Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  The ease of moving between Italy and Jordan and London was one of the reasons I had chosen Cortona. It was also less expensive for those booking my tickets, and paying me in tranches of US dollars from a safe in the Diwan. A thick wad of notes, counted out in front of me, was placed in a crested envelope each time I left.

  For the first time in my life, I paid close attention to exchange rates, to the best moment to convert the dollars to euros or sterling. I was earning about the same as I would have for a similar job in Australia, irritated when my English friends said that it wasn’t nearly enough, telling me I should have sought a British agent’s advice on contracts and fees. But the agents I knew in London always spoke as if they had a special lien on the Middle East. And perhaps they did. They were the ones who had fathers who had worked for Shell, or they had studied in Beirut, or had post-doctoral offspring with summer jobs in Tel Aviv, and seemed astounded that I was working in Jordan with ‘the voice of reason from the Middle East’.

  Carmen didn’t pull her punches. One night, over whisky in her house in London, she told me firmly that, of course, I was being underpaid, and that if I’d been English, I’d have doubled the fee. As I had done the deal, set the fee and nobody demurred, she was probably right. But if I was careful with exchange rates and extravagances, I would be able to live for part of the year in Italy, visiting London so I could access the British Library, and a publisher—once one was found—bringing some of my family over to visit me, and having the kind of adventure I could not have dreamed up two years before.

  It was also a massive test for myself, how to gouge out a life alone. How to join the ranks of women who apparently thrive on their own, claiming eventually, some of them, that they much preferred it. Being half of a couple had its limitations, they said. I couldn’t think of many—but I had married men with brains, who taught me much and made me laugh. I had several precedents in my family of women living alone. A grandmother widowed at thirty-two, who brought up four children alone in southern Tasmania; and an adored godmother who never married, and whose life was full of intrepid travel and good works. My mother lived alone for fifteen years after my father died suddenly, sleeping with his pyjamas under her pillow, but making a new life for herself, beloved by her community and active in it.

  Yet, the solitude I’d managed to arrange for myself after the failure of my long marriage was terrifying. I knew nobody in Italy except Lyndall, who had done everything possible to welcome me and make sure I was comfortable. But then she vanished, travelling as she often did, leaving me phone numbers, and passwords for the internet.

  The apartment, when I arrived that April, had basic supplies in the cupboard, eggs and milk in the refrigerator, a street map of the town, guides to Cortona’s treasures and those of Florence and Siena, and bus and train timetables for getting there. There was also a thoughtful selection of books on the shelves: substantial Italian and English dictionaries; a couple of histories of the region, one Lyndall had compiled of her lectures to a group of alumnae from the University of Georgia a few years before; and novels. A Portrait of a Lady, of course, and thrillers by Andrea Camilleri and Donna Leon. And Elizabeth Bowen’s A Time in Rome, and Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato and War in Val d’Orcia, about when she and her husband threw open their Villa La Foce and farm to refugee children during World War II.

  I arrived via Rome, with a bag of books, my laptop, and interviews on a USB stick, and everything I needed to keep working on the Hashemite book for the next ten weeks before some of my family and friends started arriving. I set up my desk in the window of the main bedroom overlooking the plain.

  The cats stalking birds on the roof of San Domenico, and the cloudscapes, took precedence over practicalities for a couple of days—until I had to hang a load of washing on racks outside the window. I returned from the shops to find my shirts in the bushes near the church, my underclothes all over the steps below, Lyndall’s inlaid desk soaking wet and the shutters banging in the wind. I would learn to see the weather coming and to time the washing. I would learn how to cope in a tough little town.

  There was a family above me whose chairs scraped audibly across the tiled floor whenever they sat down to a meal, and with whom I exchanged formal greetings every day on the street outside. In the apartment opposite lived the elderly mother of Massimo, who ran the most-favoured ristorante in town. She had helped me save my washing that first week, gathering garments I’d missed on the bushes way below. Her curiosity about me was intense and she quizzed me whenever we met at the front door. I agonised about inviting her in for a visit, and managed it only twice, trying to convey that I was una scrittice molto occupata and devo viaggiare spesso a Londra e in Giordania—but I later heard she told her son that I was writing romanzi e storie fantasiose. Which might have been a better idea.

  My lack of conversational Italian was galling, and language classes would not start until summer. My schoolgirl French and German kept surfacing instead. I’d prepare a shopping list in Italian each morning but rapid Cortonese defeated me. Scusi, non capisco became my daily chant. I felt stupid and cloth-tongued. And Cortona wasn’t kind to unaccompanied women unless they were gorgeous or big spenders, neither of which I was.

  Having the radio tuned to Rai 1 for news and current affairs helped, as did reading newspapers in La Saletta. Later, I’d find Italian translations of writers I knew, Graham Greene’s Fine di una storia (The End of the Affair) and short stories by Alberto Moravia Racconti romani (Roman Tales)—both difficult but fathomable if I persevered. Reading them boosted my confidence, or, more probably, my vanity, in a way everyday encounters in the streets did not.

  No one yet had my landline number, so when the phone started ringing during my first week, and a voice in a strong Italian accent wished me ciao bella and benvenuto, I hung up, assuming it was a wrong number. Giancarlo Giusti persisted, bless him. An old and dear Melbourne friend, he was on the board of the Arena di Verona and now, with his wife, Ann, was living half the year in Verona. He had somehow tracked me down to invite me to the first night of Nabucco with Ambrogio Maestri in the lead role. I was to catch a train to Bologna, he said, change trains to Verona, in time for lunch, and plan to stay for a few days with them in late June. That felt like an eternity away but my gratitude for the invitation was huge.

  Then it was Easter, and my first visitors, Ellie, and James, my youngest son, arrived together from London. Firm friends after a rocky start, they kept an eye on each other, and had plans to explore Cortona and perhaps see what I’d got myself into. The weather was bad on Good Friday, so we holed up in the apartment and watched from the window the Cortonese processing slowly down the hill from the Basilica Santa Margherita, umbrellas bobbing beneath banners and crucifixes.

  The next day, we hiked to the Convent de Le Celle, now a small meditation retreat on the site of the 13th-century monastery of Francis of Assisi, and joined the tourists filing through his little celle, with its plank and wooden headrest. Crowds thronged the streets on Easter Day and the cafés were all full, so Ellie and James cooked swordfish from the market and a garlicky skordalia, and bought granitas from the gelateria. We joined the crowds in the square outside the Duomo, where families were congregating for Mass, which caused us to have some intense discussions about religion. I was astonished to discover they both believed in reincarnation.

  I gave my upbeat reports on this being a Good Idea for All of Us. And how once the Australian schools broke up at the end of term, more family would visit, and how later in the year I would help them both come back if they wanted to—but waving them off was tough.

  Next came a Melbourne friend on her way to Oxford, bringing books: Anne Carson’s Grief Lessons, her recent translation of the tragedies of Euripides, and Edith Wharton’s great satirical novel, The Custom of the Country, which I started immediately. I relished this story about a world that was rushing into modernity, about divorce, and blundering over children by self-centred Undine Spragg, who would never be free
of the damage that flouting the rules had done to her reputation.

  This friend set about showing me a very good time, somehow knowing where the best bomboloni alla crema and strawberry granitas were to be had. She instructed me on the workings of small town Catholicism, on the Franciscans, and the order that the Sisters of Mercy established in Cortona in the late thirteenth century. Thanks to her, I became rather attached to Santa Margherita’s foundation story.

  The beautiful Margherita, a farmer’s daughter, made ‘reckless and willful’ when her father remarried, was seduced by a young lord, and became his mistress in a castle in Montepulciano, where she bore him a son. Then, one night, when he failed to come home, his dog led Margherita to where he lay, murdered in the woods. She fled with her baby son back to her family, who refused to take her in. Then, ‘with no worldly goods and in the snow’, she walked many miles to Cortona, somehow persuading the Franciscans to admit her and her son to the Order of St Francis, to pursue a life of prayer and penance.

  Margherita was canonised as the patron saint of midwives and single mothers, reformed prostitutes and the homeless. She established an order of Le Poverelle then the first hospital in Cortona (still there, in the Via Maffei), and her order of Our Lady of Mercy. She is proclaimed in statues and frescoes all over the town, usually with a dog at her side. Best of all, Margherita lies incorrotto in a silver and glass casket behind the altar of the church that bears her name—up my little street to the basilica on the mountain.

  The romance of Cortona I shared with visitors, and I had quite a few at first: my recently widowed cousin, Ginny; friends on their way to somewhere else, checking up on me. I showed them the sights, confided in them not at all, hoping they would report back that I was thriving. I saw my visitors off at the station, a brave grin in place, and caught the bus back up the hill, scared stiff of the solitude that was awaiting me.

  A survival plan for these weeks was essential, and took the form of a strict routine. The new version of the book was taking shape and I began each day early with a couple of hours at my desk. Then it was coffee and the newspapers at La Saletta, a minuscule amount of food shopping, then, by midday, I would be at my desk again. At four, I would put on my boots and walk very fast, a rhythm in my head, usually up the steep path to the top of the hill. I visited the tiny black incorrotto saint if the church was open, irritated whenever I found anyone else there.

  Then out through the nearby gate, along one of the roads to the cemetery, or down the hill to the Diocesan Museum, and a 13th-century painting on wood of the saint in her blue and brown robes, and Fra Angelico’s glorious Annunciation; or to one of the twelve churches, the Museo dell’Accademia Etrusca, the Duomo, the medieval part of town. Cortona’s riches were astonishing and I waited for them to gather me in. In the meantime, I found a stone seat on one of the overgrown terraces, where the sun reached, and the wall beneath the jasmine was weathered, where I could read and write, and ponder.

  The great stones of these walls that ring the town contain much of Cortona’s violent history. Built by the Etruscans in the fifth century BC, they were broached and reinforced by the Romans in the fifth century AD, then by the Goths sometime in the sixth century, until armies came marching across the plain from Perugia, from Siena, from Arezzo. In the thirteenth century, Cortona became una città ghibellina, with its own currency and familial links with the Florentines, and work began to drain the swampy, mosquito-ridden plain, to turn it into the fertile valley of the Valdichiana. I could map all this in the walls where my stone seat was. I could see, where the trains now ran, the plains the armies marched across.

  I could hear the trains if the windows were open, and learned to tell the difference between the sounds of the Regionale and the Intercity in the middle of the night—or I liked to think I could. Every few weeks, I’d catch a Regionale to Arezzo, and stand in front of the great fresco cycle of Piero della Francesca’s, The Legend of the True Cross. Painted on the basilica walls behind the altar of the Church of San Francesco, the frescoes had been through fifteen years of meticulous restoration, which had revealed their subtle colours and minute details of fabric and foliage. The Dream of Constantine, with its radiant angel in the upper left hand corner above the sleeping emperor’s tent, promised a revelation in the silence before the dawn. But I lingered longest at the massed battle scenes on the facing wall, the terrified boys trapped forever, daggers drawn amid the decapitated bodies. The frescoes fed my sense of Italy as a place of violent extremes, of fortifications and burial mounds, of Christian armies and cemeteries outside the gates, of Mussolini and fascism, of nearby half-empty hill towns where partisans were lined up and shot in front of villagers and children, in landscapes of extraordinary formal beauty stretching to the horizon.

  Then I’d walk across the square to the downstairs café for lunch, pleased I was apparently recognised and welcomed back. I had been there six years before with my husband, awaiting early proofs for his book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. We’d been invited to Italy by our friends Jan and Helen Senbergs, to stay in Posticcia Nuova near Arezzo. Jeffrey Smart and Ermes De Zan lent their villa to Australian artist friends when they were travelling for exhibitions or, in this case, to Seattle for The Ring Cycle. The deal was simple: they entrusted their friends with the care of four precious pugs, two peacocks and innumerable potted plants. Before they went, Jeffrey took us to nearby Arezzo, to view Piero della Francesca’s dramatic fresco cycle, then being restored.

  They’d left us a copy of John Pope-Hennessy’s The Piero della Francesca Trail, which included Aldous Huxley’s essay ‘The Best Picture’, written in 1925, when ‘good and bad’ art were serious categories, and tourists were few. Now the Piero Trail attracts hundreds of thousands every summer, and Pope-Hennessy’s lofty erudition accompanies them everywhere on the trail: a short drive from Arezzo to Monterchi, then to Sansepolcro and across the mountains to Urbino.

  And I was there again, aware I had become a watcher of couples: of women with husbands or lovers, of women travelling with women friends, one always in charge. I watched them being tired and irritable, sitting in silence, sharing a joke, quarrelling over shopping, arguing over directions. An occasional act of tenderness, a burst of laughter, a man kissing the top of his companion’s head, had me turning away.

  Travelling solo is not at all the same as being always in company. There is a kind of bliss in no one knowing where you are. With no one to consult about time spent looking at something, or to share thoughts about what you are looking at, you are just another woman on her own with a notebook and pen, sitting on ancient bulwarks; voyeuristic, eavesdropping, scribbling impressions and meanings for herself.

  When Lyndall was coming up to town, I would sometimes meet her at La Saletta, with its selection of newspapers. But most mornings, I went there alone, with a book and my little shopping list. I had read somewhere that shopping with a recipe in mind would help shape the day, get me out the front door. I had a cookbook my daughter had given me, and I practised a couple of Tuscan dishes—a fish soup, and something involving a chicken fillet and fresh olives. But, unless I had company, I still ate at the stove, or with a book propped up at the desk in the small sitting room; or outside, a panini in my pocket.

  Cortona’s two fruttivendoli overflowed with seasonal fruit and vegetables from the farms on the plain. Asparagus and artichokes when I first arrived; then tomatoes and zucchini flowers, melons and strawberries; then Porcini mushrooms would rule for a fortnight after the first autumn rains. There was a weekly market for fish and cheese and herbs, where I went to unlearn planning for shared meals. The supermarket in the Piazza della Repubblica around the corner from the newspaper shop was the only source of bread and milk and groceries, and was overpriced and unfriendly, the people behind the counter watching me struggling to read labels and estimate quantities. I was relieved when Lyndall agreed with me, explaining they overcharged because they served so many foreigners. I was in that category until I had the use of a
car, and could shop with the locals at much cheaper places down on the plain.

  Cortona had one narrow, flat main street for shopping and eating, and the rest was a maze of steep lanes, stepped streets and sharp corners. By early afternoon in summer, the heat from the stones pounded the eyeballs and everything closed for siesta, and only a few small groups of women could be seen out walking. Lyndall had warned me the winters were grim: the wind howled and snow filled the lanes, and more than half the town’s bars and cafés, and all of the tourist shops, were shut. It took me a while to work out that there were two or more outlets supplying everything, so that vacations could be taken in winter, and the inhabitants not starve when the snow was falling and it was almost dark by four o’clock.

  Lyndall gradually inducted me into the small-town mysteries of Cortona: the politics of the people I saw regularly in the newspaper shop, to whom she was the Contessa who bought the left-wing La Repubblica, instead of Berlusconi’s right-wing Il Giornale. I was struggling to read beyond the headlines, and fell on day-old copies of the Herald Tribune, out of Paris, for analysis and news of the war.

  Lyndall showed me how to listen to the debates in parliament on Rai Gr Parlamento, which, I was pleased to discover, I often understood. I knew enough Italian to get by with the young man who came regularly to fix the intermittent internet connection, and with the bombola di gas man who came for the heating, and at the friendly little internet café where I printed my drafts of the Hashemite chapters. I would rework the chapters again before emailing them to Amman, where, I hoped, the summer intern from Boston was now helping Adiba.