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.
sabato 29 settembre 2007
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.
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