THE PREGNANT MADONNA
The Pregnant Madonna lives in the village, beside the main road. They keep her in the old schoolhouse. It is a small, plain, white cement building, distinct from the precarious earth-colored terraces that form silent, dark, delicate chasms around the narrow village streets, winding uphill to their own exiguous and mysterious summit. The village suffered an earthquake in 1917, in which the original school building was destroyed. We meet an elderly lady who tells us how on that day her throat was sore and her mother let her stay at home. More than half of her classmates were killed by the building’s collapse. These days the school is situated in a modern complex elsewhere and the small, vaguely funereal, white cement building that extemporized between tragedy and renewal houses the Madonna.
On that side of the village the road, leading nowhere in particular, is quiet. Once or twice a day an air-conditioned coach appears at the narrow intersection like a vast, snub-nosed whale, venting great sighs from its hydraulic brakes, and clumsily maneuvers itself into place outside the old school. From its side tourists are disgorged, people from Germany and Holland, people from Japan, come to unearth the Madonna from her obscurity here by the side of the road. The rest of the time the building stands brilliant white and silent in the sunshine while the curator sits on the front steps, reading the Corriere della Sera and smoking Marlboro Lights. He is a man with business interests, and has dogs that are reputed to be the most voracious truffle hunters in the region. Often a woman is sitting on the steps in his place, keying messages on her mobile phone or talking over the little gardens to the lady who runs the café a few doors up. There are quite a few women prepared to keep an eye on the Madonna for the truffle hunter. I often pass the old school and see one or another of them, half bored, half dreaming, suspended somehow in her posture there on the steps, and they seem to me to have a certain kinship with the Madonna herself, with her weary pregnant slouch and her ambivalent mouth. Not so long ago the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered three million euros for her, and the Italian government paid the ransom. At five o’clock the truffle hunter or one of his molls locks the little wrought-iron gate at the bottom of the steps and knocks off for the day, pocketing the key and wandering away down the quiet road that is half shadow, half light.
We are staying not far away, in a house up a steep dirt track on top of the facing hill, with a kilometer or so of intricate Italian fields in between and a soft green valley on the other side. This house is to be casa nostra for the next two months. We arranged it all in England, not knowing what we would find. I saw photographs of it, as I saw photographs of many other houses, photographs that filled me with strange feelings of voyeurism: pictures of rooms with enormous three-piece suites, of knickknacks and blackened fireplaces, of strangers’ beds and kitchens and bathrooms, all suffused with an atmosphere of sadness, of impermanence, as though the people who lived there had been lost or gone astray. By contrast, the photographs of our house were so subtle as to reveal virtually nothing about it at all. They were studies of light and shade and perspective, abstract and beautiful. If only in matters of taste, I felt sure that the person who had taken them could be relied on.
The house is near Arezzo, on the eastern edge of Tuscany, where a road continues east through a gorge whose steep wooded sides plunge down on either side from far overhead. The road winds on and on through this green chasm-like wilderness. When it comes out, it is onto the flattest of plains. It is this proximity of extremes that gives the Italian landscape its atmosphere of miniaturism. It is like traveling through the plaster contour maps that hung on the wall of our geography room at school and that always seemed so enchanting, with their cozy little woods, their baby hills and streams, their gnomish dwellings and small, scaleable mountains. In the distance a village stands as though on an island, its shining roofs and tower crowning a mound of hill that rises alone out of the flat terrain. Beyond it are purple hills of an unearthly appearance, dreamlike and remote, as unreachable as the distances of a painting. The large soft sky rolls with cloud: the light falls in columns on the flat fields. The road goes up through the village with its deep, narrow streets and out the other side. Now it runs among hills, orderly and wavelike and neatly cultivated, with stone houses and ancient castellated towers in the folds.
There is something almost comical about them: they are so childlike and undulating and miniature, so picturesque and unreal. There is a sign by the roadside that reads Umbria, but our house is not in Umbria. The road goes there, meanders away and disappears into its green wooded hills. At the same place there is another sign, small and hand-painted, that points right. It reads Fontemaggio. A dirt track threads its way across the fields and up a hill, at the top of which stands a house. In the late afternoon the light suddenly ebbs away from the wave-like hills. I was to notice this often, how night fell in the valley, not through the arrival of darkness but through the departure of light. The darkness has no substance: it is merely an absence, a suspension. At this time of day the house makes a black shape on its lonely hilltop. Its silhouette is imposing, and far from friendly. We look at it from down below: we seem, all of a sudden, so far from home, so self-willed and rootless. And yet it is this feeling that is the decisive stroke in the process of our liberation. As we look at those dark, distant windows our bounds are cut, our anchors weighed. We turn the car off the road and creep slowly into the quiet of the lightless fields.
There is a bang at the door. It is a man. He is wearing an anorak with a hood, for it is raining, though so softly that it is more like mist. His name is Jim: he introduces himself, with handshakes all round, and distributes his card. I look at it. It says: Enjoy a drink! Jim Balercino, Scottish Taxi Service. For a moment I misunderstand it, for it seems to suggest that it is Jim who will be offering drinks to his passengers, and that that is what a Scottish taxi service is. In fact I am a little disconcerted generally by his arrival, with his broad Dundee accent and his anorak. It gives substance to my fear that this landscape is inhabited entirely by foreigners, all tussling over their threadbare scrap of Italian culture. I have found one or two paperbacks in the sitting room, with titles like Extra Virgin and Tuscany for Beginners (“Love and War in a Hot Climate!”), which I feel certain our gracious owner must have allowed to remain there either ironically or by mistake.
But Jim has not come to tout for business. He has come to make sure that we are all right. The telephone number on his card is for our own personal use, should we find that we are not all right. He lives just over there, on the opposite hill, where this morning, looking out of our window, we saw what the darkness had hidden from us the night before: a great castle, with a village at its feet. That is the village where Jim lives. It stands on its hill and we stand on ours, and the valley floor lies in between, a distance of perhaps five hundred meters as the crow flies, though Jim, of course, lives in Umbria and we do not. He has lived here for fourteen years. This does interest me, if only in the context of Italian in Three Months. I wonder how well he speaks it: I imagine his Dundee accent sitting on his tongue, as stubborn as a stain. I am enthralled by the prospect of his fluency, for fluent he must be, after all this time. But Jim claims not to speak any Italian at all. He understands a bit, he says, but he can’t really speak it. He stands there in the hall, reiterating that we must ask him for whatever we need. He’s a sort of unofficial minder, he says, for the Brits that come to the area. He chucks the children under their chins. But he seems a little mystified by us nonetheless. No one has ever rented this house for such a long period, he says. Usually they just stay a week or two. Before he leaves, he tells us that on Sunday nights, at the bar in his village, there is some kind of festivity. He calls it “cha-cha”: I have no idea what it is, but I don’t doubt that it will be a breeding ground for Jim’s pet Brits. Mildly, he exhorts us to come. The kids’ll enjoy it too, he says, chucking them again. Sunday night is tomorrow. I am determined not to go: I would rather spend a whole evening studying the agreement of the past participle with the direct object pronoun. I would rather spend the evening reading Extra Virgin.