Save Me, Taxista!

Spoleto is a small enough town that all I need to do, when I see a sparkling white taxi poised by the curb outside the train station, is say “Ciao Roberto,” or “Ciao Salvati” and one of these men will know what to do with me. The history I share with them seems matrimonial; the moves they’ve helped me make, the suitcases and boxes from Spoleto to Perugia, Perugia to Spoleto, were intimate adventures into new ways of being.

Salvati carried me over the threshold of my first home on Via Pompili in Perugia’s Monte Luce, helping me find the landlady, the key, the light switch—boiling espresso for me at my first stove while a low hanging bulb shone on his bald head and I noticed how blue his eyes were and felt suddenly bashful as I stuffed cash in his hand and told him I was okay , he could leave. It was likewise Salvati who drove me, Anny and the Hindi writer Lakshmi Lal across mountain ranges to pay homage to the Hermit of Monteluco, banging the chassis of his new car as he heaved over bumps, without complaint. How patiently he waited for us outside, pacing, his hands folded behind his back, his goateed chin folded into his neck, while we held our inquisition. it was also Salvati who nearly broke my heart one night when he told me about his little cagnolino losing its tongue after a snapping turtle snapped it off, so that the poor dog could no longer eat and had to be euthanized. We parked the cab in Piazza Liberta’ and drank a bottle of wine together at Bar Canasta, both of us staring at Desiree in my lap, suddenly so vulnerable seeming and ephemeral, all of us, especially dogs—here today, gone tomorrow.

My emotional life does not run as deep with Salvati’s counterpart, Roberto, but his is the card I keep in my wallet, the number I dial when I find myself on the late train, after the buses stop running at nine. It is always, always such a desperate decision—to spend 10 euro for a ride up a hill I used to climb on principle the way people sometimes dash up stairs, to burn enough calories to justify pizza. His card seems always to surface as celestial announcement—white among colorful euro bills, the grill of his taxi in watercolor, the headlights staring eyes, and his phone-number, already programmed into my cell-phone, announcing itself like a dare. Roberto is, frankly, a gorgeous young man, a Prince Charming with flowing golden locks, deep dimples, a William Hurt moody stare and granny glasses. He doesn’t tell me stories about dogs losing their tongues or hermits buying toilet paper in the supermarket; he simply beams his mysterious presence over my comings and goings. It’s Roberto who blinks in on the ethers when I return by train after weeks or even months in the states. It’s Roberto who appears when girl friends visit and pool their resources for a 4 a.m. taxi to Rome. And never does his appearance seem incidental, but rather angelic visitation, timely intervention, as though he were a fleet footed courier responding to my silent—or not so silent—call.

Last night I got stranded in Foligno. I was late breaking away from school anyway and then discovered that my train connection in Fologino was running two hours late, meaning that I would not get home until nearly midnight. I knew I could walk up the hill and should walk up the hill—I wasn’t even lugging my computer as I usually do, and what a lovely night full of stars it was to be out in the fresh air walking. But I started worrying about Desiree, poor abandoned Desiree, sitting there so pert and trusting on the lamb-skin cushion of her imprisoning crate. Twelve hours she’d been waiting for me, her little bladder had been waiting, her little soul—and certainly she deserved any possible strategy I could come up with to expedite my return.

“Ah, Cinzia, mi dispiace, non posso,” Roberto’s voice reached me over my cell phone coming out in an almost annoyed sigh. I didn’t want to imagine what I may have interrupted.

There are other taxisti in Spoleto—maybe four in all, but for some reason the older two are never waiting for me, do not know me, cannot call me by name; in fact, I do not think that in six years I have ever taken a ride in either of their taxis. I thought perhaps that this night of nights I’d break the spell Salvati and Roberto have cast on my life; I’d find one of the others awaiting me, a groom beside his golden pumpkin of a coach, a gloved hand poised to open the door to my deliverance. But a part of me knew better than to expect any taxi to be waiting in the off-season after midnight and I steeled myself to climb a mountain.

How astonished I was, stepping off the train, to discover a town too giddy with life to belong to so late an hour—teenagers in silvery shoes, gunning their engines, a scintillating giggly essence to the air, and I so much a part of the night that penetrating it, on foot, directly, intimately was so natural as to eclipse all memory of taxis or taxisti. My only regret was that I did not have my puppy-dog prancing at my heels—but in no time we were dancing together under the moon on the terrace, thoughts of abandonment, of momentary exiles in train stations and dog crates, snuffed out as though by anesthesia.