The Reluctant Tuscan (10 page)

Wait a minute, was I actually thinking of walking out on all this? Me, who never quit a job in his life? Me, whose working philosophy can best be described as just leave the money on the dresser and if you had a good time, tell your friends?

Then, for no reason whatsoever, Charylie popped into my mind. It was just a fragmentary image. The way she cocked her head or curled a lip. But it was so dead on, the tumblers clicked and her entire life opened up to me. I saw her as a baby, a child, and a woman in one vast, continuous panorama. I had to stop myself from shrieking with excitement.

I scrambled for a pen. My hand was a blur moving across the paper as I tried to follow her rap about society. It was something about how we're all suffering from “strangulation by communication” because we'd been “massmedia-ized like some fries that have been supersized.” Then I stopped writing, because I realized she was talking to me.

“Yo, man,” Charylie said, plopping her purple Doc Martens down on the coffee table. “What you be comin' up in here all whinin' and cryin' like some little punk bitch?”

“I'm not whin—”

“Look at you, sucka. You be all wah-wah-wah, oh, please, Mr. Agent-man, don't let 'em change my script. I loves my script.” She was laughing at me.

I looked over at Greta. She was on the phone and hadn't noticed that I was having a conversation with a person who wasn't there.

“What you even doin' comin' up here at all?” Charylie's eyes were on me like an arraignment.

“Trying to make a living.”

“You done made a living. Ain't you got money?”

“Yeah. Some.”

“Ain't you seen your name on TV enough?”

“Yeah.”

“Then move your sorry ass over, nigga, and make room for somebody else. You been feedin' at this trough long enough.”

She was right. It wasn't the money or even the ego strokes anymore. I was mindlessly chasing stardust, because without show business, I had nothing else in my life. No hobbies. No interests. No real friends outside of the people I worked with. I was condemned to spend the rest of my days trying to fill a hole that was essentially bottomless.

Charylie was now on my lap. She wrapped her arms around my neck and whispered, “Listen, boy, you ain't so old, you just got to be a little more bold.”

Yeah, maybe I could change. Maybe I could build my life around something else. Nancy was offering me a chance to reinvent myself, if only I had the—

“He's ready to see you now,” Greta announced.

How could I see him now? I was right in the middle of figuring out what I wanted. Why I was here. Not here in my agent's office, but here on earth. Oh, God, I'm no good at these vast, imponderable questions. I'm good at writing jokes and ordering Chinese food, but when it comes to everything else, I'm pretty clueless.

“He's ready,” Greta repeated, as if I had a hearing problem.

I stood up and looked at the door to my agent's office, and then at the elevator.

“Sir? . . . Sir?”

I
was standing in front of our bedroom mirror, my face turning a fire-engine red as I struggled to fit into my loosest pair of pants. After taking a breath, I groaned, sucked in my gut, and made one last attempt. I had just about gotten my zipper closed when I saw Nancy standing in the doorway.

“Are you okay,” she said, “or are we going to have to use the Jaws of Life to cut you out of those?”

“I know . . . I'm getting a little heavy,” I said, rummaging through the armoire for something with an elastic waist. “And do you know why?”

She pursed her lips in mock concentration. “Could it have anything to do with you eating like a cow?”

“Because in this wonderfully modern country of Italy, there's no such thing as a garbage disposal, that's why.”

“Oh, this should be good.”

“Okay, I'm having pasta or risotto or whatever you've made, which, incidentally, is delicious, but I'm getting full. I still have stuff on my plate, but there's really not enough to stick in the fridge, which is so tiny, there's never any room anyway.”

“So it's the refrigerator's fault.”

“So . . . I start thinking about having to scrape off my plate, first with a fork and then with my fingers because a fork just can't get up all those stubborn little scraps, and then shovel the whole gooey mess into that leaky paper bag we're using for garbage, which is going to get all slimy and smelly, which'll attract ants, not to mention spiders, which you'll insist I kill, and then I'll claim that as a devout vegan I'm against the killing of any living thing, and you'll say since when am I a devout vegan since I just inhaled enough meat to gag a timber wolf. It'll turn ugly, we'll get into a big fight, and so to avoid all that, I just eat everything on my plate, and, okay, maybe I am getting a little lunchy, but as you can see, I'm only doing it for you.”

“Why, thank you, Tubby, that's so considerate.” She giggled as she took me in her arms and hugged me in a way that said she was glad I was back from L.A.

And I hugged her back because I was just as glad.

“You must stay up nights thinking these things up,” she said.

She was right. I was staying up nights, but it was mostly to try and figure out what to do with my life now that I had decided not to sell my script to those producers. Remarkably, my agent had been very supportive over my sudden display of integrity, and if I hadn't known any better, I could have sworn he was treating me with a modicum of respect. He told me to go back to Italy, start writing something new, and not to worry about my script. He'd sold it once and he could sell it again.

That was three and a half weeks ago and I hadn't heard from him since.

After Nancy left
to go to the market, I made myself a little lunch, and, yes, I ate everything on the plate, because I happened to be a little depressed, you know? What was disheartening was this new script I was working on. When I was in Hollywood I had seen how hungry they were for big-budget action-adventure films. Lots of exploding tanker trucks and Uzi blowback, and every time the hero immolated a neo-Nazi skinhead, an anthrax-wielding Chechnyan, or a Columbian drug lord, he uttered some macho catchphrase, like “Hasta la vista, baby,” or “Feel lucky today, punk?”

So after lunch I sat with a yellow legal pad on my lap, trying to find that one catchphrase so testosterone fired it would rip through the Ritalin haze of a generation of teenage boys and entice them to plunk their Slurpies into the cup holders of every multiplex in North America.

I wanted to write something I didn't have any emotional connection to, so when the inevitable changes and rewrites came, I would feel no pain. But apparently this was not sitting well with me, because when I looked down at the catchphrases I was working on, I saw that I had written:

I felt alone and adrift. I needed to write something to keep my brain from devouring itself, but what? I thought about turning on the TV for inspiration, but the idea of surfing through all those Italian-language channels flayed me. I think at that point I would have sat through a documentary on the Phillips screwdriver if it were in English.

I was mindlessly staring into space when I became aware of the absolute silence. I looked around and realized that the kitchen faucet had stopped dripping. This was odd, because that constant
plunk, plunk
of the Italian Water Torture was something we'd come to count on, like the neighborhood rooster who suffered from some form of cock-a-doodle-do dyslexia, causing him to start crowing when the sun went down, continue through the night, and be left in poor voice for the sunrise.

I went to the sink and turned the handle, and, sure enough, it was dry. I went into the bathroom and tried that faucet with the same result. We'd had water before lunch. Had we forgotten to pay our bill? Was there a broken pipe? I picked up the cell phone and dialed Dino. A recorded voice from TIM (
Telecom Italia Mobile
) came on, urgently telling me something I couldn't understand. I was musing over the possibilities of living in a world where we had no water and the phones were down, when I remembered having seen a flier or something from the
Agenzia dell'acqua.
I seemed to recall throwing it out, so I proceeded to dig through the bag of stinky garbage.

I felt a soggy piece of paper, but when I pulled it out, it was yesterday's list of macho catchphrases covered in coffee grounds and pesto sauce. I went to rinse off my hand, only to remember we had no water.

“Goddammit!” I screamed to the mute faces of the Jesus Christs and the naked ladies staring down at me from the wall. “Why is everything here so difficult? Why is even the simplest thing such a struggle?”

Then I remembered the article I was thinking about pitching to that buddy of mine at the
L.A. Times
. I bet it would really make him laugh to receive an e-mail titled: “Ten Things I Hate about Tuscany.”

At that moment Nancy entered, heaved a sigh, and let the bag of groceries she was carrying drop to her feet.

“I can't do this anymore. . . .”

“What happened?” I said, trying not to show my delight that she might have an item to add to my list.

“I swung by the church, hoping to catch the mayor's wife,” Nancy said, as she took off her rosary. “Of course, she wasn't there, but I had to sit through the entire Mass anyway, because the priest was staring at me and I couldn't leave.”

“The sacrifices we make.”

“I'm so sick of these games, I decided to grab the bullshit by the horns and go see the mayor himself.”

“You went to his office?”

“He was right there! I could see him through a crack in the door, doing a jigsaw puzzle, for God sakes, while his assistant's telling me I can't see him because he's in a meeting.”

“How about I get us a meeting?” I said.

“
You're
going to get us a meeting?”

“Well, you dressing up like Jennifer Jones in
The Song of Bernadette
and running to church six times a day isn't getting us anywhere.”

After apprising her of our water situation, I had her phone the mayor's office and translate exactly what I said. As I dictated, Nancy explained to the mayor's assistant that she was calling for her husband, a
giornalista
on assignment for the
Los Angeles Times
. Nancy went on to explain that I was doing a story about the town, and because I was on a deadline, I needed to interview the mayor as soon as possible.

Without a moment's hesitation the mayor's assistant gave us an appointment for the following day. Nancy hung up and wrapped her arms around me. For this brief moment I was her overfed knight in shining armor.

And I was right about my friend at the
Los Angeles Times
. I e-mailed him that evening, and the following morning I received an enthusiastic fax from his editor authorizing me to go ahead with the story.

T
he next morning we arrived at the Comune di Cambione in Collina. It was a blocky three-story building of medieval origin, rebuilt after every war until its last reincarnation in the 1950s left it looking like the unholy marriage of a high Renaissance
palazzo
and a Texaco service station. At the top of the building fluttered an Italian flag so sun bleached, its red and green bars had faded into the pastels of orange and lime sherbet.

We walked through the lobby, past the feudal banners and the heraldic crests of the local noble families. But just as those icons symbolized the historic grandeur of the town, there were also images of her more tragic recent past. A row of photos chronicled the carnage wrought during the war. Between the retreating Germans and the advancing Allies, the city was heavily damaged. In ghostly black and white these pictures captured the haunted, shell-shocked faces of refugees wandering through the bombed-out rubble searching for food. These were the parents and the grandparents of almost everyone we were dealing with, and their faces were testament to the events that have shaped the lives of three generations of Cambionese.

As we headed down the hall toward the Ufficio del Sindaco (Office of the Mayor), I began hearing something I hadn't heard in twenty years—the staccato clacking of an electric typewriter. We entered the waiting room and the mayor's assistant, a cheerful woman bedecked in African jewelry, stopping pecking on her Olivetti and welcomed us. After making sure we were comfortably ensconced on the sofa, she scurried off to make us cappuccino.

I had just begun leafing through a brochure entitled “Cambione in Collina—City of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” when a door opened and
il sindaco
himself appeared. He was a thick, broad-shouldered man with an aerodynamically shaped head as bald as a light bulb.
Pelato,
the Italians call such a skull. Peeled. I wondered . . . does every language have to take a shot at those with hair problems?