Every Day in Tuscany, page 14
At the cemetery entrance, two large bins mounded with empty soda bottles attest to the number of people who come to water plants on graves. Through the dark of an arched corridor, I emerge into the harsh light of the bone yard. As they lived in town, so they lie—the stone dwellings with hardly a handspan between them. The first name I notice—the painter Gino Severini. His is a plain box above ground, rather like an Etruscan sarcophagus. Here he is, dead as anyone. But his epitaph proclaims otherwise: Non omnis moriar. Not all of me shall die. I wonder if Signorelli lies anywhere near, though no grave seems to be older than 1850.
The walls hold chest-of-drawer graves, each with a heartrending photo of the inhabitant, caught at a moment of full life. There are the motorcycle graves. At least every year we lose a young man to the adrenaline rush of passing on a curve. Many photos show the gnarly faces of the old contadini generations that are now quickly passing. Others proclaim Conte and Contessa, superior even in death. I run my finger along the worn carved letters: Artemisia, Laudomia, Sparteo. Lovely old names—Girolamo, Oreste, Assuntina, Felicino, Salvatore, Conforta, Oliviero, Guglielmina, Ersilia, Zeffiro, Quintilio, Italo, Candida. Will anyone ever again choose to name a boy Giovanni Battista, John the Baptist?
So many Umbertos from the late nineteenth century when Umberto I reigned, so many Elenas a little later, namesakes of Elena of Montenegro, mother of Italy’s last king. I stop before Orte Baracci, whose stone simply says, Fronte Russo, 1943. His rough wool uniform probably did not protect him from Russia’s frozen steppes, but he’s smiling under his regimental hat with an outrageous feather plume drooping to his shoulder. And near him a man born in 1918, end of another war, with the strong name of Libero, Free.
I do not find a fresh mound heaped with decaying flowers. Perhaps he is outside the walls. I navigate through internal hallways lined with the floor-to-ceiling dead, pass a dank crypt, and step out into the open field. Ah, better to rest out in the campo with the infidels and paupers, amid the blooming lacy white flowers and the weedy grasses. The rose-topped recent grave is not Alain’s. A ladybug tests a rose leaf and promptly flies off.
Most of these lack stones, which will hold down the bones on Judgment Day. Out here the skeletons can just claw through the dirt, stand erect, and assume their bodies again. Signorelli’s great fresco cycle in the duomo at Orvieto depicts souls emerging from under the crust of the earth. In the painting, as in a dream, you can feel a literal rush of ecstasy and astonishment as the beautiful flesh returns. This must be our most profound hope: Say it isn’t so. I wish I could summon a particle of belief that a Judgment Day will restore me, along with billions of others. I would again be twenty in a yellow bathing suit, sitting on the side of a pool with three gorgeous boys in the water around my feet. If I were truly religious, I think life would cling to me less. After all, it’s only a proving ground for eternity where I will greet my parents and we’ll dress in snowy cotton and attend a long choir practice. Heaven is a fantastic idea. I’m afraid, though, that death is an absolute. For me, a walk in a cemetery makes me want to throw myself over an Alpha and Omega and weep.
I remember Alain’s upstairs study with all his books in French, English, and Italian. I remember Sunday lunches in winter with the lemon soufflé made on top of the stove and a fire in the grate warming my back. I remember the glint in his eyes before the punch line and the affable laugh afterward. His little salon with draped couches and cushions, deep reds and blues, seemed exotically foreign and I remember the charge of the new I felt encountering the old world. I remember his French cuffs and his big dog, the stepped garden and the grape pergola where he served Campari and soda. I don’t find his grave.
IN HIS Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari tells a revealing and moving story. When a plague swept through Cortona in 1502, Signorelli’s son, already training to be a painter, died. Signorelli undressed him and drew his naked body “so that, by the work of his own hand, he would always be able to have before his eyes that which nature had given him and which adverse destiny had snatched away.” Signorelli is said to have made anatomical studies in the local cemetery. Did he have a body exhumed, or did he appear with his sharpened lapis before burial? Of all the Renaissance painters, Luca’s forms are the most alive. He loved distracting you from the main subject with a well-placed male buttock, tightly clad, a servant’s copious thighs through her skirt, or the quite buff chest of a minor figure off to the side of a martyrdom in progress. Weird to think his dynamic bodies originated here among the dead. I always look at his paintings and recognize people I see in the piazza. I trace the cast-down eyes of the pizza server to an exalted Annunciation Mary, and the rippled curls and short legs of a local antiques dealer to the flagellated Christ. He must have crouched there, against the wall, with his pens. I like Vasari’s story of his dual life as an artist and as a family man, active in government as a Cortona magistrate. His death at eighty-two catapulted him into a new and eternal relationship with his chosen place. Where do your bones lie, Luca?
BY NOW WE have attended many funerals. Although I’ve stood by while graves were filled with dirt, I can’t locate any of them. I was sure Lorenzo’s brother Umberto was there, but no. And Francesco Zappini. I thought he was in the right wall. When Francesco died, we visited him at home, where he rested on the matrimonial bed with the family’s cat asleep at his feet, as on a medieval marble sarcophagus.
The baker has died, the tailor, Anselmo, and Placido’s brother Bruno, whose liver transplant finally failed him. At the end of the olive harvest season last fall, our dear Primo Bianchi, restorer of Bramasole, fell from a ladder in his grove. In our winter absences, we lost the wandering artist who hitchhiked all over the area with canvases under his arm, and the hunchbacked man who delivered groceries. At Ernesto’s wake, he lay under a veil over the open coffin, surrounded by Anna and his daughters. Margherita would not let go of his cold hand, which seemed to have reached out from under the veil. Then, last winter when we were here, Amalia. On a freezing March day, we sat around the open coffin in the cold church with the family. From my vantage, only her gray nose was visible above the side of the coffin, a little sail setting out for the afterlife.
The church is always jammed. The priest always weeps, which engenders waves of weeping all the way to the back of the church. I find it offensive that volunteers pass baskets for collection. Once I saw that someone had dropped in a breath mint. Hardly anyone sings the hymns, but everyone knows the words to the funeral mass. Even I have picked up phrases. The crowd takes the long walk together to the cemetery, where the gaping grave is not disguised by Astroturf. The coffin goes down and two grave diggers set to. Then final handfuls of dirt are thrown while the priest prays. The grave diggers pound down the dirt into a smooth hump, the headstone is placed, flowers arranged, and that’s that. Everyone knows with total finality that the person is dead.
ONLY ONE OTHER person is here. On Mondays the dead are left to their own devices. A woman in a printed housedress is mopping out one of the mausoleums. The family members’ slabs line the side walls. Fresh linen and flowers adorn the altar. One prayer chair furnishes this home away from home. I peer inside several others. Some are neglected, the trinity of plants dead, the altar cloth dusty.
Out the back gate of the cemetery, I find discarded tombstones and iron crosses. Did their families die out, leaving no one to pay their rent? I could take them to my house, prop them up among the olive trees. Would anyone mind?
The most affecting part of the cemetery is a wall lined with the oldest stones. These send back messages. One commemorates two small sorelle, sisters, taken by la cruda difterite, the harsh diphtheria, in 1874. Another marks other sisters, victims of malevoli insinuazioni. What? Malevolent insinuations? Am I beginning a heat stroke, here at noon in the July sun? What could that mean? Another mourns “La cruda difterite tolse la vita a me.” The same diphtheria “took my life.” The sun beats a slow rhythm on my head. This is a long audit of the past. Since the mid-twentieth century, with the sperm count spiraling down, ten, twenty percent, approaching forty percent, the future should be my worry. If I want to worry, the low Italian birth rate should be my focus. We’re on a course so that long before five thousand million years, when the sun evolves into a red giant, ready to collapse, no one will be around to care. This place will have joined the jillions of specks in the universe along with Alain’s lemon soufflé, his crisp blue shirts, Francesco’s memory of the long walk back from Russia with no shoes, the flour on the baker’s hands, the stunned faces of Bruno’s young daughters, the cold wake in the octagonal church, the veil over Ernesto, the amused twinkle in Primo’s blue, blue eyes, the priest who cried.
But Zelinda Dragoni’s 127-year-old passion, for now, endures. She must have had time to compose her epitaph in 1881. She addresses Luigi, “My first and only love on earth. I will always speak with God of the great affection and of the compassionate care, that you vested in me and to Him I will recommend our Ida. Addio, Addio.” Ida must have been a daughter, who seems here to be something of an afterthought. Another stone (1852) implores the reader: “Scatter tears and flowers on this field of death.” Okay, no problem.
My phone rings, shattering this communion. “Where are you?” Ed asks. “Do you want me to reheat the chicken for lunch? It’s after one.” I glance up at the town above, where I see a woman as I was earlier, leaning on the duomo wall, looking down at the small city of the dead. Briefly I wonder what she is thinking.
And so I leave my bundle of lavender propped against a lichen-etched stone cross with no name.
Addio, Addio.
Amici—Friends
“WHEN IS THE CUBAN INVASION?” MASSIMO ASKS.
“Have you heard from them?” Lorenzo calls from his doorway.
“What’s the news of the Cubani?” Edo gets out his phone. “Let’s call them.”
“Ciao—you know Luca was looking for Alberto?” someone I don’t even know asks me.
As the nearest neighbors and good friends of the Alfonso clan, we’re constant conduits of information about their papal-level entrances and exits from town. Their annual arrival signals vacation as clearly as if the word appeared over the town in skywriting. They bring their Cuban laid-back charm and contagious gusto di vivere. Everyone has fallen in love with this family, seventeen strong, who bought Casa Caravita, an ancient house just above Bramasole. They can’t all stay in the house, so a couple of apartments are rented for various configurations of the three brothers, their wives and total of eight children, plus mama Rose, Uncle Enrique, and sometimes an aunt from Spain. Though the father died several years ago, I often sense he’s come along for the prolonged party and just happens to be invisible.
I will not forget the summer night I met Alberto at the Cardinalis’ pergola table. Placido had sold him a piece of land adjacent to his house and invited us over to meet “questo Cubano molto simpatico.” We had heard in the piazza that a mysterious Cuban-American had bought the house above us. Because trees hide it, I’d never even seen this oldest farm on the hillside. The chief of the polizia used to live there. We heard him every day summoning his dog. Vieni qui, he called, come here. We always referred to the hidden house as Casa Vieni Qui. Alberto’s restoration had been accomplished in record time. Miracle. I was curious.
We were a little late, and Placido invariably calls out “A tavola,” to the table, on the stroke of eight. We squeezed in, shoulder to shoulder, as Fiorella was bringing out the platter of prosciutto and melon. I had the luck to sit across from Alberto. He was there with two colleagues from his architectural firm, Elizabeth and Secondo, both of whom had bought apartments in Cortona and were in stages of restoration. From down the table there were lamentations over what was or was not hooked up and excitement at progress. Ah, hot water. Windows that open and close. Italians like roof and drainage discussions, too; they’re dealing with their own stone nightmare dream houses.
Normally the subject enthralls me, but I was riveted by Alberto. He has a full-out laugh and looks like someone Caravaggio would have liked to paint: black dense hair like Bacchus, tropical skin, and a look in his eyes—the shining brown of chestnuts—that’s quick, direct, and keeps something hidden. I could see that he was ready to be amused. Later, I’d learn of his empathetic nature, his god-given talent as a painter, his ambitious architectural projects, and his knowledge of Italian architectural history.
“Well, what are you working on?” Alberto asked me. I explained that I was in the middle of a book of travel narratives and Ed and I were on the road a lot. “What do you want to do next?” he persisted.
“I’ve been looking for a house in the South—in North Carolina—and I would love to build a little town there, based on things I like about Tuscan houses.” This popped out, not premeditated.
Ed and I recently had decided to leave California and move back to my southern roots. He went to grad school in Virginia and always had an attraction to the South. We had not then found a house with an intact soul. We had been talking a lot as we filed in and out of houses about what we, right now, value in four sheltering walls. I mentioned a term paper I wrote in college on “The Ideal Place of Learning.” Come down out of the clouds, my professor had written across the top in a crabbed scrawl. B plus. We were looking for a little farm and hoping for a creek, but had found only perfect new houses or cramped cottages.
Alberto laughed. “Really! A town? That sounds so interesting.” “Interesting,” I found, is one of his words, pronounced with a drawn-out first syllable and used either sincerely or ironically or to mean not interesting. This time he obviously was intrigued by the wild idea.
We fell into conversation about the mutually favorite subject, architecture. We talked stone, we talked water, we talked land. The dinner swarmed around us but we had found shared obsessions and it’s hard to stop that, even for Fiorella’s apricot crostata. I learned a little about his practice, the airport, museums, and houses he’d designed, then the sotto voce admission: “What I really want to do is paint; I bought my house here so that it would bring me closer to painting.”
And I confessed, “I wanted to be an architect. Back then, I just did not have the vision.”
We’ve been talking ever since: emailing, meeting at his office in Tampa, meeting in Rome, sending books, calling from airports, meeting in North Carolina, and best of all, meeting in the piazza or my herb garden or on a trail at Fonte.
Our families just give us space. After all, who wants to listen for hours to talk about the layout of a William Werther farmhouse built in Santa Cruz in 1926? Or to discuss how a church near the Florence airport looks like Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp? Who will tramp through Rome in the rain to verify whether Bramante’s Tempietto actually measures the same as the oculus in the Pantheon?1
I have had the gift of several such friendships in my life, just enough to know how rare they are. When you meet a true friend, I find, you recognize each other immediately. “Do you remember the first time we met?” I asked him recently.
He answered, “First in the bottega in Firenze the summer of 1492, just after Il Magnifico’s death, where we learned to crush pigments.”
Yes, exactly then.
A COUPLE OF days after that dinner, Alberto called. “Are you serious about your Utopian town? Because I’d like to work on something like that.”
WE CALL OUR town Montelauro, mountain of laurels. We see it near a river. We run all over Tuscany photographing houses and details and entrances to towns and piazzas and bridges and pergolas and arches. We each buy a better camera. We love the golden mean. We measure felicitous buildings, getting to the square root of ideal human scale. Ed loves the idea. He wants Italian chefs coming in to Montelauro on a rotating basis. Alberto’s brother Carlos, an architect with business sense, becomes enthusiastic, as does brother Tony, who starts scouting land on Internet sites. Alberto buys black sketchbooks for each of us and we make notes of street names, lenders, and trees to plant. I feel that I’m again inside a clubhouse made of packing crates. Password: Montelauro.
AS IT HAPPENS this morning, when I’m asked all the questions about the Cubani, I do have an answer. “They’re arriving on Tuesday. All of them.”
ON TUESDAY MORNING I cut a big armful of blue hydrangeas and Ed prepares a basket of olive oil, jars of our tomatoes—enough for their month-long visit—and fruit, bread, and cheese. Even though their house is close enough that we can shout to each other—sound carries on a hillside—the climb is steep. We load the Fiat and drive around Torreone, then along their goat-track road. I see wild white lilies on the hillside and the gingerspeckled orange ones below the Etruscan wall that borders their land. What an extravagant wildflower—spontaneous lilies. I take it as omen. In the Renaissance someone would have built a chapel there. A housekeeper is airing sheets on the line.
Just as we’re unloading, the first wave of Alfonsos arrive: Tony, the middle brother; his wife, Joy; their three children; Uncle Enrique (called Nico); and Mama Rose. First item out of the van: Tony’s guitar. We flash on great evenings to come. They’re wild to see the rose pergola, the new pool, and the lavender planted last year, now waving wands of scent.
Later, we hear Carlos and Dorothy arrive with their three, then we get a call from Alberto—late plane—driving madly with Susan and their two children from Rome.
We expect they’re tired and will throw together a pasta and turn in, but around ten, as we exit from the pizzeria, there’s commotion in the piazza and we know the Alfonso clan has taken up residence again. Luca, their architect, Massimo, Edo, and Maria have found them, and the Cynar and Averno and grappa are pouring. The children are coming and going from the gelateria and kicking a soccer ball. There is always laughter in the piazza, but with them around, the stones reverberate.
