In the afternoon it rains harder. We can’t turn the heating on and the house is cold. A pall of wet gray mist hangs over the valley. The castle looks somber and beautiful, in its shroud of mist and rain. After a while the rain stops and the others go out for a walk. I remain at home to investigate the proprietario’s library. There are a great many books about Renaissance art. I turn their pages; I glance at their Madonnas and Crucifixions, their Annunciations and Resurrections; I probe their texts a little and turn again. I feel that I am standing on the edge of an ocean of knowledge. It is a beautiful ocean, and not uninviting, but all the same it requires my complete immersion in a new element. I don’t know how to start; I don’t know where to breach these waters. I pick up a little book about Piero della Francesca, for there is a print of one of his paintings hanging in a frame in the hall. Straightaway I see names that are familiar to me, Arezzo and Sansepolcro, and even the name of our own village on its island in the plain. There is something called the Piero della Francesca Trail, and it appears to run right past our door. I imagine it as an actual path, zigzagging its way across the fields. I read that Piero was born five miles away, in Sansepolcro, in 1410. His mother was born in our village: that is why the Madonna del Parto is here. There is a print of it in the book. I am startled by it: it is like no Madonna that I have seen before in my life. What a strange expression she wears; what an abstracted, ambivalent look. It is a look that has been known, not imagined. It is a look that I am surprised to see on a human face. Such things as it expresses were not, I thought, visible to the eye.
Madonna del Parto, c. 1450–70, by Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–92)
It is raining again. The water batters hard on the roof; I look out of the window and see it falling in swaths across the valley. I run outside with my arms full of coats and umbrellas, meaning to go and find the others, and discover them standing on the front porch. A car is disappearing down the drive: it is Jim’s taxi. He has just brought them home. They were walking up through the valley. They were in his village when it started to rain.
The children are beside themselves, wanting to tell the story. It seems they took shelter under a stone loggia at the front of a beautiful house in the village square. They are standing under this loggia when the front door opens and a lady invites them inside. She leads them through great marble-floored rooms into her kitchen, where a fire is lit and there are children sitting around a big table. They are invited to join them: their clothes are dried before the fire; they are given drinks, and things made out of chocolate, things so delicious that they are unable fully to describe them to me. This lady, Paola, lives in Florence with her husband and children, but in the holidays they come here, to her childhood home. Outside, the rain has become a torrent. Paola wonders how her visitors are to return to Fontemaggio, and they mention that they met a taxi driver called Jim. Perhaps they could use her phone to call him. Paola laughs. There is no need to calclass="underline" Jim lives here. He rents the top floor of the house, with its beautiful views of the hills toward Arezzo. They go up the stairs and there’s Jim, watching a tennis match on television. The children are amazed. Immediately he dons his anorak to take them home. He will accept no payment. They should see it as a favor.
“Cha-cha” it is: Jim is our hero; I am unanimously overruled. It transpires that it is ciaccia, not a dance but a food, the traditional Sunday night repast of Italian families. The bar is far up a steep hillside, on the road that leads from Jim’s village into the mountains. Everyone is indoors because of the cold. Outside, big puddles make dark shapes on the concrete floor of the deserted terrace. Inside it is brilliant yellow with electric light. Jim is sitting at a long crowded table like the tables you see in paintings of the Last Supper. He knows everyone. He stops and talks with the old toothless men in their berets, with the round women in their gold earrings and dainty shoes, with the witty padrone and with his proud daughter who works behind the bar. Men with Giotto faces clap him on the shoulder as they pass. I see that he looks more than a little Italian himself, with his brown eyes and small, well-modeled head, his dapper tucked-in shirt. The anorak was deceiving. And as for all this talk, it does not pour forth in the argot of the Highland Glens, though I can see why Jim resiled from giving a true account of his Italian. A true account of it would be hard to give. There are only two things to be said about it: that it is mechanically sound; and that in no part or article of it is his Dundee brogue compromised.
We are introduced to everyone at the table. They are an assortment, of foreigners and locals and people from Sansepolcro, Piero’s hometown. There are the couple who live in the castle and the gay antiques dealer and the man from Milan who makes classical guitars by hand. There is Tiziana, the village beauty. There is a woman from Florida who has immigrated to Italy with her two children, and the woman’s sister, who lives in Chicago and has a holiday house in the valley. The two Americans are called Laurie and Suzanne. Laurie is small and neat and slim. Her sister has beautiful milk-white skin like a baby’s that sits in folds at her neck and her wrists. She wears her dark hair in curls, and is abundantly groomed and perfumed and painted. Laurie is a little wizened and anxious-looking. Her children, two girls of eight and thirteen, sit beside her and glance at her frequently. Laurie and Suzanne are Jewish. They say they are the only Jews in the area. They shot the rest, Laurie says drily. They did it in the field right opposite my house. I can see the place from my kitchen window. Together they laugh. Suzanne says people here are always asking her if she knows about the Jewish cemetery. There is a Jewish cemetery in the village. She supposes they are just trying to be friendly, but it happens two or three times a week.
The ciaccia comes: it is two triangular slices of pizza sandwiched together. Laurie’s daughters have theirs with Nutella inside. The younger one takes two delicate bites and pushes it away. Laurie rolls her eyes. Mangia come un uccello, she tells the table. Her Italian is a Jewish-American hybrid of Jim’s. The girl nods sadly. I eat like a bird, she says. She reveals that her name is Harley. Her father named her, after his motorbike. I notice that Laurie and Suzanne are exchanging significant looks. You’re doing it again, Suzanne says to her, sotto voce. Laurie opens her eyes wide. Am I? she mouths. Suzanne nods. You’re doing it again, she repeats. We talked about this earlier and now you’re doing it again. Laurie gives a little anxious placatory grimace and turns brightly away to talk to someone else.