The Presence of Men
The bells woke Lara up at seven. When she opened her eyes under the tall vaulted ceiling, for a split second she felt as though she were inside a church. It had been her first night in the new house in the village and she’d slept beautifully.
She was emerging from the shower in her plum-colored, Moroccan-style bathroom when she heard a vigorous knock at the front door. Still dripping wet, she ran down in her robe, crossed the courtyard and opened the old wooden door, which had been painstakingly sandpapered and waxed. A small woman of indefinite age, with an old-fashioned perm, her body shaped like a box, was staring at her.
“You are the person who bought this house?” she asked, her voice loud as a trumpet. She was a local, as Lara could tell from her accent. She nodded.
“Ha ha! At last you are here in person!” the little woman said with a cruel smile and slid herself inside the courtyard like an eel.
“For months all I’ve been seeing are your builders. Very rude people. Where do they come from?”
“Martano, I think. Why?” Lara wondered if the small woman had come to give her some kind of fine, although she wore no uniform.
“I knew it. Martano people are all thieves.”
“I’m so sorry, signora. Was there a problem?”
The woman ignored her and proceeded to take a long, critical look at the potted plants that filled the courtyard, at the indigo blue table and matching chairs that Lara had spotted in a magazine and bought online. She closely examined the pale dusty mauve of the walls, a hue that had cost days of trial and error.
“I see you have changed everything in here.”
Lara wasn’t sure where this might be leading.
“Well, I have restored the place. It was a ruin.”
The woman ignored her and peered some more. “My great-aunt lived in this house,” she said.
She brushed the smooth surface of the wall, then moved swiftly toward the glass door of what used to be the barn and glanced inside.
“She used to keep her donkey in there,” she said, pointing at the space.
“Oh yes? Well, that’s the living room now.”
“She never married, she worked very hard all her life. She was a very clever woman.”
Lara tried a friendlier expression. All this might be pretty sweet, after all. “So you knew this place from the time she lived here? How nice. Would you like to see what it looks like now?”
Lara opened the glass door, which gave into the ex-barn-now-living-room, but the woman was already snooping inside the kitchen on the opposite side of the courtyard.
“I knew this place like the back of my hand. We used to play in here all the time when we were children.”
She stepped into the kitchen and Lara followed her. There were still unopened boxes on the floor; the stainless steel surfaces of the brand-new appliances glinted in the shady room. The woman gave a yelp.
“See! I had heard from people you had done this, but I wanted to see for myself.”
“Had done what?” Lara asked.
The woman was glaring at the opposite wall.
“This thing you have done in here, is a mortal sin.”
By now, had she been in Rome, Lara would have normally lost her patience and asked her to leave, but it was her first contact with any of her neighbors in the village and she sensed she’d reached a delicate intersection that required some caution.
“A mortal sin!” the little woman repeated in a thundering voice.
“Please have a seat. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”
“No.”
“Okay. Then please, what is it that I did?”
“The forno. You tore it down.”
Lara crossed her arms.
“Yes I did, the architect … my friend,” she said, but immediately regretted bringing an architect into the conversation. “It was as big as a room. It took up too much space, it took half the courtyard.”
But the woman was right; when, a year earlier, Lara had bought the house in the heart of the village, she’d taken Silvana, her architect friend, to see it. She was a towering woman in her forties with flaming hennaed hair who on principle never came off her high heels, especially when marching through building sites (“height gains you respect, it’s Pavlovian”). Silvana had paced inside the old building not uttering a sound, with an air of concern. Maybe it was just her way, or maybe she didn’t approve of the house. Lara had begun to worry. Silvana had taken one look at the opening of the gigantic wood oven in the kitchen and before Lara could say anything she’d climbed inside it with the speed of a crab, holding her flashlight.
“It’s gigantic. And totally useless,” her voice had boomed from the dark interior, like Jonah’s from inside the whale.
She’d reappeared, her clothes coated in blackish dust, then effortlessly slid out of the oven mouth. She had a big grin on her face.
“Good. We can gain some space. I feel a lot better now.”
So the forno went down, and what was once a dark chamber was now a third of her courtyard.
The little woman waved her index finger at Lara like a mad evangelist.
“You tore down the last oven of this village to gain a little space for your plants. That forno was a public monument. It was part of our history!”
The woman shook her head with disdain.
“Yes, I was told this room was the village bakery. But as I told you the wood oven took half the space of the courtyard. I mean, it went from here all the way to …” Lara made a sweeping arc with her hand across the expanse of the courtyard.
“This was not a bakery. It was a communal oven. An oven where people could bring their own loaves of bread. Bread and pies, so that my aunt could bake for them. She only charged ten, twenty liras a piece. We all came here as children with our tins, everyone did, every Saturday …”
“Did you? How nice. So, what did …” Lara loved stories like this, it was part of what had drawn her to the village in the first place. But the woman was talking right over her question.
“… And in winter, when it was really cold, this was the warmest room in the whole village, so we sat in that corner, see? My aunt used to have a wooden bench right there.”
The woman gestured to the wall where now sat the dishwasher still sheathed in its cardboard box.
“My aunt would give us sweets while we waited. In the summer we’d wait outside in the garden, and we’d play with the donkey. This is how things were in this village up until only forty, fifty years ago.”
The little woman grabbed a chair and slumped on it, hands entwined on her lap. Her feet barely touched the ground. Lara was beginning to feel it had been a mistake to let this creature in. Obviously this was only the beginning of something far more serious than Lara had envisaged.
The little woman went on. “But of course, what do you care? You people come from the outside and assume everything here is up for sale and you think you have a right to take it down, rip it all up as you please. You even bring your own architect to destroy our history!”
Lara stared at the little woman, shocked. This was truly a disgrace. She’d come to this village with the best intentions, eager to learn and respect the local culture and traditions. And now—barely twenty-four hours after she’d moved in—she was already facing the enormity of her first mistake.
“Senta signora, I’m sorry about the wood oven,” Lara said. “I had no idea how important it was. In fact nobody told me. I’m really sorry, I … I wish I had known before, is all I can say.”
It was true: the local real-estate agent—a young man with overly gelled hair and two cell phones constantly ringing—hadn’t said a word about the oven being part of the village history, had made no mention of the old lady with a donkey who baked for the community; he didn’t mention village women and children taking their tins of pies and bread into what was now her stainless steel kitchen.
“Why did you buy a house here?” the woman asked, a prosecutor for the defendant.
Lara widened her arms, resigned.
“Because I love this village and I wanted to preserve this beautiful house.” She breathed in a bit and continued, “Which by the way would’ve crumbled had I not bought it.”
The woman didn’t balk; she shook her head.
“You people don’t come here to buy property because you love it. You come because it’s cheaper.”
Such was Lara’s welcome to her new life in the house she’d bought right after her divorce.
The truth was the little woman had a point. Tuscany was ridiculously expensive. Umbria was sold out. The Aeolian Islands were for millionaires. Whereas in this exquisite and undiscovered village in the depths of southern Italy, the house plus the cost of its renovation had equaled almost exactly the money Lara had managed to extract from the settlement. She’d thought of the quaint house in the heart of the village not only as a good investment or a summer holiday escape, but more like a second home where she could retreat all year round, and start over. She wanted it to look fresh and simple like those photos in Elle Décor, with handwoven baskets brimming with lavender sprigs or vegetables just picked from the garden, with linen tablecloths thrown over lovely old tables, secluded gardens and mosquito nets shrouding immaculate beds. Lara couldn’t deny she’d seen the opportunity of a little side business as well, maybe involving buying/fixing up/selling properties. It was impossible not to, given the prices of local real estate. In the course of the previous year, Lara had come up to the village several times to oversee the restoration work, often enough to notice how old people seemed to be dying at a worrisome rate—at least according to how often church bells tolled announcing yet another funeral. During the time it took for the workers to finish, she saw more and more old houses go up for sale as younger people kept migrating up north. The new generation refused to work in the fields and the olive groves in favor of more appealing opportunities, like opening a cell phone store in some northern province with ghastly weather. Lara felt she’d stumbled on a pot of gold. All she needed to acquire a piece of property was a modest amount of capital. She didn’t have any access to it at the moment, but she had always tended toward the unrealistic. The future, from underneath her high-vaulted ceiling, had seemed full of hope and potential.
Lara felt she should look into the forno issue right away. That same afternoon she went online and found a posting on medieval communal ovens in France and England. There was no mention of the same in the south of Italy, which suggested she could add her own entry on Wikipedia if she ever decided to. According to the website they were called bakehouses and they were places “where women and children would bring their tins of bread and biscuits for baking. Meeting at the bakehouse was also a way to exchange news and local gossip. Each woman marked her bread loaf with a distinctive cut to make sure she got back her own bread after baking.”
Reading all this made her feel even more at fault. The next day she walked to the city council, an unattractive modern building that sat like a shoe box on a parking lot and asked if she might see the historic plan of the village. She was shown inside the office of a skinny man with clearly dyed hair, semihidden behind piles of papers. He looked through the files and pulled out an old map. He showed her several locations, all marked with an F, which stood for forno. One of those capital F’s stood right over her building. It turned out that yes, she had indeed taken down the village’s last bakehouse, which was “protected” and should have never been touched.
“I never meant to have done that!” Lara blurted out. She believed in karma and felt as though, by following her architect’s advice, she had demolished an Egyptian tomb, with all the consequences that the sacrilege might entail. The skinny man behind the desk reassured her. Yes, she had actually broken the law, but it could all be fixed by paying a little something. It was going to be a small fine. Nothing much. Not to worry.
“I’ll pay, of course. That’s not the problem, it’s just that … it’s that I feel really bad that we …” Her voice broke a little. “That I did this. It was totally unintentional.”
The skinny man seemed surprised by her concern. Obviously the oven didn’t mean as much to him as to the little woman with the bad perm.
Lara rang her architect and told her about the communal oven.
Silvana cut her off. “We gained twenty square meters of walking space. It’s an added value to the property.”
“I know, I know. But—”
“You are just being sentimental, Lara. Just forget about it.”
“I feel like we committed a crime. Which by the way we did. Apparently we actually broke the law.”
But Silvana just laughed. “Well, Lara, it seems to me that everyone else did too, since you say it was the last remaining oven in the village.”
“Yes, but it was a protected monument.”
“What were you going to do with it anyway, bake loaves for the masses?” Silvana laughed. “This isn’t the eighteenth century, everyone has an oven now. Anyway, let’s talk about this later, I’m with a client now.”
Lara realized how, until that moment, the politics of her street had completely escaped her, wrapped up as she’d been with only the builders and her architect. Up until now the neighbors had been to her only extras in the background, blank faces she hadn’t paid any attention to and couldn’t remember. Owning a house in a village was clearly very different from moving into a new apartment in a city, where anonymity was not only okay but an asset. She had moved into a community that had lived so closely together for years and years, where everyone knew every little thing about one another. Now this foreigner had shown up from out of the blue; for months she had been coming and going, ignoring their existence, interested only in her building work, and not once bothering to say hello or goodbye. Another mistake that needed immediate correction.
She decided the right person to ask would be the young man with plucked eyebrows—a distinctive trait she’d observed in the local male youth—who served her cappuccino every morning at the café in the piazza. The little woman’s name was Mina, he told her. Everyone knew her: she was a dressmaker, the best in the area. She’d had a good elementary and high school education, a bit of money she’d saved, and although she’d never married she was self-sufficient and, according to the village standards, successful. Figuratively speaking, she was the mayor of Lara’s street.
The following morning Lara knocked at Mina’s door, presenting a box of chocolates. She saw the sewing machine, a stack of fabrics, a cat curled up on the table where Mina had been cutting a cloth, licking his paws.
Mina grabbed the box.
“Thank you,” she said without smiling.
There were wisps of thread floating like dragonflies in the breeze blowing from the open windows. Lara smelled the heat rising from fabric that was being ironed.
“I was just wondering, Signora Mina …,” she said. “If I brought you a shirt, could you copy it for me?”