Living in a Foreign Language (11 page)

“You mean like when I told him to shove his bill up his Neapolitan ass?”

“Yes, that and other things. Worse things.”

“Well, I won't work with him.” She turned to us. “Ask Bruno. He'll tell you what a crook he is.”

“Bruno does not know everything, JoJo.”

“Find another contractor.”

Martin

After a pause, Martin suggested that he and JoJo work this out between themselves and that we, as clients, needn't worry ourselves with these details. Behind his eyes, however, I could see that he was thinking forward to at least a year of being second-guessed by JoJo and wondering whether it was worth it. As much as I liked Martin and felt I could trust him, I wasn't ready to lose JoJo on the project. She would be our agent, our staunch advocate when we were six thousand miles away. And she would watch the purse strings. No, they'd just have to learn to get along.

“Could I ask a technical question?” asked Jill, changing the subject.

“Of course. You're the client,” said Martin, beaming.

“What do we do for electrical sockets? I can't find more than one plug in the living room.”

“You do what any good owner of a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house does—you buy an extension cord.”

JoJo piped up to say that she knew where we could get one and suggested we follow her into Spoleto. Then, she said, we could grab a little lunch up at the Piazza Mercato.

“I will leave you to it. Some of us, unfortunately, must work for a living,” said Martin as he gathered his plans and bid us good-bye.

The electric shop in Spoleto was small, featuring shelves piled high with lamps, toasters, fans and TVs—all in various states of repair. There was one man behind the counter and two people in front of us in line. While we were waiting, JoJo filled us in a bit more about Martin. She said he had an excellent reputation—not only for his work, but for his ability to deal with the local bureaucracies that hand out building permits in each
comune
, or township. Our area, she told us, is one of the most difficult areas to get permission to build—because of the olive groves, which are fiercely protected from development. She then confided that if it hadn't been for Martin's abilities to persuade, pester and cajole the authorities, our permit—which had already been approved—could have taken a year or two to actually be delivered into our hands. Now, she said, we would need his talents even more to get them to quickly approve our
variazione
—meaning the changes from Bruno's approved plans to our altered ones. The footprint, the square footage and the pool design would have to be exactly the same, and whatever changes we did inside would need the approval of the
comune
.

Eventually, our turn came to speak to the man behind the counter of the electric store. JoJo let us try to handle it ourselves. I had already looked up the word for extension cord before we left the house, so I was feeling confident. I noticed there were three people in line behind us, but I figured
we wouldn't be but a moment. Just an extension cord, after all.

“Buon giorno, signore,”
I started.
“Ho bisogno una prolunga.”

“Ah!” he said.
“Perché?”

He wanted to know what we wanted to use it for. Jill and I then got into a discussion about what our particular needs were—portable tape player, two lamps, a laptop computer and a TV, with only one electrical outlet on that side of the living room. As we explained the layout of the room, he took out a pen and paper and had us draw it for him. Then we negotiated the perfect length for the cord and the right number of plugs for the end. That led us to a discussion of color. I looked nervously behind me at the line, which had gotten longer; but no one seemed to be in a hurry. The line had transmogrified into a discussion group and they were all talking quite happily about God only knows what. After a long discussion of our own, we decided on
marrone
—brown.

Then he carefully measured out the length of cord, cut it and set about to connect the plugs on either end. He worked slowly and meticulously, as if he were creating a fine work of art. By the time he was done, we thought so, too. It was, without a doubt, the finest extension cord I have ever owned.

He then wrapped it up in brown paper, put a rubber band around it and proudly handed it to me.

“Quanto costa?”
I asked.

It was a dollar and change. For a masterpiece.

O
N SUNDAY
, J
ILL AND
I
DROVE DOWN TO THE ROME
airport to pick up Caroline, who had finally arrived to stake a claim on her share of the Rustico. When she emerged from customs with an exhausted frown on her face, Jill reached into her purse—which seems to hold all the world's goods—and produced a mortadella sandwich. Once we managed to get a few bites of it into our tired, frazzled Korean, she perked up considerably; some people are easy. As we walked to the parking lot, Caroline filled us in about the triathlon she had triumphantly completed the day before. She had to swim a full mile across an ice-cold lake, peel off her wet suit and immediately jump on a bike and pedal twenty-six miles—up and down steep hills—then ditch the bike and proceed to grind out a six-mile run to the finish line. Then, with barely a day to recuperate, she'd hopped on a plane and flown fourteen hours to Rome.

“I slept the whole way—like a rock. Right through all the airplane food!”

I told her that we had an invitation that night to go with
Bruce and JoJo to a
sagra
, which is kind of a harvest festival, but we'd completely understand if she wanted to pass on it.

“No, I have to eat dinner, after all,” she said, chewing happily on the sandwich. “But I'll see how I feel later; maybe I'll crash from the jet lag.”

We pulled out of the airport parking lot and Jill and Caroline immediately fell into conversation, catching each other up on all kinds of things. I focused on the driving and let my mind wander, the soothing, burbling white noise of their girl talk easing me into a blissful meditative state.

The drive up from Rome is just under two hours and it works as a kind of decompression chamber. Once you clear the Grande Raccordo Annulare, the ring road that circles the Eternally Chaotic City, the noise, the traffic, the fumes, the impatient honking, the road rage all slip away behind you as the scenery shifts from urban sprawl to farms, haystacks and little ancient hill towns in the distance looking down on the strip of highway that cuts through on its way to Florence and beyond. We exit the A1 at a little town called Orte and headed east into Umbria. When we clear Terni, the highway narrows into a two-lane country road—the Via Flaminia—which heads north through a steep valley into Spoleto. Just south of town, we pass by a sign on the side of the road for a local bar called the Bar Belli. Both Jill and Caroline get a big kick out of observing that it must have been named after me. I press down a little harder on the accelerator whenever we get to that point in the road, hoping to slip by it unnoticed, but so far, no luck. The Bar Belli. Very amusing.

A few minutes later—once the hilarity had cooled down—we passed beneath the breathtaking aqueduct that spans the deep gorge between the town and the mountain on the other side and we knew we were home.

After Caroline unpacked and reacquainted herself with the house, the three of us took a long hike up the hill to the Castello and beyond. We walked on a path through the woods that twists up and around, finally emerging at Silvignano, the little
borgo
that sits on the hill overlooking our property. A
borgo
is a loose collection of houses—always without shops, cafés or restaurants, but still big enough to get a name of its own. The houses of Silvignano are the only neighbors we can see from the Rustico. When we got back down the hill, Caroline decided to take a
pisolino
—that's a little nap—so that she'd be up for going to the
sagra
that night.

Bruce and JoJo picked us up around seven o'clock and we drove about forty-five minutes to a little town called Canarra, which is in the farm country just south of Assisi. Canarra also happens to be where St. Francis did his famous talk with the birds. Along the way, Bruce filled us in on what we were about to experience.

“There are
sagras
all over Italy. For most towns, the
sagra
is the sole source of revenue for the entire year. It'll help to pay for equipping the fire department or erecting a war memorial in the piazza . . . whatever. And the whole town pitches in.”

“The best is the goose
sagra
in Bettona,” chipped in JoJo. “Goose done every way you can imagine—and some ways you can't.”

“What about the snail
sagra
in the Valnerina?”

“Garden pests. I can't stomach them. I don't know what you see in them, to tell you the truth.”

“Even a snail needs love, Joanna.”

“You don't love them; you eat them.”

Bruce smiled his little Cheshire cat grin. He's been playing straight man to JoJo for years, and they have their act down pat.

“What about the one at Lago di Bolsena?” said JoJo. “That's probably the best, if you had to choose.”

“They hold it every year on Ash Wednesday. Most
sagras
are in the summer—when the crops are coming in—but Lago Bolsena's is in the middle of the winter.”

“Ash Wednesday—rain or shine.”

“They cook everything in these giant cauldrons—fish from the lake—and the cooks wear asbestos suits to avoid getting incinerated.”

“And you have to bring your own plate, your own silverware, everything.”

“Yeah. All they provide is the fish.”

“It's a madhouse. You have to reserve months in advance.”

We couldn't get any closer to Cannara than a half-mile away. We parked alongside the road and hiked in with hundreds of other people. Cannara's is an onion
sagra
. Their onions are famously sweet—much like Mauis or Vidalias—and when the crop comes in, you can find them featured all over Italy.

The tiny town was packed with people. All the stores were open and set up like booths at a carnival. And in the four main piazzas, giant tents had been constructed to serve as restaurants. There were long lines at every one, but the turnover was pretty fast. The cooks were recruited from the men and women of the town—Cannarians, I suppose—who had been cooking these recipes for generations. Once we got inside, we found seats at one of the long tables—everything was family style—and in no time, a young woman came up to take our order. She was clearly not a professional. She shouted at us over the din to hurry up and order; we shouted back what we wanted. We ordered onion soup—served with onion bread; then pasta
with bacon and onions, which was a knockout; then various meat dishes—smothered with onions, of course; then a big plate of fried onions for the middle of the table. There was an onion and fennel salad—to cleanse the palate—and we finished up with onion ice cream, which was as bad as it sounds. We washed all this down with pitchers of young red wine.

After we paid up—making our contribution to the local economy—we walked through the little streets, burping merrily along with the rest of the crowd. There were stands selling all sorts of products—onion compotes, strings of fresh onions, onion artifacts of all kinds. And there was one piazza set up for dancing, with a live band and colored lights strung from building to building. Everyone danced exactly the same—a kind of fox trot, I think. It was as if they had all studied at the same Arthur Murray's.

Caroline bought a chance at a stand called the Fish Pond. She reached into a bowl that was held high above her head by an elderly woman with very few teeth, in a black dress. She unfolded the paper and handed it the woman, who looked at it for a long time with a serious look on her face. Then that woman showed it to another woman in black and then to a third. They huddled and started talking excitedly, pointing to Caroline, who—being the only Asian person for hundreds of miles—stuck out in the crowd anyway.

“Il pesce! Il pesce!”

Caroline, it seems, had won the grand prize—the
pesce
. The fish. The prize, however, was not a fish, but a prosciutto—a whole prosciutto that they proceeded to take down from where it was hanging and give to Caroline. She was dazed—not only from jet lag, but from all these women in black dresses screaming at her in Italian.