The Reluctant Tuscan

by Phil Doran

  I felt a soggy piece of paper, but when I pulled it out, it was yesterday’s list of macho catchphrases covered in coffee grounds and pesto sauce. I went to rinse off my hand, only to remember we had no water.

  “Goddammit!” I screamed to the mute faces of the Jesus Christs and the naked ladies staring down at me from the wall. “Why is everything here so difficult? Why is even the simplest thing such a struggle?”

  Then I remembered the article I was thinking about pitching to that buddy of mine at the L.A. Times. I bet it would really make him laugh to receive an e-mail titled: “Ten Things I Hate about Tuscany.”

  At that moment Nancy entered, heaved a sigh, and let the bag of groceries she was carrying drop to her feet.

  “I can’t do this anymore. . . .”

  “What happened?” I said, trying not to show my delight that she might have an item to add to my list.

  “I swung by the church, hoping to catch the mayor’s wife,” Nancy said, as she took off her rosary. “Of course, she wasn’t there, but I had to sit through the entire Mass anyway, because the priest was staring at me and I couldn’t leave.”

  “The sacrifices we make.”

  “I’m so sick of these games, I decided to grab the bullshit by the horns and go see the mayor himself.”

  “You went to his office?”

  “He was right there! I could see him through a crack in the door, doing a jigsaw puzzle, for God sakes, while his assistant’s telling me I can’t see him because he’s in a meeting.”

  “How about I get us a meeting?” I said.

  “You’re going to get us a meeting?”

  “Well, you dressing up like Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette and running to church six times a day isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  After apprising her of our water situation, I had her phone the mayor’s office and translate exactly what I said. As I dictated, Nancy explained to the mayor’s assistant that she was calling for her husband, a giornalista on assignment for the Los Angeles Times. Nancy went on to explain that I was doing a story about the town, and because I was on a deadline, I needed to interview the mayor as soon as possible.

  Without a moment’s hesitation the mayor’s assistant gave us an appointment for the following day. Nancy hung up and wrapped her arms around me. For this brief moment I was her overfed knight in shining armor.

  And I was right about my friend at the Los Angeles Times. I e-mailed him that evening, and the following morning I received an enthusiastic fax from his editor authorizing me to go ahead with the story.

  9

  Il Sindaco

  The next morning we arrived at the Comune di Cambione in Collina. It was a blocky three-story building of medieval origin, rebuilt after every war until its last reincarnation in the 1950s left it looking like the unholy marriage of a high Renaissance palazzo and a Texaco service station. At the top of the building fluttered an Italian flag so sun bleached, its red and green bars had faded into the pastels of orange and lime sherbet.

  We walked through the lobby, past the feudal banners and the heraldic crests of the local noble families. But just as those icons symbolized the historic grandeur of the town, there were also images of her more tragic recent past. A row of photos chronicled the carnage wrought during the war. Between the retreating Germans and the advancing Allies, the city was heavily damaged. In ghostly black and white these pictures captured the haunted, shell-shocked faces of refugees wandering through the bombed-out rubble searching for food. These were the parents and the grandparents of almost everyone we were dealing with, and their faces were testament to the events that have shaped the lives of three generations of Cambionese.

  As we headed down the hall toward the Ufficio del Sindaco (Office of the Mayor), I began hearing something I hadn’t heard in twenty years—the staccato clacking of an electric typewriter. We entered the waiting room and the mayor’s assistant, a cheerful woman bedecked in African jewelry, stopping pecking on her Olivetti and welcomed us. After making sure we were comfortably ensconced on the sofa, she scurried off to make us cappuccino.

  I had just begun leafing through a brochure entitled “Cambione in Collina—City of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” when a door opened and il sindaco himself appeared. He was a thick, broad-shouldered man with an aerodynamically shaped head as bald as a light bulb. Pelato, the Italians call such a skull. Peeled. I wondered . . . does every language have to take a shot at those with hair problems?

  He greeted us with a politician’s handshake that featured the clasping of your hand with both of his for an added touch of sincerity. He escorted us into his office, which, in addition to the usual self-congratulatory plaques and framed documents, was oddly hung with completed jigsaw puzzles that were lacquered and framed, while a half-finished one sat on his desk.

  “So how may I be of service?” he asked, as Nancy translated.

  “As my wife explained to your assistant,” I said through her, “the Los Angeles Times travel section wants me to do a story about Cambione.”

  “Such a big, important newspaper for our humble little town,” he said.

  “Well, that’s all part of its charm,” I said, as handed him the fax I had received that morning. “This is from my editor authorizing me to write the article and kindly requesting your cooperation.”

  “Of course, anything we can do.” He scanned the paper as if he could read it.

  “What really intrigued him was a story about this village by someone who actually lives here,” I had Nancy tell him.

  “You live here?” the mayor said, his eyes brimming with innocence.

  “We bought the old rustico up on the hill,” Nancy said. “The one people call ‘the Bunker.’ ”

  “Oh, I know it well. As I child I often played there,” he said, gazing nostalgically at a framed puzzle of a lacquered Tahitian sunset.

  “Then you know how much work it needs,” Nancy said, “. . . and some of the problems we’ve encountered.”

  “Well, I really don’t know all the details.” Nancy didn’t have to translate how evasive he was becoming.

  “The point is, sir,” I said, boring in, “I can’t write an article as someone who lives here, because due to this denuncia business, we don’t. And my paper’s kind of a stickler about things like that.”

  “I see.” He tilted back in his chair but kept level eye contact.

  “Of course, the sooner this little problem is solved . . . the sooner I can begin.”

  “From what little I understand, your denuncia is a rather complicated situation. With many different facets to consider.” He carefully pushed his jigsaw puzzle aside to make a little room on his desk for his elbow.

  “And you haven’t even heard our side of the story,” Nancy added.

  “Indeed,” he said, staring down at the unfinished board. “And that only makes it . . . uh, more of a puzzlement.”

  Nancy tried not to smile when she translated.

  “Some pieces fit and some don’t,” he said.

  “Well, sir, just because some of the pieces may be missing,” I said, “doesn’t mean there isn’t a big picture here.”

  “True.” He held up a small piece shaped like Florida. “But even when you have that missing piece in your hand, do you always know where it goes?”

  Nancy and I craned our necks to study the board and see where Florida went.

  “We feel that you’re very skilled at solving puzzlements,” I said, handing him a piece shaped like a bird wing and pointing to where I thought it might fit. “So we were hoping you’d get involved.”

  “I’d be happy to look into it for you, signore e signora, but really there’s not much I can do until it’s been processed by the proper committee.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up”—I took out my notepad—“because I think our one point seven million readers would be very interested in how that process works. And especially how long it’s going to take.”

  “That’s hard to predi
ct,” he said. “But I can assure you that the Comune di Cambione is known far and wide as one of the most modern and efficient in Tuscany.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I saw your office equipment and it made me nostalgic.”

  “Oh, this mania for computers is so wrong,” he said, interrupted by the jangling of African jewelry on his assistant, who had entered with our cappuccinos.

  “Really?” I clicked my pen and poised to write. “Why’s that?”

  “We Italians tend to make a lot of mistakes.” He winked at his assistant, who backed him up with a smile. “With a computer, once you make a mistake, poof, it’s gone! But a typewriter is slow. You make a mistake and there’s time to catch it before it goes out in the world for everyone to see.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said, writing furiously. “You know, sir, it’d be a damn shame if I couldn’t do this article and the world missed out on reading about such a quotable civic leader as you.”

  “Sì, che peccato,” he said. Yes, what a shame.

  “And what’s an article without pictures?” I said, taking out my camera.

  The mayor sat up and adjusted his tie. “Could I be doing my puzzle?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said, as I composed the shot.

  The following day we got a call from the mayor’s assistant, and over the jangling of African jewelry, she informed us that the denuncia against us had been overturned.

  10

  Trapassato Prossimo

  Buoyed by our success at the mayor’s office and the prospect of actually living a life here, I vowed to achieve some level of competence in the Italian language. I was no longer content to let Nancy do all the talking while I remained a gray eminence on the periphery of the conversation, like some immigrant grandfather in a 1940s movie, grinning idiotically while his smooth-talking grandchildren helped him file his citizenship papers.

  I was eager to strike out on my own and make friends, develop relationships, and by God, reach out and touch somebody. To that end I enrolled at the Giosuè Carducci Language Academy, where my classmates and I were tutored by a young lady with the intoxicating name of Ms. Margarita Martini. Three times a week we were drilled on verb conjugations in the trapassato prossimo tense and encouraged to memorize the inane conversations of Paulo and Maria, until there began to grow in me a sapling of confidence that would someday be a sturdy enough oak to allow me to have a conversation in a language I did not grow up speaking.

  I studied diligently and began to see results. Within a month I was able to carve out a crude version of Survivor’s Italian, assuring me that if anything ever happened to Nancy, I could at least get myself fed in a restaurant and then ask directions to whatever hospital or morgue they had taken her.

  Of course, I still got a lot of things wrong. Once Nancy and I were at the post office to take care of some bills, a place most Italians go to directly pay a clerk, saving them the anguish that, thanks to Posta Italia, their payment will never get delivered. Nancy presented our water bill and our electricity statement, along with the correct amounts of cash, to the man behind the counter. As he was processing our payments, I heard him use the word gamba, which I had just learned was the word for “leg.” Okay, she was wearing shorts, but what was he doing talking about her legs? When I asked her about it, she laughed. What he had said was that she was in gamba, a phrase used to compliment someone on their efficiency . . . the Italian equivalent of “on their toes.”

  Mistakes aside, my confidence kept growing until I decided to attempt a conversation with a woman I saw every day, our neighbor Signora Cipollini. A short, stocky old woman who was invariably dressed in a faded brown house-coat and apron, babushka, and huge rubber galoshes, she looked if she’d just stepped out of a Khrushchev-era documentary entitled Heroic Farm Workers of the Ukraine Celebrate the Glorious Five-Year Plan.

  I admired how the signora had taken what was essentially a small scrap of land and converted it into a life-sustaining source of food, as self-contained as a terrarium. Her land teemed with rigid rows of carrots, butter lettuce, and beets. There was a microgrove of apple and pomegranate trees, flanked by tomato vines and rows of rapa rosa, a fat, bloodred turnip the Tuscans eat in the winter. Every square millimeter was under cultivation, in such an efficient manner that those plants not bearing fruit provided shade for those that did, like the line of tall cypress tress that blocked the tramonto, a feverish wind that comes howling out the Alps and was thought to cause headaches and homicides.

  In addition to her cash crops Signora Cipollini kept a flock of chickens. Eight plump white hens, with an ever-changing number of chicks in tow, all overseen by a speckled rooster who strutted among them like the cock of the walk he was. What was interesting about her approach to livestock was her frugality in feeding them. Instead of squandering money on feed, she would simply take her flock out so they could graze on whatever garbage her neighbors had dumped that day.

  It was on one of those walks that I struck up a conversation. I had just done a load of wash and I was in the process of hanging it on the line when Signora Cipollini and her poultry came clucking past our house.

  “Buona sera, Signora Cipollini,” I said with all the confidence of one quoting the first page of a phrase book.

  “Sera,” she muttered, eyeing me warily.

  “Molto bello oggi.” I pointed up to the sky so she would know I was talking about the weather.

  “Troppo caldo,” she said, indicating her displeasure with the heat.

  “Sì,” I said agreeably while I composed my next thought. “Allora, come sta, signora?”

  “In somma.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, so I just plunged on. “Prendere mangiamo . . . uh, uh, suoi polli?”

  She flashed me a look of horrified indignation, quickly huddled her brood together, and ushered them away with such alacrity, I knew I had said something wrong. As they receded in a flurry of swirling pinfeathers, I leafed though my phrase book and discovered that instead of asking if she were taking her chickens out to eat, I had asked if I could eat her chickens.

  And we wonder why nations have such a hard time hammering out peace treaties.

  I had gone back to hanging out the laundry when Dino’s truck pulled up. He hopped out, casting a baleful eye at a man too busy washing his wife’s undies to go out with the boys and gun down a wild pig.

  “Ciao, Dino,” I said, nonchalantly turning the lacy front of Nancy’s pink panties away from him.

  “Is your wife sick?” he said, sliding open the hatch and letting his pack of hounds bound free.

  “No.” Then I realized that had to be the only explanation for what I was doing. “Yeah, a little touch of the flu.”

  “Oh, too bad,” he said, “but, listen, I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Our water?”

  “Your water’s okay, huh?” he said pulling a chewed-up clothespin out of Luna’s mouth before she could choke on it.

  “Sort of. Ever since they turned it back on, there’s been no hot water in the shower.”

  “Just in the shower?”

  “That’s the strange part. Like maybe there’s an obstruction, or a broken—”

  “I take care of it.”

  “How soon?”

  “Today, tomorrow.”

  “Today would be better.”

  “Today is impossible.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow I will call my cousin Turrido, one of the finest plumbers Italy has ever produced, and if he can do it, he will do it, and that’s a promise.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But you must help me with my son.”

  “What’s the matter?” I put on the properly serious expression, which was difficult because of the sudden raspy wetness of Ninja’s tongue on my bare foot.

  “I am a worried sick. Rudolfo don’t want to marry Pia.”

  “Pia?”

  “Pia Tughi. They be together since they was kids. Our families are
very close. We all expect them to marry, but now he refuses.”

  “Well, I’m sure he’s got his—”

  “No, he don’t! You got to talk to him.”

  I winced.

  “He likes you. He thinks you’re moderno.”

  “Look, Dino, I don’t think you can talk anybody into getting married.”

  “You and Nancy have no kids, no?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know what you can’t talk anybody into? Especially a son who is killing his mother to death because she don’t have no grandchildren.”

  “Rudolfo is thirty-four years old,” I said, cupping my privates as Cosimo came sniffing up to me. “He’s old enough to know what he wants.”

  He looked at me with pity. “Ai, you Americani. You know how to get to the moon but you don’t know how to get to anybody’s heart.”

  I was truly at a loss to respond to such an observation, but mercifully, we were interrupted by Signora Cipollini coming around the corner. Her unexpected presence sparked an instant, violent confrontation between Dino’s pack of dogs and her flock of chickens. Amid a swirling dust storm of clucking and barking came the piercing shrieks of Signora Cipollini and the angry bellowing of Dino trying to separate bird from beast.

  Signora Cipollini was screaming that her chickens were being murdered when, in reality, the fighting fowl were inflicting heavy damage on the dogs. The rooster had jumped up on top of Ninja, dug his claws into the dog’s fur, and was pecking him on the head. One of her pluckier pullets clamped a beak around Scheherazade’s tail and would not let go. The rest of the emboldened hens attacked in an echelon of clawing and scratching until the poor dogs were reduced to a disoriented pack of howling mutts. Dino finally grabbed a broom out of his truck and managed to separate the combatants.

  “Promise me you talk to Rudolfo!” he hollered over the barking and clucking, as he herded his mutts toward his truck.

  “Vai! Cretino con sue bestie!” Signora Cipollini screeched, huddling her hens under the hem of her mud-stained apron.