The Reluctant Tuscan by Phil Doran Page A

not,” I said, as I composed the shot.
    Â 
    Â 
    The following day we got a call from the mayor’s assistant, and over the jangling of African jewelry, she informed us that the denuncia against us had been overturned.

10
    Trapassato Prossimo
    B uoyed by our success at the mayor’s office and the prospect of actually living a life here, I vowed to achieve some level of competence in the Italian language. I was no longer content to let Nancy do all the talking while I remained a gray eminence on the periphery of the conversation, like some immigrant grandfather in a 1940s movie, grinning idiotically while his smooth-talking grandchildren helped him file his citizenship papers.
    I was eager to strike out on my own and make friends, develop relationships, and by God, reach out and touch somebody. To that end I enrolled at the Giosuè Carducci Language Academy, where my classmates and I were tutored by a young lady with the intoxicating name of Ms. Margarita Martini. Three times a week we were drilled on verb conjugations in the trapassato prossimo tense and encouraged to memorize the inane conversations of Paulo and Maria, until there began to grow in me a sapling of confidence that would someday be a sturdy enough oak to allow me to have a conversation in a language I did not grow up speaking.
    I studied diligently and began to see results. Within a month I was able to carve out a crude version of Survivor’s Italian, assuring me that if anything ever happened to Nancy, I could at least get myself fed in a restaurant and then ask directions to whatever hospital or morgue they had taken her.
    Of course, I still got a lot of things wrong. Once Nancy and I were at the post office to take care of some bills, a place most Italians go to directly pay a clerk, saving them the anguish that, thanks to Posta Italia, their payment will never get delivered. Nancy presented our water bill and our electricity statement, along with the correct amounts of cash, to the man behind the counter. As he was processing our payments, I heard him use the word gamba, which I had just learned was the word for “leg.” Okay, she was wearing shorts, but what was he doing talking about her legs? When I asked her about it, she laughed. What he had said was that she was in gamba, a phrase used to compliment someone on their efficiency . . . the Italian equivalent of “on their toes.”
    Mistakes aside, my confidence kept growing until I decided to attempt a conversation with a woman I saw every day, our neighbor Signora Cipollini. A short, stocky old woman who was invariably dressed in a faded brown house-coat and apron, babushka, and huge rubber galoshes, she looked if she’d just stepped out of a Khrushchev-era documentary entitled Heroic Farm Workers of the Ukraine Celebrate the Glorious Five-Year Plan .
    I admired how the signora had taken what was essentially a small scrap of land and converted it into a life-sustaining source of food, as self-contained as a terrarium. Her land teemed with rigid rows of carrots, butter lettuce, and beets. There was a microgrove of apple and pomegranate trees, flanked by tomato vines and rows of rapa rosa , a fat, bloodred turnip the Tuscans eat in the winter. Every square millimeter was under cultivation, in such an efficient manner that those plants not bearing fruit provided shade for those that did, like the line of tall cypress tress that blocked the tramonto, a feverish wind that comes howling out the Alps and was thought to cause headaches and homicides.
    In addition to her cash crops Signora Cipollini kept a flock of chickens. Eight plump white hens, with an ever-changing number of chicks in tow, all overseen by a speckled rooster who strutted among them like the cock of the walk he was. What was interesting about her approach to livestock was her frugality in feeding them. Instead of squandering money on feed, she would simply take her flock out so they could graze on