Bella Tuscany (24 page)

Too bad you can't take a language in a series of injections labeled “indirect pronouns,” “the pronunciation of
glielo
,” and “tile installation terminology.” But I tell myself,
Roma non fu fatta in un giorno
. Dante, the five-year-old son of an American mother and Italian father, moves easily, thoughtlessly, back and forth between English and Italian. I can't fool him on the phone into thinking that I'm Italian. I say
“Posso parlare con la tua mamma,”
May I speak with your mother, and he says, “Sure, she's right here.”

I recently read in the paper that those who acquire multiple languages when they're young learn them in the same thimble-sized spot in the brain. Those of us who try to learn later must locate the new language in an entirely different territory. The new area must be something like frozen tundra. As I study Italian, I can feel that journey. The new words buzz to the real language spot—top center—for translation, then slide back to the new one, which is being chopped out somewhere in the obdurate back right corner. On the way, many new words fall off into lost canals and abysses. Some do make it all the way back to the new quarry. They become natural.
Gioia
is no longer joy, it's the buoyant feeling of
gioia
. Hundreds of other words are now themselves. Still, I pick up a novel by Pavese and I'm sunk by the third paragraph.
Piano
, slowly,
piano
, I tell myself, there's no exam coming. As if there will be a final, I compulsively concentrate on what I don't understand. I make lists of
all
the cases when the imperfect is used, spending hours writing examples for each of the cases I don't understand and neglecting to reinforce examples of what I do.

 

Besides the luxury—and necessity—of being able to converse easily, I am desirous of another literature. My long habit of browsing in bookstores and leaving with a nice sack of books has been stymied in Italy. I have become a great appreciator of cover designs.

Travelling or living here as a foreigner, I experience the life force of Italians acted out every day on the streets, in the cafés, and on the roads. As I walk by open windows, I'm transfixed by the aroma of
ragù
and the cascades of concurrent voices. So often I'm bearing witness to the rich
outer
life of Italians, knowing that the direct route to the inner life always is literature. Novels, essays, books of place, the philosophical treatises, poetry—here's the big news of the place, the territory most hidden from me in my friendships and brief sojourns in this
bel paese
.

Gradually, my summer reading has shifted to native Italian writers: Eugenio Montale, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi—all the heavy-hitters whose work appears in English. Sometimes I've bought a difficult book in Italian, as one might buy a skirt a size too tight, hoping to lose the ten pounds by summer.

First, their guidebooks. All the Slow Food Arcigola Editore books, especially the yearly guide
Vini d'Italia
, quickly convinced Ed that the Italians' own perspective on food and wine was the one we wanted. The Gambero Rosso guides to restaurants and hotels led us to uncrowded places of intrinsic character. They're easy to follow because of clear ranking symbols.

Then we began to pick up poetry, simply for the pleasure of reading it aloud, even if we mispronounced the author's name, as we did with Quasimodo for too long. Cesare Pavese revealed all the dark and melancholy layers of the countryside that I missed in my own elation over the landscapes straight out of Piero della Francesca and Perugino. Leonardo Sciascia's stories gave me the heart of Sicily, which I otherwise would have encountered with a raft of fears and assumptions. “Once there was a special room in old Sicilian houses that was called ‘the
scirocco
room.' It had no windows, or any other communication with the outside other than a narrow door opening onto an inside corridor, and this is where the family would take refuge against the wind.” That is the way I want into Sicily—an island where weather rules and the isolation of geography is reflected in the microcosm of the family. Thank you, Leonardo; I did not focus overly on the Mafia when I was there but on the wind in the thousands and thousands of palms.

The lavish Italian sense of design extends to books as easily as it does to shoes and cars. I found the art books irresistible, the crisp, fresh colors in both the cheap booklets on individual artists and in the grand tomes of the Uffizi Gallery and the Vatican collections. Paperback novels attracted me most. I took them down one by one, staring at the cobalt covers, each with a small reproduction of a painting tipped onto the cover. These books lead me farther into the language. To sit in a café with a cappuccino, a book, and a dictionary is not a bad way to spend an hour or two in the morning. Of course, I bought Dante. How can you not buy Dante in Italy? I had a dark secret—I'd never read Dante, except in snatches. Translating a few stanzas provides an instant cure from the textbook tedium of: The tide was ebbing. She dreaded snakes and spiders. The servicemen are on furlough. The fair was rained out. Their behavior will improve. She was looking very coy. I was a fool from the beginning. Precisely so!

 

Since I have been coming to Italy for so many summers, my friends assume that my Italian is completely fluent. “Oh, you pick up Italian,” they say flippantly. “It's so close to Spanish.” Well, I never picked up Spanish that easily. From a summer of studying in San Miguel de Allende, most of what I remember is going off-road in a taxi with my instructor whose passionate interest was Chichimeca pottery. He responded to my interest in the culture more than to my need to translate the story of the little mouse. We searched through middens for bits of black-painted pottery and I came home with more shards than words.

But my friends are right; you travel to Italy, you pick up a few phrases. Italians are so courteous and responsive that you're lulled into thinking,
This is a cinch
. I have long since spoken restaurant-Italian, travel-Italian, shopping-Italian, and a lot of house-restoration Italian. But I never have “picked up” the imperfect subjunctive or the past remote. I have not learned to understand the various dialects spoken around Tuscany, not to mention the rest of Italy. I read in
Italian Cultural Studies
that dialects are used by sixty percent of Italians, and are spoken exclusively by fourteen percent. Since we've learned on the fly, our vocabularies are unholy mixes of dialect words and the Italian we've learned in classes. The local dialect often changes the “ah” sound to “eh,” producing a harsher sound. We don't always hear the difference. Our store of curses is rather vast, since hauling out stone and digging trenches and wells elicits those from workers.
Madonna cane, Madonna diavola
, Madonna-dog, Madonna-devil, are two drastic curses. The use of some expressions we've picked up still escapes us.
Non mi importa una sega
, Don't bring me a saw, accompanied by a sawing motion, has something to do with masturbation.

Some aspects of this amazing language confound me. I admitted to myself recently that I am going to give up on the idiomatic and incomprehensible use of the invariable pronoun
“ne”
; whatever Italian I speak will have to be without this protean word. I have not admitted this to Amalia.

 

American friends say with modesty, “I did quite well in Spain,” or “It's amazing how it all comes back.” Comes back from where? I've travelled with some of those same friends, have seen them point at the menu, have seen them meekly hold out their hands for the clerk to take the cost of a purchase from their palms because they get dizzy when
duemilaquattrocentosettantalire
(2470
lire
) spirals out of the clerk's mouth. One friend belongs to the speak-loud-and-clear-and-they'll-understand-English school. Another, who visited me in Italy, was annoyed that local shopkeepers had made “no attempt to learn basic English phrases that would help them in business,” not noticing that we are in
their
country, and in a rural area at that.

Even though I “took” years of French in high school and college, it never really took to me. I never met anyone from France, and my high school teacher believed in the method of a verb workbook, with tiny spaces to write all the conjugations. Even if we had no idea what those conjugations meant, we still had to write the
passé composé
for hundreds of verbs. For the last half-hour of class she turned on scratchy records of Paris street sounds and stood clasping her hands and looking out the window. We filed out to “Under the Bridges of Paris,” Carl Twiggs slapping Mary Keith Duffy's girdled bottom and shouting “Monobuttock,” by far the most inventive linguistic moment of the hour.

In college, the class focused on “lab”—tapes about
mon moulin
, letters in a crabbed French, which I had to listen to in a cubicle in the gym at seven in the morning. News from a faraway French mill was accompanied by a basketball pounding the gym floor and a wafting odor of pine oil–scented disinfectant. When I was called on to read in class from
Les Misérables
, our endless text, the professor would say with a smirk, “Miss Mayes speaks French with a Southern accent.” I slammed the book shut and sat down. His Midwestern accent wasn't
magnifique
either.

Later, I took classes in Spanish and German. They all seemed somehow so
fake
. Surely these people went home at night and spoke English. A friend who has had similar experiences says she would like “I studied languages” carved on her tombstone. I endured German even through a bout of explosive flatulence from the instructor.
“Pflaumenkuchen,”
plumcake, he explained and continued with
Es war einmal ein junger Bauer
, There was once a young farmer. The day I dropped out of German was when I came across the word for nipple:
Brustwarze
. A glance, and even I translated “breast wart.”

 

Several local people speak many languages. Isabella, a neighbor, speaks eight; her son, a journalist, also speaks eight, but not exactly the same eight. She is in her seventies. “I tried to learn Greek a couple of years ago,” she tells me, “but it's getting hard. I used to learn a language in three weeks. If you know Russian, Polish is easy. English and French I spoke as a child. . . .” I walk home sulking after this conversation. I still am having trouble learning the uses of the simple word
“ci,”
a chameleon of a word that shifts meaning shamelessly, while she picked up French like a warm croissant. She arrives at dinner and surveys the other guests. “What language are we speaking tonight?” she asks brightly. At one party she and her Danish, Dutch, and Hungarian friends began to recite French poetry. They all knew the same poems by heart. Then they moved on to Latin poems.

In a dream, I am sitting by a window, writing on pale blue paper. Reading the wet ink as I write, I see that I am writing a poem in Italian. But maybe I am not this person. Could I be? The blue-black ink fluidly moves into words, phrases, lines—even my handwriting is better in this dream—and the woman I am or am not has on a wool sweater, a dark dress. Her hair is twisted up, like Maria's, like Anna's, like Isabella's, like the older women I know here, all of whom are at home in wider worlds than I have known. This is a poem to be sung, I can tell, the shiny ink, the wind lifting the edge of the paper, my hand moving rapidly, yes, my hand.

Bergson says the present does not exist; it is always disappearing as the past gnaws into the future. With my own language and now with the vast voyage into Italian, this feels true as well.
The past gnaws at the future
. What to say always disappears into the saying, leaving me wanting to say more.
Gnaws
, there's that word again. To gnaw the stalk to topple the corn. To gnaw:
rosicchiare
. Language: the house that Jack built.

Since language always has been crux and core for me, I was pleased to discover that we could make friends when we knew very little. My mother always thought that attraction was based on smell. Those good flashes of energy between people can supersede words. At the
frutta e verdura
, Rita was welcoming me with a hug before I could talk to her. At the same time, our neighbor invited us to dinner. We wanted to refuse. We imagined three hours of halting words and awkward silences.
“Grazie, mille grazie, ma non parliamo bene italiano
.” Thank you, but we don't speak Italian well, we apologized. “Later, when we speak better. . . .”

He looked incredulous. His eyebrows shot up. “You eat, don't you?”

Anselmo's Idea
of tomatoes

“
DO YOU HAVE THE BEANS OF SANT
'
ANNA?
”

“No, they were in season
last
week.” Matteo points to the fresh
cannellini
. “These are ready now. From all over—Roma, Milano—they come to Tuscany for these beans.” I know the
cannellini
. Simply dressed with oil, sage, salt, and pepper, they have restorative powers beyond all other beans. I've seen Ed eat them for breakfast. They are Tuscan comfort food.

When I walk out of the
frutta e verdura,
I'm struck. He said the Sant'Annas were
in season last week
. I had these skinny string beans once. Now they're gone for a year. With Anselmo's garden burgeoning, I've hardly been shopping. The cookbook watchword “seasonal” has taken on an immediacy I've never dreamed possible. Ed and I take the baskets up on the terraces late in the day and pick dinner. Anselmo has sown waves of lettuces all summer, providing tender salads constantly. We can't eat enough; when it bolts, Beppe wields his sickle and bundles the greens for his rabbits. When we cut the
bietole,
chard, it comes back. I like
the Italian word for that,
ricrescere;
it sounds as though the stalks are crashing upward through the soil. We give sacks and sacks away. Fortunately, Anselmo planted a lot of cantaloupe and watermelon. Even with the gnawing animal raiders, who take one hunk from a melon, we have plenty. I try to give them to Giusi but she has her own garden. As a crop finishes, Anselmo stomps down the remaining plants and stalks, letting them decay into the ground. I'm delighted to pick eggplant and zucchini while they are small. His one flop is celery; the stalks never developed.

In the spring, we were convinced he was planting too much, and we were right. It's divine. We never have eaten so well in our lives. Or as simply. As it turns out, Anselmo's idea of tomatoes is my idea of tomatoes. I am up to my knickers in tomatoes and I love it. Every day, a heaping basket of perfect, absolutely perfect, red, red tomatoes. I look on these brimming baskets with more pleasure than I felt when I saw my new car last year. Not a bug or a blemish. He planted three kinds. A plain round tomato he calls
locale
. This local favorite is the kind to bite into while picking—a sweet, dripping, crisp, paradigm tomato. For sauce, he planted the ovoid San Marzano, with a meatier texture and less juice. For salads, we have cherry tomatoes, tight little balls that explode with flavor.

Once upon a time, Italy had no tomatoes. Imagine the poor Etruscans and Romans, the centuries of people who lived before the New World was explored. Their garlic and basil went unpaired with tomatoes. Now, so many people grow up thinking those pallid blobs arriving in supermarkets all year are tomatoes. They should have another name. Or perhaps a number. I'd hoped to pair our Italian tomatoes with American sweet corn. What could be better? Since the animals discovered this new-on-the-mountain crop, our yield from the two packets of seeds I sowed was only three scrawny ears. Anselmo had disregarded my corn plot. “Pig food,” he pronounced.

 

The giant sunflowers I planted along the edges of several terraces are in bloom. I'm cutting a bunch early, before they have a chance to droop from heat. Suddenly, from behind my circular “room” of sunflowers, a small woman emerges. I recognize her immediately from Ed's description as the forager of daffodils and asparagus.
“Buon giorno, signora,”
I greet her and introduce myself. Even in summer, she is wearing a dark cardigan.

“Venga,”
she invites me. Her basket is heaped with the yellow flowers of wild fennel. She leads me up one terrace to a spot behind some broom. A dozen or so tall fennel plants are untouched. She has come prepared with scissors. She clips off the flowers and tells me to spread them under the sun to dry, then to rub them between my hands to remove the flowers from the stems. She pulls a plastic sack from her pocket and begins to snip some for me. She points up to the ridge of locust and oak trees. “In autumn, you find the
porcini
there.”

“And truffles?”

“Never. But you find other mushrooms, too. I will show you after the rains.”

“We'll be gone, unfortunately.”

“
Peccato,”
too bad. “You will go back to Switzerland?”

“No, the United States. We live in California.” I remember she seemed not to believe Ed when he told her he was not a Swiss professor.

She shakes her head. “
ArrividerLa, signora
. The fennel you will use with all the meats, with rabbit it is very good and always with roast potatoes.” She starts to head down the terrace path, then turns back. “I like the house now.”

 

I've reverted to another old love. I could have fried tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cream, an almost forbidden ingredient now, is so good with them that I risk a blip in the next cholesterol count. Heresy to some Southern cooks, I prefer fried red tomatoes over green ones. I like them sliced about 1/2-inch thick. I pour some flour on a piece of waxed paper and turn the tomato slices to coat them lightly then fry them on both sides in a hot skillet with 3–4 T. of peanut or sunflower oil. Then, as my mother before me and hers before her, I turn the heat to low, pour on heavy cream to cover the bottom of the pan. Shake to blend, grind a lot of black pepper over the tomatoes, salt to taste, and add a little thyme or oregano. I find them best eaten alone. Willie Bell would sometimes coat the slices in cornmeal and fry them in hot, hot oil so that they're crisper. With a plate of fried tomatoes in front of me, I feel a longing for Willie Bell's fried chicken, especially for her cream gravy over mashed potatoes, and her creamed corn. Why were we not huge from all the pints of cream that went into most meals? She always cut the kernels off the cob and cooked them with onion and chopped peppers, then stirred in cream. Longing for these brings the memory of her yellow squash casserole, too. Southern summer food rivals Italian food in my affections. Willie Bell and my mother would sit all morning shelling the delectable tiny lady finger peas, which I've never seen outside the state of Georgia.

When Ed grills, he tosses on thick slices of tomato just before we eat, just for a little smoky taste. Nothing surpasses a plain tomato sandwich if the
focaccia
is made in heaven, as it is here in Cortona. The chewy flat bread with crackly sage and sea salt on top lifts the sliced tomato into the realm of gastronomic highs. How long would it take for us to tire of fresh tomatoes? Simple stuffed tomatoes, what's better? Only one thing—the addition of chopped hazelnuts. Anselmo alerted us that ours are ready to pick. We cracked and roasted about a cup, mixed them in equal part with bread crumbs, chopped some parsley and stuffed four big tomatoes. On top, a pat of butter and a square piece of cheese such as
tallegio,
which melts in the oven. Supper is a zucchini
frittata
and these tomatoes, along with a Southern touch, a pitcher of iced tea sweetened with a little peach juice.

 

On a Tuesday after siesta, the dazzling heat of the morning abates. I decide we should go to Deruta, majolica
paradiso.
An English guidebook to Umbria dismisses Deruta, “You will probably not wish to linger in Deruta, the center of Umbria's majolica industry, whose approach roads are lined with shops selling all manner of hideous ceramics.” Is the writer crazy? My new kitchen shelf was built especially to display all the platters I've found irresistible. Some Deruta majolica is hideous, but much of it is based on traditional regional designs and is delightful. I wonder what the English writer's breakfast dishes look like. Mine from Deruta have hand-painted Tuscan fruits and a yellow border, something that certainly could cheer up a drear English morning.

In Italy, I've learned the art of serving on platters. Along the stone wall I place one for roasted vegetables, one for cheeses, one for breads, another for the main course. Every night during this season, we have a platter of plain sliced tomatoes. They can be passed family-style or guests can get up from the table under the trees and help themselves—again and again. Pitchers, too, pitchers for iced tea, wine, water. The hand-painted majolica suits the casual and abundant Tuscan style of dining. I love the colors. Some bright, others slightly muted and soft, like fresco colors. Setting the yellow table outside, or my round dining room table in San Francisco, the table comes to life instantly. True or not, it appears that a great meal will arrive.

I bought cups with pink flowers for cappuccino at Christmas, and hope now to find breakfast plates to match. Deruta must have a hundred shops selling handmade majolica gaily painted in traditional designs.

“Which shop was it?” Ed asks. “How can you remember? There are so many.” His enthusiasm for Deruta is limited.

“The one on the corner, right where the street ends.” No other town looks like Deruta. Church, fountain, facades are decorated with tiles. This has been a hub of this ancient craft for centuries.

“Ah, sì signora,”
of course. The shop owner calls a friend who will bring the plates I want from the studio. While we wait, we wander to three other shops on the main street and in one we find a lamp for Ed's desk. There must be other stores in Deruta: hardware, grocery, shoes—but somehow I've never noticed them. We stop and watch a woman painting geometric designs on small saucers. At the bar, a very old man in wide suspenders, which hold his pants almost up to his armpits, asks where we're from. San Francisco sets him into a frenzy—he was there on a ship in 1950. He remembers the
strada del mercato
. Market Street. He insists on buying our coffee. Yes! The water was right at the end of the street. When his friend comes in, he introduces us as though we were visiting relatives. The instant bond of San Francisco, a place Italians love.

Many of the ceramic shops are just outside town on Via Tiberina. My sister and I have shipped home whole dinner sets for ourselves and for my daughter, Ashley. Only one cup was broken. They pack not in plastic bubble wrap but in wet straw. Shipping is expensive but not nearly as expensive as buying Italian ceramics at home, even if you could find the variety that is available here. Choices are staggering. Most popular is the sunny yellow and blue Raphael design, a stylized dragon in the center of each piece. I don't fancy seeing a dragon as I eat, even a benign one like Raphael's.

Bisected by the Apennines, many areas of Italy developed their own designs, as well as their own dialects and habits. In Deruta they make the rooster of Orvieto, the bluebird of Amalfi, the black Siena pattern taken from the cathedral floor mosaics. There's an effort toward contemporary designs as well. Some are garish; others are playful and bold, pleasing to hold, hang on a wall, or punctuate a glass coffee table. You even can design your own dinner service, with your monogram or flowers you like. My sister chose a pattern with a blue and yellow border and Ashley loved the white set with a grape-and-vine embossed border. When I chose mine, with a pomegranate, cherries, or blueberries painted in the middle of each dish, I asked, “What is the name of the pattern?”

He lifted his shoulders,
“Frutta.”
Glad I asked. Three months later—my order was individually made and painted—the dishes arrived in San Francisco. They translated perfectly into my American kitchen.

Today I am looking for a wedding present for a friend's son. Espresso cups? A teapot? A wonderful salad bowl? Ed looks rather wild-eyed after three or four of these majolica stops. “Everyone likes a teapot,” he insists. “Let's just get one.”

“Which one do you like?” I like one that is all tiny flowers and green leaves. Also a white one scattered with sprigs of spring flowers.

He picks up the white one. “Let's go.”

I look longingly at my other favorite shops on the way to the highway but Ed has his foot firmly on the accelerator. “We might run over to look at ceramics in Gubbio and Gualdo Tadino one day soon. We could go to both places on the same day.” Is he just being nice?

 

On the way home, we stop in Assisi in spite of the tidal waves of tourists. My favorite paper store is on the main
piazza,
across from that mysterious church which began as a temple to Minerva. I need a new gift supply of hand-printed stationery, beautiful pads, note cards, and blank books to take home. In San Francisco, I almost never have time to go shopping. These forays for
things
are a treat. Ed wants to pick up a few bottles of Sagrantino, his favorite Umbrian wine, which we usually can't buy in Cortona.

We walk past the delicate roseate church of Santa Chiara, the houses of amber and pearl stone with faded blue shutters. As usual, two dogs are sleeping on either side of the door to the paper store. After I stock up, we walk, as we always do, to the Chiesa di San Rufino—the opposite direction from the undertow of tourists headed toward the famous Giotto (or according to many, school of Giotto) frescoes at San Francesco—to look at its almost primitive Romanesque facade of gargoyles and animals of the imagination. It faces a blessedly empty
piazza
with a fountain. No number of tourists totally can destroy the enchantment of Assisi. We've lingered until seven-thirty, might as well have dinner at a favorite resturant where the roasted rabbit is superb.

 

I forget the heat that comes every August. As I finish cleaning a room, I close the windows and inside shutters three-quarters of the way. Air still comes in, if any is moving, but the direct hit of the sun is closed out. My coolest white linen dress touches me only at the shoulders. It hangs like a nightgown. Emily Dickinson wore only white. I can see her point. Sometimes even that is too hot and I unbutton it all the way down, then when the heat seems to bank against me late in the afternoons, I throw it off and read in my underwear with the fan blowing straight on me.