Every Day in Tuscany (12 page)

As the failure grew more apparent two summers ago, the desperate management resorted to disco evenings with a sweeping light like those on suburban used car lots. We heard the monotonous lyrics of “I Wanna Be Your Girl,” blaring at three
A.M
. Condoms littered the Strada della Memoria on Sunday mornings. Italian discos usually stop around six
A.M
.

The absurd moment was when the pool owners suggested that those who did not want noise should
pay
for the shortfalls the management was experiencing. If each resident coughed up a couple of thousand euros a year, then they’d turn off the music. Everyone on the hillside laughed maybe louder than the disco.

Taking our previous miscue, another petition was circulated by an Italian friend who has lived his adult life in America. This time—no repercussions. Maybe we started an idea that you can speak up. This disco idiocy roused everyone on our side of the hill, and Ed and I did not have to be the ones who protested. We simply spoke to a few influential people around town. Privately. No one was put on the spot. See how we learn! The following summer permission for the disco was denied by the comune.

At the pool now, children can take swimming lessons. A few Dutch tourists stop by for a dip. All is calm.
Per ora
, for now …

The
carabinieri
never found the person who left the grenade. I often wonder if he drives by, if he regrets what he did.

All the evidence sent to Rome for analysis had revealed nothing.

But secrets will out. The gold necklace hidden in the toe of a shoe will be found by the small child. The forbidden email tends toward the forward click, not the delete. The deepest confidence awaits transformation into orange-bannered truth waving in the wind. There exists someone who protects someone else and at the same time longs to open his hands and hold out that forbidden knowledge like a ripe apple. Already, someone is rehearsing. Someday, I’ll hear a voice just behind me as I look in the bookstore window or select the local cream meringues for Sunday
pranzo
.

Signora, I just want you to know …

T
HE EDITOR NEVER
apologized for the libelous article. He exited from the pool management. I ignore him when we pass on the Rugapiana, which is often. A close Italian friend says, “Maintain Olympian disdain.” Actually I don’t hold on to animosity. A few have suggested that we should forgive each other. I replied that I would accept flowers from him in the middle of the piazza at noon. No roses have been forthcoming.

Bring Me The Sunflower Crazed With Light

If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching
.

—P
ENVELOPE
F
ITZGERALD

ROSES, CUTTING ROSES AND PLACING THEM IN
a pewter pitcher, satisfies my solitary instinct. All the colors complement one another, even red Abe Lincoln, not my favorite. He’s the dark splash of venous blood among the silky apricots, yellows, and pinks. Pronouncing the name in Italian, Ah-bay Link-o-nay, tweaks the dour president into someone who might samba instead of play “Jimmy Crack Corn” on the harmonica.

C’era una volta
, so tales begin, once upon a time. I like the archaic “upon” in English, as though the story sits atop time and therefore is outside time. Assaults refuse to fall into mere time, mere story. It seems wrong that happy times often blend into time, blur into a smear of well-being, while vicious events remain vividly themselves. How to make one’s own life the polar opposite? After the platelet shift settled down again, this question preoccupied me. That’s the question I want to answer.

N
OTHING REALLY HAPPENED
, I tell myself. I go about my day. Oddly, I do think of when a man crazed with drugs broke into my house in San Francisco. We were at dinner when he burst through the window and landed in the middle of the living room. He staggered toward us screaming, “I want to kill,” and as he lunged near, I threw my wine in his face and we fled. He shouted after us, “Give me a knife.” I ran to the left, to our new neighbors; Ed ran across the street, where lights were on. He called 911 as he ran. Our visitor followed and tried to break through the door as our startled neighbor raised a golf club over his head. The intruder was caught that night. Two weeks later he was on the street again. In my mind he broke through over and over, a sunburst of glass shattering around his goofy, druggy face.

D
AYS OF SOLITUDE;
ah, this is
my
life.
Don’t mistake the wound of the world for the world
, a wise friend told me years ago. So I cast about in art books, write thirty sentences that could open a novel, try to find the exact word for the green aqueous light falling through my studio window, look up words in the dictionary and list good new ones in my notebook. I’m asking: What informs, what inspires, what feeds, what amuses? Such days deeply refresh.

Maybe close skirmishes with violence, like small earthquakes, release pressure, warding off those doozies that seize the Richter and shake the fillings out of your teeth. Those shakes I’ve lived through in California, the glasses tinkling against each other, were nothing like the earthquake of 1989, when I was tossed from side to side as I ran down the stairs and out of the house. Life’s little wake-up calls. (Do they have to be so numerous?) Scroll down the list and start to wail—or shout out
Carpe diem
.

A
ND
E
D, MUGGED
while walking home from Fillmore Street, a few blocks away from home. When he fought back and was slugged and pinned down, he suddenly realized he could be killed and stopped struggling. His assailant climbed off him and said “Sorry, man.” When Ed went in the house, our cat Sister smelled the stink of the fight and ran crying all through the rooms. I was in Spain; he was leaving the next day and had converted his dollars. There was some satisfaction that the robber opened his wallet to find pesos and lire. We later moved to a more remote San Francisco neighborhood of Spanish-style houses and shady streets. St. Francis Woods was known to be the safest area in the city. That’s where the drugged guy leaped into our lives. The next year we moved north to Marin, to a secluded cul-de-sac with a locked gate at the top of the road and a serene view of the bay.

I begin to realize: Time to seize the day, ruthlessly, as my aunt Hazel seized my grandmother’s fur coats and jewelry during the funeral she was “too upset” to attend. By the time we trailed in, her Lincoln was packed.

R
OBERT
R
AUSCHENBERG
wrote this about his painting process:

I had been working purely abstractly for so long it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn’t work another way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.

Why not take this time of solitary self-exile to unlearn, shake up the compass and veer off into other territory, shake off “the lethargy of custom,” as Coleridge called it. Maybe then come back with new insight? At my last crux, I jumped ship, quit my university job to travel and write
A Year in the World
. Since I’m reviewing past choices, I might as well start with revitalizing my own most private and creative life.

I
REMEMBER WHEN
a student was murdered in an elevator at the university where I taught. Another was raped in the women’s bathroom. We couldn’t go into the bathrooms without a partner for months. We couldn’t open our mail either, unless it had been screened, because the Unabomber was suspected to be nearby and, who knows, might have secreted a bomb within the pages of
The Gettysburg Review
.

C
ERTAIN PRACTICES CAST
a benevolent, protective spell over the hours. One habit: choosing a book of poems, or a book on fresco cycles, or any artist, or meditations, and starting each day with a dedicated time of reading and gazing, becoming an apprentice to a mind I admire. I select my friend C. D. Wright’s poems. I miss her. She’s southern to the core, and all her poems have a handful of ferrous red dirt in them. In person or on the page, she challenges the language, turns subjects inside out, plus she owns a fine and rough sensibility that is often funny, antisentimental, and embodies the word
fierce
.

I have been to Pilates I found my old coat

I took my will to the notary I found my good glasses

I have filled my tank I am going to the market

Then I think I’ll cut my hair off with a broken bottle

The reader embarks. The writer heads out to the open waters. Carolyn’s work offers revelation, the hand of a true original, and the pleasure of synesthesis: “the slur of cars,” “The petal of one eye shutting,” “Aloe vera and bromeliad felted with dust,” “a curtain of bougainvillea.”
Dear Carolyn, can we take a road trip in the South together?