Finally, the ferry heads back toward Castiglione del Lago. We see the other two Americans on board; he looks stony and she looks as if she could cry. The sun falls low and the sherbert colors of the sky reflect on the water. We lean over the rail, watching the wake while all the Italians join with the band singing like a bridge over troubled waterrrr, I will lay me down in English, and then Italian songs everyone knows. As we gather our sunscreen and camera, we hear several groups talking about where they will go for dinner. They have a secret gene that we don't have.
Beppe's fagiolini, the green beans we call Blue Lake at home, are ready. Tender and small, they don't even need topping and tailing but I do it anyway. Steamed just to the right point, their full flavor emerges. Underdone, they squeak when you bite them and taste slightly bitter. We eat them alone, with just a little oil and salt and pepper. They're not hurt by toasted chopped hazelnuts, or a little sautéed onion, or by my old favorite, sliced fennel and black olives. My mother liked green beans with tarragon, oil and vinegar, and crumbled bacon. I remember what a fine thing we thought that was, since beans usually were cooked to pieces with a hunk of fatback. In memory of that ultra-sophisticated recipe, I clip branches from my tarragon, which has turned into a towering bush. I'm searching my books for ways to use it, other than plunging the wands into vinegar. Medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land put sprigs inside their shoes to give energy and spring to their feet. I'd like to try that.
Green beans are the one vegetable Anselmo did not plant last year when he established our garden. Beppe's garden thrives, though he has narrowed Anselmo's scope. We have onions, potatoes, green beans, lettuces, garlic, zucchini, and tomatoes. Anselmo's artichokes and asparagus gave us several treats just after we arrived. Beppe plans to plant fennel, and to reseed the lettuces every few weeks. We miss Anselmo—his ironic humor and bossy control of the garden, as well as his adventuring spirit which landed us in new situations constantly. When we call to check on him, we're told that he has been taken to the hospital.
We pick a bunch of lavender and tie it to a jar of honey. How strange to be going back to the hospital. He's a vigorous man, full of opinions and laughter. He'll have his swollen leg propped up, saying “Senta, senta,” listen, listen, into his telefonino. Ed parks and goes to the machine to get a parking receipt. I walk on toward the hospital, pausing to wait for him.
I glance up at the black-bordered manifesti funebri, funeral notices, posted on the wall. Anselmo's name. I scan it, unbelieving. I force myself to focus. Read. Yesterday, with all the religious comforts . . . funeral tomorrow . . . no flowers but good works . . . Anselmo Pietro Martini Pisciacani. . . . Unlike the other plain notices, his pictures a sappy pastel Christ in a crown of thorns, upturned eyes, surrounded by roses. Because he would have mocked it, I think there must be a mistake. He was not a churchgoer. He could not be dead. But then no one else could have that name. As Ed approaches, I shake my head and point. “No. How can this be?”
We walk on up to the hospital. At the front desk Ed says, “We have a friend who was a patient and we're afraid he has died. Is he still here? Anselmo Martini.”
He finds no record—maybe there's a mistake but then I remember “Pisciacani,” the name he hated and dropped after his mother died, was on the death notice. Pisciacani means dog piss in dialect. “Pisciacani,” I say.
“Yes, I am sorry, he is in the chapel. If you die in hospital, you must remain for twenty-four hours.” He leads us downstairs. Ed waits at the door and I walk in. There lies Anselmo on a stone slab, dressed in his brown suit, his feet splayed and a little dust on his shoes. Four women in black pray around him. I put down the honey and lavender at the door and flee.
At home the land feels charged with Anselmo's presence. He rebuilt that stone wall, he cleared two terraces for the orto, he planted the grass in the Lime Tree Bower. The potted lemons and the three roses the color of dried blood and the wine press—he gave us these with few words but I could tell with immense pleasure. On the third terrace he planted two apricots, and near the road, two pears. For all the years we will have here, we still will be enjoying the literal fruits of his labors. In the limonaia, his red beret hangs on a nail.
We feel we've lost a good uncle. Ed is still reeling from his mother's death. Anselmo's brings a double rush of grief. The hurt of loss is too hard, then there's the incomprehensible fact that the loved person simply is erased from the planet. The basic facts of birth and death I've never remotely been able to fathom. The prenatal abyss, out of it you came, into the tumult of life, light, and on to the other void. . . . I hope to be dazzled by the news of an afterlife, when the last plug is pulled on me. I can't take non-life. Anselmo stood at the Thursday market with fifty or sixty men every week for decades, talking weather, business, jingling change in his pocket. In his office on Sacco e Vanzetti, he always dropped everything when we walked in. I quizzed him about the farms for sale in photos on the wall, and if one looked wonderful, he'd say “Let's go look,” and grab his hat. He had all the time in the world. Now, none. “There's no one hundred years guaranteed or life cheerfully refunded, young lady,” my grandfather warned.
People are crammed into the church. We stand in the doorway. Out on the porch, thirty or so men smoke and talk during the funeral mass, just as though they were at the market. I recognize many of them. Their sunbaked faces attest to work in the fields. The older ones are short, dressed in suits too thick for the brutal July sun, the younger ones are taller, beneficiaries of post-war nutrition, and wear pressed short-sleeved shirts. Inside, heat and incense swirl. Who will faint? Family members support each other as they walk by the casket for communion. It's hard to grasp that Anselmo lies inside that box. The wailing Catholic hymns drag on forever. The casket is loaded into the hearse. We have seen these processions before. Now we join the crowd walking behind the hearse up to the cemetery. I hope he is not going into one of those thirty-year slots that look like dresser drawers in a wall. No, there's the raw hole. He is going into the earth, this man of the earth. No ceremony, he's just lowered by ropes into the ground. Not even a thud. When my father was buried, the ground was so saturated that the coffin floated for a moment before whooshing down into water. “That's not true at all,” my sister says. “They didn't even lower the coffin when we were there.” She's wrong. I see the red rose blanket slide off into the arms of the undertakers and the bronze box start to sink. “You were dreaming,” she insists. His family steps forward and everyone throws on a handful of dirt. No denying that he will be in the ground. We talk to the family. Everyone leaves quickly. There's no dinner or visiting. Monday, back to work.
At home, Beppe is tying grape vines to wires. We tell him about Anselmo, how quickly he was gone, and he stands up slowly, saying nothing. He takes off his hat and his eyes fill with tears. He shakes his head and goes back to the vines.
When the excitement of death is over, the shock and disbelief subside quickly and we're left with the fact of absence. A funeral cools emotion because it leaves not a doubt. It's over—the traditional sacraments are wise ways to instantly internalize the major events of life. Now we begin to say, His first night in the ground, the men at the market are gathering around a space that was his, look, Anselmo's pears. The last work of his life was here on this land. He had the oldest knowledge of what grows where and when. Did we ever thank him enough for finding Bramasole for us?
“Hearse is a strange word,” Ed says. We are walking home from town over the Roman road. “In Middle English it's herse—I know this because it came up in a poem I wrote when my father died. Herse comes from Latin hirpex, meaning ‘harrow.' You know how the harrow has all those prongs—in Italian they call them quaranta denti, forty teeth. Well, hirpex reaches way back to the Oscan hircus, which means wolf, a connection to teeth. It felt strange to follow that hearse.”
“Show me the poem again.”
SCORPIONS
The heaving, sweating, cento per cento heat broke today,
as if it
can break as unexpectedly as a car breaks,
or as the large glass demijohn that shattered on the tiles
when I bumped into it while carrying an armload of books
from one bookcase in one room to another bookcase
in another room: the heavy inhale of heat into my own lungs,
my bare feet surrounded by sharp glass. Which brought me
to “booklungs” (what the dark hollow lungs of scorpions
are called), lined up in their own bodies like blank books.
All week, an inch-and-a-half long black scorpion
has stayed in the shower, not because of the heat but because
it has eaten a slightly smaller scorpion, who had come in earlier,
perhaps looking for water. The one ate all of the other,
except for three of its eight legs, still scattered on the porcelain.
I remembered hearing the woman at the restaurant,
her overly large white teeth crunching through a plateful
of chitinous shrimp. The scorpion carries its carapace, too.
It too proved it could continue to eat, to chew through shell,
to decisively end its quarrel with the other, which was surely
over nothing important enough to die for. The one has the other
completely inside itself, is running on two histories.
I was reminded of Kronos eating his own children, lungs and all,
crunching through skull, into brains, and then Zeus tricking him
into vomiting them all whole and alive. But the proof is
in the eating—better to eat than not to. Which brings me
to my father, who ate his last on August 8th, and felt his lungs,
sacks of cheap cloth, let all the air out. Now the coffin is his new
carapace, shiny steel—we could see our faces distorted in it.
Here I hear pears drop in late August, skins pierced
by sharp wasps and armored iridescent beetles, and
there's a heavy sweetness under the tree when I rake up
the bruised fruit: Rake, as in harrow, as in hearse (the one
I followed August 12th) from the Oscan for wolf—
because of its teeth, strong enough even to break through bone.
We have had not a drop of rain all summer. The flamboyant flower garden I had last year has limped through the hottest summer on record. “I can eat only watermelon and gelato,” la signora Molesini in the grocery store tells us. No matter how much we water, the grass burns. The voluptuous roses of early June gradually have shed their leaves. The tiny buds they send out refuse to open.
The year we bought the house it was the same. Clouds would gather over the house and thunder practically shook the fillings out of our teeth—but no rain. Our well went dry and I remember thinking in the middle of the night, I must be certifiably insane. I have no idea what I'm doing. The singed oaks and locusts defrocked early, leaving dead-looking trees all over the hills. The next summer was soft, with wildflowers spilling over every terrace. We slept under a light blanket until July. We love living close to the pulse of the seasons, even the searing dry heat, which has sent foxes and wild boar into our yard for the first time. I hear the cinghiale snorting across the lawn at night, making their way to the faucet where they lap water from the stone basin. They scuffle with, what—squirrels and porcupines? Then they thunder off with their strange “ha-ha” cries. They have not managed to get through Beppe's fence around the vegetables but they find plenty to love in the fallen plums.
At the beginning of August, we return to foggy, cold San Francisco for Ashley's wedding. All my Southern relatives are arriving—the clan is stomping. My college roommates and their husbands are coming, Ashley's New York friends from her artist life, Stuart's friends, family. Ashley and her bridesmaids arrive at the house with the wedding dress and hang it in front of one of the many still-bare windows, where it drifts on its own, bringing home the reality of the wedding. Ashley suddenly is struck with the magnitude of what's coming. She comes into my room while I'm unpacking and throws herself on the bed. “Any advice for me?”
I remember asking my mother the same question. She thought a minute then said, “Don't ever wear old underwear.” I tell Ashley I'll try to come up with something better but I'm not sure I can. She's very grown, as is Stuart, and they seem to be entering this marriage not only with love and excitement but with enormous relief to have found each other after a lot of false starts. Ashley is one of the most decisive people I've ever known; when she makes up her mind there's an iron will behind her.
We're having all the out-of-town people over for drinks, and my family will stay afterwards for dinner. At this party, one of the strangest things of my life happens. Ashley looks glorious in a short red dress. Two waiters are passing champagne and Ed is going over the toast he's about to give. My sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews are in full reunion mode. Ashley is in the foyer greeting guests. I'm talking to friends in the living room when I see my nephew arrive in the crowded foyer. As I walk toward him, I introduce myself to the man talking to Ashley. “Hello, I'm Frances, Ashley's mother.” I shake his hand and see the startled look on his face. “And I'm Frank,” he answers with a laugh. My former husband. Ashley's father. We were married for a lifetime. I do not recognize him. He thinks I am surely joking. Of course, I am distracted with all the arrivals, trying to circulate among the guests—still, I look straight at him and do not know him. Once he said to me, I'd know your hand in a bucket of hands, one of the strangest intimacies I have heard. I step outside and take big breaths of air and try to adjust to the jolt—the snap of that imagined entwined umbilical of the past. He doesn't even look that different. I've seen him in my mind and in dreams many times over the years. I'd expected a flash-flood of memories, a by-pass connection to the now historical past. Looking at him, I used to feel I was looking in a mirror, my equal-opposite. For a long time, I will be feeling my hand go out to shake that of a stranger.
The garden wedding is at an inn in the wine country, a dreamy dream of a wedding, with pink and apricot roses everywhere, a golden light over the vineyard hills, a bride descending as though from a cloud, a groom with the heart to cry as she walks toward him, and the tenor sealing us all together with “Con te partirò,” With you I will go. Her veil catches on a rose thorn and tears, her father frees her, takes the torn piece of veil into his pocket, and they walk. A moment, and of such moments myths are made.
For dinner, candles all over the garden, and a Tuscan feast. As we sit down a snowy egret flies over and lands on the feathery top of a tree. “A great omen,” someone says. “No, the stork,” someone else answers. For my toast, I remember a line from Rilke, “Love consists of this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Her father gives an eloquent toast about the enormous support the presence of all the guests will give to Ashley and Stuart. Soon Ashley is dancing, floating under the full moon, then everyone is dancing. Ed is smoking a big cigar. I wish everyone would stay all night.
The newlyweds take off for hot tropical islands. My sisters and their families leave over the next few days, we see friends, adjust to the decrescendo, pack, pack, pack again, and board the plane for the long haul back to Bramasole, taking a duffle of books, fall clothes, and a handful of moments to last a lifetime.
The end of August and still no rain. In earlier times, farmers prayed to saints. If no rain came, the statue of the saint might be flogged, thrown into a river, dragged out, and stuffed in the mouth with salty sardines to make him thirsty. Whatever rituals occur now, they're private.
For nine summers I've lived on this hillside in Tuscany. I've spent scattered winter and spring holidays here, and last year had the great boon of a whole spring. I am about to spend my first fall. The feste of August—beefsteak and funghi porcini—are over; the streets are emptying by the day as tourists head home. The sun has been tamed, softening the evening light to rose-gold. An early fall; tru
ffles and mushrooms and sausages will be coming. Already we're peeling the green Sicilian tangerines, exactly the color of a parrot, and buying apples that taste like our earliest memories of apples. Primo has left a load of cement and sand; in a week he will begin the project. Beppe today has planted cavolo nero, the black winter cabbage, and has set out fennel for next year. He picked the last little bunch of beans and another basket of tomatoes. All summer we eat outside in the long twilight, now the days are short enough that we set out lanterns for dinner.
Vittorio, always with his taste buds anticipating the season, calls to invite us to a goose dinner, the last feast of the summer. His voice is the siren's call. Our Slow Food group has just celebrated the foods and wines of the Verona area at an eight-course dinner. “I think of goose as a Christmas treat,” Ed says.
“No, you do not eat the white geese after summer. They are too old, too fat. The flavor is best now.” So we wind far into the mountains to a trattoria where we gather at two long tables near the fireplace. Vittorio is pouring the wine, his treat, the Avignonesi reds we love. We see Paolo, the winemaker of that noble vineyard, at the other table and toast him. The antipasti begin, the usual crostini, served with the special stuffed goose neck. The pasta with rich ragù d'oca, goose sauce, is followed by roast goose, easily the best I've ever tasted. The noise level rises until it's impossible to hear what anyone is saying. That's O.K. We just eat. The baby in the stroller at the end of the table sleeps through everything.
Margherita, daughter of signora Gazzini, forager par excellence, stops by to introduce herself. Driving by, she happens to witness the felling of the dead palm. We waited all summer while it shed dry fronds one by one. We hate to cut it, especially since its thirty-foot mate on the other side of the house still thrives, but the completely bare trunk, like a giant elephant leg, looked bizarre. She watches from below as I watch from the window. Ed and Beppe both yell as the palm, heavier and denser than they thought, starts to fall off-course, crashing into a pot of geraniums.
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