“I’m betting airport security is looking through your things,” says my host Ursula over our Italian breakfast, a sugary pastry and full-strength coffee, on her terracotta patio.
“Are they looking for contraband?” I ask.
My backpack wasn’t in baggage claim when I arrived in Pisa last night. The “Aeropuerto” said it would take at least a week to find it, and I’m still wearing yesterday’s sweatpants and rumpled T-shirt.
“Yes, but they’re also looking for valuables?”
“I don’t have any of those.”
“Do you have a brand-name backpack or designer jeans?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Why?”
“It’s not likely your backpack will be returned.”
Italy was to be a refuge. With a deep sense of wasted hope, my fifteen-year marriage flat-lined. The last years seemed like an invisible scoop hollowing out my core. An echo of failure reverberated in its place. Then I caught him with our neighbour. With a twist, the ring came off my finger. I had long fantasized about a life in Italy–it felt like a long-distance crush. What was stopping me now?
I wanted to escape to a place where no one could sense my fragility, where the land and people would regenerate me. Now I wonder, was that an unrealistic expectation?
I found Ursula through a non-profit organisation that connected travellers with hosts. Our one-year agreement stipulated that I would help her with bi-monthly international wine-tasting parties at her home in Gavorrano, a small mountainside town in the western region of Tuscany. In exchange, I’d have free room and board at Ursula’s two-story limestone-walled villa, with its square roof covered in rolled, red terracotta tiles. Unlike me, the villa, blanched from thousands of days in sun and rain, feels solid and strong.
Heading out to find clothes after breakfast, I walk past rows of olive trees. Their leaves are lance-shaped with silvery undersides. I pass the herb garden where fringes of green shimmy from the slight breeze, then carefully navigate slippery smooth rocks to the end of the driveway. I can’t have anything else break.
Along the single-track road are side-by-side, fenced-in vineyards where uninterrupted tracks of fragile young vines soak in the sun. It’s a dry, hot day, and I kick up dirt along the path.
“Buongiorno,” I say to the first passerby heading in the opposite direction, a young woman carrying groceries.
No response.
“Buongiorno,” I say to the second woman, this one older.
Again, no response.
The third woman, elderly and bent over, faces away when I pass.
I know I’m a stranger in a community full of familiarity, but that one stung.
The only clothing store in Gavorrano is the size of a two-car garage and has a roll-down door. It’s haphazardly filled with clothes and shoes. Two women chatting behind the Formica counter look up quizzically. Their thick brows flip into apostrophes.
“Do you need help?” asks the grey-haired woman in no-nonsense rapid-fire Italian.
She sounds annoyed. I catch one word: “aiuto,” or help.
I have no idea what my size is in Italian measurements. I do need help.
“Yes, I want pants and a shirt,” I say in hesitant Italian, as if I didn’t practice twelve times before walking in.
Having studied an Italian phrase book, I know enough to buy food, get directions, and participate in superficial conversations.
The younger lady, pony-tailed and thickly mascaraed, looks me up and down.
“Molto grandi,” she says. Very large.
In a hushed discussion, they take another look at me and nod their heads yes.
Wordlessly, they turn and walk to a door at the back of the shop. It closes behind them.
I wait five minutes.
“Ciao?” I finally call. “Hello ciao? Are you coming back?”
The ponytailed one proudly appears from behind the door holding up enormous, elasticised, polyester knitted pants in dark blue.
“Molto grandi!” She says.
She stretches the waist to canyon-size for emphasis. I’m five feet six inches and within a healthy weight, most of the time.
“Maglietta, per favore?” I request. I need a shirt to go with my ugly blue pants.
Ponytail places my pantaloni next to the cash register and walks to the other side of the shop, calling to her partner in Italian, “The enormous lady wants ….”
Miraculously, two days later my backpack is returned to the postal service in town, which doubles as a utility centre. While I’m there retrieving my backpack, Ursula asks, would I mind paying her utility bills? Of course not, I tell her.
When I enter the post office, all eyes turn to me. It’s a gathering of at least two dozen short, stout, grim-faced, overly suntanned ladies. I’m the tallest person in the room. I smile, but as usual, get nothing in return. Is it me, or this town? Do they sense something within me that they distrust? Is it my fragility, my brokenness?
With one clerk behind the glass partition, it takes two hours to pay the electric and water bills. It would have been shorter if not for the other women cutting in line, elbowing past me every time I move forward.
“Ero qui prima!” I say, again and again. I was here first!
“Il mio turno,” they each reply, as sharp and serious as a cleaver. My turn. Then they laugh.
I don’t have the words to convince them to be fair.
Heading back to the villa, I walk through the town centre to check out what else this less-than-charming place has to offer. There’s a florist, a co-op grocery, a veterinarian, and a coffee shop. On a crumbling half-wall, I’m surprised to see a freshly painted yellow sickle and hammer. I recognise it as a communist solidarity symbol for agricultural and industrial workers. The paint drips look like long, thick tears.
I make a mental note to ask Ursula about it.
Outside the crowded coffee shop, middle-aged men in shorts and dirt-dusted shirts sit. They are all thin and short, perhaps just under five feet (tying grapevines is easier when you’re short, less strain on the back). Their skin is leathery and brown, and their furrowed expressions carry the look of permanent disappointment. I wonder if one of them owns yellow paint.
When I walk by, they raise their heads, point at me, and talk amongst themselves.
I imagine they think I’m a Goliath, that I have no business being here. I’m much too tall to work on vines. I might be a spy.
I note with bemusement the pair of fluffed, prissy-looking miniature poodles lying comfortably across the feet of two of the men. The poodles raise their heads too, lift their noses, take a sniff, then chin plant back down onto worn work shoes.
Back on the dirt road, I wonder if my move here has become another love gone sideways.
Ursula and I spend a lot of time together over the following months, mainly because I don’t have anyone to talk to except her, her clients, or her friends.
She tells me her theory about the sickle and hammer painted on the wall. During the communist regime in Gavorrano in the 1940s and 1950s, she says, decisions were made collectively by the community, with wine production under their control. But this eventually shifted to a state-driven, authoritarian economy that primarily benefited the political elites.
“I think long-time residents still feel betrayed by this chapter in history.” She says.
Through Ursula, I also come to understand the pushy women in the post office. To them, she says, fairness means giving up something. These women who lived through fascism were not about to do that.
Ursula’s villa produces endless dust. It’s hard to keep clean. But I find comfort in her company, and her stories; it seems I’m not the only one who dived in for love without checking for hazards.
“We all are idiots when we are young, it’s inevitable we make mistakes,” she says.
“Well, that’s a relief,” I say.
“Just learn from them,” she says with a steady stare.
One afternoon, Ursula’s visiting friend teaches me the basics of grape production. There’s berry formation, lag, and ripening, she tells me.
Lag is the deceleration of growth, right before a second period of accelerated growth. The berry slows down to half of its potential, and the energy is used in maturing the seeds within the berry and thickening the skin before a necessary second burst of growth.
I smile while she talks about lag, the idea of slowing down to gain a tougher exterior.
Out in the community, it becomes a game for me. I say hello to everyone who passes by in hopes that someone–beyond the grocers and coffee shop workers who feign politeness–will crack and acknowledge me.
It takes a solid five months of walking down roads before a resident responds to my Buongiorno. When I get my first one, I nearly skip home.
This breakthrough, however, does not mean anyone will greet me first.
Buongiorno, I continue to say. Buongiorno, buongiorno, buongiorno.
*****
It’s now September, which means harvest season. The fragile vines I saw when I arrived in March have formed berries, rested, and ripened. All villagers are invited to celebrate the bounty.
I’m given an invitation to the town party as I check out my groceries. The cashier looks me straight in the eyes when she sternly places the flier in my hand. I hold it gently, as if it’s fragile and precious, as if it’s something I might have earned.
The next night, bright white lights strung from building to building illuminate the road. A row of card tables lines the pavement, offering meats, cheeses, bread, and batches of new wine.
The locals–old, young, and in-between–drink, eat, and dance to brass music played by a mostly talented local high-school band sporting blue uniforms with white boots.
I sit on the concrete curb next to a pair of feet covered by a white poodle, and drink the freshly made wine. I’ve come to watch people embrace, laugh, and be exuberant.
“Cosa fai?” asks ponytail lady Maria from the clothing shop. What are you doing?
“Sto guardando,” I say. I’m watching.
“No, no.” She lifts her arms in fervent alarm.
“Dio, donna alzati e balla, celebra la tua buona fortuna!” She says. Goodness woman, get up and dance, celebrate your good fortune!
My good fortune, I say under my breath. Yes. I’m still here. I am stronger.
“Devi partecipare per appartenere,” she says.
You must participate to belong.
A grey-haired gentleman standing beside her gives me a nod of approval.
I stand up and take the last sip from my glass.
Eternity has passed between March and September.
I raise my arms and dance.