Under the Tuscan Sun (4 page)

WE'D ARRANGED FOR TWO WOMEN TO CLEAN AND FOR A BED
to be delivered
while we signed the final papers. In town we picked up a bottle of
cold
prosecco,
then stopped at the
rosticceria
for marinated zucchini, olives, roast chicken, and potatoes.

We arrive at the house dazed by the events and the
grappa.
Anna and Lucia have washed the windows and
exorcised layers of dust, as well as many spiders' webs. The
second-floor bedroom that opens onto a brick terrace gleams. They've
made the bed with the new blue sheets and left the terrace door
open to the sound of cuckoos and wild canaries in the linden trees.
We pick the last of the pink roses on the front terrace and fill two
old Chianti bottles with them. The shuttered room with its
whitewashed walls, just-waxed floors, pristine bed with new sheets,
and sweet roses on the windowsill, all lit with a dangling
forty-watt bulb, seems as pure as a Franciscan cell. As soon as
I walk in, I think it is the most perfect room in the world.

We shower and dress in fresh clothes. In the quiet twilight,
we sit on the stone wall of the terrace and toast each other and the
house with tumblers of the spicy
prosecco,
which seems
like a liquid form of the air. We toast the cypress trees along the
road and the white horse in the neighbor's field, the villa in the
distance that was built for the visit of a pope. The olive pits we
toss over the wall, hoping they will spring from the ground next
year. Dinner is delicious. As the darkness comes, a barn owl flies
over so close that we hear the whir of wings and, when it settles
in the black locust, a strange cry that we take for a greeting.
The Big Dipper hangs over the house, about to pour on the
roof. The constellations pop out, clear as a star chart. When it
finally is dark, we see that the Milky Way sweeps right over the
house. I forget the stars, living in the ambient light of a city.
Here they are, all along, spangling and dense, falling and pulsating.
We stare up until our necks ache. The Milky Way looks like a flung
bolt of lace unfurling. Ed, because he likes to whisper, leans to
my ear. “Still want to go home,” he asks, “or can this be
home?”

A
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ouse and
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and
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akes
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xen
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ays
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low

I ADMIRE THE BEAUTY OF SCORPIONS. THEY
look like black-ink hieroglyphs of themselves. I'm fascinated, too, that they
can navigate by the stars, though how they ever glimpse
constellations from their usual homes in dusty corners of vacant
houses, I don't know. One scurries around in the bidet every morning.
Several get sucked into the new vacuum cleaner by mistake, though
usually they are luckier: I trap them in a jar and take them outside.
I suspect every cup and shoe. When I fluff a bed pillow, an albino
one lands on my bare shoulder. We upset armies of spiders as we
empty the closet under the stairs of its bottle collection.
Impressive, the long threads for legs and the fly-sized bodies; I
can even see their eyes. Other than these inhabitants, the
inheritance from the former occupants consists of dusty wine
bottles—thousands and thousands in the shed and in the stalls.
We fill local recycling bins over and over, waterfalls of glass
raining from boxes we've loaded and reloaded. The stalls and
limonaia
(a garage-sized room on the side of the house
once used for storing pots of lemons over the winter) are piled with
rusted pans, newspapers from 1958, wire, paint cans, debris. Whole
ecosystems of spiders and scorpions are destroyed, though hours
later they seem to have regenerated. I look for old photos or antique
spoons but see nothing of interest except some handmade iron tools
and a “priest,” a swan-shaped wooden form with a hook for a hanging
pan of hot coals, which was pushed under bedcovers in winter to
warm the clammy sheets. One cunningly made tool, an elegant little
sculpture, is a hand-sized crescent with a worn chestnut handle.
Any Tuscan would recognize it in a second: a tool for trimming
grapes.

When we first saw the house, it was filled with fanciful
iron beds with painted medallions of Mary and shepherds holding
lambs, wormy chests of drawers with marble tops, cribs, foxed
mirrors, cradles, boxes, and lugubrious bleeding-heart religious
pictures of the Crucifixion. The owner removed everything—down
to the switchplate covers and lightbulbs—except a thirties
kitchen cupboard and an ugly red bed that we cannot figure out how
to get down the narrow back stairs from the third floor. Finally
we take the bed apart and throw it piece by piece from the window.
Then we stuff the mattress through the window and my stomach flips as
I watch it seem to fall in slow motion to the ground.

The Cortonese, out for afternoon strolls, pause in the road and
look up at all the mad activity, the car trunk full of bottles,
mattress flying, me screaming as a scorpion falls down my shirt
when I sweep the stone walls of the stall, Ed wielding a grim-reaper
scythe through the weeds. Sometimes they stop and call up, “How
much did you pay for the house?”

I'm taken aback and charmed by the bluntness. “Probably too
much,” I answer. One person remembered that long ago an artist
from Naples lived there; for most, it has stood empty as far back
as they can remember.

Every day we haul and scrub. We are becoming as parched as
the hills around us. We have bought cleaning supplies, a new stove
and fridge. With sawhorses and two planks we set up a kitchen counter.
Although we must bring hot water from the bathroom in a plastic
laundry pan, we have a surprisingly manageable kitchen. As one who
has used Williams-Sonoma as a toy store for years, I begin to get
back to an elementary sense of the kitchen. Three wooden spoons,
two for the salad, one for stirring. A sauté pan, bread
knife, cutting knife, cheese grater, pasta pot, baking dish, and
stove-top espresso pot. We brought over some old picnic silverware
and bought a few glasses and plates. Those first pastas are divine.
After long work, we eat everything in sight then tumble like field
hands into bed. Our favorite is spaghetti with an easy sauce made
from diced
pancetta,
unsmoked bacon, quickly browned,
then stirred into cream and chopped wild arugula (called
ruchetta
locally), easily available in our driveway and
along the stone walls. We grate
parmigiano
on top and eat
huge mounds. Besides the best salad of all, those amazing tomatoes
sliced thickly and served with chopped basil and mozzarella, we
learn to make Tuscan white beans with sage and olive oil. I shell
and simmer the beans in the morning, then let them come to room
temperature before dousing them with the oil. We consume an
astonishing number of black olives.

Three ingredients is about all we manage most nights, but that
seems to be enough for something splendid. The idea of cooking here
inspires me—with such superb ingredients, everything seems
easy. An abandoned slab of marble from a dresser top serves as a
pastry table when I decide to make my own crust for a plum tart. As
I roll it out with one of the handblown Chianti bottles I rescued
from the debris, I think with amazement of my kitchen in San
Francisco: the black and white tile floor, mirrored wall between
cabinets and counter, long counters in gleaming white, the restaurant
stove big enough to take off from the San Francisco airport, sunlight
pouring in the skylight, and, always, Vivaldi or Robert Johnson or
Villa Lobos to cook to. Here, the determined spider in the fireplace
keeps me company as she knits her new web. The stove and fridge
look starkly new against the flaking whitewash and under the bulb
hanging from what looks like a live wire.

Late in the afternoons I take long soaks in the hip bath
filled with bubbles, washing spiderwebs out of my hair, grit from
my nails, necklaces of dirt from around my neck. I have not had a
necklace of dirt since I used to play Kick the Can on long summer
evenings as a child. Ed emerges reborn from the shower, tan in his
white cotton shirt and khaki shorts.

The empty house, now scrubbed, feels spacious and pure.
Most of the scorpions migrate elsewhere. Because of the thick stone
walls, we feel cool even on the hottest days. A primitive farm
table, left in the
limonaia,
becomes our dining table on
the front terrace. We sit outside talking late about the restoration,
savoring the Gorgonzola with a pear pulled off the tree, and the
wine from Lake Trasimeno, just a valley away. Renovation seems
simple, really. A central water heater, with a new bath and
existing baths routed to it, new kitchen—but simple, soul
of simplicity. How long will the permits take? Do we really need
central heat? Should the kitchen stay where it is, or wouldn't it
really be better where the ox stall currently is? That way, the
present kitchen could be the living room, with a big fireplace
in it. In the dark we can see the shadowy vestiges of a formal
garden: a long, overgrown boxwood hedge with five huge, ragged
topiary balls rising out of it. Should we rebuild the garden with
these strange remnants? Cut them out of the hedge? Take out the
ancient hedge altogether and plant something informal, such as
lavender? I close my eyes and try to have a vision of the garden
in three years, but the overgrown jungle is too indelibly imprinted
in my brain. By the end of dinner, I could sleep standing up, like
a horse.

The house must be in some good alignment, according to the
Chinese theories of Feng Shui. Something is giving us an
extraordinary feeling of well-being. Ed has the energy of three
people. A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every
night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with
the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water.
On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was
not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would
discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a
house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't.
But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own
name.

THE BOTTLES ARE GONE. THE HOUSE IS
CLEAN. THE TILE FLOORS
shine with a
waxy patina. We hang a few hooks on the backs of doors, just to get
our clothes out of suitcases. With milk crates and a few squares
of marble left in the stall, we fashion a couple of bedside tables
to go with our two chairs from the garden center.

We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk
into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the
geometra.
The translations “draftsman” or “surveyor”
don't quite explain what a
geometra
is, a professional
without an equivalent in the United States—a liaison among
owner, builders, and town planning officials. Ian has assured us
that he is the best in the area, meaning also that he has the best
connections and can get the permits quickly.

The next day Ian drives out with Signor Rizzatti and his tape
measurer and notepad. We begin our cold-eyed tour through the
empty house.

The bottom floor is basically five rooms in a
row—farmer's kitchen, main kitchen, living room, horse stall,
another stall—with a hall and stairs after the first two
rooms. The house is bisected by its great stairwell with stone steps
and handwrought iron railing. A strange floor plan: The house is
designed like a dollhouse, one room deep with all the rooms about
the same size. That seems to me like giving all your children the
same name. On the upper two floors, there are two bedrooms on either
side of the stairs; you must go through the first room to get to
the other. Privacy, until recently, wasn't much of an issue for
Italian families. Even Michelangelo, I recall, slept four abed with
his masons when he worked on a project. In the great Florentine
palazzi,
you must go through one immense room to get to
the next; corridors must have seemed a waste of space.

The west end of the house—one room on each
floor—is walled off for the
contadini,
the farm
family who worked the olive and grape terraces. A narrow stone
stairway runs up the back of that apartment and there's no entrance
from the main house, except through that kitchen's front door. With
their door, the two doors going into the stalls, and the big front
door, there are four French doors across the front of the house. I
envision them with new shutters, all flung open to the terrace,
lavender, roses, and pots of lemons between them, with lovely scents
wafting into the house and a natural movement of inside/outside
living. Signor Rizzatti turns the handle of the farm kitchen door
and it comes off in his hand.

At the back of the apartment, a crude room with a toilet
cemented to the floor—one step above a privy—is
tacked onto the third floor of the house. The farmers, with no
running water upstairs, must have used a bucket-flush method. The
two real bathrooms also are built off the back of the house, each
one at a stair landing. This ugly solution is still common for stone
houses constructed before indoor plumbing. Often I see these loos
jutting out, sometimes supported by flimsy wooden poles angling into
the walls. The small bath, which I take to be the house's first,
has a low ceiling, stone checkerboard floor, and the charming hip
bath. The large bathroom must have been added in the fifties, not
long before the house was abandoned. Someone had a dizzy fling
with tile—floor-to-ceiling pink, blue, and white in a
butterfly design. The floor is blue but not the same blue. The
shower simply drains into the floor, that is to say, water spreads
all over the bathroom. Someone attached the showerhead so high
on the wall that the spray creates a breeze and the angled shower
curtain we hung wraps around our legs.

We walk out onto the L-shaped terrace off the second-floor
bedroom, leaning on the railing for the stupendous view of the valley
from one direction and of fruit and olive trees from the others.
We're imagining, of course, future breakfasts here with the
overhanging apricot tree in bloom and the hillside covered with
wild irises we see the scraggly remains of everywhere. I can see my
daughter and her boyfriend, slathered in tanning oil, reading novels
on chaise longues, a pitcher of iced tea between them. The terrace
floor is just like the floors in the house, only the tile is
beautifully weathered and mossy. Signor Rizzatti, however, regards
the tiles with a frown. When we go downstairs, he points to the
ceiling of the
limonaia,
just underneath the terrace,
which also is caked with moss and is even crumbling in some spots.
Leaks. This looks expensive. The scrawls on his notepad cover two
pages.

We think the weird layout suits us. We don't need eight
bedrooms anyway. Each of the four can have an adjoining study/sitting
room/dressing room, although we decide to turn the room next to ours
into a bathroom. Two bathrooms seem enough but we'd love the luxury
of a private bath next to the bedroom. If we can chop out the
farmer's crude toilet attached to that room, we'll have a closet
off the bath, the only one in the house. With his metal tape, the
geometra
indicates the ghost of a door leading into the
farmer's former bedroom from the bedroom we'll have. Reopening it,
we think, will be a quick job.