nella campagna

This weekend was set to be like any other, a welcome few days away from school with the usual homework and hidden corners of Siena uncovered in the adventures of our days off. Instead, I got three days of equal parts action, thriller, drama, and comedy-plus a half a dozen moments worthy of a quiet independent film.

First, Peter spent the weekend in the emergency room. (CAUTION: Scenes of Peril and Life Threatening Danger ahead.) We were invited to his house for a day out in the country but arrived early, so set out for some exploring before Leah called us for lunch.

It started out wonderfully; the fields were newly plowed, their deep red clay baking under an autumn sun. Wrinkled women in dusty skirts and heavy scarves called out their buon giorni as we passed, and a wiry little fox trotted along the road ahead of us, occasionally looking back to watch our progress, unafraid. The boys rode their bikes up and over the hills while Eve walked at my side, showing me fistfuls of fennel and trapping grasshoppers with uncanny dexterity. We had just left a small square of abandoned cemetery when Peter saw it, a miniature snake with a body stretched to the exact outline of a very recently digested lizard. It was intriguing, for sure, but not so much that I had any impetus to catch the thing.

Peter, however, did. And he went about it quite properly, finding a forked twig to hold the snake in place and pinning it smartly between its head and its bloated body. Unfortunately, the small reptile had a second’s chance to defend himself, and he did. Forty minutes later Peter’s thumb was very nearly the size of his wrist, and his Italian landlady was urging him to a pharmacy, if not the hospital. An hour after that he was back, wondering if Leah could drive him to the emergency room. Erin and I stayed behind to watch the kids, and when the car rumbled back up the road two hours later, Peter wasn’t in it. Turns out, vipers are big business. And my art professor would be staying the night in a hospital near the train station while frantic calls were made to Milan for the antidote.

Luckily, no great harm done in the end. Peter’s hand is still swollen something awful, but he is alive, with a right hand perfectly okay to keep up his drawing and painting. And the rest of the afternoon in Celsa was lovely, if not so eventful. We explored the land all about their 14th century farmhouse, looking wistfully across the way to where a castle still stands, supposedly complete with its own prince. We ate rice pudding on the porch, and played soccer in the field below. While tramping about the sun-soaked hills, Eve would pick flowers and hold them carefully for me to see. "It’s a whole world!" she kept saying, "A whole little world!" then she’d drop it carelessly and feign horror. "That was all they ever knew," she said sadly, once. Along a wall to an abandoned chapel she watched a beetle cross the dusty road. "Do you know how big this is for him?" she asked, with an expert’s authority. "He thinks this is as big as the entire world. But it’s only a little road!" For two hours she kept it up, imagining aloud the inhabitants for each new universe ("The little people live in the petals, and in the stem, and sometimes even in roots, too!") and then extending this especial existence to everything she saw ("What if that stick is a world! And that grass! And you! We are a world!"). She was giddy with her game, while I wondered how we ever forget to be so wildly imaginative.

That night at dinner my Italian was put to the test, trying to recount the day’s twists and turns. For the most part, a success-though I was at a loss for the verb "to bite" and when Flavia so kindly supplied the past tense, I was sure she had said that my professor was dead. Our laughter, however, was drowned out by the next drama of the day; Lucrezia had arrived at the dinner table without her sister, and trouble was afoot.

Luigia yelled for Virginia several times before going to get her herself. Virginia stalked to the seat beside me, then refused to pick up her fork. "I’m not hungry," she declared. "And I won’t eat with her at the table," she added, throwing a threatening look at Lucrezia. Lu just shook her head, calmly taking a sip of water. "What’s the problem?" Franco asked from the end of the table. Wrong question.

Virginia exploded, a torrent of accusations that grew louder as her words ran faster-too fast and too heated that I could never hope to understand. Lucrezia shot back, quietly at first but with more desperate ferocity as Virginia hammered on, unrelenting. Luigia’s attempt to soothe the tempest was useless; Franco only repeating the same question over and over. It only grew louder, faster, and feistier-until Virginia yelled a particularly forceful "Shut UP!" to which Lu replied, just as stubbornly, "Button your lips!"

I didn’t even have enough time to muse over the fact that, yes, it’s the same in Italian as English before Virginia had picked up her plate, fork, and napkin and stomped out of the room, apparently set on eating elsewhere. Which would have worked rather brilliantly, if Italians didn’t eat in a very separate three courses. Virginia had to return for each new plate, carefully avoiding any eye contact. Flavia and I kept to our own conversation, holding back a smile.

Afterward, I met Erin in the Piazza di Salimbeni, where we wondered at the empty streets and shared stories from the life we lived before Italy, before being friends and sharing such daring adventures. When I got home, Virginia was wrapped up in blankets with chocolate in hand and a movie on to drown out the silence of the otherwise empty house. Peter was in a hospital bed somewhere down the road, and Lauren was in Cinque Terre, too far from our balcony bedroom to share the day’s absurdities.

And that was only Friday.