Ferenc Maté

The Hills of Tuscany

An excerpt

1 - THE LIGHT IN TUSCANY

We stepped from the cool shadows of the archway into the warmth of the autumn sun. It was early afternoon, the narrow, flagstone streets were deserted, the shops closed; Tuscany was eating. Arm in arm in the autumn light, calmed by the warmth and the pitcher of red wine we had with lunch, we ambled in contented silence up the hill toward the piazza where the mosaic facade of the cathedral blazed like a million tiny stars.

We had been shivering while researching a book in the rain of Sweden, the cold of Finland, and the damp of Brittany, and in more than a month this was the first time we were warm. We stared at the mosaics. Then, glitter-blinded and wine-weakened, we went around to the small church garden, sat on a low stone wall, and like dreamers through the centuries before us, gazed out over the countryside below.

A sea of hills rolled to the horizon, covered by odd-shaped, lovingly kept vineyards and olive groves, orchards and fields: a freshly plowed field here, a bit of corn there, some hay, some woods, some pasture, all odd sizes, all open and unfenced. The plots were defined by the curve of a stream, or the crook of a hill, or the fold of a hollow, with boundaries of poplars or a ditch or nothing. Old stone houses were huddled on knolls surrounded by their cypresses, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens. On a ridge, in a wood, a monastery stood with a square steeple, and beyond it a tiny hamlet on a hilltop. Everything was small — to the measure of man. And over it all reigned the gentle Tuscan light, and silence, and a calm.

Candace was far away, her gaze fixed near the horizon, auburn hair glowing in the sinking sun. The air thickened with light. We sat.

After a while I suggested moving on.

Candace gazed. "You know," she finally said, "I'm getting tired of moving on. We've been "moving on" for fifteen years. The houseboat, the sailboat, the mountain cabin, that garage in Laguna Beach, the attic in Paris, the cubbyhole in New York, the whatsit in the Bahamas. What was that thing with eight sides anyway?"

A tolling of bells from the monastery trembled in the air, sonorous and slow, drifting like a veil of melancholy over the silent hills.

"They're burying someone," Candace softly said, and looked as if it were someone she had known. When the bells were still and their echo had died away, the world remained respectfully silent. The sun sank behind strips of clouds and the air glittered with light. After a while, just below the town, rose the brittle sound of kindling being cut. Then a woman's voice, one accustomed to shouting, "Mario! Non troppo grosso! Per la Madonna!"

I laughed. "What did she say?" I asked Candace.

"She said she was sick and tired of moving on, and if she had to move on one more time, she was moving on on her own and leaving you behind like camel dung in the desert."

Mario chopped for a while, unhurriedly, rhythmically. The kindling must have been "non troppo grosso," for no one gave him hell. Mario was toeing the line.

"I want to settle down," Candace said. "A tiny house, some fruit trees, a vegetable garden."

"Sounds nice," I said. "Where?"

"Anywhere." She had said that louder and it echoed from the church walls. An old man with a narrow brimmed hat who had wandered into the churchyard turned and looked at us as if he had been following the conversation. I looked out at the hills, the warmth, the gentleness. "How about here?" I said, spreading a hand toward the valley below.

"Here?"

"Lots of room for vegetables. We could get an old farmhouse and fix it up. Have a bit of land, some woods, a few rows of grapes, a wine cellar. Make our own wine. Old wood casks oozing that perfume, pigeons swooping overhead. A rooster on the dunghill. Olives. Can you imagine pressing our own olive oil, pouring it on a hunk of fire-toasted bread with a ton of garlic rubbed over it?"

"You're nuts," she laughed.

"Fine, a bit of garlic."

"I mean about settling here."

"Why not? The country is beautiful; the food the best; the people are wonderful, art even better. Concerts in churches and castles. I'll write, you paint. Even the weather is perfect. What more is there? We could have a little farm right there." And I pointed just over Mario's head at a small farmhouse near whose crumbling walls a handful of white somethings were grazing in the shade.

"A farm. You don't know a thing about a farm."

"I can learn."

"But you don't speak a word of Italian!"

"I'll take a course."

She smiled. "You don't even know where you are."

"I'll ask somebody."

She stared at me in silence. So did the old man, his face aglow with anticipation.

Candace's eyes softened. "You're a nice guy," she said, like an attendant calming a mental patient. "But you and reality just don't mix," and she shook her head. The old man seemed satisfied with that. He adjusted his hat and left. The pulleys of the bells in the tower above us rumbled, the pins creaked, and with a great "whoosh" the enormous old bell swung out of the tower, then a wider swing, swoooshhh, then a deafening "Diiiinggg" then another "Donnggg," booming and thundering until both the air and earth shook. A short priest with large hands shuffled into the church, followed by some older women in ones and twos.

Candace got up. She seemed deep in thought. "You know," she said, "there are few things more scary than moving to a foreign country."

"Name one," I said.

Anyway, the year passed.

Most mentally stable people, given this gift of time, would have sobered up from daydreams of living in Tuscany, gotten a job, and signed up with a gym and cable channels. But not I. I planned. Determined to find a place to rent for a month from which I could hunt for the Tuscan Farmhouse of My Dreams, I made calls: the Italian tourist board, Italian travel agents, an American university in Tuscany, an order of Benedictine monks near Florence, the corner pizza-parlor whose owner was Korean but had postcards from Sienna taped to the register, and even the local Italian Golden Age Club, where everyone turned out to be deaf. Nothing worked. No one knew a thing. Or if they did, they weren't talking. Or when they did, it was in Italian and I didn't understand a word. Then I found a contact through a chance encounter: in the laundry room.

Planning in advance was new to me. I usually wing it, not because I'm adventurous, just lazy. Sometimes it works. Fifteen years earlier, Candace and I, vagabonding around Central America in our Volkswagen camper on seven dollars a day, got to "discover" the Mayan ruins of Tikal, fabled to every one but us. There we were, deep in the Guatemalan jungle, fishtailing in a thunderstorm axle-deep in mud, escaping a canvas-covered truck full of either murderous hit-squad killers or melons. When I'm lost in the jungle in the middle of a revolution, stopping to clarify the contents of suspicious trucks is not a priority.

At long last the truck faded in the downpour, stuck sideways on a hill — God bless you, Mr.Volkswagen, whoever you are — when Candace says to me, "What are those great bumps in the jungle up ahead?" I immediately thought "Enemy!" but the bumps were enormous and immobile, jungle-covered things, pointy — like when you stick your toes up under a bedsheet — except there were dozens of them the size of tall, steep pyramids, which, to our speechless surprise, they in fact turned out to be.

Winging it in a camper is one thing: you can just bump along until you find a place you like. But you can't just land in Tuscany and yell out, "Anybody here have a place to rent?" So I planned. And it worked.

The autumn sun sat low in the sky as we wound through the Tuscan hills. The Matra, a little sports car we had bought when we lived in Paris years before, snuggled into the curves, past terraces of gnarled olives, and vineyards with leaves glowing yellows and reds in that fiery light. The medieval walls and steeples of Monte San Savino vanished below us, as upward and upward we climbed until the vines gave way to pines, past hamlets of half-crumbling stone houses and ancient olives, and into the six-house borgo of Palazzuolo, when Candace yelled out, "Turn here!"

I whipped the poor Matra down a small road between a teetering church shedding centuries of stucco and a long, stone stable with a large Madonna shrine. We edged between rows of cypresses of the cemetery, where on each grave flickered the eternal flame of an electric candle, then past a rough wood sign on which was handwritten "Podere Bastardino" — some name for a house. Then Candace gave her last command, "Turn left at the Madonna!" which, given the galaxies of Madonnas elbowing each other in the Tuscan countryside, is like yelling at a sailor, "Turn left at the wave." But this Madonna — bless her good-hearted expression — actually stood where the road split. To the right, a muddy cart-trail dropped into the gloom, and to the left, a rocky path rose toward the red disc of the sun.

I was getting skittish. I had driven that day from Chambéry in the foothills of the French Alps — all backroads and curves except from Torino to Pisa — so I was as tired as a dog. The road sloped into a forest of great oaks whose branches caverned over us, and in the sunlight at the cavern's end I saw, I was sure I saw, the grotesque heads of two mythical beasts lunging headlong at us. I braked hard. The Matra's nose dipped and banged the rocky road. The beasts came rushing past us and turned into the woods followed by a ghoulish specter — a tiny head with wind-tossed hair on a long beanpole with limbs.

"An eighteenth-century pastoral," Candace said dreamily. "Ancient oaks, autumn leaves, pigs in the shadows, a pig-herdess framed by the setting sun."

I opened a weary eye. Sure enough that's what they were. "Goddam stupid pigs," I groaned. "What the hell are they doing here?"

"Eating acorns, Future Farmer," Candace said. "Did you think pigs were born on Styrofoam trays as pork chops?" And she was pulling down her window and chatting amicably with an old woman so thin that only the tightness of her parchment skin seemed to keep her upright.

"Two hundred meters on the left," Candace finally said. "Would you like me to drive?" I drove. Candace was busy combing her hair and fixing herself up to meet our rented villa's sophisticated owners, who, we were told, would be waiting in the garden to meet us with open arms.

Which of course they weren't.

The house was locked and shuttered. The sun was falling. It was getting cold. The forest around us was darkening. Some bloody beginning. And I thought of leaving a polite message about where they could relocate their tumbledown old house, when, in the last gasp of daylight, the old pig-herdess came around the corner and asked something to which Candace answered, "Non c'é nessuno." There's no one here. The old lady said something else and pointed to a great ceramic vase of sage, and Candace went, tilted it and pulled into the last glimmer of day the lifesaver, the key.

Once we were inside the spotless stone house, with its old, wooden furniture, its shiny-worn kitchen table and a fireplace so big you could roast a goat, the view looking out at the blazing sun over the misty hills took my breath away.

"As I was saying," I said, "perfect paradise."

We were giddy. We ran around the house like fools, then grabbed the emergency bottle of French wine from the car, warm but who cared, and the emergency brie and bread we kept for such occasions, and straddled the stone wall on the terrace, just as the sun dipped and the sky caught fire and enormous shafts of light shot across the sky. We drank, passing the bottle, then the world around us started gushing colors. The olives glowed silver, geraniums blushed, the ancient walls and worn brick walks oozed centuries of hues. And the air was drenched with the fragrance of forest and sage, lavender, rosemary, autumn earth and sun-warmed stone. We ate, and slugged back the wine, and got drunk, and hugged, and it got dark. "The trattoria is closing soon," I said. "We'd better go and eat."

"And drink," Candace said.

God bless the Irish.

We showered, dried our hair by the fire and went out into the autumn night. A great dome of stars shimmered over us. The dark forest was alive: things rustled, frogs croaked, and something made sharp little yelps as it moved through the hedge. We wound back through the blackened woods, the headlights throwing looming shadows everywhere, through the tiny hamlet with a warm glow in its windows, and past the last house where a fire burned and the smell of chicken coops mingled with the smoke, and an old man rammed a pitchfork in the coals and made sparks fly toward the stars.

About a mile down the road in an isolated house stood the Trattoria del Cacciatore. Lights were on inside and smoke wafted from the chimney into the fields. We went in under a pergola. An old lady was sewing behind a tiny bar; around her were stacks of spices, soaps and vegetables. She greeted us with a quiet "buona sera" and waved us into the bigger room ahead. It was a clean, whitewashed place, with wood beams and terra-cotta floors, its few tables set with impeccable white linen, and behind an archway in a waist-high fireplace, a hot-coaled wood-fire glowed. There was a little girl of about three carrying a doll and calling, "Mamma, Mamma, c'é gente." This was indeed worthy news, for although it was well past eight, we were and seemingly had been the only gente there. Then Mamma came, a shy woman of about thirty, and said something and pointed at the table near the fire. We sat. On the table stood an unlabeled bottle of red wine. The fire glowed. The little girl put the doll on the chair between us and started talking to it gently, looking at each of us in turn, and then at it again, informing and instructing, and even waving a finger telling it to behave. Candace talked to her and she replied with a most serious face, then she whispered to her doll and went away. I pulled the cork and poured us wine. Candace raised her glass. "Welcome home," she said.

The food was as simple as the place. For appetizers there were assorted crostini — fire-toasted bread, some smeared with chicken liver, others with sautéed mushrooms. Then of course came pasta. We both had pici — a homemade, hand-rolled, unevenly thick spaghetti — Candace with a sauce of wild boar and I with a sauce of mixed wild mushrooms. We were slow in eating, savoring every bite, and looked up as the little girl's Mamma came and asked if the sauces were fine. Candace complimented her on the food and apologized for eating so slowly. A big smile broke on her face, "Piano, piano, con calma," she said. Slowly, slowly, with calm. Then came the meats: for Candace roasted pheasant with parchment-like brown skin, and for me wild boar stew marinated in red wine and juniper berries and tasting like heaven, and a plate of Tuscan white beans drenched in olive oil and crushed garlic, and a salad. And we kept emptying wine glasses, toasting the little girl, her Mamma, Tuscany, the boar, the beans, the toasts.

We ate, with calma, and drank, with gusto, and the little girl and her doll had said good night long ago, led upstairs by Nonna, Grandma, from behind the bar, and then Mamma went up, too, to say good night, and we swooned from the heat of the fire and the wine, and thank God Nonna came back and brought us two espressos to bring us to, then she quickly thought it over and brought two glasses of grappa, to sink us once again.

As we left, they both came and said good-bye — handshakes and smiles as if we had been acquaintances for years. Then we went out into a silver flood of moonlight.

We breathed the night air deeply, utterly content. And it wasn't just the food and wine, but also that family. There was something heartening in seeing three generations together there — at home. We felt as if we had had dinner at someone's house. And the place was so honest, unpretentious, that you knew what counted was not the walls and floors, but the people they comforted. And it felt reassuring that the vegetables came from their gardens, the wine from the small vineyard across the road, and that the boar and the pheasant were hunted by Grandpa. We talked about this as we ambled in the moonlight, until Candace said, "Did we drink all that wine just to discuss social science?" We hurried home.

The bedding was cool and white, and through the window blazed the moon and threw shadows of wind-swayed branches on the walls.