What's Laura doing in Tuscany?

Down a Tuscan Alley

“Christ, you wouldn’t get me living down those creepy little alleyways. You never know who might be lying in wait . . . “

1

Pisa

It’s June and sweltering. At the airport I pick up the hire car, a cherry-red Fiat Uno, and place my two beloved cats, Billy and Gertie, on the back seat in their VIP box. My small case goes in the boot; my worldly goods are coming later, in the removals van from England.

Important to get the feel of the car, I tell myself, jiggling the gear-stick and flashing the lights. Skirt Firenze, head for Siena, take the A1 for Perugia – Roma. Simple. Now, if I can just find my way out of the airport. I ease the car through the exit gate, on to the main road and enter the great Italian unknown.

Hardly unknown, though; I have done the journey often enough in the past, with Richard. Only then, I’d been the passenger, happy to sit back and enjoy the scenery, thinking of the things I would do when we arrived: add sand to the paint to create my textured finish for the walls, buy acid to clean the ancient floor tiles while he did the skilled work – building the bathroom and the kitchen. We worked well together, pausing every so often with a mug of tea to look round with pleasure at what we were achieving. But that was then. Now I have the present to deal with.

At the toll station I take my ticket and continue on in the direction of Perugia. I’ve got this far, I reassure myself, things are going well. And after an hour and a half of steady driving I recognize several landmarks, the group of ochre-coloured houses in a field to my left form a triangle and I’m certain I’ve seen them before. The house with the turret on the hill: that, too, looks familiar. And when, after another half-hour, I see the sign for Valdiciana I know I’m on the right road. I put my foot down and overtake several cars at a stretch, the indicator light flashing until I’m safely past.

This is the way to drive in Italy. Like the Italians, swoop up their bums, overtake, and streak on ahead. I give a hoot of laughter and the cherry-red car flies as if on wings along the superstrada. Windows open, warm air whipping hair off my face, I’m free, I’ve given him the slip and I burst into song. I’ve done it: survived endless doubts and sleepless nights and come to Italy to start a new life on my own.

I adjust the rear-view mirror. Soon I will be climbing the street steps to my little apartment. From the bedroom window I’ll see the chapel bell across the terracotta roofs, and beyond to the three cypresses, sticking up like dark green paint-brushes. And standing on the roof, if have a mind to, I’ll look into the carabinieris’ bedroom window opposite; pale, defenseless creatures they seem in their Y-fronts. And I’ll hear the church bells clanging bing-bang-ding-dang, up in the piazza; making enough noise to raise the dead and make them laugh.

And I’m laughing, with relief, as I turn off at the Valdichiana sign. Not long now. Ornelia, in the downstairs flat, will be watering her pots of geraniums; Sergio in the upstairs flat is no doubt playing his tango music, which can be heard all the way down the street to Martino’s alimentari. “Ahhh!” he’ll shout, sweeping his imaginary partner around the sofa, sliding and bending and stamping his heels, mouth in an oooh of pleasure, and “ahhhh!” again as he collides with the lamp. Nothing will have changed. Happily, nothing seems to in Sinalunga’s Centro Storico.

Keep well to the right side of the road, I remind myself, as ten minutes later, light-headed with heat, excitement and exhaustion, I travel up the familiar hill opposite the station.

But halfway up the hill I hear a bang and the car stops with a shudder. I stare ahead in disbelief. What happened? Everything was fine a minute ago. The cats howl; I swivel round to lift their box back on to the seat. Then I turn the key in the ignition. Dead. Now what? Better not to attract attention. The last thing I want is to become a spectacle for everyone to point at. I open the car door and the heat hits me like a furnace. At least the car’s not in the middle of the road. And as far as I can see, no real damage has been done; the bonnet, though, does appear somewhat closer to the ground than before.

Later I am to learn that the whole of the front suspension has dropped out. I stare appalled at the white car behind, the door dented and scraped. It’s obvious what’s happened. In keeping so well to the right I’ve veered into a parked car. I feel sick with disappointment. Why does this have to happen when I’m almost home? Shaking, I lift the cat-box and suitcase out of the car and sit on the hot pavement waiting for inspiration.

People are gathering from nowhere. They stare dubiously at the red Fiat, then at me. An old man mumbles something. I smile apprehensively and say, Buongiorno, it being the only Italian word that springs to mind at the moment. People move closer. They point at my car, then at the white one behind it. Several people are shaking their heads and tut-tutting. Then to my alarm the carabinieri draw up in their dark blue car and park alongside the Fiat, blocking the traffic, causing even more people to stop and stare at the pink-faced English woman melting with her cat-box and suitcase beside her on the pavement.

One tall and handsome, and one short and fat carabiniere saunter towards me, not so defenseless now with submachine guns stuck in their belts. I stand up and offer my passport.

“Dove abita?”

“Vicolo della Mura.”

“But that is Italia,” the fat one says, loudly, glancing round at the people, making sure they can hear him speaking English.

“I know, I’ve come to live here.”

“But where you live in England?”

“I don’t anymore.”

“Uh?” he turns to his tall companion who is writing in a thick black book. “Non capisco. You must.”

“What must I?”

“You must to live in some place in your country.”

Realizing there is no point in explaining; I give him my English address even though I no longer live there. I hold out my hand for my passport and at this point the cats howl again and all attention turns to the VIP box at my feet. “Micio, micio,” squeals a hefty woman, poking her finger through the mesh door. She draws back hastily at the hissing inside. The fat carabiniere gives me a document that is incomprehensible. The sun beats down on my head. I sway slightly and hold onto the handsome carabiniere’s arm for support. Everyone watches avidly. A young woman is looking at me from her car, one of a line moving slowly up the hill with faces turned towards me. I wave and gesture that I need a lift. She nods; I lift the cat-box and suitcase onto the back seat and in less than five minutes we are crossing the Piazza Garibaldi and turning left down the Via Ciro Pinsuti.

News travels fast here. The first person I see as I emerge from the car is Lionello Torossi, my elderly neighbour from the end of the street, who speaks fluent English, German, French and Spanish. “I have heard of the accident with la straniera,” he explains. “And I guessed it was you, and now I have come to help. You have announced your arrival extraordinarily well,” he says, chuckling. “Now everyone knows you are here.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I say. “I had hoped to arrive quietly and anonymously.”

“My dear charming lady, no one arrives anonymously in a place like this. The people are delighted to see you; they want to be entertained. You are their portable theatre.”

Thanking the woman, whose name I didn’t catch, I carry the stricken cats and my suitcase up the street steps, trip over one of Ornelia’s pots of geraniums, round into the alleyway, smelling richly of garlic and soap suds, only to find, to my alarm, my front door wide open.

“Tonina,” I call.

“Madonnasanta!” Brandishing a key, Tonina, who looks after the place, hurries down the stairs to meet me. “Signora, signora Lorri.”

“What’s happened, Tonina?”

“Niente acqua, non c’e il tetto – ” Tonina bursts into an excitable flow of Italian, ‘no water’, ‘no roof’, being the only understandable words. Struggling through the narrow front door, I stagger up the long flight of stone stairs to the bedroom, plant the case on the floor and the cat-box on the bed. I stare at the window, and at a man wearing a pork pie hat. “I spik Inlish,” he says.

Then a man’s voice behind me, from the stairs. “Signora!”

Tonina, almost hysterical, throws up her hand. “Madonnina, Sergio vuole parlare dell’acqua.”

“Oh no, please . . . not now,” I beg. “I can’t talk to anyone, about water or anything else. I’m exhausted.”

“Signora!” Sergio, my upstairs neighbour, hovers outside the bedroom. “Possiamo parlare?”

I force a smile. “Buongiorno. I am very tired. I have not slept. No sleep? You understand? We talk domani?”

Tonina understands, if not all the words, the intentions behind them. She leads Sergio firmly to the stairs with a final “No, no, no!”

But the man with the hat, he’s still there. “Sono Domenico. I make new roof. You Inlish lady? I work in Australia.”

Tonina is back at a run. She closes the shutters in his face. “Non, non, non! Then she turns to me clasping her hands to her chest. “Cara Signora Lorri,” she says. “La situazione é triste.”

I collapse on the bed. In the shadowy light I watch Tonina pile clean linen from the chest of drawers onto the mattress. It is impossible to explain right now that sometimes one can feel less sad being alone than with someone who makes you unhappy. So I nod in agreement and say nothing.

“Ah, la vita.” Tonina sighs with resignation, patting several strands of grey hair into place. She blows a kiss, and then promises to return later with buckets of water.

An acrid stench fills the bedroom. Closing the door, I ease the long-suffering cats from their box, and taking a pillowcase, the nearest thing to hand, dry their damp fur and offer biscuits from my pocket, which they refuse. Am I crazy to come here? Hardly any grasp of the language, forty-seven, alone and with virtually no money? Many would think so. But I do at least own the roof above my head, even if it is half off, and that, after all, was the main reason for coming.

The cats reach up to sniff the shutters, where I think I see Domenico peering at me through the slats.

*

“You have an air about you that makes one believe you have reserves.”

“Inwardly, perhaps. Certainly not outwardly.”

“If you have the one, you’ll have the other. It is only a question of time.”

I’m having a cup of Sunday afternoon tea with my seventy-two-year-old neighbour, retired film director and undisputed ‘wise man’ of the village, Lionello Torossi. I’ve called round for his advice on how much I’ll have to pay for the damaged Fiat, not to mention the other car. “Nothing,” he assures me. “The company is covered for such accidents. You do not have to worry about anything.”

I gaze at Lionello in wonder. Could things ever be that easy in Italy? “But won’t I have to sign something?” I ask.

“There is always something to sign in Italy. But I have spoken to the carabinieri. Your car has been collected and now there is nothing more to be done. What will you do for transport in the meantime?”

I lean back in the chintz-covered armchair with no idea what I’m going to do, not really caring at the moment. It’s too hot to think, I am happy to have Lionello think for me.

“You will buy a car, of course.”

I laugh. “I can’t afford one.”

Lionello’s eyes twinkle. “You know, you English, you are very amusing. One wealthy Englishman I knew was always complaining of not having money. How could he repair his roof? How could he pay for this or that? But the roof was repaired and life continued because when something was important enough he always found the money to do whatever was necessary.”

“He probably sold the family silver to pay for it. Unfortunately, I don’t have any.”

“You English have a talent for pretending to be hard up when really you are comfortably off.” Lionello stretches his elegant linen-clad legs out from the chintz-covered sofa. “Now tell me, I am fascinated; what is a beautiful woman like you intending to do here in this small parochial place?”

Always one for the flattery, Lionello, like most Italians, I was to learn.

“I’m going to do bed and breakfast. I advertised in The Telegraph before coming out. The first couple arrive on the twenty-eighth of this month.”

“But in what bed will you put them?”

“In my bed.”

“You are all sleeping together?”

“No, I sleep in the sitting room.”

“In that miniscule salotto? How is it possible?”

“All is possible when you have to survive.”

“Huh!”  Lionello claps his hands. “You English, you never fail to amaze me. Now, of course, you must buy a larger place. Something with a lovely terrazza and swimming-pool for the guests, no?”

This is becoming hilarious. “What with?” I ask.  “I don’t have that kind of money. In fact, I don’t have any money to speak of.”

“But you told me that you sold the house in England. Surely, Richard divided some money with you?”

“There was virtually nothing to divide,” I explain. “The bank took everything. Richard had to close his building business and accept a friend’s offer of work in Germany where he met another woman with whom he now lives.”

I place my porcelain cup on its saucer. I’m finding it difficult to continue. It only feels like yesterday since we sat in this same room discussing, over tea with Lionello, our plans for coming to live in Italy.

“Well, at least, you have your own charming little apartment. And Richard restored it beautifully. I remember how it was in the beginning: a black hole, filthy and with cobwebs.”

Richard’s Volvo, with the mattress tied to the luggage rack, plus mirrors and pictures. How well I, too, remember; always more items from England on each journey until we had created our ideal holiday home. It had been our base until we could find our dream house, sell up in England and come and live permanently here.

“And is the wine still there? Or did Tonina’s husband drink it all?”

Twelve bottles of Rosso di Montalcino were still stacked along the top of the kitchen cupboard, one bottle of which I’ve already opened. Wine bought to celebrate our arrival in Italy. Little did I think then that I would be celebrating alone.

“And what will you do if Richard returns? Will you accept him back?”

I shake my head. It’s too painful to think of.

*

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m lying on the bed in my underwear, overcome with the heat. The cats sprawl beside me, their ears twitching at any sound coming from the direction of the shutters, still closed against Domenico. Sweat pours off me. This is only June; what will July and August be like?  I look at the English prints above the Victorian chest of drawers, and spot the small rustic wardrobe next to my mother’s hand-carved gilt Italian mirror which had looked exaggerated in her St John’s Wood flat, but which now has found its rightful home in Italy. Lionello said I’m lucky to own such a charming little apartment and it’s true, I am. I gaze up at the heavy oak beams. They were covered in whitewash at first; I worked up a ladder for days on end with a carrier bag over my head, scrubbing at the wood, dirty water splashing into my eyes, ears, and down my neck. But the varnishing had made up for all the hard work, worth the aching back to see the colour seep into the wood bringing the light into it. I felt a deep sense of achievement when I’d finished, as though I had passed some kind of inner test. Mixing the paint to exactly the right shade of ochre and spreading it over the dingy bedroom walls had been like bringing the light into myself.

The window had been too high up the wall to see out of at first. Richard raised the floor so we could sit up in bed and look out at the chapel bell and the sky. And through the other small window above the bed, we could see across the village wall to the church steeple shining in the moonlight as if it had been made of silver.

I found his white canvas shoes under the bed earlier and wrapped them in a carrier bag before I had time to think and hid them on top of the wardrobe; Out of sight, out of mind.

“No looki, looki!”

The cats’ heads jerk up, and Billy, the tabby, hisses at the sound of Domenico outside the shutters. I hold Gertie, the more timid of the two; she’ll spring up on top of the wardrobe, otherwise, and nothing will coax her down for hours.

*

The furniture has finally arrived! The driver tried bringing the lorry down Via Ciro Pinsuti but the street’s too narrow. He reversed out into the piazza, performed a hazardous three-point turn in front of the astonished priest, knocked an urn off a column, and then headed back down the hill, by which time the whole of Sinalunga had been alerted to la straniera once more causing havoc.

I’d almost given up hope of ever seeing my furniture again, when finally, someone provided a pick-up truck and, in slow stages, everything has been brought up the hill and into a narrow street beside the village wall. But with so many sheets, dish-cloths, stockings and knickers dangling from a line strung across from one side to the other, the alleyway leading to my front door was totally obscured.

Sixty-five packing boxes were unloaded in the narrow street outside Tosca, my other neighbour’s front door. Though at least eighty and only as tall as some of the boxes, she was screaming so forcefully that the driver, a weary Englishman from Essex, was doubtful whether to proceed. “La roba, la roba!” she cried, waving her thin little arms frantically up into his face. I couldn’t help wondering what robes had to do with anything? Something had to be done immediately to sort out the chaos, so throwing myself at the boxes, I pushed and shoved, ducking under Tosca’s sheets, stumbling over Ornelia’s geraniums.

But several hours later, when the street was clear, Tosca was still at her door shouting about la roba, which I have since learnt means ‘the things’.

“Va bene, Tosca,” I tried to reassure her. “Tutto finito. No problems.” Tosca squinted up at me and cackled, showing two grey tusks. Then breaking into a flow of incomprehensible words, she wrapped her arms around me and buried her hairy face in my stomach. Hopefully, that meant la straniera had been forgiven for creating such confusione.

Other curious neighbours gathered in the narrow street. Rosalba, known as la vecchia bionda, the old blonde, frowned as she watched the activity. She had been the one Richard and I had lunched with every first Sunday of our visit: pasta with a tomato or meat sauce, both had to be tasted. This was followed by a horrific row of little roasted birds, a delicacy in the area, better not looked at, let alone eaten. “Mangia! Mangia!” Rosalba had yelled above the noise of the television turned up to full blast. “She very funny woman,” Giovanni, her husband said, as he’d poured the vino speciale from Martino’s shop.

***

Dave, the removal man, is looking round my small kitchen incredulously. “Where’s all this stuff going?” he asks.

“I’ll find a place.”

“Like on the roof? he laughs.

His mate, Colin, painfully thin and seemingly too weak to lift anything heavier than a box of towels, sinks onto a box marked ‘fragile’. “Oh, no, please be careful.” I rush forward. “There are some very delicate things in here.”

“Have you come for good?” Colin asks, glancing round at the boxes filling every available space in the kitchen, on the stairs and in the miniscule salotto.

“Well, she ain’t come for the weekend, has she?” says Dave, cackling.

“What brought you here?”

“I wanted to lose myself.”

Neither have an answer to that. Which is just as well as I’m in no mood for conversation. My back is breaking, having heaved most of the heavier stuff up the stairs myself, and all I want is to be left alone with my boxes. Then all I own in the world will be under one sweltering roof. All this effort only to come to another alleyway? But this one is different from the dark and dank one I’ve left behind in Devon. It’s beautiful, with the tawny old bricks, the delicious cooking smells and the general air of colourful dilapidation. And most important of all, it leads to my home. Something no one can take away from me.

Four hours later, it’s beginning to look like a home. The chintz armchair, desk, reading lamp, the tall clock and green two-seater sofa have all been squeezed into the salotto alongside the coffee table, bookcase and cupboard, which were already there. It’s now just possible to take three small steps ahead, two to the right and one to the left without knocking into anything.

Sunlight streams down the kitchen steps, picking out the colours of the old terracotta floor tiles. I sit on the top step and gaze round at the boxes surrounding me, one mounted on top of the other almost to the ceiling. How on earth am I ever to get organised before the B&Bs arrive?

I can’t help laughing; people come to Italy to live in spacious houses surrounded by vineyards. Whereas, here am I, imprisoned by boxes and furniture and not a vineyard in sight. Only a large pair of bloomers (they surely can’t be Tosca’s?) can be seen flapping on the line from my salotto window, and if I lean further out, the street steps leading down from Via della Mura to Martino’s grocer’s shop with his fruit going mouldy in the sun.

But it’s Tuscany! And against impossible odds, I’ve got myself here. I can honestly say that I have never been so excited in my entire life as I am at this moment.

But contacts are crucial. Who do I know well, apart from Lionello? Vittorio Esposito, a friend from the past – if I can call him that. For I don’t entirely trust him; he likes to profit off his friends’ vulnerability, if I remember correctly. Nevertheless, right now, I urgently need his support.

I head across the piazza to the Bar Cortese to use the telephone. At first no one answers. Then Silka, Vittorio’s wife, speaks:

“Ciao, Lorri! We hear that you arrive, but Vittorio cannot to contact you. You have the telephone?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Today is my birthday. You come tonight for dinner with us?”

“I’d love to, Silka. Thank you.”

Even dubious contacts are better than none.

I leave the bar and head back across the piazza trying to contain my excitement. My adventure has begun!

Chapter One |  Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

© 2011

Soon to be published by Solstice Publishing Inc.