THE FIVE TIGLIO TREES, OLD WORLD LINDENS OR LIMES, bear no fruit. They provide shade along the broad terrace beside the house when the sun will not allow us on the front terrace. We have lunch under the tigli almost every day. Their blossoms are like pearly earrings dangling from the leaves, and when they open—all it seems on the same day—fragrance envelopes the whole hillside. At the height of bloom, we sit on the upstairs patio, just adjacent to the trees, trying to identify the fragrance. I think it smells like the perfume counter in the dime store; Ed thinks it smells like the oil his uncle Syl used to slick back his hair. Either way, it attracts every bee in town. Even at night, when we take our coffee up to the patio, they are working the flowers over. Their collective buzz sounds like a major swarm approaching. It's both lulling and alarming. Ed stays in the doorway at first because he's allergic to bee sting, but they aren't interested in us. They have their honey sacs to fill, their legs to dust with pollen.
Allergic or not, Ed longs for beehives. He tries to get me interested in being the beekeeper. He takes the fact that I never have been stung by a bee to mean that they won't sting me. I point out that I once was stung by a whole nest of wasps but somehow that doesn't count. He imagines a row of hives at the end of the lime trees. “You'll be fascinated when you look in the hive,” he says. “When it's hot, dozens of workers stationed at the door whir their wings to cool the queen.” I've noticed that he has collected lots of local honeys. Frequently there's a pot of hot water on the stove with a jar of waxy, stiff honey softening in it. The acacia is pale and lemony; the dark chestnut is so thick a spoon will stand up straight in it. He has a jar of timo, thyme honey, and, of course, the tiglio. The wildest is macchia, from the salty coastal shrubs of Tuscany. “The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers—the sexually undeveloped females—have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.” I can tell he's carried away with the idea. I'm getting interested myself.
“What do they eat inside the hive all winter?”
“Beebread.”
“Beebread? Are you serious?”
“It's a mixture of pollen and honey. And the worker excretes gold wax from her stomach for the comb. Those neat hexagons!”
I try to imagine the size of a worker bee's intestinal system, how many times she must fly from the hive to the tiglio to make even a tablespoon of honey. A thousand times? A jar must represent a million flights of bees carrying a heavy cargo of honeydew, their legs sticky with pollen. In The Georgics, which is sort of an ancient farmer's almanac, Vergil writes that bees lift small stones to ballast themselves as they fly through boisterous east winds. He is wise on the subject of bees but not entirely to be trusted; he thought they would generate spontaneously from the decayed carcass of a cow. I like the image of a bee clutching a small stone, like a football player holding the ball to his chest as he barrels down the field. “Yes, I can see four hives painted green. I like the beekeeper's gear, that medieval-looking veil, lifting the dark combs—we could roll our own candles from the wax.” Now I'm drawn into this idea.
But he stands up and leans out into the dizzying fragrance. Practicality has left him. “The wasps are anarchistic, whereas the bees . . .”
I gather up the coffee cups. “Maybe we should wait until the house is done.”
FIGS REVEAL WATER. ON THE TERRACES THEY GROW NEAR THE stone chutes we discovered. The natural well has webby roots crawling down into it from the fig above. I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too—the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau. Fig pollination takes place through an interaction with a particular kind of wasp about one eighth of an inch long. The female bores into the developing flower inside the fig. Once in, she delves with her oviposter, a curved needle nose, into the female flower's ovary, depositing her own eggs. If her oviposter can't reach the ovary (some of the flowers have long styles), she still fertilizes the fig flower with the pollen she collected from her travels. Either way, one half of this symbiotic system is served—the wasp larvae develop if she has left her eggs or the pollinated fig flower produces seed. If reincarnation is true, let me not come back as a fig wasp. If the female can't find a suitable nest for her eggs, she usually dies of exhaustion inside the fig. If she can, the wasps hatch inside the fig and all the males are born without wings. Their sole, brief function is sex. They get up and fertilize the females, then help them tunnel out of the fruit. Then they die. The females fly out, carrying enough sperm from the tryst to fertilize all their eggs. Is this appetizing, to know that however luscious figs taste, each one is actually a little graveyard of wingless male wasps? Or maybe the sensuality of the fruit comes from some flavor they dissolve into after short, sweet lives.
THE WOMEN IN MY FAMILY ALWAYS HAVE MADE BREAD AND butter pickles and muscadine jellies and watermelon rind pickles and peach preserves and plum butters. I feel drawn to the scalding kettle, with a flat of rapidly softening raspberries leaking juice on the counter, to the syrupy clove-scented bowls of sweet peaches about to be poured into an astringent vinegar bath, to ring-finger-sized cucumbers. In California, I've cried over rubber sealing rings that turned to gum, over jams that wouldn't jam, over a cauldron of guavas that made two dozen jars of gray jelly instead of the clear exotic topaz I expected. I don't have the gene my mother had for laying-by rows of crimson and emerald jars of fruit preserves and the little pickled things called sottaceto (under vinegar) here. When I look at the product of a sweating afternoon, all I can think is “Botulism?”
This long-lost owner who placed the fruit trees on a terrace so they sweetly dangle over a grassy walk, she, I'm sure, had a shelf under the stairs for her confitures, and no qualms about breaking open her spicy plums on a January morning. Here, I think, I'll master the art my mother should have passed to me as easily as she passed her taste for hand-painted china and expensive shoes.
From the Saturday market I lug a box of prime peaches downhill to the car. They are so beautiful all I really want to do is pile them in a basket and look at the delicious colors. In the one cookbook I have here so far, I find Elizabeth David's recipe for peach marmalade. Nothing could be simpler: The halved peaches simply are cooked with a little sugar and water, cooled, then cooked again the next day, until the preserves set when ladled onto a saucer. Elizabeth David notes, “This method makes a rather extravagant but very delicious preserve. Unfortunately it tends to form a skin of mold within a very short time, but this does not affect the rest of the jam, some of which I have kept for well over a year, even in a damp house.” I'm a little bothered by this mold note, and she's vague about sterilizing jars and never mentions listening for the whoosh of the seal I heard as Mother's green tomato pickles cooled. I remember my mother tapping the tops to make sure the lid had sucked down. It sounds as though Elizabeth David just dishes it up into the jars then forgets it, scraping off mold with impunity before spreading some on her toast. Still, she says “rather extravagant but very delicious,” and if Elizabeth David says that, I believe her. Since I have all these peaches, I decide to make seven pounds and just eat the rest. We'll use the preserves this summer before an unappetizing mold can form in this damp house. I'll give some to new friends, who will wonder why I'm not painting shutters instead of stirring fruit.
I drop the peaches into boiling water for a moment, watching the rosy colors intensify, then spoon them out and slide the skins off as easily as taking off a silk slip. This recipe is simple, not even a few drops of lemon juice or a grating of nutmeg or a clove or two. I remember my mother putting in a kernel from inside the peach pit, an almond-scented secr
et nut. Soon the kitchen fills with a fly-attracting sweetness. The next day, I boil the jars for good measure, while the fruit cooks down again, then spoon it in. I have five lovely jars of jam, peachy but not too sweet.
The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. I forget my book. Pear cobbler, pear chutney, pear ice, green figs (would the wasps already be in green figs?) with pork, fig fritters, fig and nocciola tart. May summer last a hundred years.
Whir of the Sun
THE HOUSE, ONLY TWO KILOMETERS FROM town, feels like a deep country place. We can't see any neighbors, although we hear the man way above us calling vieni qua, come here, to his dog. The summer sun hits like a religious conviction. I can tell time by where the sun strikes the house, as though it were a gigantic sundial. At five-thirty, the first rays smack the patio door, routing us out of bed and giving us the pleasure of dawn. At nine, a slab of sunlight falls into my study from the side window, my favorite window in the house for its framed view over the cypresses, the groves in the valley, and out into the Apennines. I want to paint a watercolor of it but my watercolors are awful, fit only to be stored on a closet shelf. By ten, the sun swings high over the front of the house and stays there until four, when a cut of shadow across the lawn signals that the sun is heading toward the other side of the mountain. If we walk to town that way in late afternoon, we see a prolonged, grandiose sunset over the Val di Chiana, lingering until it finally just dissolves, leaving enough streaked gold and saffron behind to light a way home until nine-thirty, when indigo dark sets in.
On moonless nights it is as black as inside an egg. Ed has gone back to Minnesota for his parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. A shutter bangs; otherwise, the silence reverberates so strongly that I think I can hear my own blood circulating. I expect to lie awake, to imagine a drug-crazed intruder with an Uzi creeping up the stairs in the dark. Instead, in the wide bed with flowered sheets, I spread my books, cards, and notepaper around me and indulge in the rare act of writing letters to friends. A second indulgence goes straight back to high-school days—consuming a plate of brownies and a Coke while copying paragraphs and verses I like into my notebook. If only Sister, my black long-haired cat, were here. She is truly a good companion for solitude. It's far too hot for her to sleep against my feet, as she likes to do; she would have to stay on a pillow at the foot of the bed. I sleep like one newly born and in the morning have coffee on the patio, walk to town for groceries, work on the land, come in for water, and it is only ten o'clock. Hours go by without the need to speak.
After a few days, my life takes on its own rhythm. I wake up and read for an hour at three A.M.; I eat small snacks—a ripe tomato eaten like an apple—at eleven and three rather than lunch at one. At six I'm up, but by siesta time, the heat of the day, I'm ready for two hours in bed. Slumber sounds heavier than sleep, and with the hum of a small fan, it's slumber I fall into. At last, I have time to take a coverlet outside at night and lie on my back with the flashlight and the star chart. With the Big Dipper easily fixed right over the house, I finally locate Pollux in Gemini and Procyon in Canis Minor. I forget the stars and here they are, so alive all along, pulsing and falling.
A French woman and her English husband walk up the driveway and introduce themselves as neighbors. They've heard Americans bought the place and are curious to meet those mad enough to take on this ordeal of restoration. They invite me to lunch the next day. Since both are writers and are restoring their small farmhouse, we fall into instant camaraderie. Should they have the staircase here or there, what to do with this tiny room, would a bedroom in the animal stall downstairs be too dark? The comune won't allow you to cut windows, even in almost airless farmhouses; exteriors must remain intact on historical property. They invite me to dinner the next night and introduce me to two other foreign writers, French and Asian-American. By the time Ed returns in a week, we're invited to the house of these writers.
The table is set under a shady grape arbor. Cold salads, cold wine, fruit, a grand cheese soufflé somehow steamed on top of the stove. Heat shimmers around the olive trees in the distance. On the stone patio, we're cool. We're introduced to the other guests: novelists, journalists, translators, a nonfiction writer—all older expatriates who've settled in these hills and restored properties. To live wholly in another country fascinates me. I'm curious how the trip or assignment to Italy turned into a lifetime for each of them and I ask Fenella, the international journalist, on my right, about this. “You can't imagine what Rome was in the fifties. Magic. I simply fell in love—like you fall in love with a person—and schemed to find a way to stay there. It wasn't easy. I got on as a stringer for Reuters. Look at the old movies and you'll see there were almost no cars. This was not long after the war and Italy was devastated, but the life! It was unbelievably cheap, too. Of course we didn't have much money but we lived in enormous apartments in grand palazzi for nothing. Every time I went back to America, I just couldn't wait to get back. It wasn't a rejection—or maybe it was. Anyway, I've never wanted to be anywhere else.”
“We feel the same way,” I say, and then realize that's not really the truth. I succumb totally to the “magic” of this place, but I know the appeal to me is partly the balance it restores to my life in America. I'm not about to leave there, even if I could. I try to amend what I've said. “My job at home is hard but I really love it—I'm pushed by it. And San Francisco is not home at the blood root, but it's a lucky, very beautiful place to live, earthquakes and all. Spending time here lets me escape the craziness and violence and downright surreal aspects of America, and my own overscheduled life. Three weeks after arrival, I realize I've let down some guard that is so instinctive to me, living in an American city, that I don't realize I have it.” She looks at me with sympathy. At this point, the violence in America is hard for anyone to comprehend. “Literally, my pulse slows,” I continue. “Even so, I sense that I can best develop my thinking there—it's my culture, my rough edge, my past.” I'm not sure I've explained myself well. She raises her glass to me.
“Esatto, my daughter feels the same. You didn't come along in time to know Rome back then. It's terrible now. But then it was irresistible.” I suddenly realize they're in double exile, from the United States and from Rome.
Max joins in. He had to go to Rome last week and the traffic was horrendous, then the gypsies accosted him, as if he were a tourist, pressing their cardboard against him in an effort to distract him while they tried to pick his pocket. “Long ago, I learned to put the evil eye on them,” he tells Ed and me. “They scatter then.” They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now? Our friends who've recently bought a place in Rome are wild about the city. We love it. Maybe living with Bay Bridge traffic and San Francisco prices prepares us for anything.
One guest is a writer I have long admired. She moved here about twenty years ago, after living for years in the postwar wild south of Italy and then in Rome. I knew she lived here and even had been given her telephone number by a mutual acquaintance in Georgia, where she now spends a part of every year. Cold calls always have been hard for me to make and I am a little awed by the woman who wrote, in luminous, austere prose, about the dark, raucous, convoluted lives of women down in ravaged Basilicata.
Elizabeth is across the table and down from
me. I see her cover her glass with her hand as Max starts to pour wine. “You know I never drink wine at lunch.” Ah, the austerity. She wears a blue cotton shirt with some vaguely religious-looking medallion around her neck. She has a dead-level blue gaze, fair skin, and a voice I think has a touch of my own accent.
I lean forward and venture, “Is that a trace of a Southern accent?”
“I certainly hope not,” she snaps—do I see a hint of a smile?—and quickly turns back to the famous translator beside her. I look down into my salad.
By the time Richard serves his lemon gelato made with mascarpone, the gathering is mellowing. Several empty wine bottles stand on a side table. The intense sun is now caught in the limbs of a chestnut. Ed and I join in where we can but this is a lively group of old friends with years of shared experiences. Fenella talks about her research trips to Bulgaria and Russia; her husband, Peter, tells a story about bringing a gray parrot in his coat pocket when he came back from an assignment in Africa. Cynthia talks about a family dispute over her famous mother's notebooks. Max makes us laugh over his unbelievable luck in sitting next to a film producer on a flight to New York, launching into a description of his script to this captive, who finally said to send him the script. Now the producer is coming to visit and has bought the option. Elizabeth looks bemused.
As the party breaks up she says, “You were supposed to call me. I've tried to get your number but there's no listing. Irby [a friend of my sister's] told me you've bought a house here. In fact, I met your sister at a dinner in Rome—Georgia, that is.” I make excuses about the confusions of the house, then impulsively ask her to dinner on Sunday. Impulsively, because we don't have furniture, dishes, linen—only the rudimentary kitchen with a few pots and plates.
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