The Reluctant Tuscan

by Phil Doran

  “What about our shower?” I yelled.

  “I speak to Cousin Turrido,” Dino cried as he pushed the last of his dogs inside his truck and slammed the hatch. “He come over soon as he can.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” I asked as Dino jumped into the cab.

  “You come over to our house anytime you want,” Dino called out as he sped off. “And while Nancy’s taking a shower, you can talk to Rudolfo!”

  “Now, there’s a fine plan,” I said to the rooster, who had no comment as he pecked at the gravel around my feet.

  11

  Il Dipartimento d’Autorizzazione della Licenza Edilizia

  There’s no such thing as junk mail in Italy, at least not yet, and since our friends and family wrote to us by e-mail, the arrival of an actual letter, especially an official-looking one, was such an occasion that the postman hand-carried it to our door. Nancy invited him in for coffee, and as he sipped, he watched us read the document overturning our denuncia. He congratulated us, then he did what most Italians do. Looking up to the heavens as he tapped on his heart with his fist, he shared his tale of woe dealing with the Comune, specifically how he’d been waiting six years for them to approve the rebuilding of a ruvinato, a ruined house, so he, his wife, and their three kids could move out of his mamma’s place.

  Judging by his and many other stories we’d heard, we were lucky. For two stranieri to get this far this fast was remarkable. But we needed to begin rebuilding quickly, because things could turn against us in a heartbeat. So while I loaded up the postman with cookies for his kids, Nancy dialed Umberto. She told him that we had just received the official notification that we could proceed with our renovation, and we’d like him to start immediately. Then Nancy’s eyebrows furled over something he was telling her. She tried to get in a word but he kept insisting that we meet in person at a café in the main piazza.

  As we got ready to go, Nancy fretted about losing him. Long before I got to Tuscany, she had spent weeks driving around looking at other rustici that had been restored. Time and time again the best work had been done by Umberto and his crew. She contacted him, and when they sat down to talk, she realized how deeply he loved these old stone houses and how well he understood what she wanted to do.

  I, meanwhile, was ruminating over how much the Italians hate the telephone. During the course of rebuilding our house, we got calls from our ingegnere, the geometra, the carpenter, and so on asking us to come to their office or workshop. Invariably, we’d discover that whatever they wanted to discuss could have been dealt with over the phone. But that’s not the Italian way. They need to see your face, look in your eyes, and use their vast array of hand gestures. So dependent are they on hand gestures that an Italian with a missing finger is thought to have a speech impediment.

  So it came as no surprise that as we sat down, Umberto greeted us by placing his palms together, fingers extended toward us, and rocking them up and down as if he were praying. This was the Tuscan way of saying, “I’m begging you to understand my situation.”

  None of the workers we hired ever apologized for not showing up, being late, or installing something wrong. When confronted ever so gently, they immediately went on the offensive, getting angry with us for not appreciating how difficult their lives were. In Umberto’s case, his face reddened with indignation as he enumerated his woes, which began with his truck breaking down right after he had spent three hundred euros having it serviced! Then, kissing his wedding ring, he told us how his dear wife had fallen out of a tree picking peaches and broken her foot. Without a truck, his work was hampered. And with a plaster cast on her foot his wife could no longer do her duties, forcing him to hire a woman to cook, clean, and take care of the kids. So even though we had told him the denuncia was going to be lifted, he had taken another job because he wasn’t sure ours was ever going to happen.

  But even as Italians are disappointing you, they hope to make the situation acceptable. So Umberto insisted he could do both jobs at once by splitting up his crew and working them overtime.

  “It’s not right to make your guys work like that in the summer,” Nancy said with a scowl.

  “Loro sono bestie,” he proudly replied. They’re beasts, they like the heat.

  “Besides, how can you supervise two jobs at once?”

  “I do it all the time,” Umberto said.

  Nancy placed the thumb edge of her palm against her forehead and waggled her fingers at him in a gesture reminiscent of the Three Stooges, which meant, appropriately enough, “You’re crazy.”

  “Quanto tempo ci vuole finire nostra casa?” I haltingly said, asking how long he thought our house would take using a smaller work force.

  “Don’t worry, signore,” Umberto replied in Italian. “My guys are trained to work quickly, efficiently, and, in spite of anything man and nature throws against them, do the most magnificent work in all of Tuscany.”

  The words shot out of Umberto’s mouth with the velocity of a bullet train, which made it hard for me to follow. At this point I was able to understand about half of what people were saying if they didn’t talk too fast or stare down at their shoes when they were speaking.

  “Besides, my other job’s right next to yours,” Umberto said, turning to Nancy, “so I can be at two places at once.”

  “You’re working at Vesuvia Pingatore’s?”

  Umberto looked up to the heavens, made a fist, and pounded it on his chest. “After I finished work on her brother Mario’s villa, she made me promise to do hers next.”

  Nancy grimaced.

  “Come on, it’s no big deal. I’m just doing her outside wall.”

  “She already has an outside wall,” Nancy said.

  “She wants it higher.”

  “So she doesn’t have to look at us?” Nancy said.

  “I swear to you that no matter what it takes, or how much rain we get, you’ll be able to move into your house by the end of summer. Okay?”

  “Soon as you’re done with hers, do you promise you’ll put your full crew on ours every day?” Nancy said.

  “You have my word,” Umberto replied.

  Nancy and I looked at each other and considered the alternatives, which were few. Then she turned to him, put the tip of her index finger on the tip of her thumb, and made a downward movement as if pulling a lamp cord. She was using the Italian gesture that says, a posto . . . “Okay, all set.”

  Before we went to the Comune to pick up the building permits, we had some banking to do. One of the conditions of lifting the denuncia was agreeing to keep the amount of money needed to cover the cost of the construction in an account at our local bank. Anytime our balance fell below that sum, the bank was obligated to inform them. This was their way of making sure we weren’t going to cut and run. We had wired the funds over and now we needed the bank to give us the documentation that the required amount was in place.

  The bronze plaque that displayed the name of our bank also announced that this particular institution had been founded twenty years before Columbus sailed for the New World, and every time I walked in, I felt like there were still customers from the fifteenth century waiting for a teller. The bank had computers, but they seemed to be mostly used for sending e-mails and playing video games, often during business hours. Instead, bank workers could be seen using the traditional scissors-and-glue-pot approach to commerce.

  As usual, the bank was crowded. There were about a dozen people in a line that was moving at a glacial speed. Italian lines, by the way, are not straight, but round. They tend to coalesce into a loose mob, where everyone seems to be able to follow the threads of many simultaneous conversations at once while never losing track of who goes next.

  The wait was endless, but Italians can endure anything as long as they can talk. And their preferred way is everybody at the same time and at a volume we usually reserve for telling somebody the building’s on fire. It got so deafening in there that the tellers had trouble understanding their clients. The b
ank manager started hollering, “Silenzio!” but it was so noisy, nobody heard him.

  We finally got to a teller. We explained our need and handed him our checkbook. He then disappeared for the exact amount of time it takes to have a cappuccino and a cigarette at the café next door. He reappeared with a document verifying that we had the proper amount on deposit and handed us back our checkbook.

  A word about Italian checkbooks and that word is drab. Unlike America, where you can order your checks in lots of twenty thousand and get them printed with everything from Sunset Over the Mojave to a field of Happy Faces, Italian checks come in only one color: a faded, plain institutional brown. When you open an account, they hand you a slim packet of fifteen checks, stapled together, without even one of those cheesy plastic covers. After you’ve used up your allotted amount, you return to the bank with your checkbook. They tear it in half, giving you back the part where you recorded the information on the checks you wrote, and then give you a fresh pack of fifteen.

  In a country recognized for style and design, the very birthplace of the Renaissance, this is an appalling lack of sprezzatura, or what the Italians themselves call “the art of living.” Perhaps they are content with having their checks in sober, solid hues and leaving images of Michelangelo’s David and Raphael’s angels to adorn the Jockey shorts and potholders that are bought by the tourists.

  On our way to the Comune, we spotted a homeless man headed in the same direction. I fumbled for some change, but as he came closer, I realized it was Mario Pingatore! His face was covered in day-old stubble and he was wearing a frayed shirt, paint-splattered overalls, and a battered little sailor’s hat that looked as if it belonged to a child. His only concession to fashion was a threadbare mackintosh he wore over his shoulders, Vittorio De Sica style.

  Instead of regaling us with his pip, pip, cheerio British, he spoke little and what he did say was in Italian. He was angry for two reasons. First, he was miffed that we were actually going to fix up the rustico, which he had had every opportunity to do. In fact, before putting it on the market, he had done his own remodel. But instead of turning it over to professional workers with power tools, he did it on the cheap, hiring four Albanians with putty knives to mortar up some cracks and install glass in the windows.

  His second source of irritation was that he had to come to the Comune to receive his tax assessment. Hence, the wardrobe of a Dumpster diver over his usual natty English tweeds.

  As Mario trudged off to the tax collector, we climbed two flights of marble stairs and headed for the Dipartimento d’Autorizzazione della Licenza Edilizia. When we entered the office, I thought it was interesting that the department charged with the supervision of all construction and remodeling in the city was, in fact, under construction. Bare wires hung from the ceiling and large sections of the walls had been opened up. As we stepped around ladders, idle power tools, and buckets of plaster, Nancy told me that this was exactly the way it had been when she was here two years ago.

  A common feature of every government office in Italy is a constantly ringing phone that nobody ever bothers to answer. This office, being bigger, had two phones ringing maddeningly out of sync. On top of that the FM radio piped in to soothe us had drifted off its station and was now broadcasting pure static.

  “Buona sera,” Nancy and I said in unison when we finally reached the man behind the counter. He was movie-star handsome, with chiseled features and a magnificent Roman nose. His face made me grateful I hadn’t been born here, because with so many good-looking men around, I would never have found a woman. But he was rather short, and he immediately put on his hat so he’d be Nancy’s height.

  We handed over our documents, and he glared at our papers like a man reading that his bank had just gone under. Then he took off his hat and disappeared. We waited patiently, but when his absence stretched way past the time it took to have a cappuccino and a cigarette at the café next door, we knew there was trouble.

  “We cannot issue you your permits,” he said in Italian as he snapped his hat back on and stood up on his toes.

  Nancy’s face whitened with shock. “What?”

  “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “Did we fill out something wrong?” she asked in his language.

  “The house has no address,” he imperially replied.

  “What’s he saying?” I implored.

  “He can’t give us the permits because we have no address,” she said in my direction.

  “Tell him that’s why we’re here,” I urged.

  “That’s what why we’re here,” she said sweetly in Italian. “To get an address.”

  “Yes, but we can’t give you one, because we can’t find any proof your house exists.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Please . . .” Nancy muttered between clenched teeth. Then, turning to him with a smile, she said, “I’m sorry, signore, but we don’t understand what the problem is.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that we’ve searched everywhere and there’s no indication that your house was ever registered.”

  “What? What?” I demanded.

  “He’s saying that there’s absolutely no proof our house ever existed.”

  “Huh?” I turned and glared down at him. “What are you talking about, people have been living there for hundreds of years.”

  “He can’t understand you,” Nancy said.

  “I think he can and I think he’s speaking Italian just to piss me off.”

  Nancy closed her eyes and bobbed her head back and forth, as if she were smashing her forehead into a brick wall.

  “Just tell him what I said,” I hissed.

  Nancy flicked her smile back on and spoke to him in Italian, until I stopped her.

  “Wait a minute, you just used the words mio marito. What are you saying about ‘your husband’?”

  “That you don’t mean to be an asshole, but you missed lunch.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  She went on to ask how people could have been living in the rustico for hundreds of years if it didn’t exist.

  “Back then it was common to build a structure and not register it,” he explained in Italian, “and over the years no one’s ever bothered. So according to law, if it’s never been registered it doesn’t exist.”

  “Why hasn’t this come up before?” Nancy asked.

  “No one’s ever tried to remodel it,” he replied.

  “Come on, man, how can it not exist?” I said, elbowing Nancy out of the way. “Everybody in town knows it’s there!”

  He said something to me in Italian that was so indignant, he jerked his head and his hat went askew.

  I dug a paper out of our folder and handed it to her. “Show him the title. Doesn’t that prove something?”

  He didn’t even look at it, replying to Nancy, who turned to me and said, “Their position is: a title signed over to us is only a bill of sale. Nothing more.”

  “Well, if it doesn’t exist,” I said to Nancy, “ask him what difference does it make what we do to it?”

  Nancy asked and was answered. Holding her throbbing temples, she told me that the law says it’s illegal to alter or change an unregistered property.

  “Well, it’s immoral to approve the sale of something when you know damn well you’re not going to allow any improvements,” I said.

  “Honey . . .” Nancy said, tugging on my arm.

  “We’re only trying to make something nice out of a place no one can live in!” I cried. “Improve the neighborhood, build up the tax base and—and . . . wait till the Los Angeles Times hears about this!”

  Nancy dragged me away before I could finish my indictment of how they ran things in this Tuscan Hooterville.

  “You can’t get anywhere arguing with them,” she said as we stepped over a trough of wet plaster.

  “The hell you can’t! Goethe lived here, you know. In Italy for three years. And he once said, ‘Be bold and great forces will come to your aid.’ �
��

  “Listen, honey, they’ve been here two thousand years and they never invited you, me, or Goethe. So forget bold, that doesn’t work. Let’s just relax and try to figure out how to do things their way, okay?”

  12

  L’Avvocato

  I have no trouble lying to the Italians, because they’re a highly imaginative people who have an ethereal relationship with the truth. They are a nation of natural-born story-tellers who love to wrap you up in their yarns. Interestingly, they tend to label such a narrative as “una storia,” which implies that what they are telling you can be true, made up, or a combination of the two. Often these anecdotes are long and quite intricate, carefully crafted to elicit your sympathies, or, failing that, exhaust you so you’ll go away.

  For instance, we have an English friend in Italy who once called a repairman because he wasn’t getting any heat in his house. After examining the furnace the repairman blithely told him it was working perfectly. Trouble was the outside air was too cold.

  We had a similar experience after we moved into the rustico and had a satellite dish installed by Telepiù Italia so we could watch CNN and the BBC World Service (which, incidentally, aired a documentary on the Phillips screwdriver that was quite fascinating). A few days later, however, something malfunctioned and we couldn’t get any reception at all.

  After many phone calls, with me screaming in Nancy’s ear, a cable guy finally showed up. He looked at our equipment, jiggled a few wires, and concluded that everything was working fine. But, as I pointed out, we still had no picture or sound, strongly suggesting that he climb up on the roof and try repositioning our dish.

  Since he didn’t want to do that, he told us that the problem was with the transmission of our signal. Being in the communication business myself, I pressed him for specifics. He was vague and evasive enough to make me think he was vamping, so I kept grilling him because I didn’t want to go another day without TV.

  Finally, he leaned in close and in a confidential tone told us that the company didn’t want their customers to know this, but they were having trouble with their satellite. I asked him what they were doing about it, and as he packed up his tools, he told me to just be patient. The satellite would soon be functioning again because Telepiù Italia had the best technicians in the world.