Читать книгу In Maremma - David Leavitt - Страница 8

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AFTER WE SETTLED on settling in Maremma and before we found Podere Fiume, we looked at about twenty houses that were for sale. Each of them seemed to have an insuperable flaw Finally we did see a house that we quite liked. It was one of a row of attached houses built in the thirties, in a tiny borgo just north of Montemerano. (One of these houses belonged to the Toscanini family.) The owner was a Roman real estate agent whose wife, an architect, had restored the small yet high-ceilinged rooms with care, building a reading loft in the bedroom, carving a room for dealing with what Mussolini called “gli elementi della natura” from a thick wall, adding a terrace on the roof. In the living room a new fireplace had been installed—on the model of the one that originally was there, but smaller. In front of the house there was a big garden with a grass lawn (rare in this part of the world), stone paths, roses, and an ancient oak tree.

In reality, this house fit our fantasies better than it did our needs. For example, it had only two bedrooms, which meant that one of us would have to do without a study and work in the living room or at the dining table: not a big deal, but something to consider. The living room was far too small ever to hold a piano. There were no closets. And yet, and yet . . . the view from the terrace was so splendid, did it really matter if there weren’t enough closets? After all, one didn’t buy a house in Italy for the sake of storage space. Both our families had excesses of storage space, and what had they done with it? Stowed away boxes filled with creased sheets of Christmas wrapping paper, fondue sets, Tupperware bowls missing their lids, ancient blenders, and televisions that actually had dials. What need had we of closets?

And so we paid a visit to the real estate agent who had taken us to see the house—his name was Marco Rossi, which in Italy is like being named John Smith—during which we expressed some timid interest, then inquired as to how we might proceed. He smiled, then took out a thickly stuffed file from his desk. Because he liked to be completely up front with his clients, he said, he wanted to make sure that we were aware from the beginning of certain piccoli problemi with the house—nothing serious, no; still, worth knowing about.

He opened the file.

The first “little problem” had to do with the garden. Although it was for sale along with the house, and had the same owners as the house, the patch of land that led from the front door to the gate belonged to someone else. How was this possible? The piece of land in question was about the size of a large sofa. Marco Rossi explained that the land around the house had originally belonged to a widow who had died intestate. As she had eighteen legitimate heirs, the land had been divided into eighteen parcels. Seventeen of the owners had agreed to sell when the real estate agent and his wife had bought the garden, but one had held out. One always holds out . . . Not that it mattered in this case. The owner of the sofa-sized patch was very nice, actually a friend of his, Marco Rossi said, and he had no objections to the owners of the garden trespassing on his land in order to reach it.

Marco Rossi turned another page in his file. “Little problem” two, he said, concerned the cantina (basement). It did not belong to the owners of the house, but to an old woman who lived down the street, and though she would be willing to sell it, she wanted thirty-five million lire (at that time about twenty thousand dollars). The old woman told Marco Rossi to reassure us that if we chose not to buy the cantina, she was certain that someone else would—perhaps even someone in the borgo who would like to convert it into a playroom for their children. Old Italian women often are subtle practitioners of the art of blackmail.

Anything else?

Just one more “little problem”: if we bought the house, we would have to buy it as two separate apartments, the upstairs and the downstairs. This was merely a technicality. As there were two of us, it even could be perceived as an advantage: we could each buy one apartment.

We went back to Rome with photocopies of the documents relating to the three “little problems.” The next day we called Ada, a real estate agent we had met the summer before in San Francisco, where she was vacationing with her girlfriend, Maura. At a restaurant, they had appealed to us for help in translating the menu and then for advice on where they could go to get married. (This was in the days before same-sex marriage was legalized—and then just as quickly illegalized—in California.) Ada invited us to her apartment, where we gave her the photocopies. It took her about ten minutes to get through them. The reason the house was being sold as two apartments, she said, was because the major “renovation”—nothing less than the construction of the staircase linking the two floors—had been done without a permit. The electricity, the plumbing, and the roof terrace had also gone in without permits. In short, the whole house was illegal. If we bought it, and the illegal works were discovered, we could be compelled either to undo them or to pay an exorbitant fee in exchange for a condonno (certificate of approval).

“You could buy that house,” Ada said, “but I wouldn’t. I like to sleep at night.”

So we didn’t.

When we told Domenico about this adventure, he said, “Oh, that’s pretty common. In one house I did, I put in a swimming pool without a permit. When the inspector came, we covered the deck with sheets of sod and said that it was a holding tank for water.”