Seven Seasons in Siena (21 page)

Yet that didn't stop Roy Moskovitz. By all accounts he was a short, bald, unprepossessing man of middle years, of such ample physicality that he once became wedged in one of the seats of the palchi and remained stuck there till he was discovered later, stranded alone on the Campo in a rainstorm. And yet he adored, and was adored by, all the brucaioli, and a good portion of the rest of Siena too.

What, then, is wrong with me? I try to imagine showing up in the contrada with gifts for everybody, and it just seems awkward and silly. Yet it feels entirely right for Rachel. Possibly this is just a matter of personal style—and personality, period. I have to be accepted on my own terms or not at all. The karaoke night was a good indication of that. I can do this in my own way.

I have to keep in mind something Dario told me the last time I experienced a degree of frustration. He said, “Rob, you're an American, you're gay, and you're a writer. None of those are things the Sienese see a lot of.” The implication being that any one of those attributes would've been an obstacle to easy acceptance; but all three in one package?

In the piazza a woman stops and asks me if it's true that Rachel has arrived, and I tell her indeed it is. I've never actually spoken to this person before, nor she to me, but it's clear now that she's well enough aware of my identity to know I'll be able to tell her about Rachel. The unsettled feeling comes over me again as I recall that not only is Rachel a favorite
among the contrada; she's also well beloved here in Vagliagli. And though I've stayed here often, I know only a handful of the villagers by name, and none of them extraordinarily well.

There's something unnerving about being confronted with the fact of someone who shares your ambitions but pursues them with greater energy, positivity, and success. Maybe it's not about being American or gay or a writer. Maybe it's about being a tentative, timid, unyielding kind of guy, self-obsessed but not self-confident, drawn to light and joy while privately nursing drear and dourness. Maybe I'm just not a people person. Maybe I'm just not
likable
. Not everyone can be. It's not the end of the freakin' world.

And people can change. Maybe the next time I come here, I can make a concerted effort to be less inner-directed, more open to the views and experiences of other people. Peggy, the American brucaiola, said the way to gain entry into the contrada was to “just be here.” But there's more to “just being here” than simply occupying a space. I think I'm beginning to get that now.

When I began this journey, I knew there'd be some difficulties along the way, but I presumed they would be mainly tactical: travel problems, the language barrier. I didn't realize I'd find myself facing a complete top-down reconstruction of my entire character.

But if that's what it takes, that's what I'll do.

…

 
I'M READY FOR A RENEWED ASSAULT ON THE BASTIONS
of the Bruco, but it's the dead of February. What, I wonder, constitutes the life of the contrada in the bleakest weeks of the year? Most of the brucaioli who have posted on Facebook during the past month have mentioned only the inclement weather—especially a vicious blizzard that descended on them in the days before I'm set to return.

When I arrive, the snow remains piled high in some places but bleeds away in others. It's one of those peculiar days where the temperature in the shade is subarctic, but just a few steps into the sun and you're compelled to remove your scarf and unbutton your collar. I have to cover a lot of ground on my journey from the airport in Bologna, through the Florence train station, to the terminal at Siena, and by the time I get there I feel as though I've been frozen, thawed, and frozen again about a dozen times over, like a supermarket fish stick.

Dario meets me at the train station, bearing a box of organic pici from the warehouse that he's earmarked for our dinner. But as we arrive in Vagliagli he comes up with an idea: rather than cook it at home and burden ourselves with the trouble of laying a table and clearing it away afterward (and
with no Rachel around to do it for us), he pulls up to Osteria L'Antico Detto, just thirty seconds down the road from his place. It's a weeknight in February, so business there is bound to be slow; he'll ask Giovanna if she'd mind cooking the pasta for us.

Giovanna wouldn't mind at all. In fact, she seems glad of the company, and after she sets the pot boiling she comes out and lights a cigarette and sits down to chat. Her young waiter, Dani, lingers on the sidelines, jumping to attention whenever Giovanna tosses him an order.

Giovanna is a handsome, athletic-looking woman with fine cheekbones and sand-colored hair she wears pulled back from her face. She also speaks very briskly, so I have difficulty keeping the thread of her conversation. Occasionally she pauses to take a drag off her cigarette and I have a chance to catch up, but as soon as she starts in again I'm left gasping.

Perhaps inevitably, talk soon turns to the Palio. I hadn't known it before, but Giovanna is Sienese—from the Panther contrada, which I still hold in esteem and affection after its hospitality to me last August. But unlike Dario, Giovanna isn't enamored of the great annual rite in the Piazza del Campo.

She keeps saying
“È morto il Palio”
—“The Palio is dead.” She and Dario argue the point for a while, not back and forth but overlapping each other, as Italians sometimes will, so that at first I can't get a sense of what she means; but eventually Dario sits back and sighs and lets her rail on for a bit, and I get a gist of where she's coming from.

Basically, she feels that the Palio has become a spectacle—no longer a rite for the Sienese but a show put on for visitors and gawkers. This is astonishing to me, because to my eyes—
and admittedly I'm one of the gawkers—everything about the Palio is deeply, invincibly authentic. There's no corporate sponsorship, no crass commercialization; you have to look hard even to spot a TV camera. As for tourists—again, admittedly I am one; but ask any tourist how catered to he feels in Siena at Palio time, when the
cittadini
surge forcefully through the streets of their city like blood pumping through vital arteries, knocking visitors aside like stray bacteria. It's nothing at all like, say, Florence, where you have to hire a bloodhound to track down an actual Florentine.

As I consider this, Dario is taking his turn at bat. “You can't say the Palio is dead,” he insists. “You can say it's changed—and it has, of course it has; whether for good or ill, that's a matter of opinion. But you can't say it's
died
. As long as there is turf laid in the piazza every summer and ten contrade send out horses to race, the Palio lives.”

Giovanna keeps waving her cigarette in response, as though she can simply scatter Dario's logic in midair, the way you'd flap away a bad smell. It's at this point that Michele comes in, and Giovanna takes the opportunity to go to the kitchen and dish up the pici.

Michele doesn't stay long enough for a drink, which is saying something; but he apparently has a driver's test the next day and is wisely playing it safe. (His license was once confiscated when he was on his way to a victory dinner in the Porcupine. He says it's a good thing he was pulled over while going
to
the dinner instead of
from;
otherwise they'd also have taken his car, his house, his mother, and his girlfriend.) (I ought to add that
of course
he went on to the dinner anyway, after having consigned his car keys to the carabinieri.) After he leaves we tuck into our pici, and Giovanna lights a new cigarette.
If I thought Michele's cameo appearance would serve as a palate cleanser, prefacing a new topic of conversation, I was wrong, because Dario and Giovanna immediately pick up where they left off.

A few minutes later someone else comes through the door, and wouldn't you know it, it's another Sienese—a worldly-looking man of middle years named Angelo, better known by his tongue-twisting nickname, Gnagno (pronounced
NYAHN-nyoh
), who's introduced to me as being of the Unicorn. (When you're introduced in America, your occupation follows your name—in Siena, it's your contrada affiliation.)

Gnagno joins the conversation, but with less intensity than Giovanna and Dario (later I'll learn that he's still a bit shell-shocked from August, when the Unicorn's great rival the Owl won its first Palio in twenty years). As their talk gets faster and more furious, I lose all track of it. It's like one of those trios in a Mozart opera where everyone tells the audience what they're thinking, only you can't really understand because they're all singing at the same time, and also it's in Italian. And in fact it's as though I'm watching a small-scale production of
Don Giovanni
, with Dario crooning a gently urgent tune, trying to seduce the others into taking his view; Giovanna, à la Donna Elvira, keeps furiously running up the scale, starting with a growl and ending on an aggrieved trill; and Gnagno bounces merrily between them, like a witty Leporello.

And this is when it hits me: the wine, the smoke, the intensity of the emotions, the music of the language … 
I'm back
. The weather may be grim, the street life fallow, but Tuscany remains Tuscany, and heat and vitality are never in short supply.

Giovanna ducks to the kitchen for a moment, returning with sliced steak for us, served with a spinach-Parmesan mold; it's aromatic and colorful and completely delicious. Dani refills our glasses, and while Giovanna lights yet another cigarette, as deliberately as if she were igniting a cannon, Dani smiles at me, and I smile back.

“Crazy,” I say, nodding my head at the three others. Then, thinking he might misunderstand me, I add, “Crazy
wonderful.
”

He pulls up a chair. “I know. I always think so too.”

“But you must be used to it by now.”

He shakes his head. “I haven't been here long enough.”

“You're not a native, then?”

It turns out he's not. He comes from Turin but has landed in Chianti by way of Ireland, China, and—no kidding—Tennessee.

“What brought you here, then?” I ask.

“A girlfriend. That's how I know the Sienese. She's from there.” He pauses only briefly before adding, “Snail,” as though I would of course need to know her contrada.

“They're a very different kind of people, aren't they?”

“It's a strange city,” he says. “Stranger to me than China … stranger even than Tennessee.” I have to laugh at that. “But I'm so jealous of my girlfriend, because to her it's
not
strange. To her it's normal.”

I sense a kindred spirit, and further discussion reveals that in fact he, like me, finds himself wildly attracted to the city's close-knit communities and envious of those born into them. I tell him I hope to earn my way into the Caterpillar contrada, and he wishes me luck, in a way that manages to mix earnest good wishes with a little dollop of
You'll need it
.

When he gets up to clear our plates, he's so stealthy that Giovanna, now deeply engrossed in her conversation—and so shrouded by smoke she can barely see; she looks like the Oracle of Delphi—doesn't notice him go. And when Dario, attempting to convince her that the Palio and its traditions are as solid as ever, uses me as an example—“That's what brings Rob over here so often; he sees their value and has come to study and understand them”—Giovanna, clearly unaware that I'm now listening to every word, snorts in derision and says, quite clearly, “Rob appalls me.”

Immediately my face burns, and I feel a prickle of shame creep over me. I feel as though I've been found out—Giovanna has taken my measure and found me wanting: a tourist, an interloper, a poseur. I have a horrified moment in which I wonder how many other people have looked at me and reached the same conclusion.