As we both know, any description of what’s happened will fall wide of the mark. We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them, wrote T. S. Eliot. That’s perhaps as close as I can get.
One recent lunchtime, a young cat very unlike the half-blind one—fluffy tail, pale-green eyes—managed to reach our terrace, having somehow scaled a wall and crept across our upper roof. It tried to enter the house; seeing us step out to investigate, it backed off warily.
I fetched a saucer of ricotta and put it on the terrace. When I returned to the doorway, the cat began eating, and I was able to approach. I made sure to blink, to state in the cat’s own language that I intended no harm. After a moment, the cat blinked back. Though I knew it’d soon flee, I found myself hoping I could be a sort-of mother to it, if only for a little while. An oversized, fur- and tail-less simulacrum of the cat’s true mother, wherever she might be. Assuming she still lived.
The cat devoured the ricotta, then cleaned itself. Antonio and I watched it take off, a graceful model of self-possession. Would it, like the kitten with the infected eyes, survive whatever awaited it? I hadn’t told it outright I hoped so. Not that this mattered; we’d exchanged the speech of acceptance, silent and mutual. And who knew, maybe the cat would come back. Perhaps before long, we’d find it curled quietly in a corner of the terrace. Noting our presence, it would swivel its head, those lovely eyes the color of sea glass . . . I’d blink at it, and it would blink in response.
What its blinking might be saying: Don’t make so much of being seen. Try rather to see, however you can.
3. Pleasantly and Well-Suited
They’re dark brown, as it turns out. Not black like Batman. And small, not much bigger than mice. Exceedingly fast, too—when they fly, I don’t hear a whoosh or flap-flap but rather a zippy SSSssssss . . . Yet as I learned on our very first night here, bats can also move languorously.
I’ve been thinking about that night ever since.
Antonio and I were punch-drunk with excitement and fatigue, barely able to eat. I’d fixed us a little salad; we’d washed it down with some Prosecco Antonio found in the fridge (a gift, intentional or not, from our absent landlord), then dragged ourselves up to our bedroom.
A dark-green canvas cloth covers the bedroom windows. Actually, the windows are a pair of glass-paned doors that open onto a balcony. Two hooks, one on each side of the doors, affix the green cloth to the outer wall of the house. Since Antonio is taller than I, it’s his job to fasten the cloth in place each night, take it down each morning, and put it up again at noon, to keep the room cool.
On the day of our arrival, the cloth was hooked up. Antonio took it down and tossed it onto the terrace, so we could enjoy the view while we hauled and unpacked our stuff. Hours later, after supper—it was fully dark by then—Antonio went onto the balcony to put up the cloth, and woke a bat tucked into its folds.
Antonio saw nothing. I, however, was in the bedroom, and saw an oval shadow waft slowly across the doorsill into the bedroom.
It passed a few feet from my face. A very large moth, I figured: a sort of compact and noiseless flying lozenge. It seemed to float rather than fly, with no sputter of wings or erratic motion. Hang on, I thought—this thing isn’t a moth, or even a bird . . . The word bat took several more seconds to arrive.
The creature circled near the ceiling as it tried to get out. At one point it aimed directly at us as we squatted, our arms flailing over our heads. Then it veered and sailed slowly through the bedroom door and down the stairwell. Slamming the door shut, Antonio and I jabbered anxiously in English and Italian, trying to make sense of what’d just occurred. The brisk shaking of the green cloth, we decided, must’ve launched the bat aloft; it hadn’t had the option of slipping away from the cloth on its own schedule. And now it was seeking a hiding-spot.
For a little while, each of us tried unsuccessfully to get the other to go downstairs, find the bat, and shoo it out. Then, too tired to care any longer, we turned off the light and tumbled into bed, not bothering to cover the glass-paned doors with the cloth. Adrift, I thought as I lay in the moonlit room: the bat had drifted in without aim or purpose. It wasn’t trying to invade our space; it had erred, entering, and simply wanted out. Yet despite the circumstances, the bat’s flight had seemed leisurely, as if the creature had all the time in the world.
The next morning we tiptoed downstairs, looked all over, climbed to the third floor, saw nothing, decided against entering the crawl space, and gave up. Somehow, the bat must’ve fled outside. Or was hiding in the walls of the house.
They’re very retrattili, Antonio said. They can fold themselves up into nothing, slip under baseboards . . . In any case, it’ll find a way out.
Or not, I thought. Or it’ll get stuck, and eventually we’ll smell it.
But why that strangely easy, unrushed glide?
Since then, whenever I see bats’ shadowy forms darting through the air at dusk, keeping mosquitoes at bay, I recall that lone interloper coasting into our bedroom.
Folded in the green cloth, the bat must’ve imagined itself shrouded from danger. Like an actor behind a theater’s thick curtain, her lines memorized and movements mapped, waiting for the preordained rise of dark velvet before stepping onstage and playing her part . . . Then suddenly everything changes, this isn’t the right moment, no, something’s gone amiss yet the curtain’s lifting anyway—whoosh!
But that bat was no helpless actor. When it was tossed onstage without warning, its surprise provoked not a mad skitter but a slow-down, a husbanding of its energy. Perhaps the bat expected to meet its end, perhaps to elude it; who can say? The creature’s gone now, but its stately passage through our bedroom has left me with a question. Faced with unexpected, unrehearsed perils, will I learn to glide through my own spaces of heart and mind without automatically heightening the drama? Will I be able to waft rather than flail and rush?
Walt Whitman put his finger on the challenge in “To Think of Time,” a poem in which he asks: If I were to suspect death, I should die now, / Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation? That image of Whitman strolling toward his own extinction like some relaxed flaneur makes me smile. Such was his intent, I suppose—to make me realize how much, despite my boasts to the contrary, I fear time’s passage. And how futile my resistance is.
Give me a hand with this thing, calls Antonio.
He’s out on the balcony, trying to put up the green cloth. It’s definitely a two-person job on this moonless, gusty evening. A summer rainstorm’s en route; a few drops spatter us. We wrestle the cloth onto its hooks and step inside the bedroom; when we close the doors, the wind gives a sharp whistle, as though objecting to being shut out.
We should deal with that curtain before dark, Antonio says. Not after.
Yeah, I say. Remember the bat?
You bet!
He smiles, proud of himself. I’ve recently taught him that expression, which he enjoys; the Italian version, puoi scometterci (literally, “you can bet on it”), isn’t as zippy.
Porco pipistrello! he adds. Wasn’t that evening fun!
He’s recently taught me pipistrello, the word for bat. When I told him it was dumb that such a wee animal had such a long name, he retorted that at least pipistrello wasn’t also the name of a stick. What stick, I asked. The one they use in that silly American national sport, he answered.
Living here, I say, I bet we’ll be learning all kinds of stuff from animals.
I already have, says Antonio. That cat with the fluffy tail—she got inside the house yesterday, I forgot to tell you . . . I found her in the living room, lying on the blue chair like she owned the place. Cazzarola! So you know what? For the next year, I’m gonna pretend I own the place, too!
I should try that as well, I think as we climb into bed.
Not just sort-of pretend, though. It’ll have to be genuine, this make-believe—a serious game of “as if.” I’ll
need to imagine myself the actual proprietor of this domicile. I’ll do it for the sake of expansion: not of property but of self. As if one fit to own things, mused Whitman, could not at pleasure enter upon all, and incorporate them into himself or herself . . . Incorporate all things, all experiences. Because all I see and know, I believe to have purport in what will yet be supplied.
The wind whistles again. We pull the blanket up to our ears. Drops of water ping off the glass doors.
Watch out, amore, says Antonio. Here it comes!
Though it’s pitch-black in the room, I can tell from his tone that he’s smiling. So am I.
Off-leash, the rain scampers across the roof.
4. Fatti Nostri
The Madonna of Castiglione del Terziere resides in a miniature one-room edifice made of stuccoed brick, with a terra-cotta roof.
She’s about thirty inches tall, wearing a flowing robe with a blue sash. Her head-scarf, like the robe, is white with gold trim. She gazes outward, her expression the classic one of open-eyed humility and contemplation; her two palms lie flat against each other, fingertips upright. Colorful plastic flowers lie at her side, along with what appear to be flora and fauna lodged in glass jars filled with water. The jars’ lids have been sealed with gold braid. There’s also a red electric light at the front of the alcove, above its door; it reminds me, incongruously, of a whore’s beacon.
When was her original home built? No one’s sure, although according to a small plaque set into the stucco, it was reconstructed in 1966. Now, more than fifty years later, the Madonna’s abode has just been through a remodeling. A new plaque will have to be made, but that can wait. What counts is that this residence is once again sturdy, and the Madonna herself has been touched up, her dignity restored.
Roberto, one of her renovators, says, “I fixed her home so she’ll help me stay healthy.”
Elide says, “We can all pray better, now that she’s got a decent place of her own.”
Rina simply smiles, maybe because she’s hard-of-hearing and has no idea what’s just been said.
The Madonna oversees la colla, the piazza that serves as the collective entrance point for Castiglione. Near its connection with the entry road are the houses of Roberto and of Daniel, another of the Madonna’s renovators; he and his family are from Romania. At the far end of la colla begins the cobblestoned lane that ascends to the upper borgo. Lined by four houses on one side and an abandoned farmhouse with a small grazing plot on the other, la colla is the unofficial, unglamorous seat of the village. Our collective trash and recycling receptacles are here, as are at least half the village’s cats and one of its three dogs. Entering or leaving, residents encounter one another regularly in la colla.
Most summer evenings, a small group gathers at the incipit of the cobblestone lane. They perch on a low stone wall or on plastic chairs for a few hours of chat, joking about being the village’s dogana—its Customs, where newcomers must show their documents or tell a good story in order to pass. An aged sign near this gathering point chronicles the village’s historical significance during the Renaissance, when castles did the work of defense departments and the borgo came into its own as a seat of civil law, one of Florence’s key outposts in northern Tuscany.
What the sign doesn’t capture is Castiglione’s unusual trajectory thereafter.
After several centuries of historical prominence and several more during which the borgo gradually ceased to matter to the Florentines or anyone else, its castle—reduced to near-ruin—was purchased in the 1960s and restored by Loris Jacopo Bononi. Obsessed with his native Lunigiana and with literature, Bononi created and curated a remarkable library in the castle. Stacked higgledy-piggledy on the five-hundred-year-old shelves of grand armoires are rare medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, incunabula, and first editions of Dante, Petrarch, and other Italian and Lunigianese authors. The castle contains a culture trove little known outside the region. The aged sign in la colla gives no hint that such a pot of book-gold exists, not over some rainbow but right up the hill.
These days, only a dozen or so people (including Antonio and myself) live in Castiglione year-round. Our ranks swell to around thirty when members of families who’ve long owned houses here return in August for a few weeks of rest and nostalgia. Our oldest long-term permanent residents, Elide and Rina (the latter, at eighty-five, has ten years on the former), hold court in la colla: they are its twin queens. Seated on cushions on a stone stoop, they listen as information is traded, questions are raised, judgments passed, arguments settled. A few feral cats venture for handouts. And the Madonna asserts her silent sovereignty.
On a late-August afternoon, while the renovators of the Madonna’s abode took a cigarette break, I told Elide about the challenges Antonio’s daughter was facing. She’d been trying to wean her twenty-month-old son.
Elide recounted her own daughter’s experience with one of her kids, a little girl who would go to kindergarten without a fuss, play and have lunch, return home in the afternoon, and ask to be nursed—not out of hunger but because this was the best way to process social anxiety. Elide mimed the giving of a breast to a baby. Quasi quattro anni, she reiterated, brows raised—almost four years old! She made one of my favorite Italian gestures: one hand slightly cupped, thumb touching the tips of bunched fingers, the whole performing a forward-backward motion in the air as if to say, give me a break!
Clever kid, I said to Elide. I guess we could all use such help.
Elide rolled her eyes. I wondered how often she used to pray to the Madonna when children, husband, in-laws, chickens, pigs, and everything else got to be too much for her. On damp, mildew-producing spring days; during winter temporali with their stinging rains; while her garden languished under a high summer sun; on gray autumn mornings when nothing stirred but monotony itself: at such times (and they must’ve been legion), prayer might’ve been a useful distraction. And might still be helping her now, in moments when she thought, I may be next to leave.
The renovation of the Madonna’s alcove involved several days’ painstaking labor on the part of three men: Roberto, Daniel, and another man, elderly and florid, whose name I never caught. Roberto and Daniel did the lion’s share of the work.
To each of them Elide issued supervisory orders. We need a place for flowers. No, rotate her slightly! A little more to the left. Good! Are you sure about that color? Rina, the assistant supervisor, simply smiled encouragingly at the workers. The three of them would keep at it, her smile seemed to say. They’d get the job done right, not because Elide was riding herd but because the Madonna was.
The men built a wood-framed glass door for the alcove—a new design element, and a tricky bit of work. The door had to arc at the top, which meant the glass had to be cut and set into its frame with care.
Daniel took it upon himself to do the carpentry work. Roberto ceded this responsibility without argument, admiring as he does Daniel’s can-do attitude and energy. Roberto himself is competent in many areas—he cultivates olive trees and makes marmalade from his bountiful plums—but he knew Daniel would fret if anyone else performed the task at hand. Roberto’s chatty and can seem oblivious, yet he’s canny about people. (When my daughter and wife arrive for a visit, he says, I give them the run of the place. We get along better that way.)
Before the glass-paned door could be installed, the men had to repair and repaint the alcove’s stucco interior. Then they fixed the Madonna’s chips and cracks, and repainted her from head to toe. To do so, they had to take her out and stand her on the ground, where she could be more easily worked upon and dried in the sun. No one seemed concerned that she was subjected to midday heat. Lunch hour and a short stretch before supper were the only times when all three renovators could convene to accomplish their mission, so everyone agreed that the Madonna would have to deal with the weather.
Once all the repair work was done, the men resituated the Madonna so her position in the alcove would deliver maximum benefits to who
ever approached her—even people who wouldn’t notice or care about her as they walked by. The men were undertaking this renovation, I slowly realized, not just for themselves but for everyone—known or unknown, locals or strangers, believers or atheists—who visited or lived in the borgo. This was not a selfish mission.
Why? I asked Antonio. Why are they putting so much energy into this?
To make their own homes sacred, he answered.
When I asked him what he thought sacred meant—not to the Church but to the villagers—he replied that he thought it meant safe.
* * *
The renovation has been finished for a fortnight. Roberto calls to us as we’re getting out of our car, groceries in hand. Since his house sits at the far end of la colla, opposite Daniel’s, they both monitor anyone entering or leaving the village.
Come, Roberto says, you’ve never seen my garden, have a look. Bring that stuff over here and put it in the shade.
He shows us around. Plum and olive trees descend in neatly terraced rows; a lemon tree boasts large yellow orbs. At the side of the house is an herb garden rife with thyme, rosemary, parsley, and basil. The whole scene gives off an air of calm fecundity.
Roberto offers us a glass of wine. We talk about the renovation project in la colla, how efficiently it was done. Roberto praises Daniel—that guy can do just about anything with his hands, he says—and Antonio asks how Daniel’s newborn is doing. A light-blue chiffon bow announcing the baby’s birth at the start of summer is still wrapped around a stone pillar at the base of Daniel’s driveway.
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