Bella Tuscany (28 page)

At home, Beppe is tying grape vines to wires. We tell him about Anselmo, how quickly he was gone, and he stands up slowly, saying nothing. He takes off his hat and his eyes fill with tears. He shakes his head and goes back to the vines.

 

When the excitement of death is over, the shock and disbelief subside quickly and we're left with the fact of absence. A funeral cools emotion because it leaves not a doubt. It's over—the traditional sacraments are wise ways to instantly internalize the major events of life. Now we begin to say,
His first night in the ground, the men at the market are gathering around a space that was his, look, Anselmo's pears
. The last work of his life was here on this land. He had the oldest knowledge of what grows where and when. Did we ever thank him enough for finding Bramasole for us?

“Hearse is a strange word,” Ed says. We are walking home from town over the Roman road. “In Middle English it's
herse
—I know this because it came up in a poem I wrote when my father died.
Herse
comes from Latin
hirpex,
meaning ‘harrow.' You know how the harrow has all those prongs—in Italian they call them
quaranta denti,
forty teeth. Well,
hirpex
reaches way back to the Oscan
hircus,
which means wolf, a connection to teeth. It felt strange to follow that hearse.”

“Show me the poem again.”

SCORPIONS

The heaving, sweating,
cento per cento
heat broke today,
as if it can break as unexpectedly as a car breaks,
or as the large glass demijohn that shattered on the tiles
when I bumped into it while carrying an armload of books
from one bookcase in one room to another bookcase
in another room: the heavy inhale of heat into my own lungs,
my bare feet surrounded by sharp glass. Which brought me
to “booklungs” (what the dark hollow lungs of scorpions
are called), lined up in their own bodies like blank books.
All week, an inch-and-a-half long black scorpion
has stayed in the shower, not because of the heat but because
it has eaten a slightly smaller scorpion, who had come in earlier,
perhaps looking for water. The one ate
all
of the other,
except for three of its eight legs, still scattered on the porcelain.
I remembered hearing the woman at the restaurant,
her overly large white teeth crunching through a plateful
of chitinous shrimp. The scorpion carries its carapace, too.
It too proved it could continue to eat, to chew through shell,
to decisively end its quarrel with the other, which was surely
over nothing important enough to die for. The one has the other
completely inside itself, is running on two histories.
I was reminded of Kronos eating his own children, lungs and all,
crunching through skull, into brains, and then Zeus tricking him
into vomiting them all whole and alive. But the proof is
in the eating—better to eat than not to. Which brings me
to my father, who ate his last on August 8th, and felt his lungs,
sacks of cheap cloth, let all the air out. Now the coffin is his new
carapace, shiny steel—we could see our faces distorted in it.
Here I hear pears drop in late August, skins pierced
by sharp wasps and armored iridescent beetles, and
there's a heavy sweetness under the tree when I rake up
the bruised fruit:
Rake,
as in
harrow,
as in
hearse
(the one
I followed August 12th) from the Oscan for wolf—
because of its teeth, strong enough even to break through bone.

We have had not a drop of rain all summer. The flamboyant flower garden I had last year has limped through the hottest summer on record. “I can eat only watermelon and
gelato,”
la signora Molesini in the grocery store tells us. No matter how much we water, the grass burns. The voluptuous roses of early June gradually have shed their leaves. The tiny buds they send out refuse to open.

The year we bought the house it was the same. Clouds would gather over the house and thunder practically shook the fillings out of our teeth—but no rain. Our well went dry and I remember thinking in the middle of the night,
I must be certifiably insane. I have no idea what I'm doing
. The singed oaks and locusts defrocked early, leaving dead-looking trees all over the hills. The next summer was soft, with wildflowers spilling over every terrace. We slept under a light blanket until July. We love living close to the pulse of the seasons, even the searing dry heat, which has sent foxes and wild boar into our yard for the first time. I hear the
cinghiale
snorting across the lawn at night, making their way to the faucet where they lap water from the stone basin. They scuffle with, what—squirrels and porcupines? Then they thunder off with their strange “ha-ha” cries. They have not managed to get through Beppe's fence around the vegetables but they find plenty to love in the fallen plums.

 

At the beginning of August, we return to foggy, cold San Francisco for Ashley's wedding. All my Southern relatives are arriving—the clan is stomping. My college roommates and their husbands are coming, Ashley's New York friends from her artist life, Stuart's friends, family. Ashley and her bridesmaids arrive at the house with the wedding dress and hang it in front of one of the many still-bare windows, where it drifts on its own, bringing home the reality of the wedding. Ashley suddenly is struck with the magnitude of what's coming. She comes into my room while I'm unpacking and throws herself on the bed. “Any advice for me?”

I remember asking my mother the same question. She thought a minute then said, “Don't ever wear old underwear.” I tell Ashley I'll try to come up with something better but I'm not sure I can. She's very grown, as is Stuart, and they seem to be entering this marriage not only with love and excitement but with enormous relief to have found each other after a lot of false starts. Ashley is one of the most decisive people I've ever known; when she makes up her mind there's an iron will behind her.

We're having all the out-of-town people over for drinks, and my family will stay afterwards for dinner. At this party, one of the strangest things of my life happens. Ashley looks glorious in a short red dress. Two waiters are passing champagne and Ed is going over the toast he's about to give. My sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews are in full reunion mode. Ashley is in the foyer greeting guests. I'm talking to friends in the living room when I see my nephew arrive in the crowded foyer. As I walk toward him, I introduce myself to the man talking to Ashley. “Hello, I'm Frances, Ashley's mother.” I shake his hand and see the startled look on his face. “And I'm Frank,” he answers with a laugh. My former husband. Ashley's father. We were married for a lifetime. I do not recognize him. He thinks I am surely joking. Of course, I am distracted with all the arrivals, trying to circulate among the guests—still, I look straight at him and do not know him. Once he said to me,
I'd know your hand in a bucket of hands,
one of the strangest intimacies I have heard. I step outside and take big breaths of air and try to adjust to the jolt—the snap of that imagined entwined umbilical of the past. He doesn't even look that different. I've seen him in my mind and in dreams many times over the years. I'd expected a flash-flood of memories, a by-pass connection to the now historical past. Looking at him, I used to feel I was looking in a mirror, my equal-opposite. For a long time, I will be feeling my hand go out to shake that of a stranger.

The garden wedding is at an inn in the wine country, a dreamy dream of a wedding, with pink and apricot roses everywhere, a golden light over the vineyard hills, a bride descending as though from a cloud, a groom with the heart to cry as she walks toward him, and the tenor sealing us all together with
“Con te partirò,”
With you I will go. Her veil catches on a rose thorn and tears, her father frees her, takes the torn piece of veil into his pocket, and they walk. A moment, and of such moments myths are made.

For dinner, candles all over the garden, and a Tuscan feast. As we sit down a snowy egret flies over and lands on the feathery top of a tree. “A great omen,” someone says. “No, the stork,” someone else answers. For my toast, I remember a line from Rilke, “Love consists of this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Her father gives an eloquent toast about the enormous support the presence of all the guests will give to Ashley and Stuart. Soon Ashley is dancing, floating under the full moon, then everyone is dancing. Ed is smoking a big cigar. I wish everyone would stay all night.

The newlyweds take off for hot tropical islands. My sisters and their families leave over the next few days, we see friends, adjust to the decrescendo, pack, pack, pack again, and board the plane for the long haul back to Bramasole, taking a duffle of books, fall clothes, and a handful of moments to last a lifetime.

 

The end of August and still no rain. In earlier times, farmers prayed to saints. If no rain came, the statue of the saint might be flogged, thrown into a river, dragged out, and stuffed in the mouth with salty sardines to make him thirsty. Whatever rituals occur now, they're private.

For nine summers I've lived on this hillside in Tuscany. I've spent scattered winter and spring holidays here, and last year had the great boon of a whole spring. I am about to spend my first fall. The
feste
of August—beefsteak and
funghi porcini
—are over; the streets are emptying by the day as tourists head home. The sun has been tamed, softening the evening light to rose-gold. An early fall; truffles and mushrooms and sausages will be coming. Already we're peeling the green Sicilian tangerines, exactly the color of a parrot, and buying apples that taste like our earliest memories of apples. Primo has left a load of cement and sand; in a week he will begin the project. Beppe today has planted
cavolo nero,
the black winter cabbage, and has set out fennel for next year. He picked the last little bunch of beans and another basket of tomatoes. All summer we eat outside in the long twilight, now the days are short enough that we set out lanterns for dinner.

Vittorio, always with his taste buds anticipating the season, calls to invite us to a goose dinner, the last feast of the summer. His voice is the siren's call. Our Slow Food group has just celebrated the foods and wines of the Verona area at an eight-course dinner. “I think of goose as a Christmas treat,” Ed says.

“No, you do not eat the white geese after summer. They are too old, too fat. The flavor is best now.” So we wind far into the mountains to a
trattoria
where we gather at two long tables near the fireplace. Vittorio is pouring the wine, his treat, the Avignonesi reds we love. We see Paolo, the winemaker of that noble vineyard, at the other table and toast him. The
antipasti
begin, the usual
crostini,
served with the special stuffed goose neck. The pasta with rich
ragù d'oca,
goose sauce, is followed by roast goose, easily the best I've ever tasted. The noise level rises until it's impossible to hear what anyone is saying. That's O.K. We just eat. The baby in the stroller at the end of the table sleeps through everything.

 

Margherita, daughter of signora Gazzini, forager
par excellence
, stops by to introduce herself. Driving by, she happens to witness the felling of the dead palm. We waited all summer while it shed dry fronds one by one. We hate to cut it, especially since its thirty-foot mate on the other side of the house still thrives, but the completely bare trunk, like a giant elephant leg, looked bizarre. She watches from below as I watch from the window. Ed and Beppe both yell as the palm, heavier and denser than they thought, starts to fall off-course, crashing into a pot of geraniums.

Margherita lived at Bramasole as a child, when the palm was small. I am stirred to hear that she still dreams of the rooms and land she knew at four years old. From my first glance, Bramasole always has been a house of dreams. Coming upon it now, I see that it belongs to the Etruscan Bramasole wall, to Torreone, to Cortona, to Tuscany. Beyond my possession, still it is mine—the contraries meet—and transitory as my tenure may be, it is a fierce and primitive tenure. “Don't give up the house, no matter what happens,” I recall a friend advising another friend, who was divorcing. “You're discovering the irrational power of a woman's domesticity,” my friend Josephine tells me. “Possession always has a secret root.”

I don't say any of this to Margherita. Since I've just met her I don't want her to think I'm some sibyl of the mountain. While Ed and Beppe cart away the carcass, she tells me that her mother stays out for six or eight hours some days. Not only does she gather lettuces, asparagus, snails, and mushrooms, she cuts greens for her rabbits. “She's a person who likes to live outside,” she explains. “We don't know where she goes—sometimes she's just roaming the hills. She's been roaming this mountain for a lifetime.”

 

I understand the impulse. Walking the ridge road toward the Porta Montanina gate to town, I'm reading Keats's ode “To Autumn” and feeling how closely his words anneal to the subject. Of all the poems about the season, his brings me the closest to the unsayable sensation I experience as summer circles toward the autumnal equinox. The internal clock turns, too, a visceral knowledge of change. Earlier, the pale dog-roses bloomed along the road; today the branches are studded with bright orange rose hips. The air seems to hold a calming sense of peace as the landscape turns toast, amber, wheat, and the grasses dry to—what? The shade of lion's fur, the tawny crust of bread, the gold of a worn wedding ring. A moment ago the grasses were a fervent green. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” Keats writes, and I see the valley mists and laden branches of pear blotched and gnawed and bumbled by birds, bees, and worms. I like the idea of the season conspiring with the sun to “load and bless” the fruit and vines. I taste his phrases: “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,” the furrows “drowsed with the fume of poppies,” “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” And yes, we do think “warm days will never cease,” that first moment in the poem when the innocence of the perspective gently darkens. The resonant hint of change and cold trip easily along the tongue. And that's his skill, to tinge the mind with knowledge, while simultaneously reveling in the season when gold ingots of light fall across the road. Entering the Etrus-can gate into upper Cortona's immaculate streets, I see a woman setting out small cyclamen plants in a pot by her front door. Pink, white, magenta, she's mixed all the colors into a little blaze to warm her during the cold months. Beautiful, I tell her, and she points to dark green spikes and a tight yellow bud pushing through the ground. “This kind of crocus comes back in autumn, but only briefly, only a few.”
We're riding the earth, she and I
. Sitting on the front steps of San Francesco, listening to the bells early Sunday morning, I don't want anything more than this poem rolled in my hand, 5000
lire
in my shirt pocket for coffee and pastry, my new red loafers which navigate the stony streets so well.