The Reluctant Tuscan

by Phil Doran

  With the exception of rubbing the head of an occasional dwarf, I have little regard for superstition, having lost any respect for the occult when as a teenager I was unable to reconcile, from an astrological standpoint, how Soupy Sales, Cardinal Richelieu, and my girlfriend Marsha could all share the same birthday.

  Perhaps my skepticism has softened, for I was grateful to whatever mysterious powers now favored us because, thanks to our having an address, we were able to turn in our rental and buy ourselves a car.

  True to the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, Dino was quick to insist that we could get preferential treatment and the best deal only by shopping at his future in-law’s establishment, Tito Tughi’s Auto Mundo. In addition to keeping the money in the family, Dino saw this as an opportunity for me to spend some quality time with Rudolfo and convince him to marry Pia Tughi, guaranteeing that there would be a family to keep the money in. I wanted no part of this, preferring to stay focused on our goal of not winding up with a vehicle that didn’t need a horn because you could hear it two blocks away. But in Italy, where nothing is business but everything is personal, my objections were in vain and we soon found ourselves in the backseat of a van, our faces being licked by dogs, while Dino drove us to Signore Tughi’s car lot.

  To Americans the words car lot conjure up a very specific image. A crisp, asphalt-paved expanse of real estate, festooned with flapping flags and neon signs fluttering and flashing over rows of gleaming cars, while a fast-talking guy in a loud sport coat earnestly tells us that he’s not authorized to go that low, but he’ll go talk to his manager. That was exactly what Tito Tughi and his Auto Mondo were not.

  The lot itself was a meandering patch of land partially concealed by an outcropping of bramble bushes. Not only was it unpaved, but it dipped and dived into flat-bottomed gullies and shallow ravines, so that all vehicles on display sat at various heights and angles, as if they were bobbing on the surface of a rather choppy body of water. Additionally, the phrase hail fellow well met never has been, nor ever will be, used to describe Signor Tito Tughi. A dour man with tired, droopy eyes and a toothbrush moustache, he dressed in black and walked around with his hands clasped behind him in a manner more befitting a gravedigger than a used-car salesman.

  There wasn’t a vast assortment of cars to choose from, but after navigating up and down the terrain and kicking the tires of various Fiats, Lancias, and Opels, we gravitated toward a red sedan that was parked at such a steep angle, we could see without a doubt that no fluids were seeping out. When we asked Signor Tughi the price, his hangdog expression became positively funereal.

  “Do you have any young children?” he asked.

  Nancy told him we didn’t and proceeded to translate.

  “Then this would be a good car for you. For when you have that unfortunate traffic accident”—Signore Tughi held up a closed fist with his pinkie and thumb sticking out in the shape of horns—“you won’t have to worry about them being killed.”

  His use of the hand gesture the Italians call le corna to ward off bad luck did little to soften the fact that he was speaking of a car accident as if it were as much a part of driving in Italy as an oil change.

  “Much safer to be inside this,” he said, patting the fender of a VW Polo with one hand as he made le corna with the other. “If and when . . .”

  Signore Tughi went into great detail extolling the solidity of the frame and the dependability of the airbags, with the tacit implication that any macchina build by the Germans had to be superior to anything manufactured in Milan, Turino, Detroit, or Yokohama. A begrudging respect for their engineering skills is about the only good thing the Italians can find to say about their Teutonic neighbors. That’s because the atrocities committed by the Germans during the war seem as fresh in people’s minds as if they happened last Tuesday, and even a carefree stroll around the piazza takes you past a plaque marking the spot where the Nazis lined up eight partisans and shot them. Resentments run deep, for as our neighbor Annamaria so succinctly put it, “How can a nation that belches understand a nation that sings?”

  After the Germans failed to occupy Italy by force, they turned around and conquered it with Deutsche marks, and now euros. This fact also riles the Italians to the point where if a German and a French customer are in a store, the Italian clerk will often choose to wait on the French one, only because they hate them slightly less than they hate the Germans.

  Over and above the car’s excellent bloodlines, Signor Tughi presented us with the most compelling reason to buy it. The original owner was Father Fabrizio of the Chiesa della Madonna dell’Acqua, so not only had this car been actively engaged in the charitable acts of visiting the sick and the needy, it was also featured in the annual parade honoring Our Lady of the Autostrada. Clearly, here was a car whose history of pious service would long protect its occupants. I, for one, didn’t feel worthy to own such a hallowed vehicle, but events were pushing us along and we found ourselves following Signor Tughi through the bramble bushes back toward his office.

  When Nancy asked him the price, he led us over to the garage to talk to his sales manager, who turned out to be his daughter, Pia, a lively blonde in a short skirt that seemed better suited for a disco than a service bay. She signaled that she’d be right with us, but she was busy dressing down her two brothers for botching up the repair on an exhaust manifold. Signor Tughi looked away, and the boys all but hung their heads, as Pia showed them the proper way to remove the housing assembly without tearing apart the gasket.

  Wiping her hands on an oil rag, she approached us. Dino made a great display of welcoming his daughter-in-law-to-be and introduced her to us. She shook our hands and told us how much Rudolfo liked us. We in turn told her how fond we were of Rudolfo, with Nancy commenting on what an adorable couple they made. Pia blushed and I was hard pressed to understand his reluctance to settle down with a girl who not only looked good in a miniskirt, but also knew how to rebuild a transmission.

  The question of the price came up and Pia was almost apologetic, hoping we’d understand that, all religious implications aside, Father Fabrizio had taken very good care of the car, rarely driven it, and had had it serviced regularly. I figured this was the Italian way of letting us know it had once been owned by the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, so after a nod of agreement from Nancy, I was prepared to make a counteroffer.

  Pia brought the offer over to her father. He took out his pocket calculator and she whipped out hers, and they stood, not ten feet from us, arguing as they plinked on their keys as if they were playing a duet. After a great deal of bickering Pia threw up her hands in resignation and returned to us with a new figure that was only a few euros less than their original.

  We seesawed back and forth, but we were clearly at an impasse. Nancy finally took Signor Tughi aside and told him that as much as we liked the safety features of the Volkswagen, it was too expensive. We would have to settle for a cheaper car and pray that, when my sister visited with her grandchildren, any accident we had would not be fatal. As she said this, I stood behind her making the sign of le corna and looking to the heavens for divine protection. This moved Signor Tughi to relent. Not wanting the blood of innocent children on any car that came from his lot, he agreed to come down from his price and we split the difference.

  Just then the roar of a motorcycle heralded the arrival of Rudolfo. Taking a bounce off of a ravine, he popped a wheelie and executed a flashy state-police stop right at our feet. He dismounted, and disregarding Dino scolding him for being late and needing a haircut, he shook everybody’s hand and planted a polite peck on Pia’s cheek.

  By the time we had finished haggling over the price, filling out the paperwork, receiving the temporary registration, and arranging for the insurance, it was dark. It had been a long day, but at last we felt that our lives were moving.

  “He doesn’t love her,” Nancy said as she downshifted the Popemobile and we whipped around a curve.

  “You think?”

&
nbsp; “I didn’t feel any heat.”

  “Well, they’ve known each other since they were kids,” I said.

  “Hey, unless you’re jumping out of your skin every time you see somebody, you shouldn’t marry ’em.”

  “You mean, like us?”

  She smiled.

  I was struck by how beautiful she looked, illuminated by the dashboard lights. “You know, after all these years I’m still jumping out of my skin.”

  “Yeah?”

  I moved closer.

  “Hey, stop that, I’m driving,”

  “Pull over,” I whispered, indicating the wooded area ahead.

  “No!”

  “Come on, let’s do something really sacrilegious in the backseat.”

  “Leave me alone, you perve,” she giggled as she flicked on the turn signal.

  18

  Archeologia

  The actual construction on our house began in a most inauspicious way. One morning we were walking up the hill to our rustico in the cool hours before the sun burned off the pink baby blanket of fog that lay across the town. As we approached, we began to hear a steady tapping noise that, if we hadn’t known better, sounded like a woodpecker that preferred rocks over trees. We spotted the squatting figure of Carlo, one of Umberto’s workers, chipping away at a softball-sized stone with a ball-peen hammer. With the dexterity of a Neolithic hunter fashioning a spear point, he was chiseling the stone until it was the perfect shape to fit into one of the many holes in the ancient stone wall that surrounded our property.

  We called out to him and he waved. Carlo was a fleshy, wide-bodied guy with warm eyes and a shy grin. He told us that Ivano was also here working, and that after lunch Umberto himself would show up with Silvio, the other member of the crew.

  We were elated. True to his word, Umberto was managing to be at two places at once, and how he was able to sneak his guys out from under Vesuvia Pingatore’s nose, we had no idea. But work had started and we hoped the house would be finished before we got too old to climb up the hill to get to it.

  Over the course of the time it took to restore the house, Umberto and his guys, Carlo, Ivano, and Silvio, became a steady part of our existence. We ate lunch together under the shade of a gnarled old olive tree, met their parents, wives, and children, and attended family weddings, confirmations, and funerals. From the beginning we established a cordial relationship when Nancy asked if we could address one another as tu, because, as in many Romance languages, you must be granted permission before you can refer to an Italian in the informal manner. Unlike Americans, who are world famous for our informality, the Italians are very rigid about this, using the more formal le to address anyone older, more educated, or in a socially superior position, unless he is the prime minister of their country—and then they speak to him as if he were the Antichrist.

  We also gave each other nicknames. I became Fellini because of my penchant for videotaping the progress on the rustico. Nancy was la donna della casa (the lady of the house), but her confrontational style with the Comune and anyone else who stood in our way quickly earned her the nickname Rompicoglione. The verb rompere means “to break” and coglione is slang for testicles. The expression these two words form, however, is somewhat less confrontational in Italian than it is in English. Over here, this appellation is most commonly bestowed on those with the ability to make themselves into a real pain in the butt. Either way you translate it, Nancy was so proud of her sobriquet, she often introduced herself by that title.

  Of course we also gave as good as we got. We quickly noticed that Carlo and Ivano had decidedly predictable responses to anything that we asked. To the biggest and most complex problem Carlo would nod and say, “Va bene”—“Okay”—and to the smallest and most piddling request Ivano would gravely shake his head and reply, “C’è un problema”—“There’s a problem.” So they became respectively Va Bene and Problema.

  Silvio, the third worker, came with his own nickname. Because he was a nice-looking guy in his late twenties with shaggy hair and Don Johnson stubble, who was mildly indifferent to his job and preferred to conserve his energies for club hopping and hustling women, the town had dubbed him Il Vagabondo.

  Despite his penchant for coming to work from a different direction every day and nursing a chronic hangover until noon, I enjoyed his insouciant, lounge-lizard attitude and I was delighted when he told me that he wanted to learn English. We came up with a plan where I spoke to him in Italian, he spoke to me in English, and we both learned from each other.

  I was impressed with his ambition, thinking that perhaps he wanted to get into computers or do carpentry work for some of the many Brits who had settled around Lucca. But his real need was far more pragmatic. Vagabondo’s objective was to meet a rich American woman and become her gigolo. In time she would fall madly in love with him, take him back to the States, and they would live together in a mansion just like the one on the TV show Dallas. As a result of his dream my job was to teach him how to tell a woman that she was beautiful, they were meant for each other, and he had a cazzo the size of a baby’s arm.

  There was never any discernible pattern to the work. Some days nobody showed up. Then suddenly the whole crew would be there with more heavy equipment than Hitler had when he invaded Poland. Mostly, though, when we took the ten-minute walk from the house we were renting from Dino to the rustico, we’d discover that Vagabondo was there by himself chucking broken terra-cotta tiles off the roof, or that Problema was using a hand ax to split apart a rotting beam, although he was quick to tell us that he was only doing this because Umberto had told him to, and that our house would probably fall down.

  Coincidentally, the issue of our house falling down became a constant topic of conversation with Umberto. He minced no words in suggesting that the rustico’s collapsing was a distinct possibility. Once he tried to intimate that this could actually be a good thing, since building a new house from scratch would actually be easier, faster, and cheaper. But Nancy shot him one of her rompicoglione looks, and the subject was never broached again.

  To better understand the construction problem we were facing, try to imagine a two-story structure made of thousands of stones held together by whatever form of mud, sand, and ash they were mixing three hundred years ago. Over the years as the hill above the house eroded, vast amounts of earth slid down and piled up behind and on the sides of the house. So much dirt, in fact, that one could literally jump out the second-story window and only fall six feet. Over the years this earth became hardened and impacted so it, more than anything else, was holding the house together.

  You’re probably way ahead of me in realizing that in order to restore the house, the tons of earth holding it up would, of course, have to be removed. We began cautiously, with shovels and wheelbarrows, but it soon became apparent that doing the job that way would put us on a time frame comparable to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. So on a fine Sunday morning Umberto drove up in a flatbed truck that was hauling an enormous steam shovel. He somehow got the entire rig up our narrow little road. Climbing into the cab, he fired up the earthmover, drove it off the flatbed, and proceeded to carefully excavate the mound. Nancy and I did our best to haul away wheelbarrow-fulls of earth but the frenetic Umberto picked up his pace and started clearing dirt like he was on a mission from God.

  Over the roar of the diesel and the whirring of the power arm came the ominous sound of stones being wrenched apart. Nancy and I gasped as a jagged crack suddenly appeared on our back wall, and for a moment the house quivered as if it were about to collapse into a pile of rocks and rotting beams.

  Nancy accused Umberto of doing this on purpose, and he argued that he was just trying to get the job done quickly because they were charging us for the machinery by the hour. All of this was being hollered back and forth as Umberto turned the earthmover around until for a moment it was coming straight at us. We scurried out of the way just as he pivoted the arm so that the flat edge of the bucket rested flush aga
inst the sidewall of the house, literally holding the entire structure together.

  After a moment to catch our breath in the haze of swirling dust and diesel fumes, the three of us cautiously entered the house. The crack had come completely through a wall that was over twenty inches thick. It ran like a hideous scar from about the middle of the kitchen wall all the way up to the roof. At its narrowest it was pencil thin, but it spread as it climbed until it was wide enough to stick your fist through without scraping your knuckles.

  We stood there gazing at it as if we were seeing some vertical Grand Canyon for the first time. Then Umberto, who had been studying the crack up close, beckoned us over. He pointed to a clump of what looked like matted weeds imbedded in caked mud.

  His eyes widened in reverence as he explained that we were looking at a mixture of straw and clay that made up a wall inside our stone wall. This was how we learned that our house had been built over the shell of a far more ancient structure, a primitive house with daub walls and a thatched roof where serfs had cowered in the darkness from capricious feudal lords and the Black Plague.

  According to its cornerstone the oldest church in town was built in 1250 A.D., about a hundred years after Cambione was founded. People were obviously living here even before then, so we had accidentally discovered that our little rustico could be over a thousand years old!

  Clearly this house had gone though many adaptations over the years, a fact made evident, for instance, by the faint outline of a wide opening that had once existed where one of the kitchen walls now stood. This opening was called the cattle door, and in cold weather the livestock was herded inside through it, so that they would not only be protected from the cold night air, but their bodies could also warm the house for the people sleeping on the floor above them. And all of this was done, mind you, hundreds of years before the invention of the room air freshener.