Every Day in Tuscany, page 7
Part of me wants Bramasole to remain quirky, but some of me wants grounded electricity that does not burn out the modem every time it storms, and yes, the tourist was right, screens that disappear when raised, not these wedged into the stone frames. When it’s windy, they sometimes crash to the ground. The list is long and we are wary. A large construction project at Bramasole is daunting. I’m getting too old and impatient for projects that can run on for years. The dollar is weak, the euro mighty. We don’t have normal jobs anymore. The United States slides irrevocably toward recession. Once I cooked pumpkin soup in a pumpkin. Just as I proudly reached the table, the bottom of the pumpkin gave way and the lovely soup flooded the table. Is my portfolio like that? Will I be left holding a hot sheaf of papers with the numbers falling off? If we live to a hundred, will we be reduced to a gas ring in a freeway motel?
Fonte delle Foglie, the mountain house, gave us the opportunity to work with one of Tuscany’s best restorers, Fulvio Di Rosa, who is now thoroughly occupied with Borgo di Vagli, the medieval village he bought and revived. “Do the minimum,” he advises. “Bramasole’s charm is in how it is.” I keep that advice in mind. Still, work has to be done. What will it take to incorporate a few graceful improvements as well?
TO INVESTIGATE, we turn to Walter Petrucci, a local architect with an impeccable reputation. Even when he has climbed around a ruin encased in blackberries, his shirt is never wrinkled. His shoes are unscathed. He’s slender, slightly balding, and has a steady gaze with a practiced remoteness. Probably he’s had to shield his true reactions many times to the outlandish ideas of foreigners. Last year, we worked with him and a master of restoration, Rosanno Checcarelli, on an addition to the mountain house. Quickly, we appreciated his genius for solutions. And if you don’t like one, he finds another. I admire resourcefulness. Get it done. Like a good surgeon preparing the patient, he knows how to be involved and not involved at the same time. With all this sangfroid intelligence, I’m enchanted to learn the mad fact that he has been restoring his own villa for twenty-seven years.
He invites us there to dinner with his family and a few friends. A Medici would feel right at home. The Renaissance-influenced gardens with walks and geometric paths and pools are formal and perfect. Inside, local artist Eugenio Lucani has adorned walls and ceilings in the charming Pompeian style known as “grotesque.” Walter points out arches and niches, leads us through bedroom suites, an impressive cantina, his library. Silvana, his vivacious wife, serves dinner from a kitchen that must have made a sizable dent in some marble quarry. In the dining room, our voices echo slightly.
Though the house has been ready for years, the family does not actually move in. They live, instead, in a comfortable, plain postwar house, nothing like this. “Maybe next year when our daughter graduates. We don’t want to interrupt her studies,” Walter explains. But friends have told us that every year there’s a new reason. Has the villa become Walter’s Paradigm, a book to be written and lavishly illustrated?
As we leave, Ed says, “Walter’s dream house is like something in a Borges story. Or Calvino’s invisible cities, if he’d written about houses instead of cities.”
“Yes! Some abstract perfection hovering over Walter’s mind.”
“Maybe it will be reached, maybe never.”
“That house is his mind—in 3-D.”
Meanwhile, Walter finishes other projects on time and has designed the plans and overseen several friends’ restorations. The work proceeds smoothly. We’ve admired his ingenuity, and now quickly learn to admire his droll wit and inventiveness.
As we walk around Bramasole together, he reveals to us possibilities we’ve not envisioned. We’ve been set on the practical. New laws allow us to expand interrato, into the hillside behind the house. He sketches a floor plan. We could double the size of the downstairs. The limonaia could become a phenomenal kitchen and the current small kitchen could be joined to the dining room, creating a place for large feasts. Further, we could request permission to consolidate the bathrooms stuck on the rear facade, and place them outside bedrooms, so that they become en suite. Guests would not have to navigate stairs to reach the bathroom. Removing the back bathrooms would allow the upstairs terrace to run across the entire back of the house.
This is heady. A laundry room here, he points out, and a wine cellar. Then he delivers the coup d’état. “This law allows you to build a garage into the hillside at the top of the driveway.” He begins to sketch an extension of the stone wall, with an elegant iron and glass door into an underground room, which we see will be full of light because of the glass front. I don’t see “garage” but, instead, a luminous writing studio lined with books.
Ed shocks me with an immediate enthusiastic response. I’m asking the architect how long it would take, would the work destroy my garden, how much would it cost. Ed’s thinking of wine racks, creamy marble counters, and a grilling fireplace in the kitchen. I pore over the drawings Walter soon gives us. Yes, it would be astonishing to wrap the small upstairs terrace around the back. We could walk out into the olives and plum trees. I can’t believe we’re considering something so drastic. How do we bring forward all we’ve learned about Tuscan vernacular architecture without losing the individuality of the house? I have the irrational thought that the house will have an opinion.
After such remodeling, would it be the same house? Ed has a radical idea: “Maybe we should just sell instead. After Walter’s revelations, can we really just patch up the roof, put in new windows, and go on? Or wouldn’t it be easier to find another house already updated, made over, or ‘tarted up.’” He quotes the writer Ann Cornelisen’s expression, which she used so dismissively.
“Wait. Be serious. Could you ever leave Bramasole?”
He shrugs, making the Italian palms-up gesture, signaling “Who knows?” I smile and shake my head.
When I met Ed, I parted from my husband, Frank. He and I had a college-sweethearts connection, a child, graduate school, houses, moves back and forth across the country. We even loved Italy. I felt the Red Sea divide when our pact broke. Even now, after decades of happiness, I find that behind the intervening unpleasantness, I still feel an unbroken bond. The gold ring engraved forever lies among my earrings and bracelets. I think I once claimed to Frank that I’d thrown it off the Golden Gate Bridge, but I did not. Ties that bind. We can’t invent them or dissolve them. Circumstances may be devastating, but love refuses to budge.
How could we ever leave? Three summers ago, I was ready. Hurt. Indignant. Mad. In profound disillusionment, I thought, Time to move on to an alluring Greek island or a beach house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks? A new place on the globe where we, blessedly, know no one. Sartre is right, I thought: Hell is other people. Worse, I had to face that what I thought I knew, I did not know. Even now, I put off writing about that time.
I did not go, obviously.
Now a few more rolls of the scroll unfurl. New possibilities—Bramasole redux.
I’m tempted. This is scary. I’m not tempted. This is a relief.
BEFORE I GO to bed, I lean out my study window, a daily habit. I like to hear the night birds, but right now they are elsewhere. I lay my notebook on the stone sill and go back to my desk for a pen. When I return, a granddaddy of a black spider has settled in the crease between the pages. I blow on it until it rises on bent stilts and moonwalks into the folds of the white curtain. I write a few notes: To taste the phases of the moon, to touch the aria floating down from a balcony, to smell the blond sunlight warming the child’s hair and to hear the grand opening of the favoloso Eden rose that scrambles along a stone wall. What do you sense is coming toward you?
THE NOTEBOOK LIES open. Still no owls, but the voices of two University of Georgia art students float up. “That fart-sack. He doesn’t know shit about …” His voice is cut by a passing motorino.
Charming. As they pass, I hear, “Man, it was fuckin’ Pompeii, not Herculaneum.” The motorino is a wisp of white curling up the road.
Before I leave Italy this year, I decide, I will write about the tumultuous summer that had me looking at Portugal, at Sarasota, at Merida, at anywhere but here. Get it down. Get it out of the way. It’s history. Not that important, is it? Then it truly will be over.
I write in the notebook: The White Vespa. There, wet black ink. The top of a blank page.
TORTA DI SUSINE CON MANDORLE
Plum Tart
A dessert guaranteed to provoke extravagant praise, such as “This is the best tart I’ve ever tasted.” It’s equally as good with pears. This was inspired by a recipe in Rogers Gray Italian Country Cook Book: The River Café by Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray.
Makes 1 tart
PASTRY
½ pound very cold butter, cut into pieces
2½ cups sifted flour
⅛ teaspoon salt
1¼ cups powdered sugar
3 large yolks, beaten
FILLING
¾ pound butter
1½ cups fine sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups almonds, pulverized to fine powder in food processor
3 whole eggs
7 ripe but firm plums, pitted and halved
First prepare the pastry: By hand or in a food processor, mix the butter, flour, and salt until crumbly; then mix in the powdered sugar, then the yolks. When well combined and adhering together, roll it into a ball and chill thoroughly, about half an hour.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Slice it into pieces and press it into a large glass pie plate or a 12- to 14-inch tart pan. Chill about 10 minutes, then prick the pastry dough all over and bake it in a hot oven until slightly toasty, about 10 minutes. Lower the oven to 350 degrees F.
For the filling, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy, add vanilla, mix with ground almonds, then add eggs one at a time, beating well.
Arrange the plums over the baked pastry shell, pour the filling over them, and bake until set, about 30 minutes.
The White Vespa
A PHOTO BOOK FROM SOUTH AFRICA, A POUCH of paprika from Budapest, a ceramic angel from Poland, Christmas ornaments from Germany, wildflower seeds from Provence, landscape sketches from everywhere, maple leaf tie tack from Canada, honey from Estonia, wine, lots of wine, T-shirt from Brazil, even hand towels monogrammed with a B for the house: Many gifts are left at Bramasole. And so I thought nothing of picking up the small parcel wrapped in newspaper, left on the grass just inside the gate.
I came down the steps first. We’d just finished taking photos: Ashley, Ed, and I, dressed in summer best—Ed in his white suit, Ashley in aqua chiffon, and I am wearing a green and hot-pink silk shirt and linen pants. We were going to a party for Ed—a big surprise. Who took the picture? I don’t know; probably Willie’s babysitter. Next, suddenly I am walking down alone, trying not to catch my high heels between the stones and crack my ankle. Maybe Ashley went back inside to kiss Willie good night. Maybe Ed went back to pick up his cell phone. I start down to the road—wanting to hustle everyone along because surely the guests had gathered. Just inside the gate, a “present” lies in the grass.
We were en route to Corys, just up the road, for the celebration. Because Ed gave pints of blood to the reconstruction of the fallen stone walls at Bramasole, with many mighty frustrations, and also to the restoration of Fonte, I had planned a party for him—twenty of our closest friends for a feast. He thought we were meeting four friends for a quiet dinner. Instead, Chiara and I had been to Arezzo and bought a retro-style white Vespa, straight out of Fellini. We hid it all week in the horse corral at her house. At dinner, we planned to hand Ed a tiny box holding a key. Chiara bought him a key ring. Resplendent with bows, the white Vespa would be moved out front by Simone just as Ed was led outside. He had no idea.
The narrative at this point always will replay as present tense.
I PICK UP the package wondering if I should wait to open it until we return. But there’s no ribbon or string. A note flutters to the ground and I glimpse crude handwriting as it falls. I unfold the colored newspaper, the pink sports section.
I am holding a grenade in my hand.
I stare only for a moment before I lower it softly to the ground as if it were an abandoned kitten. I run fast, back to the house.
“Ed!” I call out. “There’s a grenade in the driveway. It was wrapped … like a present…. I opened it.”
“Holy shit, what are you talking about?” He grabs my arm and steadies me.
“It’s real. Call Claudio.” He’s our friend who is the maresciallo, marshal of the carabinieri.
“Wait a minute. This must be some idiotic joke. Let’s start over. What …” This is the first of many times that I will hear the word joke.
“Look, Eddie, I know what a grenade looks like. This is not plastic. It’s real,” I shout. “If I’d dropped it I might be up in the pine trees now.”
“This is impossible.”
“What’s going on?” Ashley comes out of the house looking fresh and lovely. I don’t want to say anything—also a reaction that reoccurs—but I tell her.
“Get inside,” she commands us.
“Claudio’s sending a car.” Ed stares at his phone, as if there were someone else to call. He leans over the wall and looks down at the square of newspaper on the grass.
“This can’t be happening.” Who says this? We all say this.
Very soon, the carabinieri pull up in the driveway and Ed asks me, “I just told Claudio that we needed him. What’s the Italian for grenade?” Neither of us knows, but we do know bomba. Ed calls down, “Claudio, stai attento, c’è una bomba.“ Be careful, there’s a bomb. They pause in the act of closing the car doors.
“Che cosa, Edoardo?” What? Claudio then spots the crumbled newspaper and they stop. Claudio takes out his phone. The three men step inside and regard the grenade silently. We venture down the steps. I explain what happened. Visions shoot through my brain—the Red Brigade, the Mafia, the progressive mayor of Naples gunned down. My fear slides toward anger.
Claudio looks serious but says, “This must be a joke.” The heavy gray ugly weapon in the grass does not look like a joke.
“Maybe it’s not real,” says the muscular one, who looks as if he could bite open a grenade.
“It’s real,” the third affirms. “But maybe it’s stripped. I think it’s stripped?” His question-mark inflection defeats his opinion.
Even in this crisis, I can’t help but notice how sharp they look in their summer blue shirts, black pants, with big guns strapped around their waists. Their presence comforts me. It seems that the grenade is not going to explode in our faces.
Even now, writing this, my heart starts to thud. I feel breathless. I keep writing “they” where I mean “we,” still trying to distance myself.
Claudio picks up the note. He shows the others, then hands it to me.
Wait, wait, I think. Fingerprints.
“Qualcuno che è maleducato,” he says. “Brutta figura.” Maleducato doesn’t just mean “badly educated.” It means “crude,” the opposite of bella figura.
“Al meno,” I reply. At least.
“See,” the stocky one says, pointing to the signature. “Ragazzi.“ Kids.
My Italian is not up to this discussion at this time. “No. Non sono ragazzi,” I insist. Not kids. Not.
Ed is shaking his head. “This is not the writing of a young person.” He points to the penmanship.
“Look at the crossed-out word diga. Diga means dam; kids writing about a pool would not confuse pool and dam. Makes no sense.” What seemed probable to me was that the hired thug who wrote the note was confused as to what his purpose was. He certainly did not know how to spell our name.
This is what the note says:
Signori Maier and the other neighbors
Don’t block the construction of the dam public swimming pool
Otherwise 5 hand grenades
Will be placed in your house
UNDERSTOOD
Young people of Cortona and Camucia
Signed GB
A few months ago, we circulated a petition among our neighbors, a protest over the approval the town had given for a private recreational complex at the end of the Strada della Memoria, the road Bramasole overlooks. While we were in favor of a pool somewhere, the location made no sense at the dead end of this undeveloped, residential road where local people take their daily passeggiata, bike, and jog. It’s narrow. We feared increased traffic in a Zona del Silenzio, totally unsuitable for the memorial road planted with cypresses, one for each local boy who died in World War I. This is a designated belle arti zone where nothing can be built. Nothing even can be altered without a full-court review. Woe unto you if you’d like to install a window in your dark bedroom. We’d offered to help raise money to replace the copper plaques with the name of the soldier under each tree.
When we’d circulated the petition, we were amazed that only a few of the Italians would sign, even though they agreed with the petition and did not want “the wild side” of Cortona developed at all. I was stunned. In America, if you don’t agree, you do something. You speak up. You organize. You make signs. You write to the paper. You band together and make common cause.
I learned new Italian words—ritorsione, punizione, castigo, rappresaglia. All of which, essentially, seemed to carry a heightened fear of reprisal. As Fulvio explained to me when I expressed amazement that the Italians wouldn’t sign: “It’s ancient history, cara: You kill one of mine, I kill ten of yours.”
“My taxes will go up.”
