Under the Tuscan Sun (6 page)

IF THE GUN IS ON THE MANTEL IN CHAPTER ONE, THERE MUST
be a bang by
the end of the story.

The former owner had not just affirmed the bounty of water,
he had waxed lyrical. It was a subject of great pride. When he
showed us around the property's borders, he'd opened a garden
faucet full blast, turning his hands in the cold well water. “This
was a watering spot for the Etruscans! This water is known to be the
purest—the whole Medici water system,” he said, gesturing
to the walls of the fifteenth-century fortress at the top of the hill,
“runs through this land.” His English was perfect. Without doubt,
he knew about water. He described the watercourses of the mountains
around us, the rich supply that flowed through our side of Monte
Sant'Egidio.

Of course, we had the property inspected before we bought
it. An impartial
geometra
from Umbertide, miles away
over the hills, gave us detailed evaluations. The water, he agreed,
was plentiful.

While I am taking a shower after six weeks of ownership, the
water slows, then trickles, then drips, then stops. Soap in hand,
I stand there without comprehension for several moments, then decide
the pump must have been turned off accidentally, or, more likely,
the power has gone off. But the overhead light is on. I step out
and rub off the soap with a towel.

Signor Martini drives out from his office bringing a long
string marked with meters and a weight on the end. We lift the
stone off the well and he lowers the weight.
“Poca
acqua,”
he announces loudly as the weight hits bottom. Little
water. He hauls it up, black roots hanging off, and only a few inches
of string are wet. The well is a measly twenty meters deep, with a
pump that must have ushered in the Industrial Revolution. So much
for the expertise of the impartial
geometra
from Umbertide.
That Tuscany is in the third year of a serious drought doesn't help
either.

“Un nuovo pozzo,”
he announces, still louder.
Meanwhile, he says, we will buy water from a friend of his who
will bring it in a truck. Fortunately, he has a “friend” for
every situation.

“Lake water?” I ask, imagining little toads and slimy green
weed from Trasimeno. He assures us it's pure water, even has fluoride
in it. His friend simply will pump umpteen liters into the well and
it will be adequate for the rest of the summer. In fall, a new
pozzo,
deep, with fine water—enough for a swimming
pool.

The swimming pool had become a leitmotif while we were
looking for houses. Since we are from California, everyone who
showed us a house assumed that naturally we would want a pool first
thing. I remembered that years ago, while visiting in the East,
I was asked by the pale-faced son of a friend if I taught my
classes in my bathing suit. I liked his vision. After owning a pool,
I think the best way to enjoy the water is to have a friend who has
a pool. Dealing with overnight neon green transformations of water
is not in my vacation plans. There is trouble enough here.

And so we buy a truckload of water, feeling half foolish and
half relieved. We only have two weeks left at Bramasole and paying
Martini's friend certainly is cheaper than going to a hotel—and
not nearly as humiliating. Why the water doesn't just seep into the
dried-out water table, I don't know. We shower fast, drink nothing
but bottled water, eat out frequently, and enrich the dry cleaners.
All day we hear the rhythmic pounding of well-drilling equipment
rising from the valley below us. Others, it seems, don't have deep
wells either. I wonder if anyone else in Italy ever has had a load
of water dumped into the ground. I keep confusing
pozzo,
well, with
pazzo,
crazy, which is what we must be.

By the time we start to get a grasp on what the place
needs—besides water—and who we are here, it's time
to go. In California, students are buying their texts, consulting
their class schedules. We arrange for permit applications. The
estimates are all astronomical—we'll have to do more of the
work ourselves than I imagined. I remember getting a shock when I
changed the switchplate on an electrical outlet in my study at home.
Ed once put his foot through the ceiling when he climbed into the
attic to check for a roof leak. We call Primo Bianchi and tell him
we'd like for him to do the main work and will be in touch when the
permits come through. Bramasole, fortunately, is in a “green
zone” and a “
belle arti
zone,” where nothing new can be
built and houses are protected from alterations that would change
their architectural integrity. Because permits require both local
and national approval, the process takes months—even a year.
We hope Rizzatti is as well-connected as we have heard he is.
Bramasole must stand empty for another winter. Leaving a dry
well leaves a dry taste as well.

When we see the former owner in the piazza just before we
leave, he is congenial, his new Armani tossed over his shoulders.
“How is everything at Bramasole?” he asks.

“Couldn't be better,” I reply. “We love everything about
it.”

AS I CLOSED THE HOUSE, I COUNTED. SEVENTEEN WINDOWS,
each with heavy outside shutters and elaborate inside windows with swinging wooden
panels, and seven doors to lock. When I pulled in the shutters, each
room was suddenly dark, except for combs of sunlight cast on the
floor. The doors have iron bars to hook in place, all except the
portone,
the big front door, which closes with the iron
key and, I suppose, makes the elaborate locking of the other doors
and windows moot, since a determined thief easily could batter his
way in, despite the solid
thumft, thumft
of the lock
turning twice. But the house has stood here empty through thirty
winters; what's one more? Any thief who pushed into the dark house
would find a lone bed, some linens, stove, fridge, and pots and
pans.

Odd, to pack a bag and drive away, just leave the house
standing there in the early morning light, one of my favorite
times, as though we'd never been there at all.

We head toward Nice, across Tuscany toward the Ligurian
coast. The toasted hills, fields of drooping sunflowers, and the
exit signs with the magical names flash by: Montevarchi, Firenze,
Montecatini, Pisa, Lucca, Pietrasanta, Carrara with its river milky
with marble dust. Houses are totally anthropomorphic for me. They're
so
themselves.
Bramasole looked returned to itself as we
left, upright and contained, facing the sun.

I keep hearing myself singing, “The cheese stands alone” as
we whiz in and out of tunnels. “What
is
that you're
singing?” Ed is passing cars at 140 kilometers an hour; I'm
afraid he has taken rather naturally to the blood sport of Italian
driving.

“Didn't you play The Farmer in the Dell in first grade?”

“I was into Capture the Flag. Girls played those singing
games.”

“I always liked it at the end when we boomed out, “The cheese
stands alone,' emphasizing every syllable. It's sad to leave, knowing
the house will just stand there all winter and we'll be busy and
won't even think about it.”

“Are you crazy—we'll be thinking every day about where
we want things, what we'll plant—and how much we're going to
be robbed.”

At Menton, we check into a hotel and spend the late afternoon
swimming in the Mediterranean. Italy is now that far off arm of
land in the hazy twilight. Somewhere, light years away, Bramasole is
now in shadow; the afternoon sun has dipped below the crest of the
hill above us. Further light years away, it's morning in California;
light is spilling into the dining room where Sister the cat is
warming her fur on the table under the windows. We walk the long
promenade into town and have bowls of
soupe au pistou
and
grilled fish. Early the next day we drive to Nice and fly away.
As we speed down the runway, I glimpse a fringe of waving palms
against the bright sky; then we lift off and are gone for nine
months.

S
ister
W
ater,
B
rother
F
ire

JUNE. WE'RE TOLD THAT WINTER WAS
fierce and spring
was unusually profligate with bloom. Poppies have lingered and the
fragrance of spiky yellow broom still fills the air. The house looks
as if more sun soaked in during these months I've been gone. The
finish that faux painters all over creation are trying to perfect,
the seasons have managed admirably. Otherwise, all is the same,
giving me the illusion that the months away were only a few days.
A moment ago I was hacking weeds and now I'm at it again, though
frequently I stop. I am watching for the man with the flowers.

A sprig of oleander, a handful of Queen Anne's and fennel
bound with a stem, a full bouquet of dog roses, dandelion puffs,
buttercups, and lavender bells—every day I look to see what
he has propped up in the shrine at the bottom of my driveway. When
I first saw the flowers, I thought the donor was a woman. I would
see her soon in her neat navy print dress with a market bag hung
over the handlebars of a battered bicycle.

A bent woman in a red shawl does come early some mornings.
She kisses her fingertips, then touches them to the ceramic Mary.
I have seen a young man stop his car, jump out for a moment, then
roar off. Neither of these brings flowers. Then one day I saw a man
walking down the road from Cortona. He was slow and dignified. I
heard the crunch of his steps on the road stop for a moment. Later,
I found a fresh clump of purple sweet peas in the shrine, and
yesterday's wild asters thrown down into the pile of other wilting
and dead bundles.

Now I wait for him. He examines what wildflowers the roadside
and fields offer, leans to pick what he fancies. He varies his
selection, bringing new blooms as they spring up. I'm up on a
high terrace, hacking ivy off stone walls and chopping off dry
limbs of neglected trees. The profusion of flowers stops me every
few minutes. I don't know enough of the English names, much less
the Italian. One plant, shaped like a little tabletop Christmas
tree, is spiked all over with white flowers. I think we have wild
red gladioluses. Lusty red poppies literally carpet the hillsides,
their vibrancy cooled by clusters of blue irises, now withering
to an ashy gray. The grass brushes my knees. When I stop just
to look, the pilgrim is approaching. He pauses in the road and
stares up at me. I wave but he does not wave back, just blanky stares
as though I, a foreigner, am a creature unaware of being looked at,
a zoo animal.

The shrine is the first thing you see when you come to the
house. Cut into a curved stone wall, it's an ordinary one in these
parts, a porcelain Mary on a blue background, in the Della Robbia
style, centered in an arched niche. I see other shrines around the
countryside, dusty and forgotten. This one is, for some reason,
active.

He's an old man, this wayfarer with his coat draped over his
shoulders and his slow contemplative walk down the road. Once I
passed him in the town park and he gravely said,
“Buon
giorno,”
but only after I spoke first. He had taken off his
cap for a moment and I saw a fringe of white hair around his bald
crown, which is bright as a lightbulb. His eyes are cloudy and
remote, a stony blue. I also have seen him in town. He is not
gregarious, does not join friends for coffee at bars, does not
stop his stroll through the main street to greet anyone. I begin
to get the idea that he is possibly an angel, since his
coat always hangs around his shoulders, and since he seems to be
invisible to everyone but me. I remember the dream I had the first
night I spent here: I would discover one hundred angels one by
one. This angel, though, has a body. He wipes his forehead with his
handkerchief. Perhaps he was born in this house, or he loved
someone here. Or the pointed cypresses that line this road,
each one commemorating a local boy who died in World War I (so
many from such a small town), remind him of friends. His mother
was a great beauty and stepped into carriages on this spot, or
his father was tight as a whip and forbade him to enter the house
ever again. He thanks Jesus daily for saving his daughter from the
perils of surgeons in Parma. Or perhaps this is just the far point
of his daily walk, a pleasant habit, a tribute to the Walk God.
Whatever, I hesitate to wipe the road dust from Mary's face,
or shine the blue to gloss with a cloth, even to disturb the mound
of stiff bouquets piled on the ground, still intact. There's a life
in old places and we're always passing through. He makes me feel
wide circles surrounding this house. I will be learning for years
what I can touch and what I can't, and how I can touch. I imagine
the five sisters of Perugia who held this family property, letting
the closed stone rooms grow coats of fluffy white mold, letting
vines strangle the trees, letting plums and pears thud to the
ground summer after summer. They would not let go. As girls here,
did they wake at the same moment in the mornings, push open the
shutters of five bedrooms, and draw the same breath of new green
air? Some such memory held the house to them.

Finally they let go and I, who simply happened by, now
hold eighteenth-century maps showing where the property ends. At
a triangular point below that, I discover cantilevered steps
jutting out of a stone wall that was put together as neatly as a
crossword puzzle. The sculptural integrity of limestone stairs
extending into the air was only some farmer's ingenious method of
stepping up to the next terrace. Lacy blue and gray lichen over
the years erased the evidence of a foot, but when I run my hand
over the step, I feel a slight dip in the center.

From this high terrace I look down on the house. In places
where the plaster is broken, the stone called
pietra
serena,
square and solid, shows. In front, the two palm trees
rising on either side of the front door make the house look as
though it should be in Costa Rica or Tangier. I like palms, their
dry rattle in the wind and their touch of the exotic. Over the
double front door, with its fanlight, I see the stone and
wrought-iron balcony, just large enough to step out on and admire
the spilling geraniums and jasmine I will plant.

From this terrace, I can't see or hear the workers' chaos
going on below. I see our olive trees, some stunted or dead from the
famous freeze of 1985, others flourishing, flashing silver and
green. I count three figs with their large improbable leaves,
visualizing yellow lilies beneath them. I can rest here marveling
over the hummocky hills, cypress-lined road, cerulean skies with
big baroque clouds that look as if cherubs could peer from behind
them, distant stone houses barely brushed in, neat (will ours
ever look like that?) terraces of olive and grape.

That I have acquired a shrine amazed me. What amazes me
more is that I have taken on the ritual of the man with the flowers.
I lay the clippers down in the grass. He approaches slowly, the
bouquet almost behind him. When he is at the shrine I never watch.
Later, I will walk down the terrace, down the driveway to see
what he left. The brilliant yellow broom called
ginestra
and red poppies? Lavender and wheat? I always touch his blade of
weed tying that ties them together.

ED IS TWO LEVELS UP, CHOPPING RAMPAGING IVY OUT OF A
black locust
tree. At every ominous crack or snap I expect to see him careening
down the terraces. I pull at tough runners in a stone wall. Ivy
kills. We have miles of the stuff. It causes stone walls to fall.
Some of the trunks are as big as my ankle. I think of the ivy I
have in pretty jardinières on my mantle in San Francisco,
imagine that in my absence they will bolt, strangle the furniture,
cover the windows. As I move along this wall, my footing becomes
more canted because the terrace starts to angle down. The cool
scents of crushed lemon balm and
nepitella,
tiny wild
mint, rise from around my feet. I lean into the wall, cut a runner
of ivy, then rip it out. Dirt flies in my face and little stones
crumble out, hitting my shoes. I disturb not at all a long snake
taking a siesta. Its head is (how far?) in the wall, tail
dangling out about two feet. Which way would he exit—back
out or go farther in and U-turn? I skip ten feet on either
side and begin to snip again. And then the wall disappears
and I almost disappear into a hole.

I call Ed to come down. “Look—is this a well? But how
could there be a well
in
the wall?” He scrambles down
to the terrace just above me and leans over to look. Where he is,
both ivy and blackberries are unnaturally dense.

“It looks like an opening up here.” He turns on the weed
machine then, but when blackberries keep choking the filaments, he
resorts to the grim-reaper scythe. Slowly, he uncovers a chute
lined with stones. The immense back stone curves down like a
playground slide and disappears underground, opening in the wall
I'm trimming. We look at the terrace above him—nothing.
But two terraces up, in a line from here, we see another unnaturally
large blackberry clump.

Perhaps we just have water and wells on the brain. A few days
before, when we arrived for the summer, we were greeted by trucks
and cars along the road and a pile of dirt in the driveway. The
new well, drilled by a friend of Signor Martini, was almost
finished. Giuseppe, the plumber who was installing the pump,
somehow had driven his venerable
cinque cento
over a
low stone edge of the driveway. He introduced himself to us
politely, then turned to kick and curse the car.
“Madonna serpente! Porca Madonna!”
The Madonna is a
snake? A pig? He raced the engine but the three wheels remaining
on the ground couldn't get enough traction to spin his axle off
the stone. Ed tried to rock the car and dislodge it. Giuseppe
kicked his car again. The three well drillers laughed at him, then
helped Ed literally lift the toy-sized car off and over to level
ground. Giuseppe hoisted the new pump out of the car and headed
for the well, still muttering about the Madonna. We watched them
lower it the three hundred feet down. This must be the deepest
well in Christendom. They had hit water quickly but Signor
Martini told them to keep going, that we never wanted to run
out of water again. We found Signor Martini in the house, overseeing
Giuseppe's assistant. Without our even thinking of it,
they have moved the water heater from the older bathroom to the
kitchen so we'll have hot water in our improvised kitchen this
summer. I'm touched that he has had the house cleaned and has
planted marigolds and petunias around the palm trees—a touch
of civilization in the overgrown yard.

He looks tanned already and his foot is healed. “How is your
business?” I ask. “Sell many houses to unsuspecting
foreigners?”

“Non c'è male,”
not bad. He beckons for
us to follow. At the old well, he pulls a weight out of his pocket
and plunks it down the opening. Immediately we hear it hit water.
He laughs.
“Pieno, tutto pieno.”
Over the winter the
old well has completely filled.

I read in a local history book that Torreone, the area of
Cortona where Bramasole sits, is a watershed; on one side of us,
water runs to the Val di Chiana. On the other, water runs down
to the valley of the Tiber. We already are intrigued by the
underground cistern near the driveway. Shining a light down the
round opening, we've contemplated the stone arch tall enough to
stand under and a deep pool our longest stick can't measure. I
remember a Nancy Drew I liked at nine,
The Mystery in the
Old Well,
though I don't recall the story. Medici escape
routes seem more dramatic. Looking down into the cistern taps
my first memory of historical Italy—Mrs. Bailey, my
sixth-grade teacher, drawing the soaring arches of a Roman aqueduct
on the board, explaining how ingenious the ancient Romans were
with water. The Acqua Marcia was sixty-two miles long—that's
two thirds of the way from Fitzgerald, Georgia, to Macon, she
pointed out—and some of the arches still exist from the
year 140. I remember trying to grasp the year 140, meanwhile
overlapping the arches onto the Ben Hill County highway north.

The cistern opening seems to disappear into a tunnel. Though
there is footing on either side of the pool, neither of us is
brave enough to lower ourselves the fifteen dank feet underground
to investigate. We stare into the dark, wondering how large the
scorpions and vipers are, just out of sight. Above the cistern
a
bocca,
a mouth, opens in the stone wall, as though
water should pour into the cistern.

As we strip the ivy's thick roots and webs off the stone walls,
we realize that the chute we're uncovering must be connected to the
opening above the cistern. Over the next few days we discover four
stone chutes running downhill from terrace to terrace and ending at a
large square mouth that goes underground for about twenty-five feet,
then reappears on the lowest terrace above the cistern, just as we
suspected. The backs of all the chutes have the big single stone
curved for the water to flow down. When the channels are cleaned
out, water will cascade into the cistern after rains. I start to
wonder if, with a small recirculating pump connected to the cistern,
perhaps some of the water can fall all the time. After the experience
of the dry well, the trickle and splash of falling water would be
music indeed. Fortunately, we didn't stumble into these chutes
last year as we blithely meandered the terraces admiring
wildflowers and identifying fruit trees.