Bella Tuscany (23 page)

Nine men are working here. Our tutor, Amalia, comes out for our Italian lesson because we can't get away to go into Cortona. We're gratified when she leans over the upstairs terrace and listens to the workers talking. “I don't know how you do this. I can't understand half of what they're saying. Do you realize that you've got four dialects going on down there.” Meanwhile, plaster is drying in the little bath. Recessed lighting and the tub are in place. Primo's tiler arrives tomorrow.

 

In July, the garden looks glorious. Everything we planted becomes its ideal self. Vita Sackville-West spoke of her garden in “full foison.” This one, too, is abundant, outpouring. Only the dahlias languish. Powdery mildew spots the leaves and the flowers rot before they open. Everything else has spread or sprung and blooms outrageously. From the upstairs windows, I look out and think of Humphrey Repton, who might approve of this Italian marriage to a basic English scheme. Even the spilling pots of geraniums on all the walls have a Humphrey touch. In the corner of each one I planted a morning glory seed. The vines fall down the wall, twine around the outdoor lights or crawl along the stones. They open their pure pink faces to the morning sun. I have found an old stone statue of a woman holding a sheaf of wheat. She stands among hydrangea pots, a nod to the Italian tradition of garden ornaments. Not only has Egisto, master
fabbro
at Ossaia, repaired the house's original gate, he is making iron arches for a pergola of grape vines at the entrance to the Lake Walk. We're still looking for our water inspiration—a small pond, a fountain? At an antique warehouse in Umbria, I sighted a rusted, curvy iron bench shoved up against a fence with some equally rusted iron gates and beds. When we asked the price, the store owner was clearly dumbfounded; he never expected to sell that wreck. We wove back through the mountains with the bench tied to the top of the car. With my arm outside the window, I held on to a leg: at least if it started to slip, we could stop.

Anselmo's lemon pots in the garden are purely Italian. He has shaped them to bamboo supporting cages. “Pick them, pick them,” he urges. I wait, loving the look of the yellow fruit dangling among the leaves. After their initial spurts, the two Mermaids calmed down and sent out a few creamy yellow flat roses. Each Sally Holmes rose we planted among the lavender, cheerleader that she is, gives us white pompom armfuls constantly. They've choked out the decadent lilac-colored rose, a weak sister anyway. Ed comes across a photo of the wild garden taken when we bought the house, and another from a couple of summers later, when it was nothing but a blank stretch of dirt bordered by the boxwood hedge. If I could have had a glimpse then of what we could do, my nights of wide-eyed anxiety would have been fewer. I love the garden transformation as much as the restoration of the house. This green and blooming swath is where the house combines sweetly with nature. Beyond it, the cultivation of olives, grapes, cypresses, and lavender creates a lighter link with nature, before the natural scrub and broom, the wild asparagus and roses. I love the space for these levels of connection, these cruxes between home and the wider world. “Every olive has its own story,” Anselmo tells us.

“The roses do, too. They're speaking to me all the time,” I joke.

But he does not care about the roses.
“Mah,”
he replies and turns back to the
orto
.

 

The five-inch-square stones look as though they always belonged to
il brutto
. Gone is the floor of black and dun concrete squares. The sink was set into the stone wall. The hollow above it testified to the height of the first owner. Even I, at 5'4" had to stoop a little to see in the mirror. Primo raised and arched the hollow, and I found an old foxed mirror that perfectly fit the space. Just that one change made the cramped sense of cat-inside-a-dollhouse disappear. Antonio arrives with his partner, Flavia. Making frames is the bread and butter of their shop but they love most the decorative finishes and designs. They have made a mock-up of the blue Etruscan wave which will run around the wall. We sit outside drinking tea and experimenting with paints for the exact milky blue, the exact rosy color for the border. Flavia should be painted, with her expressive brown eyes and almond skin. She ties her long hair up and covers it with a scarf, looking more and more like the Madonna about to mount a donkey for the long journey. Still, a strand escapes and trails through the blue paint. Antonio looks nothing like a Joseph. Too full of fun and irony. After a heated discussion about proportion, they make a plastic stencil for the wave. The painting goes quickly. They draw the border lines in pencil then paint them freehand. We've kept the original wooden window with a wide sill where thrushes hatched in June. We've kept the hip-bath–sized tub, although the original had to be replaced. “Who would buy one of those?” Paolo asked dismissively, when we asked if they still were made. “I would,” I answered. “It seems to belong in the house.”

Antonio comes to get me every few minutes. “Do you like it? Do you completely like it?” He lights a cigarette and Flavia and I both fan smoke from our faces with excessive gestures, which prompts him to rub it out in a paint can.

“Yes, will you paint something in every room in the house?”

Going upstairs, I open the door just to look. “Dear Ashley,” I write. “
Il brutto
has become
il carino,
the darling. The tiniest bathroom possible but equipped with mimosa bath salts, the thickest American towels, tuberose soap, and a deserted bird nest on the windowsill. When will you come bathe here?” She is so slender she can slip into the basin half of the tiny tub.

While Antonio is here, I sketch a shelf I would like in the kitchen, one running the width of the room above the brick ledge, where I prop all the serving platters I've collected. A second row, then I can just grab one for whatever I'm about to serve. He takes a measurement; we walk around the house until I identify the exact stain color I'd like.
“Ecco fatto,”
he says, it's done.

 

What's not done, as July comes to a close, is the butterfly bath. The tile is on its way but will not arrive until after Primo's men are on August holiday. Since we must leave at the end of August, we store the fixtures in the
limonaia
and make room for the boxes of tiles.
“Pazienza, signora,”
Primo says, patience. “Next year, another new set of problems.” Zeno covers the trench. Tools are cleaned and loaded into the Ape. My colleague does not arrive, explaining he'll come back when he can stay with us. Anselmo hangs braids of onions and garlic in the cantina. Antonio installs the beautiful shelf—some things happen like magic. I lower my tired frame into the new tub, baptizing myself in the cold water that will run out through tubes and rocks and sand, harmlessly, harmlessly, onto the land.

Lost in Translation

AT AN EARLY STAGE IN THE HUMAN EMBRYO,
traces of gill slits appear near the throat, faint reminders that once we were finny and swam freely through the streams and seas. Often I feel in myself another vestigial trait—being locked in one language. Multilingual friends assure me that a new personality emerges when one acquires a new language. This is something to look forward to. I would like a personality that includes flowing hair to toss at appropriate syntactical pauses, perhaps those tinted Italian glasses, which manage to look sexy
and
intellectual. I'd like for my natural reserve to fall away when fluency allows me all the gestures and rhythms of Italian. Meanwhile, I can say, “Have you washed yourself well?” and “Sir, you have insulted me! I demand satisfaction”; “Sooner or later I am going to have a nervous breakdown”; “Catherine, have you been to see if the barometer has fallen?”; “Where we come from, we don't have a party when someone dies,” and many other useful sentences my textbooks have taught me. These phrases are not the pertinent rejoinders when

Primo Bianchi discusses with us the intricacies of a
fossa biologica,
a biological pit, otherwise known as a septic tank.

Twice a week for two hours, I report to a white room in a
palazzo
in Cortona. I go with anticipation and dread. En route, I pass Caruso, the mynah bird who lives in a cage outside an antique shop.
“Ciao,”
the bird says, and I hear the exact, chomped-on inflection of the local
ciao
. Even the bird has a better ear than I. Amalia is waiting, a pile of photocopied exercises for me to complete in front of her. She plans to make clear to me, finally, the differences among the simple past, the imperfect, and the past definite. I think it goes like this: I shopped; I shopped and continue to shop; and I've shopped until I've dropped. The room's three enormous windows overlook the rooftops of Cortona. We sit at a long table, facing a blackboard. Nothing distracts from the intense study of Italian. We begin with conversation. At half her normal speed, she speaks clearly of a Benigni film, a politician on trial, a local custom. We discuss where we have been, and what we have done since the last lesson.

I am halting, I am corrected frequently, I do not hear the difference in the way she says
oggi,
today, and the way I say it. Because the ceilings are so high, everything we say echoes slightly, amplifying the trauma. With verbs, I hear my own blunders as soon as I make them. Odd—sometimes I understand almost everything she says. We discuss the death penalty, ravioli, or the Mafia. I congratulate myself on a clever question—maybe she can see that I'm not as stupid as I must sound. Other times I feel that my brain is a big potato
gnocco
or a ball of
mozzarella di bufala,
and I'm not hearing half. Worse, I sometimes tune out. She could be speaking double Dutch. I want to cry or run out of the room.

Still, taking on a new language is enormous fun. While waiting for a transaction at the bank or sitting in front of the gas station while the car is washed, I take out my list of past participles. During the afternoon
riposo,
I sometimes close the shutters and listen to conversation tapes. Mine focus on cooking. In the heat, with the cicadas clacking outside, I lie back and hear blow-by-blow instructions on how to make rice fritters and cherry soup. Listening is a thrill because I start to think that I spoke Italian in another life; way inside, I know this language. In his fine World War II novel,
The Gallery,
John Horne Burns was on to something when he said, “Italian can soon be understood because it sounds like what it's saying. Italian is a language as natural as the human breath. . . . It keeps in motion by its own inherent drive. . . . It's full of bubble-like laughter. Yet it's capable of power and bitterness. It has nouns that tick off a personality as neatly as a wisecrack. It's a language in which the voice runs to all levels. You all but sing, and you work off your passion with your hands.”

One of those evocative nouns fascinates us.
Galleggiante
. We love the sound—a mixture of “gallant,” “gigantic,” and “elegant.” Ed says, “You're looking so, how shall I say it, so
galleggiante
this evening.” I say, “I love Parma. It's
galleggiante.”
We admire the antique iron bench we have bought; truly
galleggiante
in the garden. The real
galleggiante
first entered our vocabularies more practically. When the toilet kept running water, Ed stood on a ladder and looked inside the tank. Lifting the floating ball made the noise stop. There's no way to look up “floating ball inside toilet” in the dictionary so he went to the building supply store for the thingamajig and endured the charade of gestures and sketches. “Ah,” the clerk caught on. “You want a
galleggiante.”
Yes, we did.

 

Because I'm learning Italian while living here, I conduct my education in public. In a bar, I once asked for a grenade (
granata
) instead of a lemon slush (
granita
). I have commented on the beauty of a basket of fish (
pesce
) when admiring gloriously ripe peaches (
pesche
). Imagine pointing to a black cabbage (
cavolo nero
) and asking for a black horse (
cavallo nero
). Tiny but huge differences. The worst was at a funeral when I spoke of the deceased not as a
scapolo
, bachelor, as I meant, but as a
sbaglio
, a mistake.

That was early. Now that I have more understanding of Italian, I have greater occasions to make a bigger fool of myself. I know more and am likely to launch into a description of a trip to a balsamic vinegar maker and forget once again that complicated questions will follow, and I'll need to pull out of my head verbs in tenses that I haven't yet faced. Could I pass it all off as a kind of new dialect? Today, I was telling Matteo at the
frutta e verdura
that overnight something has eaten the young melons and corn in the garden. Perhaps a wild boar or a porcupine—I know both of those—and then, uh oh, I finally see it coming; I want to say “gnawed the stalk to topple the corn.”

Gnawed—“ate” won't do. The word for “stalk”—no, not a glimmer. Topple—forget it. The closest I can come is “cut” and that's not right. All the synonyms I do know will not convey the sense of something gnawing the stalk to topple the corn. I think for a moment of pantomiming the whole scene with a stalk of celery for the corn and me as the porcupine, but a sense of propriety—thank god—saves me.

But this is good, isn't it? Knowing enough that precision is developing? I'm saved because three other people in the shop have joined the conversation, each with an opinion as to the real culprit's identity. Hedgehogs and nutrias are discussed, but the consensus is porcupine, with one man holding out for wild boar because the tomatoes are untouched. If it were a porcupine, obviously the tomatoes would have been mangled, too. I buy my peaches, never having made
that
mistake again, and leave the shop, realizing I have understood everything, even though I was blocked by my own vocabulary.

At times I am not translating;
arancia
is
arancia
and I'm just listening, the image of an orange flashing in my mind, not the word. This is a mystery to me, those moments when the English melts between the Italian and the meaning. I happily make my way around town, having little conversations in the shops. An Italian tourist asks me,
me!,
for directions and I answer with full confidence. Although I may have sent him to the wrong church, I have faith that he will like it just as well.

Old World–cultured Europeans and the upheaved millions who have migrated in the last half century represent opposite means, but the end is the same—they move among languages—while most of us who were culturally isolated on the great landmass of North America speak English at best. Already, we are a growing minority. Generations hence, our descendants will say to their children, “Once there were people who spoke only one language,” and the children will be amazed. But I have become determined to survive with the fittest.

Having made many blunders and gone home fuming, I've had altogether too much time to analyze my problems. I've come to know why I have made learning Italian more difficult than it had to be, perhaps why all the languages I've studied have been so elusive.

I have the habit of wrenching everything into English. Although we have the same structures—all languages basically have the same parts of speech—there is no way to proceed
rationally
with the obliteration of the Italian pronoun, the foregrounding of the verb, and the genders of nouns. The idiosyncracies of idioms, just as irrational, are immediate to me because they work with metaphors. I love the graphic figurative image
acqua in bocca
(water in the mouth), which means “I won't tell anyone.” Something between us two is something for
quattr'occhi,
four eyes. “I feel oppressed” or “depressed” translates as
sotto una cappa di piombo,
under a hood of lead. Not only is an image conjured, but
piombo,
sounds oppressive, like three low notes plucked on the bass. All the connotations of the English “rolling in money” are not at all the same as the Italian “swimming in gold.”

Sound unwittingly often translates meaning where it shouldn't.
Stinco,
a savory cut of meat, and also a thin loaf of bread, sounds unappetizing even when you know
stinco
means shin-bone. And how
foreign
the saying,
“Non è uno stinco di santo,”
He's not the shin-bone of a saint; he's no saint.
Bar
conjures solitary figures hunched over mixed drinks, or more sophisticated scenes, not the Italian version, which is centered on coffee and quick bites. Most certainly, an Italian “bar” is not a “pub.”

The common word
più,
more, is hard for an English-speaking person to say without suspecting a bad smell. So I purse my lips and say we're eating tonight at Amico Più, a
trattoria
on the edge of the valley, where to the satisfaction of my inner ear, the odor of pigs sometimes wafts from farms across the grassy outdoor dining area from nearby farms.

“Your friend certainly is handsome but he's so cruel to his dog,” my friend Deb said about stop-traffic good-looking Silvano. “He kept telling the poor thing to die.” Silvano was trying to talk to her, and his playful
pastore tedesco,
German shepherd, pestered him to throw a stick over and over.
“Dai, Ugo, dai,”
he told the dog as he threw the stick yet again.
Dai
sounds like “die,” but he simply meant “give”—
basta,
enough, give it up, Hugo.

I know well from French, that if one is hungry or thirsty, that you
have
hunger, you
have
thirst. This is imprinted on my mind from my first trip to France. I went to a restaurant alone and was seated by a door where blasts of cold air blew in my face. I asked the waiter for another table, explaining that I was cold. Back in the hotel, I realized I had not said
j'ai froid
but instead had said
je suis fraise,
I am strawberry. The waiter graciously had directed me to a cozy table near the fireplace.

Strange that a cat purrs differently in Italian; a cat “makes the purrs.”
Ha sonno?,
You have sleepy?, now comes naturally. Some things may never. If I forget and take to the literal, I'm often left with “Now I must to go myself of it,” for “Now I must leave.” Or “I myself was forgotten of this,” for “I had forgotten this.” Translation is approximation; the original doesn't say that at all.

Mark Twain, who obviously had an ear for language, had fun with a literal translation of his own speech, given to the Press Club in Vienna:

I am indeed the truest friend of the German language—and not only now, but from long since—yes, before twenty years already. . . . I would only some changes effect. I would only the language method—the luxurious, elaborate construction compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover can. With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One her yonder-up understands. . . .

I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit reform. I might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history of the Thirty Years' War between the two members of a separate verb in-pushed. That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller the permission refused the History of the Hundred Years' War to compose—God be it thanked! After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be.

 

I've had the late realization that English is a spoken language, whereas Italian is sung. An opera teacher at Spoleto told me she has her American students listen in class to someone speaking ordinary Italian while following the tones with their own voices la, la, la-ing. Then she has them perform the same exercise with someone speaking English. The English voice-graph modulates gently and regularly up and down while the Italian zips dramatically around. I knew this instinctively. When people are walking toward me, long before I can hear words, I can tell if they are speaking English, German, or Italian. I know it, too, from my own very plain buon giorno and the exuberant response from the Italians, with several lifts and slides of sound. Italian spoken by a native English speaker is much easier for me to understand—the pacing is still in English even when the words in Italian are grammatically perfect. Catching the rhythm—that's the hardest part. The lucky few who have a natural grasp of ritmo are understood by Italians even if their grammar isn't so hot.