Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes Read Free Book Online

been a namesake. I remember that Mussolini
actually was named for the Mexican Benito Juárez, who
fought French oppression. Odd to think of that revolutionary name
travelling through the dictator and into this quiet man whose wide,
blank face and bald head shine like a polished nut. When he speaks,
which is little, he uses the local Val di Chiana dialect. He
cannot understand a word either of us says and we certainly
can't understand him. Even Ian has trouble. Benito worked on the
restoration of the chapel at Le Celle, a nearby monastery, a solid
recommendation. We're even more impressed when Ian drives us out to
look at a house he's restoring near Castiglione del Lago, a farmhouse
with a tower supposedly built by the Knights Templar. The work looks
careful. His two masons, unlike Benito, have big smiles.
    Back at Bramasole, Benito walks through, not even taking a
note. He radiates a calm confidence. When we ask Ian to request an
estimate, Benito balks. It is impossible to know the problems he
might run into. How much do we want to spend? (What a question!)
He is not sure about the floor tiles, of what he will uncover when
he takes the bricks off the upstairs terrace. A small beam, he
notices, needs replacing on the third floor.
    Estimates are foreign to builders around here. They're used to
working by the day, with someone always at home to know how long
they were there. This projecting is just not the way they do
business, although they will sometimes say “Under three days” or
“Quindici giorni.” Quindici giorni—
fifteen
days—we learned is simply a convenient term meaning the speaker
has no idea but imagines that the time is not entirely open ended.
“Quindici minuti,”
we'd learned by missing a train,
means a few minutes, not the fifteen it indicates, even when spoken
by the train conductor about a departure. I think most Italians
have a longer sense of time than we do. What's the hurry? Once up,
a building will stand a long, long time, perhaps a thousand years.
Two weeks, two months, big deal.
    Removing the walls? He doesn't advise it. He makes gestures,
indicating the house collapsing around us. Somehow, Benito will come
up with a number and will give it to Ian this week. As he leaves he
flashes a smile at last. His square yellow teeth look strong enough
to bite through brick. Ian endorses him and discounts Nando as
“the playboy of the western world.” Ed looks pleased.
    Our
geometra
recommends the third contractor, Primo
Bianchi, who arrives in an Ape, one of those miniature three-wheel
trucks. He, too, is miniature, scarcely five feet tall, stout and
dressed in overalls with a red kerchief around his neck. He rolls
out and salutes us formally with an old word,
“Salve,
signori.”
He looks like one of Santa's workers, with
gold-rimmed glasses, flyaway white hair, tall boots.
“Permesso?”
he asks before we go through the door. At
each door he pauses and repeats,
“Permesso?”
as though he
might surprise someone undressing. He holds his cap in his hand in
a way I recognize from my father's mill workers in the South; he's
used to being the “peasant” speaking to the
“padrone.”
He has, however, a confident sense of himself, a pride I often notice
in waiters, mechanics, delivery people here. He tries the window
latches and swings the doors. Pokes the tip of his knife in beams
to check for rot, wiggles loose bricks.
    He comes to a spot in the floor, kneels and rubs two bricks
that are a slightly lighter color.
“Io,”
he says,
beaming, pointing to his chest,
“molti anni fa.”
He replaced them many years ago. He then tells us he was the one who
installed the main bath and that he used to come every December and
help haul the big lemon pots that lined the terrace into the
limonaia
for the winter. The house's owner was his
father's age, a widower then, whose five daughters had grown and
moved away. When he died, the daughters left the house vacant. They
refused to part with it but no one cared