Bella Tuscany (22 page)

 

When Primo and the men arrive, we go out and discuss the plan of attack with them. Ed and I have spent ten-hour days decalcifying tile floors, ten-hour days stripping doors, but facing your true love over an open septic tank may be one of those true tests. Primo wants to explain the compartments. How they purify waste and where it exits. “This tank is O.K.,” he insists. “I need to make another section on the inside. See,
acqua nera
in,” he points to a pipe from the bathroom. He scrapes sand off the septic tank lid and pries it up. I gasp and step back. This is too much. I would like to be anywhere but here. Unfazed, he points, “
acqua chiara
out.” Black water in, clear water out. It all looks
nera
. Primo leaps about with the alacrity of a cat on a dining room table. Ed has stepped back, clapped his hand over his nose. “There, then there, then out. All clear.” Suddenly Primo makes a little gagging sound as he slides the top back in place and jumps aside. We all start to laugh and run.

Because our steep hill makes the delivery of a huge tank impossible without a crane to hoist it over the wall, Primo suggests two septic tanks, keeping the old one behind the house and installing a new one in the Lime Tree Bower. He shakes his head and shrugs. “Big enough for an apartment building. A hospital. Call the honey wagon; ask him to come today.”

He takes off for supplies. The men head upstairs. The minute bath goes first and demolition is fast. Franco and Emilio—how do they both work in there?—cart bucket after bucket of tile. How it didn't crush his Ape, I don't know, but Primo inched up the boxwood lane and across the front terrace with a giant cement septic tank, which must be buried. The old toilet is loaded in the Ape. Zeno, a Pole, starts digging a trench and Ed hauls stones out to our pile, with which by now we could build a small house.

The honey wagon honks in the road below. I look out the window and see a man waving and a tractor pulling a rusty tank. Ed runs out. The driver throws a rope to him and Ed hauls up the hose. Secondo comes up, leaving his tractor heaving in the road. He has cottonball hair and a pouncing step. He greets Ed like an old friend. After my brief view into the bowels, so to speak, of the system, I don't even want to watch. I hear suction and slushing. In a short time, I hear Ed in the shower. He's laughing. “What's funny?”

“That was unbelievable. It's just—you know, I never saw myself that way. Running all over the place helping clean shit out of a tank. The system is empty and rinsed. I really liked Secondo—he wanted to see the olives and told me he'd send his son to plow our terraces.”

 

Even though I have trouble writing, studying Italian, or reading when guests are here, I have no problems at all when work is going on. Primo's men work; so do I. Ed, too. He is up two hours before the workers arrive, writing, as he prefers, in the dim light. In the series of poems he's working on, each one begins and ends with an Italian word, often a word that has an English meaning as well, such as
ago
, needle, and
dove
, where. One of his pleasures in learning Italian has been its invasion into his writing. He spends hours poring over etymologies.

I start every day with a walk into town. My ritual is to have my cappuccino in a bar where “Wonder Woman” blares away in dubbed Italian. She's hilarious, and an excellent companion to the news. Yesterday's headline was “Lizard Found in Frozen Spinach.” A very short man with a head shaped like a schnauzer's comes in the bar every morning. Instead of asking for a
caffè macchiato
, an espresso “stained” with milk, he always says,
“Macchiame, Maria,”
stain me, Maria. She doesn't blink.

When the men arrive at eight, Ed is through writing for the day. He emerges in shorts and boots, wanting to attack the brush on the top terrace, but he heads instead to the vegetable garden to hack out weeds. Suddenly, the
orto
is ours. Anselmo is in the hospital with pneumonia, odd for July. He calls on his
telefonino
to tell us to water in the mornings, to dig all the potatoes and let them dry for two days in a single layer before we store them in the dark.

When we take him some flowers, we find him in a depressing ward with seven other men in iron beds. He's in a robe, sitting on the side of his bed. Usually full of opinions and jokes, he suddenly looks frail and vulnerable, his bare round belly poking out under the sash. He asks everything about the
orto
. How many melons? Have we picked the zucchini every day? We know he thinks we don't water or cut lettuce properly. We put the yellow begonia we've brought by the bed. As we leave, we hear him on the telephone, “Listen, that apartment on the road to Dogana, I can get you in by next week. . . .”

Primo's men are
muratori,
stonemasons. We're surprised that they actually lay the pipes. We expected that job to fall to the plumbers. For the installation of the wiring and lights, Mario and Ettore, plumber/electricians step in. They're now-you-see-them-now-you-don't men—incredibly efficient and fast. Mario shouts; Ettore is silent. They run, they're sleight-of-hand, they're
bravissimi
.

“Squilla il telefono,”
Mario calls out the window. He has the loudest voice in the universe.
Squillare
—to ring, and the squeal in the sound of the telephone always grates. Paolo has bad news. “The tile from Sicily—such a beautiful selection, truly the sales representative was pleased that someone had the refinement to select this tile—unfortunately this tile has met with an accident in the form of a wreck of the transport truck and the truck has run into the sea. The driver is not injured but the tile. . . .”

For a minute, I don't take this in. “You mean my tile is in the water?”

“Sì, mi dispiace; è vero.”
He's sorry but it's true. This is so unbelievable that we both laugh. Little fish nosing the boxes? The truck overturned, lodged in sand. “We must begin again. And soon the August holiday arrives. No one will be making tile.”

Very close friends are arriving. Inopportune timing, but they're welcome anytime. We hope they won't mind a bit of chaos. We dash to Paolo's and wait while he shouts into the phone about the tile. You'd think he was talking to Mars. He slams it down. “They don't promise but they'll try to get it here on time.”

“If it's not here in two weeks, we won't be able to finish the project.”

“Boh,”
Paolo goes through several what-can-you-do gestures. “Sicilians,” he explains.

Fortunately, the men have not yet started demolishing the butterfly bath. As compensation, Paolo shows us his truck, which is loaded with the fixtures we ordered for both baths and boxes of faucets. We take off to shop for food. We want to make duck breast ravioli with olive sauce for Sheila and Rob, our friends from Washington.

When we get home, we find them waiting, six bottles of Brunello lined up on the wall as a welcome home for us, and right in the middle of the front yard, two toilets, two sinks, a tub, a shower basin, and a four-foot stack of boxes. The scarred tub from
il brutto
has been brought outside and someone has put a large box turtle inside it. He climbs the slope then slides down again, frantic claws dragging the porcelain. I know just how he feels. From around the corner in the Lime Tree Bower, we hear the unmistakable sound of shovels striking rock and the voices of Franco and Emilio starting their litany of Madonna curses. It looks as if they're digging a grave for a behemoth. They're up to their waists. Zeno's trench has miles to go. Ed places the turtle in the strawberry patch, Sheila and I shell peas, Rob puts on a Righteous Brothers CD and turns up the volume of “Unchained Melody.” The men fire up their portable gas to heat the pasta they've brought for lunch. Zeno turns the hose on his filthy legs. I'm completely happy. We're sitting on the stone wall in the sun. Our neighbor Placido calls up from the road, “Edward, Frances, I have a new name for your house. You should change to Villa delle Farfalle [House of the Butterflies] because it is a miracle there are so many all over the lavender. They are like confetti—there's a big party going on every day.” Wasps have taken up residence in the old terra-cotta urn next to me. It's missing a handle, cemented in ages past to the wall so the wind does not blow it over. The busy wasps exit from a small opening like helicopters angling off a pad. Rob pops the cork of a Brunello. I hear the urn humming. Rob pours, telling us about circling Rome twice on the ring road. Ed the poet speaks truly in my ear:
Don't you love it—this urn is like our house
. He cups my hand around the side and I feel the buzz.

 

Cynthia, an English friend who has lived in Tuscany for forty years, has invited us for dinner the night Sheila and Rob, our last house guests of the summer, have departed. Right now, I'm facing the arrival of my former colleague at the hotel next week. Our house is so full of construction dust today that we found it between our toes and on our eyelids. No sign of the tile's arrival, but otherwise the project is going without a hitch.

We find other
stranieri,
all English friends, at the table. When Ed mentions that we haven't had anyone over because we've had nonstop people at the house, the conversation erupts. “Guests come in two sizes: excellent and terrible. Most are the latter. Do you know that expression about house guests, like fish, are good for three days? It exists in every language, the remote Pacific islands, Siberia, everywhere.” Max always has guests.

Cynthia happens to be serving a large fish decorated all over with sliced olives arranged like scales. “Do you know my stepbrother arrived with two children with colds—and he had car trouble. He hoisted his dirty suitcase onto the white bedspread and began tossing their underwear into a pile. Mind you, I haven't even seen him in fifteen years. He stayed ten days—never brought home a flower, a bottle of wine, or a hunk of cheese, and never even wrote a thank-you. He left a hundred thousand
lire
note [about sixty dollars] inside the fridge with a note saying ‘for food.' Is that not the limit? No one can top that.” Her eyes flash. “And I was afraid I'd misjudged the poor boy all those years.” She lops off the fish's head and pushes it aside.

Her friend Quinton, a mystery writer, pours the wine. “I never have guests. Too disrupting.”

“Isn't it just?” Peter agrees. “Some friends were arriving by train and I popped down to meet the 1:05 from Florence. They didn't get off. I waited until the 2:14. I gave up. Finally, around 4, quite hot and miffed, they called from the station.”

“One guest came bearing all the tiny jam jars, plastic shower caps, and shoeshine cloths from hotels along her way and presented them to me as a gift. Some of the jam jars had been opened and had a touch of butter stuck to the lid,” I tell them.

“That's rather sweet,” Cynthia says.

“Rubbish,” Quinton laughs. “These people never would behave this way at home.”

“She kept the nice soaps for herself,” I add.

“Something cuts loose when people travel to a foreign country,” Ed says. “The words, ‘We're going to be in Italy . . . ,' release them. It's as if we're bonded by being miraculously in this alien place at the same time.”

Quinton agrees. “We man the campfire and they're the wanderers in the lonely outback who arrive safely.”

“The concept that we have work in progress doesn't stick. If you are in Italy, you are on vacation. Period.” Peter glances at his watch. “Actually, an old friend is arriving tomorrow.”

 

Our neighbor Placido comes over to ask if we want town water. We could split the cost of bringing a connection from Torreone. His water supply by midsummer is low and he has just put in a new lawn he doesn't want to lose. We'd investigated bringing town water here when we bought the house and found it to be outrageously expensive. Anselmo had a new well dug for us, a 300-foot-deep well he guarantees never will go dry. But Placido has a friend; the cost we were quoted is now quartered. It seems a neighborly thing to do, and if there's a severe drought, we'd be protected. Why not? We can just have the line brought in, cap it, and leave it until we need it. Fortuitous that we have a trench in progress.

The next thing we know, we are in the middle of an immense project adjacent to our other immense project. A gargantuan yellow backhoe digs a ditch from Torreone, a kilometer away, all the way to our house. All day it scrapes and dumps dirt into the road. Shirtless men lay tubing and shout. Heat is on us like the hot breath of a dog who has run all the way home. The men here are hauling rubble, digging, chiseling into rock. We flash on the layers they jimmied out from the living room floor two years ago; but here they're hitting the solid rock of the mountain. The hole for the new tank could accommodate a Fiat 500. They loop the tank with ropes and the four men edge the tank near the hole, then lower it in a controlled fall. After that, the tubes connect quickly. The men all join into Zeno's trench digging. They're at the melting point. Septic and water pipes are laid running out from the house. The electricians connect tubes for wires, in case we ever want electricity farther out. Other tubes are installed for a gas line so we can move the enormous green tank out of the
limonaia
and reclaim space for the lemons.

On the third day of digging along the road, the backhoe reaches us, claws out a path up the hill, and the water line, too, is laid in the trench. We just stand and watch with awe. Did we ever imagine we'd dig a half-mile ditch?

This is Anselmo's first day back. He's pale under his red beret and gingerly climbs the steps to the garden terraces. He surveys the havoc we've caused in his garden. We have not directed the sprawling of the melon vines; they're tangled. We have not removed the proper lateral branches of the tomatoes. Obviously, the carrots have not been watered enough because the ground is hard as bone, stunting their growth. I'm the good student, nodding and asking questions. We've come to see that he's always right. He pokes at the weeds around the artichoke plants, clips the blue thistles of those that went to seed. He agrees with Primo—we're foolish to install another entire septic system, and of course the drainage should have been elsewhere.