Susan sticks to the bright notion what do I have to lose?
Camille backs out in late July. She can’t. And Lara works to convince her that she shouldn’t. She keeps mentioning Cornwallis Meadows. Charlie, skeptical, says little, although at breakfast one Sunday, he remarks that Dad would surely recommend Cornwallis if he could. “But he can’t,” replied Camille, “can he?” The idea truly takes root then. Her two friends inspire her more than her own hardwired timorousness holds her back. Yes. She’s going.
They all decide.
Yes.
* * *
—
Such an emprise takes time but was accomplished: Susan opted to close her Chapel Hill house, not sell. At home alone one afternoon, she was reading in the sunroom and experienced an undeniable love for the bronze bars of sunlight hitting the heart pine floors, the design books on the coffee table, the two nails for stockings over the fireplace. Everything happened here, glorious, good, bad. Her miscarriages before they gave up and adopted, those sad days lying in bed, leaking out hope. The girls’ projects, the kitchen messes from their cookie and fudge attempts. Aaron’s golf bags and fishing gear on the back porch. Full, jammed life. Let the house go? Not yet. What if Eva or Caroline wants to come home? She threw a farewell party in her garden and invited all her friends and colleagues.
* * *
—
She hired a grad student to come twice a week to flush the toilets, air out the rooms, and pick up flyers on the porch. She trusts her gardener. Her hundred houseplants she put out on the street with a sign: FREE.
Camille offered her car and home to Charlie and his family, and they arranged to rent their little place to a visiting professor from China. She was pleased that Lara finally got over the shock and became excited for her. Charlie, she’d always known of her good boy, would take her side whatever she chose. She told him about the coffin dream and, as a painter, he understood intuitively what it meant. They planned a Christmas visit. How fabulous to introduce Ingrid to Italy. She left behind the urn of ashes.
Julia filed for divorce. She wrote Hugh that as of October, she’d find someone good to take care of his house. And could he come stay in Tuscany, because he might like to study the Etruscans? She’d heard nothing from Lizzie and made no contact with Wade, other than the wrenching business of serving him with papers. She made a quiet trip to visit her father, who thought Italy was a splendid idea and asked when he could visit. Her father agreed not to reveal her whereabouts except in emergency. She did not drive by her house.
They all made arrangements—gardens, bank accounts, insurance, good-byes to baffled friends, medical and dental checkups. All three began online courses in Italian. Hugh’s housekeeper’s daughter’s divorce coincided with Julia’s exit and she was thrilled to move in the day Julia left. Susan had an eye lift and was quite pleased to see her gray eyes widen again. She installed the FOR SALE sign at the beach. Her daughters agreed—it was the right time for their mom.
Camille practiced watercolors and loved her color studies, and experiments with transparency and opacity. Julia wrapped up her recipe testing. Susan sold two stellar properties, then closed her office at Ware Properties. To her surprise, her brother, Mike, bought Sand Castle.
In October, they will fly to Rome.
The morning after the arrival of the three women, my neighbor Leo whistled under my study window. His three notes mock a certain bird (a blackbird?) that often sings nearby, leading me to the window because I think it’s Leo. He knows I’m up early, usually working, but has no concept at all that he possibly could be disturbing an earthshaking line of poetry. Still in my nightgown, I looked out the window. He was holding a chicken.
“Buon giorno.”
“Porca miseria,” he replied. Pig misery, one of my favorites of the milder Tuscan curses. “We have the new neighbors. They have brought a dog. It got out and into my garden.” The chicken’s head, I noticed now, was drooped over and limp. “I chased, Candida was squawking to heaven, and it dropped her.”
“Oh, awful. What are you going to do?”
“I went to the villa door and introduced myself. They started fluttering around like chickens when they saw Candida. Americans, like you. Three ladies. One of them raced out in her bathrobe and started chasing the dog.”
“You must be angry.”
“Boh, she was ready for the grill. And I have a three-month rabbit, too. I invited them for dinner tomorrow. You must come, too.”
I’m always taken aback by the Tuscans’ lack of sentiment for their food sources. Leo has petted that rabbit, carried it in his pocket, fed it tiny bits of lettuce, and now he’s ready to skin it and enjoy every bite. Realism, I suppose. Like Margaret’s. How much power she gained when describing children in the postwar south of Italy when she wrote that beatings for wives and boys happened routinely; incest was “not unexpected” in the lives of girls. Always the opposite of sensational, her understatement was devastating.
Though I cringe now, I probably won’t think about the gray bunny when Leo’s wife, Annetta, places her boned and stuffed coniglio on my plate. Especially if her sister has made those crisp rosemary potatoes.
* * *
—
Twelve hours in Tuscany, and the three women already have a dinner invitation. Happens all the time in Dallas and L.A., right? Someone rushing over and inviting you before you’ve even unpacked? Yes, especially right after you’ve run over their cat, or backed into their mailbox.
* * *
—
I must get on to my projects. On my screen this morning: Margaret.
When Colin moved in, he’d ask me, “Will we need to buy a chain saw?”
“Do you think the shutters must be oiled every year?”
“Is that Roman painting of Janus in the museum a fake?”
“How will we get the well tested?”
I’d look up from my book. “Call Margaret—she would know.”
Brief bio:
Born in 1938 in Washington, D.C., Margaret Merrill graduated from Georgetown University. Except for stays in the United States, she lived in Italy from 1964 until a few months before her death in 2013. She wrote three novels, three books of investigative nonfiction, and was on staff at Corriere della Sera. She also was a frequent contributor to major newspapers and periodicals in the United States and Great Britain. Stairs to Palazzo del Drago was published in 1968, followed by In the Cold Shadows (1974), The Taste of Terror (1979), Sun Raining on Blue Flowers (1988), World Mafia World (1994), and Labranda (2009). Her photographs have appeared in her books and have been exhibited in Italy. She was awarded the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prima Donna Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
I leave out the last spectacular act.
After writing for a couple of hours every morning, I follow into town my special path that Colin keeps free of brambles. Between two ancient cypresses at the edge of my land, a gate opens to a narrow sentiero that winds over the hump of hill, past chariot-wide stone pavers of a Roman road, and down into the village. It’s always a slight shock to descend from solitude and views, to drop into the waking-up streets where merchants sprinkle water from plastic acqua minerale bottles and scrub around their thresholds, trucks hurry in for morning delivery hours, the woman far gone in dementia calls greetings from the door of her son’s shoe shop—buon dí, tutti—and the toasty fragrance of baking bread drifts out the forno door across the street.
San Rocco is set like a brilliant medallion on the lower slopes of Monte San Lorenzo. No other hill town charms me as much. If you’ve ever read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this could be one of his dreamy fictional creations. What enchants? Maybe it’s the via Fulvio, ancient decumanus, the classical straight east/west Roman road dividing the town in half and laid to catch the sun. Maybe it’s the fountain of diving nymphs and dolphins in the middle
of the elliptical piazza; maybe it’s the cluster of café umbrellas at one end, and along one long side, three rival restaurants with outdoor tables and menus resolutely posted, only in Italian. (I appreciate that.) The Duomo with frescoes of the Last Judgment anchors the opposite side, and worn marble steps provide locals with a place to sit and watch the inevitable repetition of each day.
The Friday market, small and boisterous, pulls me in every week. I visit the fish truck on Wednesday and the porchetta stand on Thursday. Always something tasty to eat. It’s a wonder I’m not gargantuan. We have a pastry shop, a book/art supply shop, enough clothing stores, a dry cleaners, and three antique shops that draw people from Milan and Rome. Two excellent gelato places and other righteous trattorias scatter along the streets that radiate from the decumanus, along with two boutiques where chic young women lean in the doorways, managing not to look bored, and branching vicoli, tiny streets, lead to artisan jewelry, a shoestore, and a knitwear designer. Five thousand souls, all particular. (And, naturally, a few creeps, fascists, and grumps.)
Though archaeologists flock here to study the Etruscans, the main piazza originally was a Roman circus for chariot races, hence the graceful ellipse. The Romans were grid-minded but I don’t see how this town ever could have been conceived that rigidly, given that the steep terrain requires curves to get from A to B. I guess they gave up on the cardo, their usual north/south road that intersected the decumanus. By medieval times, the circus perimeter was built up with rabbity warrens of shops, stands, houses, and later the rambling noble palazzi you still can get lost in. Anytime sewers are repaired or gas lines installed (and most recently fiber optic cables laid), workers discover grain storage wells, vaults, cellars, and sections of Etruscan road. A few of the ancient stone arches still function as doorways and windows of shops. Layers of time happily coexist, one of the comforts of living here.
I go to all the cafés because baristas are among my favorite Italians. I love their efficiency and skill. This morning I’m at Violetta’s Bar San Anselmo. She swirls into the foam of my cappuccino the design of a lyre because she knows I’m a poet. (That’s another thing I love about Italy. The person making coffee knows a lyre symbolizes poetry.) “Signora,” she tells me, “you have new neighbors. Gianni says they are simpatiche, molto simpatiche. Have you met them?”
“No, they only arrived last night.”
“Yes, but already Leo has met them.” Is that a rebuke?
News travels fast in this town. Violetta probably knew before I did what I would wear today.
* * *
—
My out-early-into-town habit comes from Margaret. When we first met, I’d see her on mornings when I walked in. I was trying to establish a writing rhythm but finding Tuscany too alluring—and I still love to see the town come alive. Walking over the hill I took my Italian verb book, memorizing conjugations, but when I got to the town gate, I put away my book and concentrated on seeing Anna arranging vegetables, the garbage collector sweeping the street with one of those witch brooms made of twigs, the barber lighting his first smoke, leaning back in his chair with a tabby sleeping on his lap. Often I’d run into Margaret at Bar Beato Angelico, where they should but don’t have a plaque over her regular table. She’d put down her paper and cigarette and motion me to join her. Smoke, smoke, everyone smoked then. (Not I.)
Without plan, we began to meet a morning or two a week. She was just as happy without me. The bar soon filled with local people nipping a coffee before work and with tourists who, assuming no one there speaks English, have conversations novelists cannot resist tuning into. Not surprisingly, I soon saw in Margaret herself the same stunning quality of her writing—the observer with the archaic smile.
* * *
—
In comes Gianni, our local taxi driver. “The women have no men,” he tells me. “They are on solo trips. They have come from the South of America, bringing a little dog, naughty, who peed in the carrier and barked all the way from the Rome airport.”
“They have no car?”
“No, but Grazia will sell them her mama’s Cinquecento as soon as the brakes are repaired.”
“Is that legal?” I know that it is not, unless they are registered residents. That Grazia. Maybe she has some scheme that gets around the law. I wouldn’t be surprised.
“Why not?”
Why not is the local response to every preposterous proposition. Another thing I love.
“I told them about their famous neighbors, the poet and the architect. You will be friends as you are of the same country.”
“Yes, we’re all American. We’ll love each other,” I laughed. I’m still a foreigner. Always will be, one of the sharp hooks in my flesh when I think of staying forever in this place. If I went back to the shady neighborhood in Florida where I was born and raised, I’d blend like an alligator or mosquito into the landscape with never a thought of being the exile far from home. Colin scoffs at that. “We’re the new people. Citizens of the world.”
As the day is unseasonably warm, I take my coffee to an outside table on the piazza and open my vellum-bound book.
NOTES:
Will not yet say how she died. (Dire.) I’m saying now how she was as a friend. (Luminous.) What she wrote. (Janus!) She may or may not have been a “courier” between Italy and the CIA. (She denied; I’m sure she was.) She may or may not have been a lesbian. (If so, she was a lipstick lesbian and now who cares anyway?) She once humiliated me publicly. (Why? Jealousy?) She named me in her will. (Ferocious generosity.) She was drawn to trouble spots. (Why? Pushed to the edge, she liked to decide whether to jump.)
Margaret, maddeningly elusive but what a wicked, raucous sense of humor. I miss that. Those seven years I knew her in Tuscany, she was slippery even in answering basic questions that should not be difficult between friends. Why did you never marry again? You were only in your twenties…She’d pour into a glass a big splash of the martinis she brought over in a Mason jar to my house. We only drink wine but she was always a martini girl. No one could mix one the way she could, or so she believed. She’d laugh. “Tried marriage twice and after the second crash landing, I thought, This is just not going to work out,” as though she were bad at piecrusts. And then she’d notice the white dahlias I’d planted and warn me that they must be dug out in autumn; they’d never survive the Tuscan winter. With Margaret, conversation was a series of detours. Muddy road ahead.
* * *
—
When I start to pay, Violetta tells me that Gianni has bought my coffee. This is a charming San Rocco tradition and another reason to love this town.
“Welcome to the hood, Archie!” Julia scans the open shelves for the Moka espresso pot she knows must be there—Grazia has left an obsessive inventory—then spots it on the windowsill. For their arrival Grazia stocked the kitchen with a few provisions—bread, cheese, prosciutto, coffee, oranges. “American canine invasion on the borders! Killing and mayhem!” Julia pauses and looks around the kitchen. “This is odd—I feel like I have cooked in this room all my life. How simple. And aren’t these checked curtains across the lower shelves so characteristic? I’ve seen them in Italian cookbooks. Brick floors—what are they called, cotto? Cooked—how practical. Spill anything.” Julia is already dressed in jeans and a red sweater but barefoot. She unrolls the felt pouch of chef’s knives that she brought over in her luggage. At Mulberry Press, she was the chef for authors’ events and occasionally she catered parties for friends.
“I can’t believe that huge marble sink. You could bathe two babies in there. Archie! What a disaster. He never saw a chicken in his life. Now on our first morning he’s murdered the neighbor’s hen. Oh, what was his name? Leo! He was sweet about it and now we’re going to have to eat the damn chicken.”
Susan couldn’t help but laugh. “I cannot believe little goofy Archie has the killer instinct.”
“He’s nev
er been out of North Carolina. He is insanely confused. When we go in town, we’ll buy Leo something nice. Wine?” Camille saws into the bread, prepares a platter with everything Grazia brought, and pours big glasses of blood orange juice. On the long kitchen table, the mound of cheese, rustic bread, and oranges forms a still life. The juice looks dark and powerful—a glass will speed you into the day. They are starving, not having eaten since the exceptionally good sandwiches at a highway grill en route from the airport.
Women in Sunlight Page 9