In Maremma (15 page)

The next day—Christmas Day—we arrived early to claim our table.

“Ah, the lucky Americans,” said the more loquacious of our gin-playing (and drinking) companions. “Are you going to steal our prize from us again?”

Apparently not. As the game began, neither of us got anywhere.
Ambo, terno, quaterna, cinquina
passed us by. (The engineer won twice.) Then it was time for the
tombola
. Suddenly—magically—one of DL's cards started filling in. “Mark,” he whispered, “I only need three numbers! Two numbers! One number! Thirty-eight!”

“Trentotto,”
the bartender called. “Thirty-eight.”

“Tombola
!”

He had won the ham.

“You young people are too lucky,” our neighbor said. “Luck should be for the old. A beautiful ham like that!”

25

N
O HOUSE is ever really finished, or finished for long. The workmen leave, months pass, you cook and spill olive oil on the terra cotta and play with the dog. Spiders build webs; you brush them away and perhaps leave a fingerprint. Candle wax melts onto the mantel. Soon you notice that the long drying of the plaster has left tiny fissures on its surface, that a little wine has stained the marble top of a table. Everywhere there are things you haven't done: one room lacks a bracket for keeping the shutter open, in another a hole still needs to be drilled for the hanging of a picture. Somehow you never got around to having curtains made for one of the rooms, so you Scotch-tape an old blue bedsheet to the beautifully wrought curtain rod. Yet for all that, the house is more beautiful, not less. In the words of Margaret Drabble, it has “weathered into identity.”

When we were first restoring Podere Fiume, we resolved to buy a clothes dryer, which is something of a rarity in Italy. (Italians—as generations of painters and photographers have happily recorded—prefer to dry their clothes out of doors.) For years, in Florence and then in Rome, we had missed having a dryer, especially on those afternoons when an unexpected rainstorm washed our sheets all over again. But then the appliance
arrived, and though, for a while, we indulged in an orgy of drying, soon we found ourselves missing the smell of clothes that had dried under the sun, noticed that whenever we ran the dryer, the lights in the house dimmed to about half their usual brightness. Presently we took to hanging things out again, and used the dryer less and less. Toward the end, we barely used it at all.

We moved there to capture a dream less of Italy than of being foreigners in Italy, figures in a Forster novel. And yet Italy has a way of refusing to remain only a background. It grows into you, just as you grow into it. You begin to doubt dryers. After seven years, in ways you could never have predicted, you become Italian.

26

W
E LIVED IN Podere Fiume as if we'd retired from the world. In many respects it was a good existence, but not for two men in their thirties. We grew restless. We travelled more and more. We changed. Our part of the Maremma changed. The Terme, once one of the most wonderful places in Italy, was destroyed by greed. (The old pools and waterfalls were incorporated into an expensive aquatic park.) Fosco put his farm on the market and moved his parents into an apartment in Semproniano. Ilvo died during the summer of 2001 and was buried on one of the hottest afternoons of the year. Although we did not attend the funeral, we joined the procession to the cemetery. Not knowing the custom, we wore dark suits. With the exception of Ilvo's family and the old ladies of the village, the other mourners wore the clothes they worked in because back to work they would go after the good man was laid to rest.

On July 25, 2001, we were in a car accident. The rear of our car was pushed in more than two feet. The impact left an impression of the other car's license plate in our bumper. Someone must have been looking out for us that day, because our car still ran—not too safely, to be sure, but it ran well enough to get us home.

We put the car in the body shop in Grosseto and
rented a Fiat for the duration. Since it was early August, and Italy goes on vacation for the month, we had no hope of getting our own car back until the end of August or even early September. After a month, the owner of the body shop called to tells us the car was ready, and that we could pick it up the next day. We said we'd be there after lunch and we were. It was September 11, 2001.

We stopped to have coffee at
a pasticceria
in Grosseto.
“Le torre gemelle,”
the girl behind the counter said to us. We didn't understand what she was talking about until we did.

27

T
HE LAST NIGHT we slept in Podere Fiume, we did so as the guests of its new owners. It was the anniversary of the burning of the Olivone.

28

W
E ONLY WENT back once.

 

In July 2003—Americans again, living in Gainesville, Florida—we decided to rent an apartment in the seaside town of Otranto in Puglia. This was the sort of holiday we would never have taken when we lived in Maremma (likewise, since moving to Gainesville, we have not once been to Disney World), and while we had a very good time swimming in the Mediterranean and eating
ricci di mare
(sea urchins; literally “sea hedgehogs”) and drinking the very sweet Pugliese iced coffee, what we enjoyed most about the holiday was the awareness that for the first time in years we were
just tourists.
No longer did we have an Italian bank account or an Italian phone number or an Italian television. Since we were renting a car, we did not even have to use our hard-earned Italian drivers' licenses; the American ones did just fine. A remarkable feeling of freedom buoyed us, even as the holiday ended and we drove diagonally across the Italian boot, first to Rome and then to Semproniano, where we had made plans to rent a house called Il Kremlino from Graziella, the realtor who had arranged the sale of Podere Fiume.

Well, Rome was just fine. As we had hundreds of times before, we walked the streets around the Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna, looking at the marble plaques memorializing the many foreigners who had sojourned here: Goethe, Lord Byron, Shelley ... But then the next morning, as we drove up the coast toward Grosseto—a drive we had made hundreds of times before—an unexpected anxiety beset us. Officially we were delighted to be returning to the village that for five years we had called home. Yet when we had called Pina the night before, she had told us that she and Giampaolo were just about to close Il Mulino for a week and go on vacation. Il Mulino closed! Where would we eat? Though we pretended it didn't matter, the truth was that both of us felt abandoned.

We arrived in Semproniano late in the afternoon, at the hour when in the summer the sun is at its peak and the streets are empty. At the Bar Sport, where we were to meet Graziella, Stefano greeted us affectionately. All was well, he told us, nothing had changed since our departure; very little happened in Semproniano, it was really quite a dull place, he and his girlfriend were looking forward to their next holiday, far afield—Mauritius perhaps, or Laos. Then Graziella arrived and swept us up in her exuberance and walked us up the hill to Il Kremlino, a narrow medieval stone tower the three floors of which were connected by perilously steep staircases ... As it happened, before leaving we had sold or given quite a few of our things to Graziella and her German partner, Klodwig (in Italian, Clodoveo), and now, to make us welcome, they had ranged some of these things around the house, including a set of cereal bowls that a local ceramist had made for us, bearing our names ... And
why was it, in that stern Kremlin with its terrifying steps, that our anxiety was getting more intense by the minute? Why was it that at the sight of the cereal bowls—Mark, David; merely our
names—
we wanted to hurl them out the window?

The sun had begun its descent. Figuring that we should get the ordeal over with, we got into our rental car and drove to Podere Fiume. From Graziella we had learned that the new owners—a couple from Milan—had of late begun work on the landscaping that we ourselves, nearly bankrupted by the renovations, had had neither the means nor the stamina to undertake.

The drive was pleasant. Curves don't change; they seemed to embrace us, so often had we navigated them. Down a hill we went, and across a stream, and up another hill, and down again, and then Podere Fiume came into view. There was the gravel drive along which Tolo used to run. There was the mailbox in which tarantulas had nested. There were the sheep. There was the olive grove.

We got out of the car. No one was at home. Even so, we could see that a lot of work was in progress. A swimming pool was being dug. Flowerbeds had been planted and trees staked. Hesitantly—after all, we were trespassing—we peered in the windows. Little had changed. We had sold the house furnished and, so far as we can tell, the only thing the new owners had done to make their mark was to cover the sofa and the chairs with white canvas slipcovers. A good idea, in summer. Why hadn't we thought of that? But beyond that, though, there really wasn't much to look at. Finally we stepped back and for a few minutes just gazed at this house into which we had put so much of ourselves, this house in which we
were once naive enough to imagine that we might live, at peace, forever: life as a perpetual sigh of relief at arrival. And yet from this house—much to our own surprise—we had lightly, easily stepped away. From this house, without once looking back, we had moved on.

A few months earlier, in Miami, we had eaten lunch at a Chinese restaurant with DL's Aunt Molly, who was then in her early nineties. Most of our American acquaintances, when we first told them that we had sold our house in Italy, had reacted with disbelief: how could we have voluntarily given up what was a culturally recognized, officially sanctioned Dream—the Dream of Tuscany? Some were angry with us, others treated us as if we were survivors of a tragic loss. Molly, however, had a different view. We'd sold the house? “Great! Move on!” We'd sold the furniture? “Who needs it? You can buy new furniture!”

It was as if—in her exuberance, her focus on the future, above all her willingness to let go—this very old woman, over spring rolls and wonton soup, was giving us the blessing we needed.

Thank you, Molly. You were a wise woman. May you rest in peace, never looking over your shoulder.

At Podere Fiume, the sun was setting. We could think of no good reason to stay any longer—not here, not even in Semproniano. The next morning we would continue on to Florence.

But we did do one thing. In Rome, DL had had some of his shirts washed at the Green Colosseo laundry, the owner of which still remembered us from the years when we had been her regular customers. Through one of the
buttonholes of the shirt he was wearing, the tag was still looped: LEAVITT D. and the date arranged in the Italian way (day/month/year instead of month/day/year).

Carefully he removed and unfolded the tag. Then he knelt down, dug a hole with his hands, and buried it: the frailest plaque imaginable, likely to degrade within weeks, but at least the Maremman soil would remember his name.

 

Poppies between Podere Fiume and Saturnia (Poppies to Make Them Sleep)
(Photo by MM)

Copyright © 2011 by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

 

eISBN : 978-1-619-02024-5