Through the years, fragments of those dreams actually came true. But never until now have I had more than one guest room. With three extra bedrooms, my dream of the bounteous table and the open door have become reality.
Revolving door is more like it. Dreams sometimes need revision. During the visits of six sets of house guests, I have needed a conveyer belt from town to send out bread and meat. I strip off the sheets, and the washing machine lunges and churns for hours. I have lapsed into a set menu for lunch: caprese (mozzarella, basil, tomato salad), focaccia, various kinds of salami and ham, green salad, cheeses, and fruit. “Again?” Ed asks.
“Yes! They don't know we've had it four days running. We are definitely going out tonight.”
I'm ready to draw maps to the antique shops of Monte San Savino or the Etruscan tomb near Perugia, but often they say, “We just want to stay here. Those four days in Rome were exhausting. . . .”
At what point did I flip from Excited to see you to How long, oh lord, how long will you be staying? It must have been around day ten. For Ed, around day five; he is more solitary than I. He must have his private hours of writing and working on the land. Too much socializing throws the circuit breaker and he comes down with a migraine. By the third onslaught of guests, we were growing tired of the sound of our own voices. By the fourth, we switched to automatic pilot, almost pointing instead of speaking. “Bus is leaving for Siena,” I whispered at their door. Feeble humor. We agreed to leave by eight to avoid the heat. Ed filled up the car so we could get an early start. We're showered and ready by 7:30, plates of melon on the table, the Moka hissing on the stove. They're still sleeping at 9:30. If we're out by 10, we'll arrive with an hour or so before the town closes for the afternoon. Our guests will be sorely annoyed at this retro custom. The rhythm of the Italian day seems impossible to grasp. “We're on vacation; we don't want a schedule. Let's play it by ear,” he says. “Yes,” she agrees, “and besides a lot of places stay open during siesta.” No they don't, I think, but don't say anything.
When they left, I couldn't even say hello to the neighbor's gray cat, who sometimes comes by for a bowl of milk.
“Would ten days be too long?”
“The friends we're travelling with have heard so much about you. Would it be all right if the six of us stopped by for lunch?”
“My son's roommate and his cousin will be passing your way and we thought you might enjoy meeting a couple of kids on their first trip to Italy.”
My mouth has a hard time forming the word “no” but I'm learning. “I'm working on a project,” I say, only to hear, “Well, don't worry about us. We won't disturb you a bit. You just do your writing and we'll go off on day trips.” If I say how sorry I am but we have a full house on the dates they propose, the reply often is, “Just tell us when and we'll plan our vacation around you.”
Primo, welcome. You don't know how welcome. We've wanted to remodel the two original bathrooms ever since we first saw them. Because they worked, other more crucial projects came first. We ignored the chipped porcelain sinks and the funky showers that sprayed all over the floor, simply added brass towel racks and antique mirrors from the Arezzo market and turned our energy and cash over to central heating and unraveling electrical wires. Unlike those monster jobs, changing the bathrooms offers instant pleasure.
While our first guests slathered suntan oil on each other's backs, we dashed out to order toilets and lights. During the next guests' stay, we were looking at tile. Time to choose; the order needed to go. Karen and Michael waved from the upstairs terrace, where I left a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of cinnamon iced tea to hold them until we returned.
Selecting tiles in Italy would be daunting even for my two sisters, who can spend entire days examining fabrics or lamps or wallpaper. The attractive showrooms of building suppliers are backed with dusty warehouses. If you don't see what you want up front in the model bathrooms with the space-capsule showers and gadget-laden whirlpool tubs, you're turned loose in the magazzino to fend for yourself among racks, stacks, and boxes of pavers in shades of rose-honey, elegant limestone squares, the thousand versions of hand-painted blue and white birds and flowers, slick primary colors, and—oh, no!—the pink and blue butterfly we are about to exorcise from the house. I found immediately that I prefer tiles with the touch of the maker on them, the rougher surface, and the traditional designs. The range of marble and natural stone tiles also is staggering. For the first time ever, I thought I could not choose. When we built the first bath, I knew what I wanted—large marble squares—and, fortunately, didn't even look further.
Finally, we narrowed our choices and decided to come back in a few days. Back at Bramasole, Karen and Michael were glowing and spotless in new linen bought for their trip. Ed and I were grimy from the warehouses and my dust allergy started acting up. But—lunch in a few minutes! And in the afternoon, the Etruscan museum, the churches of upper Cortona, the monastery where St. Francis's narrow bed is still on view.
“La dolce vita,” they say, leaning back for a sip of grappa in the long evenings, as I'm glancing in the kitchen at the stacks of pots. “Umm, think I'll go up; it's just so relaxing here. You two are so lucky—all day with nothing to do but enjoy all this beauty.” The lovely guests trail upstairs, forgetting to notice that Ed and I are rolling up our sleeves for a bout with grease and suds. Over our heads, as we scrape and sweep, their bed bangs rhythmically against the wall.
By the time they leave, we've changed our minds about the tile. At last we can just look for a whole morning, without thinking of rushing home to feed ravenous guests. For the original bathroom of the house, called “il brutto,” the ugly, by my daughter, we select a rosy natural stone with the same stone in cream for the border. For the nightmare butterfly bath, we decide on a handmade Sicilian tile in a blue and yellow design on white.
The yellow house fantasy is still real. I love having friends and family here. In a foreign country, we see each other in an unfamiliar perspective, which can heighten and enrich the closeness we already have. Good friends jump right in and love walking to the market for strawberries. They come home with ideas for dinner and we have great times frying zucchini blossoms and making watermelon sorbetto. They're ready to search for a Roman road we've heard about, to start the coffee, or even to weed the asparagus bed. The bad guest could be anywhere; the good guest seems to know that places are unique unto themselves and gives over to the new heartbeat, letting the place have its way with them.
Now Toni and Shotsy arrive from San Francisco with a list of places they want to see; some are new to us. They're delighted on their first evening when the fireflies crowd the lane. Even a walk into town with them brings new adventures. We're walking past San Francesco, a church perpetually closed for restoration. Shotsy sees a priest at the side door and asks him if we can peep inside. He seems happy that we're interested. A grape-juice birthmark covers half his face. His eyes are direct and he moves his head from side to side as he walks, his black robe catching dust rolls. We spend an hour on a tour inside the vaulted, gloomy church which was re-dressed from its original spare architecture into a Baroque interior. The priest then takes us into a room with closed cupboards. He wants to show us something special, but first he shows us the skulls of several Roman martyrs, eleven or twelve years old. The shelves are full of various hanks of hair and pieces of bone. He reverently takes out a bit of cloth. “The last sash of Santa Margherita, a rare and precious relic.” Then he shows us a piece of one of San Francesco's garments. This church, named for him, was built by his friend Brother Elias, about whom little is known except that he was a sometime hermit in the hills above our house. The priest shakes our hands and tells us, “I'll probably go to hell but all of you will go to heaven.”
Near Piazza San Cristoforo, a man picking cherries in a tree calls “Buon giorno,” and throws down samples for us to try. All this and it's not even ten o'clock yet. They take off for the day and come home with stories to tell. We're sorry when they
go.
My two sisters came with me for two weeks early last summer, when Ed was finishing his spring quarter of teaching. Because our mother has been in a nursing home for many, many years, most of our visits revolve around her dips into illness, her emergencies, or just the painful regular visits to her. For the first time in too long, we talked about everything but Mother. We travelled all over Tuscany, cooked pasta, and worked in the garden.
Our aunt Hazel had died recently and left us each a little inheritance. We decided to splurge. After all, we never expected this little windfall. I certainly didn't. Any selfish act when I was a child was corrected with, “You don't want to grow up to be like Hazel do you?” When my grandmother died, Hazel was too upset to go to the funeral. When we filed into my grandparents' house afterwards, we found that she'd loaded her car with all Mother Mayes's best things. Because of another painful memory I wouldn't write about, I had not spoken to Hazel since college.
My sisters and I ate in the best restaurants, ending each meal, with “Thank you, Hazel. We enjoyed that so much.” We began to feel rather friendly toward her. We bought shoes and trays and scarves, saying, “Hazel, that was so sweet of you,” as we walked out of each shop. As much as I disliked her, I found that her last act toward me stirred up a memory-belief that runs strong in my family, the old impulse, Blood is thicker than water, and a late forgiving began to form.
We found ourselves one day in the deep recesses of a medieval building in Florence, being shown rooms of designer bags and jewelry. My sisters were thrilled at the prices and began selecting—gold bracelets, wallets, summer handbags. It suddenly occurred to me that this was stolen merchandise but I couldn't say anything because the signora who took us there from her shop understood just enough English. I hoped they'd finish before the carabinieri burst in. We left with Gucci and Chanel, the real thing my sisters knew. “We're lucky we weren't arrested,” I told them in the taxi. Oddly enough, they paid by personal check and no one ever cashed them. Just one comment catapulted us back to familiar ground. At breakfast in the hotel courtyard with a splashing fountain, we were served perfect cantaloupe. Which one of us said, “Mother would have loved this”? A deep relief to reconnect on a new basis. Now when we send each other unexpected gifts, we enclose a card, Love, Hazel.
Bathrooms. The Romans loved them. Their bathing pools with black-and-white mosaic dolphins and stylized sea creatures never have been improved upon. Their fanciful designs influenced the original designers of bathroom decor at Bramasole not at all. Early in this adventure, we realized that not only were the old ones ugly, but our sewage treatment facility—one cement tank—was inadequate when several people were staying in the house. Noxious odors and scorpions crept up the drains. We read books on home water supplies, on waste management in the country, made photocopies of septic tank diagrams. After a few hours of digging behind the house, Primo revealed that the shower emptied right into the tank, an environmental no-no. More digging revealed that all three showers and sinks dumped gallons and gallons of clear water right in, forcing the waste out before the biological action of purification could happen. We are polluting our own land. Or so we think, with our book knowledge. “That's the way it's done,” plumbers assured us. “Your system is good.” We don't think so. We have insisted to Primo that we want a better plan. We want the showers and sinks routed out of the septic system. We want long pipes to exit the septic tank, with rock-filled pits along the way for further filtering.
When Primo and the men arrive, we go out and discuss the plan of attack with them. Ed and I have spent ten-hour days decalcifying tile floors, ten-hour days stripping doors, but facing your true love over an open septic tank may be one of those true tests. Primo wants to explain the compartments. How they purify waste and where it exits. “This tank is O.K.,” he insists. “I need to make another section on the inside. See, acqua nera in,” he points to a pipe from the bathroom. He scrapes sand off the septic tank lid and pries it up. I gasp and step back. This is too much. I would like to be anywhere but here. Unfazed, he points, “acqua chiara out.” Black water in, clear water out. It all looks nera. Primo leaps about with the alacrity of a cat on a dining room table. Ed has stepped back, clapped his hand over his nose. “There, then there, then out. All clear.” Suddenly Primo makes a little gagging sound as he slides the top back in place and jumps aside. We all start to laugh and run.
Because our steep hill makes the delivery of a huge tank impossible without a crane to hoist it over the wall, Primo suggests two septic tanks, keeping the old one behind the house and installing a new one in the Lime Tree Bower. He shakes his head and shrugs. “Big enough for an apartment building. A hospital. Call the honey wagon; ask him to come today.”
He takes off for supplies. The men head upstairs. The minute bath goes first and demolition is fast. Franco and Emilio—how do they both work in there?—cart bucket after bucket of tile. How it didn't crush his Ape, I don't know, but Primo inched up the boxwood lane and across the front terrace with a giant cement septic tank, which must be buried. The old toilet is loaded in the Ape. Zeno, a Pole, starts digging a trench and Ed hauls stones out to our pile, with which by now we could build a small house.
The honey wagon honks in the road below. I look out the window and see a man waving and a tractor pulling a rusty tank. Ed runs out. The driver throws a rope to him and Ed hauls up the hose. Secondo comes up, leaving his tractor heaving in the road. He has cottonball hair and a pouncing step. He greets Ed like an old friend. After my brief view into the bowels, so to speak, of the system, I don't even want to watch. I hear suction and slushing. In a short time, I hear Ed in the shower. He's laughing. “What's funny?”
“That was unbelievable. It's just—you know, I never saw myself that way. Running all over the place helping clean shit out of a tank. The system is empty and rinsed. I really liked Secondo—he wanted to see the olives and told me he'd send his son to plow our terraces.”
Even though I have trouble writing, studying Italian, or reading when guests are here, I have no problems at all when work is going on. Primo's men work; so do I. Ed, too. He is up two hours before the workers arrive, writing, as he prefers, in the dim light. In the series of poems he's working on, each one begins and ends with an Italian word, often a word that has an English meaning as well, such as ago, needle, and dove, where. One of his pleasures in learning Italian has been its invasion into his writing. He spends hours poring over etymologies.
I start every day with a walk into town. My ritual is to have my cappuccino in a bar where “Wonder Woman” blares away in dubbed Italian. She's hilarious, and an excellent companion to the news. Yesterday's headline was “Lizard Found in Frozen Spinach.” A very short man with a head shaped like a schnauzer's comes in the bar every morning. Instead of asking for a caffè macchiato, an espresso “stained” with milk, he always says, “Macchiame, Maria,” stain me, Maria. She doesn't blink.
When the men arrive at eight, Ed is through writing for the day. He emerges in shorts and boots, wanting to attack the brush on the top terrace, but he heads instead to the vegetable garden to hack out weeds. Suddenly, the orto is ours. Anselmo is in the hospital with pneumonia, odd for July. He calls on his telefonino to tell us to water in the mornings, to dig all the potatoes and let them dry for two days in a single layer before we store them in the dark.
When we take him some flowers, we find him in a depressing ward with seven other men in iron beds. He's in a robe, sitting on the side of his bed. Usually full of opinions and jokes, he suddenly looks frail and vulnerable, his bare round belly poking out under the sash. He asks everything about the orto. How many melons? Have we picked the zucchini every day? We know he thinks we don't water or cut lettuce properly. We put the yellow begonia we've brought by the bed. As we leave, we hear him on the telephone, “Listen, that apartment on the road to Dogana, I can get you in by next week. . . .”
Primo's men are muratori, stonemasons. We're surprised that they actually lay the pip
es. We expected that job to fall to the plumbers. For the installation of the wiring and lights, Mario and Ettore, plumber/electricians step in. They're now-you-see-them-now-you-don't men—incredibly efficient and fast. Mario shouts; Ettore is silent. They run, they're sleight-of-hand, they're bravissimi.
“Squilla il telefono,” Mario calls out the window. He has the loudest voice in the universe. Squillare—to ring, and the squeal in the sound of the telephone always grates. Paolo has bad news. “The tile from Sicily—such a beautiful selection, truly the sales representative was pleased that someone had the refinement to select this tile—unfortunately this tile has met with an accident in the form of a wreck of the transport truck and the truck has run into the sea. The driver is not injured but the tile. . . .”
For a minute, I don't take this in. “You mean my tile is in the water?”
“Sì, mi dispiace; è vero.” He's sorry but it's true. This is so unbelievable that we both laugh. Little fish nosing the boxes? The truck overturned, lodged in sand. “We must begin again. And soon the August holiday arrives. No one will be making tile.”
Very close friends are arriving. Inopportune timing, but they're welcome anytime. We hope they won't mind a bit of chaos. We dash to Paolo's and wait while he shouts into the phone about the tile. You'd think he was talking to Mars. He slams it down. “They don't promise but they'll try to get it here on time.”
“If it's not here in two weeks, we won't be able to finish the project.”
“Boh,” Paolo goes through several what-can-you-do gestures. “Sicilians,” he explains.
Fortunately, the men have not yet started demolishing the butterfly bath. As compensation, Paolo shows us his truck, which is loaded with the fixtures we ordered for both baths and boxes of faucets. We take off to shop for food. We want to make duck breast ravioli with olive sauce for Sheila and Rob, our friends from Washington.
Bella Tuscany Page 20