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.