WHEN SHE MOVED to Semproniano, Pina made it her policy to cast her lot with those whom she perceived as the town’s misfits. These included Luciano, who rode his bicycle in endless circles around the village and had a reputation for being “not quite right.” When we asked Pina about him, her answer was decisive: “He’s right. It’s Semproniano that’s wrong.”
Pina’s assistant in the years when we first went to Il Mulino was a boy called Michele. He was fifteen then, very tall and skinny, with curly black hair. His sister, who looked just like him, was called Michela. Our first Christmas in Italy, we had Christmas Eve dinner (always a fish menu) at Il Mulino. It was raining, and as Michele didn’t have an umbrella, at the end of the evening he had to run home in order not to get drenched. How like a figure in a painting by Piero della Francesca he looked!
A few years later, he went off to do his military service, and was replaced by Maura. Maura—just a few years older—was already ubiquitous in the area. Though her only means of transport was a Vespa, nonetheless she managed to cover a great deal of territory. Indeed, she had been sighted as far away as Grosseto, where she went sometimes to look at ragazzi (boys). Yet her beau ideal was, and always had been, Michele.
Like Luciano, Maura was not well-liked in Semproniano. Hers was a sad story. Her mother died when she was very young, and she lived with her old father—a stronzo (shit) according to Pina—in a filthy and dilapidated podere not far from ours. The front garden (the one parallel to the street) was the final resting place of two broken front-loading washing machines, in which some of their chickens slept, and a still. A few years earlier, Maura’s older sister had gone to live in Castel del Piano, having first promised to come back for Maura—and, of course, she never did.
Maura’s physique was, to say the least, formidable. Giampaolo had once tactfully described her as having a “bellezza rinascimentale” (“Renaissance beauty”). To make matters worse for her, she possessed what he called a “grande fuoco sessuale” (“great sexual fire”). He and Pina counseled her to look for an older lover, a man in his thirties or forties who would appreciate what she had to offer, but Maura had eyes only for young men who would have nothing to do with her. Later she got a job cleaning the caserma (where the carabinieri lived) in Semproniano, which at first must have seemed like a dream come true. Erelong, however, she was delusa, for none of the carabinieri was any more interested in her than Michele had been.
Michele, in the intervening years, had completed his military service and come back to Semproniano. He had bought a car and put a Che Guevara sticker on the back of it. He had grown a beard and gotten a pretty girlfriend. Though he was kinder to Maura than some of the other boys, he still didn’t have much to do with her, preferring to hang out in the piazza with his friends. Because the Sempronianini, by necessity, have always been hardworking, the idleness of this new class of youth was particularly upsetting to the older people in the town. Last year, when we went to the consorzio agrario (agricultural consortium) to ask its sturdy proprietress if she knew of any young people we might hire to help us pick our olives, she asked us if she might hire us to help pick hers. “And when I think how hard we had to work when we were their age;” she said of the young people in the piazza, paring her thick fingernails with a scissors and then tearing the stubborn ends off with her teeth.
Semproniano’s refusal to accept Maura as one of its own, alas, was an illustration of the intolerance that often underlies Italian life: a bigotry that had no role in our American fantasies, and that explained in some measure the Italian hysteria over immigration and the influx of extra-communitari (Europeans from countries not belonging to the European Union) and Africans. In a Jewish retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, an old Jewish man is stranded on a desert island for twenty years. When at last he is rescued by an English ship, he takes the captain on a tour of the island, showing him the crops he has cultivated, the animals he has domesticated, the hut he has built, and so on. Finally he leads the captain to the middle of the island, where on two hills he has built two temples. “Forgive me, sir, for my ignorance of your religion;” the captain says, “but why two temples?” At this point the old man frowns and, pointing to the one on the left, says, “That one I don’t go to.”
The joke speaks volumes about life in Italy, where rivalries go back centuries, and an unfortunate, even a perceived unfortunate like Maura, had little chance of improving her standing with her own people. Thus Brunella had not walked into Carlucci’s or spoken to Sirio since the day many years before when she had forgotten her wallet and he had refused to let her take her groceries and pay him in the morning. By the same token, Giampaolo had not stepped through the doors of the Bar Sport in more than a decade. A dozen years before, when he and Pina had just opened their restaurant, Giampaolo had sent his brother to the bar to ask Miranda to recommend a place to eat in town. When she failed to suggest Il Mulino, Giampaolo began boycotting the bar. “That one I don’t go to” explained why it was that, in a town of fewer than six hundred souls, there were two bars, two groceries, two bakers, two butchers, and two olive presses. It also explains why Maura always had a look of suffering and resignation in her eyes when she bought her lottery card.
Late in September of 1994, Reginald and Margaret Green of Bodega Bay, California, lost their seven-year-old son Nicholas while driving along the coastal highway from Salerno to Calabria. They were sitting in the front seat of their rented car, and Nicholas and his sister were sleeping in the back. Being tourists (and not speaking Italian) the Greens didn’t know that this particular stretch of highway is notorious for banditry. Likewise, they didn’t understand why a car pulled up alongside theirs, or what words its driver shouted at them, or why, when they speeded up and the second car fell behind, one of the car’s occupants shot at them, hitting their son in the head. And Italy did not understand either: did not understand its own violence, simmering up from a feudal past; did not understand the Greens’ insistence that they didn’t hate Italy for killing their son; above all, did not understand their swift decision to donate all of Nicholas’s usable organs for transplant. At that time, organ donation was nearly unheard of in Catholic Italy, because it was perceived as a violation of the body. As a result, most people on transplant lists languished and died. But Nicholas Green’s parents had different attitudes, and so his heart and kidneys and liver and eyes were cut out of him, and helicoptered all over the south, and sewn into the bodies of other children. In response Italy venerated the Greens. While some Italian tourists beaten in Miami went into crippling debt to pay their hospital bills, the Greens were given medals by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arranged for them to be flown home on a military jet. At every café and restaurant people talked about Nicholas Green, and brooded, and blamed themselves. Subsequently the rate of organ donation shot up dramatically.
Around the same time, Moana Pozzi died of liver cancer. At thirty-two she was Italy’s second most popular porn actress, after Cicciolina, who had achieved brief worldwide fame as a result ofbeing elected to Parliament on the Radical party ticket. (Cicciolina subsequently married and divorced the American artist Jeff Koons.) Moana had a sturdy dignity at odds with the situations in which her films usually placed her. With her long blond hair, her severe, equine, almost masculine face, she looked more Scandinavian than Mediterranean. She was much loved in Italy: the national newspaper La Repubblica, in its obituary, emphasized her reputation as “a person of intelligence and sensitivity.” (Thanks to Moana, pornography had become almost respectable, so much so that her sister, Baby Pozzi, was following in her footsteps.) Then at the height of her career, according to the papers, she travelled to India and came back with liver cancer. (A link between journey and tumor was cryptically implied.) Five months later, she was dead.
But this was not the end of the story. According to her mother, Moana’s last wish had been to have her ashes scattered over the sea. The scattering was scheduled to take place, when at the eleventh hour a j
udge threatened to arrest the Pozzis should they go through with it: in Italy the dispersal of cremated human remains is criminal. They can be kept in urns or buried, but they cannot be scattered over the earth.
What do these two dead people have to do with each other? Catholic doctrine disparages the livingbody even as it reveres the dead body (even the cremated body). But Moana insisted life was the body, while the Greens willingly sacked the temple of their child’s body so that other children could live. Just as the Pope prepared to publish In My Own Words, the organs of life were scattered as ashes cannot be.
One thinks of that very Italian martyr, Santa Lucia, whose eyes were gouged out by the pagans, and who in paintings carries those eyes on a plate for eternity to revere. Now Italy has a new saint, who holds an empty plate. The eyes have gone to save a child from blindness.
In January of 1995, the Greens appeared on the cover of a magazine, wishing a happy new year to Italy. The press was still amazed that they had no desire for vendetta, did not cling to the notion that blood must have blood. In Italy, the very real consolations of revenge are not to be undersold.
That year a television program called Perdónami—“Forgive Me”—became extremely popular. People went on this show when they’d had disputes with loved ones, and could not seem to bring those loved ones round to making up with them.
One afternoon a very old man appeared on the show. His palsied face recalled that of Benedetto Croce. He wanted forgiveness from his sister for refusing to attend both his brother-in-law’s and their father’s funeral, which in Italy is pretty unforgivable.
Minicam in hand, Perdóname’s roving reporter showed up at the sister’s door. “These flowers are from your brother,” she said. “He asks that you accept them, and with them give him your forgiveness.” The sister, an elegant-looking woman in her fifties, looked pensive, and finally shook her head. “I cannot accept them,” she said. “What he did, it was too strong. He’s not bad at heart, but his character is bad.”
“His character is bad?”
“He gets too angry. He wouldn’t attend my husband’s funeral. He wouldn’t attend our father’s funeral. I’m sorry, but I cannot forgive him.”
The reporter made a few more efforts to persuade her, but the sister was adamant.
Back in the studio, the old man looks at the floor. “She’s proud,” he murmurs. “She’s too proud.”
“And what if I were to tell you;” the host says, “that your sister was here, in the studio, today?”
The old man lifts his head.
“Yes, she is here,” the host says. “Afterwards she had second thoughts. Let’s bring her out: Letizia.”
Now, like a long-lost aunt on an episode of This Is Your Life, in comes Letizia, beaming while the audience applauds. The old man stands; he embraces her. Tears stream down his twisted face. “She’s so beautiful,” he says to the host. “So beautiful.”
“How could I not forgive him?” the sister says. “He’s my brother.”
“But you must promise to control your temper, and not be so proud,” cautions the host.
“He’s bad in character, but his heart is good,” the sister says.
“I promise,” says the old man.
“Good,” the sister says. “Good. And tonight we’ll have supper together.”
Well, in Italy, this is the best news of all. The audience is in a euphoria of applause, it approves so wholeheartedly. Forgiveness—too often cheaply offered and accepted, passed back and forth like a single bunch of flowers that commerce has left listless—is stern, uncompromising, real as flowers (indeed, in its outer aspects, not unlike vendetta itself).
It’s winter, but there’s an intimation of spring in the air, like the scent of perfume lingering in a dead woman’s boudoir. Thus spring must have felt to the sufferers in the Inferno: a memory of sun that was almost a sunbeam, bleeding through layers of blackness to those who would never know the real sun again because they were not forgiven.
20
PIERO, WHO GAVE us the potato roaster, was a gentleman in his early seventies, with a corrosive yet humane humor. Like Aschenbach in Death in Venice, he rouged his cheeks. This was not because he was trying to attract the young, but because his health was failing and he did not want anyone to know just how unwell he was. (It seems apt that by profession he was a restorer of antique clocks.) In the years just prior to his death, Piero, who had enjoyed a lengthy career as a Don Juan, served as the nominal cock to a brood of elderly hens. We met them for the first time at a dinner that Piero gave on May 17, 1998: Aina, who, with her sweeping kaftans, heavily painted eyebrows, and gravity-defying hair, resembled more than anyone Agnes Moorehead as Endora on Bewitched; Sandra, who had been close to Wanda and Vladimir Horowitz, and expressed great perplexity when she learned that Wanda had left her money to “blind dogs” (presumably she meant seeing-eye dogs); Giovanna, who had survived “one of those US Air crashes” and spoke obsessively of the hip replacement she had had to have as a consequence; Gloria, who was fat, and whom Aina pointedly served smaller portions than she did her other guests at dinner parties; and Venetia, an Englishwoman who had met an Italian man named Pasquale in India, married him regardless of the fact that she could not speak Italian and he could not speak English, and settled in Maremma. Piero had infinite patience for these women, and they adored him—particularly after his second wife died.
Though Aina professed to be above gossip, she gave us an ear full of it about Piero before asseverating, “Of course, I don’t believe a word of it.” This is what she said:After finally obtaining a divorce from his first wife, with whom he had been on bad terms for many years, Piero moved to Poggio Capanne, a village near Saturnia, with his second wife, a German noblewoman named Beatrice. (“She was a lamb.”) There they lived in what he described as “a kind of Eden.” One evening at a party [Aina was also present] Beatrice and Piero had a squabble, after which, to get back at him, she flirted with some other men. His amour propre wounded, he slept elsewhere. When he returned home the next morning, she was dead. The doctor said she had had a heart attack and fallen down the stairs. No autopsy was performed, however. In fact, she was buried with unseemly haste.
All the women in Piero’s circle seemed thrilled to the marrow by the very suggestion that he might have murdered his wife in a fit of jealous passion, even if they insisted publicly that he could not possibly have been capable of such an act. And yet, Aina hinted, he had appeared to feel remorse as well as grief after Beatrice died, so one could not help but wonder if, after all . . .
“He gave me her clothes,” she added. “You know Beatrice had a tiny figure. They certainly wouldn’t have been of any use to Gloria.”
Aina was a piece of work—sometimes delightful and sometimes extremely trying, but always fascinating. Her father, Paolo Emilio Pavolini, was a philologist; hence her Finnish name. Her half-brother was the powerful Fascist Alessandro Pavolini, whose corpse was hung upside down along with Mussolini’s, Claretta Petacci’s, and others’ in 1945. (Alessandro Pavolini also initiated the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.) As a child, Aina had been introduced to Umberto Giordano, the celebrated composer of the operas Andrea Chénier and Fedora, who prophesied a career as a femme fatale for her.
Aina had lived all over the world—in England, in Sierra Leone, and for many years in Hanover, New Hampshire, as a Dartmouth English professor’s wife. She was perfectly brilliant in her own right. At the time we had the most to do with her, she was translating into English (from the French) Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s novel The Fortunes of Wangrin. One of her regular visitors was the late English literary critic Frank Kermode. (It was after taking him to the airport in Rome early one morning that she told us she had seen a tapir on a rarely travelled stretch of road. She probably had. We ourselves once saw a turquoise snake in Maremma.)
We seemed to attend more of Aina’s dinner parties and luncheons than anyone else’s. It is remarkable, in retrospect, that she could maintain such a hectic soci
al schedule living, as she did, in the middle of nowhere. MM’s date books record dinner on Saturday, June 6, 1998 (7:30); dinner on Monday, September 21, 1998 (Rosh Hashanah, 8:15); drinks on Sunday, October 4, 1998 (6:00); dinner on Saturday, November 14, 1998 (7:00); dinner on Saturday, December 5, 1998 (8:00); lunch on Tuesday, December 8, 1998 (Feast of the Immaculate Conception) (1:00); lunch on Wednesday, March 10) 1999 (12:30); dinner on Thursday, May 27, 1999 (7:30); dinner on Thursday, July 29, 1999 (7:30); drinks on Monday, September 6, 1999 (6:00); dinner on Sunday, September 26, 1999 (7:45). At very few of these were we the only guests. We in turn took her to dinner at Il Mulino (Friday, July 31, 1998, at 8:00) and to lunch at Bacco e Cerere in Saturnia (December 26, 1998, at 12:00), where the owner’s son flirted with her. We also invited her to pick apricots from our trees and had her over for drinks when MM’s mother was visiting (Tuesday, August 11 1998, at 6:00).
Usually at her dinners and luncheons, Aina served her “famous Parsi eggs” or a mousse made with tinned halibut. (The latter dish put us in mind of the Monty Python movie in which all the guests at a dinner party die from eating salmon mousse made with tinned rather than fresh salmon.) She’d invite us to arrive an hour before her other guests so that we could speak with her only in English, talk about books, reflect on how we found ourselves where we were—and, sometimes, move something incredibly heavy up or down the perilous stairs of her house for her. Among the other things we had in common with Aina just then were financial straits (hers worse than ours). We had spent most of our money restoring a place, whereas she was trying to raise money in order to restore a place: a dipendenza (outbuilding) that she wanted to be able to rent as a vacation house.
The Dining Room, Podere Fiume
(Photo by Simon McBride)
In Maremma Page 7