Bella Tuscany (21 page)

Antonio, who also lives in this
palazzo
, stops in for a glass of wine. He takes us to the mysterious apartment where he grew up. We enter a large room, then another. His dead mother's paintings—portraits and landscapes—cover the walls. Her piano, her furniture, her photographs on the mantel, remain. There is a photo of four-year-old Antonio on Santa's knee. Someone years ago has made a few swipes low on the wall, enough to reveal that something chestnut brown and green lies underneath, but what? I think I see the quick curve of a horse's haunch. This room obviously is unused. We go down a squirrely, low corridor into a vast room under the eaves, with a painterly view of the
piazza
far below. Antonio takes me into a side room stuffed with his paintings. The main room has a long table covered with sketches and squeezed tubes of paint. Two cats fly around the room and then curl together in a mammoth fireplace, where people have warmed themselves since the 1500s. Along the way, who took the brush to these walls and what was painted? And who grew weary of them, decided white was better, and simply wiped them out? Antonio sits by the drafty fireplace with his wild cats, sipping coffee and drawing, walking to the windows to look down at the
piazza
.

He has other rooms we do not see, rooms he has closed. Under paint and smoke, I imagine other garden scenes, Annunciations, mythological trysts, Europas, distant castles, scenes from the lives of saints. But Antonio is showing me the decorative border he has designed for someone's house, a restored house with newly plastered walls, where he will stencil acanthus leaves in gold bounded by lines of Pompeian red. In a hundred years, a woman will wake up one morning, her eye traveling along the top of her bedroom wall, and she will think
no,
she will think
flowers, I would like to see flowers
and Antonio's work will be covered by a border of roses.

I ask Antonio if he and his friend Flavia will paint a border in the bathroom we are about to remodel. I love the stylized, running Etruscan wave. He sketches a few. We decide on milky blue, bordered with two lines in apricot.

The next day, I find myself in the art supply store staring at the pristine watercolor paper, tubes with delicious names, thick sketch pads and trays of colored pencils. When my daughter was small, she and I used to set up a table in the back yard and paint all morning. She had a vigorous sense of color and, even then, thought big. She painted huge purple elephants with backgrounds of wildly splotched colors and princesses in swirling pink. Her boxy houses, with the spoked sun above, always had people in the yard and cats in the windows. And what's that off to the side? A yellow convertible. My watercolors were rolled up and hidden under the bed. The still life of a blue bowl of oranges was born dead. The fragile coral bells against a stone wall conveyed no sense of textural contrast. The immense pleasure of sitting in the sun watching my daughter, thinning carmine to pale pink and dipping in the fine tip, creating something where there was nothing—she had the flow of freedom. I was not spontaneously
good
enough.

In the art shop, I reach for the chalk pastels, the stack of handmade paper. The inkling I began to have in Orvieto slips into consciousness. I'm going to draw the
pleasure
of wild purple orchids springing up every day, the outrageous
upupa,
hoopoe, who lands in my hazelnut tree every morning, and the lines of the hills I can see from my study, how they lap into each other like pleats in a green velvet skirt. I've been breathing these images. And if I could
deeply
breathe art, I would try to paint the
feeling
of all the birds singing every morning splurging all their megahertz on the dawn.

I have always loved that collision point of nature with the desire to create art. For me the form is words. How to pull the scent of wet mock orange through the walls of the house? Through the ink in the pen, through the keys of the computer? The dark when the birds begin—their songs so tangled together that no one can be separated—so impurely accessible to music, art, words. Song like a
riffle
, a sandbar just under water, sunlight pushed by the tide. How do they know and why do they sing? How to say that although everything is at stake when experiencing or making art, that it is at the same time a birthright joy. How to paint or write the everyday rising green burst of birdsong? The levitation, the silverpoint thread drawn along the black hills, slow melting of rose, opalescent blue, and the pulse of the birds still rising?

I am lying half-awake, wondering if I've died and this is what was promised. The ache in my hind end from digging out stones from the flower beds yesterday reminds me that I am still mortal and that the earth simply has returned to aurous colors; to diffusion, then to the birds scattering from their conjoined song and into their own jactations from tree to tree. I long for the creation.

This is every day, how art slips in and out.

Mad July:
The Humming Urn

THIRTY-ONE STRAIGHT DAYS OF HOUSE GUESTS.
A seventh set threatens to arrive. When Primo Bianchi stops by and announces that he is ready to begin work, we call these acquaintances, having earlier warned them that we might not be able to put them up because of the restoration project. “We'd love to see the work-in-progress,” my former colleague says. “We'll stay out of the way.” I rarely see him in San Francisco and can't remember whatever conversation we had at the book signing of a mutual friend, which has now led to him and his girlfriend visiting us.

“I'm afraid it's really not going to work. They're ripping out two bathrooms. I think you'd be more comfortable at a hotel.”

Silence from across the Atlantic. Then, “Don't you have three bathrooms?”

“Yes—but you'd have to go through our bedroom to get to the other one.” Momentarily nonplussed, he agrees that I can arrange a hotel for them.

 

When I was in college, I used to imagine a yellow house on a shady street. The indefinite location could have been Princeton, Gainesville, Palo Alto, Evanston, San Luis Obispo, Boulder, Chapel Hill—some college town where bicycles were preferred, tomatoes were grown in the back yard, and one's friends dropped in without calling. My writing desk would face a window upstairs where I could keep watch over the children playing, could run down to check on the roast. I imagined extra rooms with blue toile wallpaper, a dormer room with spool beds for children, and a dining room with a wall of French doors. Friends could stay as long as they liked, their children blending with mine at the great round table. This fantasy alternated with another of living alone in a fabulous city, Paris, San Francisco, or Rome, where I would wear a tight black knit dress, sandals, and sunglasses, smoke thin cigars in a café, while writing poems in a leather book.

Through the years, fragments of those dreams actually came true. But never until now have I had more than one guest room. With three extra bedrooms, my dream of the bounteous table and the open door have become reality.

Revolving door is more like it. Dreams sometimes need revision. During the visits of six sets of house guests, I have needed a conveyer belt from town to send out bread and meat. I strip off the sheets, and the washing machine lunges and churns for hours. I have lapsed into a set menu for lunch:
caprese
(mozzarella, basil, tomato salad),
focaccia,
various kinds of salami and ham, green salad, cheeses, and fruit. “Again?” Ed asks.

“Yes! They don't know we've had it four days running. We are definitely going out tonight.”

I'm ready to draw maps to the antique shops of Monte San Savino or the Etruscan tomb near Perugia, but often they say, “We just want to stay here. Those four days in Rome were exhausting. . . .”

At what point did I flip from
Excited to see you
to
How long, oh lord, how long will you be staying
? It must have been around day ten. For Ed, around day five; he is more solitary than I. He must have his private hours of writing and working on the land. Too much socializing throws the circuit breaker and he comes down with a migraine. By the third onslaught of guests, we were growing tired of the sound of our own voices. By the fourth, we switched to automatic pilot, almost pointing instead of speaking. “Bus is leaving for Siena,” I whispered at their door. Feeble humor. We agreed to leave by eight to avoid the heat. Ed filled up the car so we could get an early start. We're showered and ready by 7:30, plates of melon on the table, the Moka hissing on the stove. They're still sleeping at 9:30. If we're out by 10, we'll arrive with an hour or so before the town closes for the afternoon. Our guests will be sorely annoyed at this retro custom. The rhythm of the Italian day seems impossible to grasp. “We're on vacation; we don't want a schedule. Let's play it by ear,” he says. “Yes,” she agrees, “and besides a lot of places stay open during siesta.” No they don't, I think, but don't say anything.

When they left, I couldn't even say hello to the neighbor's gray cat, who sometimes comes by for a bowl of milk.

“Would ten days be too long?”

“The friends we're travelling with have heard so much about you. Would it be all right if the six of us stopped by for lunch?”

“My son's roommate and his cousin will be passing your way and we thought you might enjoy meeting a couple of kids on their first trip to Italy.”

My mouth has a hard time forming the word “no” but I'm learning. “I'm working on a project,” I say, only to hear, “Well, don't worry about us. We won't disturb you a bit. You just do your writing and we'll go off on day trips.” If I say how sorry I am but we have a full house on the dates they propose, the reply often is, “Just tell us when and we'll plan our vacation around you.”

 

Primo, welcome. You don't know how welcome. We've wanted to remodel the two original bathrooms ever since we first saw them. Because they worked, other more crucial projects came first. We ignored the chipped porcelain sinks and the funky showers that sprayed all over the floor, simply added brass towel racks and antique mirrors from the Arezzo market and turned our energy and cash over to central heating and unraveling electrical wires. Unlike those monster jobs, changing the bathrooms offers instant pleasure.

While our first guests slathered suntan oil on each other's backs, we dashed out to order toilets and lights. During the next guests' stay, we were looking at tile. Time to choose; the order needed to go. Karen and Michael waved from the upstairs terrace, where I left a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of cinnamon iced tea to hold them until we returned.

Selecting tiles in Italy would be daunting even for my two sisters, who can spend entire days examining fabrics or lamps or wallpaper. The attractive showrooms of building suppliers are backed with dusty warehouses. If you don't see what you want up front in the model bathrooms with the space-capsule showers and gadget-laden whirlpool tubs, you're turned loose in the
magazzino
to fend for yourself among racks, stacks, and boxes of pavers in shades of rose-honey, elegant limestone squares, the thousand versions of hand-painted blue and white birds and flowers, slick primary colors, and—oh, no!—the pink and blue butterfly we are about to exorcise from the house. I found immediately that I prefer tiles with the touch of the maker on them, the rougher surface, and the traditional designs. The range of marble and natural stone tiles also is staggering. For the first time ever, I thought I could not choose. When we built the first bath, I knew what I wanted—large marble squares—and, fortunately, didn't even look further.

Finally, we narrowed our choices and decided to come back in a few days. Back at Bramasole, Karen and Michael were glowing and spotless in new linen bought for their trip. Ed and I were grimy from the warehouses and my dust allergy started acting up. But—lunch in a few minutes! And in the afternoon, the Etruscan museum, the churches of upper Cortona, the monastery where St. Francis's narrow bed is still on view.

“La dolce vita,”
they say, leaning back for a sip of
grappa
in the long evenings, as I'm glancing in the kitchen at the stacks of pots. “Umm, think I'll go up; it's just so relaxing here. You two are
so
lucky—all day with nothing to do but enjoy all this beauty.” The lovely guests trail upstairs, forgetting to notice that Ed and I are rolling up our sleeves for a bout with grease and suds. Over our heads, as we scrape and sweep, their bed bangs rhythmically against the wall.

 

By the time they leave, we've changed our minds about the tile. At last we can just look for a whole morning, without thinking of rushing home to feed ravenous guests. For the original bathroom of the house, called
“il brutto,”
the ugly, by my daughter, we select a rosy natural stone with the same stone in cream for the border. For the nightmare butterfly bath, we decide on a handmade Sicilian tile in a blue and yellow design on white.

The yellow house fantasy is still real. I love having friends and family here. In a foreign country, we see each other in an unfamiliar perspective, which can heighten and enrich the closeness we already have. Good friends jump right in and love walking to the market for strawberries. They come home with ideas for dinner and we have great times frying zucchini blossoms and making watermelon
sorbetto
. They're ready to search for a Roman road we've heard about, to start the coffee, or even to weed the asparagus bed. The bad guest could be anywhere; the good guest seems to know that places are unique unto themselves and gives over to the new heartbeat, letting the place have its way with them.

Now Toni and Shotsy arrive from San Francisco with a list of places they want to see; some are new to us. They're delighted on their first evening when the fireflies crowd the lane. Even a walk into town with them brings new adventures. We're walking past San Francesco, a church perpetually closed for restoration. Shotsy sees a priest at the side door and asks him if we can peep inside. He seems happy that we're interested. A grape-juice birthmark covers half his face. His eyes are direct and he moves his head from side to side as he walks, his black robe catching dust rolls. We spend an hour on a tour inside the vaulted, gloomy church which was re-dressed from its original spare architecture into a Baroque interior. The priest then takes us into a room with closed cupboards. He wants to show us something special, but first he shows us the skulls of several Roman martyrs, eleven or twelve years old. The shelves are full of various hanks of hair and pieces of bone. He reverently takes out a bit of cloth. “The last sash of Santa Margherita, a rare and precious relic.” Then he shows us a piece of one of San Francesco's garments. This church, named for him, was built by his friend Brother Elias, about whom little is known except that he was a sometime hermit in the hills above our house. The priest shakes our hands and tells us, “I'll probably go to hell but all of you will go to heaven.”

Near Piazza San Cristoforo, a man picking cherries in a tree calls
“Buon giorno,”
and throws down samples for us to try. All this and it's not even ten o'clock yet. They take off for the day and come home with stories to tell. We're sorry when they go.

My two sisters came with me for two weeks early last summer, when Ed was finishing his spring quarter of teaching. Because our mother has been in a nursing home for many, many years, most of our visits revolve around her dips into illness, her emergencies, or just the painful regular visits to her. For the first time in too long, we talked about everything but Mother. We travelled all over Tuscany, cooked pasta, and worked in the garden.

Our aunt Hazel had died recently and left us each a little inheritance. We decided to splurge. After all, we never expected this little windfall. I certainly didn't. Any selfish act when I was a child was corrected with, “You don't want to grow up to be like Hazel do you?” When my grandmother died, Hazel was too upset to go to the funeral. When we filed into my grandparents' house afterwards, we found that she'd loaded her car with all Mother Mayes's best things. Because of another painful memory I wouldn't write about, I had not spoken to Hazel since college.

My sisters and I ate in the best restaurants, ending each meal, with “Thank you, Hazel. We enjoyed that so much.” We began to feel rather friendly toward her. We bought shoes and trays and scarves, saying, “Hazel, that was so sweet of you,” as we walked out of each shop. As much as I disliked her, I found that her last act toward me stirred up a memory-belief that runs strong in my family, the old impulse,
Blood is thicker than water,
and a late forgiving began to form.

We found ourselves one day in the deep recesses of a medieval building in Florence, being shown rooms of designer bags and jewelry. My sisters were thrilled at the prices and began selecting—gold bracelets, wallets, summer handbags. It suddenly occurred to me that this was stolen merchandise but I couldn't say anything because the
signora
who took us there from her shop understood just enough English. I hoped they'd finish before the
carabinieri
burst in. We left with Gucci and Chanel, the real thing my sisters knew. “We're lucky we weren't arrested,” I told them in the taxi. Oddly enough, they paid by personal check and no one ever cashed them. Just one comment catapulted us back to familiar ground. At breakfast in the hotel courtyard with a splashing fountain, we were served perfect cantaloupe. Which one of us said, “Mother would have loved this”? A deep relief to reconnect on a new basis. Now when we send each other unexpected gifts, we enclose a card,
Love, Hazel
.

 

Bathrooms. The Romans loved them. Their bathing pools with black-and-white mosaic dolphins and stylized sea creatures never have been improved upon. Their fanciful designs influenced the original designers of bathroom decor at Bramasole not at all. Early in this adventure, we realized that not only were the old ones ugly, but our sewage treatment facility—one cement tank—was inadequate when several people were staying in the house. Noxious odors and scorpions crept up the drains. We read books on home water supplies, on waste management in the country, made photocopies of septic tank diagrams. After a few hours of digging behind the house, Primo revealed that the shower emptied right into the tank, an environmental no-no. More digging revealed that all three showers and sinks dumped gallons and gallons of clear water right in, forcing the waste out before the biological action of purification could happen. We are polluting our own land. Or so we think, with our book knowledge. “That's the way it's done,” plumbers assured us. “Your system is good.” We don't think so. We have insisted to Primo that we want a better plan. We want the showers and sinks routed out of the septic system. We want long pipes to exit the septic tank, with rock-filled pits along the way for further filtering.