The Reluctant Tuscan (15 page)

During the course of our investigation we discovered why the Tughi and the Tartughi families hated each other, why the former capo of the local carabinieri went to jail, and that when Rudolfo was born, Dino and Flavia had only been married for two months.

But there was not a single word about
il piccolo rustico
.

I was squatting over a box of dusty documents, using my pocket dictionary to try and figure out whether they were geological surveys or death certificates, when I heard someone addressing me.

“I say, old sport, frightfully dank down here, eh, what?”

I looked up to see Mario Pingatore standing over me in a crisp white linen suit and a creamy Borsalino hat.

“Worse are the spiders,” he said for Nancy's benefit. “Mind the little gray buggers. One bite and you're dead as mutton.”

“Thanks for the warning, Mario,” Nancy said, “but if you'll excuse us, we've got work to do.”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to disturb. Just here to pay my taxes,” he said with a sly little grin. “Must have taken a wrong turn looking for the bloody loo.”

Mario had reason to smile. His hobo costume had somehow convinced the Comune to reduce his assessment. He had money to play with and he was in no hurry to leave.

“Find anything?” he said, looking over Avvocatessa Bonetti's shoulder.

“Nulla,”
she said. Nothing.

“Call me an old softie,” he said, turning to me, “but I feel bad for you and Nancy, stuck down here when you two should be out larking in the sunshine.”

“The California sunshine?” I suggested.

“And paying a solicitor by the hour, on the odd chance you'll—”

“If you're thinking about us giving up,” Nancy said, “forget about it.”

“Oh, come on, you Yanks put up a good fight as you always do, but you've surely come a-cropper here. Now, I'm willing to make you a very decent offer. Pay you full whack.”

Hmm, I wondered: How much is full whack?

“Not for me, mind you, but Vesuvia's keen to keep the old place in the family name. Sentimental rubbish and all that.”

“We're not selling,” Nancy said with utter finality.

“Very well.” He shrugged. “Good hunting. Hope you find something.”

“Maybe we'll find something on you,” Nancy said provocatively.

“Trust me, dear girl, I have nothing to hide.”

 

 

We worked
in silence for the rest of the morning, interrupted only by Nancy calling me over several times to kill little gray spiders. The Comune closed at one, and after swinging home to eat lunch and change, we headed up to the
rustico
. We couldn't do anything about the structure right now, but Nancy and I agreed that we'd at least clear away all the stones and weeds, so that when we finally did get the paperwork straightened out, Umberto and his guys would have a clear area in which to work.

Nancy was on weed patrol and I had challenged myself to see how many stones I could lift before I got a hernia. At first I thought heaving stones would be fun in a mindless way, and a good workout to boot, but I quickly discovered how grueling this was. Filling and hauling wheelbarrows full of stones, day after day under the blazing sun, was hell, and I vowed never to squawk about a bill from Umberto, because whatever we were going to pay these guys, it wouldn't be enough.

At the end of our labors Nancy and I sat in the shade with our backs propped up against a stone wall, too exhausted to speak. We passed a bottle of
acqua naturale
back and forth, taking long swigs, holding the bottle gingerly with hands raw from hard labor. From across the way we could see Umberto and his crew leaving Vesuvia Pingatore's house. They saw us and waved. We feebly waved back. From behind a window we saw a shadow, and we could just imagine the severity of the
malocchio
(evil eye) she was casting in our direction.

While Nancy muttered some unflattering comments about the Pingatores, Super Mario's offer kept eating through my brain like battery acid. How tempting to get out now while I was feeling so bruised and achy, physically beaten, and stymied at every turn. I knew Nancy was in for the long haul, but was I?

We drove back to the rented house and took showers . . . short ones timed to end before we ran out of hot water. After picking at some cold cuts we were both too exhausted to eat, we dragged ourselves to bed. Nancy fell asleep immediately, but I lay there trying to sort out my feelings. They all seemed to be bound up around the observation that life in Italy was hard, but it was easy; while life in L.A. was easy, but it was hard. I felt confused and conflicted. I wanted clarity and a pure vision of my future, but my brain felt numb and burned out by all the exasperations and exhilarations of living here.

I was listening to the soft purr of Nancy's breathing when I drifted into a hypnagogic state, and somewhere between staying awake and falling asleep, my screenplay started to write itself.

My eyes popped open and I accidentally knocked over a water glass fumbling for my notepad.

“Shit.” I tried to mop up the spill with the edge of the blanket.

“Hunh?” Nancy mumbled, waking up. “What're you doing?”

“Sorry, I had this idea. Go back to sleep,” I said, drying the pen off on my T-shirt.

“Idea for what?” She rolled over to face me.

“You know, that action-adventure thing.”

“You still doing that?”

“Sort of,” I said, scribbling in the darkness.

“What happened to ‘I'm a whore'?”

“I think at these prices we're technically referred to as call girls.”

“Did you ever finish that article for the
Times
?”

“Still working on it.”

“I'd rather see you spend your time on that,” she said, sitting up. “And why is the blanket wet?”

“Problem with the article,” I said, “the reader's got to be thinking if I have so many complaints about Tuscany, what am I doing living here?”

“Well,” she said through a yawn, “maybe you need to explain that you're just cranky because we're living this weird gypsy existence, and that you'll be a lot happier when we move into the new house.”

I thought for a moment about the wisdom of pursuing this. “I'm not trying to rain on your piazza, but has it occurred to you that we may never live in that house?”

“Go to sleep.” She rolled over and pulled the covers up to her shoulders.

“We're working like galley slaves, hemorrhaging money, in search of some scrap of evidence that probably doesn't even exist. I mean, at some point we might have to admit that we've a come a-cropper here, whatever the hell that means.”

She rolled over, propped herself up on her elbow and stared at me.

“What?” I innocently asked.

“I can't believe that Mario Pingatore . . .”

“It has nothing to do with him!”

“He wants it back,” Nancy said. “Doesn't that mean something to you?”

“Yeah, he's a bigger schmuck than we are.”

“How about he knows there's a way to get an address?”

“Then why didn't he do it?”

“Because he needed us to buy it first so we'd put in the road. Then he buys it back, gets the address, and enlarges it. Any idea what that could be worth?”

“At this point I don't care anymore.”

“Really?” Even in the dim light I could see her eyes go icy and hard.

“Really.”

“Okay, fine. Let's sell it.”

“I mean, we've given it a good try here, you know.”

I was expecting an argument, but she got real quiet.

“And it doesn't mean we're giving up on Italy,” I said, trying not to sound like I was pleading.

“I'll call Mario tomorrow.”

“Look, I don't want you to think that I'm just some spoiled yuppie who's whining because I have to stick my hand in garbage and I can't watch
Friends
, because—”

“It doesn't matter what I think.”

“—because I know the house means a lot to you but, Jesus, honey, for the money we're spending, we could rent a villa and live like—”

“The house means nothing to me. Nothing! What means something is that you and me were finally doing something together. Standing for something, committed to something!”

“Come on . . .”

“For twenty years we lived parallel lives, which was fine. But I really thought this was our last chance to do something like this.”

“Oh, stop being so dramatic.”

“How many more years do you think we've got where we're strong enough and healthy enough to haul rocks and take on the powers that be?”

“A lot.”

“Don't kid yourself. In ten years we'll be sitting in wheelchairs, wondering what room we left our teeth in. That's why we've got to do this now!”

“I don't know. . . .”

“Unless this is just too much reality for you.”

Her word stung me like a slap across the face with a riding crop. Righteous anger started to rise, but it had nowhere to go, because I knew she was right. All my writing, the scripts, the articles, were just my way of retreating into the playground of my mind. I've lived my whole life in fantasy land, and only pure dumb luck and/or divine providence enabled me to make a living out of it. Nancy knew I was no good at reality, because, just like Peter Pan, if I had bad thoughts I would no longer be able to fly. Once again, I was guilty of what she had always charged me with . . . being absent from my own life.

D
espite my misgivings I was earnestly trying to improve my language skills, fit into small-town life, and wean myself away from living inside my own skull to the exclusion of everywhere else. I discovered that a daily walk through Cambione was a good way to address all of those needs. Without Nancy, I had to rely on my own abilities to do my shopping and converse with the people I saw every day.

One ritual I grew to cherish was breakfast, Italian style. There were more cafés in Cambione than churches, and there were a
lot
of churches, indicating a preference for the worship of strong coffee and a flaky
cornetto
over the usual path to salvation. I had no favorite, gravitating to the café that had the liveliest crowd dishing the freshest gossip. People came to know me as I tried my best to join in. Gratefully, Italians are very forgiving about the mangling of their mother tongue. If I got anywhere close, they helped fill in the blanks. Much of their banter, however, was lost on me because they'd often lapse into a local dialect, full of “shushes,” for their
s
's and chopping the ends of their verbs . . . something Ms. Margarita Martini failed to cover at the Giosuè Carducci Language Academy.

If the café wasn't crowded enough to support conversation, I borrowed an Italian newspaper and tried to understand why the sports reporter wrote that the local soccer team had been playing like a pack of
mutilati
(handicapped people).

After breakfast I took a leisurely stroll down the walking street on stones smoothed soft as
mascarpone
cheese by a thousand years of foot traffic. The main walking street, officially known as Via Vittorio Emanuele, is about twenty feet wide and six blocks long. It is slightly humped to help the rain runoff. Its ancient paving stones, arranged in a herringbone pattern, are terrazzoed with the remnants of innumerable cigarette butts and the million amoeba-shaped ghosts of wads of hardened chewing gum.

I'd marvel at the houses painted in the lunatic colors of apricot, parchment yellow, and a highly saturated dark red they call
sangue di bue
, oxblood. I studied these colors, trying to understand why they worked here, but if any suburban house in America were painted those shades, the neighbors would throw rocks at it.

I continued past the
panificio
with its warm, yeasty fragrance of baking bread drifting unacknowledged past the lowered heads of the off-duty ambulance drivers playing dominos next door. The next heady aroma I encountered came from the Gelateria di Pinocchi. It was too early for them to be serving their homemade ice cream, but when I passed the life-sized statue of the eternal wooden boy sitting in the shop window, I went weak at the smell of the wafer cones they were making, one at a time, on a tiny, ancient waffle iron.

I turned left at an icon on an ancient wall that featured a muscular Jesus carved in concrete that looked like a certain governor of California with long hair and a beard. I strolled past the Confused Store, to gaze once more in the window in hopes of trying to figure out what led them to sell only items made of wicker and boxes of chocolates. If I had to stop for something at the hardware store, I hoped that Mina (whom Nancy and I called Mean Girl) wasn't on duty, but that her brother Nicola (Nice Guy) was.

I entered the Piazza Maggiore and hailed the clump of old men hanging around the fountain, arguing about politics and football just as they had done every day since they were ten. At the news kiosk, I ritually gave the signora a two-euro coin. She handed me the
Herald Tribune
, and glancing at a headline she couldn't read, she would cluck,
“Che casino!”
(What a madhouse!)