Free Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes Page B

right.
“Signora,”
Krzysztof (we call him Cristoforo, as he
wishes) says, motioning to me,
“Italia cemento.”
He crumbles too-dry cement between his fingers.
“Polonia
cemento.”
He kicks a rock-hard section of the retaining wall.
This has become a nationalistic issue. “Alfiero.
Poco
cemento.
” He puts his fingers to his lips. I thank him.
Alfiero is using too little cement in his mixture. Don't tell. They
begin to roll their eyes as a signal, or, after Alfiero departs,
which usually is early in the day, to show us problems. Everything
Alfiero touches seems bad, but we have a contract, they work for
him, and we are stuck with him. However, without him, we would not
have met the Poles.
    Near the top of the wall, they uncover a ground-level stump.
Alfiero maintains it is
non importa.
We see Riccardo shake
his head quickly, so Ed says authoritatively that it will have to
be dug out. Alfiero relents but wants to pour on
gasolio
to kill it. We point to the pristine new well not twenty feet away.
The Poles began to dig and two hours later are still digging.
Beneath the exposed stump, a mammoth three-legged root has wrapped
itself around a stone as big as an automobile tire. Hundreds of
inveigling roots shoot out in all directions. Here is the reason
much of the wall had fallen in the first place. When they
finally wrench it out, they insist on evening the legs and top,
the stone still entwined. They load it in a wheelbarrow and take
it up to the lime tree bower, where it will remain, the ugliest
table in Tuscany.
    They sing while they heave stone and their voices begin to
sound like the way the work of the world should sound. Sometimes
Cristoforo sings in a falsetto, a strangely moving song, especially
coming from his big brown body. They never skimp on a minute's
work, even though their boss is gone all the time. On days when their
supplies are gone because Alfiero forgets to reorder, he capriciously
tells them not to work. We hire them to help clear the terraces of
weeds. Finally we have them sanding all the inside shutters. They
seem to know how to do everything and work about twice as fast as
anyone I've ever seen. At the end of the day, they strip and rinse
off with the hose, dress in clean clothes, then we have a beer.
    Don Fabio, a local priest, lets them live in a back room of
the church. For about five dollars apiece, he feeds all three of
them three meals a day. They work six days a week—the priest
does not allow them to work on Sunday—exchanging all the
lire they make into dollars and stashing it away to take home for
their wives and children. Riccardo is twenty-seven, Cristoforo
thirty, and Stanislao forty. During the weeks they work, our Italian
deteriorates. Stanislao has worked in Spain, so our communication
begins to be an unholy mixture of four languages. We pick up Polish
words:
jutro,
tomorrow;
stopa,
foot;
brudny,
dirty;
jezioro,
lake. Also something
that sounds like
grubbia,
which was their name for Signor
Martini's sloping stomach. They learned “beautiful” and “idiot”
and quite a few Italian words, mostly infinitives.
    Despite Alfiero, the wall is strong and beautiful. A curving
flight of stairs, with flat tops on either side for pots of flowers,
connects the first two terraces. The well and cistern have stone
walls around them. From below, the wall looks immense. It's hard
to get used to, since we liked the tumbled look, too. Like the
other walls, soon it will have tiny plants growing in the cracks.
Because the stone is old, it already looks natural in the landscape,
if a bit tall. Now comes the pleasure of planning the walkway
from the driveway around the well to the stone steps, the flowers
and herbs for the border, and the flowerings and shadows of small
trees along the wall. First we plant a white hibiscus, which
pleases us by blooming immediately.
    On a Sunday morning the Poles arrive after church, dressed
in pressed shirts and trousers. We've seen them only in shorts.
They've