Under the Tuscan Sun (33 page)

Intimacy.
The feeling of touching the earth as
Eve touched it, when nothing separated her.

In paintings, the hilltop town rests in the palm of Mary's
hand or under the shelter of her blue cloak. I can walk every
street of my Georgia town in my mind. I know the forks in the
pecan trees, the glut of water in the culverts, the hog pear in
the alley. Often the Tuscan perched villages seem like large
castles—extended homes with streets narrow as corridors,
and the
piazze,
like public receptions rooms, teeming
with visitors. The village churches have an attitude of privacy;
the pressed linen and lace altar cloths and scarlet dahlias in a
jar could be in family chapels; the individual houses, just suites
in the big house. I expand, as when my grandparents' house, my
aunt's, my friends', the walls of home were as familiar to me as
the lines in my own palm. I like the twisted streets up to the
convent where I may leave a bit of lace to be mended on a
Catherine wheel, spin it in to the invisible nun, whose sisters
have tatted in this great arm of the castle for four
hundred years. I do not glimpse even the half moons of her nails
or the shadow of her habit. Outside two women who must have known
each other all their lives sit in old wooden chairs between their
doorways and knit. The stony street slopes abruptly down to the
town wall. Beyond that stretches the broad valley floor. Here
comes a miniature Fiat up this ridiculously steep street no car
should climb. Crazy. My father would drive through swollen streams
that flooded sudden dips in the dirt roads. I was thrilled. While
he laughed and blew the horn, water rose around the car windows. Or
was the water really that high?

We can return to live in these great houses, unbar the gates,
simply turn an immense iron key in the lock and push open the
door.

S
olleone

SOLLEONE. HOW USEFUL THE -ONE SUFFIX
in Italian; the noun
expands.
Porta,
door, becomes
portone,
and there's no doubt which is the main door.
Torre
becomes
torreone,
the name of our part of Cortona, where a great
tower must have stood once.
Minestrone,
then, always is
a big soup. Days of the sun in Leone (Leo):
Solleone
—big sun.
Dog days we called them in the South. Our cook told me the name was
because it was so hot that dogs went mad and bit people and I would
be bitten if I didn't mind her. Eventually, I was disappointed to
find the name only meant that Sirius, the dog star, was rising and
setting with the sun. The science teacher said Sirius was twice the
size of the sun and I thought, secretly, that somehow the heat was
augmented by that fact. Here, the expanded sun fills the sky, as in
the archetypal child's drawing of house, tree, and sun. The cicadas
are in the know—they provide the perfect accompaniment to
this heating up. By dawn they're hitting their horizon note of
high screech. How a finger-sized insect can make such a racket
only by vibrating its thorax, I don't know. As they tune up to
their highest pitch, it sounds as though someone is shaking
tambourines made from the small bones of the ear. By noon, they've
switched to sitars, that most irritating of instruments. Only the
wind quiets them; perhaps they must hang on to a limb and can't
clutch and vibrate at the same time. But the wind seldom blows,
except for the evil appearance now and then of the
scirocco,
which gusts but doesn't cool, while the sun roars. If I were a cat,
I would arch my back. This hot wind brings particles of dust from
the African deserts and deposits them in your throat. I hang out
the clothes and they're dry in minutes. The papers in my study
fly around like released white doves, then settle in the four
corners of the room. The
tigli
are dropping a few dry
leaves and the flowers suddenly seem leached of color, although
we have had enough rain this summer that we have been able to water
faithfully every day. The hose pulls water directly from the old
well and they must feel blasted at the end of the hot day by the
rush of icy water. Perhaps this has exhausted them. The pear tree
on the front terrace has the look of a woman two weeks overdue. We
should have thinned the fruit. Branches are breaking under the weight
of golden pears just turning ruddy. I can't decide whether to read
metaphysics or to cook. The ultimate nature of being or cold garlic
soup. They are not so far apart after all. Or if they are, it doesn't
matter; it's too hot to think about it.

The hotter the day, the earlier I walk. Eight, seven, six
o'clock, and even then I rub my face with number thirty sunblock.
The coolest walks start at Torreone. A downhill road leads to Le
Celle, a twelfth-century monastery where Saint Francis's minute
cell still opens onto a seasonal torrential stream. Many of the
first Franciscan monks who lived as hermits on Monte Sant'Egidio
started Le Celle in 1211. The architecture, a stacked stone honeycomb
up against the hillside, recalls their caves. When I walk there,
peace and solitude are palpable. In early summer, the rush of water
down the steep canyon makes its own music and sometimes, above that,
I hear singing. By now the stream is almost dry. Their vegetable
garden looks like a model. One of the Capuchin friars who lives
there now trudges uphill barefooted toward town. He's wearing his
scratchy brown robe and strange pointed white hat (hence cappuccino),
using two sticks to pull himself along. With his white beard and
fierce brown eyes, he looks like an apparition from the Middle Ages.
When I pass him he smiles and says,
“Buon giorno, signora.
Bene qua,”
nice here, indicating the landscape with a rotation
of his beard. He glides by, Father Time on cross-country skis.

But I take the slightly uphill road this morning, passing a few
new houses, then a kennel, where dogs go into an uproar until I am
about five feet beyond their pen; the road is then just a white track
through pine and chestnut forests, no cars, no people. The shoulders
look as though someone scattered one of those cans of native
wildflowers seeds and they all took root, then flourished. I climb
a hill to look at an abandoned house so old that it still has a
thick slate roof. Brambles surround the doors and windows. I glimpse
dark rooms with stone walls. In front, I look down on a 180-degree
view of Cortona in profile and on the entire length of the Val di
Chiana, a yellow and green patchwork of sunflower and vegetable
fields. The upstairs must have a low ceiling, right for a crude bed
made of chestnut limbs, a white goose-down quilt. The terrace should
go there—in front of the lilac bushes. A pink rose still
blooms its heart out without any care at all. Whose was it? The
wife of a silent woodcutter who smoked his pipe and drank
grappa
in the winter evenings when the
tramontana
shook the windows on the back of the house? Perhaps she growled at him
for sticking her so far in the country. No, she was content with her
work embroidering the linens for the
contessa.

The house is small—but who would stay inside when
there's a broad terrace overlooking the world? The waiting house:
all potential. To see one and start dreaming is to imagine being
extant in another version. Someone eventually will buy it and
perhaps will run all over Tuscany looking for old slate to restore
the roof authentically. Or the new owner might rip off the roof and
put on flat new tiles. Whatever the predilections, the owner will
respond to the aerie's isolation, that and the magnetic pull of
the panorama, a place to linger and soothe the restless beast
every day.

At the end of the road, a path through the woods leads to our
favorite Roman road. I suppose it was laid by slaves. When I first
heard about the Roman road near our house, I assumed it was unique.
Not long after that I saw a rather thick book on the many Roman
roads of this area. Walking alone, I try to think of chariots tearing
down the hill, though the only thing I'm likely to meet is a
cinghiale,
a wild boar, roaming around. One stream still
has a trickle of water. Maybe a Roman messenger verging on heat
stroke paused here and cooled his feet, as I do, when running south
with news of how Hadrian's wall was coming along. There have been
more recent visitors; on the grassy bank, I see a condom and a
wad of tissue.

When I walk into town, I see a shriveled, pasty man who,
clearly, is dying. He has been propped in the doorway with the
sun fully on him, his last chance for revival. He spreads out his
fingers on his chest, warming everything he can. He has enormous
hands. Yesterday I received a shock so hard my thumb went numb for
half an hour. I was trying to pull the cord that turns on the
overhead light in my study from the inside of the radiator, where
it somehow had fallen. The clicker I had hold of split, leaving me
with my thumb on the hot wires, my other hand on the metal radiator.
I screamed and jumped back. That mindless, animal feeling of
shock—I wonder if the man in the doorway feels that way in
the sun. His life force siphoning off, the great solar energy
coming at him, filling him up. His wife sits beside him and appears to
be waiting. She's not mending or pinching back her flowers. She's his
guard for his trip to the underworld. Perhaps she'll dry his dead
body, then anoint his bones with olive oil and wine. Or maybe the
heat is getting to me, too, and he's just recovering from an
appendectomy.

WE MUST GO TO AREZZO, ABOUT HALF AN HOUR AWAY, TO
pay our insurance
for next year. They seem to expect us to turn up rather than send a
check. We park in the broiling train station lot. The station's
full-sun digital thermometer-clock says it is 36°(97°F). After our pleasant interview with Signor Donati,
an ice cream, a stop for Ed to buy a shirt at his favorite store,
Sugar, and one for me to buy hand towels at my favorite shop,
Busatti, we come back to the car and find the big 40
(104°)
flashing over the car. The door handles appear to be on fire. The
heat inside slams into us. We air out the car and finally get in.
My eyelids and earrings are hot. Ed touches the steering wheel
with his thumbs and index fingers. My hair seems to be steaming.
Stores are closing; it's the hottest part of the hottest day of the
year. At home, I lower myself into a cool bath, wet washcloth over my
face, and just lie there until my body takes on the temperature of
the water.

Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the
windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the
floor. If I am mad enough to take a walk after one-thirty, no one
is out, not even a dog. The word
torpor
comes to mind. All
shops close during the sacred three hours. If you need something for
bee sting or allergy, too bad. Siesta is prime time for TV in
Italy. It's prime time for sex, too. Maybe this accounts for the
Mediterranean temperament versus the northern: children conceived
in the light and children conceived in the dark. Ovid has a poem
about siesta, written before the first millennium turned. He's
lying relaxed in sultry summer, one shutter closed, the other ajar,
“the half-light shy girls need,” he wrote, “to hide their
hesitation.” He goes on to grab the dress, which didn't hide much.
Well, everything is always new under the sun. Then, as now, a quick
wash in the bidet and back to work.

What a marvelous concept. For three hours in the middle of
the day, you are invited to your own interests and desires. In the
good part of the day, too, not just the evening after an eight- or
nine-hour day slogging away.

Inside the high-roomed, shuttered house, it's completely
silent. Even the cicadas have quit. Peaceful, dreamy afternoon.
Partly for the pleasure of my feet sliding on soothing
cotto
floors, I walk from room to room. The classic look—I've seen
it eleven times before and now I see it again in the new living
room: dark beams, white brick ceiling, white walls, waxy brick
floors. To my eye, the rugged textures and the strong color contrasts
of the typical Tuscan house create the most welcoming rooms of any
architectural style I know. Fresh and serene in summer, they look
secure and cozy in winter. Tropical houses with bamboo ceilings
and shuttered walls that open to catch every breeze, and the adobe
houses of the Southwest, with their banquettes and fireplaces that
are rounded like the curves of the human body, impart the same
connected sense:
I could live here.
The architecture
seems natural, as if these houses grew out of the land and were easily
shaped by the human hand. In Italian, a coat of paint or wax is a
mano,
a hand of that substance. Before the plastering
started, I noticed Fabio's initials scratched in a patch of wet
cement. The Poles, I remembered, wrote POLONIA at the base of the
stone wall. I wonder if archaeologists find many reminders of the
anonymous hands behind enduring work. On the wall of the prehistoric
Pech Merle cave in France, I was stunned to see handprints, like
ones children make in kindergarten, above the spotted horses. The
actual “signature” of the preliterate artist outlined in blood,
soot, ashes! When the great tombs of Egypt were opened, the footprints
of the last person out before the entrances were sealed remained in
the sand: the last work finished, a day's work over.

A butterfly, trapped inside, bats and bats the shutter but does
not find the way out. As I fall asleep, the fan drones, a shimmering
head looking left and right.

I LOVE THE HEAT. I LOVE THE EXCESSIVE INSISTENCE. SOMETHING
in me says
yes. Maybe it's only that I grew up in the South, but it feels like
a basic yes, devolving back to those old fossil heads of the first
people who came into being under a big sun.