Ritmo: Rhythm

IN THE MIDST OF THE TORRENTIAL EL NIñO winter in San Francisco, we decided to move. I was reading the paper one Sunday and saw a small drawing of a Spanish/Mediterranean house with two balconies and what looked like a tall palm in front. “Look at this house—doesn't it remind you of Bramasole?”

Ed stared. “I like it. Where is it?”

“It doesn't say. Isn't the balcony nice? You could line it with those yellow orchids that seem to grow everywhere in San Francisco.” Ed called the listing agent and found out the house was sold.

Living at Bramasole makes us want to import into our American lives as many Italian elements as we can. More urgently, the death of Ed's mother in January heightened our sense of carpe diem. Our flat, which I bought as my former marriage slowly dissolved, is the third floor of a large Victorian house. I loved the coved ceilings and moulding and all the light flooding through skylights and thirty windows. The dining room looks out into trees and then onto a city view, with a slice of the bay in the distance. After years there, every room reflected the way we live. The kitchen I'd remodeled the year we bought Bramasole. Black and white tile, mirror between the glass-fronted cabinets and counters, and a six-burner restaurant stove with an oven where I easily could roast two geese and a turkey. What we began to miss was living outdoors. Stepping outside as though it were inside, stepping inside as though it were outside. Suddenly, I needed herbs in the ground and a table under a tree. Besides, it's good to move. I throw away all the accumulated junk—jars, papers, shoes in the back of the closet, black-splotched cookie sheets, tired towels. Remembering every move, I see that a new period of my life began with each change of house. Is the irrational instinct to move now (the flat is large and pretty and in a great location) also a pre-knowledge of change, or a readiness for the new?

We began to circle ads for houses in the paper, to drive around on Sunday afternoons to open houses, to look at neighborhoods we hardly knew, since our own Pacific Heights neighborhood was not remotely affordable, given what we wanted. The real estate market was wild: Asking price turned out to be a base in what quickly became an auction. Houses were selling for up to a hundred thousand dollars over the list price. Confusing. John, our agent, agreed. And we weren't finding anything we especially liked. I wanted the this is it feeling I experienced when I first saw Bramasole.

We'd give up for a couple of weeks, then John would call and say we might drive by a certain address, we might like this ranch house with a large garden with redwoods and a greenhouse. As we were driving toward the peninsula one day to see a Carmel-type cottage, we followed an open house sign and turned into a wooded area of San Francisco originally landscaped by the Olmstead firm, designers of Central Park. The houses live among trees and lawns. The Tudor house for sale was in “original” condition, meaning every plank and pane needed attention. We started talking to the agent, and told him we were about to give up for a year or so, until things calmed down. “I have a house I think you might like. Meet me at four and I'll show you.” We drove on to see the overly charming cottage, where multiple offers were being made during the first hour.

When we pulled up at the address the agent had given us, I recognized the house I'd seen in the paper, the one that had set me dreaming about moving. “We saw this house advertised and called about it. We thought it was sold.”

“It was, but the deal fell through. It's not yet back on the market.” Steps curve up to a tile veranda with a large arched door from the dining room opening to it. Three upstairs balconies and a sunroom with eleven windows—the house is speaking my language. I can see Sister moving from one sunny patch to another in this light-flooded house.

We bought it. Even though we'd not even listed our own flat, we had to act quickly. I started sorting through letters and sweaters. My daughter became engaged. We were getting to know Stuart, her fiancé. Ashley and I began to plan their wedding. Visits to photographers and florists were fitted between trips to the hardware store to find hooks and doorknobs. She was studying for her PhD qualifying exam, then her orals. High panic set in. Several of her classmates had failed the year before. We listed the flat and it sold within three days. We closed on the new house and ripped out miles of thick white carpet, blotched with spills. Underneath, the seventy-five-year-old herringbone hardwood floors were intact. Dirty but intact. We found a brick stairway spattered with paint, which had to be stripped. We began having the floors refinished, new wiring and alarm system installed, the interior painted. We had to have a new tile roof put on. While I was out, the wrong room was painted yellow. Ashley and I looked at wedding dresses—she quickly decided that she wanted the floating-cloud variety—and invitations and bridesmaids' dresses. We met with caterers. Ed went to Italy to prune during his spring break. I was running between the flat and the house, dealing with workmen who spoke no English. The people we hired to work spoke English but when the actual labor began, they sent workers newly arrived from Cambodia, Malaysia, Korea, and all parts of South America. Often, they couldn't even talk to each other. Restoring Bramasole was so much easier! One Honduran painter locked a bedroom door from the inside and closed it as he came out. When I showed him that the door wouldn't open, he looked at me with great brown eyes and sadly uttered his only two American words, “Fook sheet.” I looked at him for a moment before those popular expletives registered.

Blithely, I'd said I loved to move. It would be fun. When the truck loaded our furniture and boxes for an entire day, I wondered how we ever would unpack. Sister yowled all the way from our flat, which she'd lived in always, to the new house. The bookshelves we bought—and painted three coats—did not begin to accommodate all our books. Sixty boxes were stored in the new basement. In the large living room, our sofa and chairs looked like dollhouse furniture. The men set about unpacking but I didn't know where vases and platters and paintings should go. They were left in stacks and heaps on the gorgeous new floors. We were happy with the house every step of the way. Our bedroom has a fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto a balcony, tropical trees, and then, in the distance, the Pacific Ocean. I had the walls painted a color called “Sicily,” a faint shade of peach. Studies for both of us, extensive storage, a little walled garden, and a bougainvillea that must have been planted when the house was new—we were too thrilled to be overwhelmed by our dawn-to-midnight days. Ed came back from two weeks of solid work at Bramasole. Re-entry was rude. A pipe burst and the basement started to flood. He was up to his ankles in water, telephone in one hand, a box of books under the other arm. Two plumbers worked for eleven hours and finally found the leak. I travelled three times to southern California to give talks. Locally, I spoke at several events. We had a new window made for the stair landing, replacing with clear glass a pair of staring, stained-glass owls on a limb. We had a gardener hacking ivy, a reminder of buying Bramasole. The entire garage door had to be replaced. Oh, and I was teaching full time. I had ten MFA theses, classes, and meetings.

We decided to get married. We told no one. I recalled my primitive instinct that moving is a signal that one is ready for change. I ordered two cakes from Dominique, my favorite pastry maker, we sent invitations for a housewarming to about thirty of our closest friends. Then I told Ashley and two friends. We dashed downtown for the license, which was shockingly easy to obtain. Twelve dollars, sign on the line.

All the years after my divorce, I had avoided the subject of marriage. Even when it was clear that Ed and I would be permanently together, I'd say, “Why bother?” Or, “I'm not in the important business of raising children anymore. We're adults.” I feared my friend who said, “Marriage is the first step toward divorce.” To myself I'd say, I don't want to put my hand down on the hot burner twice. Also, I never wanted to be financially dependent ever again. My former years of writing poetry while my husband worked, I'd paid for dearly. I knew I'd never marry without stepping into it with full financial freedom. Miraculously, and thanks to my own writing hand, I felt secure.

A carload of flowers, a big board of cheeses, strawberries, the cakes, gelato, champagne—no wedding ever was easier. Our friends arrived bearing soaps, plants, bowls, and books to warm the house. Our close friend Josephine, a licensed minister, called everyone together in the living room for a blessing of the house. We stood beside her in front of the fireplace. Ashley and Stuart stood with us. And then Josephine said, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered . . .” Our friends gasped and clapped. She talked about happiness. Ed and I read poems to each other. That was it.

The next day we were back into unpacking boxes and changing locks and arranging insurance. But we were breaking into big smiles at the mailman, and now and then dancing in the hallway.

Most of the arrangements for Ashley's August wedding were finished. She did well on both exams and had a paper accepted for a conference. Stuart broke away from his company and started a new business. They moved his office and hired people. He talked on the phone as we drove to restaurants. Who could cook? We were all so far beyond the beyond that we seemed calm. They brought us a grill and one night we managed to burn both steak and vegetables. Changes, changes, changes. The house looked spare but settled. We lived there two weeks. I never knew where the forks were or how the new washer worked. We'd compressed a half-year of house restoration into six weeks, thanks to our Italian training. Sister looked at us accusingly and wouldn't budge from the top of Ed's suitcase. We were searching for tax papers, having filed extensions during all the confusion. We filled in final grade sheets and cleared up our school offices. It was June. The house sitter arrived. Time to move to Italy.

 

On Italian time I wake up by the sun, not by my alarm clock. In shock from the chaotic spring, I look blankly out the window. Ed has risen in the dark, only to fall asleep on the sofa. We have come back to Bramasole for summer. I wonder if we could stare into the trees without speaking to anyone for at least a week. I would like a nurse in the hallway, a silent white-uniformed presence who would bring in crescents of melon on thin plates, her pale hand soothing my forehead. The first week of June—odd, the garden is at prime bloom. Even the yellow lilies are open. The linden trees Ed and Beppe pruned in March have spread umbrellas of fresh leaves. Some roses already are waning from their first flush of flowers.

Beppe arrives and Ed steps out barefooted and shirtless to say hello. Beppe hands him a sack. “Un coniglio per la signora, genuino.” In its seventy days on earth, the rabbit has eaten nothing but greens, salad, and bread. I look in the bag and see the head. “Put the head in sauce,” he tells me. “The meat of the face is . . .” He makes the corkscrew gesture of rotating his forefinger against his cheek, signaling a fine taste. Beppe says rain fell every day in spring and all the plants are two weeks early. The air feels heavy with moisture and it seems that I'm looking through a green lens at the wet light over the valley. He tells us he has planted the orto because Anselmo is sick again. When we call Anselmo later, he sounds weak but says he'll be well in a couple of weeks. Ed makes coffee and we lower ourselves into chairs outside in the sun, ready to let the rays restore us. We're discussing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and whether we have them.

Primo Bianchi drives up in his battered blue Ape. As we walk down to meet him, we see him limping badly. He's dressed in pressed gray pants and loafers, not in his usual work clothes. Immediately he sits on the wall and slips off his shoes. Even through his socks, his ankles look swollen. He grimaces every time his foot touches the ground or moves. “Gout, perhaps gout. I have not been able to work for a month. And the pills they give me are bad for my liver.”

We are poised to finish the bathroom project we started last summer, which had to be aborted when the Sicilian tile ended up in the sea. We also plan to build a stone terrace and grill in front of the limonaia and to make a pergola of grapes, a continuation of our garden master plan. He tells us he spent the entire rainy spring reconstructing a stairwell in a palazzo. On his knees on damp brick, pouring cement and hauling—no wonder his feet rebelled. Maybe we should find someone else, he suggests. “No, no, we'll wait until you are ready,” Ed tells him. “We like your work and your men.” We're crazy about him, too. He knows how to do anything. He looks at a problem, moving his head from side to side, pondering. Then he looks at us with a smile and explains what we will do. When he works he sings tuneless songs like those I've heard on a tape of traditional Tuscan and Umbrian farm music. The songs don't seem to venture far from three or four notes endlessly repeated in a humming drone. His blue eyes have a far sadness in them which totally contrasts with his immediate smile. He hoists himself up and promises to call when he can begin.

Although we are worried about his feet, we are ecstatic over the delay. Now a few weeks of dolce far niente, the sweet to do nothing, which we love most. It seems accidental that we keep falling into enormous projects. The sweetness of the early summer is intense. The double-time, triple-time rhythm of the past few months suddenly starts to fade and the long, long Tuscan days present themselves like gifts. Even the Mad Spring was motivated by our desire to bring a piece of our lives here to San Francisco, although at this moment that seems like bomb-the-village-to-save-the-village thinking.

Reliving the spring, we ask each other what we could have done differently. And what can we take back to our lives in the new house? What accounts for the dramatic shift in our minds and bodies when we live here? And, in California, aren't we frequently out of control? When over-commitment kicks in, I feel my concentration start to flit. After a few days here, my scattered consciousness gradually melds, mends. Even that seems a level of happiness: the absence of anxiety. Clearly, factor one is not working at our jobs in summer. But we like teaching and must continue, so, given that, what else?

Here, almost all media are subtracted from daily life. I notice the enormous difference immediately. The habit I have, of turning on the radio news as I drive to work, comes to mind as a destroyer of the natural rhythm of the day. Subtle, because flicking on the radio seems almost an automatic gesture, a neutral gesture. But in the half hour from my flat to the parking lot at school, drug lords are shot, children are abused by those who are supposed to protect them, car bombs go off, houses are carried off by floods, and my waking psyche has absorbed a load of the world's hurt. The bombardment of frightening, disturbing images assaults any well-being that might have accrued from a lovely night's sleep. TV probably would be worse; I rarely watch TV news except for reports of earthquakes and dire events. At school, I get out of the car already tense and not knowing why. The constant overload of recurrent horror on the news and in the papers we assume is normal until we live without it. Has any study focused on the correlation of anxiety and level of exposure to news? I read the paper here two or three times a week, enough to more than keep up with crucial events. “I'll start the day without that negative drone,” I tell Ed. “On my own terms.”

“I do like the traffic report, though. All the words rush together; it sounds like a Dylan Thomas poem. Instead of the news, try the Bach cello suites.” He is normally not as pushed as I am because the teaching load at my university is double that at his. “Taking buckets of time back is the main thing.”

“In the new house let's get up early and walk, the way I do here. Another way of starting out on our own terms. We could walk to the ocean.”

“If only we could take back the siesta—free hours in the middle of the day.”

“Wouldn't you like to call one friend and say ‘How are you?' and not hear the answer, ‘I'm so busy'?”

“Well, ‘I'm busy' means several things—partly it means ‘I'm important.' But maybe living life is so important that we shouldn't be busy. At least not busy, busy, with that buzz-buzz sound.” Ed tells his students to figure out how many weekends they have left, given the good fortune of normal life expectancy. Even to the young it's a shock to see that there are only 2800 more. That's it. Done for. Carpe diem, sì, sì, grab the days.

 

We decide on hedonism. After two days of stocking the house with essentials, planting the last annuals we can grab before the nurseries are emptied, and just breathing in the life we know so well here, we start taking long walks. The wildflowers must be at the peak of the century. All that spring rain coaxed every latent seed, and from the fire roads around the hills we see meadows knee-deep in bloom and hillsides golden with ginestre, the broom sending its scent down the breezes in rivulets. We gather strawberries the size of two-carat rubies and sit in long grass eating them. We drive around in Umbria, looking at antiques, hoping to find a desk. One shop owner tells us, “I can find anything you want; just tell me what you want.” I flash on the grandiose promises of my father when I was a child. “You can have anything in this world. Just tell me what you want.” I could never think of anything except a swimming pool, to which he'd say, “You don't want that; you just think you want that.” We travel to San Casciano dei Bagni, where the Romans bathed, and eat pigeon ravioli at the restaurant on the main street, then on to Sarteano and Cetona, with meandering drives around the blissful countryside.

When the exhaustion we brought over finally disappears, we go up to Florence and spend the night. I must find a dress to wear to Ashley's wedding in August. Already the browns, plums, and grays of fall are on view. Ed slips easily into a fall mood and finds two soft-style sport coats. When we have shopped in Florence before, I never bought anything except shoes and handbags. Especially when Jess (Ashley's former boyfriend and now our friend) visits, Ed loves a day in the men's stores. He and Jess incite each other and I'm the spectator. Now Ed visits shop after shop with me. I'm getting used to the Italian mode of shopping. You say what you are looking for and they show you. It's a mistake just to browse through what's out, since many shops only have one size on display. The salespeople are there to be of service. The self-service we are used to is still unusual here. As soon as I say I want a dress for my daughter's wedding, everything in the shop comes forth. They understand totally that the occasion is molto importante. Most brides' mothers, I think, do not want a mother-of-the-bride dress. All the lavender lace and beige crêpe dresses designed with that in mind must go unsold. The suit I finally choose at a small shop, which makes everything especially for the customer, is orange. I never have had an orange dress in my life. It's a frosty silk orange, which requires two fittings. My sister will loan me her coral and pearl necklace. I find beautiful dull gold shoes with high heels that could kill. The wedding will be wonderful. The hitch being that I will see my former husband for the first time in years.

 

Vittorio calls to invite us to a dinner on a boat. The Lago Trasimeno wine consortium has arranged for a ferry to take a group on what we used to call a “progressive dinner,” a different course in four places around the lake. We meet at Castiglione del Lago on Sunday at noon. When we arrive, glasses of prosecco and plates of bruschette with tomatoes and basil are being passed. We're given a wine glass and a pouch to wear around our necks where we can store the glass when we're not drinking. The crowd is larger than we expected. We find Vittorio and Celia, their children, and several friends of theirs. Maybe two hundred people are piling onto the ferry, with a bar set up at the entrance. People are drinking more prosecco as we pull away from the dock. I love boats and islands and the sky shifting as we ride the rises and falls of the water. We disembark on Isola Maggiore, and the hotel staff serves us pasta with the roe of carp and baskets of excellent bread. The workers of the wine consortium of the lake area generously pour all their whites. After the pasta, there's time for a hot walk along the beach. Back on the ferry, we move farther into the lake toward Isola Polvese.

The red wines are open. Various crostini are passed. The lake silvers under the flaring white sun. The children start to tire but a band begins to play and some people are dancing. I'm ready to go home but there is no exit. We've been gone four hours. An empty island for birds and small wildlife, Polvese has grassy beaches full of people over for the Sunday afternoon in the sun. One man spread out on a towel has turned so red he looks like an écorché, a body without skin. We troop across the island to long outdoor tables. We're served carp cooked in the style of porchetta, grilled and stuffed with herbs and salt, and also wrapped in pancetta. It's rich, meaty.

On the boat again, I realize that the Italians have had long training for this kind of day. All the first communions, baptisms, weddings, and other feste totally prepare them for the long celebrations. We've had steady wine poured into our glasses all afternoon. Faces are glazed with sweat. The bar is popping cork after cork. The band cranks up its speakers and the singer in a slinky dress starts in on “Hey, Jude,” then speeds up to Italian rock. Suddenly everyone is dancing. The boat is swaying. Could we tip? A retarded man is dancing with his mother, grannies are swinging their hips, a man twirls his three-year-old daughter. The drummer announces a soccer score into the microphone and everyone jumps up and shouts so loud I think the boat will sink. We disembark again at Passignano for dessert. Children turn cranky. But back on board the wine keeps pouring, spinach and cheese crêpes are passed around, and we enter our eighth straight hour of eating and drinking.

Finally, the ferry heads back toward Castiglione del Lago. We see the other two Americans on board; he looks stony and she looks as if she could cry. The sun falls low and the sherbert colors of the sky reflect on the water. We lean over the rail, watching the wake while all the Italians join with the band singing like a bridge over troubled waterrrr, I will lay me down in English, and then Italian songs everyone knows. As we gather our sunscreen and camera, we hear several groups talking about where they will go for dinner. They have a secret gene that we don't have.

 

Beppe's fagiolini, the green beans we call Blue Lake at home, are ready. Tender and small, they don't even need topping and tailing but I do it anyway. Steamed just to the right point, their full flavor emerges. Underdone, they squeak when you bite them and taste slightly bitter. We eat them alone, with just a little oil and salt and pepper. They're not hurt by toasted chopped hazelnuts, or a little sautéed onion, or by my old favorite, sliced fennel and black olives. My mother liked green beans with tarragon, oil and vinegar, and crumbled bacon. I remember what a fine thing we thought that was, since beans usually were cooked to pieces with a hunk of fatback. In memory of that ultra-sophisticated recipe, I clip branches from my tarragon, which has turned into a towering bush. I'm searching my books for ways to use it, other than plunging the wands into vinegar. Medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land put sprigs inside their shoes to give energy and spring to their feet. I'd like to try that.

Green beans are the one vegetable Anselmo did not plant last year when he established our garden. Beppe's garden thrives, though he has narrowed Anselmo's scope. We have onions, potatoes, green beans, lettuces, garlic, zucchini, and tomatoes. Anselmo's artichokes and asparagus gave us several treats just after we arrived. Beppe plans to plant fennel, and to reseed the lettuces every few weeks. We miss Anselmo—his ironic humor and bossy control of the garden, as well as his adventuring spirit which landed us in new situations constantly. When we call to check on him, we're told that he has been taken to the hospital.

We pick a bunch of lavender and tie it to a jar of honey. How strange to be going back to the hospital. He's a vigorous man, full of opinions and laughter. He'll have his swollen leg propped up, saying “Senta, senta,” listen, listen, into his telefonino. Ed parks and goes to the machine to get a parking receipt. I walk on toward the hospital, pausing to wait for him.

I glance up at the black-bordered manifesti funebri, funeral notices, posted on the wall. Anselmo's name. I scan it, unbelieving. I force myself to focus. Read. Yesterday, with all the religious comforts . . . funeral tomorrow . . . no flowers but good works . . . Anselmo Pietro Martini Pisciacani. . . . Unlike the other plain notices, his pictures a sappy pastel Christ in a crown of thorns, upturned eyes, surrounded by roses. Because he would have mocked it, I think there must be a mistake. He was not a churchgoer. He could not be dead. But then no one else could have that name. As Ed approaches, I shake my head and point. “No. How can this be?”

We walk on up to the hospital. At the front desk Ed says, “We have a friend who was a patient and we're afraid he has died. Is he still here? Anselmo Martini.”

He finds no record—maybe there's a mistake but then I remember “Pisciacani,” the name he hated and dropped after his mother died, was on the death notice. Pisciacani means dog piss in dialect. “Pisciacani,” I say.

“Yes, I am sorry, he is in the chapel. If you die in hospital, you must remain for twenty-four hours.” He leads us downstairs. Ed waits at the door and I walk in. There lies Anselmo on a stone slab, dressed in his brown suit, his feet splayed and a little dust on his shoes. Four women in black pray around him. I put down the honey and lavender at the door and flee.

At home the land feels charged with Anselmo's presence. He rebuilt that stone wall, he cleared two terraces for the orto, he planted the grass in the Lime Tree Bower. The potted lemons and the three roses the color of dried blood and the wine press—he gave us these with few words but I could tell with immense pleasure. On the third terrace he planted two apricots, and near the road, two pears. For all the years we will have here, we still will be enjoying the literal fruits of his labors. In the limonaia, his red beret hangs on a nail.

We feel we've lost a good uncle. Ed is still reeling from his mother's death. Anselmo's brings a double rush of grief. The hurt of loss is too hard, then there's the incomprehensible fact that the loved person simply is erased from the planet. The basic facts of birth and death I've never remotely been able to fathom. The prenatal abyss, out of it you came, into the tumult of life, light, and on to the other void. . . . I hope to be dazzled by the news of an afterlife, when the last plug is pulled on me. I can't take non-life. Anselmo stood at the Thursday market with fifty or sixty men every week for decades, talking weather, business, jingling change in his pocket. In his office on Sacco e Vanzetti, he always dropped everything when we walked in. I quizzed him about the farms for sale in photos on the wall, and if one looked wonderful, he'd say “Let's go look,” and grab his hat. He had all the time in the world. Now, none. “There's no one hundred years guaranteed or life cheerfully refunded, young lady,” my grandfather warned.

People are crammed into the church. We stand in the doorway. Out on the porch, thirty or so men smoke and talk during the funeral mass, just as though they were at the market. I recognize many of them. Their sunbaked faces attest to work in the fields. The older ones are short, dressed in suits too thick for the brutal July sun, the younger ones are taller, beneficiaries of post-war nutrition, and wear pressed short-sleeved shirts. Inside, heat and incense swirl. Who will faint? Family members support each other as they walk by the casket for communion. It's hard to grasp that Anselmo lies inside that box. The wailing Catholic hymns drag on forever. The casket is loaded into the hearse. We have seen these processions before. Now we join the crowd walking behind the hearse up to the cemetery. I hope he is not going into one of those thirty-year slots that look like dresser drawers in a wall. No, there's the raw hole. He is going into the earth, this man of the earth. No ceremony, he's just lowered by ropes into the ground. Not even a thud. When my father was buried, the ground was so saturated that the coffin floated for a moment before whooshing down into water. “That's not true at all,” my sister says. “They didn't even lower the coffin when we were there.” She's wrong. I see the red rose blanket slide off into the arms of the undertakers and the bronze box start to sink. “You were dreaming,” she insists. His family steps forward and everyone throws on a handful of dirt. No denying that he will be in the ground. We talk to the family. Everyone leaves quickly. There's no dinner or visiting. Monday, back to work.

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.

 

I wander at night, too. Ed and I have walked into town for a gelato and he starts a long conversation with Edo about installing lawn irrigation. Our wild-herb lawn has not survived the summer drought, though fall rains will bring back the green hills. Out of chat, I start back, walking over the Roman road with a flashlight, then down onto the cypress-lined road toward home. Before it was paved, the white pebble strada bianca used to reflect the moonlight. Now with the asphalt and the luna nera, black moon, the road is dark, the cypress trees seeming to gather into their massive shapes all the light from the stars. I have the ambition to see every cypress tree in Tuscany. Like the California oaks in the Bay Area countryside, the cypresses seem to speak for the landscape. The bare oaks of California interact with light, giving their skeletal shadows to the hills and their silhouettes to the sky.

But the cypresses play no games with light. If they were in the sky they would be the black holes and if I were in America, I would be petrified to be alone on a deserted road at night. Because each of these trees was planted for a local boy who died in World War I, they are huge presences, not only in form but in a silence stopped inside their fixed curves, something of the unlived life of each boy. The tips, pointed like sable paintbrushes, wave back and forth against the stars.

Hot from the climb over the hill, I unbutton my blue linen dress all the way down and let it lift behind me. Oh, for a life of sensation, our friend Keats also told us. The cypress trees are grand companions. If anyone were coming, I would hear them because sound carries along the mountain, like the last sigh of the gladiator in the amphitheater heard on the last row. Around the curve, the house rises above the road, a rough translation of my body into a mute language of windows, doors, and stone. Ed, I think, is translated by the olive trees and vines, which now droop with dusty purple grapes.

From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon's wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside. I recognize the cadence of Ed's step below in the road. “Are you home?” he calls up to me. Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one.