“Always, always,” Placido answers. Scholars think the first commemoration of Mary's feast day was celebrated in Antioch back in 370 A.D. That makes this year's the 1,624th event for her. Old as Cortona is, perhaps killing the white cow and serving it forth in honor of some deity goes back even farther than that.
AFTER FERRAGOSTO, CORTONA IS UNUSUALLY QUIET FOR A FEW days. Everyone who was coming to town has been. The shopkeepers sit outside reading the paper or looking absently down the street. If you've ordered something, it won't be coming until September.
OUR NEIGHBOR, THE GRILL MASTER, IS ALSO THE TAX COLLECTOR. We know the time by when he passes our house on his Vespa in the morning, at lunch, after siesta, and as he comes home at night. I have begun to idealize his life. It is easy for foreigners to idealize, romanticize, stereotype, and oversimplify local people. The drunk who staggers down the road after unloading boxes at the market in the mornings easily falls into the Town Drunk character from central casting. The hunched woman with blue-black hair is known as The Abortionist. The red and white terrier who visits three butchers to beg for scraps each morning turns into Town Dog. There's the Mad Artist, the Fascist, the Renaissance Beauty, the Prophet. Once the person is really known, of course, the characterization blessedly fades. Placido, the neighbor, however, owns two white horses. He sings as he rides by on his Vespa. We hear him clearly because he coasts by our house on his way in. Starts the motor down the road where the hill levels out. He keeps peacocks and geese and white doves. In early middle age, he wears his light hair long, sometimes tied with a bandanna. On horseback, he looks totally at home, a born rider. His wife and daughter are unusually pretty. His mother leaves flowers in our shrine and his sister refers to Ed as that handsome American. All this—but what I idealize is that Placido seems utterly happy. Everyone in town likes him. “Ah, Plary,” they say, “you have Plary for a neighbor.” He walks through town to greetings from every door. I have the feeling that he could have lived in any era; he is independent of time there in his stone house on the olive terraces with his peaceable kingdom. To reinforce my instinct, he has appeared, my Rousseau paradigm neighbor, at our door with a hooded falcon on his wrist.
With my bird phobia, left from some forgotten childhood transference, the last thing I want to see at the door is a predatory bird. Placido has a friend with him and they are beginning to train the falcon. He asks if they can go out on our land to practice. I try not to show the extent of my fear. “Ho paura,” I admit, thinking how accurate the Italian is: I have fear. Mistake. He steps forward with the twitchy bird, inviting me to take it on my arm; surely I won't be afraid if I see the magnificence of this creature. Ed comes downstairs and steps between us. Even he is somewhat alarmed. My phobia gradually has rubbed off on him. But we are happy that our Placido feels neighborly enough toward the stranieri to come over, and we walk out to the far point of land with him. His friend takes the bird and stands about fifty feet away. Placido removes something from his pocket. The falcon extends its wings—a formidable span—and flaps madly, rising up on his talons.
“A live quail. Soon I'll take pigeons from the piazza,” he laughs. The friend unfastens the cunning little leather hood and the bird shoots like an arrow to Placido. Feathers start to fly. The falcon devours quickly, making bloody work of the former quail. The friend signals with a whistle and the falcon flies back to his wrist and takes the hood. A chilling performance. Placido says there are five hundred falconers in Italy. He has bought his bird in Germany, the little hood in Canada. He must train it every day. He praises the bird, now immovable on his wrist.
This sport certainly does nothing to subtract from my impression that Placido lives across time. I see him on the white horse, falcon on his wrist, and he is en route to some medieval joust or fair. Walking by his house, I see the bird in its pen. The stern profile reminds me of Mrs. Hattaway, my seventh-grade teacher. The sudden swivel of its head brings back her infallible ability to sense when notes were tossed across the room.
I'M PACKING FOR MY FLIGHT HOME FROM ROME WHEN A stranger calls me from the United States. “What's the downside?” a voice asks on the telephone. She's read an article I wrote in a magazine about buying and restoring the house. “I'm sorry to bother you but I don't have anyone to discuss this with. I want to do something but I don't know exactly what. I'm a lawyer in Baltimore. My mother died and . . .”
I recognize the impulse. I recognize the desire to surprise your own life. “You must change your life,” as the poet Rilke said. I stack like ingots all I've learned in my first years as a part-time resident of another country. Just the satisfaction of feeling many Italian words become as familiar as English would be pleasure enough: pompelmo, susino, fragola—the new names of everything. What I feared was that with the end of my marriage, life would narrow. A family history, I suppose, of resigned disappointed ancestors, old belles of the country looking at the pressed roses in their world atlases. And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women's movement, there's always the fear that it's not real, you're not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment. I've had the sensation of surfing on a big comber and soon the spilling wave will curl over, sucking me under. But, slow learner, I'm beginning to trust that the gods are not going to snatch my firstborn if I happen to enjoy my life. The woman on the other end of the line has somehow, through the university, obtained my number in Italy.
“What are you thinking of doing?” I ask this total stranger.
“The islands off the coast of Washington, I've always loved them. There's this place for sale, my friends think I'm crazy because it's all the way across the country. But you go by ferry . . .”
“There's no downside,” I say firmly. The waterfall of problems with Benito, the financial worries, the language barriers, the hot water in the toilet, the layers of gunk on the beams, the long flights over from California—this is nothing compared to the absolute joy of being in possession of this remarkable little hillside on the edge of Tuscany.
I have the impulse to invite her over to visit. Her desire makes her familiar to me so that we would immediately be friends and talk long into the night. But I'm leaving soon. As I speak to her in her highrise office, the half moon rises above the Medici fortress. Way up, I see the bench Ed made for me under an oak tree. A plank over two stumps. I like to zigzag up the terraces and sit there in late afternoons when the gilded light starts to sift over the valley and shadows stretch between the long ridges. I was never a hippie but I ask her if she ever heard the old motto “Follow your bliss.”
“Yes,” she replies, “I was at Woodstock twenty-five years ago. But now I handle labor disputes for this transnational conglomerate . . . I'm not sure this makes sense.”
“Well, does it seem that you'd be moving into a larger freedom? I've had an incredible amount of fun here.” I don't mention the sun, how when I'm away and picture myself here, it's always in full light; I feel permeable now. The Tuscan sun has warmed me to the marrow. Flannery O'Connor talked about pursuing pleasure “through gritted teeth.” I sometimes must do that at home but here pleasure is natural. The days right themselves one after another, as easily as the boy holding up the jingling scale easily balances the fat melon and the rusty iron discs.
I am waiting to hear if she took the clapboard cottage with its own deep-water pier.
I see her blue bicycle leaning against a pine tree, morning glories climbing up the porch railing.
BRAVE GIRL! PLACIDO IS WALKING WITH HIS DAUGHTER OUT to the point. She holds up the falcon on her wrist. Her long curls bounce as she walks. Even something to fear is layering into memory; I'm going to dream about this over the winter. Perhaps the falcon will fly through a nightmare. Or perhaps it only will accompany these neighbors in late afternoon as they walk up the cypress drive and out to where they release the bird, allowing it to fly farther each time. So much more to take home at the end of summer. “The Night,” by Cesare Pavese, ends:
; At times it returns,
in the motionless calm of the day, that memory
of living immersed, absorbed, in the stunned light.
Green Oil
“DON'T PICK TODAY—TOO WET.” MARCO observes us taking down the olive baskets. “And the moon's wrong. Wait until Wednesday.” He's hanging the doors, two original chestnut ones he oiled and repaired, and new ones, virtually indistinguishable from the old, that he has made during the fall while we were gone. They replace the hollow-core doors our great improver in the fifties preferred.
We're already late for the olive harvest. All of the mills close before Christmas and we've arrived with a week to spare. Outside, a gray drizzle blurs the intense green grasses that thrived on November rains. I put my hand on the window. Cold. He's right, of course. If we pick today, the wet olives might mildew if we don't finish and get them to the mill. We gather our osier baskets that strap around the waist—so handy for stripping a branch—and the blue sacks the olives are loaded into, the aluminum ladder, our rubber boots. Still jet-lagged and dazed, we're up early, thanks to Marco's arrival at seven-thirty when it barely was light. He tells us to go make an appointment at a mill; maybe it will clear up later. If so, the sun will dry the olives quickly.
“What about the moon?” I ask. He just shrugs. He wouldn't pick now, I know.
We feel like tumbling back into bed, having had no time since arriving last night to get beyond the twenty-hour trip, with storms buffeting the plane most of the way across the ocean. I felt like kissing the ground when we stepped out on the tarmac at Fiumicino. We crazily went into Rome to do a little shopping, then were really beyond thinking as we drove to Cortona in a hilarious rented Twingo, purple with mint green interior. We hit the autostrada in a bumper car and in a state of exhaustion. Still, the wet and vibrant landscape filled us with elation—that lit-from-within green and many trees still twirling colored leaves. When we left in August, it was sere and dry; now the freshness has reasserted itself. At dark we finally arrived. In town we picked up bread and a pan of veal cannelloni. The air felt charged and invigorating; we no longer wanted to collapse. Laura, the young woman who cleans, had turned up the radiators two days ago and the stone walls had time to lose their chill. She even had brought in wood, so on our first night here, we had a little feast by the fire, then wandered from room to room, checking and touching and greeting each object. And so to bed, until Marco aroused us this morning. “Laura said you arrived. I thought you'd want the doors right away.” Always, always when we arrive there is something to haul from A to B. Ed helped him hoist the doors and held them steady while Marco wiggled the hinges onto the metal spurs.
The venerable mill at Sant'Angelo uses the purest methods, Marco tells us, cold-pressing each person's olives individually, rather than requiring small growers to double up with someone else. However, you must have at least a quintale, one hundred kilograms. Our trees, not yet recovered from thirty years of neglect, may not give us that bounty yet. Many trees have nothing at all.
The mill smells thickly oleaginous and the damp floor feels slippery, possibly oily. Rooms where grapes and olives are pressed have the odors of time, as surely as the cool stone smell of churches. The permeating ooze and trickle must move into the workers' pores. The man in charge tells us of several mills that press small batches. We never knew there were so many. All his directions involve turning right at the tallest pine or left beyond the hump or right behind the long pig barn.
Before we leave, he extols the virtues of the traditional methods and to prove his point dips two tablespoons into a vat of new oil and hands them to us to taste. It can't be poured onto the floor; there's nothing to do but swallow the whole thing. I can't but I do. First, a tiny taste and the oil is extraordinary, of a meltingly soft fragrance and essential, full olive taste. The whole spoon at once, however, is like taking medicine. “Splendido,” I gulp and look at Ed, who still hesitates, pretending to appreciate the greeny beauty. “What happens to that?” I ask, gesturing to troughs of pulp. Our host turns and Ed quickly slips his oil back in the vat, then tastes what's left on the spoon.
“Favoloso,” Ed says to him. And it is. After the first cold pressing, the pulp is sent on to another mill and pressed again for regular oils, then pressed last for lubricating oils. The dried-out remains, in a wonderful cycle of return, often are used to fertilize olive trees.
As we start to drive away, we see that the doors of San Michele Arcangelo, a church we've admired, are open today. The threshold is scattered with rice—arborio, I notice, the rice for risotto. A wedding has taken place and someone must be coming to take down the pine and cedar boughs. The church is almost a thousand years old. Just across the road from each other, the church and mill have served two of the basic needs—and the grain and the vine are not far away. The beamed and cross-beamed ceilings of these old churches often remind me of ship hulls. I've never mentioned this before but now I do. “The church structures reminded someone else of boats, too. “Nave' comes from “navis' in Latin—ship,” Ed tells me.
“And what does “apse' come from then?” I ask, since the lovely rounded forms remind me of bread ovens standing alone in farmyards.
“I believe that root means a fastening together of things, just practical, no poetry there.”
There is poetry in the rhythm of the three naves, the three apses, the classic basilica plan in miniature. The lines rhyme perfectly in their stony movement along such a small space. The only adornment is the scent of evergreens. As much as I love the great frescoed churches, it's these plain ones that touch me most deftly. They seem to be the shape and texture of the human spirit, transformed into stone and light.
Ed swings the car out onto what once was a Roman road. Later it led pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. San Michele was a place to rest and restore. I wonder if a mill stood here, too. Perhaps the pilgrims rubbed oil into their weary feet. We, however, are just searching for a mill that will transform our sacks of black olives into bottles of oil. Two of the mills already have closed. At the third, a woman in about six layers of sweaters comes down her steps and tells us we're too late, the olives should have been picked and now the moon is wrong. “Yes,” we tell her, “we know.” Her husband has closed his mill for the season. She points down the road. At a grand stone villa, we turn in. A discreet sign, IL MULINO, directs us to the rear but when we drive around, two workers are hosing off their equipment. Too late. They direct us to the large mill near town.
Whizzing along, I look at the winter gardens. Everyone's growing pale, stalky cardi, cardoons—called gobbi in the local dialect—and green-black cavolo nero, black cabbage, which grows not in a head but in upright plumes. Red and green radicchio star in every garden. Most have a few artichoke plants. Until winter, I never knew there were so many persimmon trees. With the lacquered orange fruit dangling in bare limbs, the trees look composed of quick brush strokes, like Japanese drawings of themselves.
At the mill, everyone is so busy that we're ignored. We walk around watching the process and aren't drawn to having our precious olives pressed here. It's all quite mechanized looking. Where are the big stone wheels? We can't really tell if they use heat, a process that supposedly damages the taste. We watch a customer come in, have his fruit weighed, then see it dumped into a large cart. Maybe the olives are all the same and mixing doesn't matter but somehow, this time, we would love to have the pleasure of oil from the land we've worked on. We exit quickly and drive to our last hope, a small mill near Castiglion Fiorentino. Outside the door, three huge stone wheels lean against the building. Just inside, wooden bins of olives are stacked, each one with a name on it. Yes, they can press ours. We are to come back tomorrow.
The afternoon warms and clears. Marco gives us the O.K. to begin. Moon or no, we start picking. It's fast. We empty our baskets into the laundry basket and, as that fills, pour the olives into the sack. Few have fallen though they yield easily to our fingers. A strong wind could cause a lot of damage unle
ss one had spread nets under the trees. The shiny black olives are plump and firm. Curious about the raw drupe, I bite one and it tastes like an alum stick. How did anyone ever figure out how to cure them? The same people, no doubt, who first had the nerve to taste oysters. Ligurians used to cure them by hanging bags in the sea; inland people smoked them over the winter in their chimneys, something I'd like to try. We peel off jackets, then sweaters as we work, hanging them in the trees. The temperature has climbed to about fifty-five degrees and although our boots are wet, the air feels balmy. Off in the distance, we see the blue swath of Lake Trasimeno under an intense blue sky. By three, we have stripped every single olive off twelve trees. I've put my sweater on again. Days are short here in winter and already the sun is headed for the rim of the hill behind the house. By four, our red fingers are stiff and we quit, hauling the sack and basket down the terraces into the cantina.
Not for the first time in our history here, my body is jarred into awareness. Today: shoulders! Nothing would be nicer than a long soak in a bubble bath and a massage. I have left my body oil to warm on the radiator in anticipation. But with only twenty days here every minute counts. We force ourselves to go into town to stock up on food. My daughter and her boyfriend Jess arrive in three days. We're planning several major feasts. We drive in just as the stores are reopening after siesta. Strange—it's already dark as the town comes back to life. Swags of white lights strung across the narrow streets swing in the wind. The A & O market, where we shop, has a rather ratty artificial tree (the only tree in town) outside and big baskets of gift foods inside.
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 20