Matisse as a kitten and Houdini

Here is Matisse as a kitten.












On the right is Houdini, one lazy summer day at Poggio.

12 Poggio December 2003

Poggio, December 2003

Monday 1

Liza arranged a lunch for all her friends so they could meet her younger sister Dim, who wore a skirt and was dressed in blue. I was in brown and also dressed in a skirt, which I mention because it is a rare event for me. Dim wore a necklace of highly coloured miniature parrots. A necklace a child, or any good friend of mine, might wear.

Justin the watercolour painter was there. He’d ridden his motorino in from a small town where he’s now living. He said it had taken him an hour and he looked as though he needed to be thawed out. “Long time,” he says to me, but there was nowhere for him to sit at my table. He used to sit on the street in Rome and paint and sell everything he painted to passers by as soon as it was dry. I tell him I’m to go into Rome with Katherine to see the Toulouse Lautrec exhibit.

I tell Pat that I’ve not yet figured out how to stay at home and be paid. She says, “When you have a pension this happens.” I’ll probably never have a pension. Artists don’t stop working. I remember being told that. I also remember a life drawing teacher shouting in exasperation during a class in summer school. “Why are you looking for a job? This is your job. You are painters. You are never without work.”

Tuesday 2

I went to Rolando’s art class. A man I’d not met before was there. His name begins with B and ends in ino. He paints realistically. Takes photos, which he copies, placing a few unrelated images in the same painting. We all seem to be painting from photos, mostly the paintings bear no resemblance to the photo.

I enjoyed the drive to Viterbo, except when I came to what I call the bad bridge, which is built at an angle. Going one way you can’t see the cars coming from the other direction. Coming from the other the same thing but at night the blank grey wall, lit by headlights, looks exactly like mist lit by headlights. It has confused me more than once. This time there were a few cars, unusual on a Monday. One car was stopped at the side of the road and the driver waved me on.

On the left hand side of the road, not too far along from the bad bridge was a huge pile of flowers. Someone, maybe more than one person, had recently died there. It seemed that the people in the cars had to do with the flowers. Round the corner by the bar, up the hill on the right there is a cemetery that I’d never noticed before. Walking towards it there were many people, a broad cross-section of Italy; young, old, middle-aged. All going to the funeral in the clothes they happened to be wearing that day to go to work.

I am at the art class and have to leave early because I want to feed the horses at 5.30pm. Silly really. Maestro says he likes the painting I’m working on. It is a shame when I myself am not so sure and am struggling with it. I struggle to maintain enough enthusiasm to continue on a certain path and not suddenly start painting something else.

Wednesday 3

My Australian colleague called to book a ride with three other people on Saturday. I’ve decided to take the Saturday riders to a friend’s riding stable: Caino. Actually Caino is the nickname of my friend’s father. He’d been kicked off a bucking horse when a boy and had landed in a tree. They had meant to call him Icarus, but they got the name wrong and called him Caino. The name stuck. The son now runs the riding stable at the top of a cliff out by Canale Monterano.

I found a robin trapped in the kitchen fluttering against the windowpanes. I caught it in my green jacket and finally let it fly out the window. It was unharmed, unlike the blue tit that had been caught by Matisse.

I’m being paid the last payment for my work. Money seemed easier to hold onto when we had lire instead of the euro. I also felt a lot richer. Anyone would, I suppose. One million sounds a lot better than one thousand. Six hundred lire sounds better than three hundred euro. My bank account looks depressing and I can no longer call myself a millionaire.

A lemon sky and I wonder where my grey wool hat is.

Thursday 4

I put the halter on Nutmeg. Doesn’t count. I tricked her. I put feed in a bucket and had the halter all ready loose in my hand. As she ate I fiddled around her head and got it on her. When she raised her head from the bucket to take a breath from eating, I got the noseband over her muzzle. I told her she looked very beautiful with her new halter on. Actually it is Pepita’s old one so must now get her a new one. I want to teach Nutmeg to lead today.

Cherokee is out there looking for food. She seems to be hungrier in the morning than she is at night. Maybe they need to eat more because of the cold.

I am wondering where I can take my Australian colleague and friends to ride. Remo’s cousin used to have a place over by Anguillara, but he fell out with his father. All the horses used to come out of their stalls to drink water at the same time. Then they would all go back to their own places. All without any human intervention. Or you would unsaddle them and let them be and they would go for a drink of water and back to their own stalls.

Friday 5

I have a headache since last night after I went out to check the horses. Pepita was nowhere to be seen. She’d lifted up the bar between Nutmeg and herself and Sully’s stall and squeezed herself through. It was raining and I found Pepita eating the leftover hay in Sully’s den. I chased her out.

I complain of a cold head and am still searching for my grey hat, which may remain on my head indoors and out throughout the winter months. I’d been wearing my hat at Maestro’s. I had to take it off because he gets two wood stoves burning and a fire in a huge fireplace in the main room. I got my old spot back. This is crunched in with the long timers in the smaller room with a very efficient wood stove. Maybe the light is better in there. We all get an easel and stand or sit to paint in oil. Not too much room to move around.

I’ve bought a beautiful bosal from Donà, the local saddle shop. It is white rawhide with plaited cotton reins. A girl’s bridle for a girl horse. It cost a whacking 90 euro. It is more for show than for being used. It is very beautiful and I wonder about just hanging it on the wall.

Saturday 6

Vincenzo the landlord shows up. “Come stiamo?” How are we? he asks me lightly joking with me. Then he starts apologising. He tells me he called to say he was coming but that the phone must have been off the hook. I tell him that I have Memotel, which is a telephone answering service and would take a message even if my phone was off the hook. It is very difficult to explain all these new innovations. I’m beginning to suspect that this elderly gentlemen in his too short trousers can write his name but would be hard pressed to read what he’d written.

Vincenzo says he has an electrician who is installing a burglar alarm at his house. He wants to ask him to make an estimate on changing the wiring in the house I’m renting.

Later, Mara rode by leading a young boy on the overfed pony Polly. She told me one of her horses, Ricca, had died of colic. I knew that horse and she was always getting colic. I saw her once in such pain. These horses lived in a field or waited standing in stalls to be ridden. It was while she was standing in the stall that I saw her arch her back downwards. All muscles tense. That time Mara and I were with her and were able to give her something to relieve her pain and, I suspect, save her life.

The folks coming for the ride wanted to know how the horses would be. They wanted to add another woman to the party. I booked them into a restaurant so we could eat something before getting in the saddle.

Pepita escaped (again) on Friday. She ignored a bucket of feed that I rattled at her. I decided to chase her and made her canter around until she was fed up and wanted to get back to the herd (of two others). I was able to catch her and then took the opportunity to lead her and teach her “whoa”. She listens. However, I still don’t know if I can tie her and leave her.

Sunday 7

The ride was wonderful, the weather was cool and it didn’t rain. The hills rolled away into the soft grey sky. I rode a black horse that acts up in the same way as mine will on the way home. I am aware that I may be the problem and not the horse. I feel myself stiffen and hold too tight to the reins. I resolve to watch myself when I next get onto my horse.

The people were OK and I didn’t lose my temper. One of the crowd had to get off his horse to be sick behind a bush. They’d all been out drinking the night before and had probably had made a long night into the morning. It was about this time that we were joined by a man I’d ridden with before. A few of us had gone to Civitella Cesi on horseback. One man rode Paprika, who was stolen during the BSE crises and horses were being stolen for meat. Later her owner died. A mutual friend said he’d never got over his horse being stolen.

R, one of the riders, rode with me in the car from the restaurant and after the ride back to my house. Where we all met up for hot tea or hot chocolate. I’d bought a lemon cake from the supermarket and it was dreadful. I have frozen it. Maybe it will improve the flavour.

I really liked the man who led the ride. They also train folks to be guides on horseback, and I want to do this. He said that I could bring Merry if she was ready to be ridden. We could learn together.

R had told me bad news about future work. No one wants to invest in agriculture in Iraq and five to eight hundred staff members are to be released from service.

Monday 8

A holiday Monday and it feels like a Sunday. Porgy was barking and it never occurred to me that he was barking at the horses. All it would take is one kick from Sully to his silly head and he’d be dead. Going on the same concept as tying a dead chicken around a dog’s neck to stop it chasing them. I tied Porgy up beside Sully while she ate. I saw her make an ugly face at him and at one time she laid her bared teeth against his head. I knew I couldn’t go into lunch and leave them to it. When I went to put water in the buckets I saw Sully stamp her forefeet beside Porgy and felt that he may have had enough. So tied him up at further away from her.

Tuesday 9

The wind blows and teaches me all the places the cold comes into the house. I dress to feed the horses hay and immediately after I’ve done this come back inside again. I find Matisse on the closed cover on the toilet. He can no longer watch the shadows play on the bathroom window as I have covered it with a thick and heavy towel to keep the cold wind out.

Wednesday 10

It took about twenty phone calls, but finally Remo and Lele showed up to help me with the vaccinations. I don’t know why I bothered call them in the end as I could really have done the job myself. I had been afraid that the vaccination for the foal would have been different, and it wasn’t.

In the night I hear the heater work overtime. Pat and the electrician tell me that it costs less to keep the heater on all the time and to keep the temperature at a constant and even low temperature. I think differently. I will turn it off all the time and only turn it on when I really have to. I think this will save fuel. They argue that the heater must work longer to heat a cold house up. I watch myself. When the house is really cold the only warm place is in bed and that is where I go. I don’t actually have any energy to do anything else, not even work on the computer. In the end it is warmer outside even with the wind blowing.

My French friend AM turns her heater off at night and sleeps with her bedroom window wide open. She sleeps under a heavy rug made of many pieces of goatskin. As a child I used to imagine being at the North Pole on a sledge pulled by huskies. Someone would be wrapping me up first in silk, then in thick soft wool and then in soft furs, and then I would fall asleep and be pulled through the cold northern night in my dreams.

Thursday 11

Went to the dentist, who is more beautiful than I remembered him to be. He is young, his hair sticks up on his head as though spiked by the wind. He has an artists way of doing his dentistry. I’d been told to go to younger dentists in Italy, because they are now trained longer than they used to be.

I bump into a colleague from Anguillara who asks how can I continue with these short work contracts. After a while, he adds, “They must weigh you down”. It’s true that at the beginning I feel quite positive and then I start to worry about whether or not my contract will be renewed. It makes it difficult to concentrate sometimes. I’m not very Zen.

On the radio I hear them talking about Iraq and saying how it seems that someone is sitting down and planning attacks on humanitarian aid workers. “This has never happened before,” they say.

Friday 12

Here I am at Christmas time, with no job. Once, I was told by a friend that she knew I was to be offered a temporary post. Someone had seen the paper work. It got stuck in someone’s desk drawer, she said. However, I was glad to be out of that particular department at the time. Maybe it was a lucky break.

Marco the maniscalco came on the dot of 2.30pm. He charged me 10 euro for doing both Sully and Pepita’s feet. After, I put the horses in the field with the electric fence and it works. Porgy got zapped twice and came to me to comfort him; sweet.

Saturday 13

Remo rode Merry on the campo. She has to look at everything. He says he will take her out in a group. He tells me that the next time they go out in a group I can be the one on Merry. I’m not so sure.

I think of going Christmas shopping, which means going to the upstairs discount above the supermarket, or looking for newer, unread books on my bookshelves.

I’ve been turning the heat down to 10-12°C at night. In the morning there is a smell of mould in the bathroom and I see it spreading on the underside of the tiles over the bathtub. The engineer for the house tells me the bathroom was added after it had been built by him, or he’d followed its construction.

Vincenzo will show up today. He told me that he usually builds a fire after the first rains. He is talking about the huge hill he’s building in the field, over which he’s placed a sheet of plastic so the rain will not wet the pile and it will light easily. I told him that we have had days and weeks of rain. He moves his hands and shakes his head as though to clear it. I think he means he’ll light his fire after these long first rains have ended.

Sunday 14

Matisse gets me out of bed at 6.35am. I let Porgy out and Houdini comes in. Matisse pounces on him and gives him a body hug, which may come with a bite. Houdini sometimes spends an hour or so inside playing with Matisse, but today it seems he has another place he wants to be.

Matisse is intent on burying his food in the floor. I’ve bought very expensive Hills D/D prescription diet because he is scratching a lot. The woman in the pet food store says that sometimes this is caused by a food allergy. I’ve been buying the highly coloured – inexpensive – red cat food. Maybe this is it.

I spent three or four hours waiting for Remo to train my horse. The next appointment was walking up the driveway. A man with white hair and a beard who has bought his granddaughters a stallion to ride. I think I wouldn’t have done that, even though Remo seems to have a magic touch with stallions and they behave themselves as well as a mare or a gelding when he is done with them.

There is something heavy bouncing around the garden. I am hoping it is the dogs and not an escaped horse.

Monday 15

I wake in a bad mood. I thought I was going to write a Christmas letter to anyone who might want to hear from me. I hate Christmas. Hate is maybe too strong a word, I am indifferent perhaps. I buy presents for people I know are buying presents for me. There is no point in sending anything to Mummy because she won’t get it. I think the problem may lie with the Jamaican and/or Italian post office.

There were five vacuum cleaners lined up in the storeroom beside the house. I’ve now taken them to stand in a line beside the rubbish bin out on the road. I have hung the faded plastic hula hoop on the plastic knob sticking out of the side of the rubbish container. Maybe a child will take it. It looks like some sad time traveller. I was too small to really enjoy a hula hoop when it came into fashion, but I remember by elder cousins played with it while shrieking and giggling.

Tuesday 16

I awake with a headache. It is biting cold. Matisse is battering at the window wanting to be let out.

An electrician came to do a quote on the re-wiring of the house. He drives a BMW. I don’t think I want an electrician who drives such an expensive car to be writing up an estimate for a job. It makes me nervous. He barely glances at the house and tells me the estimate will be ready in the afternoon.

I find Matisse eating the outside cat food. He refuses to eat the expensive kind that is drying up in his bowl. Now he is contentedly washing himself on the back of the sofa-bed.

I’ve given all the kiwi fruit away to Pat and Rolando. I’ll pick the rest growing upstream from where the dead cat is buried and store them in the crawl space in the store room. How Vincenzo got there I don’t know.

A chill wind blows strong enough to make the curtains move over the closed window. It is painful where it lands on me, like a cold knife plunged to the bone.

Wednesday 17

At one in the morning I find the two male dogs, Porgy and Navaho curled up in the barn. I tried to keep Cherokee in, but she was whining and so I put her out. She looked at me with her big brown eyes. Sorrowful and questioning. She has a huge tumour and no longer follows the male dogs on their excursions through the woods.

I think Cherokee was once used to following the previous tenant, the one who abandoned her, around the house. Once she’d come into the house and immediately gone into the studio, which used to be the bedroom and curled up on the floor. In the kitchen poor Cherokee goes into the corner where there is now the washing machine, as though she expects to lie there.

I sat in the barn waiting for Navaho to come back, but more to feel what it was like, and experience why the dogs sleep there. Amazingly warm for an old tin-sided barn. I suspect it depends which way the wind is blowing.

Thursday 18

I wonder if my brother, Peter, is planning a surprise visit. He’s been very quiet. He may well be thinking the same thing about me.

Friday 19

Navaho has not been back for two nights. Cherokee showed up last night after I got home and I’d decided to take Porgy out to see what the dark lump was beside the road. I brought her into the kitchen and fed her, and then again, and twice more in the night. She is so thin. Today she is walking around. I’d got up in the night to give Cherokee yet more food and I put on the heat, so by late morning we were all sleeping like babies.

As Matisse leaves when I open the door to let Cherokee out, I’m reminded of what Rolando my painting teacher tells me. I must let the animals live their own lives, with as little interference from me as possible. I’m there to feed them, give them water. I don’t know, I think I’m also here to worry about them too.

I’ve been interviewed for another editing job, at least a month’s work.

Saturday 20

Went to Remo’s where he was preparing the sand field with the tractor. “Ten minutes,” he says. Two and a half hours later he is on Mary Rose’s back, but it didn’t matter, it gave me such joy to see her. She looks so elegant and as though she is thinking about what she is doing. Remo seems to be preparing her to spin. Remo tells me he will take me to a good store to buy Western gear when I’m ready. I said I cannot ride my little horse looking like a rag bag.

I’m not good at Christmas. I think of buying small gifts for people, like a bottle of rum and tropical fruit. Who knows if the family I would buy this for would even eat tropical fruit. I thought of putting all this in the little red basket I have, but I see that it has been taken over by Matisse.

In the night I hear a sound in the garden and remember times I’ve opened the bedroom window and found Cherokee there. She has been going down hill for a while now with her tumour. It is very cold out there. I think of getting her into the car and taking her to the vet. I could lift her front legs in and then her back. She is very large. Maybe I should pay someone to come to visit her.

Sunday 21

I thought of giving away my ivory netsuke, the little working man and the man with the horse. I picked them up and they were warm as though they had recently been handled. The little working man smiled up at me and I put both ivory sculptures back in their safe spot.

I have taken Cherokee to the vet, who told me she has bronchitis and gave her a shot of antibiotics. Cherokee staggers. The vet said it could be this but it could also be the tumour has spread to her lungs. The part I can see is as big as an apple. He tells me there is not much he can do. I can only make her comfortable. He talks of her staying in the barn. He may think of a barn with brick walls, filled with sweet-smelling hay. I now don’t have much faith in the tin-sided barn to offer much protection to a staggering dying dog.

Later in the day after a dog walk with Porgy, I found Cherokee had collapsed in the field. I got her into the kitchen slowly encouraging and half dragging her there.

Monday 22

Cherokee is still alive. She circles the kitchen walking kilometres. I pick the food I’d set down for her off the floor since she walks through it as though not seeing. She scatters the contents in the bowl. Porgy looks at me from his place under the kitchen table.

I told Anthea about Cherokee and she tells me she has only just put Esposita, her Marimano dog down because of a tumour on her chest. I tell her that Cherokee circles the kitchen and gets stuck in a corner and won’t move. “Maybe she’s in pain,” says Anthea. “She makes no sound,” I tell her. Then Anthea tells me something I never knew. “They don’t”. They don’t make a sound. Dogs that whine and bark all through their lives don’t make a sound when they’re in pain.

Down at Remo’s I play darts. They are playing with light-weight children’s darts. Not the heavy kind I remember from my parent’s bar, the Old Pimento House in Jamaica. Marco the blacksmith was there with his sweet daughter, Ilena, with an angelic tiny face. I watch a young man ride his Arab gelding as it rears and bucks and he rides out the storm with elegance and doesn’t fall off or shout. We are all given Christmas gifts. A horse shoe with a pine cone and dried oranges. It is pretty and seems filled with good magic. I put it up on my bedroom wall.

At Poggio, someone drives up to the corner of the garden and whistles. Maybe they wait for the dogs to come barking and running. No one will go. Porgy is under his table in the kitchen, Navaho is missing and Cherokee is silently circling the kitchen.

Penny calls, she’d been on my mind because she’s the one who has sat and watched her pets die at the end of their lives. She has never put any of them down and disapproves of it. I wonder if the veterinarian would release Cherokee from her pain.

I tell Penny that I used to think of my brother’s house as a “safe house” a place to go when I needed to feel cared about. It was easier when I was in New York and he was in Florida. “You can come here,” she tells me. And I know that I can. Somehow I am much more stuck with all the animals. I don’t feel able to just close up the house, get someone to feed horses, dogs and cats and disappear to England for a couple of weeks to get my bearings again.

Penny tells me someone is building in her garden. She is ordering trees to shut them out. Magnolia and Cypress all the way from Tuscany. “Will they grow in Sussex?” I ask. She tells me the gardener says to move them in the winter so they have time to acclimatise. They may even grow better with the extra English rain.

I notice that Matisse sits on the left hand side of the bed and he blinks at himself in the mirror. From this vantage point he can also keep an eye on me without even turning his head.

It was only two weeks ago that Porgy and Cherokee were walking around outside the gate together. Maybe I’d not notice how ill she was for a whole week because I thought the dogs were being fed by the neighbours. Cherokee had not been eating and I’d not been concerned. Now she drinks milk, laps it up. She’s drinking my expensive goat’s milk very slowly. I see Porgy eyeing it. “Give it to me,” he seems to say, “I’ll show you how fast a dog can lap up goat’s milk”. And he does. He places one paw in the centre of the bowl so it doesn’t run away from him and finishes the milk in seconds.

Tuesday 23

The Maestro was very pleased with my painting. “Very painterly,” he says. One of the students comes and asks if the man in my painting is eating an apple. The maestro returns to look into my eyes. I wondered if I should feel hurt by this comment. The man in my painting is playing a tiny wind instrument that is held in both hands like a harmonica, it can’t be seen. I know it is there because I took the photo, which I am now working from. The man was one of my male friends. I may even have been in love with him, but he was never in love with me. He was as I have painted him mercurial, and his eyes are laughing.

About painting, I learned some time back that people’s comments should be listened to. They often tell me more about the person doing the criticism than it does about my painting. It all really depends on who is doing the talking. I will always listen to Rolando, Maestro. I will sometimes listen to Pat. I will always listen to Liza, because her advice is worth following.

Sometimes the comments about my work make me embarrassed, as though the person talking does not realise they are giving so much of themselves away. I used to read the children’s books I wrote at schools, then the children and I would take huge sheets of paper and coloured pens and we’d create books together. Some of the stories they told me would make my heart skip a beat, or cause me to hold my breath. These children were not always from the richest or prettiest part of town.

I go to visit Mara carrying a stupid mug with a grinning horse on it. I find Flora is on her friend’s horse just about to go looking for her husband who is riding around bareback in the woods on her horse, Orazio.

I have stopped writing the Christmas letter because I have no Christmas feeling and my letter would be filled with questions. Maybe people wouldn’t mind that so much, especially friends. Although my friends would want a personal handwritten letter from me and not one they shared with a lot of folks they’d not met and had not much wish to meet.

Cherokee continues her clockwise circles of the kitchen. She stops in corners and under the stepladder. I know she sees because she focuses on Matisse as he flickers across her vision. I try to feed her and her tongue comes out and doesn’t pick up the food. Is there a point in continuing this life of hers?

Wednesday 24

I took Cherokee to the vet. He says there is not much we can do. He tells me to leave her in the hay barn. I did and when I went to look she was no longer there. Maybe she went to look for Navaho. Liza was here and we exchanged Christmas gifts. I heard Cherokee bark. Two short barks, as though in some kind of distress. I didn’t run out to look. Later I went, when Liza had gone, she was nowhere to be found.

Isn’t it better that she is outside? In the kitchen she would circle always in a clockwise direction and then flop down asleep. I think the vet must have thought the barn would be a warm one, filled with hay and animals sheltering from the cold. A warm barn. Not the windy, draughty place with the flapping tin sides.

Pat tells me Cherokee had probably gone off to die somewhere. I smelled her outside the kitchen door, even with the tramontana, the cold wind from the north, blowing. Strangely, I smell her more outside than inside the kitchen where she’s been existing for the last few days. I never knew that I would learn the smell of a dog. In the summer I learned their barks and could tell one dog from the other. It is a cold day for Cherokee to die.

Thursday 25

Christmas day and I wouldn’t know it. Matisse and I bump into each other. There are at least five good sized rooms here and we always seem to be in the same place at the same time and going to sit on the same spot. Now he is lying close to me with his right paw hugging my leg and his nose up against me. I am thinking angry sad thoughts and spiralling down into a pit. I feel two paws on my face, “Wake up,” seems to say, my furry friend. “There’ll be lizards to chase in the spring when the sun shines.”

Friday 26

Santo Stefano, Boxing Day. Matisse gets me up at 6.39am. He is battering around the house waiting for me to let him out. It is feeling like a very sleepy day out there. Quiet, cold. No sign of Cherokee or Navaho. I hear a human cough on the other side of the hedge outside my bedroom window. Then a car came by, probably to pick up the cougher.

The water outside is frozen in the taps. I fill the horses’ water container filling a bucket in the kitchen sink and pouring it into the container. They gather around to drink.

Peter calls and I miss the call. He’s left a message. When I call back his phone is busy and I call him on his cell phone. Debbie, his second wife answers. “He’s on the phone with his sister in Jamaica. Who is it?” “His other sister,” I tell her. When he calls back he tells me he’s been sick with bronchitis. He is losing weight. Has lost weight. He tells me he doesn’t get sick pay. I’m surprised. I thought everyone in America got paid when they were off sick. What kind of a country is that? At least he is getting a pension. I hope.

He tells me the Department of Transport rules are changing on the 4^th of January. I’m surprised that he even keeps up with these things. He apologises for not sending me the cowboy boots I’d wanted for my 50^th birthday in June. I tell him not to worry about it. “It was your 50^th birthday,” he says. People from Jamaica visited him and Debbie for Christmas. I don’t tell him that I’m on my own. Not such a bad thing, as it is my choice and I enjoy the country quiet. I know I have friends just round the corner, celebrating in front of their fireplaces or snoozing through the afternoon.

I take Porgy on what I think will be a two hour walk, it takes twenty minutes. I don’t know how the same walk on horseback can take so much longer, maybe because I don’t walk from A to B and meander because its not me who’s doing the walking.

For lunch I cook mushrooms with cream and butter. These are the huge feathery mushrooms I’ve been growing in the cellar on my mushroom block. I don’t need to eat anything else all day.

Liza calls to thank me for the present and to tell me about her Christmas lunch at a local restaurant with a bunch of friends. Dried up salmon and lamb. Some kind of vegetable. A sorbet between the first and second course and…NO DESERT. I know the place. Two televisions blaring at opposite ends of the room both turned to a different channel. The sound of voices and the tvs bounce of the walls. I get a headache and my teeth hurt just thinking about the noise.

Saturday 27

Divine. I don’t know that even my father would have succumbed to such a breakfast. Coffee with a dash of Tia Maria.

Today I opened the studio and it was a pleasure to see the tidy shelves. Now I have to concentrate on tidying up the right hand side of the studio.

Horses gallop around the garden. Pepita threatens to crash through the fence, she didn’t succeed. Matisse complains about the food I put down for him. He doesn’t like beef with rice. Only fish, fish, fish.

I went to Anthea and Luigi’s open house. Luigi wearing his red Babbo Natale hat. I’d found a couple on the road with a black Labrador, who finally showed up. Another couple was there, the man works for the BBC covering the Pope. I may have even heard him on the news. Lena was there with her two youngest children. Her husband and elder son were out all day somewhere doing boy stuff. She wanted to kidnap me and take me to see an exhibition in Bracciano. I just wanted to go back to my house and hide from the cold and the wet and the wind.

I take Porgy out for a walk on the lead. At the holes in the fence he turns to look at me with his paw raised. Poor baby. Maybe he’ll find the missing Navaho and Cherokee.

Sunday 28

Navaho is back. He must have come in the night. Porgy “told me”. As we went out he makes a sharp right and I see that the door to the cantina is open. Navaho comes up the steps. Of course there’s no Cherokee. He licks my hand, “Breakfast?” Just like any man who’s been out for the week chasing a woman in a fur coat and the right kind of perfume.

Later Matisse looks out the window. He’s heard a sound. Maybe it’s Navaho in the cantina. I only hope he doesn’t knock over my highly productive mushroom block.

I find a photo of all the dogs together in the spring. Do I really need a puppy?

Monday 29

Rain. Can I face the road to Viterbo in this rain? Navaho has gone again. He’d come back to be refuelled and now he’s gone again. Porgy gets taken on walks on the lead. I don’t feel like being dog less.

Mirto calls and tells me she spent Christmas serving a Christmas dinner to the homeless. She talks of moving out of Rome.

Tuesday 30

Navaho has again returned. He looks sideways at Porgy who is now tied up to the table leg in the kitchen so he won’t eat Matisse’s food. Matisse skips out into the rain. I take Porgy for a walk and he doesn’t want to go because it’s still raining. I walk him around the house. Bop Bop. There’s Matisse trapped behind the huge plastic sheet I’ve used to cover over the porch. I let Matisse back in by opening the living room door from inside the house. He comes in slowly as though doubting that he is entering the place he now knows as home.

Wednesday 31

I begin to prepare the rooms for the electrician to begin his work. He is supposed to up date the wiring and put in an earth. If the electricity is in order I can think of doing a bed and breakfast here.

At Remo’s I hear that someone has had four horses stolen, and another person five. Remo and Lele now take it in turns to sleep in the car down by the horses. I know that I’ll be up at every sound in the night looking for horse thieves in the night.