Free Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes Page A

amazingly homogeneous; it is rare to see a black or Asian
face in Tuscany. Recently, Eastern Europeans, finding the German
work force at last full of people like themselves, began arriving
in this prosperous part of northern Italy. Now we understood
Alfiero's estimate for the work. Instead of paying the normal Italian
twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand lire per hour, he is able to
pay nine thousand. He assures us they are legal workers and are
covered by his insurance. The Poles are pleased with the hourly
wage; at home, before the factory went kaput, they barely earned
that much in a day.
    Ed grew up in a Polish-American Catholic community in
Minnesota. His parents were born of Polish immigrants and grew up
speaking Polish on farms on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. Of
course, Ed knows no Polish. His parents wanted the children to be
All American. The three words he tried out with the Poles they
couldn't understand. But these men he can't understand seem very
familiar. He's used to names like Orzechowski, Cichosz, and
Borzyskowski. Passing in the yard, we nod and smile. The way we
finally make contact with them comes through poetry. One afternoon
I come across a poem by Czeslaw Milosz, long exiled in America but
quintessentially a Polish poet. I knew he'd made a triumphant
journey back to Poland a few years ago. When Stanislao crossed the
front terrace with the wheelbarrow, I asked, “Czeslaw Milosz?”
He lit up and shouted to the two others. After that, for a couple
of days, when I passed one or the other of them, he would say,
“Czeslaw Milosz,” as though it were a greeting, and I would
answer,
“Sì,
Czeslaw Milosz.” I even knew
I was pronouncing the name correctly because I'd once practiced his
name when I had to introduce the poet at a reading. For several
days before that, I'd referred to him to myself as “Coleslaw”
and had anxiety that I would stand up before the audience and
introduce him that way.
    Alfiero becomes a problem. He lights like a butterfly on one
project after another, starting something, doing a sloppy job, then
taking off. Some days he just doesn't show up at all. When
reasonable questioning doesn't work, I revert to the old Southern
habit of throwing a fit, which I find I still can do impressively.
For a while, Alfiero straightens up and pays attention, then like
the whimsical child that he is, he loses his focus. He has a charm.
He throws himself into playful descriptions of frog races, fast
Moto Guzzis, and quantities of wine. Patting his belly, he speaks
in the local dialect and neither of us understands much of what
he says. When it's time to throw a fit, I call Martini, who does
understand. He nods, secretly amused, Alfiero looks abashed, the
Poles let no expression cross their faces, and Ed is mortified. I
say that I am
malcontenta.
I use waving gestures and
shake my head and stamp my foot and point. He has used rows of
tiny stones under rows of big stones, there are vertical lines in
the construction, he has neglected to put a foundation in this
entire section, the cement is mostly sand. Martini begins to shout,
and Alfiero shouts back at him, since he dares not shout at me.
I hear the curse
“Porca Madonna”
again, a serious thing
to say, and
“Porca miseria,”
pig misery, one of my
favorite curses of all times. After a scene, I expect sulking but,
no, he turns up sunny and forgetful the next day.
    “Buttare! Via!”
Take it down, take it away. Signor
Martini starts to kick at Alfiero's work. “Where did your mother
send you to school?
Where did you learn to make cement like sand castles?” Then they
both turn and shout at the Poles. Now and then Martini rushes in the
house and calls Alfiero's mother, his old friend, and we hear him
shouting at her, then subsiding into soothing sounds.
    They must think, privately, that we are brilliant to know so
much about wall building. What neither Signor Martini nor Alfiero
realizes is that the Poles let us know when something is not