I gloried in the September sun raying down on the terraced vineyards of Tuscany, as I followed Paulo, the grandson of the owner of Villa Montebella, the Conte de Ghiberti, into the rows of wooden stakes supporting luscious green leaves and vines interspersed with moist clumps of purple and green grapes nearly bursting with rich juices. Paulo stopped on the edge of a rock-walled terrace where we could look down across the harbor hamlet of Marina de Massa to the calm Mediterranean waters of the Ligurian Sea.

It was a perfect morning, and I had the perfect guide beside me to show me the fundamentals of a grape harvest. If he had been around in Michelangelo’s day, he would have been the model for the statue of David. For all I knew, one of the youth’s ancestors had been the model. He was small, thin, and lithe, appearing several years younger than the age his grandfather had told me he was. His body was perfectly shaped, and his features achingly handsome. His hair was dark and curly, and his fingers and the toes I could see clinging to his sandals were long and sensuous, a promise of length in other features as well. He wore only loose cotton trousers, having come to the fields to put in a hardworking day. The skin of his body, tightly stretched on his musculature, was an olive brown, evidencing the many hours he spent in the sun on these hilly slopes and belying what took up his time most of the year. His grandfather had told me that the young man was dedicated to the church, that the Ghibertis descended from popes and perpetually had at least one member of the family located close to the pontiff’s throne in the Vatican. Having seen the grandson now, I thought that this was a sad waste of good manflesh.

Paulo turned to me and grinned, all pearly white teeth and sensuous lips, showing me in that one gesture just how much he loved these Tuscan hills and their bounty of rich grapes. He gestured for me to follow him, and I watched the motion of his lithe body as I followed him into the vineyard terraces. It hit me that Paulo had been in perpetual motion since the first time I had seen him standing in the morning light coming through the Palladian window in the marbled front hall of the Villa Montebella. Even when he was standing still, his torso was languidly moving. He could have been a dancer. Better a dancer than a priest, I thought a little bitterly. I loved watching him move. But as much as I ached in my groin in observing his fluidity, I also ached to put him at rest, to give him so much of what I thought he needed that his body would be calm and silent, would not have to be in perpetual motion, as if it was trying to escape from some unavoidable reality. I had been with his grandfather only briefly, but I had gotten the same sense of a life of regret and velvet-walled imprisonment from him as well.

When Paulo halted, deep down the corridors of the grapevine support fences, I stripped off the gauzy white shirt that had loosely covered my torso, and we worked hard, side by side, for nearly an hour. Paulo showing me which grapes were begging to be plucked and how to harvest them without bruising their tender skins. And all the time his torso was in perpetual motion, moving like a master dancer.

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