We arrived in Bergamo in September, during the first year of our marriage. The town, settled in ancient times by Etruscans, was perched atop a green hill facing the foggy plain of the Po River and encircled on three sides by the Italian Alps. We had come to Bergamo so that Dan could attend the Istituto Montessori Internazionale, and while he learned how to communicate the wonders of Maria Montessori’s cosmic education, translating tales of dinosaurs, ice ages, and volcanoes for the minds of nine- to twelve-year- olds, I was on my own in a language I had yet to learn. For several weeks after our arrival we suffered a dripping faucet, plugged sink, slow seepage from the kitchen wall, and a strange odor that rose from the bathtub every day at noon. I sat down with the dictionary, collected the words I needed, and prepared a speech for our landlady, Signora Agazzi. She came to inspect the problems and promised to call the plumber. He arrived on the day— though not at the time—I expected, wearing a suit. Apologizing for being late, he explained that when he’d opened the morning paper, a photograph of his cousin had jumped out from the obituary page, so he had put on a suit and rushed to the funeral. Then he’d come directly to our apartment. I gave him a towel to protect his wool trousers, and he knelt down to work on the stopped-up bathroom sink. He dismantled the U-shaped drain pipes and dug out a dripping wad of muck, some hairpins from about 1930, and five red toothpaste caps. When he reassembled the pipes, the drain ran free, but water gushed out around the joints. He unscrewed and inspected the worn threads, rescrewed them more carefully, and when they still leaked, he pulled from his tool box a shank of long, brown fibers: horse-hairs, he said. He wrapped a few of these around the inside threads, and when he rescrewed the pipes they were perfectly sealed. The house itself was difficult to comprehend. Built during the 1400s, it appeared to be one thing from the outside, and from the inside another. The blank face of the building made with its neighbors a continuous wall broken only by an enormous wooden door tall enough to ride through on horseback. Passing through the door, you first entered a red-tiled courtyard with a stone fountain in the shape of a lion’s head (symbol of St. Mark) and four or five motorcycles on which a one-eyed cat dozed. Craning your neck, you could see five stories of arched porticoes and a jumble of balconies with laundry, hanging bird cages, and bobbing geraniums. Stairways zig-zagged in all directions, and there were many mysterious doors. We never saw whoever lived two floors above us, where a basket swung outside a window, though we’d hear shouts from the courtyard, watch the basket descending on a rope, see the relatives filling it with bread and packages of cheese. We never saw the cats that raced all night in the attic above us. Our bedroom walls gave off the smell of cat urine, which seeped through the ceiling boards. We heard that former tenants were awakened one night when the cats crashed through a sky-light and landed fighting and clawing on the bed. In our early flush of enthusiasm to make the apartment our own, Dan and I stripped the livingroom wallpaper. Anything would have been better than the discolored orange flowers, 1950s style, that puckered across the wall. To our great surprise, underneath the wallpaper we found a fresco. We pulled each strip of paper carefully, liberating garlands of leaves, vines, and flowers. At the very end a girl appeared, her breasts bare, her arms upraised as if holding the garlands in a dance. There were big gouges, lots of nicks and scratches. From cataloguing works of art in a museum in Minneapolis, I was acquainted with two philosophies of painting restoration: one method is to camouflage repairs and repaint the work so that it looks as it did when new; the other is to leave the work as untouched as possible, making repairs obvious so that the effects of age and damage remain part of the work. We decided on the latter, and limited our repairs to filling in the holes and painting out the orange streaks. The paint I bought at an art supply store, tubes labelled “Sienna” and “Umber” matched exactly, and I stood with my brush in hand thinking about the artist who five-hundred years before ground up pigments from the earth of nearby places—Sienna and Umbria. One day we noticed a black cloud growing around a hole high in the kitchen wall and realized we were waking up with soot in our noses. After much puzzling, I discovered that the exhaust pipe from the tiny space heater, our sole source of heat, conducted soot from the dining room into the kitchen. We called the landlady who sent the muratore. (In English he would have been the plasterer, but in Italian he was “wall worker.”) He immediately ran into a problem. Even after crawling around in several of the attics, he couldn’t tell where the exhaust pipe was supposed to connect with the main chimney, which was buried somewhere in the walls between other apartments. Sra. Agazzi brought an architect, and they stood a long time on each landing pointing and peering up at the top of The town, settled in ancient times by the Etruscans, was perched atop a green hill facing the foggy plain of the Po River and encircled on three sides by the Italian Alps. the chimney, which emerged from the many-angled tile roofs. Then she consulted older relatives who knew the building better. (Her family had lived there for centuries.) Unfortunately, the only person who had dared in recent years to climb the steep, slippery roofs was a young nephew, Roberto. He’d been an adventuresome twelve-year-old, but wasn’t inclined to risk his life again at twenty-, two. He didn’t remember anything about the chimney. It was incredible to me that no one understood the building, that knowledge of its structure had been completely obscured as generations had added and subtracted sections, and that there was no way to imagine the relation of the parts to the whole. This building had become inextricably, unexplainably connected to the buildings closest to it. In the end, the muratore and Sra. Agazzi decided on an attitude of humility in the face of a problem too old and complex to be thoroughly understood. If it was impossible to route the soot into the chimney and out of the building, it could at least be channeled to land somewhere else. The muratore extended the exhaust pipe a few feet, and twisted it so that it opened into the attic and deposited the soot there. This was an improvement. Maybe the soot would at least discourage the cats. The dictionary gives the word “repair” a hopeful definition: “to restore to a sound or good state after decay, injury, delapidation or partial destruction.” But this naively assumes that every problem can be isolated and treated in its entirety; it ignores those difficulties that lie embedded in their own complex contexts. The Latin root seems more realistic. It means “to make ready again.” Our repairmen didn’t sell perfection. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard laments the advances of domestic architecture. He abhors the efficiency and predictability of the modern apartment and suggests that people need to live with dark, secret spaces (basement, root cellar), with forgotten spaces (attic, stairwell), with intimate spaces (kitchen). The human spirit needs physical metaphors for itself. Bachelard especially disliked electricity. In the days of candles and hearth, every room had a physical and emotional focus. To enter a room was to move from darkness to light, from cold to warmth, from things unseen to the seen. Electricity, spreading an even bath of light, banished mystery. The condition we call comfort, Bachelard regarded as a state of dulled sensation and diluted emotion. Reading the views of that French philosopher in the bright light of a library some years ago, I was ready to leave the bland twentieth century for good. But to live in Italy, in the kind of house that inhabited his dreams, was to step inside a kaleidoscope and find myself among huge chunks of glass whose sudden shifting was both beautiful and violent. Ramage It was the evening of our fourth day in the apartment, before we had become acquainted with the peculiarities of the space. Those were the early days of shins bumped in tight spaces, toes stubbed on steps the wrong height, eyelashes singed because each burner of the stove flared differently. The building demanded that we, the modern visitors, make many compromises, and our early partnership was uneasy. We made the compromises in our bodies. At about nine o’clock Dan was fixing dinner. We’d had an argument, but night was quieting the courtyard. As he washed a piece of glass he’d used as a cutting board, it slipped out of his hands and smashed against the wall. I heard a sickening crash and rushed into the kitchen. Dan slumped on the floor as if he’d been shot—he’d slid down the wall into a sitting position and clutched his left hand to his chest. “I think I’ve cut my finger off.” My mind raced out the door, - down the stairs and into the street where I tried to imagine a phone booth. I couldn’t remember having seen one and knew that even if I found a pay phone I wouldn’t be able to read the instructions to operate it. My Italian was so rudimentary I wouldn’t be able to summon help or follow directions to a hospital. My mind went blank. I stood staring at Dan, gulping. “Go get Signora Cerut- ti,” he said. I ran out in my bare feet. I had forgotten Sra. Cerutti, a neighbor we’d met the day before. She had been watering plants in a window box and had greeted us from her window across the courtyard. She had lent us her vacuum cleaner. I wasn’t sure where she lived. I ran down three flights of stairs in the dark, then groped my way toward what I thought was her stairway, found the tiny light that illuminated her doorbell. After a long time she came to the door and opened it as if expecting guests. Her smile changed to a look of alarm. I said “Dottore,”*”' hoping that was something like the Italian word. She understood. I ran back and helped Dan down the stairs’ Her son, Roberto, pulling on a shirt, met us at the door and led us to a car. Someone who^seemed to be Rober32 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
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