I don’t believe her but when I break open the cookie, it is crawling with maggots. I quickly throw it out the window.

‘‘What did you see in that awful gyp joint?’’

‘‘Nothing,’’ I answer.

Growing up, I absorbed the Southern obsession with place, and place can seem to me somehow an extension of the self. If I am made of red clay and black river water and white sand and moss, that seems natural to me.

However, living as a grown woman in San Francisco, I never have that belonging sensation. The white city with its clean light on the water, the pure, heart-stopping coast, and the Marin hills with the soft contours of sleeping giants under blankets of green—I am the awed tourist, delighted to have made this brief escape, which is my adult life. My house is just one of thousands; 274

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my life could be just another story in the naked city. My eye looks with insouciance at the scissors point of the Transamerica pyramid and jagged skyline I can see from my dining room window.

Everyone seems to have cracked the door two inches to see who’s there. I see you through my two inches; you see me through yours. We are monumentally self-reliant.

i n e v e r t i r e o f g o i n g i n t o i t a l i a n c h u r c h e s . t h e vaulted arches and triptychs, yes. But each one also has its characteristic blue dust smell, the smell of time. The codified Annuncia-tions, Nativities, and Crucifixions dominate all churches. At the core, these all struggle with the mystery of the two elementals—

birth and death. We are frangible. In the side altars, the high arches, the glass manuscript cases in the crypts, the shadowed curves of the apse, these archetypal concerns and the dreamland of religious fervor lock horns with the painterly subject matter in individualized ways. I’m drawn to a bizarre painting that practically leaps off the wall. In a dark, high panel close to the ceiling in San Gimignano, there’s Eve rising boldly out of supine Adam’s open side. Not the whoosh of instantaneous creation I’ve imagined from reading Genesis, when she appeared as easily as ‘‘Let there be Light.’’ This is graphic, someone’s passion to be present at the miracle. As graphic as the wondrous cobra of Calcutta spiraling up in the humid air of South Georgia before my very eyes. Adam is meat. The vision grabs the viewer like the glow-in-the-dark torch. Now hear this, loud and clear. In Orvieto’s Duomo, Signorelli’s humans, just restored to their flesh on Judgment Day, stand grandly and luxuriously beside the grinning skeletons they were just moments before. Parts of the body still glow with the aura of the bare bone, a gauzy white light emanating from the R E L I C S O F S U M M E R

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firm, new flesh in its glory. A strange turn—we’re used to thinking of the decay of the flesh; here’s the dream of rejuvenation.

Flitting around in the same arena of that cathedral are depictions of hell, green-headed devils with snaky genitals. The damned are twisted, poked, jabbed, while one voluptuous blonde (no doubt what her sins were) flies away on the back of a devil with stunted, unaerodynamic wings. Clearly we are in someone’s head, midnight imaginings of the descent, the fall, the upward turn. The paintings can be sublime but there is a comic book aspect to much church painting, a wordless progression of blunt narrative very close to those of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists who still hold forth in the South. If there was more than one word, Repent, hanging on those Southern pines, it was bound to be Doomsday.

Wandering around in churches, I see over and over San Sebas-tiano pierced with arrows, martyred Agata holding out her breasts on a plate like two over-easy eggs, Sant’Agnes kneeling piously while a lovely youth stabs her in the neck. Almost every church has its locked relic box like a miniature mausoleum, and what does this mean? Thorn from the crown. Finger digits of San Lorenzo. The talismans that say to the viewers, ‘‘Hold on; like these, have faith.’’ Standing in the dim crypt in a country church where a handful of dust has been venerated for several hundred years, I see that even today, toward the end of the century, the case is remembered with fresh carnations. I uncover my second realization: This is where they put their memories and wants. Besides functioning as vast cultural repositories, these churches map intimate human needs. How familial they begin to seem (and how far away from the historical church, the bloody history of the Papacy): the coarse robe of St. Francis, another phial of Mary’s, this one filled with tears. I see them like the locket I had, with a curl of light brown hair, no one remembered whose, the box of rose petals on the closet shelf behind the blue Milk of Magnesia 276

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bottle and the letters tied with frayed ribbon, the translucent white rock from Half Moon Bay. Never forget. As I wax the floor tiles and wring out the mop, I can think of Santa Zita of Lucca, saint of housekeeping, as was Willie Bell Smith in my family’s house. Basketmaker, beggar, funeral director, dysentery sufferer, notary, speleologist—everyone has a paradigm. I once was lost but now I’m found. The medieval notion that the world reflects the mind of God has tilted in my mind. Instead, the church I perceive is a relief map of the human mind. A thoroughly secular interpretation: that we have created the church out of our longing, memory, out of craving, and out of the folds of our private wonders.

If I have a sore throat from drinking orange juice when I know I’m allergic to it, the saint is there in his monumental church at Montepulciano, that town whose syllables sound like plucked strings on the cello. San Biagio is a transubstantiated metaphor and a handful of dust in a wrought box. Its small key-hole reminds us of what we most want to be reminded of, you are not out there alone. San Biagio focuses my thoughts and throws me beyond the scratchy rawness of my own throat. Pray for me, Biagio, you are taking me farther than I go. When the TV is out of whack and the buttons won’t improve the picture, nor will slapping the side soundly, Santa Chiara is out here somewhere in saintland. Chiara, clear. She was clairvoyant and from there is only a skip and jump to receiver, to patron saint of telecommuni-cations. So practical for such a transcendent girl. A statue of her on top of the TV won’t hurt a thing. Next year on July 31, the wedding ring of Mary will be displayed in the Duomo in Perugia. The history says it was ‘‘piously stolen’’—isn’t that an oxy-moron—from a church in Chiusi. Without a shred of literal belief, I, for one, will be there.

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a t t h e t o p o f t h e s t a i r s , i t o u c h t h e s p r i n g w a t e r i n my ceramic Mary with my fingertip and make a circle on my forehead. When I was baptized, the Methodist minister dipped a rose in a silver bowl of water and sprinkled my hair. I always wished I’d been baptized standing knee deep in the muddy Alapaha, held under until the last moment of breath then raised to the singing congregation. My spring water in Mary’s cup is not transformed to wash away my sins or those of the world. She always seems like Mary, the name of my favorite aunt, rather than Santa Maria. Mary simply became a friend, friend of mothers who suffered their children’s pain, friend of children who watched their mothers suffer. She’s hanging over almost every cash register, bank teller, shot giver, bread baker in this town, and I’ve grown used to her presence. The English writer Tim Parks says that without her ubiquitous image to remind you that all will go on as before, ‘‘you might imagine that what was happening to you here and now was unique and desperately important . . . I find myself wondering if the Madonna doesn’t have some quality in common with the moon.’’ Yes. My unblessed water soothes. I pause at the top of the stairs and repeat the lovely word acqua.

Years ago, the baby learned to say acqua on the lake shore at Princeton, under a canopy of trees blooming madly with pink pompons. Acqua, acqua, she shouted, scooping up water and letting it rain on her head. Acqua sounds closer to the sparkle and fall, closer to wetness and discovery. Her voice still reverberates but now I touch my little finger as I remember. The gold signet ring, a family treasure, slipped off in the grass that day and was not to be found. Water of life. Intimacy of memory.

Intimacy. The feeling of touching the earth as Eve touched it, when nothing separated her.

In paintings, the hilltop town rests in the palm of Mary’s hand or under the shelter of her blue cloak. I can walk every street of my Georgia town in my mind. I know the forks in the pecan 278

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trees, the glut of water in the culverts, the hog pear in the alley.

Often the Tuscan perched villages seem like large castles—extended homes with streets narrow as corridors, and the piazze, like public receptions rooms, teeming with visitors. The village churches have an attitude of privacy; the pressed linen and lace altar cloths and scarlet dahlias in a jar could be in family chapels; the individual houses, just suites in the big house. I expand, as when my grandparents’ house, my aunt’s, my friends’, the walls of home were as familiar to me as the lines in my own palm. I like the twisted streets up to the convent where I may leave a bit of lace to be mended on a Catherine wheel, spin it in to the invisible nun, whose sisters have tatted in this great arm of the castle for four hundred years. I do not glimpse even the half moons of her nails or the shadow of her habit. Outside two women who must have known each other all their lives sit in old wooden chairs between their doorways and knit. The stony street slopes abruptly down to the town wall. Beyond that stretches the broad valley floor. Here comes a miniature Fiat up this ridiculously steep street no car should climb. Crazy. My father would drive through swol-len streams that flooded sudden dips in the dirt roads. I was thrilled. While he laughed and blew the horn, water rose around the car windows. Or was the water really that high?

We can return to live in these great houses, unbar the gates, simply turn an immense iron key in the lock and push open the door.

Solleone

s o l l e o n e . h o w u s e f u l t h e - o n e s u f f i x in Italian; the noun expands. Porta, door, becomes portone, and there’s no doubt which is the main door. Torre becomes torre-one, the name of our part of Cortona, where a great tower must have stood once. Minestrone, then, always is a big soup. Days of the sun in Leone (Leo): Solleone—big sun. Dog days we called them in the South. Our cook

told me the name was because it was so hot

that dogs went mad and bit people and I

would be bitten if I didn’t mind her. Even-

tually, I was disappointed to find the name

only meant that Sirius, the dog star, was ris-

ing and setting with the sun. The science teacher said Sirius was twice the size of the

sun and I thought, secretly, that somehow

the heat was augmented by that fact. Here,

the expanded sun fills the sky, as in the ar-

chetypal child’s drawing of house, tree, and

sun. The cicadas are in the know—they

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provide the perfect accompaniment to this heating up. By dawn they’re hitting their horizon note of high screech. How a finger-sized insect can make such a racket only by vibrating its thorax, I don’t know. As they tune up to their highest pitch, it sounds as though someone is shaking tambourines made from the small bones of the ear. By noon, they’ve switched to sitars, that most irritating of instruments. Only the wind quiets them; perhaps they must hang on to a limb and can’t clutch and vibrate at the same time. But the wind seldom blows, except for the evil appearance now and then of the scirocco, which gusts but doesn’t cool, while the sun roars. If I were a cat, I would arch my back.

This hot wind brings particles of dust from the African deserts and deposits them in your throat. I hang out the clothes and they’re dry in minutes. The papers in my study fly around like released white doves, then settle in the four corners of the room.

The tigli are dropping a few dry leaves and the flowers suddenly seem leached of color, although we have had enough rain this summer that we have been able to water faithfully every day. The hose pulls water directly from the old well and they must feel blasted at the end of the hot day by the rush of icy water. Perhaps this has exhausted them. The pear tree on the front terrace has the look of a woman two weeks overdue. We should have thinned the fruit. Branches are breaking under the weight of golden pears just turning ruddy. I can’t decide whether to read metaphysics or to cook. The ultimate nature of being or cold garlic soup. They are not so far apart after all. Or if they are, it doesn’t matter; it’s too hot to think about it.

The hotter the day, the earlier I walk. Eight, seven, six o’clock, and even then I rub my face with number thirty sunblock. The coolest walks start at Torreone. A downhill road leads to Le Celle, a twelfth-century monastery where Saint Francis’s minute cell still opens onto a seasonal torrential stream. Many of the first Franciscan monks who lived as hermits on Monte Sant’Egidio started Le Celle in 1211. The architecture, a stacked stone honeycomb up S O L L E O N E

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against the hillside, recalls their caves. When I walk there, peace and solitude are palpable. In early summer, the rush of water down the steep canyon makes its own music and sometimes, above that, I hear singing. By now the stream is almost dry. Their vegetable garden looks like a model. One of the Capuchin friars who lives there now trudges uphill barefooted toward town. He’s wearing his scratchy brown robe and strange pointed white hat (hence cappuccino), using two sticks to pull himself along. With his white beard and fierce brown eyes, he looks like an apparition from the Middle Ages. When I pass him he smiles and says, ‘‘Buon giorno, signora. Bene qua,’’ nice here, indicating the landscape with a rotation of his beard. He glides by, Father Time on cross-country skis.

But I take the slightly uphill road this morning, passing a few new houses, then a kennel, where dogs go into an uproar until I am about five feet beyond their pen; the road is then just a white track through pine and chestnut forests, no cars, no people. The shoulders look as though someone scattered one of those cans of native wildflowers seeds and they all took root, then flourished. I climb a hill to look at an abandoned house so old that it still has a thick slate roof. Brambles surround the doors and windows. I glimpse dark rooms with stone walls. In front, I look down on a 180-degree view of Cortona in profile and on the entire length of the Val di Chiana, a yellow and green patchwork of sunflower and vegetable fields. The upstairs must have a low ceiling, right for a crude bed made of chestnut limbs, a white goose-down quilt.

The terrace should go there—in front of the lilac bushes. A pink rose still blooms its heart out without any care at all. Whose was it? The wife of a silent woodcutter who smoked his pipe and drank grappa in the winter evenings when the tramontana shook the windows on the back of the house? Perhaps she growled at him for sticking her so far in the country. No, she was content with her work embroidering the linens for the contessa.

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broad terrace overlooking the world? The waiting house: all potential. To see one and start dreaming is to imagine being extant in another version. Someone eventually will buy it and perhaps will run all over Tuscany looking for old slate to restore the roof authentically. Or the new owner might rip off the roof and put on flat new tiles. Whatever the predilections, the owner will respond to the aerie’s isolation, that and the magnetic pull of the panorama, a place to linger and soothe the restless beast every day.

At the end of the road, a path through the woods leads to our favorite Roman road. I suppose it was laid by slaves. When I first heard about the Roman road near our house, I assumed it was unique. Not long after that I saw a rather thick book on the many Roman roads of this area. Walking alone, I try to think of chariots tearing down the hill, though the only thing I’m likely to meet is a cinghiale, a wild boar, roaming around. One stream still has a trickle of water. Maybe a Roman messenger verging on heat stroke paused here and cooled his feet, as I do, when running south with news of how Hadrian’s wall was coming along. There have been more recent visitors; on the grassy bank, I see a con-dom and a wad of tissue.

When I walk into town, I see a shriveled, pasty man who, clearly, is dying. He has been propped in the doorway with the sun fully on him, his last chance for revival. He spreads out his fingers on his chest, warming everything he can. He has enormous hands. Yesterday I received a shock so hard my thumb went numb for half an hour. I was trying to pull the cord that turns on the overhead light in my study from the inside of the radiator, where it somehow had fallen. The clicker I had hold of split, leaving me with my thumb on the hot wires, my other hand on the metal radiator. I screamed and jumped back. That mindless, animal feeling of shock—I wonder if the man in the doorway feels that way in the sun. His life force siphoning off, the great solar energy coming at him, filling him up. His wife sits beside S O L L E O N E

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him and appears to be waiting. She’s not mending or pinching back her flowers. She’s his guard for his trip to the underworld.

Perhaps she’ll dry his dead body, then anoint his bones with olive oil and wine. Or maybe the heat is getting to me, too, and he’s just recovering from an appendectomy.

w e m u s t g o t o a r e z z o , a b o u t h a l f a n h o u r a w a y , t o pay our insurance for next year. They seem to expect us to turn up rather than send a check. We park in the broiling train station lot. The station’s full-sun digital thermometer-clock says it is 36˚

(97˚F). After our pleasant inter view with Signor Donati, an ice cream, a stop for Ed to buy a shirt at his favorite store, Sugar, and one for me to buy hand towels at my favorite shop, Busatti, we come back to the car and find the big 40 (104˚) flashing over the car. The door handles appear to be on fire. The heat inside slams into us. We air out the car and finally get in. My eyelids and earrings are hot. Ed touches the steering wheel with his thumbs and index fingers. My hair seems to be steaming. Stores are closing; it’s the hottest part of the hottest day of the year. At home, I lower myself into a cool bath, wet washcloth over my face, and just lie there until my body takes on the temperature of the water.

Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor. If I am mad enough to take a walk after one-thirty, no one is out, not even a dog. The word torpor comes to mind. All shops close during the sacred three hours. If you need something for bee sting or allergy, too bad. Siesta is prime time for TV in Italy.