 The following is an excerpt from the book A Year in the World
by Frances Mayes
When I finish my travels, I will open the Yellow Café.
For now, I’m enthralled by the blue rowboat pushing off from Delos, the arrow-straight cypress-lined road into an Italian hill town set up on its perch like a five-carat Tiffany diamond, the spine-tingling muezzin call to prayer from a minaret in Antalya, way south in Turkey.
Unforgettable the evening light on the Bay of Naples as the boat churns away from the dock. When I can’t sleep, I visit Taormina’s flowering vines -- purple, ghastly magenta, hot pink. A woman in a housedress steps out and shakes a rug over the street below, oblivious of me gaping at her balcony. I run from the dust. Then I taste the sharp cheese in Scotland, where we picked our salads and beets in a walled garden that reminded me of a book I loved as a child. I think of my friends’ baby dipped in a vat of olive oil, the Greek church packed and sweat trickling off the priest’s beard. Constantine emerges screaming, and everyone smiles as he is held aloft, dripping in a shaft of sunlight. Later, at the baptism party men shoot off guns at the stars far down in the Mani.
When I’m driving or ironing, slide shows flash through my brain. A waiter balancing six plates of tapas along his arm; the painted acrobat vaulting over the head of a bull; Ed shouting Whoa and laughing as we careen along the Amalfi coast road; Willie, my grandchild, at two, referring to the piazza in Cortona as a party; slits of gray light angling into a castle bedroom in Portugal; cooking with Carlos and shivering as he pulls off an eel’s skin like a glove; sharing chocolate cake with a taxi driver; singing “Happy Birthday” in Istanbul as the hotel manager wheels in the surprise cake. He’d placed paper umbrellas in big fruit drinks. The ten thousand things.
Unpacking the oldest bags, I remember the empty beach in Nicaragua,
when two men with machine guns guarded our swim on the deserted beach;
I see a flash of my mother driving my sisters and me to St. Simons, me
causing maximum pain by singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the
Wall,” exulting that we were escaping my father for a month. And way,
way back, the trips to Macon for shopping, when I was allowed to select
a rabbit fur muff and my mother squeezed my hand in the unaccustomed
traffic, making a red indentation where my bloodstone birthstone ring
cut into my fingers. Daddy, I saw a blind man. He was selling pencils.
“Packing and Unpacking,” my father frequently said. That’s the motto of
this family. Our forays were only to Atlanta or the Georgia coast,
sometimes to Highlands and Fernandina -- a small radius -- but we did
go. Always, I liked the infinitive to go. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s
really go. Andare was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian.
Andiamo, let’s go, the sound comes out at a gallop.
I was twenty-six the first time I went to Italy. I went for the art,
but I liked the risotto and the shoes, I liked the slicked-back hair
and the perfume of the men I passed in the street, I liked the waiter
who put his hand on my shoulder when I ordered the osso buco, which I
had never heard of. I was drawn to the Bologna arcades, where everyone
was downing espresso in quick nips and visiting with their friends.
“These people are having more fun than we are,” I said to my husband.
Cultural analysis had begun. What makes them the way they are? That
question is at the taproot of my travel quests. How do place and
character intertwine? Could I feel at home here? What is home to those
around me? Who are they in their homes, those mysterious others?
To find out, I rented houses. Although I love hotels, the experience of
living in a house offers a chance to shop at the Saturday market,
venture to the butcher, the flower shop, the mom-and-pop bodega, and
the frutta e verdure. Suddenly we’re in a different relationship with
the place, and when I stayed a few weeks, I became known by the
neighbors and began to learn the rhythms of their lives. When you’re
storing your onions, washing leeks, and turning the pages of a local
cookbook, the aromas from your kitchen become a territorial marker. I
live here. If only for a while. When the time to leave comes, often I
am disoriented. The thyme I planted by the front door is flourishing.
My own tender roots have invaded the foreign soil. The anguish of
moving goes down into the bone marrow. Even when I want to move, the
actual uprooting is traumatic.
* * * *
Ever since my first trip to Europe -- I chose Italy as the first
country I wanted to see -- my profound desire for home, for the
profoundly beautiful nest, the kitchen garden, the friends gathered at
my table, for the candlelit baths, and the objects arranged and the
books in order, and most of all the sense of this is my place -- all
that has been at the mercy of an equal force, the desire to shut the
door, turn the key, and go. Go. The domestic and the opposite. At the
beginning of these travels I saw that as a conflict. Now I think the
oxymoron is not a double bind but a way forward. Does the way forward
imply the way back?
* * * *
The Yellow Café already has a location, just outside the town of ten
thousand where I grew up in south Georgia. A sandy road turns off the
two-lane highway into town and runs along a stand of moss oaks. You
cross a low wooden bridge. In the black swampy water fed by a lively
creek, I will get my crayfish. There’s the house, big, square, with
gnarly wisteria raddled around the pillars on either side of the steps.
The house is not yellow today but will be when I transform it. I
already have the paint chip in my handbag, stuck between the pages of
my passport.
From the broad open porch, which seems to float on a raft of daylilies,
you enter a wide hall opening to two gracious dining rooms with tall,
many-paned windows. The ample kitchen runs all across the back of the
house. I will outfit it with the best brass-trimmed blue stoves and
expanses of white marble counters for making pasta and pastry. My
collection of antique painted tiles will be embedded randomly in the
walls. The former living room becomes a wine library, where guests can
sip an elixir from my cellar -- the raspberry ratafia invented by two
women in a village in Abruzzo, or a sparkling wine I will make from
local scuppernong grapes -- while their table is laid with antique
linens I’ve acquired at Arezzo’s monthly antique market, and bowls of
smoky blue irises with vinic scents. Gardenias and Casablanca lilies
will be allowed only in the library, lest the guests succumb to their
narcotizing perfume and forget to eat.
The rear screen porch extends the kitchen. Cooks can sit there and
strip sugarcane or shuck corn or mix the spices they have brought from
their countries. In the bottomless pond fed by a fresh creek, we’ll
catch catfish and blind rockfish with rusty hooks dangling from their
mouths. I will build a salt pool for shrimp, crab, and lobster, as in
the old Tuscan villas.
My rooms are upstairs, and they feel like other manifestations of my
body. Bookcases, stuffed with poetry and travel narratives, line the
walls. The windows let in the blue light that filters through Spanish
moss. Kelims from my travels cover heart pine floors, and on the beds I
am torn between using luxurious Venetian silks and the country quilts I
have stored for years in a trunk. In the wide upstairs hall my
collection of ex-votos, amulets against the evil eye, and folk art
gives me joy every time I walk by.
The other eight or nine bedrooms are for visitors and for the cooks who
spend six months here, bringing their mothers’ recipes and their own
culinary inventions. One room always is reserved for a poet who needs
nourishment and the scent of gardenias rising from the old mother bush
outside the kitchen.
Sunday-night dinners at the Yellow Café commence with a reading of
poems in the library. Guests will bring their own favorites. Sunday
night calls for a light dinner. It’s the beginning and end of the week.
Also the copious noon meal on Sunday has driven everyone to their beds.
But because all the food was so delicious, we rise and walk on the
country roads, picking violets. After the poems perhaps tortellini in
brodo, tender knots of pasta stuffed with chicken and herbs and
floating in the broth made from an old hen. That’s a righteous dish in
Tuscany. The salad garden yields all year in the benign climate, and
several local women bring us field greens they gather. My hometown
neighbors are avid to start a Faulkner reading club, and at the end of
the table there’s talk of performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream out
under the oaks on the solstice. One of the Methodist deacons rises and
toasts, “If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it .
. .” So let’s leave it at that for this evening among friends: a fine
plate of country Spanish cheeses, and a sliver of lemon tart that will
invade everyone’s dreams in the form of a citrus grove in full frisson
outside Granada.
One night a month is the concert dinner. My old friends from the
Cortona Tuscan Sun Festival arrive, speaking Russian and French. They
kiss hands and slightly bow; then they fill the twilight with Fauré and
Shostakovich. Everyone shouts bravi, bravi. We dine late, and the good
citizens of my hometown are shocked to drive home at two in the
morning, sated with the cello rubbing against their oldest memories, my
roasted vegetables, quail with juniper berries, mulled pears, and a
little dessert wine that brought them a gust of wind from Pantelleria.
In the mornings my neighbors will swing by for brioche and cappuccino,
though some insist on the churros and migas I first savored in Spain.
Such will be the enchantment of paradiso. They’ll start the day hearing
a rousing piece by my friend Bobby McFerrin. The McDonald’s sausage
breakfast and bladder-bursting cup of coffee will cease to be offered
in the land. On holidays the cooks will turn out baskets of cheese
straws, pannetone, pound cakes, caramel cakes, and tiny lemon tarts
that I used to devour in a Provençal bistro with a gaslight outside. If
you’d like a dessert to take home, you must order the day before.
* * * *
“Why south Georgia?” my daughter asks. “Why not in Cortona, where you
have spent the happiest times of your entire life? Why not California,
where you raised me and worked and have all those friends?”
“I don’t know. California doesn’t need the Yellow Café. California only
needs itself. Cortona -- certainly not. They already have many places
with a heartbeat instead of a marketing concept.” I’m not satisfied
with my smart-mouth answer. I always try not to alarm my daughter with
what I really feel. If I answered, “Because I am looking for the square
root of light,” I might be alarmed myself. And the question burrows
deep into the psyche. The real answer is home, the real answer is
beauty. Living and travelling in Europe, especially Italy, I’ve lived
in places where art and beauty buoy everyday life. And there I have
felt the most at home. Home, where everything connects.
At the end of “Four Quartets,” T. S. Eliot proposed the idea that at
the end of our voyages out, we return to our origins and understand the
place for the first time. This idea is so often quoted that it must not
be true. The easy and comforting sentiment feels like an old pair of
cashmere slippers. I prefer to think of the end of exploring as an
invitation to return to my origins and transform them. The prodigal,
the wanderer, the minstrel, the one who took the first thing smoking on
the runway at nineteen -- they already know the place. Those who stayed
know less, caught as they are inside the crystal globe. Shake it, and
the snow falls. I, a runaway, return in my coat of many colors to sweep
off the family graves and create my café. The spices of Portugal, the
music of Angel Barrios, the Venetian vellum book, the bells of Cortona:
offerings. Why? Because I learned to stir the marrow into the risotto.
Because of the place where my mind never comes to rest. Offerings to
whom? To anyone who wants a handful of spring rain.
Think of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. Everything that
happened, on some mystic plane, still happens. The first events in your
life slap you into the shape you take. The baby child knows within six
weeks whether he can trust the parents. The temperature at the window
signals bliss, boredom, or alarm. Going back in time is impossible
because memory only has a line of front burners. But literally to go
back to a place -- of course you can go home again, only a blowhard
sentimentalist like Thomas Wolfe thinks you can’t. I always will be
stepping into the same river. Fate decrees that I still love the high
school boyfriend. I remember Nancy Lane wet her pants on the first day
of kindergarten, and I felt her hot humiliation, the first blush of
empathy in my life.
Of course, all roads lead to Rome -- or maybe its rhyme, home. This is
the third angel I was promised at the beginning of my travels. The
transforming angel: you go out, far out, and when you return, you have
the power to transform your life. Roads always lead to Rome/home. They
always have. In the far countryside of Tuscany, the big truck driver
shouted out his window, “Dov’é Roma?” and I pointed south. It was only
a general direction he was after. He could take it from there.
Bees navigate by a magnet in their heads. I have one, too, just under
the pineal gland that looks so much like broccolo romano. Instead of
true north, the magnitudes of attraction are multidirectional. During
any airport delay, I study all the departures. What if I just chose
one? Cairo, Mozambique, Catania, Dublin -- but I’m in Frankfurt with a
ticket to Florence. Someday I will drop that ticket in the wastebasket,
step up to the desk, and say, “One way to Zagreb, please.”
The lyrics of a torch song, a line in a book, a friend’s postcard, a
glimpse out the window on the overnight train to Paris, a just-shucked
oyster that recalls the briny air at Tomales Bay -- even an overheard
word can trigger the magnet’s force, sending me to check my airline
mileage account, propelling me to the computer to scout ticket prices,
into the garage to see which suitcase has wheels ready to roll.
When I finish my travels, I will solve the riddle of home. When I
finish my travels, I will know the answer. Then I will open the Yellow
Café.
Cortona, Italy
San Rafael, California
2005
Excerpted from A Year in the World by Frances Mayes
© 2006 by Frances
Mayes.
Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Frances Mayes is the author of four books about Tuscany. The
now-classic Under the Tuscan Sun, which was a New York Times bestseller
for more than two and a half years, and became a Touchstone movie
starring Diane Lane, was followed by Bella Tuscany and two illustrated
books, In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home. Mayes is also the author
of the novel Swan, six books of poetry, and The Discovery of Poetry.
Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. For
more information, visit: www.randomhouse.com/features/mayes/
|
