The Reluctant Tuscan (7 page)

I took a piece from each man and, forking a slice of prosciutto, made myself a sandwich. I took a lusty bite and smiled at both of them, indicating that I was enjoying the top slice every bit as much as the bottom.

“Mangia, mangia,”
Flavia commanded, plopping a huge serving of what she described as a “rhapsodic”
tagliatelle ai porcini
on Nancy's plate.

“Per favore, signora,”
Nancy protested.
“Non posso mangiare così tanto.”

Flavia reacted as if Nancy had just desecrated a church, launching into a lecture condemning her, and most American women, for being too skinny. And by denying her body the food it needed, Nancy was all but guaranteeing herself a series of crippling illnesses and most assuredly an early death. Faced with such dire predictions, we put our heads down and ate until our underwear felt tight and it was difficult to breathe.

Unlike the French, who tend to sink into reverential silence when the food arrives, the act of eating merely increases the Italian need for volume and drama. Somewhere between the
primi
and the
secondi
a row broke out between Cousin Aldo and Dino, which Nancy translated for me.

“Porca miseria!”
Cousin Aldo slammed his cell phone down on the table hard enough to wake up
la bimba
Artemisia.

“Hey, we are eating,” Dino said with indignant rage. “Stop acting like an animal!”

“Don't bother me, I'm under a lot of pressure,” Cousin Aldo roared. He was a big, thickset guy with the huge, triangular upper body of a cartoon bully.

“What's wrong?” Dino said.

“Leave me alone.”

Dino thrust out his chest. “Tell me or I swear by the Virgin, I'll take you out back and beat some sense into you.”

“It's Mamma,” Cousin Aldo said. “We had a fight. I keep calling to apologize but she won't pick up the phone!”

“You must do something.” Dino grabbed Aldo by his large sawhorse shoulders and shook him. “This is your mamma!”

“I know!” A tear waddled down Cousin Aldo's cheek.

“My God, what if the old woman is lying dead by the phone, her head split open from the fall?” Dino's own tears started to well up. “And she died before you had a chance to apologize!”

The two big men embraced in a cumbersome bear hug and sobbed, as Cousin Aldo cried out, “Oh, Mamma!”

Oh, brother, I thought. If these two guys get up and start dancing, I am outta here.

Cousin Aldo bolted out of his chair to go home to Mamma. As we got up to bid him good-bye, the renowned
funghi
fighter Cousin Faustino arrived. He was a toothless, misshapen little man with two fingers missing from one hand and a thumb from the other. His left eyeball was strangely blackened, and his right eye seemed to meander off to the side, as if he were trying to see who was behind him. Moreover, he looked drunk.

Dino introduced us, and Nancy greeted him warmly. She told him that she had heard great things about him, and now that our olive trees were being threatened, we urgently needed his expertise.

“Would you be able to come up to our house tomorrow?” Nancy asked.

“Magari . . .”
Cousin Faustino said with an upward toss of his three-fingered hand.

I
t was one thirty in the morning and I was wide awake, or as the Italians say,
in bianco,
in white. I was staring at the ceiling waiting for the antacids I had taken to help digest Flavia's dinner . . . and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I began to sense that the source of my anxiety was how ill prepared I was to make any kind of change. During the times Nancy and I were apart, she had been addressing the issue and evolving. She had deliberately sought a life peaceful enough for her to hear that small voice within that unerringly tells us what we should be doing, while I was doing my best to ignore mine. I felt my competitive juices flow and found myself slightly angry with her. Hey, I could be just as centered and serene as she was, goddammit! I tasted blood in my mouth and I realized I had been chewing on the inside of my cheek.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself picking olives. I was wearing a straw hat and a red bandanna, and in the background somebody was playing “O Sole Mio” on a wheezy concertina. My sister was in the kitchen stirring a huge vat of pasta, while Nancy had her skirt hiked up as she stomped grapes, throwing back her head and laughing lustfully like a young Anna Magnani.

Everything was a script to me. I was incapable of experiencing life without trying to rewrite it. But maybe that was a good thing. After all, writers from as far back as Goethe have been coming to Italy for inspiration—why not me? Maybe I should tackle something big, like a book or a play. Let's see, what did I used to be interested in before I started working twelve hours a day, six days a week?

Unable to come up with anything beyond a vague fascination with the History Channel, I began composing an e-mail in my head diplomatically asking my agent if he'd had a chance to read my script. All at once I became aware of a steady tapping noise. At first I thought it was Nancy's teeth chattering from the cold, but then I realized it was coming from downstairs. I climbed out of bed and bundled on my robe. Nancy stirred and, in a groggy voice, asked where I was going. I told her that somebody was here.

Flipping on lights as I went, I followed the tapping to our front door. Through the peephole I spied a young man hopping up and down to keep warm.

“Buona notte, Scrittore,”
he called out, addressing me by my title, Writer. I realized that this was Dino's son, Rudolfo. I opened the door and he entered, apologizing for the lateness of the hour. He explained, in almost accentless English, that he had just gotten home when his father insisted he come right over and turn on our heat.

He headed for the thermostat, and as he peeled off his jacket, I could see that he was sporting all the prerequisite totems of his generation: the small silver earring, the hieroglyphic tattoo, and the bizarrely cut facial hair.

Italy leads the world in young men with funny beards. Rudolfo's particular cultivation consisted of sideburns that tapered into a pencil-thin line running down both sides of his jawbone, then stopping just short of the chin, where they formed a set of apostrophes and then suddenly ascended into a narrow rattail of a Fu Manchu moustache.

I looked at his beard in wonder, knowing that, if I were to try to maintain such a creation, between the unsteadiness of my hand and my myopic eyesight I would wind up slicing off my nose one fine morning.

Nancy entered, her cheeks pink tipped from the cold. Rudolfo introduced himself and assured us that he would have our heater working in a minute . . .
bocca di lupo.
I looked to Nancy, who informed me that the phrase meant “mouth of the wolf,” and the Tuscans used it to say “good luck.”

“Let me see what you're doing,” I said as I watched him tinker with the control panel.

“This button here, marked
Gravenungafürlenspielen
, is the main on/off.”

“Gravenunga . . .”
I squinted at the console, wishing I had put on my reading glasses.

“And this one marked
Kleisterwahlfunghausen
”—he pushed another button—“is the—”

The house plunged into blackness.

“
Maledetto
Italian circuit breaker!” Rudolfo let fly a bilingual string of expletives as he dug a cigarette lighter out of his pocket and used the flame to see his way down into the cellar.

Nancy and I stood alone in the dark. From downstairs we heard Rudolfo knock over a bookcase and cry out in pain as his disposable lighter burned his hand. Over the howling of Italian curses Nancy commented that, for just having spent a week at a Buddhist retreat, young Rudolfo didn't seem very Zen.

Just then the lights came on, and as Rudolfo clomped up the stairs, we heard the pleasant
whoomp
of a burner igniting.

“Bravo, Rudolfo,” Nancy said, clapping her hands.

“Yeah, nice work, dude.”

“No problem,” Rudolfo said through the burned thumb he was sucking on.

Nancy took down a bottle of
Vin Santo
. “Can I make you a sandwich?”

“Oh, no, thank you,
signora
. Mamma fed me when I got home.”

“We really appreciate you coming over,” I said.

“Well, I just wanted to meet the people who bought the Bunker and say
bocca di lupo
.”

“We're screwed, huh?” I said.

We sat and Rudolfo proceeded to give us a brief history of our house, starting with how the young men of the village had been using it for years as a place to take their girlfriends. He slyly intimated that he himself had been deflowered on the very floor of our
rustico
.

Turning to weightier matters, he told us that Mario Pingatore had been trying to unload the house for as long as he could remember. Offered it to everybody. Even his father, Dino, had held a
compromesso
on it for a while. He went on to explain that since the house needed a road to be of any value, Pingatore had to find a buyer who didn't understand how things were done around here. In other words, he needed
stranieri
.

This is a word Italians use a lot. It literally means “strangers” or “tourists,” but more accurately it connotes “outsiders.” And in Tuscany that can mean somebody from the next village over. For example, one of our neighbors is a seventy-two-year-old man who came here from Milan when he was ten. He married a local girl, had five children and twelve grandchildren. But to this day they still refer to him as
Il Milanese
.

Nancy poured drinks, and we passed around a tin of biscotti while Rudolfo summed up our dilemma. Pingatore owned a house that was worthless because there was no road leading up to it. He sold it to a couple of “outsiders” and a road mysteriously appeared. Then his sister, Vesuvia, filed a complaint. This stopped all construction, rendering the house uninhabitable, so we poor
stranieri
would probably have no recourse but to sell it back to Pingatore.

“At a bloody loss, of course.” Rudolfo dipped a biscotto into his amber dessert wine with a raised pinky in a send-up of Mario Pingatore's English airs.

“How can he get away with this?” I demanded.

Rudolfo shrugged. “We're Italian. We live with a million laws and no rules.”

“We're so screwed.” I was starting to get overheated from our now throbbing radiators.

But Rudolfo suggested that being
stranieri
might actually have a benefit. It seemed that everybody in town knew we had been conned by Mario Pingatore, and since nobody liked him, they would enjoy seeing us prevail if we could just give them a good reason.

“I have a good reason,” Nancy said. “And I've been trying to get in to see the mayor for days to tell him about it.”

“Oh, you've got to go much higher than that,” Rudolfo said. “You got to get to the mayor's wife.”

 

 

The following day
the cold snap broke. The sun came out and it turned hot enough to blister paint. Unfortunately, the German behemoth in our cellar continued to heat our radiators to a white-hot pitch despite my best efforts to push the Kleisterwahlathingee and fiddle with the Gravenungamajig. I called Rudolfo, only to learn that he had left for Corsica to go surfing and would not be back until the end of the week.

I was sitting in my underwear, dripping sweat on the laptop, when Nancy came downstairs. She was dressed in black, her wild mane of blond hair was tamed into a prim bun, and she was sporting a large crucifix.

“You're going to burn in hell for this,” I said.

“I'm just going to church.”

“You haven't gone to church in ten years.”

“Then I've got a shitload to confess.”

So for the next two weeks, she went to Mass every day in hopes of accidentally running into the mayor's wife. Nancy spotted her several times but was unable to approach because the mayor's wife was either with somebody (once it was Vesuvia Pingatore!) or so deep in prayer that disturbing her seemed sacrilegious.

Burning with the need to corner Cambione's first lady alone at the right moment, Nancy dragged me out of bed early one morning to drive her to the Chiesa de Santa Maria della Pieve.

I parked the car and sat under the faded green awning of a café across from the church. Swarms of Vespas sputtered past me as I sipped a
caffè macchiato
to the steady rhythm of an old woman sweeping the sidewalk with a twig broom. I watched a young couple drift by and stop at the condom vending machine under the very shadow of the church. After discussing the relative merits of each product, they pooled their coins and made a selection.

I was thinking about what a great example this was of how unfazed the Italians are about the basic incongruities in their lives. Then I realized that this would make a terrific hook for a travel article. I started fleshing out the piece with the idea that I might run it by a buddy of mine who worked at the
Los Angeles Times.

I was just contemplating a quick trip down to Rome to see if there were any such machines on the walls outside the Vatican, when I spotted a squat tugboat of a woman steaming down the street. In spite of the heat, she was wearing a wool dress and a thick black shawl. Arriving at the church, she stopped at the doorway and crossed herself. Then she bowed her head and entered.

Later, Nancy described what happened when the mayor's wife stepped inside the near-empty chapel. How the heavyset woman marched to her usual spot at the side altar of Santa Dominica. Dropping to knees sheathed in brownish-orange support stockings, she lit a candle and began to say her rosary in the fat, waxy smoke. But she quickly became distracted by the muted sobbing of the woman next to her. She tried to keep praying, but the weeping grew louder. Nancy apologized for the disturbance, prompting the mayor's wife to ask what was the matter.