The figure pauses, and then waves to us, and only then do we realise it’s Lorenzo, working on the house he’s attempting to renovate for a studio. He beckons us up to have a closer look. He’s done a lot of the structural work, and virtually finished the new roof, but it will still be a year or so till it’s properly habitable. He shows us the sixteenth-century tiles he’s using, given by another neighbour, his boyish enthusiasm bubbling over at the fact they’re still in such remarkable condition. He turns over a tile to show us something he found, after scraping away the moss – an inscription ‘Wivere Pace’ (’Long live peace’ – with the old Latin spelling of ‘vivere’). On other tiles he’s discovered the paw prints of cats and dogs. The liveness of the animals, frozen in the clay 400 years ago, and now giving a kind of literal and allegorical shelter for another age.
As we walk to the top of the village, where the trattoria is, we go through an arch dividing the oldest part of the village from the rest. Under the arch there are hundreds of rusted nails, each one denoting a villager who has died. The black-and-white notices are long gone, but the nails remain, pockmarking the surface, the older ones rusting into the stone like dried blood. Each nail a life spent here. A little further on we bump into Mario, a friend of Lorenzo’s – a man in his seventies, a crumpled face, lopsided smile, wearing a curious green, triangular hat. Lorenzo begs him to bring another load of wood down to the house. Mario protests, he can’t do it this evening, he begins to walk away. Lorenzo makes a face, does the ‘praying hands’ gesture, and explains he has guests, what will they think if the village can’t even provide wood for them? Where is the hospitality in that?! Mario smiles sardonically, realising he’s trapped, telling him, with playful taps on his chest, ‘Lorenzo! You will put me in my grave! OK, OK, I give up, but one load, OK? I give in! Stasera, sí!’ He walks away, down the cobbled path, waving his right hand in the air behind him.
As we get to the trattoria we ask Lorenzo about his relations with the villagers. Well, of course some of them think he’s mad, but others respect what he’s done, and the fact he’s restoring two houses. He doesn’t have the ‘deep and meaningful’ conversations with people here, which he used to have in the city, but that’s OK. ‘It’s so light here. It suits me. “Allegro”, if you get my drift.’ And there’s a kind of code of behaviour, completely unspoken, but understood by all who live here. People help each other, they have to, it’s the only way of surviving. Soon after he arrived a couple of years back, the old woman whose house he was renting at first, while renovating his own, asked if he knew anything about cars. She took him to a large shed on the edge of the village and revealed, to his amazement, a fine silver 1949 Lancia. It had been her husband’s pride and joy, and now she wanted to give it to her nephew, but, she shrugged her shoulders – it hasn’t started for years. Lorenzo, with a little help from a friend, managed to get it working, much to the woman’s delight. The next day, returning from a walk, he found five magnificent roof beams propped against his house. No note or anything. He asked around; nobody knew where the beams had come from. A week later the old woman died suddenly, and at her funeral the daughter asked Lorenzo if he’d received the wood. Her mother had wanted him to have it.
I’m happy to be sociable for a day, even two, at a push, but soon I’m feeling an overwhelming need to have time to myself, to write and think. The next day Erin heads off with her camera, and as Lorenzo’s still working on the roof of his studio, I borrow his neighbours’ house to do some writing. First I light a fire. The instinct of this action, learnt as a child growing up in the country – always the joy of just using a match and some newspaper, and then feeding the smallest, driest twigs into the fire, and seeing the flame take hold, then gradually adding thicker kindling, and, after a few minutes more, knowing the intense glow will now be able to deal with a small log. I know intimately how English oak, ash, elm and apple burn, but I’m unsure about these Italian logs – different types of wood, some chestnut, and some with a curious sheen on the bark which reminds me of cherry. But soon the flames are lapping round the kindling, and I reach for the thinner logs. The fire hisses and fusses around them at first, but within ten minutes the flames are established, and soon I’m able to feed on the heavy piece of old roof beam that Lorenzo has discarded from the studio. It will burn until dusk, maybe even through the evening, my companion today, giving out its stored energy from the sun of centuries ago.
And here I sit in my coat and scarf, at the beaten-up old wooden table, in the irregularly shaped, bare room, fire blazing, looking out through the rectangle of window to the other side of the valley. From time to time I can hear Lorenzo hammering on the roof, a dozen houses away, and occasionally the crackle of voices, exclamations, laughter. But the hissing of the fire is more constant. In the corner of the room I see a dusty cassette recorder, and out of curiosity, press the ‘play’ button. A single cello, Bach surely. It sounds like the quintessence of wood itself this afternoon echoing in this room of wood and stone.
I look into the fire, mesmerised as always. I think about how rare such moments are. The struggle for time. This is what most of our lives consist of, in our supposedly rich world. The ‘luckier’ ones talk of five or six weeks’ holiday a year. Many people batter themselves into submission in cities doing soul-destroying work, and then feel pathetically grateful for a few weeks’ remission. And for what? ‘Time off.’ It doesn’t begin to make sense. And I find myself wondering just how much writing I’ll really be able to do in the coming months, trying to juggle the demands of teaching, a relationship. I see my twenty-four-year-old self in a way I haven’t before, with an almost ironic detachment, as if observing myself from a distance. I turn the music off, and take out my battered typewriter from its blue case.
*
The sound of the fire was sound enough, needing no recorded music. The light of the room was light enough, needing no artificial bulb. The warmth of the fire was warmth enough. He stretched his feet, sensing the prickling of cold bones, the beginning of thawing from the heat, the blood coursing, warmer, through his veins.
And suddenly he was with his father. Some years before, on an icy evening, above the old house. Returning from the fields and wood cutting. Walking steadily down the hill, in the tractor’s ruts, the barn silhouetted against the last silver of the dusk. Walking just in front of him, almost home now, he stops. They pause together, for only a matter of seconds. They look down to the house below. Curtains not yet drawn, the light from the two windows spills out. Promise of warmth, the fire inside, the dark beams, supper, family. Nothing said between them, just a silent appreciation of that moment, shared.
My father loved fire. After dark I would sometimes find him still outside, tending the shuddering remains of a bonfire. Hypnotised and drawn by its elemental simplicity – the neat rings of charred wood circling at the edge of white-hotness – he, with his back against a tree, smoking. Or gathering the stray twigs that had avoided the fire and feeding them back into this sun. Or bringing down larger, springier boughs, with some force, on the core of the fire, sending a skyful of sparks into the black above.