their regret. Cortona has little crime and certainly nothing remotely like this, ever. I knew they were mortified and I was sorry to be the troublesome foreigner who attracted such an event.
Next came the young mayor, Andrea, smoking furiously, and his assistant, also Andrea. Somehow, we always laugh together. He gestures wildly, paces, acts out whatever he’s saying, and when he leaves, I’m never quite sure what actually has happened. The mayor was concerned, rightly, about negative publicity for the town. We all had visions of articles: “American Writer and Family Evacuated by CIA.” What a disaster for the hotels, the restaurants, the merchants. “Goof-ball Terrorist Lobs Grenade at Americans.” Tour buses gunning out of Piazza Garibaldi. Camera crews rolling in. He hoped the incident was a joke, although when he looked at the note, he dropped that line of thinking. No ragazzo , young man, in the fine Cortona schools wrote that badly. Simply impossible. But. No. Need. To worry. Everything is under control.
After friends stopped by with melons and beans, after the cicadas provided their screeching background music, after everyone stepped around the grenade in the grass and paused at the top of the driveway to admire the white Vespa, after a call to Ashley urging them to take a day trip, after expat friends asked if one of the five thousand Muslims in the province were involved in an anti-American gesture, after I stood with my back against a tree and stared into the valley below, after a morning that lasted a week, the Florence squadron arrived.
Five men in high black boots, black shirts, tight gabardine pants, and shoulder holsters stepped out of a menacing black sedan. They’d closed the road at Corys and asked us to stay inside. Good. They meant business.
After about fifteen minutes, one came to the door and told us the grenade was not live. We took some bottles of water down where they were gathering their evidence. Soon they were joking, asking about the olive trees, asking about the movie of my book. Under their fierce demeanor and serious outfits, they’re like most Italian men—gregarious, ribald, warm. I wish they would stay in the driveway all summer.
That the grenade was stripped made us feel slightly better. Gilda had her theories. Giorgio, too, but never mind. Gilda made a soup. Giorgio, who helps us here, walked the land. Usually we have fun together; I felt sorry that they had to be concerned. Ed took a rag and wiped a film of dust off his sweet Vespa until it glowed white as the moon and immaculate.
I went into town once that week and faced a repeat of the famous petition aftermath. Quite a few people, though, seemed not to have heard—or perhaps preferred to pretend. The guesses about the perpetrator, the repetition of “fascisti,” the arousal of old left-right political feuds going back a century (memory is long in Italy), the cynical shrugs, the certainty that someone had been hired—it was all interesting. Secret. Nothing in the open. No one spoke to us in the piazza about the grenade. We were called into tiny shops, spoken to in doorways, smiles on the faces seemingly speaking everyday greetings but really recounting an uncle’s dealings with a certain unsavory person, World War II grudges from when someone turned in a partisan, dreams of revenge over a broken rental agreement. Bewildering. “Ed, maybe it’s the architecture of the town—all the steep, dark vicoli [tiny streets] leading off the main street, winding into nether Cortona.”
“Really. The city as a metaphor for the collective brain.” We were in a trance all week.
The algebra we were learning: Equations that balanced to our American ways of thinking were all x’s equaling other x’s here. A small notice appeared in the Arezzo paper. Astonishing, astonishing. It said:
BOMB THREATS AT A BUILDING SITE
It didn’t explode and wasn’t able to explode: It was an old reminder of the war, an empty casing found
Next came the young mayor, Andrea, smoking furiously, and his assistant, also Andrea. Somehow, we always laugh together. He gestures wildly, paces, acts out whatever he’s saying, and when he leaves, I’m never quite sure what actually has happened. The mayor was concerned, rightly, about negative publicity for the town. We all had visions of articles: “American Writer and Family Evacuated by CIA.” What a disaster for the hotels, the restaurants, the merchants. “Goof-ball Terrorist Lobs Grenade at Americans.” Tour buses gunning out of Piazza Garibaldi. Camera crews rolling in. He hoped the incident was a joke, although when he looked at the note, he dropped that line of thinking. No ragazzo , young man, in the fine Cortona schools wrote that badly. Simply impossible. But. No. Need. To worry. Everything is under control.
After friends stopped by with melons and beans, after the cicadas provided their screeching background music, after everyone stepped around the grenade in the grass and paused at the top of the driveway to admire the white Vespa, after a call to Ashley urging them to take a day trip, after expat friends asked if one of the five thousand Muslims in the province were involved in an anti-American gesture, after I stood with my back against a tree and stared into the valley below, after a morning that lasted a week, the Florence squadron arrived.
Five men in high black boots, black shirts, tight gabardine pants, and shoulder holsters stepped out of a menacing black sedan. They’d closed the road at Corys and asked us to stay inside. Good. They meant business.
After about fifteen minutes, one came to the door and told us the grenade was not live. We took some bottles of water down where they were gathering their evidence. Soon they were joking, asking about the olive trees, asking about the movie of my book. Under their fierce demeanor and serious outfits, they’re like most Italian men—gregarious, ribald, warm. I wish they would stay in the driveway all summer.
That the grenade was stripped made us feel slightly better. Gilda had her theories. Giorgio, too, but never mind. Gilda made a soup. Giorgio, who helps us here, walked the land. Usually we have fun together; I felt sorry that they had to be concerned. Ed took a rag and wiped a film of dust off his sweet Vespa until it glowed white as the moon and immaculate.
I went into town once that week and faced a repeat of the famous petition aftermath. Quite a few people, though, seemed not to have heard—or perhaps preferred to pretend. The guesses about the perpetrator, the repetition of “fascisti,” the arousal of old left-right political feuds going back a century (memory is long in Italy), the cynical shrugs, the certainty that someone had been hired—it was all interesting. Secret. Nothing in the open. No one spoke to us in the piazza about the grenade. We were called into tiny shops, spoken to in doorways, smiles on the faces seemingly speaking everyday greetings but really recounting an uncle’s dealings with a certain unsavory person, World War II grudges from when someone turned in a partisan, dreams of revenge over a broken rental agreement. Bewildering. “Ed, maybe it’s the architecture of the town—all the steep, dark vicoli [tiny streets] leading off the main street, winding into nether Cortona.”
“Really. The city as a metaphor for the collective brain.” We were in a trance all week.
The algebra we were learning: Equations that balanced to our American ways of thinking were all x’s equaling other x’s here. A small notice appeared in the Arezzo paper. Astonishing, astonishing. It said:
BOMB THREATS AT A BUILDING SITE
It didn’t explode and wasn’t able to explode: It was an old reminder of the war, an empty casing found
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