The Reluctant Tuscan

by Phil Doran

  As we were talking, Uncle Carmuzzi came over with another bottle of his homemade wine. He had been saving this bottle for this occasion and he assured us that more than mere vino, it was closer to being an elixir of the gods. He filled our glasses and we drank several toasts to the eternal friendship between the peoples of Italy and the United States.

  Shade was now covering the center of the piazza, so the folding chairs were cleared away and couples began to dance to the synthesized melodies of a local Bar Mitzvah band. For a country that seems to be organized along chaotic lines by a people with a deep-seated sense of anarchy in their souls, Italians dance in a highly structured way. The couples executed a rather intricate four-step fox-trot, where everybody moved at the same speed in the same counterclockwise direction, like many small wheels turning inside one gracefully turning pinwheel.

  But we hadn’t come to dance. We were here on business, and to that end we were surreptitiously stalking the vice president of our bank, Marco Mucchi. We waited until he got his wife and two small daughters seated at a table, and when he went to bring them food, we positioned ourselves at the end of the serving line so our backs were to him as he fell in behind us.

  Just as he was about to greet us, Nancy’s knees buckled and she started to swoon. A surprised Marco Mucchi caught her.

  “Honey?” I said anxiously.

  “It’s okay,” she said, regaining her balance. “It’s just the heat and the excitement”—she clutched her broken arm and grimaced—“and the pain. . . .”

  “Please, come sit over here.” Marco Mucchi led her to a chair and helped her ease into it.

  “Did you take your pills?” I asked.

  “I guess I forgot,” she said.

  I opened her purse and handed her the prescription bottle. “I’ll get you some water,” I said, disappearing into the crowd.

  Later Nancy described to me how profusely Marco Mucchi was sweating as he hovered around her, fanning her face with a program from the day’s event. Nancy then sighed, took a deep breath, and proceeded to sum up the status of our life by using the word rotto, broken. Her arm was broken, our car was broken, our house was broken . . . and with the mounting bills and no decent place to live, our spirits were broken. She told him that she had not even told her mother about the accident, because the poor woman was so frail. Besides, how could she call her mother with any news except to tell her to pack up and come back to Italy, where she could spend her last days in our piccolo rustico?

  He was starting to weaken, so Nancy applied the coup de grâce. Her eyes glistening with tears, she talked about how her mother had been living alone since the death of her father—a man who, incidentally, had served his country with great distinction during World War II.

  This was true, but Nancy managed to omit the part about her father having been assigned to the Army Corp of Engineers and having spent the entire war running a supply dump in Hawaii, from which he returned with a tattoo that said Leilani and an insatiable appetite for poi.

  All this combination of patriotism and motherhood was just too much for Marco Mucchi, and he caved. A sheen of perspiration covered his round face and caused his normally plastered-down hair to splay across his forehead like spit curls as he offered a solution. By law he could not unfreeze our funds, but he could allow us to use that amount as collateral to secure a loan.

  “Un prestito?” Nancy said with disappointment. “What if it took years for the Comune to approve all the things they had to sign off on? We’d have to pay on that loan forever!”

  “Non preoccuparti.” In hushed tones Marco Mucchi told her not to worry. There was a vacancy on the Comune board and he was running for it. Everyone felt that he had an excellent chance, and the first thing he’d do when he got elected was to make sure our rustico was fast-tracked for approval.

  I returned with a glass of water, and as Nancy took her pills she told me the good news. I wished him luck on running and told him if there was anything we could do to help, we would. He told me that as a professional writer, perhaps I could give him a little help with his campaign. He took out a folded-up sheet of paper and spread it out on the table, explaining that this was the mock-up for his poster and he’d like my opinion before it went to the printer.

  The page featured a prominent posed photo of him in a dark suit and a yellow power tie. Under the picture was the caption that declared him to be:Onesto, Competente, e Disponibile

  That is to say, Honest, Competent, and Available. In my rudimentary Italian I told him that I was fine with the first two, but the last one made it sound like he’d been sitting around the house with nothing to do when he decided to run for office. He pursed his lips and nodded in agreement. I told him that if he gave me a chance to come up with some ideas, I’d get back to him. He told me that he didn’t want to impose on my time, but I assured him that I was happy to do it for all he had done for us.

  We then gave him our word of honor that we were not putting up a three-story aluminum-and-glass California beach house and, in fact, our rebuilt rustico would become a great source of pride for the community. Marco Mucchi shook my hand with the same double-handed shake the mayor used, and I noted that, win or lose, Signore Mucchi did have a good learning curve. He kissed Nancy good-bye on both cheeks, wished her good health, and rejoined the food line.

  “Well, this does call for a toast.” I raised my glass of Uncle Carmuzzi’s wine and tipped it toward Nancy.

  I was about to take a sip when I spotted Dottore Spotto coming toward me with an agitated look in his eyes. He took the glass I was holding, spilled out the contents as if it were so much swill, and proceeded to fill it with his own homemade wine.

  “Have you seen where Carmuzzi gets his grapes?” he said to me in Italian while Nancy helped translate. “The vines are held up by aluminum posts instead of branches! They use plastic sticks instead of bamboo, and clothesline instead of real twine. No wonder his wine tastes like cat piss!”

  Wars may come and go, but here in Cambione, feuds last forever.

  27

  Ferragosto

  In the month of August the Italians celebrate something called Ferragosto, a national holiday on the magnitude of Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July. It’s a celebration of the harvest that, like most things there, dates back to the Roman Empire. It was named for the emperor Augustus, who apparently liked the idea so much that he decided to name the whole damn month after himself as well.

  Ferragosto marks the official end of summer, and it’s somehow tied in with the Feast of the Assumption. But over and above its religious implications it is best known as the day in Italy when everything is closed and everybody goes to the beach. In a country that shuts down for the flimsiest excuse, it’s hard to describe how totally and absolutely everything is locked up—so much so that pregnant women pray not to go into labor on that day out of fear that the hospitals will be chiusi, closed. It was therefore surprising when Nancy and I discovered that work was actually going on at our rustico, leading us to surmise that between the intensity of the heat and the importance of the holiday, the only ones working on that Ferragosto morning were the prostitutes on the Via Aurelia and Umberto and his crew.

  Umberto was taking advantage of the holiday to tell Vesuvia Pingatore that his guys wouldn’t be working on her wall that day. The fact that her jagged silhouette could be seen watching us didn’t seem to bother him. Also, the issue of paying overtime for holidays was not relevant, for as we learned, Italian construction workers are not paid by the hour, but by the actual measurements of whatever it is they’re constructing. They are literally paid by the meter, which explains why the workday will often drift into the evening with no one grousing about overtime, and also why walls seem to become mysteriously thicker and windows larger.

  No one was particularly happy about it, of course, except for Va Bene, who didn’t seem to have any problems with single-handedly laying the foundation of a patio, which would eventually become our forno, an outdoor pizza ov
en. Problema, on the other hand, unleashed a constant stream of complaints as he hammered the narrow wooden beams called travicelli into place on our bedroom ceiling.

  I wasn’t able to hear what Vagabondo was complaining about over the roar of a pair of dueling chain saws. He and Umberto were cutting tree trunks into squared-sided beams that would be used to hold up the roof of our terrazzo. Assisted by Umberto’s father, an old man no bigger than a ten-year-old boy, they were using chain saws on logs they’d drape across their knees for support. No goggles, no gloves, and only measuring by eye. Wood chips were flying around like shrapnel.

  While Nancy kept up a steady stream of bottled water, I contented myself with staying out of everyone’s way by breaking large stones into small ones with a pickax, in an attempt to show everybody that I could use a dangerously pointed instrument without impaling myself on it.

  The stones needed to be made smaller so we could use them for the reconstruction of our walls. It was brutal work, and I was only able to do it because the pain in my neck and shoulders from the accident had been dramatically lessened when I heeded our neighbor Annamaria’s advice. She advocated the application of an ice pack followed by raw heat, as hot as I could stand it. The idea of ice sounded refreshing, but I balked at the prospect of laying a water bottle, hot enough to iron a shirt, on my neck on the hottest day in the history of the universe. But it felt better almost immediately and that, in concert with a little made-in-the-USA Advil, enabled me to swing a pick like I had spent my last twenty years on a chain gang.

  In fact, the steady motion of swinging the pick and the rhythmic clanging of forged steel on stone seemed to do for me what no amount of meditation or vino could.

  I felt my mind disengage and a soft, peaceful feeling ease over me. My muscles were on some kind of autopilot, moving free and easy as if lubricated by the flow of my own sweat, and the only mantra I needed was the panting of my own breath, which was coming out hot as a blowtorch.

  Clang.

  This is the way of a man.

  Clang.

  This is the way of the warrior.

  Clang.

  I am a samurai.

  Clang.

  I am a Jedi Knight.

  Clang.

  I am an idiot! I just hit myself in the ankle!

  Pain shot up my leg like a jolt of electricity. I bent over in agony and checked to make sure I hadn’t shattered it. Mercifully, I had just grazed my anklebone with the side of the tool as it careened off the rock. I rubbed my ankle and could feel it swelling up in my hand. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed and saw Nancy staring at me.

  “I’m okay,” I called out with the aplomb of somebody with an arrow sticking out of his eye.

  She shook her head in disbelief as she came toward me. “Let me see it.”

  “Honest to God, I’m fine.”

  “It’s not bad enough my arm’s broken, you’ve got to—”

  “Look, I’m fine,” I said taking a few steps without limping. “Really.”

  She stared at me for a long beat, then blew out her breath. “Dino just called. They’ve taken a place at the beach and they’re inviting us to join them for lunch.”

  “Great. What about the guys?”

  “They’re going to knock off soon, so I want to go back to the house and jump in the shower.”

  “Can I scrub the parts you can’t reach?” I suavely suggested, trying not to grit my teeth in pain.

  “Before we leave, why don’t you go water the orto?” She pointed me toward the garden as if to say, Think you can handle that without drowning yourself?

  I watched her walk away and reached down to tie my shoe, but really to check my ankle, which was now the size of a slo-pitch softball. I just needed ice, heat, and Advil and I’d be okay, I vowed as I hobbled toward our vegetable patch, with but one thought burning across my mind . . . how much I loathed gardening.

  There, I had said the unthinkable. Especially for one living in this heavily agricultural area, where the locals are fond of saying that if a man has a woman he’s happy for a day, if he has a cow he’s happy for a week, but if he has a garden he’s happy for a lifetime. That may work for them, but, except for one psychedelic summer back in the seventies when I grew some pretty lethal marijuana, I absolutely despise the idea of growing things.

  I know . . . millions and millions of seemingly normal people ascend into absolute rapture at the prospect of mucking around in the dirt and coaxing some form of vegetation out of the soil. But I hate it. Never mind the running to the store every five minutes to lug back hundred-pound bags of what was essentially dirt, and all manner of arcane planting implements, there was the daily weeding, tilling, hoeing, and watering that had become the bane of my existence.

  You see, our land was terraced in such a way that our garden, small as it was, meandered onto three different elevations. And as hard as I tried, with all the climbing up and down, I could never seem to water it without getting the hose all twisted and tangled. I’d get frustrated, and start cursing and yanking on the hose until I had managed to tear out half the things we’d planted, making myself sopping wet in the process, and coming home at the end of this adventure looking like a nine-year-old boy who had been out playing in the mud.

  Additionally, I discovered that, although we like to think we own this land, our garden is the rightful property of a species of housefly the Italians call il tafano. I think they’re referred to as houseflies because they’re big enough to live in one. These flies are not just annoying, they’re downright aggressive. And until they start selling insect repellent whose active ingredient is Ebola virus, nothing can stop them. They fly right up into your face and try to bite you at the worst time, like when you have the hose wrapped around your knees and you’re trying to bunny-hop away from them, landing in puddles of muddy water with each hop. These bugs are big enough to carry off a baby goat and not leave a scrap of meat on its bones. I’m telling you, these little bastards are nothing but two hundred milligrams of bad intentions.

  And so I hobbled over to our garden, unraveled the Gordian knot that each night our hose mysteriously twisted itself into, and began the ritual hunting for my favorite nozzle. For some odd reason Nancy liked to stand farther back and use a nozzle that shot the water out with such force, it looked as if it had once been used to break up a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama. But even though I detested gardening, I kind of liked the way my nozzle, which got hidden by the same unseen forces that kinked up our hose, diffused the water into a wide, gentle stream. It sprinkled each plant with a cooling mist that coalesced into fat silvery drops that reminded me of morning dew in the Alps.

  I also liked it because when some bloodthirsty tafano tried to bite me on the cheek I could drive it away by turning the hose on myself with a delicate cooling spray instead of a blast of water powerful enough to rip off my eyebrows.

  I had also convinced myself that my favorite nozzle was more economical than the other. With two straight months of temperatures in the nineties (thirties, Centigrade) and no rain for weeks, we were forced each night to soak the garden down till it was as flooded as a rice paddy. By midmorning, as the water evaporated, the ground was caked hard enough to dribble a basketball on.

  The Comune hadn’t sent us our first water bill yet, but judging by how people complained about theirs, I was figuring that each tomato we grew was costing us at least thirteen dollars.

  By the time we got to the beach at the Lido di Cambione, traffic was backed up all the way to Sicily. I dropped Nancy off in the shade of a tall umbrella pine and left her sitting on our cooler as I drove around in our rented Fiat Punto looking for a parking space. I considered myself luckier than had I been born Ringo Starr when I found a spot a mere two and half miles from the Bagni Veronica, where each year Dino and his family celebrate the holiday.

  This is a routine of Ferragosto that Italians slavishly follow. Unlike in America, where we are accustomed to public beaches, here, they
are few and far between. Instead, the entire coastline, it seems, is lined with private bagni, which is the plural of bagno, meaning “bath” or “bathhouse.” In layout they’re all pretty much the same. The fancier ones have swimming pools and video machines for the kids, but they all have a restaurant/snack bar, rows of small changing rooms, and walkways that lead you to a fenced-off area of the beach. These walkways are lined with clusters of beach chairs and chaise longues, each under the cover of either un ombrello or una tenda, a tent.

  Dino had rented one of the largest tende they had, and it was barely sufficient to shade him; his wife, Flavia; their son, Rudolfo, and his girlfriend, Pia Tughi; cousins Faustino, Spartaco, Turrido, and Aldo; along with Aldo’s mamma, plus the “pious” Cousin Monica, with her “mythically gifted” children, Leonardo, Rafael, and la bimba Artemisia. And, of course, no family gathering would be complete without aunts Nina, Nona, and Nana, who were covered in so much black they looked like they were dating a Muslim cleric.

  Mercifully, Dino had not brought along all twelve of his dogs, selecting only two—Torpedo and Luna—to take up space on the blanket, their tongues hanging out and their furry bodies casting off more heat than a pair of Franklin stoves.

  The population density under the tent was no worse than that on the rest of the beach, since the month of August signals the time when all the large Italian cities empty out and everyone with the time, the money, or a relative living anywhere near the Med comes to the coast. This is also the time of year that the fair-skinned people of Northern and Eastern Europe begin their annual invasion of Italy. This onslaught was first begun by Attila the Hun, but has now been continued by the Swedes, the Danes, the Brits, and, more recently, the Russians, the Hungarians, and the Poles.