Chapter One: Too Much Trouble for Wine

        I decelerated when I reached the bumpy road that led from the quaint town of Borgofranco d’Ivrea to the rows of balmetti that hugged the foot of the nearby mountains. Unfortunately my parents had pawned their party house off on me. “I’m not Italian,” I’d protested, waving my arms in the air. “I’m Italian-American!” They’d given me funds to make necessary “minor” repairs. Thus I’d left Boston for the summer and traveled to Piemonte. I was an outsider in Borgofranco, but since I had relatives and an Italian passport, I’d been accepted.

        Yet I didn’t feel at ease. Being in Borgofranco reminded me of a photograph I kept on my desk at home: a gray cat half in the window and half out. I’d framed the shot because I agreed with the cat. It was best to sit on the window ledge so that you could quickly switch between one decision and the other. As long as you didn’t completely commit, you could easily change your mind.

        The photograph reflected my current state. I loved being in Italy, but I didn’t belong. I liked living in a small town, but I missed the excitement of Boston. I also had two major flaws. I disliked the hearty, local red wine, and I didn’t know how to cook. Nonetheless, I was about to host a dinner party for an army of hungry Italians.

        If I’d only known what awaited me. It never occurred to me that party houses could be dangerous. Then again, it had never occurred to me that Italians, of all people, sometimes kept things inside until they exploded. All that I learned later. At the time, that day, all I was thinking about was being a cat in a window frame. As if my life could be as simple as an in/out decision. As if the world could be divided so easily.

        As I turned east, I thought several months back. “Why renovate a wine cellar if I don’t like wine?” I’d asked my parents.

        “We’ll babysit your cat. Permanently,” Dad insisted. “The balmetto is a family heirloom.”

        I didn’t mention that an heirloom was usually a painting or a necklace.

“Besides,” my mother told me, “you can spend the summer practicing your Italian.”

This was unnecessary. I’d grown up speaking Italian. Because studying the language seemed too easy, I’d done doctoral work in French. I’d started over on my dissertation twice because I couldn’t stick with a topic. That was also why, instead of a decent full-time job, I worked three different gigs at language schools.

        “If the balmetto is so important, why don’t you keep it yourselves?”

“We’re old. We went over this already.”

Thus my scheming parents had unloaded their property on their only daughter so that they could enjoy their Floridian retirement in peace while I spent the summer running errands for my cousins’ friends who were assisting with the balmetto repairs. The trade was uneven. I didn’t care that the balmetto had once belonged to my great-grandfather or that it kept wine at an even sixty-two degrees.

        “All this trouble for fermented grapes,” I muttered as I downshifted to second gear in my borrowed Cinquecento. When I’d voted to sell the balmetto, my parents bought me a plane ticket. They had an even more sinister game plan. They wanted me to live abroad long enough to find a companion and then move back home. My mother had read an article stating that Europe was full of single, forty-something men and that they preferred American girlfriends. For my fortieth birthday a few months earlier, they’d given me a card based on an icanhascheezburger picture. A squadron of cats was breaking down the front door as the kitties bullied their way inside a cozy house. The caption? “Hi. I hear you are over forty and still not married.”

As I neared the row of balmetti, I should have felt cheerful that we’d finally finished the renovations. Instead I felt worried. The party was supposed to be a payback, but so many people had offered to help with the event that I was simply incurring more favors. Cousin Renato would fire up the stove. Aunt Maria would prepare pasta. Cousin-in-law Ivano would bartend. The list went on. The preparations had gotten so elaborate that I yearned to spend the evening alone at Aunt Angela’s. My aunt and uncle had loaned me their house because they spent the summer on the beach, which is exactly where I wanted to be.

        I rolled through the stop sign as a villager. My intention had been to come to Borgofranco long enough to set things in motion and then head to the beach for a month. I’d been overly optimistic. I’d also been misinformed. My father had claimed the repairs would be minor. I envisioned replacing the garbage disposal; my property didn’t have one. Instead it had structural flaws. I thought that rebuilding the stone walls had taken forever until we got to the stairway. I thought the stairway had taken forever until we dived into the electricity. Each repair had taken twice as long as I’d imagined. Instead of meeting dashing men at the beach, I knew every employee at Carrefour, the local megastore where I could buy every conceivable tool.

        If I called home to complain, my parents laughed. “Home repairs are like that,” my mother insisted. “You’ll see when you finally buy a house.” That was another dig, yet I had little reason to complain. For five weeks I’d worked hard by day, but most nights I’d been wined and dined by cousin Grazia and her husband Ivano. I could even understand some Piemontese, which was the local dialect, but I missed all the jokes. That meant I fit in, but then again I didn’t.

        My immediate problem was different. How many cups of espresso would I need to get through the evening? While everyone else I knew could taste wines for hours, the stuff put me to sleep. I disliked all the Piedmont reds equally. Hence I was especially unimpressed that in my parents’ absence, my cousins had made a habit of storing their extra wine in my cellar. By now every shelf was jammed. A few bottles carried labels such as “2012, alcohol level 13,” but most specimens had been hastily stored without any clues at all, so every bottle was a surprise.

        That was one reason for the party. Not only did I need to thank everybody I’d ever met in Borgofranco, but I needed to get rid of some of that bad Italian wine.

        I drove past the first cluster of balmetti. Although such party houses existed in other areas of Piemonte and Liguria, Borgofranco had the most. The stone structures huddled together like a medieval village and cut into the mountain in several uneven rows. All were constructed with the same goal: to make use of the natural fissures in the rocks. Thus the cellars stayed at cool, even temperatures that were perfect for storing wine.

I parked in the empty public piazza that bisected the cluster and grabbed up a couple of grocery bags. Carefully I picked my way among the grass and stones to reach my balmetto, which was on the corner of the second row.

        I was completely alone. No one came to the balmetti in the dead of the afternoon, and the air was so still the wind didn’t bother to whistle. At night everything would be different. On a hot summer’s evening, every third balmetto would be filled with partiers enjoying long dinners over glasses of wine. In the meantime I was thankful for the quiet. I needed time to compose myself and prepare for the onslaught of guests, all of whom would be talking at the same time.

        In structure my balmetto was typical. An iron gate led into a small grassy picnic area. Beyond that, three steps led into the cellar, which was a cavern the size of my parents’ living room in Coral Gables. An outer staircase led up to a small room that could be used for winter parties.

        Balmetti didn’t come with bedrooms. People weren’t allowed to live in them; that way partiers could make as much ruckus as they wanted to without bothering anyone who was trying to sleep. This seemed logical. Unfortunately, since most of the balmetti dated from the 1880’s and 1890’s, they were sacred. You weren’t allowed to modernize them. Worse, they’d been built without the benefits of plumbing. Thus I had a swell party house with lots of bad red wine and no bathroom.

        Obviously the setup had been designed by men. When they wanted to relieve themselves, they simply walked down to the fields that faced the balmetti. Not a single tree was even in sight.

I flipped on the electricity from the box I shared with my neighbors and unhooked the high gate leading into my yard. So many people had been coming and going that I’d stopped locking it weeks before.

Once inside my own grounds, I nearly felt satisfaction. The cobwebs had been swept away. The electricity worked without flickering on and off. The wall surrounding the yard no longer crumbled. The stairs were patched up. The weeds had been meticulously pulled, almost all by me, one stubborn plant at a time.

Seven picnic tables, four of which were borrowed, had been squeezed into neat rows. Stacks of plastic silverware and paper napkins filled a basket. Aunt Maria’s five-gallon pot waited on a metal table. She’d promised to make the best Bolognese sauce ever, and I could already taste the delicately roasted garlic she would be throwing inside. Grazia’s mom was truly a godsend. The guests would need as much food as possible to help soak up the wine.

          I set down the heavier bag on a picnic table. I was sure I’d bought way too many olives and breadsticks, but I’d been warned that passersby would stop by uninvited. I prayed these extra guests would come thirsty rather than hungry. Instead of handing out plates, I planned to arm guests with two wine glasses and hope they wouldn’t notice the difference.

As I descended to the cellar, I wrestled to extract the special balmetto key from my handbag. The metal monster measured half a foot long and weighed more than a paperweight. I was about to insert the key into the lock when I realized the door was ajar. This was not unreasonable. Ivano, Maria, and Renato had all promised to stop by with various supplies. Any one of them might have forgotten to secure the door.

Using my shoulder, I pushed open the wooden slab. I flipped the light switch, but as I turned around, I screamed. I dropped the sack. Canned olives rolled in three directions.

Ivano lay face down on the dirt floor. A muddy puddle of red had already seeped into his navy Polo shirt and gardening jeans. His head was turned to one side, and I instinctively avoided looking into his open eye. I swooped down and rocked his shoulders as if I could wake him from some kind of magical nap, but he was already stiff.

I ran back outside. I was dreaming. I was insane. It couldn’t be true.

Ivano, the man who had immediately befriended me upon my arrival in Borgofranco. The man who had patiently explained phrases of dialect. The man who had been my passport to Piemonte.

I dug into my handbag for my cell phone but couldn’t find it in the left pocket or the right one either. To save time, I turned the bag upside down and dumped the contents on the nearest picnic table. I found my cell, but I didn’t make any calls. The worthless thing was so dead it wouldn’t even turn on long enough for an emergency call.

I desperately needed a glass of water. Instead I was surrounded by bottles of red wine.