The woman dying in the bed next to Mallary’s really was reading a book called, What to Wear with Cancer. That’s the second thing Mallary had noticed about her after noticing the contents of the suitcase the woman had unpacked— the silk pajamas and cashmere wraps, the satiny underpants and bras with lace that didn’t curl, the hospital wardrobe that immediately confirmed all Mallary’s notions about Italian women and fashion, perhaps an absurd obsession with fashion, given that this woman had come to have her stomach removed and radiated outside of her body for days in a new last-resort experimental procedure to extend her life.
Mallary could not believe that the woman was as sick as she was, given her cheerfulness and insistence on popping out of bed every time Mallary moaned in order to rub Mallary’s temples or kiss her cheeks or show her a picture of a beautiful dead sister; Mallary looked just like the sister, the woman insisted—the exact same waist-length dark curls!-- though Mallary couldn’t see it, despite how flattering the comparison. The resemblance was such a comfort to the woman who had not yet gone in for her surgery; it seemed as though the sister had stepped into the room to watch over them both—a guardian angel. Mallary had been in Perugia only two days when her appendix burst and she’d been rushed to Silvistrini Hospital not knowing a word of Italian, her parents in route but still 24 hours away. The cancer-riddled woman had kissed the picture of her dead sister, uttering prayers, possibly weeping as burly attendants hoisted Mallary onto the gurney to wheel her toward surgery. When Mallary woke up with a drain in her side, the first thing she’d seen was the woman’s pixie face, made up to perfection, hovering over her like an angel; nothing about her had looked sick.
The time came for the woman to go under the knife and, the night before, Mallary wished she were capable of standing up, getting out of bed, getting out of the room, out of the way so her room-mate could say what she needed to say to her husband and seven year old son and mother and mother-in-law and cousin Agnese, and brother Filippo, and the priest who came and prayed over her, kissing the cross and waving it over her like a wand. Everyone was crying, everyone except the woman who kept saying things in words Mallary could not understand and blowing kisses while her son with a wizened, knowing face sat at the foot of her bed twisting the sheet around his arm.
When the woman awoke from anesthesia the first thing she did is smile at Mallary as though greeting a friend she’d thought she’d lost. She seemed too happy to have been through such physical trauma and Mallary felt sudden shame that she had moaned and carried on like such an American over a mere appendix. Now this woman was to learn that the cancer had invaded too many of her organs for the surgeons to do the trick they’d had in mind with her stomach . They had opened her abdomen, stood back in horror, then closed her up again to let her die of the same kind of cancer that had killed her sister.
A mere two weeks after surgery, Mallary has caught up with her school work, comes to class, is going with me this weekend to an agriturismo near Gubbio—ready, she says, to walk in the wild and see the sights that had originally drawn her to Italy. But the real beauty of Italy exists elsewhere, she’s sure, and she’s still trying to find it and name it as she makes her daily visits to the hospital, bringing her new friend bright scarves, flea-market bracelets, trendy camouflage vests embroidered with roses—outfits sure to shock and dazzle the many visitors who flock to the woman’s bedside to discover what on earth she’ll wear next.
sabato 15 dicembre 2007
venerdì 9 novembre 2007
My Pranzo with Vincenzo
He approached my table to borrow a chair, explaining that his two wives would be joining him as soon as the train arrived from Rome. He lived in Spoleto now, with his nurse, because it was easier for him in Spoleto where people could come take care of him and he could paint all day—he was a painter, had in fact done all the paintings in the restaurant, watercolors of fruits and vegetables. He had a sack—you know, what they give you when they cut out your intestines. He patted it gently. Diverticulitis, he explained. In Spoleto the nurse comes and takes care of him and someone else comes to cut his toe-nails and his wife stays in Rome with her mother who is missing a leg. If he ever needs her, though, she hops on the train and gets here in a flash. He can call at two in the morning—anytime, and she will come. She and the nurse (wasn’t really his second wife, but he liked to pretend) would be here any minute to join him for pranzo. That’s why he needed the other chair—so he’d have two free and another on which to put his folded up overcoat and red scarf and hat.
He was a dapper fellow in a baby blue cashmere V-neck and bow-tie, white haired, eyes as blue and soft as the sweater; he smelled like baby-powder. He asked me if I was Dutch or German and when I told him I was American he said he’d been to every country in the world at one time or another except the United States because he had been sure it held no surprises. India, China, Peru were interesting because so different; to see America all he had to do was turn on the TV. He showed me he knew how to speak English by uttering phrases he remembered from a textbook: “How are you today? Would you like some tea?” He giggled at himself and asked me how I’d come to know Italian. I told him about my life and job and interests.
He told me that when he was in the hospital getting his intestines cut out, they had given him more than the usual dose of morphine. They had promised him, while giving the morphine, that there is one thing in life one can never lose, even under the influence of morphine: and that’s intelligence and culture. You can lose your mother, lose your wife, lose all your relatives, lose your legs, lose everything, but even in a concentration camp they can’t take away your intelligence and culture. His father had been in a concentration camp for two years. They’d all been fascists till they caught on to what fascism was. A pack of lies is what Mussolini had told them. Everyone was fascist until they caught on. Spoletini are still fascists—I had to watch out for them. But even his father had said what the nurse had told him: you can never lose intelligence or culture.
He’d met a woman in the hospital who had lost one leg to diabetes and had just learned that she would have to have the other leg amputated. She told the doctor she would rather die than have her grandchildren see her with no legs. She was adamant: no way would she endure the operation. “Do you really think your grandchildren would rather lose you altogether than see you without legs?” the man told me he’d asked the unfortunate woman. “I said this because it came in mind for me to say it. It just came out of my mouth.” Then he’d heard much later from the doctor that those words had changed the woman’s life. She’d had the operation and was doing fine and had even told the doctor to thank the man, Vincenzo, who had calmed her down that day.
This is the beauty of life. You do something so small and it turns out to be so big. These are le belle cose…the beautiful things of life.
I finished my zuppa di farro about the time two young-looking women arrived, taking the chairs on either side of Vincenzo. They both looked like ageing fashion-models, in elegant wools and boots. “My two wives,” Vincenzo grinned at me and then told his wives he’d like to introduce them to his American lover. As I was leaving the restaurant I could hear him telling them stories about me, stories I hadn’t remembered even sharing with him that were nonetheless true.
He was a dapper fellow in a baby blue cashmere V-neck and bow-tie, white haired, eyes as blue and soft as the sweater; he smelled like baby-powder. He asked me if I was Dutch or German and when I told him I was American he said he’d been to every country in the world at one time or another except the United States because he had been sure it held no surprises. India, China, Peru were interesting because so different; to see America all he had to do was turn on the TV. He showed me he knew how to speak English by uttering phrases he remembered from a textbook: “How are you today? Would you like some tea?” He giggled at himself and asked me how I’d come to know Italian. I told him about my life and job and interests.
He told me that when he was in the hospital getting his intestines cut out, they had given him more than the usual dose of morphine. They had promised him, while giving the morphine, that there is one thing in life one can never lose, even under the influence of morphine: and that’s intelligence and culture. You can lose your mother, lose your wife, lose all your relatives, lose your legs, lose everything, but even in a concentration camp they can’t take away your intelligence and culture. His father had been in a concentration camp for two years. They’d all been fascists till they caught on to what fascism was. A pack of lies is what Mussolini had told them. Everyone was fascist until they caught on. Spoletini are still fascists—I had to watch out for them. But even his father had said what the nurse had told him: you can never lose intelligence or culture.
He’d met a woman in the hospital who had lost one leg to diabetes and had just learned that she would have to have the other leg amputated. She told the doctor she would rather die than have her grandchildren see her with no legs. She was adamant: no way would she endure the operation. “Do you really think your grandchildren would rather lose you altogether than see you without legs?” the man told me he’d asked the unfortunate woman. “I said this because it came in mind for me to say it. It just came out of my mouth.” Then he’d heard much later from the doctor that those words had changed the woman’s life. She’d had the operation and was doing fine and had even told the doctor to thank the man, Vincenzo, who had calmed her down that day.
This is the beauty of life. You do something so small and it turns out to be so big. These are le belle cose…the beautiful things of life.
I finished my zuppa di farro about the time two young-looking women arrived, taking the chairs on either side of Vincenzo. They both looked like ageing fashion-models, in elegant wools and boots. “My two wives,” Vincenzo grinned at me and then told his wives he’d like to introduce them to his American lover. As I was leaving the restaurant I could hear him telling them stories about me, stories I hadn’t remembered even sharing with him that were nonetheless true.
martedì 6 novembre 2007
Pizza Night Puzzlements
We are gathered at Sacrestia to re-establish our Saturday night rite: Pizza Night with Bente and Merisa. For a time we went to another a pizzeria because Daniela wanted to support the young family who had opened it, especially after a group of my students nearly burned down their Monteluco hotel while building a bonfire in their fireplace. Then Bente had been diagnosed with liver cancer and had spent most of the winter in the hospital and the summer and fall adjusting to a specialized diet the doctors had prescribed and subsequent months adjusting to the impact of chemo on her appetite. It really is the first time the four of us have celebrated Pizza Night together in a year. Bente has lost 16 kilos she never had to lose and looks gaunt in her gabardine suit with a spilla—lapel pin—shaped like a leaf or a feather of tiny pearls. Merisa remarks how much she likes the pin and Daniela remarks she has one just like it that her mother had bought her in Spain when they’d traveled there, just the two of them, when Daniela was a girl. Bente remarks that she likewise bought her pin in Spain but was already married and so not a girl—but it could have been at the same time Daniela had gotten hers, given Bente is so much older. I tell them both I’ve decided it is a feather—because the fronds of pearls are so delicate.
The boy named Matteo who knows I eat only the Mezzanotte—arugula, tomato and smoked provola cheese--says outright that he will make it a quarter of the normal size out of respect for my diet. He likewise knows also what each of my friends will order, even after a year, and it amazes us all that he remembers and, not only that he remembers, but that we are all so predictable without knowing how predictable we are…or was it the power of suggestion, his telling us what we liked and reminding us how good it was the last time we were here, so that the idea of choice and full menus of choices, eludes us or seems to interfere with the more crucial things we have to talk about.
Tonight the gossip concerns a woman in town who was once engaged to a twin. For years the woman was the lover of this man we will call Federico. Then they’d had the kind of lover’s spat that lovers tend to have and she’d gone along mourning him for maybe a year until they’d suddenly encountered each other per strada not too long ago—must have been six or seven months ago, given the size of her pregnant belly. The thing was: It was not Federico she’d encountered and gone to bed with, but the twin, Franco…and after one night of love making she’d conceived a baby without knowing that the baby was the baby of a stranger. The deceit had so enraged the woman that she’d sought DNA testing and taken the imposter to court to sue for moral damages. She had learned that identical twins have the exact same DNA so that it was impossible to prove which twin had fathered the baby, but she’d nevertheless won the law suit—50, 000 euro in “moral damages” plus eighteen years of child support for the offspring of that one night of dark pleasure.
I think it’s hilarious, Daniela hoots—perfect justice. She could have taken the pill or, better yet, practiced abstinence. “Pensa!” Merisa says, astonished, as this is the first she’s heard the story and was widowed recently after having been married to only one man for fifty years. Bente is the one who loves to chatter and has recounted the details of this tryst, both for its surprise value and the mystery—just imagine, she turns to Merisa—if Maurizio had had a twin and you’d made love to his double! Merisa turns a little pale at the thought and then blushes.
I don’t buy it, I interrupt—I’m sorry. I don’t believe she could not tell the difference. Even if the two men had the exact same body (the one twin was shorter, Bente interjects) their maniera would be different, especially in bed. Tell me you wouldn’t know the touch of your lover from that of a stranger! I just don’t buy it!
Certo, certo, any woman would recognize her lover’s touch, Daniela proclaims as though she and I had reversed the court’s verdict and could now set right all the world’s injustices. “Vero, Merisa? Vero, Bente?” You would think I were the oracle given the queasy way the two older women look at me, perhaps assuming I've known too many lovers if I have figured this out. Daniela alone is delighted that we have stumbled upon such clear and irrefutable evidence.
Matteo with his sweet always-sleepy looking face and murmur-y way of addressing us, dispels the sudden awkwardness with an on-the-house plate of struzzichini—fried mozzarella, a rice ball, a potato ball, each of which Daniela cuts into four liliputian slices in honor of Cinzia’s ever-precarious diet.
“I think I agree with Cinzia,” Merisa suddenly announces—la spilla, your pin, Bente—it is a feather. All this time I saw a leaf, but now that I see a feather I can’t stop seeing the feather. Do you agree Daniela?
Per dire la verita, Daniela says to all of us, amused by her own silliness—I see una spilla, a piece of jewelry, white gold that is not really white gold and tiny pearls that at any moment could fall off the fragile wire they’ve been clinging to for fifty years. Mine is bent entirely out of shape at this point. Bente, how have you kept yours intact?
We all look at Bente’s pin and then at Bente, who we remark looks extraordinarily well for all she's been through. How delighted we are that she’s going against doctor’s orders and splashing red wine into her water.
The boy named Matteo who knows I eat only the Mezzanotte—arugula, tomato and smoked provola cheese--says outright that he will make it a quarter of the normal size out of respect for my diet. He likewise knows also what each of my friends will order, even after a year, and it amazes us all that he remembers and, not only that he remembers, but that we are all so predictable without knowing how predictable we are…or was it the power of suggestion, his telling us what we liked and reminding us how good it was the last time we were here, so that the idea of choice and full menus of choices, eludes us or seems to interfere with the more crucial things we have to talk about.
Tonight the gossip concerns a woman in town who was once engaged to a twin. For years the woman was the lover of this man we will call Federico. Then they’d had the kind of lover’s spat that lovers tend to have and she’d gone along mourning him for maybe a year until they’d suddenly encountered each other per strada not too long ago—must have been six or seven months ago, given the size of her pregnant belly. The thing was: It was not Federico she’d encountered and gone to bed with, but the twin, Franco…and after one night of love making she’d conceived a baby without knowing that the baby was the baby of a stranger. The deceit had so enraged the woman that she’d sought DNA testing and taken the imposter to court to sue for moral damages. She had learned that identical twins have the exact same DNA so that it was impossible to prove which twin had fathered the baby, but she’d nevertheless won the law suit—50, 000 euro in “moral damages” plus eighteen years of child support for the offspring of that one night of dark pleasure.
I think it’s hilarious, Daniela hoots—perfect justice. She could have taken the pill or, better yet, practiced abstinence. “Pensa!” Merisa says, astonished, as this is the first she’s heard the story and was widowed recently after having been married to only one man for fifty years. Bente is the one who loves to chatter and has recounted the details of this tryst, both for its surprise value and the mystery—just imagine, she turns to Merisa—if Maurizio had had a twin and you’d made love to his double! Merisa turns a little pale at the thought and then blushes.
I don’t buy it, I interrupt—I’m sorry. I don’t believe she could not tell the difference. Even if the two men had the exact same body (the one twin was shorter, Bente interjects) their maniera would be different, especially in bed. Tell me you wouldn’t know the touch of your lover from that of a stranger! I just don’t buy it!
Certo, certo, any woman would recognize her lover’s touch, Daniela proclaims as though she and I had reversed the court’s verdict and could now set right all the world’s injustices. “Vero, Merisa? Vero, Bente?” You would think I were the oracle given the queasy way the two older women look at me, perhaps assuming I've known too many lovers if I have figured this out. Daniela alone is delighted that we have stumbled upon such clear and irrefutable evidence.
Matteo with his sweet always-sleepy looking face and murmur-y way of addressing us, dispels the sudden awkwardness with an on-the-house plate of struzzichini—fried mozzarella, a rice ball, a potato ball, each of which Daniela cuts into four liliputian slices in honor of Cinzia’s ever-precarious diet.
“I think I agree with Cinzia,” Merisa suddenly announces—la spilla, your pin, Bente—it is a feather. All this time I saw a leaf, but now that I see a feather I can’t stop seeing the feather. Do you agree Daniela?
Per dire la verita, Daniela says to all of us, amused by her own silliness—I see una spilla, a piece of jewelry, white gold that is not really white gold and tiny pearls that at any moment could fall off the fragile wire they’ve been clinging to for fifty years. Mine is bent entirely out of shape at this point. Bente, how have you kept yours intact?
We all look at Bente’s pin and then at Bente, who we remark looks extraordinarily well for all she's been through. How delighted we are that she’s going against doctor’s orders and splashing red wine into her water.
giovedì 11 ottobre 2007
Barbabietola
I think I resisted beets as a child because they reminded me of some inner organ, like the liver, a little calcified, at least hardened by maybe cancer, as it sat there, cross-sectioned, bleeding on my plate…bleeding all over my plate, staining the respectable broccoli and even the mashed potatoes, its presence far too vivid and insistent. The taste was too strong as well. I think the beets my mother pushed on me were pickled and too vinegary, the beet’s inherent sweetness also strangely per-fumey, the fumes doing something to the inside of my sinuses and the back of my throat. It seemed utterly duplicitous the way my mother would carve off a little piece of beet-flesh, caught almost squirming on her fork prongs, and bring it so reverently toward her mouth, saying it’s fine, fine if you don’t like them because that merely means more for me.
I think I recall even Beet Gerber baby food, poised on the shelves looking like jars of coagulating blood. I think I recall her dipping the baby spoon in the jar to feed the clots to my little sister. There are very few foods I resist on principle, very few foods I frankly do not like. “I will eat anything that does not eat me first,” I used to joke with friends, because truly my tastes are encompassing and eclectic. “Except beets,” I would qualify. Beets, I surmised, may indeed have the capacity to “eat me first”—or perhaps suggest something that has already been eaten, digested, and converted into something else I didn't want to know.
Then arrived this past summer and the month of July when I was visiting my friend Anny, helping her, when the weather would permit, in her lush garden in Lisores, France. “We’ve got to do something with all these beets,” she proclaimed early in the adventure, yanking them up in great clumps of dirt by the purple stained greens that grew so innocuously from the muddy earth. She’d already initiated me by cooking the purplish Swiss Chard in Crème Fraiche du Normandie—there was a slightly beety tang to the chard, and a diluted bloodishness to the purple that puddled my plate. I did not want to offend or seem too childish in my disdain; I confessed that in truth I did not like beets, but insisted that I would face one, come to terms with one, if she insisted.
How generous she was the night she made red flannel hash to offer to leave the beets out of my portion, cook simply the corned beef and potatoes in a cream sauce for me. I was tempted to allow her to do this for me though it seemed like cowardice on my part and also seemed incomplete somehow, a recipe stripped of its essential ingredient so off-balance as to be genetically defective in a certain sense and liable to do the body harm. No, no, no, I insisted, I would go the distance.
Everyone remembers the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, and remembers the wordless two pages on which Sam-I-Am pauses before the fork offering his mouth the green eggs and ham. The silence is iconic, the certain adjustments taking place in the psyche of the one who is going to ingest what once disgusted him. I faced a Sam-I-Am moment before Anny’s red flannel hash, but then found as did in fact Sam-I-Am himself—I do, I do, I do like Anny’s red flannel hash; the French mustard and salty corned beef somehow cut the beet-sweetness in a way that made it palatable, more than palatable, even good, even wondrous, even delicious enough that I think I ate the leftovers three meals running, long after others at the table had moved on to duck and certain pates.
I still would not have considered myself a convert to beets. Even having enjoyed Anny’s red flannel hash, I was not convinced that it was the beets that had made the dish for me or that I would ever want to replicate the dish and certainly I did not imagine that I would buy beets on my own and figure out a way to deal with them. This moment of truth arose just the other night as I was following my resolution to eat only locally what I can buy at Antonio’s alimentaria up the street. Antonio is a co-conspirator in my diet and effort to live the politics expressed in so many of the books I’ve recently been reading. Desiree and I drop into Antonio’s daily after giri and he will announce what new variety of epicurean delight he has to offer my day--watermelon, zucchini flowers, a certain golden apple. And then Tuesday, he announced he had fresh barbabietole. I did not even know the word, did not know what barbabietola was, but it sounded promising. In the spirit of my newfound lust for the unusual, for getting past certain cravings and learning to want only what IS…I agreed to a cena of barbabietole and Antonio reached his hirsute hand into one of the crates gaping open near the cash register and did a little Ta-Da as he pulled out the globulous bunch of beets.
Oh, beets, I thought. Barbabietola means beet.
Two beets last forever if you are a single woman. These two were bigger than my fist, the waxy uncooked purple hardly indicative of the bleeding beasts themselves. I spent half a morning on the internet seeking out beet recipes. Borscht and pickled beets seemed most prevalent and I knew I needed mustard on mine, even if the corned beef was impossible given my resolutions and uncertainty that corned beef exists in Italy. It took all day for me to learn how to roast them and make a creamy mustard sauce, but I did, and perhaps they were as delectable as they were less for their intrinsic value as unique food as for what they represented in my quest to live in deeper more open and adventurous ways. I had mastered the beet and rendered the disgusting delectable. Now I could practice with the Buddhist meditation Tonglen—breathing in all that is bad in the world to breathe out only goodness, peace and joy--and somehow mean it in a more convincing way.
How delighted I was to find an email from Anny that night after gorging on the very meal she had somehow made possible for me. It was communion, I told her, a kind of pagan eucharist—how our souls had found each other this day of days that I had chosen to conquer my resistance to the Is-ness of Beet-ness. She’d been trying to call the entire time I’d been seeking out recipes. How wondrous is this? I wrote back. I thought perhaps she believed I was making too much of too small a thing, as usual. But she gets it.
I think I recall even Beet Gerber baby food, poised on the shelves looking like jars of coagulating blood. I think I recall her dipping the baby spoon in the jar to feed the clots to my little sister. There are very few foods I resist on principle, very few foods I frankly do not like. “I will eat anything that does not eat me first,” I used to joke with friends, because truly my tastes are encompassing and eclectic. “Except beets,” I would qualify. Beets, I surmised, may indeed have the capacity to “eat me first”—or perhaps suggest something that has already been eaten, digested, and converted into something else I didn't want to know.
Then arrived this past summer and the month of July when I was visiting my friend Anny, helping her, when the weather would permit, in her lush garden in Lisores, France. “We’ve got to do something with all these beets,” she proclaimed early in the adventure, yanking them up in great clumps of dirt by the purple stained greens that grew so innocuously from the muddy earth. She’d already initiated me by cooking the purplish Swiss Chard in Crème Fraiche du Normandie—there was a slightly beety tang to the chard, and a diluted bloodishness to the purple that puddled my plate. I did not want to offend or seem too childish in my disdain; I confessed that in truth I did not like beets, but insisted that I would face one, come to terms with one, if she insisted.
How generous she was the night she made red flannel hash to offer to leave the beets out of my portion, cook simply the corned beef and potatoes in a cream sauce for me. I was tempted to allow her to do this for me though it seemed like cowardice on my part and also seemed incomplete somehow, a recipe stripped of its essential ingredient so off-balance as to be genetically defective in a certain sense and liable to do the body harm. No, no, no, I insisted, I would go the distance.
Everyone remembers the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, and remembers the wordless two pages on which Sam-I-Am pauses before the fork offering his mouth the green eggs and ham. The silence is iconic, the certain adjustments taking place in the psyche of the one who is going to ingest what once disgusted him. I faced a Sam-I-Am moment before Anny’s red flannel hash, but then found as did in fact Sam-I-Am himself—I do, I do, I do like Anny’s red flannel hash; the French mustard and salty corned beef somehow cut the beet-sweetness in a way that made it palatable, more than palatable, even good, even wondrous, even delicious enough that I think I ate the leftovers three meals running, long after others at the table had moved on to duck and certain pates.
I still would not have considered myself a convert to beets. Even having enjoyed Anny’s red flannel hash, I was not convinced that it was the beets that had made the dish for me or that I would ever want to replicate the dish and certainly I did not imagine that I would buy beets on my own and figure out a way to deal with them. This moment of truth arose just the other night as I was following my resolution to eat only locally what I can buy at Antonio’s alimentaria up the street. Antonio is a co-conspirator in my diet and effort to live the politics expressed in so many of the books I’ve recently been reading. Desiree and I drop into Antonio’s daily after giri and he will announce what new variety of epicurean delight he has to offer my day--watermelon, zucchini flowers, a certain golden apple. And then Tuesday, he announced he had fresh barbabietole. I did not even know the word, did not know what barbabietola was, but it sounded promising. In the spirit of my newfound lust for the unusual, for getting past certain cravings and learning to want only what IS…I agreed to a cena of barbabietole and Antonio reached his hirsute hand into one of the crates gaping open near the cash register and did a little Ta-Da as he pulled out the globulous bunch of beets.
Oh, beets, I thought. Barbabietola means beet.
Two beets last forever if you are a single woman. These two were bigger than my fist, the waxy uncooked purple hardly indicative of the bleeding beasts themselves. I spent half a morning on the internet seeking out beet recipes. Borscht and pickled beets seemed most prevalent and I knew I needed mustard on mine, even if the corned beef was impossible given my resolutions and uncertainty that corned beef exists in Italy. It took all day for me to learn how to roast them and make a creamy mustard sauce, but I did, and perhaps they were as delectable as they were less for their intrinsic value as unique food as for what they represented in my quest to live in deeper more open and adventurous ways. I had mastered the beet and rendered the disgusting delectable. Now I could practice with the Buddhist meditation Tonglen—breathing in all that is bad in the world to breathe out only goodness, peace and joy--and somehow mean it in a more convincing way.
How delighted I was to find an email from Anny that night after gorging on the very meal she had somehow made possible for me. It was communion, I told her, a kind of pagan eucharist—how our souls had found each other this day of days that I had chosen to conquer my resistance to the Is-ness of Beet-ness. She’d been trying to call the entire time I’d been seeking out recipes. How wondrous is this? I wrote back. I thought perhaps she believed I was making too much of too small a thing, as usual. But she gets it.
venerdì 5 ottobre 2007
Deus est Caritas
We had already done eight giri—eight kilometers!—when Daniela asked me to climb the mountain with her. It was the Festa di San Francesco—October 4th, the anniversary of his death—and she’d heard from Bente and Merisa that there would be a special mass followed by a cena at the Chiesa di San Francesco at the top of my mountain, in the very chapel where I’d experienced a miracle my first summer in Spoleto. All the little old ladies would be driving up with their offerings of pizza and lasagna and crostate. She thought it would be just the thing if we hiked up with the dogs and met them at Mass, participated in the feast, and then got a ride back down the mountain with one of them—since it would, by nine o’clock certainly, be dark.
It’s not as easy as it used to be to get to the summit of Monteluco. First of all they closed the ponte—the lovely aqueduct that traverses the valley between the hill Spoleto Centro sits on and Monteluco. Now you have to walk down to the Agip gas station and cross the highway, walk on the shoulder of the curving main road up the mountain and pray that a motorist doesn’t come hurling around a hairpin turn to knock you to your doom. Then technically one is supposed to be able to pick up the Monteluco path where the road meets the other side of the ponte, as Daniela and I had done a mere two weeks before, but now discovered we could no longer do—because a huge wall had suddenly been constructed to prevent hikers from climbing up the first gravely tier of the path.
What were two women and two dogs (we’d brought only Desiree and Tarontola) to do?
Valkyrie-like, two cyclists whizzed by us as we stood in the middle of the asphalt cursing the wall and construction in general that had rendered Spoleto a rat’s maze full of dead-ends and impossible detours. I had the sudden sense to call out after the cyclists—did they know a way up to Monteluco?—and one called back over his or her shoulder (impossible to tell whether man or woman given the helmet and goggles and blur-of-colors; even the voice itself was wind in my ears) that we could pick up another path just up ahead on the left and follow the red marks—on stones or tree-trunks—to our longed-for destination.
We trusted and did as we were told, but there followed a struggle against time, against the limitations of the human body, against the limitations of canine bodies that weigh less than 4 kilograms and wend their way on wee little dachshund legs. We faced a veritable allegory of trust and persistence, not knowing the path or believing it would lead us where we wanted to go, not having any way of gauging where we were on the path, how much distance we had covered or how much distance yet remained. The minute hand on my fat-faced watch quivered strangely as though will or might could hold back time just long enough for us to reach the pew in the church where Merisa and Bente and other women were awaiting us, their purses poised discretely to save our seats. I’d breathe deeply and trust only to blink my eyes and find the minute-hand bounding forward, twenty minutes, now only ten minutes left to get there and not knowing even if we could get anywhere following the path we had found. Time and space seemed to reach mysterious conjunctions, to participate in a new physics, as we negotiated stopping for a moment to catch our breaths and chug at our Nygene bottles bursting with tap water, splashing a bit in our palms for the dogs to lap at, though they would not lap, so eager did they seem to yank us toward our destination.
We made it to the Mass before our old lady-friends arrived in their gabardine suits, silk scarves, polished pumps. We took up an entire back row of chairs in the chapel specially opened for the occasion. It wasn’t a Eucharist Mass, but a Rosary Mass—all the decades of the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Marys and Gloria Patrias. The dogs were panting and we were sweating; it seemed almost sacrilege to be among these primped and powdered worshippers with our sweat rings so visible under the arms of our cotton tees, my entire back so sweaty that when I’d stand to sing between decades I could see little puddles of myself evaporating in the seat behind me. But there was something so mystical about a mountain high—that amazing rush of adrenaline and too much oxygen—heightened by the the incessant reciting of the rosary prayers. In between decades, after the Gloria patria, reciting da secoli a secoli all the congregants would wink open one of their prayer-closed eyes to watch the mystery of dogs in church, sitting there on our laps so sentient as though the dogs themselves were likewise deep in prayer, a witness to the movement of the spirit.
Time fell away from us completely when we stepped into the brother’s medieval dining hall and climbed up high on the benches, our backs against the wall as we faced the narrow boards that serve as tables. Ten fratti and four priests live in this particular convent, replete with their brown hooded robes cinched by ropes around the waist, their bare toes wiggling out of Birkenstocks. Six or seven postulants in jeans and sweatshirts were including among them, boys really, hippy-ish adolescents no older than my students, on the brink of committing their lives to the church. How young and full of pranks they seemed as they danced platters and platters of food before us: here a plate of salame, of prociutto, of pizza a rosmarino; here the pasta dishes, Bianca, Spoletina, Lasagna; here the fresh tomatoes, cut in oblong halves, too pink inside, but nevertheless garden-tasty, now the wild boar in a secret recipe, the roast pheasant and game hen; here the zuppa inglese, the tiramisu, and the crostate di moro made by Merisa. While we ate, the boys played guitar and sang folksy songs about new life in the spirit—jumping up and down and swinging their arms in gestures meant to indicate how each of us was included—embraced by the occasion. Bente sat to my right whispering to me that even the jugs of wine were blessed by God –vino benedetto--and could not make me drunk or hurt her liver—just a little more, a little more—dai!—what an occasion it was.
I had the distinct impression that something metaphysical had shifted at the moment Daniela and I had lost our habitual footing on the path we knew. I turned to fill her glass from the jug of deep red Montepulciano wine and found her so radiant on the bench beside of me, Tarantola poised sleepily in the crook of her elbow as Desiree was poised on the crook of mine. Out of her eyes a new light seemed to shine, her smile, her entire face seemed to have taken on a deeper resonance of some mysterious familiar as we nodded in recognition and agreement about something we are still at a loss to name.
It’s not as easy as it used to be to get to the summit of Monteluco. First of all they closed the ponte—the lovely aqueduct that traverses the valley between the hill Spoleto Centro sits on and Monteluco. Now you have to walk down to the Agip gas station and cross the highway, walk on the shoulder of the curving main road up the mountain and pray that a motorist doesn’t come hurling around a hairpin turn to knock you to your doom. Then technically one is supposed to be able to pick up the Monteluco path where the road meets the other side of the ponte, as Daniela and I had done a mere two weeks before, but now discovered we could no longer do—because a huge wall had suddenly been constructed to prevent hikers from climbing up the first gravely tier of the path.
What were two women and two dogs (we’d brought only Desiree and Tarontola) to do?
Valkyrie-like, two cyclists whizzed by us as we stood in the middle of the asphalt cursing the wall and construction in general that had rendered Spoleto a rat’s maze full of dead-ends and impossible detours. I had the sudden sense to call out after the cyclists—did they know a way up to Monteluco?—and one called back over his or her shoulder (impossible to tell whether man or woman given the helmet and goggles and blur-of-colors; even the voice itself was wind in my ears) that we could pick up another path just up ahead on the left and follow the red marks—on stones or tree-trunks—to our longed-for destination.
We trusted and did as we were told, but there followed a struggle against time, against the limitations of the human body, against the limitations of canine bodies that weigh less than 4 kilograms and wend their way on wee little dachshund legs. We faced a veritable allegory of trust and persistence, not knowing the path or believing it would lead us where we wanted to go, not having any way of gauging where we were on the path, how much distance we had covered or how much distance yet remained. The minute hand on my fat-faced watch quivered strangely as though will or might could hold back time just long enough for us to reach the pew in the church where Merisa and Bente and other women were awaiting us, their purses poised discretely to save our seats. I’d breathe deeply and trust only to blink my eyes and find the minute-hand bounding forward, twenty minutes, now only ten minutes left to get there and not knowing even if we could get anywhere following the path we had found. Time and space seemed to reach mysterious conjunctions, to participate in a new physics, as we negotiated stopping for a moment to catch our breaths and chug at our Nygene bottles bursting with tap water, splashing a bit in our palms for the dogs to lap at, though they would not lap, so eager did they seem to yank us toward our destination.
We made it to the Mass before our old lady-friends arrived in their gabardine suits, silk scarves, polished pumps. We took up an entire back row of chairs in the chapel specially opened for the occasion. It wasn’t a Eucharist Mass, but a Rosary Mass—all the decades of the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Marys and Gloria Patrias. The dogs were panting and we were sweating; it seemed almost sacrilege to be among these primped and powdered worshippers with our sweat rings so visible under the arms of our cotton tees, my entire back so sweaty that when I’d stand to sing between decades I could see little puddles of myself evaporating in the seat behind me. But there was something so mystical about a mountain high—that amazing rush of adrenaline and too much oxygen—heightened by the the incessant reciting of the rosary prayers. In between decades, after the Gloria patria, reciting da secoli a secoli all the congregants would wink open one of their prayer-closed eyes to watch the mystery of dogs in church, sitting there on our laps so sentient as though the dogs themselves were likewise deep in prayer, a witness to the movement of the spirit.
Time fell away from us completely when we stepped into the brother’s medieval dining hall and climbed up high on the benches, our backs against the wall as we faced the narrow boards that serve as tables. Ten fratti and four priests live in this particular convent, replete with their brown hooded robes cinched by ropes around the waist, their bare toes wiggling out of Birkenstocks. Six or seven postulants in jeans and sweatshirts were including among them, boys really, hippy-ish adolescents no older than my students, on the brink of committing their lives to the church. How young and full of pranks they seemed as they danced platters and platters of food before us: here a plate of salame, of prociutto, of pizza a rosmarino; here the pasta dishes, Bianca, Spoletina, Lasagna; here the fresh tomatoes, cut in oblong halves, too pink inside, but nevertheless garden-tasty, now the wild boar in a secret recipe, the roast pheasant and game hen; here the zuppa inglese, the tiramisu, and the crostate di moro made by Merisa. While we ate, the boys played guitar and sang folksy songs about new life in the spirit—jumping up and down and swinging their arms in gestures meant to indicate how each of us was included—embraced by the occasion. Bente sat to my right whispering to me that even the jugs of wine were blessed by God –vino benedetto--and could not make me drunk or hurt her liver—just a little more, a little more—dai!—what an occasion it was.
I had the distinct impression that something metaphysical had shifted at the moment Daniela and I had lost our habitual footing on the path we knew. I turned to fill her glass from the jug of deep red Montepulciano wine and found her so radiant on the bench beside of me, Tarantola poised sleepily in the crook of her elbow as Desiree was poised on the crook of mine. Out of her eyes a new light seemed to shine, her smile, her entire face seemed to have taken on a deeper resonance of some mysterious familiar as we nodded in recognition and agreement about something we are still at a loss to name.
sabato 29 settembre 2007
Mad Dogs and Hunting Men
I thought I was being attacked by Cerberus itself—the two-headed dog that guards the gate of hell, its twin mouths, twin jowls salivating mercilessly, leaping desperately for the morsel of animal I clutched in my arms—dear Desiree, sweet Desiree, bundled up in her pooch-purse, zipped up to the neck, so that only her fuzzy muzzle poked out, her terrified eyes beseeching me to get back on the bus—NOW.
I had brought 20 students to an agriturismo near Gubbio to eat extremely well and write extremely well on either side of two extended hikes through what I would call mountains but an Umbrian calls hills. The trip has not gotten off to a propitious start. For days the rain has been torrential and it had suddenly gone cold. A pall of fog was draped menacingly over the very vistas we’d come to see. During the morning hours we’d hoped to see the Eugubine tablets—the inscriptions of early Umbra language, dating from before the Roman conquest ; the museum had closed just before we got there. I’d hoped to take the students up the funavia—the cable cars, or should I say baskets, nightmare for the vertiginous, the way they swing so insubstantially throughout the ride; but the rain deterred even the most courageous. We’d stopped at Fabiani for a wondrous pranzo—the cheesiest lasagna, veal alla marsala, spinach, zuppa inglese. But while eating our bus-driver called my cell phone to tell me it would be absolutely impossible to navigate the dirt road leading to the agriturismo in his over-sized vehicle. Even cars run into trouble on those stradine so narrow, made of gravel and sand—especially in such unrelenting rain. He contacted another company that had sent two smaller vehicles and I was sure that once we’d made it to the safety of the agriturismo we could relax and enjoy ourselves.
Now a plumpish woman in an apron and high-water pants introduces herself as Giulia and tells me to get back on the bus until she can chain the dogs up; they really would eat Desiree for cena. The one dog has teats that hang almost to the ground and she explains to me about the 14 puppies and how this is a breed of dog that goes back to the time of the Roman Empire, a “Cane Corso”—which looks rather like a Mastiff, with its oversized head. Think pit-bull in overgrown proportions, horse-size—think solid black, lusterless coat, paws the size of dinner plates, eyes that show no affection, horse-power, unrelenting appetite and aggression. “I hope my dog is not a problem,” I apologize to the woman and she says, “No, no,” even though her eyes—worried, anxious—suggest otherwise. I say in English to Tiffany , who is cooing at Desiree trying to sooth her angst , that I really had thought to ask beforehand could I bring my dog, but hadn’t known what I would do had the woman said, No.
Soon as possible we start climbing the hill I think is a mountain. There are no paths, Giulia tells me, but we can wander anywhere. I like the sudden wilderness feeling of striking out without a path or sense of direction. The students who are not in flip flops like the wildness, too, like the word “bushwhacking” which is what we really need to do to penetrate the spiny, thorny underbrush; I like the mud we sink into up to our knees and the place in the barb-wire we reach that seems a portal into yet another dimension of the savage freedom we seek. But just as we step through the portal, we see a veritable army of men in camouflage carrying rifles on their shoulders, their ammo-vests glistening with dozens of rifle cartridges. I do indeed feel that I have led the group into enemy territory. For a sudden flash, I imagine that we are in a war zone—are time traveling back to World War II and the fascist resistance or flashing forward into a future when war and violence will go by some other name. The one man, young and grizzle-faced, his eyes too gentle to be evil, tells me there are six or seven huge dogs—sciolti/loose—that would put my little rabbit of a dog in danger. Perhaps I should carry her in my arms. I do indeed pick her up and carry her down the piece of road we find before us. He communicated something to someone via walkie-talkie and amid cracking static a voice sputtered something back.
We never came across i cani sciolti, but again and again we encountered the hunters, standing with their rifles poised, the ammo in their vests glistening. “State tranquilla,” a voice reached me from where one of the men was hiding behind a tree. Be calm, he told me—you are okay. We will not kill you. You are safe.
The wine at dinner that night was undrinkable. Giulia, softening toward me and my rat of a dog, beamed proudly that it was “fatto a casa”—made right at the agriturismo, and the students agreed it tasted like meat, like game, like maybe prociutto—perhaps they fermented the wine in the same vat they cured the prociutto. This was not a bad thing, I did not tell them, their not liking the wine, their not wanting to drink enough of it to get drunk. I asked Giulia about the hunters and what they’d been hunting. Was it wild boar season—cinghiali? No, she clarified—cinghiali season is November. The hunters I saw were hunting rabbits and pheasant. In fact, our dinner of spedini—or shish kebab—was bounty from the hunt.
Something seemed out of proportion, I considered. The rifles, the enormous cartridges they used as bullets, the intimidating stature of the men poised in the hills across which I’d led my never-timorous group of adventurers. I kept reaching for the place where Desiree remained snuggled in my lap—as though to assure myself I was not in fact eating her for dinner. How suddenly clear I was that I needed to be vegetarian—needed vegetables, right now. Carrots maybe. Raw broccoli.
I had brought 20 students to an agriturismo near Gubbio to eat extremely well and write extremely well on either side of two extended hikes through what I would call mountains but an Umbrian calls hills. The trip has not gotten off to a propitious start. For days the rain has been torrential and it had suddenly gone cold. A pall of fog was draped menacingly over the very vistas we’d come to see. During the morning hours we’d hoped to see the Eugubine tablets—the inscriptions of early Umbra language, dating from before the Roman conquest ; the museum had closed just before we got there. I’d hoped to take the students up the funavia—the cable cars, or should I say baskets, nightmare for the vertiginous, the way they swing so insubstantially throughout the ride; but the rain deterred even the most courageous. We’d stopped at Fabiani for a wondrous pranzo—the cheesiest lasagna, veal alla marsala, spinach, zuppa inglese. But while eating our bus-driver called my cell phone to tell me it would be absolutely impossible to navigate the dirt road leading to the agriturismo in his over-sized vehicle. Even cars run into trouble on those stradine so narrow, made of gravel and sand—especially in such unrelenting rain. He contacted another company that had sent two smaller vehicles and I was sure that once we’d made it to the safety of the agriturismo we could relax and enjoy ourselves.
Now a plumpish woman in an apron and high-water pants introduces herself as Giulia and tells me to get back on the bus until she can chain the dogs up; they really would eat Desiree for cena. The one dog has teats that hang almost to the ground and she explains to me about the 14 puppies and how this is a breed of dog that goes back to the time of the Roman Empire, a “Cane Corso”—which looks rather like a Mastiff, with its oversized head. Think pit-bull in overgrown proportions, horse-size—think solid black, lusterless coat, paws the size of dinner plates, eyes that show no affection, horse-power, unrelenting appetite and aggression. “I hope my dog is not a problem,” I apologize to the woman and she says, “No, no,” even though her eyes—worried, anxious—suggest otherwise. I say in English to Tiffany , who is cooing at Desiree trying to sooth her angst , that I really had thought to ask beforehand could I bring my dog, but hadn’t known what I would do had the woman said, No.
Soon as possible we start climbing the hill I think is a mountain. There are no paths, Giulia tells me, but we can wander anywhere. I like the sudden wilderness feeling of striking out without a path or sense of direction. The students who are not in flip flops like the wildness, too, like the word “bushwhacking” which is what we really need to do to penetrate the spiny, thorny underbrush; I like the mud we sink into up to our knees and the place in the barb-wire we reach that seems a portal into yet another dimension of the savage freedom we seek. But just as we step through the portal, we see a veritable army of men in camouflage carrying rifles on their shoulders, their ammo-vests glistening with dozens of rifle cartridges. I do indeed feel that I have led the group into enemy territory. For a sudden flash, I imagine that we are in a war zone—are time traveling back to World War II and the fascist resistance or flashing forward into a future when war and violence will go by some other name. The one man, young and grizzle-faced, his eyes too gentle to be evil, tells me there are six or seven huge dogs—sciolti/loose—that would put my little rabbit of a dog in danger. Perhaps I should carry her in my arms. I do indeed pick her up and carry her down the piece of road we find before us. He communicated something to someone via walkie-talkie and amid cracking static a voice sputtered something back.
We never came across i cani sciolti, but again and again we encountered the hunters, standing with their rifles poised, the ammo in their vests glistening. “State tranquilla,” a voice reached me from where one of the men was hiding behind a tree. Be calm, he told me—you are okay. We will not kill you. You are safe.
The wine at dinner that night was undrinkable. Giulia, softening toward me and my rat of a dog, beamed proudly that it was “fatto a casa”—made right at the agriturismo, and the students agreed it tasted like meat, like game, like maybe prociutto—perhaps they fermented the wine in the same vat they cured the prociutto. This was not a bad thing, I did not tell them, their not liking the wine, their not wanting to drink enough of it to get drunk. I asked Giulia about the hunters and what they’d been hunting. Was it wild boar season—cinghiali? No, she clarified—cinghiali season is November. The hunters I saw were hunting rabbits and pheasant. In fact, our dinner of spedini—or shish kebab—was bounty from the hunt.
Something seemed out of proportion, I considered. The rifles, the enormous cartridges they used as bullets, the intimidating stature of the men poised in the hills across which I’d led my never-timorous group of adventurers. I kept reaching for the place where Desiree remained snuggled in my lap—as though to assure myself I was not in fact eating her for dinner. How suddenly clear I was that I needed to be vegetarian—needed vegetables, right now. Carrots maybe. Raw broccoli.
venerdì 28 settembre 2007
Who Needs a Passport?
In another era , these women would have all had blue hair, teased up and lacquered, flipped up at the widow’s peak to reveal the pale powdery forehead and the bones of a skull too close to the surface of an aging face. Now fashion dictates just a little more variety—a kind of faux blonde known as “foglie secche” or “dry leaves”—some outright platinums, the long tresses left unteased suggesting the plight of the more rebellious to stay allied to a self-image established decades ago. I like the woman who is sharing the pages copied from the Missal with me—she’s in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, her hair just hangs, uncolored, unstyled; she bites her nails, I see. She suggests what I may look like to the other, more put-together women gathered here. She belongs yet she does not belong. She sings as heartily as anyone.
We are gathered with the nuns in the chapel of the convent Istituto di Bambin’ Gesu to honor women who have served the St. Vincent di Paul society for fifty years or more. Merisa, my landlady, is one of the honorees and she had asked me to accompany her to the Mass and ceremony during a fluke of inspiration; her sons just aren’t religious and it would be nice to have me there. Fifty years! I remark to her—that’s more years than I’ve been alive that she and these women have devoted themselves to an organization that I do know in the states—know the St. Vincent di Paul thrift shop in Tallahassee where I used to find books and hand-me-down clothes when I was a poor graduate student. All the women in the society are so old, Merisa muses, that she wonders what will become of the world once she and her friends are dead. Like her sons, none of the young generation is interested in charity—they are all too busy making a living.
Self-consciously, I tell her if she needs me to do something…if she needs help…or has insight into something I could do. I used to be a Hospice volunteer, I tell her. I’d been very dedicated to Hospice after my mother’s death, I tell her. Maybe I should help with Hospice, but as a foreigner I’d feel rather out of place and wondered about my capacity to bring comfort. “Certo,” Merisa nodded, reinforcing my suspicion that no Italian would want to be nursed by an American—comfort was the premium, after all, and comfort came through the familiar.
It had been pouring down rain all day, gusts and torrents, so that we’d taken the car even the mere block we had to travel so the cake she brought—called a pizza even though it does not look like pizza, looks like cake, but is salty rather than sweet and, frankly, too dry to eat—would not get wet. The reception would not be held among the bougainvillea in the convent courtyard, but instead would happen inside, in a plain room off the kitchen where I ate many a winter breakfast in the days when I used to stay in the convent weeks at a time. Suor Chiara can hardly believe I’m still here—a guest that never loses her status as guest though I seem intent on never going away. She kicked me out of the convent when I bought my dog and seems amused to know that I live in the house belonging to her favorite parishioner, Merisa. The Sister’s face moons out of her wimple at me throughout the Mass—her eyes catching mine then looking away.
The bishop in his miter is here for the occasion—the feast day of St. Vincent is of course the occasion to celebrate the St. Vincent di Paoli society. I have not seen the bishop since the midnight mass at Christmas and he’s accompanied today by an ancient, wizened priest who makes me think of Mr. Magoo for the first time in twenty years, his short stature and baldness and blindness, the thick dark-rimmed glasses he peers through to read the Gospel before sinking into the chair one of the spritely-er nuns delivered promptly in order to catch him. The bishop is rather pompous and long-winded, with jiggly jowls and a voice that booms with studied self-importance. He goes on and on and I only half-listen, certain aphorisms leaping out of his speech—“charity is the key that opens the door to the heart”…”even a Muslim in Libya responds to charity”…”charity has no religious identity, has no passport, requires no passport.” Then suddenly my attention is purely arrested—everything in the room freezes then fades and I find myself alone with a presence that is speaking to me through the sputtering of the bishop. “In the middle of October, Spoleto’s residential Hospice will open for the first time. Who of you has the courage to take this walk with the dying?”
Merisa’s hair is the color of foglie secche—impeccably styled. Her eyebrows are drawn carefully with pencil, as her are her lips and she looks radiant in her cherry-red blazer. “Cinzia,” she whispers—“Did you hear what the Bishop said about the Hospice?” Yes, I nod. She holds out her arm to me and says “guarda la pella d’oca”---look I’ve got goose-bumps. I hold out my own arm and show her I do too.
After the Eucharist, after the benediction, someone brings Merisa a bouquet of blooms that do not seem indigenous to this country; I cannot identify them, they seem tropical—purple and yellow and fuchsia flourishes amid dense foliage of green. A pert white-haired woman in a gray flannel suit pins some kind pin on her. Merisa is coy, bashful—all her friends rush up to her, congratulate her. Suor Chiara is the one who finds me. “Cinzia,” she intones as though placing me in the world somehow.
We are gathered with the nuns in the chapel of the convent Istituto di Bambin’ Gesu to honor women who have served the St. Vincent di Paul society for fifty years or more. Merisa, my landlady, is one of the honorees and she had asked me to accompany her to the Mass and ceremony during a fluke of inspiration; her sons just aren’t religious and it would be nice to have me there. Fifty years! I remark to her—that’s more years than I’ve been alive that she and these women have devoted themselves to an organization that I do know in the states—know the St. Vincent di Paul thrift shop in Tallahassee where I used to find books and hand-me-down clothes when I was a poor graduate student. All the women in the society are so old, Merisa muses, that she wonders what will become of the world once she and her friends are dead. Like her sons, none of the young generation is interested in charity—they are all too busy making a living.
Self-consciously, I tell her if she needs me to do something…if she needs help…or has insight into something I could do. I used to be a Hospice volunteer, I tell her. I’d been very dedicated to Hospice after my mother’s death, I tell her. Maybe I should help with Hospice, but as a foreigner I’d feel rather out of place and wondered about my capacity to bring comfort. “Certo,” Merisa nodded, reinforcing my suspicion that no Italian would want to be nursed by an American—comfort was the premium, after all, and comfort came through the familiar.
It had been pouring down rain all day, gusts and torrents, so that we’d taken the car even the mere block we had to travel so the cake she brought—called a pizza even though it does not look like pizza, looks like cake, but is salty rather than sweet and, frankly, too dry to eat—would not get wet. The reception would not be held among the bougainvillea in the convent courtyard, but instead would happen inside, in a plain room off the kitchen where I ate many a winter breakfast in the days when I used to stay in the convent weeks at a time. Suor Chiara can hardly believe I’m still here—a guest that never loses her status as guest though I seem intent on never going away. She kicked me out of the convent when I bought my dog and seems amused to know that I live in the house belonging to her favorite parishioner, Merisa. The Sister’s face moons out of her wimple at me throughout the Mass—her eyes catching mine then looking away.
The bishop in his miter is here for the occasion—the feast day of St. Vincent is of course the occasion to celebrate the St. Vincent di Paoli society. I have not seen the bishop since the midnight mass at Christmas and he’s accompanied today by an ancient, wizened priest who makes me think of Mr. Magoo for the first time in twenty years, his short stature and baldness and blindness, the thick dark-rimmed glasses he peers through to read the Gospel before sinking into the chair one of the spritely-er nuns delivered promptly in order to catch him. The bishop is rather pompous and long-winded, with jiggly jowls and a voice that booms with studied self-importance. He goes on and on and I only half-listen, certain aphorisms leaping out of his speech—“charity is the key that opens the door to the heart”…”even a Muslim in Libya responds to charity”…”charity has no religious identity, has no passport, requires no passport.” Then suddenly my attention is purely arrested—everything in the room freezes then fades and I find myself alone with a presence that is speaking to me through the sputtering of the bishop. “In the middle of October, Spoleto’s residential Hospice will open for the first time. Who of you has the courage to take this walk with the dying?”
Merisa’s hair is the color of foglie secche—impeccably styled. Her eyebrows are drawn carefully with pencil, as her are her lips and she looks radiant in her cherry-red blazer. “Cinzia,” she whispers—“Did you hear what the Bishop said about the Hospice?” Yes, I nod. She holds out her arm to me and says “guarda la pella d’oca”---look I’ve got goose-bumps. I hold out my own arm and show her I do too.
After the Eucharist, after the benediction, someone brings Merisa a bouquet of blooms that do not seem indigenous to this country; I cannot identify them, they seem tropical—purple and yellow and fuchsia flourishes amid dense foliage of green. A pert white-haired woman in a gray flannel suit pins some kind pin on her. Merisa is coy, bashful—all her friends rush up to her, congratulate her. Suor Chiara is the one who finds me. “Cinzia,” she intones as though placing me in the world somehow.
martedì 25 settembre 2007
Sudden Equinox
It’s time, my Daniela said to the other Daniela who was walking with us this morning much later than usual—well after eight, though I myself had arrived at the usual summer hour of seven. I had not understood why no one else was out and about—the sun had risen a good half hour before and it was not too cold out, was fresh, dewy, with a subtle venticello blowing morning light into the leaves, a woman in fluorescent pants sweeping leaves and candy wrappers into fallish looking piles with a rake that made my flesh crawl as it scraped the asphalt so that I wondered why she didn’t use a broom, but otherwise thought the morning peaceful and ideal and in no way sullied for the walk I usually take with my friends who for some reason were not there.
Now I am being told it’s time to shift from 7 o’clock to 8 o’clock or maybe “otto meno un quarto”—quarter till eight, because after the equinox, walking too early, in the dampness, in the cold, could lead to things like arthritis and Parkinson’s disease, certainly colds and sore throats and jock itch and other kinds of rashes and chafing problems. The body is delicate and its relationship to the seasons should be carefully observed. Yes—“otto meno un quarto—Va bene, Cinzia?” my Daniela queries, and I say, No—absolutely, no—there is no way I can walk at eight when I have to leave for work at 9:30—my routine was perfect when we walked at seven.
The two Danielas stop and even the six dogs stop and look at me; the world just beyond the aqueduct freezes behind the misty haze that has not yet melted in the sun just now forming its lemony orb above Monteluco across the valley—all the eyes staring at me glaze over and go solemn as though I have said something downright offensive, even sacrilegious. Even the other Daniela seems a little dumbfounded as though she did not expect me to have it in me—this power to stop dogs in their tracks and challenge not only the dog lady herself, but the very seasons she inhabits and the routines the seasons dictate. What I love about these women is they are still girls, even in their sixties—still trim and agile and buoyant and playful and silly, the other Daniela even giddy with a school girl’s blunt hair-cut and bangs and impish eyes—I always blink twice thinking the fine wrinkles are a mistake, sun damage maybe , but not age; we should all be teenagers. The Danielas wait, the dogs wait, the venticello that has been puffing over the valley ever since I arrived at seven waits as though all were anticipating God’s verdict concerning what to do about my ignorance and insolence.
Tell your students to come to school an hour later, my Daniela lights up with the sure incandescence of epiphany. She is always confident that I over complicate my life by failing to see the obvious.
For a moment I inhabit the world they envision for me—I do want to live by the seasons, eat by the seasons, walk when the light is right and invite the people I love to do the same, invite my students to do the same, model appropriate if not ideal behaviors. I think of the Philosopher Charles Pierce at Hopkins who wrote on the top of his syllabus: "Class will meet on overcast Tuesdays only", and taught for years and years without the administration catching on, spending his sunlit Tuesdays writing his great works in semiotics, founding his principle of “abduction”—the suggestion that in addition to deductive logic and inductive logic there was likewise the abductive boon —manna from heaven, the sudden insight clearly independent of reason and that was the basis of all creativity. I wondered how I’d word my syllabus for this new life I hoped to model. How would one calculate the light of the solstices and equinoxes, how would one further account for daylight’s saving’s time? Would it be possible to use a sun dial and talk in terms of shadow? Could this be my new mission in life—to convince even Trenitalia to postpone trains or put them on a sliding scale according to the position of the sun in the sky—all of which could be calculated to work with some kind of grand schem allied with solar energy .
The Danielas grin at me, confidently, the dogs, too—Usque intensifying her stare, Desiree and Zinzannia so trusting in their regard of me, even mopey Tarontola brightening, and Ambrogino the fuzzy faced mutt and the two Golden Retrievers, Ginger and Fred, and the other bassotto a pelo ruvido named “Bo Bo”—Think Out of the Box, Where There is a Will, There’s a Way—each of them urging me with insistent gazes to make an imaginative leap into unknown possibility. And I know, I know I am cornered for a reason, awaiting the abductive flash that will spur me to greater heights of creativity when it comes to my dilemmas. I trust, I do trust, but for the moment I am just a little bit stymied.
Thank heavens I need only find my way to Perugia two days a week.
Now I am being told it’s time to shift from 7 o’clock to 8 o’clock or maybe “otto meno un quarto”—quarter till eight, because after the equinox, walking too early, in the dampness, in the cold, could lead to things like arthritis and Parkinson’s disease, certainly colds and sore throats and jock itch and other kinds of rashes and chafing problems. The body is delicate and its relationship to the seasons should be carefully observed. Yes—“otto meno un quarto—Va bene, Cinzia?” my Daniela queries, and I say, No—absolutely, no—there is no way I can walk at eight when I have to leave for work at 9:30—my routine was perfect when we walked at seven.
The two Danielas stop and even the six dogs stop and look at me; the world just beyond the aqueduct freezes behind the misty haze that has not yet melted in the sun just now forming its lemony orb above Monteluco across the valley—all the eyes staring at me glaze over and go solemn as though I have said something downright offensive, even sacrilegious. Even the other Daniela seems a little dumbfounded as though she did not expect me to have it in me—this power to stop dogs in their tracks and challenge not only the dog lady herself, but the very seasons she inhabits and the routines the seasons dictate. What I love about these women is they are still girls, even in their sixties—still trim and agile and buoyant and playful and silly, the other Daniela even giddy with a school girl’s blunt hair-cut and bangs and impish eyes—I always blink twice thinking the fine wrinkles are a mistake, sun damage maybe , but not age; we should all be teenagers. The Danielas wait, the dogs wait, the venticello that has been puffing over the valley ever since I arrived at seven waits as though all were anticipating God’s verdict concerning what to do about my ignorance and insolence.
Tell your students to come to school an hour later, my Daniela lights up with the sure incandescence of epiphany. She is always confident that I over complicate my life by failing to see the obvious.
For a moment I inhabit the world they envision for me—I do want to live by the seasons, eat by the seasons, walk when the light is right and invite the people I love to do the same, invite my students to do the same, model appropriate if not ideal behaviors. I think of the Philosopher Charles Pierce at Hopkins who wrote on the top of his syllabus: "Class will meet on overcast Tuesdays only", and taught for years and years without the administration catching on, spending his sunlit Tuesdays writing his great works in semiotics, founding his principle of “abduction”—the suggestion that in addition to deductive logic and inductive logic there was likewise the abductive boon —manna from heaven, the sudden insight clearly independent of reason and that was the basis of all creativity. I wondered how I’d word my syllabus for this new life I hoped to model. How would one calculate the light of the solstices and equinoxes, how would one further account for daylight’s saving’s time? Would it be possible to use a sun dial and talk in terms of shadow? Could this be my new mission in life—to convince even Trenitalia to postpone trains or put them on a sliding scale according to the position of the sun in the sky—all of which could be calculated to work with some kind of grand schem allied with solar energy .
The Danielas grin at me, confidently, the dogs, too—Usque intensifying her stare, Desiree and Zinzannia so trusting in their regard of me, even mopey Tarontola brightening, and Ambrogino the fuzzy faced mutt and the two Golden Retrievers, Ginger and Fred, and the other bassotto a pelo ruvido named “Bo Bo”—Think Out of the Box, Where There is a Will, There’s a Way—each of them urging me with insistent gazes to make an imaginative leap into unknown possibility. And I know, I know I am cornered for a reason, awaiting the abductive flash that will spur me to greater heights of creativity when it comes to my dilemmas. I trust, I do trust, but for the moment I am just a little bit stymied.
Thank heavens I need only find my way to Perugia two days a week.
venerdì 21 settembre 2007
Getting it Right
Seldom, seldom do I ever entertain the longing to live my life over again. It exhausts me to even think about scraped knees, lunch room spitballs, pimples and training bras, the debilitating queasiness of high school , the arbitrary hierarchies that compel us from point A to points Q, V and Z—all our so-called achievements based on fickle standards of beauty or intelligence or competence. I am grateful to have arrived at mid-life even as modestly intact as I am intact. I am not dead yet. That in itself seems a miracle. I am also living exactly where I want to live doing exactly what I want to do with exactly the people with whom I want to be doing it—this too seems such an unexpected flourishing and boon, that I sigh outright and knock wood and try never to look over my left shoulder. Sometimes the end does in fact justify the means.
Then arrives a day that seems delivered straight from heaven, a day it’s nigh’ impossible to describe without clichés and rhapsody: The sun a steady orb in the sky delivering light without the heat that can be so irritating. The sky--oh my God the sky!--what Icarus heights can be imagined through all that bluer than blue, what oceanic depths, what navigable nether-spheres, what promises of eternity radiating from that boundlessness as a breeze caresses the planet, runs it fingers through the grasses, unsnarls branches, dreadlocks, ordinary ponytails, breeze just enough to keep us ever aware of how alive we are in our goose-pimply skin as we gather around the elegantly appointed table at the edge of Lago Trasimeno, lake water lapping luxuriously as we stare into each other’s faces for the first time and suddenly find we know each other.
I am here on una gita to the lake’s Isola Maggiore with four students and former school director, Charles Jarvis. It doesn’t get better than this, resounds the cliché when words fail us, even the word for the fish with grill stripes filleted before us—il menu pesce only 15 euro but delivering Troncia, freshly caught from the pier that extends just beyond where we sit, at the end of which is even a little table set for one, whimsically it seems as no one is sitting there but we all proclaim, if one of us were alone, she’d have chosen to sit there—dramatically, hair whipping in her face. Amid this togetherness, amid this resplendent pranzo-hour sunshine, amid the flapping edges of the table cloth and umbrella cloth that shields us from glare and possible heat, looking from Jeanette to Diana to Brianna to Ashley and back again to Charles—I am overcome with the certainty that the rightness of this present moment ensures our getting all other moments right, as even the preceding moments that at one time seemed so unlivable in the living of them may have been right enough to get us where we are.
These young women just amaze me: Diana who, at 21, has just recovered from Malaria after striking out on her own for a farm in Kenya, to help plant a vegetable she never learned to name in English. She has been wandering around the world through WWOOF, that extraordinary organization that encourages experiences in sustainable gardening by providing room and board in exchange for work. I’d have never had the courage at 20 to fly alone to Kenya, move in with a Kenyan family in a village far from contact with other Americans and work day and night planting a plant I couldn’t name while also helping the family learn to use a computer and the internet. Jeanette unpacks a digital Canon with a telescoping lens and talks about her experiences at Eastman museum in Rochester. She’s the delicate red-head of Norwegian descent who instantly updates my course reading list with new travel narratives, hitherto unknown to me—an Ella Maillart with waist-length dreadlocks, ready to kick off the rest of her life to follow her photographer’s eye wherever its sure twinkle leads—for the moment it's led to my class, the hike she asked me to organize, this spot on the edge of an island we will soon climb to find thousand year old olive trees, the souls of which seem palpable, their presences more present than the human shades that flicker by them. Brianna is seeking out her Italo-Romanian heritage; she suspects her forebears were gypsies as she feels the gypsy in her blood and wants to trace the feeling back to real origins—that’s why she’s here and why she’s picked up Italian so fast, the need to penetrate all barriers to knowledge gathering urgency as time goes on and allowance funds start to drain. Only Ashley is quiet, perhaps because she finds herself a guest of Brianna, coming along to come along, and shy before the others and yet the mystery of her finding herself at this table complicit with the rest of us dazzles her face and turquoise-flecked eyes.
“Ah, to be thirty years younger,” Charles looks across the table at me and I know what he means for the acute moment of his saying it—I want to be striking out for Kenya, taking photographs with a good camera, discovering the origins of my gypsy blood—want to live with possibility before me in the way possibility exists for them at this moment of their lives. But then the moment opens up for me as a many petaled thing and it occurs to me —it does! Possibility does exist for me as it does for them as it does for Charles, not the same possibility, but when is possibility ever the same between any two of us?
How suddenly allegorical our visit to the island seems —as we make our way past lace-makers poised in lawn chairs like the fates with their hooks and string, past the convent where a woman with a flashlight likewise waits poised in her lawn chair with a flash light, offering a chance for a tour of the castle and the hidden frescoes within, up the crest of hill that is the arching spine of the island where another mythic woman sits also in her lawn chair within the 14th century ("Nessun flash, senza flash!" she calls to the girl with camera) church with a yard full of recyclable graves—the dates on the headstones all as recent as the 1980s and 90s and 2000s. I see us there, making our way past the church and the sentry of watching olive trees, the four girls breathless and fleet-footed, ahead of their teachers who trudge lazily, but contentedly behind.
Then arrives a day that seems delivered straight from heaven, a day it’s nigh’ impossible to describe without clichés and rhapsody: The sun a steady orb in the sky delivering light without the heat that can be so irritating. The sky--oh my God the sky!--what Icarus heights can be imagined through all that bluer than blue, what oceanic depths, what navigable nether-spheres, what promises of eternity radiating from that boundlessness as a breeze caresses the planet, runs it fingers through the grasses, unsnarls branches, dreadlocks, ordinary ponytails, breeze just enough to keep us ever aware of how alive we are in our goose-pimply skin as we gather around the elegantly appointed table at the edge of Lago Trasimeno, lake water lapping luxuriously as we stare into each other’s faces for the first time and suddenly find we know each other.
I am here on una gita to the lake’s Isola Maggiore with four students and former school director, Charles Jarvis. It doesn’t get better than this, resounds the cliché when words fail us, even the word for the fish with grill stripes filleted before us—il menu pesce only 15 euro but delivering Troncia, freshly caught from the pier that extends just beyond where we sit, at the end of which is even a little table set for one, whimsically it seems as no one is sitting there but we all proclaim, if one of us were alone, she’d have chosen to sit there—dramatically, hair whipping in her face. Amid this togetherness, amid this resplendent pranzo-hour sunshine, amid the flapping edges of the table cloth and umbrella cloth that shields us from glare and possible heat, looking from Jeanette to Diana to Brianna to Ashley and back again to Charles—I am overcome with the certainty that the rightness of this present moment ensures our getting all other moments right, as even the preceding moments that at one time seemed so unlivable in the living of them may have been right enough to get us where we are.
These young women just amaze me: Diana who, at 21, has just recovered from Malaria after striking out on her own for a farm in Kenya, to help plant a vegetable she never learned to name in English. She has been wandering around the world through WWOOF, that extraordinary organization that encourages experiences in sustainable gardening by providing room and board in exchange for work. I’d have never had the courage at 20 to fly alone to Kenya, move in with a Kenyan family in a village far from contact with other Americans and work day and night planting a plant I couldn’t name while also helping the family learn to use a computer and the internet. Jeanette unpacks a digital Canon with a telescoping lens and talks about her experiences at Eastman museum in Rochester. She’s the delicate red-head of Norwegian descent who instantly updates my course reading list with new travel narratives, hitherto unknown to me—an Ella Maillart with waist-length dreadlocks, ready to kick off the rest of her life to follow her photographer’s eye wherever its sure twinkle leads—for the moment it's led to my class, the hike she asked me to organize, this spot on the edge of an island we will soon climb to find thousand year old olive trees, the souls of which seem palpable, their presences more present than the human shades that flicker by them. Brianna is seeking out her Italo-Romanian heritage; she suspects her forebears were gypsies as she feels the gypsy in her blood and wants to trace the feeling back to real origins—that’s why she’s here and why she’s picked up Italian so fast, the need to penetrate all barriers to knowledge gathering urgency as time goes on and allowance funds start to drain. Only Ashley is quiet, perhaps because she finds herself a guest of Brianna, coming along to come along, and shy before the others and yet the mystery of her finding herself at this table complicit with the rest of us dazzles her face and turquoise-flecked eyes.
“Ah, to be thirty years younger,” Charles looks across the table at me and I know what he means for the acute moment of his saying it—I want to be striking out for Kenya, taking photographs with a good camera, discovering the origins of my gypsy blood—want to live with possibility before me in the way possibility exists for them at this moment of their lives. But then the moment opens up for me as a many petaled thing and it occurs to me —it does! Possibility does exist for me as it does for them as it does for Charles, not the same possibility, but when is possibility ever the same between any two of us?
How suddenly allegorical our visit to the island seems —as we make our way past lace-makers poised in lawn chairs like the fates with their hooks and string, past the convent where a woman with a flashlight likewise waits poised in her lawn chair with a flash light, offering a chance for a tour of the castle and the hidden frescoes within, up the crest of hill that is the arching spine of the island where another mythic woman sits also in her lawn chair within the 14th century ("Nessun flash, senza flash!" she calls to the girl with camera) church with a yard full of recyclable graves—the dates on the headstones all as recent as the 1980s and 90s and 2000s. I see us there, making our way past the church and the sentry of watching olive trees, the four girls breathless and fleet-footed, ahead of their teachers who trudge lazily, but contentedly behind.
venerdì 7 settembre 2007
In Dieta
It’s a consensus during morning giri that Cinzia must begin her new academic year with fresh resolutions, the first of which must be to lose every single etto she has gained during ten years of eating pasta in bell’Italia. There are still those, like Daniela, who remember the thin woman within the inflated version, the one who lived before having tasted not only pasta and pizza, but Crème fraiche du Normandie: tarts, crepes, cod in sorrel sauce, Lindt dark chocolate with nougat and orange peel. Poor unsuspecting woman who spent her noon-days under the awning of that smoky café in Vimoutiers, swirling yet another french-fry in the sorrel flecked sauce, wondering how ever could Americans consider ketchup a worthy condiment. And if the french-fries run out before the crème fraiche du Normandie, goodness please—what is the purpose of a baguette if not for soaking up every trace of sauce so one can behold the pattern of the Limoges. Have I even mentioned Anny’s specialty, the jambon and lentils floating ever so delicately in a secret sauce, the secret having something to do with shallots filtered through a sieve—and whatever it was that gave the cream its pinkish tint? Daniela’s eyes widened—I believe it was horror—when they first lit on me after these indulgences, despite my confidence that the trendy linen pants I wore concealed what I’d rationalized was visible only to my conscience. “Ciccione,” she said, even about poor Desiree who admittedly got her share of Cesar Francese (the same Cesar they sell in the states done in Mousses and Tourraines) Little Desiree chubby? Here is a woman whose eyes are trained to register a tenth of a kilo on a dog—of course she could find the excess flesh on me.
She couldn’t outright give me a set of scales for my birthday—she had to make it seem that I’d be doing her a favor to take the scales off her hands. She didn’t need an apparatus so huge for her small feet and small bathroom; she claimed it didn’t fit in the place she’d had in mind for it. She was going to take it back to the store anyway, but she almost hated to do so, it was so accurate and so easy to read, the digital numbers beaming up so large and so red the moment one planted one’s feet on the surface—and then the number would fix and be available as a reminder throughout the day. The secret to weight loss was indeed scales, she had discovered in her many years of successfully fighting to stay slim. One weighed oneself every morning and on the morning the digital numbers went up rather than down, well, the solution was simple: one simply did not eat until the numbers started going down again.
There is nothing like a support group for losing weight, but mine is a fascist regime. Once upon a time I enjoyed cappuccino and cornetto every morning with Daniela and the dogs at Bar Portella. Now, Orieta, Assunta, Merisa, flank Daniela and the squadra of dogs and calculate how many giri it will take for me to burn off the drop of lemon in my tea. They teach me things I never wanted to know about menopause. They’ve enlisted Marianna, the new barista, a svelte, hipless twenty-year old with a navel ring and toothy smile to never put so much as a zucchero packet on the saucer of my tea cup. One slice of lemon, one red-enveloped bag of Twining’s English Breakfast tea—never mind my diddling the bag in the pot extends the coffee hour. My health, my appearance, my capacity to climb Monteluco is a worthy cause, they all concur. Plus I have become their autumn project—they can spend the autumn season feeding Desiree crumbs from their cornetti whilest watching me shrink, watching my astonishing forebearance and fortitude.
“Sei dimagritta!” Orieta exclaimed this morning—already they say I am less gonfiata, less swollen, my stomach suddenly flat.
Where oh where has this surge in will power come from? I’ve lost weight before—after pregnancies, one summer when I was living alone in Rome and walking hours back and forth to work, the summer of 2005 when I made myself join a swim team. I know how to lose weight, but always in the past, the motive has seemed sheer vanity—a need to look better and, in looking better, feel better about myself. But now, weight loss has become a public statement of group mind over my matter. I am not simply my own problem. I can already hear the cultural echoes of “If Cinzia can do it, hell anyone can.” How can one fail the earnest efforts of others—the cornetto withholders, the tea-enthusiasts, the man with the Jack Lalane cleft in his chin who has always pinched my tit, but now says “sei sempre piu bella”—making an hour glass shape with his hands as he passes me on the walk. How dare I disappoint or bore or risk being other than the miracle they see in the making, in their making. Even Desiree looks back at me over her shoulder, eyes narrowing in on something.
She couldn’t outright give me a set of scales for my birthday—she had to make it seem that I’d be doing her a favor to take the scales off her hands. She didn’t need an apparatus so huge for her small feet and small bathroom; she claimed it didn’t fit in the place she’d had in mind for it. She was going to take it back to the store anyway, but she almost hated to do so, it was so accurate and so easy to read, the digital numbers beaming up so large and so red the moment one planted one’s feet on the surface—and then the number would fix and be available as a reminder throughout the day. The secret to weight loss was indeed scales, she had discovered in her many years of successfully fighting to stay slim. One weighed oneself every morning and on the morning the digital numbers went up rather than down, well, the solution was simple: one simply did not eat until the numbers started going down again.
There is nothing like a support group for losing weight, but mine is a fascist regime. Once upon a time I enjoyed cappuccino and cornetto every morning with Daniela and the dogs at Bar Portella. Now, Orieta, Assunta, Merisa, flank Daniela and the squadra of dogs and calculate how many giri it will take for me to burn off the drop of lemon in my tea. They teach me things I never wanted to know about menopause. They’ve enlisted Marianna, the new barista, a svelte, hipless twenty-year old with a navel ring and toothy smile to never put so much as a zucchero packet on the saucer of my tea cup. One slice of lemon, one red-enveloped bag of Twining’s English Breakfast tea—never mind my diddling the bag in the pot extends the coffee hour. My health, my appearance, my capacity to climb Monteluco is a worthy cause, they all concur. Plus I have become their autumn project—they can spend the autumn season feeding Desiree crumbs from their cornetti whilest watching me shrink, watching my astonishing forebearance and fortitude.
“Sei dimagritta!” Orieta exclaimed this morning—already they say I am less gonfiata, less swollen, my stomach suddenly flat.
Where oh where has this surge in will power come from? I’ve lost weight before—after pregnancies, one summer when I was living alone in Rome and walking hours back and forth to work, the summer of 2005 when I made myself join a swim team. I know how to lose weight, but always in the past, the motive has seemed sheer vanity—a need to look better and, in looking better, feel better about myself. But now, weight loss has become a public statement of group mind over my matter. I am not simply my own problem. I can already hear the cultural echoes of “If Cinzia can do it, hell anyone can.” How can one fail the earnest efforts of others—the cornetto withholders, the tea-enthusiasts, the man with the Jack Lalane cleft in his chin who has always pinched my tit, but now says “sei sempre piu bella”—making an hour glass shape with his hands as he passes me on the walk. How dare I disappoint or bore or risk being other than the miracle they see in the making, in their making. Even Desiree looks back at me over her shoulder, eyes narrowing in on something.
venerdì 2 marzo 2007
Eclipse at the Holy of Holies
When I reached the Sanctora Sanctorum, I could not see the “image not made by human hands”! It was high noon and the glare from the grated window above the portone of the building that houses the Scala Santa shone so brilliantly on the glass window that all I could make out amid the glare and shadows of grating was my own silhouette eclipsing the very image of Christ I wanted to see. I stood there squinting and soon the other pilgrims, making their way up the stairs on their knees, would rise like shadow specters behind me, appearing one after another in the obscuring light. How can it be? I wondered, that I would choose precisely the hour for my penance that the Acheiropoieton cannot be seen? I waited the longest time, thinking the sun outside would rise higher, the light would change and soon all would be revealed to me, but no: direct glare and my own silhouette, followed by the shape-shifting shadows of the others who’d climbed the stairs with me.
It may have been because I’d decided to bring the dog. Was it sacrilege to let an animal climb the stairs alleged to have been the very stairs Jesus himself climbed into Pontius Pilate’s palace? I’d originally intended to leave the dog at home. Shouldn’t my pilgrimage be between me and God alone, without canine distraction? Surely I could take the train early and return early and leave poor Desiree in her cage. But then I thought a pilgrimage should have no time restraints. I should be free to follow wherever the Spirit led, on a time-table not dictated by concerns for the dog or train schedules. If I could not climb the stairs, I could not climb the stairs. I could at least look at them and at the Giotto in San Giovanni di Laterano and at the other churches my art historian friend Ann, expert on pilgrimages, had insisted I should see. I’ve never been kicked out of church because of Desiree.
The last time I’d been to the Scala Santa was during the Jubilee year of 2000 when Lucy and I lived down the Ardeantina near the church of Divina Amore and, whenever we went anywhere, would have to catch the 218 bus that parks right in front of San Giovanni. We ‘d always talked about the rite of climbing the stairs and would see the throngs of pilgrims lined up to do so, but what patience does an 11 year old have for lines or holy ritual? While in Turin, we’d found ourselves accidentally stumbling across the Shroud, not knowing that the idling group of tourists we followed were taking us there, not knowing that it was even on special exhibit. I figured a divinely lit moment would impel us up the holy stairs as well, but one never arose.
How surprised I was today to just walk up to the building, walk into it—not only no lines, but no one standing guard to wave a finger about the dog, not even one of those circles with red slashes through it with a dog pictured inside as one often finds forbidding dogs in sacred places. Here I thought was the clearing Lucy and I’d never found: There were only five people poised in a staggered line along the 28 steps, their whispered prayers a soft and reassuring murmur. I stayed for the longest time at the foot of the stairs, wondering could I really do it? Climb the sacred stairs with my dog? I read the history--okay, legend--of how St. Helena brought the stairs from Jerusalem. I read about Sixtus V removing the stairs from the old Lateran palace in 1589 and installing them where they now rise toward the Holy of Holies. Suddenly I read that there are special dispensations for penitents who climb on Fridays during Lent. And thought, Wow--it is Lent! It is Friday! And got chills. The others were so deep in prayer, who would even notice that I’d brought my dog?
What I loved most about the climb were the places in the wood where centuries of knees had left gullies, soft indented places where my knees seemed to fit. I would find myself on one step feeling that I was ripping my knees up on gravel--the stairs are hard, they really hurt, they really are penitential. And then, when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, it did seem rather miraculous—the soft places that would suddenly find me, places where my knees truly fit and found comfort; places that seemed to even cradle my hurting knees—it did indeed seem so meaningfully allegorical, this mystery of generations of predecessors having created spaces of comfort for me to make my way up the holy stairs somehow easier! I was hardly aware of the prayers that happened through me. The Lord's prayer, but here and there, I’d find myself cheating: skipping lines, or forgetting whether or not I’d prayed the whole thing. At other times, the prayer would come out earnest and convincing. A prayer for every step: 28 prayers. Desiree must have been in a holy trance of her own. She didn’t squirm. I was not aware of her in my arms. I merely climbed.
The Acheiropoeiton, or the image of Christ “not made by human hands” hangs above the altar in the Sancta Sanctorum and is a Byzantine dazzle of silver—that much I could see. It was brought to Rome some time prior to 752, the year Pope Stephen II carried it barefoot to S. Maria Maggiore in an effort to invoke divine protection from the Lombards. The procession persists: the image of Christ seeking out the image of his mother annually. Did I feel cheated that I could not see him? No. But strangely chastened, somewhat amused—my own shadow a gentle kind of rebuke.
Today marks only the second Friday in Lent. There are four more. I can take an earlier train. I can leave the dog at home. I suppose I must try again. I do want to see the Acheiropoeiton and also any other visions variations on the climb will yield
It may have been because I’d decided to bring the dog. Was it sacrilege to let an animal climb the stairs alleged to have been the very stairs Jesus himself climbed into Pontius Pilate’s palace? I’d originally intended to leave the dog at home. Shouldn’t my pilgrimage be between me and God alone, without canine distraction? Surely I could take the train early and return early and leave poor Desiree in her cage. But then I thought a pilgrimage should have no time restraints. I should be free to follow wherever the Spirit led, on a time-table not dictated by concerns for the dog or train schedules. If I could not climb the stairs, I could not climb the stairs. I could at least look at them and at the Giotto in San Giovanni di Laterano and at the other churches my art historian friend Ann, expert on pilgrimages, had insisted I should see. I’ve never been kicked out of church because of Desiree.
The last time I’d been to the Scala Santa was during the Jubilee year of 2000 when Lucy and I lived down the Ardeantina near the church of Divina Amore and, whenever we went anywhere, would have to catch the 218 bus that parks right in front of San Giovanni. We ‘d always talked about the rite of climbing the stairs and would see the throngs of pilgrims lined up to do so, but what patience does an 11 year old have for lines or holy ritual? While in Turin, we’d found ourselves accidentally stumbling across the Shroud, not knowing that the idling group of tourists we followed were taking us there, not knowing that it was even on special exhibit. I figured a divinely lit moment would impel us up the holy stairs as well, but one never arose.
How surprised I was today to just walk up to the building, walk into it—not only no lines, but no one standing guard to wave a finger about the dog, not even one of those circles with red slashes through it with a dog pictured inside as one often finds forbidding dogs in sacred places. Here I thought was the clearing Lucy and I’d never found: There were only five people poised in a staggered line along the 28 steps, their whispered prayers a soft and reassuring murmur. I stayed for the longest time at the foot of the stairs, wondering could I really do it? Climb the sacred stairs with my dog? I read the history--okay, legend--of how St. Helena brought the stairs from Jerusalem. I read about Sixtus V removing the stairs from the old Lateran palace in 1589 and installing them where they now rise toward the Holy of Holies. Suddenly I read that there are special dispensations for penitents who climb on Fridays during Lent. And thought, Wow--it is Lent! It is Friday! And got chills. The others were so deep in prayer, who would even notice that I’d brought my dog?
What I loved most about the climb were the places in the wood where centuries of knees had left gullies, soft indented places where my knees seemed to fit. I would find myself on one step feeling that I was ripping my knees up on gravel--the stairs are hard, they really hurt, they really are penitential. And then, when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, it did seem rather miraculous—the soft places that would suddenly find me, places where my knees truly fit and found comfort; places that seemed to even cradle my hurting knees—it did indeed seem so meaningfully allegorical, this mystery of generations of predecessors having created spaces of comfort for me to make my way up the holy stairs somehow easier! I was hardly aware of the prayers that happened through me. The Lord's prayer, but here and there, I’d find myself cheating: skipping lines, or forgetting whether or not I’d prayed the whole thing. At other times, the prayer would come out earnest and convincing. A prayer for every step: 28 prayers. Desiree must have been in a holy trance of her own. She didn’t squirm. I was not aware of her in my arms. I merely climbed.
The Acheiropoeiton, or the image of Christ “not made by human hands” hangs above the altar in the Sancta Sanctorum and is a Byzantine dazzle of silver—that much I could see. It was brought to Rome some time prior to 752, the year Pope Stephen II carried it barefoot to S. Maria Maggiore in an effort to invoke divine protection from the Lombards. The procession persists: the image of Christ seeking out the image of his mother annually. Did I feel cheated that I could not see him? No. But strangely chastened, somewhat amused—my own shadow a gentle kind of rebuke.
Today marks only the second Friday in Lent. There are four more. I can take an earlier train. I can leave the dog at home. I suppose I must try again. I do want to see the Acheiropoeiton and also any other visions variations on the climb will yield
giovedì 8 febbraio 2007
Their Cup of Tea
My landlady, Merisa, likes to give tea parties reminiscent of a bygone era. The first time she invited me to tea I behaved like a woman of my generation—I said I was busy at the hour she indicated but could come a little later or earlier or on another day. She looked a bit confused, but politely said there would be another time. Daniela later explained to me that when Merisa said “would you like to have a cup of tea with me” she was indicating a formal occasion and an ordeal. Daniela had likewise been invited and Bente and a few other women I barely knew from the community. Sadly, on the day I had declined that first invitation, so had everyone else. Daniela and I were taking the dogs to field trials in Montecarrota that Sunday and she’d extended the apologies and excuses I hadn’t known were required. “Poor Merisa,” we kept saying to each other the long drive, thinking maybe the tea had in fact been more important than letting the dogs chase rabbits and foxes. How was one to know?
Women no longer wear white gloves and hats, but going to tea at Merisa’s one feels like one ought to be wearing white gloves and a hat. As the ladies arrive at the house one by one or in pairs bearing gifts for the hostess, they take calculated places on stiff backed chairs in the foyer. We kiss kiss the cheeks of women we know or shake the finger-tips of women we do not know and say, “piacere.” The friends closest to Merisa inquire who has been invited and who has yet to arrive. One woman stands by the window and makes the announcement: Ecco Lidia! Ecco Mariachiara! Finalmente c’e Luisa!" When everyone is gathered in the foyer--"Eccoci quoi!"-- we can all rise for the journey to the dining room at which point the table will be unveiled. The silver service is gleaming, the Ginori china twinkling. The hand-embroidered table cloth is still pristine after five-generations of use. Chunks of chocolate with hazelnuts, homemade biscotti, little cream puffs with zabaglione centers and slices of Torcolo from the Festa di San Costanza are arranged ever delicately on doilies on silver platters. Each woman takes her place and Merisa lets each sniff the tea bag to make sure the perfumo is not too strong. Sicure/are you sure? Merisa wants to know before she lets it drop into the steaming pot.
This Sunday when Merisa invited me to have a cup of tea with her, I determined that I should let nothing stand in my way. I’d just finished climbing a mountain with students when she buzzed my doorbell saying that the tea would be ready in an hour. She assured me my jeans and trekking shoes, even my sweat and dirty hair, were fine; it was just a cup of tea and a last minute gathering; we would be pochi. She’d been having brutte pensieri/ugly thoughts all day and needed a little divertimento/fun.
At first I felt like the ugly stepsister who crashes the ball, even though I’d traded trekking shoes for loafers, sweaty fleece for a turtle neck. The women were initially so polite, sitting on the edge of the dining room table chairs, pinching the delicate tea-cup handles, blowing at the steam. They made the expected comments about how lovely the table had been arranged, how wondrous the assortment of goodies. They inquired about missing friends and what business on earth—or god forbid, illness—could keep someone away from such a delightful afternoon. But after maybe two sips of the day’s choice in green tea with cinnamon, they began to cuss and giggle.
I love the way even proper Italian ladies cuss in ways American ones of a similar background would never dare doing. Cazzo (“dick,” but used like “fuck” as in “what the fuck are you doing? Che cazzo fai?") and stronzo or turd are expressions so common they infiltrate the language at even the level of tea-party usage. If one is angry, one is “incazzato/a”—dicked/fucked. Rarely does one hear “sono arrabbiata”—the more formal expression “I am angry.” “Stronzate” are turdy-things…an expression that’s used likewise diffusely in response to “What did you do yesterday? What did you write yesterday? What are your kids up to?" If the answer is “nothing worthwhile”(usually the answer among this set)—the reply is “stronzate” and of course anyone who gets on one’s nerves is a stronzo/a.
I don’t know why I found in a table-full of cursing grandmothers such amusement and comfort. There were such things of grand importance to discuss: the death of Gian Carlo Menotti, grand maestro of the Spoleto festival; the masked balls of Carnevale, no longer the grandche’/big deal they were in years of old. The women told me their stories, Merisa climbing on a ladder to pull down books full of pictures and proof. But it wasn’t so much the stories they told as how they told them, hooting, cussing, slapping their thighs until the church bells rang 7:30 p.m.--time to go home and prepare cena for husbands--and they all turned into pumpkin-people again, rising from the table together, stiffening visibly.
Women no longer wear white gloves and hats, but going to tea at Merisa’s one feels like one ought to be wearing white gloves and a hat. As the ladies arrive at the house one by one or in pairs bearing gifts for the hostess, they take calculated places on stiff backed chairs in the foyer. We kiss kiss the cheeks of women we know or shake the finger-tips of women we do not know and say, “piacere.” The friends closest to Merisa inquire who has been invited and who has yet to arrive. One woman stands by the window and makes the announcement: Ecco Lidia! Ecco Mariachiara! Finalmente c’e Luisa!" When everyone is gathered in the foyer--"Eccoci quoi!"-- we can all rise for the journey to the dining room at which point the table will be unveiled. The silver service is gleaming, the Ginori china twinkling. The hand-embroidered table cloth is still pristine after five-generations of use. Chunks of chocolate with hazelnuts, homemade biscotti, little cream puffs with zabaglione centers and slices of Torcolo from the Festa di San Costanza are arranged ever delicately on doilies on silver platters. Each woman takes her place and Merisa lets each sniff the tea bag to make sure the perfumo is not too strong. Sicure/are you sure? Merisa wants to know before she lets it drop into the steaming pot.
This Sunday when Merisa invited me to have a cup of tea with her, I determined that I should let nothing stand in my way. I’d just finished climbing a mountain with students when she buzzed my doorbell saying that the tea would be ready in an hour. She assured me my jeans and trekking shoes, even my sweat and dirty hair, were fine; it was just a cup of tea and a last minute gathering; we would be pochi. She’d been having brutte pensieri/ugly thoughts all day and needed a little divertimento/fun.
At first I felt like the ugly stepsister who crashes the ball, even though I’d traded trekking shoes for loafers, sweaty fleece for a turtle neck. The women were initially so polite, sitting on the edge of the dining room table chairs, pinching the delicate tea-cup handles, blowing at the steam. They made the expected comments about how lovely the table had been arranged, how wondrous the assortment of goodies. They inquired about missing friends and what business on earth—or god forbid, illness—could keep someone away from such a delightful afternoon. But after maybe two sips of the day’s choice in green tea with cinnamon, they began to cuss and giggle.
I love the way even proper Italian ladies cuss in ways American ones of a similar background would never dare doing. Cazzo (“dick,” but used like “fuck” as in “what the fuck are you doing? Che cazzo fai?") and stronzo or turd are expressions so common they infiltrate the language at even the level of tea-party usage. If one is angry, one is “incazzato/a”—dicked/fucked. Rarely does one hear “sono arrabbiata”—the more formal expression “I am angry.” “Stronzate” are turdy-things…an expression that’s used likewise diffusely in response to “What did you do yesterday? What did you write yesterday? What are your kids up to?" If the answer is “nothing worthwhile”(usually the answer among this set)—the reply is “stronzate” and of course anyone who gets on one’s nerves is a stronzo/a.
I don’t know why I found in a table-full of cursing grandmothers such amusement and comfort. There were such things of grand importance to discuss: the death of Gian Carlo Menotti, grand maestro of the Spoleto festival; the masked balls of Carnevale, no longer the grandche’/big deal they were in years of old. The women told me their stories, Merisa climbing on a ladder to pull down books full of pictures and proof. But it wasn’t so much the stories they told as how they told them, hooting, cussing, slapping their thighs until the church bells rang 7:30 p.m.--time to go home and prepare cena for husbands--and they all turned into pumpkin-people again, rising from the table together, stiffening visibly.
sabato 27 gennaio 2007
Foiled Again!
I warn everyone, everyone I know, not to take the 64 bus or other tourist lines in Rome, or even the metro, if one can help it, because I have been ripped off so often by professional pick-pockets. Eight years ago I lost everything, every card, every scrap of cash, my driver’s license, my passport, simply because my hands were full of luggage and people were jostling up to me from behind, pushing me onto the train; I didn’t even feel the hand that reached in my pocket to steal the document pouch. Another time, after the first time, when I was duly guarded and attentive, I clutched my purse underneath a tote bag, braced my arm against both, squeezing my own elbow so no one could yank my purse off my shoulder, but, again, the bus was so crowded, I did not feel the person who took a razor and sliced open my purse and emptied its contents, did not even FEEL this happening, as I stood there savvy and secure. And I did not, a future time, feel the man or woman’s hand that reached into another jacket pocket to steal my cell phone. And I won’t even go into the time I lost all my clothes—this has happened twice—when I left rental cars parked where hotels told me to park them, and the windshields got bashed to smithereens.
More seasoned travelers sort of smirk at me as though they are immune, and I am simply vulnerable out of ignorance.
“Dear, dear,” they shake their heads, “surely you know better than to carry a passport in the city, know better than to cram all your resources into one pouch, one pocket.”
“Surely you know better than to keep the ringer of your phone turned on so that, when it rings, and you answer, a zillion watching eyes will see directly which pocket in your shirt or coat or pants is the cache of instant treasure.”
“Surely you know not to put the hotel parking pass in the rental car window. You are advertising: “Tourist here! Come rob me!”
The thing I do not say to these smug, un-violated travelers is that absolutely, they avete ragione, are right, so right, and I have been traveling in Italy since long before cell phones existed, since I was a teenager with an aluminum frame backpack with orange day-glow parachute silk flapping and Europe on $5 a Day in the side pocket along with my Earthshoes and bong. I should know better and do know better, but am no longer a tourist and seldom a traveler, there are simply some days I want to walk to the market with just my jacket on and my wallet in my pocket, walk as though I lived sleepily as I do in fact live in a forgotten paradise of goodwill among neighbors.
What a shame that the world is still trying to teach me the sad lesson that I don’t.
More seasoned travelers sort of smirk at me as though they are immune, and I am simply vulnerable out of ignorance.
“Dear, dear,” they shake their heads, “surely you know better than to carry a passport in the city, know better than to cram all your resources into one pouch, one pocket.”
“Surely you know better than to keep the ringer of your phone turned on so that, when it rings, and you answer, a zillion watching eyes will see directly which pocket in your shirt or coat or pants is the cache of instant treasure.”
“Surely you know not to put the hotel parking pass in the rental car window. You are advertising: “Tourist here! Come rob me!”
The thing I do not say to these smug, un-violated travelers is that absolutely, they avete ragione, are right, so right, and I have been traveling in Italy since long before cell phones existed, since I was a teenager with an aluminum frame backpack with orange day-glow parachute silk flapping and Europe on $5 a Day in the side pocket along with my Earthshoes and bong. I should know better and do know better, but am no longer a tourist and seldom a traveler, there are simply some days I want to walk to the market with just my jacket on and my wallet in my pocket, walk as though I lived sleepily as I do in fact live in a forgotten paradise of goodwill among neighbors.
What a shame that the world is still trying to teach me the sad lesson that I don’t.
venerdì 26 gennaio 2007
Snow and Mimosa
They don’t even seem like flowers, more like the bright yellow pom-poms my mother used to sew along the hems of kitchen curtains in the 50s becoming 60s—yellow gingham ones perhaps, cheery, an emblem of a kind of chipper domesticity, the happy housewife in her bouffant going to town with the foot-pedal of her Singer sewing machine, whistling while she worked, tunes from the hit parade. Now the pom pom Mimosa is the symbol of Italian Woman’s Day, bold yellow on every “festa della donna” greeting card, twisted into tight cellophane bouquets and lavished on female frequenters of grocery stores and restaurants. You hold a Mimosa up under your chin the way I was taught as a child to hold a buttercup. The yellow glow the flower casts is indicative of something. Love, probably. I don’t remember.
Yesterday, taking the bus up Via Pellini, I thrilled at the sight of them: Mimosa trees in full bloom, the delicate branches literally bowing under the weight of a sudden explosion of puffy blooms, festooning in grape-like bunches, in ever-swelling tiers. Sogno d’oro/dreams of gold, Italians say for “sweet dreams” and I found myself thinking that I was indeed walking through golden dreams as I beheld the strange marvel that surely had not existed the day before. I take this route to school every day yet only today had the trees caught sudden flame and it seemed a miracle until I recognized why it seemed a miracle. Festa della Donna is March 8th and it’s still only January.
It would have been one thing to accept the blooming as yet another sign of Global Warming, but the odd thing was: I’d just that morning gotten over my belief in Global Warming and my fear. It was gloriously cold, a true January, with leaden gray skies and the menacing kind of fog that doesn’t wisp around in a dreamy way but simply, stubbornly hangs a kind of dismal pall all over everything. There was also precipitation—I say precipitation, because rain, sleet, hail, snow all seemed present at once and independently, a hoary icey-ness covering the cobbles, making me slip. I’d gotten so used to the mild winter, I no longer even thought of hats and gloves. Scarves, yes, because scarves are to Italians in any kind of winter weather what billed caps are to American men in sunshine. Italians are careful with their necks and twirl miles and miles of hand woven Pashamina around their necks indoors and out to stave off mal di gola (sore throat) and raffreddore (cold) and one would look nude navigating the streets without a scarf so I comply with that accessory, but hadn’t thought of gloves or hat and wished I had thought, given the sudden wonder of frigid weather. My feet in their ordinary loafers were wet and numb, my hands raw, my cheeks burning, my knees shook, teeth clattered. I thought perhaps the buses would not run as I stood by my stop for what seemed like hours. And then out of the mist, there appeared the angel of deliverance—Daniela on the way to her cellulite massage, swooping me up to carry me to my train.
How on earth could the bitter cold, the rain/sleet/hail/snow arrive on the same day the Mimosa burst into bloom? This phenomenon seemed to defy all the theorists who think they know what’s happening in our universe and can project the end of the world. I smirked, beholding the burning bushes that line my road. What a vision they were—so vivid against the backdrop of distant snowy Appenines, the yellow fuzz balls bold, bright heralds of mysteries arcane.
Fellow passengers also took note of how strange it was: Mimosa in January. What then will we do in March come time for La Festa di Donna? There won’t be any flowers to go along with all the greeting cards and yellow Mimosa cakes. No lapel pom poms, no bouquets, no discovering the yellow glow under her chin.
I think I am perfectly satisfied to see the Mimosa bloom in January. Come March I’d like something lustier than pom poms to commemorate the women I adore. Roses are cliché. How about the hibiscus…nothing shy or coy, chipper or domestic about the hibiscus, wildly splaying its petals, open to anything. Yes, I nominate the hibiscus for the new symbol of Women’s Day. Do I hear a second?
Yesterday, taking the bus up Via Pellini, I thrilled at the sight of them: Mimosa trees in full bloom, the delicate branches literally bowing under the weight of a sudden explosion of puffy blooms, festooning in grape-like bunches, in ever-swelling tiers. Sogno d’oro/dreams of gold, Italians say for “sweet dreams” and I found myself thinking that I was indeed walking through golden dreams as I beheld the strange marvel that surely had not existed the day before. I take this route to school every day yet only today had the trees caught sudden flame and it seemed a miracle until I recognized why it seemed a miracle. Festa della Donna is March 8th and it’s still only January.
It would have been one thing to accept the blooming as yet another sign of Global Warming, but the odd thing was: I’d just that morning gotten over my belief in Global Warming and my fear. It was gloriously cold, a true January, with leaden gray skies and the menacing kind of fog that doesn’t wisp around in a dreamy way but simply, stubbornly hangs a kind of dismal pall all over everything. There was also precipitation—I say precipitation, because rain, sleet, hail, snow all seemed present at once and independently, a hoary icey-ness covering the cobbles, making me slip. I’d gotten so used to the mild winter, I no longer even thought of hats and gloves. Scarves, yes, because scarves are to Italians in any kind of winter weather what billed caps are to American men in sunshine. Italians are careful with their necks and twirl miles and miles of hand woven Pashamina around their necks indoors and out to stave off mal di gola (sore throat) and raffreddore (cold) and one would look nude navigating the streets without a scarf so I comply with that accessory, but hadn’t thought of gloves or hat and wished I had thought, given the sudden wonder of frigid weather. My feet in their ordinary loafers were wet and numb, my hands raw, my cheeks burning, my knees shook, teeth clattered. I thought perhaps the buses would not run as I stood by my stop for what seemed like hours. And then out of the mist, there appeared the angel of deliverance—Daniela on the way to her cellulite massage, swooping me up to carry me to my train.
How on earth could the bitter cold, the rain/sleet/hail/snow arrive on the same day the Mimosa burst into bloom? This phenomenon seemed to defy all the theorists who think they know what’s happening in our universe and can project the end of the world. I smirked, beholding the burning bushes that line my road. What a vision they were—so vivid against the backdrop of distant snowy Appenines, the yellow fuzz balls bold, bright heralds of mysteries arcane.
Fellow passengers also took note of how strange it was: Mimosa in January. What then will we do in March come time for La Festa di Donna? There won’t be any flowers to go along with all the greeting cards and yellow Mimosa cakes. No lapel pom poms, no bouquets, no discovering the yellow glow under her chin.
I think I am perfectly satisfied to see the Mimosa bloom in January. Come March I’d like something lustier than pom poms to commemorate the women I adore. Roses are cliché. How about the hibiscus…nothing shy or coy, chipper or domestic about the hibiscus, wildly splaying its petals, open to anything. Yes, I nominate the hibiscus for the new symbol of Women’s Day. Do I hear a second?
giovedì 25 gennaio 2007
Talking Heads
I have been trying to figure out what to do about my hair. For months—okay years!—I have simply let it grow. I do not dye or cut it. Most days I brush it and pull it back sloppily with a plastic claw; some days I actually braid it; other days, I must confess, I am a veritable Medusa, the way I let it twist and snarl and coil unattended down my back. Hair is a political statement and sometimes I consider that my hair is talking back to Daniela’s hair—which she submits to the parruchiere as often as three times a week for fine-tune trims and tints and teases. Her hair is never quite right: too orange, too red, too black, too square, too puffy, too in the face, too brushed back, too last year, too nineties, too old, too come una ragazza—young. My hair remains simply, blessedly, inarguably wrong.
I am not adverse to change, to upgrading my appearance and have been reading heads like a physiognomist as I encounter them on the bus, the train, per strada with hopes of discovering which if any Italian style would ever suit me. I am too fat and too long-faced for the fashionable shorn look I most admire—the scalp practically shaved with almost a tonsure of bang…big earrings, cherry-red framed glasses, lots of lipstick (you laugh to imagine me so!). Politically this look would work: androgynous, low-maintenance, even lower maintenance than the mess I now don’t maintain—easy to dress up or dress down, funky one minute suave the next, and I wouldn’t be able to hide behind hair like a human Cousin Itt, but would be right out there, exposed. Revelation is everything or almost everything. Vanity still has something to say, however, and I really don’t want to be exposed as a pin head.
My daughter recommended the Devil-Wears-Prada look of Meryl Streep. After all, that’s almost how old I am, even if I don’t want to admit it; grown-up women do and should look, well, grown up with the hair whisked up to one side and lacquered with spray, a precision cut—a place for every hair and every hair in its place (I laugh to imagine me so!), the kind of hairstyle that requires an entire make-over to complement it: the complete line of Loreal make-up and body unguents, Prada, Gucci everything—you won’t find Meryl hurtling through Umbria in a hoodie-sweat shirt and Tevas. But dai, Margaret…really, what are you thinking? Wasn’t the movie, in fact, a political indictment of the hair, the first purchase in a lifetime of conspicuous consumption, the selling of the soul, to…well, yes, the film is aptly named.
I believe I encountered an appropriate compromise on the bus this morning, one Margaret might even approve. I never saw her face, because she was standing in front of me and would not turn around, but she clearly could have stepped off 5th Avenue. She flaunted the full length mink many Italian women are known to parade around in—hers glistening golds, browns and oranges from neck almost to ankle, drapey, cape-like, at least 200 animals worth of fur. One could never guess the girth of the body under the tent, but presumably thin if the tiny booted feet—spike heels, spike toes—were any indication. The orange-y brown of the boots brought out highlights in the fur and also coordinated with the scarf the woman wore—shot through with gold thread, expertly knotted around her neck--definitely a put-together woman. But the hair—she hadn’t brushed it! She hadn’t run a comb through it a single time! It stood on end! Standing not far behind her for an entire giro of the city, I could even study the disarray: not even three inches long, and there were rats’ nests and funny parts forking every which way. If she had not been in the mink one might have taken her for someone recently released from a straight-jacket, someone who'd been thrashing around all night and now was too numbed-up on thorazine to even see what had become of her. For a moment, she seemed such a contradiction, but then I got it! It was high-fashion, high-maintenance bed head. She’d probably paid her parruchiere 100 euro to achieve that look.
And to think what I achieve at no cost on my own quite naturally.
I have a whole lot more listening to do before I come to any conclusions about hair and hairstyles. Until these dos start making sense, I'll let mine hang fire.
I am not adverse to change, to upgrading my appearance and have been reading heads like a physiognomist as I encounter them on the bus, the train, per strada with hopes of discovering which if any Italian style would ever suit me. I am too fat and too long-faced for the fashionable shorn look I most admire—the scalp practically shaved with almost a tonsure of bang…big earrings, cherry-red framed glasses, lots of lipstick (you laugh to imagine me so!). Politically this look would work: androgynous, low-maintenance, even lower maintenance than the mess I now don’t maintain—easy to dress up or dress down, funky one minute suave the next, and I wouldn’t be able to hide behind hair like a human Cousin Itt, but would be right out there, exposed. Revelation is everything or almost everything. Vanity still has something to say, however, and I really don’t want to be exposed as a pin head.
My daughter recommended the Devil-Wears-Prada look of Meryl Streep. After all, that’s almost how old I am, even if I don’t want to admit it; grown-up women do and should look, well, grown up with the hair whisked up to one side and lacquered with spray, a precision cut—a place for every hair and every hair in its place (I laugh to imagine me so!), the kind of hairstyle that requires an entire make-over to complement it: the complete line of Loreal make-up and body unguents, Prada, Gucci everything—you won’t find Meryl hurtling through Umbria in a hoodie-sweat shirt and Tevas. But dai, Margaret…really, what are you thinking? Wasn’t the movie, in fact, a political indictment of the hair, the first purchase in a lifetime of conspicuous consumption, the selling of the soul, to…well, yes, the film is aptly named.
I believe I encountered an appropriate compromise on the bus this morning, one Margaret might even approve. I never saw her face, because she was standing in front of me and would not turn around, but she clearly could have stepped off 5th Avenue. She flaunted the full length mink many Italian women are known to parade around in—hers glistening golds, browns and oranges from neck almost to ankle, drapey, cape-like, at least 200 animals worth of fur. One could never guess the girth of the body under the tent, but presumably thin if the tiny booted feet—spike heels, spike toes—were any indication. The orange-y brown of the boots brought out highlights in the fur and also coordinated with the scarf the woman wore—shot through with gold thread, expertly knotted around her neck--definitely a put-together woman. But the hair—she hadn’t brushed it! She hadn’t run a comb through it a single time! It stood on end! Standing not far behind her for an entire giro of the city, I could even study the disarray: not even three inches long, and there were rats’ nests and funny parts forking every which way. If she had not been in the mink one might have taken her for someone recently released from a straight-jacket, someone who'd been thrashing around all night and now was too numbed-up on thorazine to even see what had become of her. For a moment, she seemed such a contradiction, but then I got it! It was high-fashion, high-maintenance bed head. She’d probably paid her parruchiere 100 euro to achieve that look.
And to think what I achieve at no cost on my own quite naturally.
I have a whole lot more listening to do before I come to any conclusions about hair and hairstyles. Until these dos start making sense, I'll let mine hang fire.
mercoledì 24 gennaio 2007
Tyrannous Toilets
Mine has flipped its lid. For awhile things were precarious. The seat and the lid were attached to the bowl with two plastic hinge-things, one piece that slipped into another piece super-glued to the bowl-ledge, the entire mechanism too insubstantial for the heft of the seat and its lid together, not to mention the human weight that would compound it virtually every time it was used—as toilets often are. People would sit and find the seat slipping; the little plastic hinge would pop; the lid would clatter to the floor. Time and time again I’d try to fit it together again, not sure what kind of glue—if any—would hold the hinges in place. Finally one day the hinges popped and Desiree found one and chewed it into a little wad that looked like spit out Wriggley’s Spearmint. That was the day my toilet turned into the kind of toilet you see in public restrooms all over Italy—the kind you really don’t want to use, the kind that seem unsanitary even when completely sanitary, simply because they are naked, raw, exposed, and even obscene without the tidy modesty of seat and cover.
Though embarrassed to have such a toilet, I entertain myself watching visitors decide how they want to approach the problem of it. Certain friends consider it a sign: “Congratulations! You really are Italian now--you've got the toilet to prove it!” Others conscientiously make efforts to help me find a way to rig the seat to the bowl. Still others insist on delicately propping the seat on the bowl—for comfort I suppose, if not decency. I argue that people sit on bidets and they do not have seats, if people do indeed sit on bidets; most Americans I know use them to store extra toilet paper or towels or even bath soap and shampoo and rarely is use of them discussed. I argue it could be worse: just last week I had to face one of those miserable kinds with two foot-print looking things to stand on in order to squat over a hole in the ground.
I have shopped far and wide for replacement hinges and no one seems to carry them. I am told that the safest bet is to just buy the whole apparatus—seat and lid with all the little fixtures packed with them in the cellophane. Michelle and Lewis, with all their experience renovating a bed and breakfast, say they have seen countless people buying toilet covers at the suburban plumbing stores. The way it’s done is you get a big piece of newsprint and trace the shape of your toilet bowl. They are all different, one should know. Some are perfectly oval, some are more rotund, others have little dips and flourishes and of course the size differs. So, yes, I should get a sheet of newspaper and trace the shape and cut it out and take it to the nearest plumber.
The challenge reminded me, perversely, of cutting out face silhouettes in kindergarten, the kind mothers always cherish, the shadow of a child’s profile cast on the wall by a high intensity light and traced, little nose and even eye-lashes cut out and preserved on black construction paper. Tracing toilets is a little trickier because of the bowl-full of water and there being no real surface to trace against, but it can be done. I rather enjoyed getting on my hands and knees for arts and crafts and coming up with the pattern.
The problem, alas, is that the kinds of stores that sell such seats are way out on the periphery. I’m sure I could figure out what bus will take me there, once I have a full day and the time. Still, I find myself resisting this particular journey, and think I may just wait for Michelle and Lewis to return from Australia so they can take me in their car. I don’t know why I balk before the image of me and Desiree on the bus: she under my left arm, the toilet seat under my right arm, the bus trip, the walk through il centro home. Toilets should not be a source of embarrassment. After all, everyone has them; everyone needs them; they are common place, a fact of life. Maybe my inertia is not simply embarrassment, but the recognition that buying another may be entirely futile. Surely the new will have the self-same plastic hinges. Surely I have the same frustrations to look forward to—a Sisyphean task of keeping the lid in place. I try to rethink what is happening in the situation: the toilet is reinventing itself beneath our very derrieres! Why resist…why fight the inevitable? We must choose our battles, afterall.
Though embarrassed to have such a toilet, I entertain myself watching visitors decide how they want to approach the problem of it. Certain friends consider it a sign: “Congratulations! You really are Italian now--you've got the toilet to prove it!” Others conscientiously make efforts to help me find a way to rig the seat to the bowl. Still others insist on delicately propping the seat on the bowl—for comfort I suppose, if not decency. I argue that people sit on bidets and they do not have seats, if people do indeed sit on bidets; most Americans I know use them to store extra toilet paper or towels or even bath soap and shampoo and rarely is use of them discussed. I argue it could be worse: just last week I had to face one of those miserable kinds with two foot-print looking things to stand on in order to squat over a hole in the ground.
I have shopped far and wide for replacement hinges and no one seems to carry them. I am told that the safest bet is to just buy the whole apparatus—seat and lid with all the little fixtures packed with them in the cellophane. Michelle and Lewis, with all their experience renovating a bed and breakfast, say they have seen countless people buying toilet covers at the suburban plumbing stores. The way it’s done is you get a big piece of newsprint and trace the shape of your toilet bowl. They are all different, one should know. Some are perfectly oval, some are more rotund, others have little dips and flourishes and of course the size differs. So, yes, I should get a sheet of newspaper and trace the shape and cut it out and take it to the nearest plumber.
The challenge reminded me, perversely, of cutting out face silhouettes in kindergarten, the kind mothers always cherish, the shadow of a child’s profile cast on the wall by a high intensity light and traced, little nose and even eye-lashes cut out and preserved on black construction paper. Tracing toilets is a little trickier because of the bowl-full of water and there being no real surface to trace against, but it can be done. I rather enjoyed getting on my hands and knees for arts and crafts and coming up with the pattern.
The problem, alas, is that the kinds of stores that sell such seats are way out on the periphery. I’m sure I could figure out what bus will take me there, once I have a full day and the time. Still, I find myself resisting this particular journey, and think I may just wait for Michelle and Lewis to return from Australia so they can take me in their car. I don’t know why I balk before the image of me and Desiree on the bus: she under my left arm, the toilet seat under my right arm, the bus trip, the walk through il centro home. Toilets should not be a source of embarrassment. After all, everyone has them; everyone needs them; they are common place, a fact of life. Maybe my inertia is not simply embarrassment, but the recognition that buying another may be entirely futile. Surely the new will have the self-same plastic hinges. Surely I have the same frustrations to look forward to—a Sisyphean task of keeping the lid in place. I try to rethink what is happening in the situation: the toilet is reinventing itself beneath our very derrieres! Why resist…why fight the inevitable? We must choose our battles, afterall.
martedì 23 gennaio 2007
Camomilla Cure-all
I wish my body recognized the magic Italians attribute to te camomilla.. . I should be able to sip the elixir and find instant relief for jangled nerves, depression, sleeplessness, indigestion, nausea, menstrual cramps, malaria, fever, dehydration (of course!), sluggish-liver, petulant gall bladder, colic, cystitis, kidney stones, hay fever, hiccups, vomiting, spastic pain, arthritis, asthma. I should be able to wash my hair with it and discover brighter highlights, find relief from dandruff. I should be able to wash my face with it and cure eczema, acne, quotidian pimples, actual wounds. I should be able to put the used tea bags over my eye-sockets and soak out all possible puffiness. The mighty Italian mosquito or zinzara should be no threat to me—if I bathe in the stuff.
Just look on the open shelves in my narrow but well-equipped kitchen. I have every one of the Twinnings varieties, Chamomile with Spearmint, Chamomile with Lime Flower, Chamomile with Vanilla, Chamomile with Spiced Apple, Organic Chamomile, just plain Chamomile. I have Italian varieties, both Pompadore and Sogno D’oro…with its steam misty cup and soothing crescent moon. Celestial Seasonings Varieties, to include “Wellness Tea” that combines chamomile with zinc and Echinacea to ensure a quick fix. I have a zip-lock baggie filled with dried Chamomile flowers—and it is not that my fetish is reserved for only varieties of Chamomile. English Breakfast, Earl Gray, all the Republic of Tea green tea varieties, Japanese plum blossom, the new African reds. For years I’ve been sure if I could just knock the coffee habit (I can’t!) and drink only teas I’d be offering my innards a soothing inner-bath and immunity from all plagues. Not that I am in anyway a hypochondriac or prone to plagues or other illnesses. But we all have our inglorious moments and our sudden desperate need for cure-alls.
Imagine the time I was in Venice for Carnevale, taking a bus because I’d found a deal, a bus of unknown student strangers ready for a wild and rollicking good time. Just as we are approaching Mestre, the wintry, watery city, the telltale eyeless white masks and plumes and harlequins and period costumes of yards and yards of gathered silk…it comes over me, a puking disease, that had not even announced itself with a foreboding headache or achey-ness. This is no mild bout of nausea but a full-fledged scourge—intent on disgusting all who travel with me, rendering companionship and joy in the bacchanalian rites we are about to explore—utterly impossible. “What you need is un po’ di camomilla,” the chaperon-esque mother-figure accompanying us insists, urging the bus to stop, so serene in her confidence she will inscribe on my soul forever my faith in un ‘po di camomilla. Had the tea no viable ingredients, the placebo effect would certainly have been enough that day, so intent was my mind on overcoming matter— to drink to the dregs and find myself instantly transformed into a masked dancer with a powdered wig.
Today has, alas, been a chamomile day—a day of staring into the steaming brew while willing it to do its magic as dog companion and I loll around under the ink-stained comforter hearing the terrace doors blow open in the storm but finding no strength to get up and close them. Such deluge and flying branches I have not seen in some time and it’s strangely satisfying to watch now that I am sitting upright against the pillows able to lift my head enough to see. For half the day I was visited by phantoms of delirium as I tried not to succumb to the waves that were rushing over me and trying to cast me to a place that does indeed seem a place (illness does have its fascinations). I did not cross over. I summoned all the strength I had to tiptoe to the kitchen and light the gas under the kettle.
I am still here. I am still writing. Sometimes that seems magic enough.
When is Carnevale this year anyway? Isn't it about that time?
Just look on the open shelves in my narrow but well-equipped kitchen. I have every one of the Twinnings varieties, Chamomile with Spearmint, Chamomile with Lime Flower, Chamomile with Vanilla, Chamomile with Spiced Apple, Organic Chamomile, just plain Chamomile. I have Italian varieties, both Pompadore and Sogno D’oro…with its steam misty cup and soothing crescent moon. Celestial Seasonings Varieties, to include “Wellness Tea” that combines chamomile with zinc and Echinacea to ensure a quick fix. I have a zip-lock baggie filled with dried Chamomile flowers—and it is not that my fetish is reserved for only varieties of Chamomile. English Breakfast, Earl Gray, all the Republic of Tea green tea varieties, Japanese plum blossom, the new African reds. For years I’ve been sure if I could just knock the coffee habit (I can’t!) and drink only teas I’d be offering my innards a soothing inner-bath and immunity from all plagues. Not that I am in anyway a hypochondriac or prone to plagues or other illnesses. But we all have our inglorious moments and our sudden desperate need for cure-alls.
Imagine the time I was in Venice for Carnevale, taking a bus because I’d found a deal, a bus of unknown student strangers ready for a wild and rollicking good time. Just as we are approaching Mestre, the wintry, watery city, the telltale eyeless white masks and plumes and harlequins and period costumes of yards and yards of gathered silk…it comes over me, a puking disease, that had not even announced itself with a foreboding headache or achey-ness. This is no mild bout of nausea but a full-fledged scourge—intent on disgusting all who travel with me, rendering companionship and joy in the bacchanalian rites we are about to explore—utterly impossible. “What you need is un po’ di camomilla,” the chaperon-esque mother-figure accompanying us insists, urging the bus to stop, so serene in her confidence she will inscribe on my soul forever my faith in un ‘po di camomilla. Had the tea no viable ingredients, the placebo effect would certainly have been enough that day, so intent was my mind on overcoming matter— to drink to the dregs and find myself instantly transformed into a masked dancer with a powdered wig.
Today has, alas, been a chamomile day—a day of staring into the steaming brew while willing it to do its magic as dog companion and I loll around under the ink-stained comforter hearing the terrace doors blow open in the storm but finding no strength to get up and close them. Such deluge and flying branches I have not seen in some time and it’s strangely satisfying to watch now that I am sitting upright against the pillows able to lift my head enough to see. For half the day I was visited by phantoms of delirium as I tried not to succumb to the waves that were rushing over me and trying to cast me to a place that does indeed seem a place (illness does have its fascinations). I did not cross over. I summoned all the strength I had to tiptoe to the kitchen and light the gas under the kettle.
I am still here. I am still writing. Sometimes that seems magic enough.
When is Carnevale this year anyway? Isn't it about that time?
lunedì 22 gennaio 2007
St. Francis of Monteluco
The St. Francis I fell in love with was designed by Franco Zeffirelli to win adolescent hearts. As depicted in his 1972 “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” Francis was a dead-ringer replica of the Romeo of Zefferelli’s 1969 “Romeo and Juliet”—the one responsible for the classic love song still piped into our hearts insidiously as elevator music: “A Time for Us”—boyish, a bowl-cut Beatle’s hairstyle, huge ga-ga eyes drinking in a lover’s gaze. Zefferelli’s Francis would discover there was no “Time for Us” as he gazed so wantonly into his flower-child sister’s eyes, the Donovan soundtrack expressing in words what he and Clare refrained from saying to each other as poppies and sunflowers and knee-deep wild grasses swayed in gentle breezes on the Umbrian hillsides where the would-be lovers frolicked and, yes, made flower-chain necklaces and hair-wreathes. How giddy they were! How in love! How tragic that poor Clair would shave her endless “Herbal Essence” locks to follow him into celibacy. How tragic that they let God get in the way of their loving each other. The couple remained inscribed on our hearts like figures on Keats’ Grecian Urn, poised eternally for that lusty kiss we would internalize and live out even compulsively with our more available lovers. Poor Clare (no wonder the order found in her name would be the “Poor Clares”).
I can’t believe that the real Francis would have in anyway been considered a heart-throb. I went to his church in Monteluco yesterday and took a hard look at the cells he is said to have prayed in. He and his brothers must have been the size of gnomes to fit through the teeny, squat doors leading into the closets in which they sequestered themselves. Either that or they took the biblical insistence “straight is the gate and narrow the way” quite literally, forcing themselves physically through key holes, starving themselves, sleeping on splintery planks of wood with rocks as pillows. Even in 1220 they wore the Franciscan robes, hair shirts really with ropes knotted three times to represent and perhaps invoke the trinity. I doubt they ever bathed (or go skinny-dipping as they are often depicted doing by Zefferilli). They suffered ketosis breath from starvation (and they did starve! When Francis’ body was exhumed in 18…examiners could tell he had starved to death because of the way his knuckle-bones were knit together), not to mention, regarding Francis, the crazed fits of temper that would have him run naked in public places and destroy his father’s merchandise and business. Where Francis fails as a lover, he certainly fit the cult ideal of a 60s radical, pooh-poohing the establishment, striking out barefoot with a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal this Book.” Who needed money, who need worry about money, when one could live like the lilies of the field off charity and divine helium?
It surprises me to this day that so many women of my generation still have crushes on St. Francis. They can’t identify with Lucy plucking her eyes out or Catherine cutting off her breasts, but Francis—he’s still the boy-wonder of hagiography. “Live Simply so Others can Simply Live,” perennially he returns to us, but always air-brushed, the stigmata no longer oozing, his Zeferelli smile still intact. But it seems that even as the soul’s lover he is not truly loving in a direct hands-on way, but is always up to strange antics in the name of love, crawling on his battered knees across the eaves to chase a bird into flight, while we stand back in distant wonder—beholding God’s fool.
Adjacent to the Chiesa di San Francesco on the peak of Monteluco is the Sacro Bosco or Sacred Grove with yet another secluded grotto where Francis is said to have prayed. The thousand year-old oaks have living presence, like old souls materializing, holding a stern and mossy vigil. One feels the otherworldliness of the Grove, the enormous branches of the ancient trees sealing us in somehow, containing us, scrappy light on the forest floor flickering with mysteries. One feels even St. Francis’ presence—solitary, somehow fugitive as he seeks a sulky shelter away from us all.
I can’t believe that the real Francis would have in anyway been considered a heart-throb. I went to his church in Monteluco yesterday and took a hard look at the cells he is said to have prayed in. He and his brothers must have been the size of gnomes to fit through the teeny, squat doors leading into the closets in which they sequestered themselves. Either that or they took the biblical insistence “straight is the gate and narrow the way” quite literally, forcing themselves physically through key holes, starving themselves, sleeping on splintery planks of wood with rocks as pillows. Even in 1220 they wore the Franciscan robes, hair shirts really with ropes knotted three times to represent and perhaps invoke the trinity. I doubt they ever bathed (or go skinny-dipping as they are often depicted doing by Zefferilli). They suffered ketosis breath from starvation (and they did starve! When Francis’ body was exhumed in 18…examiners could tell he had starved to death because of the way his knuckle-bones were knit together), not to mention, regarding Francis, the crazed fits of temper that would have him run naked in public places and destroy his father’s merchandise and business. Where Francis fails as a lover, he certainly fit the cult ideal of a 60s radical, pooh-poohing the establishment, striking out barefoot with a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal this Book.” Who needed money, who need worry about money, when one could live like the lilies of the field off charity and divine helium?
It surprises me to this day that so many women of my generation still have crushes on St. Francis. They can’t identify with Lucy plucking her eyes out or Catherine cutting off her breasts, but Francis—he’s still the boy-wonder of hagiography. “Live Simply so Others can Simply Live,” perennially he returns to us, but always air-brushed, the stigmata no longer oozing, his Zeferelli smile still intact. But it seems that even as the soul’s lover he is not truly loving in a direct hands-on way, but is always up to strange antics in the name of love, crawling on his battered knees across the eaves to chase a bird into flight, while we stand back in distant wonder—beholding God’s fool.
Adjacent to the Chiesa di San Francesco on the peak of Monteluco is the Sacro Bosco or Sacred Grove with yet another secluded grotto where Francis is said to have prayed. The thousand year-old oaks have living presence, like old souls materializing, holding a stern and mossy vigil. One feels the otherworldliness of the Grove, the enormous branches of the ancient trees sealing us in somehow, containing us, scrappy light on the forest floor flickering with mysteries. One feels even St. Francis’ presence—solitary, somehow fugitive as he seeks a sulky shelter away from us all.
In the early 1970's, Donovan agreed to write and record songs for the English version of Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). While the film included Donovan's recordings of the songs, the accompanying soundtrack included none of Donovan's original recordings. The absence of these recordings prompted many of Donovan's fans to request an official release of the songs. In order to satisfy demand, Donovan embarked on acquiring the rights to the original recordings. Due to the nature of the original contract and complex publishing rights issues, it became evident to Donovan that releasing the original "Brother Sun Sister Moon" recordings would be extremely difficult. In the absence of this release, Donovan decided to record new versions of the original songs and release it exclusively through the iTunes Music Store. For the new recordings, Donovan opted not to recreate the lush orchestration and choir vocals of the original recordings. Instead, he plays guitar and sings solo, in a style reminiscent of his Sutras album. [edit] Track listing All tracks by Donovan Leitch. "The Little Church" – 3:26 "The Lovely Day" – 2:20 "Lullaby" – 2:31 "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" – 2:02 "A Soldier's Dream" – 3:03 "Shape in the Sky" – 2:35 "Gentle Heart" – 3:52 "The Year Is Awakening" – 3:15 "Island of Circles" – 2:56 "The Lovely Day (Instrumental)" – 2:16
sabato 20 gennaio 2007
Deruta Detour
My pattern is called “Grottesche”—on each cup the monster-dragons face each other, blowing orange plumes of stylized fire. First thing in the morning, as I hold my cup of coffee to warm my hands, I stare rather absently at my breakfast companions. These creatures are almost indiscernible among the colorful arabesques—unless one looks at them the way one learned to look at line-drawings in Children’s Highlife, where one found--tangled in tree-branches, lost in vines—the sudden shape of a lion. I bought four Deruta cups in the pattern when I first came to Spoleto, because I needed cups and everything else one generally needs to set up a home and a life. I would buy the cups, because coffee and tea are crucial, and then advance to dinner plates and pasta bowls, soup tureens and platters. Like a bride choosing a china pattern, envisioning the dreamy day when the place setting would be complete, I imagined my cups were the beginning of something—the start of a real home in my marriage to myself.
I knew the plates would be expensive, that’s why I’ve put them off, but I’d never dreamed how expensive or what process made them so until I visited Deruta yesterday to scope out a field trip for my students and perhaps finally pick up a dozen plates to bring home with me. To make a single Deruta plate takes three months’ effort by a staff of 42, each artist a graduate of the Deruta school, the average term of employment 50 years and sometimes as much as 70—an entire lifetime of perfecting the craft. At the factory one moves from the pits out back, where the clay—indigenous to the town of Deruta—is dug up, next to the refining room in which the clay is cleaned, then to the studio where the white coated artists are kneading out the slabs that will ultimately be put on the potters’ wheel and shaped. It dries for a dozen days and then is put on another wheel to be trimmed and smoothed with little blades held by expert hands, then dries for a month, I think I was told, before a first glazing and preparation for the artists who paint the designs much as Michaelangelo once painted frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, hand-drawing the design on wax paper, poking holes, dusting the plate or the urn or the candelabra with charcoal in order to transfer paper design onto clay and thereafter paint with fine brushes the trademark Deruta colors, originally green and brown, but after the introduction of cobalt from Africa in 1300, an entire palette of vivaciousness. The kilns run at 1200 degrees centigrade, the clay objects baking for 16 hours; once out, the flaws are touched up and other layers of glaze are applied. The entire process for a single plate! For a single cup! Each is handled so expertly, so lovingly (not one of the employees I met seemed bored—no radio buzzed to pass the time)! “This is what I want to do with my life,” I said to one of them. “But, ah,” I was reminded by my guide, "it takes a lifetime to perfect such a skill, plus you must first be born with the talent.” The 128 euro price for a signed dinner plate seemed a pittance given the level of care it took to create it.
Ubaldo Grazia, my guide, was also the proprietor of the business and factory, his family having manufactured Majolica ceramics for 500 years, one of only 15 companies in the world that has been in perpetual operation for so long, his company number 13 on the list. He pointed to a picture of his grandfather at 20, painting an urn the way I had just seen a woman in another room painting an urn of similar design—he might have been one of them, still alive—only the bulb-struck, posed look of a subject staring out of daguerratype hinted at the young man’s generation. “Here is a plate he painted at 13,” Ubaldo held up for me to see, one in the popular style of classical ladies--flowing locks and a winsome face dead center. I learned about pigment, about lusterware (not really gold!) about seasons of color and design. Fragments from decimated pottery were arranged like dead butterflies on specimen boards to illustrate the varieties along a time line.
At this point we were in the owner’s office-museum and he had pulled out a ledger dating back to 1926 so I could sign my name among the illustrious visitors. 80 years of yellow pages, leather-bound and only maybe a quarter-way filled. He pointed out the names of all of the American ambassadors, of Gucci and Tiffany presidents. Williams-Sanoma keeps his business thriving with a specialized line. Mel Gibson had commissioned huge contemporary panels of the stations of the cross. Another artist had made a Majolica sun dial representing the vicissitudes of the business…on the pedestal “Giu” for when the market was going down and “Su” for when it would be on the upswing again. I signed my name in green ink, trying to recall why I was here, who I was, what to say in the space for a comment. I felt immortalized.
Ubaldo sponsors a contest annually to invite artists to submit fresh designs and spend a season at the factory producing fresh lines of ceramics. From the Umbrian landscapes, painted with Japanese delicacy, to the outlandish Scandanavian splashes of primary color-wildness, I saw Deruta possibilities that challenged everything I thought I knew about my style. My “grottesche” monster dragons have been commonplace—conventional!—since the Renaissance. Wouldn’t I prefer something with a little more pizzazz…say a field of Spoletina poppies or farfalle—wild, flapping butterflies? Perhaps I would like to commission the factory to come up with a design plumbed from the depths of my own imagination! Ubaldo’s artists could achieve anything.
I did stop by the showroom and did pick out a new and wilder china pattern, though it saddens me to think I may never be able to afford it. Isn’t it a shame that single women can’t throw showers when they marry themselves and set up housekeeping? I am reconciled, though, to not owning my heart’s desire. I’d surely drop a plate and break it and feel the weight of 500 years of artistry crumble in my conscience along with the money-in-coins jingling to the tiles. My coffee cup cost only 12 euro at the boutique right here in Spoleto and I own a wealth of four. Conventional or no, this morning my fire-breathing monsters seemed oh-so precious to me, a veritable bestiary traveling through time from the Renaissance to find me and awaken me so I could convey to you the wonder.
I knew the plates would be expensive, that’s why I’ve put them off, but I’d never dreamed how expensive or what process made them so until I visited Deruta yesterday to scope out a field trip for my students and perhaps finally pick up a dozen plates to bring home with me. To make a single Deruta plate takes three months’ effort by a staff of 42, each artist a graduate of the Deruta school, the average term of employment 50 years and sometimes as much as 70—an entire lifetime of perfecting the craft. At the factory one moves from the pits out back, where the clay—indigenous to the town of Deruta—is dug up, next to the refining room in which the clay is cleaned, then to the studio where the white coated artists are kneading out the slabs that will ultimately be put on the potters’ wheel and shaped. It dries for a dozen days and then is put on another wheel to be trimmed and smoothed with little blades held by expert hands, then dries for a month, I think I was told, before a first glazing and preparation for the artists who paint the designs much as Michaelangelo once painted frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, hand-drawing the design on wax paper, poking holes, dusting the plate or the urn or the candelabra with charcoal in order to transfer paper design onto clay and thereafter paint with fine brushes the trademark Deruta colors, originally green and brown, but after the introduction of cobalt from Africa in 1300, an entire palette of vivaciousness. The kilns run at 1200 degrees centigrade, the clay objects baking for 16 hours; once out, the flaws are touched up and other layers of glaze are applied. The entire process for a single plate! For a single cup! Each is handled so expertly, so lovingly (not one of the employees I met seemed bored—no radio buzzed to pass the time)! “This is what I want to do with my life,” I said to one of them. “But, ah,” I was reminded by my guide, "it takes a lifetime to perfect such a skill, plus you must first be born with the talent.” The 128 euro price for a signed dinner plate seemed a pittance given the level of care it took to create it.
Ubaldo Grazia, my guide, was also the proprietor of the business and factory, his family having manufactured Majolica ceramics for 500 years, one of only 15 companies in the world that has been in perpetual operation for so long, his company number 13 on the list. He pointed to a picture of his grandfather at 20, painting an urn the way I had just seen a woman in another room painting an urn of similar design—he might have been one of them, still alive—only the bulb-struck, posed look of a subject staring out of daguerratype hinted at the young man’s generation. “Here is a plate he painted at 13,” Ubaldo held up for me to see, one in the popular style of classical ladies--flowing locks and a winsome face dead center. I learned about pigment, about lusterware (not really gold!) about seasons of color and design. Fragments from decimated pottery were arranged like dead butterflies on specimen boards to illustrate the varieties along a time line.
At this point we were in the owner’s office-museum and he had pulled out a ledger dating back to 1926 so I could sign my name among the illustrious visitors. 80 years of yellow pages, leather-bound and only maybe a quarter-way filled. He pointed out the names of all of the American ambassadors, of Gucci and Tiffany presidents. Williams-Sanoma keeps his business thriving with a specialized line. Mel Gibson had commissioned huge contemporary panels of the stations of the cross. Another artist had made a Majolica sun dial representing the vicissitudes of the business…on the pedestal “Giu” for when the market was going down and “Su” for when it would be on the upswing again. I signed my name in green ink, trying to recall why I was here, who I was, what to say in the space for a comment. I felt immortalized.
Ubaldo sponsors a contest annually to invite artists to submit fresh designs and spend a season at the factory producing fresh lines of ceramics. From the Umbrian landscapes, painted with Japanese delicacy, to the outlandish Scandanavian splashes of primary color-wildness, I saw Deruta possibilities that challenged everything I thought I knew about my style. My “grottesche” monster dragons have been commonplace—conventional!—since the Renaissance. Wouldn’t I prefer something with a little more pizzazz…say a field of Spoletina poppies or farfalle—wild, flapping butterflies? Perhaps I would like to commission the factory to come up with a design plumbed from the depths of my own imagination! Ubaldo’s artists could achieve anything.
I did stop by the showroom and did pick out a new and wilder china pattern, though it saddens me to think I may never be able to afford it. Isn’t it a shame that single women can’t throw showers when they marry themselves and set up housekeeping? I am reconciled, though, to not owning my heart’s desire. I’d surely drop a plate and break it and feel the weight of 500 years of artistry crumble in my conscience along with the money-in-coins jingling to the tiles. My coffee cup cost only 12 euro at the boutique right here in Spoleto and I own a wealth of four. Conventional or no, this morning my fire-breathing monsters seemed oh-so precious to me, a veritable bestiary traveling through time from the Renaissance to find me and awaken me so I could convey to you the wonder.
Journey to the End of the World
I was waiting for the bus at the bottom of the hill in the sudden dark after a warm day when a voice I didn’t recognize reached me and asked, “Been to Piandellenoce lately?” I couldn’t imagine that anyone in this town besides Daniela, Bente, Michelle and Lewis had any knowledge at all about my forays into the wild Umbrian hills toward Piandellenoce—plane of the nuts—so I felt a bit accosted and spied upon. Turned out it was the boyish bus driver who’d talked my ear off under the “don’t talk to the driver while the bus is in marcia” sign hanging just above the driver’s seat the last trip I’d made when I’d had such a hard time finding any bus at all and had wound up alone with just this boy-driver who had explained to me that we were making the route backwards; the red house would not be last stop before Montemartano, but first stop after Montemartano. Now we stood poised under the Calder Sculpture waiting for the E bus and his evening duty driving the E bus and me in it up the hill—if the E bus ever happened to arrive.
All weekend it has been in the mid-sixties to low-seventies, weather completely unseasonable for January when the mountains should be capped with snow and our breath visible as we speak beneath the newly lit streetlamps. This is the second January I have spent in Spoleto when Spring has seemed to hurdle over all obstacles to arrive prematurely, even impossibly, a déjà vu that prepares me for the turn in my conversation with the young bus-driver: how scary it is— warm weather in January, surely evidence of global warming and the coming end of the world. Now that the sun has gone down, it’s not really warm, there’s a damp chill; I’m wearing only a fleece, and don’t need more, and it’s dampness more than cold that makes us hold ourselves tight to ward off shivers as though our bodies had already gotten the message that Spring had come and were resisting even the slightest dip in temperature. The air smells like Spring air, like fecundity, like germinating nubs of plant-life poking white-green from moist peat, from forking branches of branches. A colleague at school who worries about the end of the world has indeed verified that there has not been a winter so warm in Umbria in 156 years. Global warming, you betcha! Had Al Gore produced his film on the subject before the last election, guaranteed he’d be president today.
I am relieved when the bus comes and I can point to the “don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in marcia” sign as an excuse to take a seat toward the back of the bus by a woman I don’t realize is drunk, drunker than I’ve ever known anyone to be and don’t know her to be until she hands me her shopping bag and stands up only to realize that she can’t stand up. She hangs from the pole, stiffens her knees to hold herself up right, then her eyes close and she passes out for a moment while standing, jerking awake before she falls, murmuring words I don’t understand, smiling in some kind of communion with herself, closing her eyes, passing out again, jerking awake, again and again. There’s a well-coiffed older woman sitting across the aisle from me politely, her gloved hands crossed daintily in her lap. She refuses to look at either me or the drunk lady and I think it strange that we do not look at each other to acknowledge—with pity surely, with concern—what is happening right before our eyes, what we are living in this moment together as the weary, creaky-feeling bus makes its sudden twisty-turns up the hill. There’s something about night travel that’s so intimate: the insides of the bus lit up so fluorescently, all of us contained so tightly within, and so at the mercy of the driver and flukes of circumstance. For a funny, fluttery moment I want desperately to make eye-contact with someone—the lovely old lady sitting there so prim with pursed lips, the drunk woman whose head is lolling and eyes are closed, though she’s still smiling in her bemused way as though privy to something the rest of us can’t know, my friend the bus-driver whose forehead is visible in the rear-view mirror, but not his eyes where I can catch them, and find in them some reassurance of something small talk about the weather can no longer provide.
This is the way the world ends...
"...not with a bang but a whimper..." T. S. Eliot
An Inconvenient Truth
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.
All weekend it has been in the mid-sixties to low-seventies, weather completely unseasonable for January when the mountains should be capped with snow and our breath visible as we speak beneath the newly lit streetlamps. This is the second January I have spent in Spoleto when Spring has seemed to hurdle over all obstacles to arrive prematurely, even impossibly, a déjà vu that prepares me for the turn in my conversation with the young bus-driver: how scary it is— warm weather in January, surely evidence of global warming and the coming end of the world. Now that the sun has gone down, it’s not really warm, there’s a damp chill; I’m wearing only a fleece, and don’t need more, and it’s dampness more than cold that makes us hold ourselves tight to ward off shivers as though our bodies had already gotten the message that Spring had come and were resisting even the slightest dip in temperature. The air smells like Spring air, like fecundity, like germinating nubs of plant-life poking white-green from moist peat, from forking branches of branches. A colleague at school who worries about the end of the world has indeed verified that there has not been a winter so warm in Umbria in 156 years. Global warming, you betcha! Had Al Gore produced his film on the subject before the last election, guaranteed he’d be president today.
I am relieved when the bus comes and I can point to the “don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in marcia” sign as an excuse to take a seat toward the back of the bus by a woman I don’t realize is drunk, drunker than I’ve ever known anyone to be and don’t know her to be until she hands me her shopping bag and stands up only to realize that she can’t stand up. She hangs from the pole, stiffens her knees to hold herself up right, then her eyes close and she passes out for a moment while standing, jerking awake before she falls, murmuring words I don’t understand, smiling in some kind of communion with herself, closing her eyes, passing out again, jerking awake, again and again. There’s a well-coiffed older woman sitting across the aisle from me politely, her gloved hands crossed daintily in her lap. She refuses to look at either me or the drunk lady and I think it strange that we do not look at each other to acknowledge—with pity surely, with concern—what is happening right before our eyes, what we are living in this moment together as the weary, creaky-feeling bus makes its sudden twisty-turns up the hill. There’s something about night travel that’s so intimate: the insides of the bus lit up so fluorescently, all of us contained so tightly within, and so at the mercy of the driver and flukes of circumstance. For a funny, fluttery moment I want desperately to make eye-contact with someone—the lovely old lady sitting there so prim with pursed lips, the drunk woman whose head is lolling and eyes are closed, though she’s still smiling in her bemused way as though privy to something the rest of us can’t know, my friend the bus-driver whose forehead is visible in the rear-view mirror, but not his eyes where I can catch them, and find in them some reassurance of something small talk about the weather can no longer provide.
This is the way the world ends...
"...not with a bang but a whimper..." T. S. Eliot
An Inconvenient Truth
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.
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