Chapter 2 #8
The frantoio was called, inexplicably, I Bonsai (The Bonsai), and getting there was a rough ride (bumping constantly against Giacomo, who took every opportunity to bump me back), bringing us down a back road past a gloomy castle I had never seen before; in the thick fog, it all seemed imbued with a mystery that in sunlight, surely, would have vanished, revealing only factory buildings.
We found ourselves at an old stone structure whose parking lot was packed even at this late hour; Estelle (narrating the whole business with the hushed gravity of someone explaining a religious ceremony) told me they were pressing olives all day and all night.
Two workers in blue uniforms loaded our crates—one dozen of them!
—onto a conveyor belt, then slid a plastic sheet between our olives and those ahead of us, belonging to a party named Vaggia.
Estelle explained this was to be certain we would not mix olives.
“Who knows what our neighbor uses on their trees? Who knows if they have the olive fly? This way we are sure the oil is ours, and not,” she added with disdain, “Vaggia.” The wait was long, but the workings of the mill fascinated me—a shining steel structure inside, with transparent tubes in which one could see the olives being rushed overhead to the presses, great crushing wheels, and more tubes transporting both the olive remains (for a second crush, a donation to the frantoio) and the first-crush oil itself.
That was incredible to see: pouring from the metal spout into our large containers, a bright green liquid, almost unnaturally chartreuse, swirling like sea-foam and carrying into the air a scent of pine forests and grass.
But an even greater surprise awaited me.
“Vinsanda booked the back room,” Estelle told me as Giacomo and I wheeled the containers along. I looked over at Vinsanda, who grinned sheepishly. “It is his birthday.”
The “back room” was at the far end of the mill, a dim stone chamber, where a simple wooden table was set with plates and silver—and there sat Nimali, smiling as if la vita were not dura after all.
Estelle produced a ceramic pot, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of her wine.
Vinsanda took a seat at the head of the table, smiling as I worked my way through bad Italian in trying to thank him for all his help over the past months.
Nimali had the expression of a piano teacher at a recital, powerless to correct her student.
Then it was time for the oil. The pot contained white beans Estelle had made, the bread was broken, and with the wine we tasted the very freshest oil I may ever have.
It stung like nettles. The unexpected sensation brought me out of myself, and I could see the room with clarity, as if I had wiped my glasses and returned them to my face, now with the ancient stones making of it a painting of workers celebrating a harvest, myself merely one of them, or even (perhaps under the influence of Vasari) a Caravaggio in which we were about to recognize in our companion Vinsanda the divine.
The formal placement of the bread and oil, the shadowed wall and bright faces, the shine of oil on Giacomo’s lips.
I sat very still, trying to keep this remoteness as long as I could, to hold in my mind this moment, plain and ordinary to the others, which my foreignness alone found beautiful.
“It’s a bit harsh on the first press,” Estelle said, and I was brought back to the table. She had noticed my expression at the first taste of the oil. “It will be mellower in spring.” I smiled sadly and took a piece of bread. I would not be here in spring.
High above our little villa brooded the mountains of Vallombrosa, and I had long heard of the abbey sequestered there, where monks sold honey and medicinal liqueurs and it was said that wolves still hunted among the silver firs and beeches.
A hike in the mountains seemed, to me, a fine escape for Giacomo and myself, and, it being Sunday (a day when my employer often liked to dine alone), I proposed to the Baronessa that we remove ourselves and find our own dinner in a nearby village.
“High spirits!” she said with a tight little grin. “I approve.”
“You’ll be all right?”
“You know I do not require attention,” she said, turning to her half of the newspaper. She sat in her parlor with the windows open to the autumn air. “But have you perhaps neglected a guest in need of an outing? Our friend Oscar does not want more of my old stories.”
She was as wrong about herself as she was right about Oscar; once again, my “high spirits” had led me to abandon an old person, and one who had so recently come to my aid.
Oscar, however, declined the invitation when Giacomo and I proposed it, saying his days in the mountains were behind him and that an attack by wolves no longer held the charms it had in his youth.
He sat in the loggia below the Baronessa’s window, beside the fading orange tree, dressed in a camel cardigan and reading the other half of the newspaper.
“You should consider visiting Cascia di Reggello,” he pointed out.
“It is an unassuming village with a masterpiece in its church, one that is seldom visited.” I thanked him for his advice and was about to leave when I felt Giacomo’s hand on my arm.
His glance told me I had missed something.
As always, the American, taking people’s words too literally.
“Would you come and show it to us?” Giacomo asked.
Oscar’s eyes rose above his reading glasses. “I would not put you out of a mountain adventure. I think fondly of my own.”
Giacomo said, in Italian, that it was we who would not want to miss a guided tour of a masterpiece.
Oscar looked to me and back to Giacomo and surely understood, for he smiled as one does when one is offered a special wine.
I tried to curb my disappointment at the loss of a mountain hike and a meal with Giacomo.
The house phone rang twice; it was the Baronessa, suggesting we make a reservation in Cascia at the restaurant Lala and ask for a view of the piazza.
I thanked her and wondered how her deafness had been so magically cured.
The route to Cascia took us over the hill on which I had walked so many times and onto the main road from town.
I drove (I could no longer trust Giacomo’s whims) and, as Oscar and Giacomo chatted in Italian in the macchina, I found that after I had conquered one curve above a terrifying cliff, there would always come another, so that in the end I was wrestling a snake that took us back and forth across the hills until we reached the other side of the valley, and there, with a bit of straight path ahead of me, I was able to glance out the passenger window and see flashes of light reflecting the evening sun—the windows of the Baronessa’s balcony.
My life at Villa Coco, seen now from the world outside.
We passed a row of cypresses and then it was gone.
The town itself appeared to be falling down the hill, the houses held back only by a low, plain Romanesque church before what I took to be a sloping parking lot.
Parking seemed to be prohibited, however, with a sign that read merely Nina!
And yet a truck and trailer had clearly found a home there.
Rebuffed, I put the car under another set of cypresses, on which were tacked more signs of Nina!
“Nina!” Giacomo said with a poignant cry.
He explained this was a famous rock star from the 1960s.
“Andiamo avanti!” he sang merrily. “Andiamo lo stesso!” Both Oscar and I were mystified.
The old man turned to me as we entered the church. “Did you read about Masaccio in your Vasari?”
I said that I had but could hardly be expected to remember. Giacomo paid the fee for the museum, which seemed to be no more than a narrow passageway leading to a distant, gloomily lit room tacked onto the church.
“Ah. Well, he is an important one. His name was not Masaccio, of course, no more than Parmigianino was Parmigianino.” I was pleased that at least I knew Parmigianino.
Oscar went on as we made our way down the hall: “His name was Tommaso. Thomas, and I think they called him Maso. Tom. But there were so many Masos in those days, they had to give him a nickname, and since apparently he never bathed and was a very filthy boy, they called him Masaccio. ‘Dirty Tom.’ And so he remains for eternity. Ah, here we are!”
The only object in the chamber was a triptych on wood, displayed on the wall.
The left and right panels each held two saints, one of them looking at his book like a student caught unprepared for a test, and in the middle sat the Virgin Mary and her child, attended by two kneeling angels.
Everything appeared just as I had seen it many times before.
“Do you see?” Oscar asked, glancing to me and to Giacomo. We must have seemed like students caught unprepared for a test. “The angels. They look away from us.”
It was true; each was at an angle facing Mary so we could make out only part of their faces.
“And the chair,” he said, pausing to allow for dawning comprehension.
I did now notice that Mary was seated in a chair with rather grandly jutting armrests.
“It recedes into the distance. So does the platform on which she sits. You see? You could draw a line from every corner to the point where they meet in the distance. The vanishing point. The famous Renaissance perspective. You have probably studied that in school.” Giacomo nodded.
“Well,” Oscar said, “this is the first time it had ever been done. This painting here. By Dirty Tom.”