Smith in my family's
house. Basketmaker, beggar, funeral director, dysentery sufferer,
notary, speleologist—everyone has a paradigm.
I once
was lost but now I'm found.
The medieval notion that the world
reflects the mind of God has tilted in my mind. Instead, the church
I perceive is a relief map of the
human
mind. A
thoroughly secular interpretation: that
we
have created
the church out of our longing, memory, out of craving, and out of
the folds of our private wonders.

If I have a sore throat from drinking orange juice when I
know I'm allergic to it, the saint is there in his monumental
church at Montepulciano, that town whose syllables sound like plucked
strings on the cello. San Biagio is a transubstantiated metaphor and
a handful of dust in a wrought box. Its small keyhole reminds us of
what we most want to be reminded of,
you are not out there
alone.
San Biagio focuses my thoughts and throws me beyond
the scratchy rawness of my own throat.
Pray for me, Biagio,
you are taking me farther than I go.
When the TV is out of
whack and the buttons won't improve the picture, nor
will slapping the side soundly, Santa Chiara is out here somewhere
in saintland.
Chiara,
clear. She was clairvoyant and from
there is only a skip and jump to
receiver,
to patron saint
of telecommunications. So practical for such a transcendent girl.
A statue of her on top of the TV won't hurt a thing. Next year on
July 31, the wedding ring of Mary will be displayed in the Duomo
in Perugia. The history says it was “piously stolen”—isn't
that an oxymoron—from a church in Chiusi. Without a shred
of literal belief, I, for one, will be there.

AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, I TOUCH THE SPRING WATER IN
my ceramic
Mary with my fingertip and make a circle on my forehead. When I
was baptized, the Methodist minister dipped a rose in a silver bowl
of water and sprinkled my hair. I always wished I'd been baptized
standing knee deep in the muddy Alapaha, held under until the last
moment of breath then raised to the singing congregation. My spring
water in Mary's cup is not transformed to wash away my sins or
those of the world. She always seems like
Mary,
the name
of my favorite aunt, rather than Santa Maria. Mary simply became
a friend, friend of mothers who suffered their children's pain,
friend of children who watched their mothers suffer. She's hanging
over almost every cash register, bank teller, shot giver, bread
baker in this town, and I've grown used to her presence. The English
writer Tim Parks says that without her ubiquitous image to
remind you that all will go on as before, “you might imagine that
what was happening to you here and now was unique and desperately
important .         .         . I find myself wondering if the
Madonna doesn't have some quality in common with the moon.” Yes.
My unblessed water soothes. I pause at the top of the stairs and
repeat the lovely word
acqua.
Years ago, the baby learned
to say
acqua
on the lake shore at Princeton, under a
canopy of trees blooming madly with pink pompons.
Acqua,
acqua,
she shouted, scooping up water and letting it rain on
her head.
Acqua
sounds closer to the sparkle and fall,
closer to wetness and discovery. Her voice still reverberates but now
I touch my little finger as I remember. The gold signet ring, a
family treasure, slipped off in the grass that day and was not to
be found.
Water of life. Intimacy of memory.