Slugs

I don’t know where they come from, showing up as they do in the same spot on the bedroom floor, no cracks that I see they can slip through or vent or drain: there for me to step on in bare feet as I climb wearily into bed on a rain-soaked evening, at first sure that it must be dog poop I’ve found, given how slimy and cold it feels to the foot, given the rain and the impossibility of Giri della Rocca and, now especially, with Desiree’s recent confinement and sure knowledge that her rival puppy has been born –this slippery something could be her vendetta.

It is such a tiny, innocuous thing to cause in me such fright. A snail without its shell, a wisp of protoplasm, smaller than my smallest finger, glistening there, streaking its mucous path across the polished wood -floor, a hoodwinking path that almost convinces it is traceable to some point of origin until one sees it is simply a smear. Could it be that it fell from the sky—or simply materialized, something self-generating, born of the air’s moisture or some creature of my own rainy day angst and frustration, the anti-pearl of my restlessness, my own tight shell creating nothing more glorious than the snot of a mollusk, dripping into its being from some crimp in my own. Impossible, I know.

All creatures great and small, I think, and wonder how best to love the unlovable alien that clings to the floorboard, resistant to all my efforts toward pathetic fallacy, the need to anthropomorphize, give sentience to what I must consider a sentient being though I cannot quite reach that far inside a creature that appears not to have eyes. I should ache for the rawness of it, the shell-less, sheer exemplum of stripped nakedness and vulnerability, but the fear harks back to worms and stories of blood-letting, leaches: the mysterious parasite that finds its way into skin by night from no place I can name and might also slither into the depths of me through my sleep. Mind says it’s innocuous but my flesh crawls knowing otherwise.

It may not necessarily be the otherness of this creature that repels, but its sameness to a tenderness within myself—a lopped off piece of viscera, lost from who knows where inside me, suddenly there, not really wiggling but surely capable of wiggling, still alive on the floor.

I cannot feel pity for a thing without eyes.

I accept the word of others: they are hermaphrodites, these gastropods—with a propensity to be male and also to bite off each other’s penis and thereafter reproduce as females; an insight that should make me chuckle or at least rouse enough curiosity for me to poke it with a pencil, if only to see what state my bedfellow’s penis is in, and maybe also find the tongue I’m told is covered with tiny teeth. All I see is the blip of protoplasm, a nothing blip, too tiny to arouse in me this fear.

I believe it easy enough to overcome. One need only reach for a piece of toilet paper and pinch the tissue around the creature as one might in fact clean up after the dog—carry the bundle at arm’s length toward the toilet, toss and flush. One might then of course have to contend with New York sewer fears, the colonies of alligators and overgrown carp-from-goldfish that have evolved in our imaginings of the underworld. But I tell myself not seeing is not believing—along the lines of out of sight out of mind, or so I want to believe about belief as I begin the Sisyphean task of clearing my life of this tiny onus.

Cockie

I had heard rumors about Alberto’s new dog long before I met the dog yesterday morning, limping along Viale Matteotti unaccustomed to an obviously new collar and leash—bright purple! I’d heard Alberto had found the puppy at the market in Pissignano Sunday before last, and I’d imagined the kind of creature one would cup in two hands and rub against one’s cheek, a true cucciolo, eight weeks old, say, just leaving its mother, which would explain why Alberto had not brought the dog out for giri around the Rocca. This morning I collided with Alberto as I was taking a sharp right out of my driveway while headed toward the bus to catch the train to get to work. I looked down and found a quite adult looking dog—white with flame-like orange markings, border-collie-ish, but whippet-fragile looking, cowering at Alberto’s feet. The dog looked up at me, it's head half-ducked as though apologizing for itself. “Ti presento, Cockie,” Alberto said with a kind of gallantry. Then to Cockie: “Ecco Cinzia.”

I had not understood why it had taken so many months for Alberto to find a new dog after the death of Brill who had somehow gotten fatally ill after devouring a platter of party meats at Giampy and Brit’s open house at the art gallery. This had in fact happened the day before I left for France in July—on the 4th of July, in fact, not that the party or the dog’s death had anything to do with American Independence Day. As Daniela and I were saying our goodbyes on the morning of my departure, Brill was at Albigini’s on an I.V. drip and Alberto’s call had come in to announce kidney failure. “E’ morto Brill," Daniela’s text message had awakened me with its barely audible tingle as I'd tried to sleep on the overnight train to Paris.

It is so hard to imagine the loss of a dog when your own beloved companion is snuggled up next to you on the bunk in a train’s sleeping car, its eyes shining so trustingly in the light spangled darkness. The death of Brill seemed more than the death of a dog. Certainly from loner-Alberto's point of view, Brill was the boon campanion, the kind of canine spouse late-middle aged men and women both seem to acquire as though reaching beyond the human to the angelic for a more refined kind of union. Brill was the dog that accompanied the Fool in the Tarot Card and Alberto the Fool--a self-proclaimed Barbone/Tramp who refused to put a leash on his free spirit animal and provoked the ire of all Spoletini when the dog shit in people's doorways or allegedly caused cars to crash into stone walls as they swerved to avoid his trickster presence.

Brill had played a special role in my own life while serving as my personal fertility alert system when it was time to mate Desiree. Daniela had claimed he'd be more reliable than the striscia-test at Albigini’s--one sniff from a trustworthy male dog and Desiree would "sposta la coda" (an eerie phenomenon, that tail twisting) and thereby tell us when to rush Desiree to Rome to cast her amid the lascivious scramblings of Wolfgang Amadeo. I'd felt such compunction for using Brill in this way--truly using him!--poor mongrel creature who didn't stand a chance of being anyone's chosen stud.

There is a gallery on Via Fontesecco that features a still unfinished portrait of Brill, looking fox-like and mischievous as he glances up at the viewer from the stone gutter. The artist is known for his capacity to render stone as though under intense magnification, with living, breathing texture --actual pores and almost visible respiratory swellings, hairline cracks like those in the skin of someone's hand. The portrait is all living stone, cobbled street, curb, marciapiedi, monochrome save for Brill as the central watching figure, his eyes painted to surreal perfection, also the black, gray, white bristles in the reddish fur of his muzzle, but otherwise utterly unfinished, a gessoed-swipe of burnt orange against the gray. The portrait had cost an occhio della testa (an eye out of Alberto’s head), and Alberto did not have the means to pay for it, though certainly, after the death of Brill, Spoletini raised enough of the money to ensure the painting get done, though the artist himself, I believe I heard tell, is now somewhere in Sicily.

When first I'd heard Alberto had a new dog, I suspected it would be disorienting to see him with any kind of dog other than the street-smart, elusive Brill. And true enough the pitiful creature I discover collapsed at Alberto's socks-in-sandals feet makes no sense to me. Alberto explains that he hasn't been walking Cockie at the Rocca because of a gimp leg; he shows me the hind leg, much shorter than the other three, curling up a bit, floppy as though missing a joint or piece of bone, something. He tells me that when he first saw the dog in Pissignano, he had been cowering in a cage, one stray among a half-dozen other strays, but Cockie clearly the most downtrodden and in need of a special touch. The poor animal had been terrified of Alberto, of the car-ride back to Spoleto, of the creeking of doors, fall of shadows, clatter of dishes. After just a week, though, Cockie won’t let Alberto out of sight. They sleep together, the dog curled up right against Alberto’s chest, mysteriously attentive to the nocturnal beating of Alberto's heart.

After I bid Alberto and Cockie a buona giornata, I mill around Piazza delle Liberta' a bit while waiting for the bus. I stop by the post-office to pay my Amici di Bassotti Club dues, stop by Bar Canasta for cornetto and cappuccino. The few minutes it takes me to do these things feels like a small eternity. I lose sight of Alberto and Cockie, even in memory. But by the time I find myself standing at the bus-stop, I find also a sight that seems suddenly familiar: Alberto and Cockie crossing the pizza, the dog a few paces behind Alberto, trying to keep up but barely able because of the limp. “You have been waiting for the bus all this time?” Alberto wants to know as though he too were conscious of the trap door in Time I have just fallen into. We chat as though days and days had passed and there was so much to say. Ages have indeed passed, so much Time that the spectacle of Alberto crossing the piazza with his purple-leashed, limping animal is common place, an intrinsic part of the glorious scenery.

When Worlds Won't Collide

I don’t know why I believe that my life in Spoleto should have anything to do with my life in Perugia. I suppose it has something to do with a vague sense of integrity and not wanting things to stay forever compartmentalized: the personal over here, the professional over there. It is not that my soul’s mirror cities are that far apart: only an hour by train, though admittedly the frequency of trains leaves a lot to be desired and so to invite a Perugia friend to Spoleto is to ask for an entire day of his or her time, the kind of time not usually available to professional people who have what Italians call impegni, commitments, obligations, things to do, people and places to see. But yesterday was a glorious day rapturous with the kind of sunshine that begs to be celebrated and there is no better way to celebrate than to hike up Monteluco and then eat an endless meal at Ferretti, a hike I’d planned a full week earlier not knowing what the weather would do, but lately the weather and I seem in cahoots, even if I am not in cahoots with the powers that will let my two worlds collide.

I do admit that, as I was sitting in Bar Canasta with Daniela, an hour too soon for Campari but too late for cappuccino, waiting for Perugia to encroach on our tender vita canina, I had my doubts that such a merger could ever happen but then doubted my doubts because, after all, we were sitting there waiting for it to happen. My boss Carol and friend Marie were in route via Honda car and had even called before I’d left the house saying that they had hit the road and would stop for gas and probably arrive at Bar Canasta a few minutes later than the time Daniela and I had agreed to meet them before students and other colleagues arrived later still via a train that was also in route.

With the sun as hot at noon as it was proving to be, Daniela was squirming in the thick turtleneck she’d put on in defense of morning cold, pulling at the collar, her face scrunched with discomfort, cranky enough that I ordered our Campari Sodas even after she’d told me to wait for the others who would surely arrive at any moment. In the meantime we would work out the renewal of our membership to the ABC—the Amici di Bassotti Club—friends of dachshunds club, because our annual dues had come due and for some bizarre reason only I had gotten the paperwork for renewal, despite having been a member for maybe two years while Daniela is Queen of ABC having bred world champions for more than 20 years, having owned a pet shop, having navigated these circles endlessly, and certainly should be at the top of their mailing list. My task for the morning was to bring her my paperwork so she could photocopy it, and then after I paid my dues, she would fax our forms and evidence of our having paid our dues to the office in Rome in time for us to vote at the upcoming election of delegati. For some reason I could not wrap my mind around either the idea that a dachshund club needs delegates and elections, nor the idea that I would pay my dachshund dues the way I pay the light bill or telephone bill at a special counter in the post office, first pulling a ticket out of the machine that says bollette corrente—current bills—finally getting the stamped and faxable receipt. “You have never paid a bolleta corrente?” Daniela assaulted with a sarcasm that irks me. Of course I have paid bills, I bristled with my defense...but since when have dachshund dues become the province of whatever bureaucratic process deals with real bills? “Cinzia,” she glared, “our dogs are as real as electricity, maybe even more real, per carita.”

The mood was not right, I think I told myself. Where was joy? Where was light? Where was deliverance? How possibly could we seguey from a conversation about dachshund dues to whatever conversation was being imported from the academic world in Perugia? Daniela was not dressed right, I think I saw. We Americans would all be hiking and so were clad in boots, and tights, and t-shirts, while there she was in lipstick and tweed and the suffocating turtleneck, her eyebrows suddenly not right on her face, plucked too thin, her mouth too pursed with evident impatience. What’s more, I crashed headlong into her Italian-ness, which is never apparent to me. Suddenly she was only Italian, the kind of exotic Italian one finds poised mysteriously in black and white Fellini films or in old textbooks of Italian culture—beauties from a world seeped in otherness, remote and inaccessible.

“Five more minutes and then I must run to Giorgio’s for pranzo,” Daniela sighed, checking her square bracelet watch, relief melting her tense features, or maybe it was the Campari, having its effect. “It would be maleducata for me to say “hello” and then run off to Giorgio’s," she considered. "Okay. Io vado. I’m going.” It was indeed 1:00 and we’d been waiting an hour.

My heart kept clutching at lost opportunity—stay! I want you to know these women and them to know you!—while at the same time I felt strangely rescued from an eventuality that did not eventuate. I could not imagine what possible disaster could have been lurking to require divine intervention, but had a certain clarity that she had left in the nick of time.

Bar Canasta faces Piazza delle Liberta and, through the plate glass doors of the bar, I could follow Daniela as she scurried up the Via Brignone while I could also see Carol and Marie approaching the bar from an adjacent street that converges on the piazza. The timing did indeed seem miraculous, the progress of these women even geometric as they followed their respective trajectories from where I sat, Daniela’s movement away from me calibrated mysteriously with the others’ approach. Had she stood up from the table even one moment earlier, we’d have all collided in piazza. But no. The timing was indeed impeccable.

Carnevale

Michelle, Lewis and I were heading toward Tre Fontane for a Fat Tuesday pizza when we thought we saw a ghoul, leaning against a stone wall, a child dressed up in Carnevale costume. I was the first to spy him or her—the black hooded cape, the mask of a strega/witch, maybe the befana herself with the squinty eyes and hooked nose. “Look, look,” I called out to them and made them veer with me toward the child, but then proximity proved the ghoul was neither a ghoul nor a child, but an old woman standing there being herself.

I am not sure why Carnevale kept hoodwinking me this year, kept passing me by. Sunday before last I definitely heard the music, but didn’t make sense of it until the party was over and all the people gone. I was on the computer, instant-messaging with Anny : “That’s strange,” I even wrote her, “suddenly Spoleto is suffused with the pumped up sound of Disney show-tunes. I wonder what on earth could be going on. “ By the time I’d finished chatting on email and grading papers, by the time I’d gathered shoes and Desiree, the only thing left to discover were the spoils: heaps of confetti as well as a blanket of it covering the asphalt of my street.

I assumed the big day would be Fat Tuesday, Martedi Grasso…Mardi Gras. So it didn’t even occur to me to seek out parties on Sunday. I did solitary giri della Rocca, early for me, but at a time when Spoletini are just getting out of morning Mass so that right away I found Merisa near her hotel trying to walk in new shoes, walking as though on her heels, trying to break them in, waving her hand to tell me not to even worry about walking with her, given the shoes and how her feet hurt. Spiderman and a creature I could not identify walked past us, each holding the hand of a gargantuan looking father. I did a double-take, mostly to figure out if the other was a dragon…do dragons have spikes prickling out of their skulls and necks? Do they wear spats? For the life of me I could not figure out what kind of creature was accompanying Spiderman and the gargantuan human who seemed to float past Merisa and me while she proudly showed off the new shoes that made my own toes ache just to imagine walking in them.

“I don’t suppose we should go to the party at Pecchiardo and then also out for pizza,” Daniela mused as we were drifting down Via Brignone a little high from our Campari sodas mid-day on the Tuesday I didn’t remember was Fat Tuesday until she mentioned the meranda at Pecchiardo. I remembered that I’d also made plans with Michelle and Lewis to check out a new pizzeria near my house, one that boasted Wi-Fi access. We were going to each bring our laptops and download music and movies—go hog wild with a real internet connection rather than dial-up. You’d think that on Fat Tuesday the restaurants would be teeming with people primed for debauchery, but the Wi Fi pizzeria was closed and there seemed no one whatsoever on the streets, save an old woman I wanted to be a ghoul who turned out not to be.

This is ridiculous, I found myself telling Daniela, telling Michelle, telling Lewis, telling friends I emailed after dinner, telling my children when I spoke to them on the phone: Here is the one day of the year when the church allows me to ritualize debauchery and the best I could come up with is profiteroles.

“Profiteroles are pretty decadent,” my daughter assured me. “All that cream…all that chocolate mousse. And you are on a serious diet, which makes it outright temptation…you did indeed succumb to temptation. That’s decadent.”

I had a list of things I was going to give up for Lent. Sex, maybe. Chocolate, maybe. Alcohol. Self-indulgent emails. Complaining. Putting off until tomorrow what can be done today. But suddenly it comes as almost an epiphany: I am what I am, the face of the Befana is my own and she is wryly smiling over all my unlived Fat Tuesdays, the darkness I have failed to court, the breast I’ve failed to flash from a parade float overflowing gardenias. Smiling especially over the purity I've failed to embody in the aftermath of my failed Fat Tuesdays.

This year I think I am going to observe a kind of anti-Lent: give myself and others little gifts of chocolate, wine, little kisses of titillation. I am going to dance around the Rocca during giri. And if my shirt wafts up in the breeze...watch out. You never know what may be winking at you.

Affinity

The lone woman making her way around the Rocca in her full length mink buttoned to her chin knows that she knows me and that I know her but refrains from looking toward me, I think because we both realize we do not remember each other’s name and do not have anything to say to each other. She stands by the rail that prevents walkers from toppling over into the valley, clutching her mink collar tightly around her throat, poised with her face in the wind, looking dramatic. She belongs to another era, my mother’s era, coming-of-age in the 1950s, aspiring to be Katherine Hepburn; she looks like Katherine Hepburn, but a diminutive version, tiny as only Italian women can be, and with her hair poofed up the way Katherine would never poof up her hair, sealed in hairspray as crisp as fiberglass so that not a finger-curl blows in the gale.

What I remember about this woman is a crostate filled with blackberry marmalade that she brought to the convent of Monteluco during the Festa di San Francesco. She was from Rome but came to Spoleto often, perhaps because she had grown up in Spoleto and still owned a home here and found herself returning more and more to her past and childhood friends, one of which may have been Merisa, my landlady. She had in fact been introduced to me by Merisa and had sat with us at the feast the fratti had prepared and I had instantly liked her for reasons I tried to seek out in her eyes and face, which moved in close to me and seemed to recognize me as well. In the middle of the meal her son appeared from nowhere—everyone commenting that he looked just like his mother though I could not see it; her face was so familiar to me, while her son’s was not. It was her birthday, we learned, and the son had driven all the way from Rome to surprise his mother on her birthday. Imagine, she was born on the Festa di San Francesco and was turning eighty this very day.

It is not cold today; I’m not even wearing a jacket, just a sweatshirt, but at the Rocca, weather is a fickle thing. At noon on the Bar Portella side there is sunshine, springtime, a cluster of people in the plastic chairs at the plastic tables sitting out with their Campari sodas and spicy rice-crackers, holding their faces up to sun that beams in across the valley in a direct way as though someone stood on the opposing mountain flashing light with a trick mirror. Walk a few paces beyond the Gattapone Hotel, past the Ponte, around the bend, and the season changes—the sun is lost, the temperature drops by ten degrees, fog creeps past the guardrails in eerie wisps and you think of coming rain and the drops you may or may not be feeling; certainly the air is wetter, denser. When I see the woman poised at the rail trying not to see me, I feel we have lost something that we had almost found that day at the convent, something inexplicable and fleeting, perhaps illusory.

Daniela and the dogs arrive and create a flurry—there is so much to say and think and talk about as we do our giri that are no longer giri, because of the walls still sealing off construction of the escalator that will someday scale the mountain from train station to the top. Luciana arrives and wants a dog to walk and Daniela untangles Tarontola’s leash and lets Luciana walk Tarontola even though Tarontola keeps looking back at us over her shoulder saying with her eyes veiled by wire-hair eyebrows, Why did you give me to this strange woman? I am yours. "Eccoci," Daniela and I both say to Tarontola at the same time and I love it that we can say “eccoci”—here we are—rather than “eccomi”—here I am--to the sweet-faced animal whose sense of belonging informs my own.

Soon enough, Daniela and I are the ones sitting in the sun at Bar Portella stirring the orange slices in our Camparis with our fingers, watching the ice melt, letting our mid-day aperitivo stretch as long as it will as we talk about this, that and the other, our dogs tied to a table leg, poised angelically for the rice-crackers they know we will offer. “Bianca Maria,” Daniela’s voice sings out and her face lights up and now I remember the name that made me think of “Snow White,” Bianca Maria, the woman now approaching us that I had seen trying not to see me.

Bianca Maria responds to Daniela’s greeting and then tip-toes in her pumps toward our table and toward me. “Well, it is you,” she says…raising her gloved hands to pat my cheeks and examine my face. “I was afraid to look twice for fear I was mistaken.”

I love the feeling of inevitability that comes over me when, later in the day, I run into Bianca Maria twice again in unexpected places, in Piazza del Mercato mid-afternoon, shopping for eggplant, along the park side of Viale Matteotti, well after dark, perhaps out for an evening stroll and coming across me under a street light. We stop and stand before each other, though we clearly have nothing to say. “Cinzia,” she says when she looks in my face. “Bianca Maria,” I say back and grin though I’m not sure what I’m grinning about.

Hair of the Dog

I’ve been told for about three years that I need a haircut. Both my daughters cut their waist length hair this Christmas because they said, looking at me, they realized how gross long hair could get. Almost-50 year old women are not supposed to wear their hair below their shoulders. The cut-off age is 30, according to my now dead mother—no one over the age of 30 should wear their hair like a girl’s. Rules notwithstanding, the problem, according to my girls, was not my age, but the hair, the kind of hair I have, the stringiness and wispiness and colorlessness of it. I just didn't need too much of a bad thing.

Last March when Anny and Michael were visiting she would sometimes look sidelong at me and say as sweetly as possible: “I wonder what you would look like with a kind of bob. You have the kind of hair that would sway if you had the right kind of bob, cleanly cut—you know—just below your chin.” I looked at Anny and looked at Anny’s hair. Since when did you rule the cult of makeovers? I wanted to say but didn’t.

“Do I need to cut my hair?” I asked Daniela. She turned me around by the shoulders to guage something I couldn't see behind me as though the thought had never occurred to her. She lifted my ponytail. “Si,” she said, matter-of- factly.

I have to be in the right mood to face myself in the 3-way mirror of a beauty shop, face myself trussed up in one of the gowns they make you wear with your hair all goopy on top of your head so your face is all face and all its wrinkles and imperfections and something else that has nothing at all to do with the flesh but more with what is unknowably in your own eyes staring back at you. And for some reason, I have never had the courage to go to a beauty parlor in Spoleto even though Daniela knows every parucchiere in town, or maybe it’s because Daniela knows every parrucchiere in town and I am wary of her habits becoming contagious so that, before I know it, a trim could become layers, become a bob that sways at the chin with a 100 euro a week highlight-to-hide-the-gray habit.

Last March when I took Anny and Michael to Assisi to photograph the Green Man on the altars of the Basilica, the guard would not let me in the church because of Desiree. “No problem, we’ll just take a little walk,” I told them and we agreed to meet up in an hour. I’d had no intention whatsoever of going to the beauty parlor but, walking up a lonely street, I met a woman sweeping wisps of hair into a gutter. She liked my dog. She called and clucked and asked me what her name is and how old she was and could she caress her and Desiree responded as she does only to true dog lovers and, before I knew it, I was in her chair, trussed up, facing that face you find only in a 3-way mirror. She cut enough for Michael to notice I’d had a haircut, though Anny swore she could not tell a difference and thought I was lying just to tease her. I felt lighter. I felt like my haircut was providential and I kept the woman’s card. I like haircuts that do not announce themselves.

Friday I took a group of 20 students on a fieldtrip to Todi. I think the thing about me and haircuts is they must always take me by surprise. The last thing I’d have imagined myself capable of doing is cutting off my hair in the middle of a student field trip. But the intern, Marijana, and I were walking along talking about how best to get to know a town, after you’ve seen all the churches and museums. It just occurred to me that that the best way to learn about the underbelly of a culture is to find a beauty parlor and allow the man who cuts the hair of the heads of the townspeople cut yours.

Marijana claims she was instantly worried for me when she saw how old the parruchiere was and how suspect his old-fashioned pompadour and how feeble and fumbly his arthritic hands. She worried about the funny thing he did with the scissors, sliding the blade up and down the hair shafts as though to tease them into split ends. And then I’d told him no more than two centimeters and she’d watched him lop off hanks, great lengths of hair, cascading down the glossy black cape I was wearing to pile in endless heaps on the floor while I seemed oblivious, seemed to be transfixed by Desiree’s eyes watching me in the mirror.

It was a haircut that announced itself, but my students, when we met them at the restaurant for pranzo, were polite, deferent, waiting for me to explain to them why I’d done what I’d done before they gasped in horror. “It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would,” Marijana kept telling them. “I’ve never seen anyone do what this man did with scissors. But then I looked around and he’d won some awards and…well, it’s short, but…it looks normal, as far as haircuts go.”

I thought I should be more devastated than I was, thought I should feel some pang of remorse for lost self-image or identiy. But my unique experience of Todi had cost me nothing but 15 euro and a fistful of hair. For some reason I felt I had gained far more than what they believed I’d lost.

Phished

There are people in my life who believe I am starving in Africa. My ex-husband, bless his heart, even found the hotel where my double resides and tried to wire cash for the $1550 I owed for the nights I’d been staying there working for a program he believed in and believed me involved with: “Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education.” My daughter was filming in Baltimore and had not checked her voice mail, but when she checked it she said his voice was poignantly concerned. “Your mother is starving in Africa, wouldn’t you know it? And it would happen this month, my having just paid tuition at both your siblings’ colleges.”

I am wondering about those people who, like my ex-husband, do indeed believe I am starving in Africa. I suppose it’s not such a stretch to imagine, if I am capable of running out of money in Spoleto, I am likewise capable of running out of money in Africa and of being in Africa given the world looks awfully small when one spins a globe and sees the continent of North America looking so familiarly there, trailing South America, and then trace across the dotted line of latitude toward Europe and the landmass of Africa below and surmise from proximity and my own tendency to wander that I could practically step over the Strait of Gibraltar—at its narrowest point only eight miles wide. Even my father started getting phone calls: “Is Cindy in Africa?” These friends who did not have my alternative gmail address would call him to inquire and my sister claimed he was not the least concerned: “Well, I thought she was in Italy, but one never knows.”

I am trying to figure out which friends are the truest friends: Those who believe I am in Africa or those who read the message from my evil twin and knew right away that she was not I, either because they were already familiar with the scam or because they deduced from the voice of the message that the person writing could not possibly be me nor ethically could be me because I am not the sort to beg for even small sums of money, even from an ex-husband, even when desperate. Of course my closest friends had my gmail address and my phone number and wrote or called immediately to confirm, still there are gaps in communication always and I may never know how many now lost friends will persist through their lives believing I am starving, or even dead, in Africa.

For a moment, my truest friends seemed the very ones who do not know me, who simply heard my cry for help and did not even stop to think whether the message made sense or whether I was writing out of voice or character. Their generous response of wanting to send money regardless, wanting to ensure my well-being regardless of my state or whereabouts, seemed so genuinely loving that I fell into new philosophical quandary: Is it better to be loved or to be known? Or is the discrepancy entirely arbitrary? Isn’t love what helps us to be known and those souls so willing to save me from my erstwhile crisis in Africa possibly those who in the end truly know me, know at least what seeds of possibility lie not only within me but in the dark nights of all us who venture toward the edges of ourselves.

I suppose I should feel mostly rage over the violation: that some terrorist hacker has stolen my identity and perhaps the friendships of those whose only tether to my life was an address on my Yahoo contact list. I must say I am sad for the years’ worth of saved correspondence now lost in cyberspace; I doubt my evil twin has much use for old love letters. Even so, I woke up this morning deeply challenged in the right ways to recreate myself, as though the ablutions of the day before had been timely and meaningful, a sorting out of the chaff from the grain, the seeds from the lentils, a way of cleaning the slate and making fresh commitments. Shaman journeys come to mind: something about me is working for good in Africa. I step over some Strait of Gibraltar within myself and chase after her.

Winter Picnic

It seemed a fluke that the sun rose to our occasion. The text message had arrived from Michelle early in the week when leaden clouds hung desperately close to us, blocking out all hope of sudden rays or even warmth enough for brisk giri of the Rocca. She was going to put together one of her picnics for Saturday. Who said picnics could only happen when the fields were bristling wildflowers? Maybe we could drive up to the field at the top of Monteluco and spread out blankets and feast under a winter sky.

Umbrians call the last three days of January i giorni dei merli, Blackbird Days, days legend claims to be so cold that white doves turn black to just to hide from cold. And indeed, the way things have been going for most of us, I have kept in mind that these are traditionally the worst days of the year, the bleakest, the most isolated, the time when dogs like Sosso die, and friendships go crazy, and Seasonal Affective Disorder reaches peak, and vitamin D levels fall to make everyone cranky and miserable and not sure life is really worth living, after all, or if worth living, not the way one is currently living it—where and with whom, doing what seems suddenly not worth doing at all. Think of last January, I tried to reassure Michelle on the phone, all the things that went wrong, the people we were not speaking to. Remember the day just before the 1st of February—yes, one of i giorni dei merli—when I almost gave up on life here and moved back to the States. Yes, I told Michelle, it would be a fine thing to get together and even eat together, but why not at Ferretti by the huge open fireplace with the grill upon which the waiters toss the Umbrian sausages and porkchops and steaks to sizzle and pop right on the flames while they keep refilling our glasses with wine from Montefalco. I had no desire to be out in the cold. “We’ll talk on Saturday,” Michelle dismissed me, as though trusting the power of her intention—and the feast she would prepare—to sway the weather.

Saturday came around and it seemed disorienting: to wake up—late for me—at eight in my dark shuttered room and see just beyond the crack of the door a lemon yellow light that seemed unnatural as though something surreal were going on outside—something unname-able and too close to dreams to make sense, lemon water maybe, lemon jello, the world gone yellow from the birth of a new sun. I tip-toed into the hall, somewhat disbelieving, reticent, but sure enough it was only ordinary sunlight streaming in from an extraordinary sky so blue it did not belong to winter and certainly not to i giorni dei merli, not that Saturday was a bona fide giorno dei merli given it was only the 26th, three days short.

I am told it is a sure sign of insanity to believe one’s wishes can control the weather. That is what madmen do: wave their fists at the sky and demand Spring when it is Winter. Pink sky at night, sailors delight; pink sky at morning, sailor take warning—we must humble ourselves before the elements, beneath the neutral, uncaring sky. But how the day seemed made for us, as we spread out quilts and pillows in the field and began to unpack a feast that would put Babbette to shame: potato/farro soup with chili croutons; wild green salad; baked ricotto with black cabbage on a bed of rucola garnished with cherry tomato halves and pickles wrapped in procuitto. Prosecco fizzed in our fluted glasses, an orange and almond cake twinkled with honey and sugar garnishing…and the steady, caring light made us all feel gifted by a miracle.

Today is a bona fide giorno dei merli, and yet the sunshine and warmth persist like a promise, enough of a promise that Daniela and I did 12 giri della Rocca this morning, tirelessly, commenting over and over how much we needed this time, this clearing of the weather, this light, this joy, this evidence of another time and place and season beyond the winter we will surely endure.

A Taste for Trains

I almost convinced Daniela to take the train with me to Perugia this morning, but as usually happens when I almost convince her to do anything, she changed her mind. “What’s wrong with trains? Why won’t you ever take a train?” I insisted she think about it. “It’s the way they taste,” she explained, grimacing, making a tsking sound with her tongue as though her palette were suddenly producing the taste for her to spit at me. “I don’t know what it is, diesel fuel, iron…ecco…trains taste like iron. When I ride on a train, for the rest of the day my mouth tastes like train. I can’t stand it.”

I take the train from Spoleto to Perugia and then back again from Perugia to Spoleto at least twice a week, usually three or four times a week, and have been doing so for months and I can honestly say that they have never left a bad taste in my mouth, not even during a sciopero or strike, when I’ve had to readjust my entire schedule to board the only train-of-the-day serving commuters. Not even when the Eurostar sat on the track ninety minutes with all the commuters sealed up inside it, with me thinking it would suddenly buck into ferocious, lightening speed action…any minute now, any minute, the minute refusing to come. How delightful it was to text-message my boss that there was a “guasto nella linea elettronica” realizing I did not even quite know how to translated “guasto” into English…some kind of problem in the electric line that would keep me sealed in Carozza 9 for god knew how long intent on whatever thoughts I was thinking at the time and I assure you I was not thinking of the taste or even the smell of the train.

Not even when I once took a train from Ravenna through Bologna to Naples or thought I was taking a train from Bologna to Naples until I reached Florence and was told that I’d boarded the wrong train and was actually heading toward Milan but could get off in Florence and take another train to Naples and so wound up spending half a life time on the train, this time in First Class, because no other seats had been available, with a little pull-out tray holding the only thing I remember tasting-- an endless Dixie cup of espresso and little cookies shaped like crescent moons dipped in chocolate.

If I had a better head for arithmetic I’d start calculating how many hours of my life I’ve spent on trains and am sure I would come up with a staggering figure comparable to those arrived at when one discovers that humans spend a third of their lives sleeping. I am never bored on trains, never anxious for them to reach their destinations. There are days I read or grade papers or even pull out my laptop to write a letter or a story or stream ideas for a book; there are other days I press my head against the cool window glass and read over and over, a zillion times perhaps, “Non gettate alcun oggetto dal finestrino”—don’t throw things out the window—read the words as though they were haiku conveying something metaphysical. There are days I do watch the landscape, pretending the train is what’s stationary, all Umbria is flashing by, like celluloid, like what Keats must have meant when he said the world is “a vale of soul making.” It’s the vale that glides by, outside the window, making my soul—creating it!—while I sit idly on the idle train tasting nothing in my mouth but my own spit.

There are days I strike up conversations with random fellow-travelers, surprisingly rare days, given how much I travel and how many eyes I meet, rare enough that, when someone does break through the forcefield of my aura, he or she seems mysteriously important, a ghost from time past or time future, a guardian of thresholds, an angel bearing messages I will need for whatever turn my life is taking around the next bend, on the outside of the tunnel the train enters when all cell-reception is lost and the lights go dim and there you are with a stranger who is never really strange, no matter how foreign, his or her words hanging heavily in the air between us.

There are days I think I live in Italy simply so I can ride the trains and feel myself hurtling from here to there, houses, family, lovers, jobs, friends fleeting scenery in something wilder going on, my entire life suddenly a trajectory of train trips, AMTRAK from Georgia to Washington, Baltimore to New York, derailing for the tranatlantic crossing that will restore me to the carozza in which I find myself today, where it seems I have always been, stowing away for the adventure, the only stench I do recall that which comes from the toilet, but a mere gust of air will dispell it, if one opens the window.

The train is all its metaphors, is the phallus, eros, kundalini, is time and force and industry, is life itself hurtling through history, careening toward inevitable death. I much prefer being a part of the central nerve, fire in the lightning, than waiting on the platform, watching it whiz past. I know only exhileration and the wonder of hills, trees, stations platforms, familiar faces appearing for a moment in the fog and then receding. I find Daniela herself at the crossing where road meets track, sealed up in her jeep, the windshield wiper's whacking at the glass, heading where I'm headed but so alone in the getting there her propensity for road rage doesn't surprise me, nor do her sudden about-face u-turns toward the safety of home. I've offered her chewing gum, Mentos, sacchettini of salty travel snacks, but how naive I can be, offering antidotes when I don't know the poison, suggesting cure when I've yet to determine if there's any illness at all to be cured in either one of us.

The Benediction

She said she’d dreamed of horses all night long, huge horses, galloping through her head, staring at her with bulging, ogly eyes that were still staring at her as she spoke, making her head throb, a head-ache I could not imagine, mal di testa so ferocious she had vomited. Could I explain to her the horses in her head, why they had done this to her?

I was trying to grade papers on the morning train, desperate to grade papers that I needed to hand back to my students almost as soon as I arrived in Perugia. I was, furthermore, plugged into an iPod, tuning out the world, taking advantage of the uninterrupted time I count on while commuting an hour each morning, just enough time to grade a thin stack of papers or write the emails that must go out to insure my morning progresses in the clockwork way that makes me feel one with the operations of the universe, all my gears and cogs lined up, the flow streaming through me in a way that makes all life feel like dancing. Could she not see that I was busy and that perhaps a dozen others in this carozza were not busy ? Why ever would this stranger choose me to confide in—not only choose me, but sit directly across from me, her feet tangled in mine even though there were two other seats available, the one next to me or across from the empty one next to me she could have chosen , and certainly dozens more in this carozza alone, not to mention the perhaps 20 other carozze on this long commuter train from Rome to Perugia that is never overcrowded at such a late hour of morning?

She looked far too ordinary to have horses in her head and far too ordinary to be the kind of woman who would prey on strangers, seemed in fact a little prim in her pink cardigan and buttoned-up cotton shirt, wisps of bangs brushed carefully to one side and stylish bug-eyed glasses precisely the model that my friend Orieta wears, but one of the lenses spotted with something white that made me want to rub my own eyes or offer her a handkerchief to help her see a little better even if it seemed she saw just fine and sat unblinking behind those lenses looking into my face as though I were not at all strange to her but clearly the woman she knew could explain to her about the horses.

I was hopeless before her and before the stack of papers I soon realized I would never get done and felt a kind of tingle at the nape of my neck that always signals a divine appointment and the need to surrender to it. Could it possibly be, I suggested, that the headache came first and the headache felt like horses running through her head and so she’d dreamed of the horses? “Puo darsi!” she’d shrugged, a polite “could be” though I could see her seeing that I just didn’t get it.

Soon we were at the station in Assisi and she pointed out to me the gru (yes, even in Italy they name cranes after the birds) and how the gru was pulling up the train tracks to lay down new ones—work that had to be done now and then; Lord knows it had to be done and it was high time, though such a frightful enterprise; just imagine where our lives would be if someone slipped up. She crossed herself, then kissed the fingers that had been doing the crossing and sprinkled some kind of blessing through the window to the men operating the gru. The train pulled out.

I believe she was able to tell me her entire life story in the few minutes it took us to get to Punto San Giovanni, one stop before my own in Perugia. She was from Foligno and had never owned a car, but rode a bike everywhere except for places she needed to reach by train--even up and down the hills and mountains, she rode her bike. That explained why she didn’t look old enough to have four sons in their 50s, the one married to a Cuban, though he hadn’t followed her to Cuba when she’d tired of Italy—could I imagine anyone tiring of Italy? No, I told her, I could not imagine, nor did I think I ever could or would tire of Italy or even Umbria; I hoped to stay here forever, for all my life, but how did one know such things. “Oh,” she assured me, “you have the mark of one who will stay here.” She smiled and she nodded and looked at me intently as though indeed she could find my future in my eyes. As she gathered herself to get off at her stop, she kissed her finger tips as she had for the boys in the gru and sprinkled her blessing on me. The horses were gone, she assured me, they’d run off into the hills. She wished me “tante belle cose”—many beautiful things—and I thought what a lovely salutation.

As I stepped off the train in Perugia, Time had taken on an interesting shimmy: My bus was waiting for me, a friend was waiting for me with a free seat beside her, some one else offered me a rose and almost all my fellow passengers seemed to have twinkles in their eyes--secrets to share with me had only I the courage or stamina to confront them one by one, moving up and down the aisle, "What are you thinking right now?" Once at school, moments that had once seemed too short began to swell with a kind of magnitude that allowed me to grade three papers in the time it usually takes me to grade one, allowed me to grade all my papers, the last note in the margins of the last paper appearing in green ink at just the moment the first student stepped into the room. The moment kept opening for me: an email from a friend I thought long gone—fourteen years since I’d heard from her—arrived this very day after uttering to a friend—“I wonder what became of the woman Rebecca from Boulder?” I suddenly got a chill, considering how a kiss delivered to the ethers can change so many things.

Teodelapio, Duke of Spoleto

Tourists are hard-pressed to name it or identify what it is—the monster-creature that takes up the entire parking lot in front of the train station. Taxis, even buses, are said to drive under it, through its legs, for they are surely legs—at least that part of the anatomy is clear. “It’s a Calder,” one might offer off-handedly to the uninitiated and, depending on the newcomer’s orientation to art, delight, bewilderment, indifference might arise. Here? Calder? What’s Calder doing in Spoleto?

“Teodelapio,” as the sculpture is called, was commissioned by Alexander Calder for the annual Festival dei due Mondi in 1962—the largest of his “stabile” or land creatures, which he began constructing after working for 30 years on “air” sculpture or mobiles. This particular work is made entirely of iron, all 59 feet of him, all 30 tons; cranes had to be brought in from Genoa’s shipyards to erect him, at first at a strategic intersection in the town centro. Now Teodelapio is to Spoleto what the Griffin is to Perugia—is its emblem and trademark, the stamp on all sugar packets.

What a strange totem for a city to adopt! A “docile dinosaur” it is often called, because of the size and certainly the prehistoric name, Teo-having something to do with god and the --delapio something perhaps to do with legs, all forged together into something that, like the name, seems dinosauric. Here the pre-historic meets the ultra-modern in the angular, abstract way that senza dubbio suggests the eternal sixties, the Dolce Vita decade and Spoleto’s special place in it, when Menotti’s Festival, four years up and running, was in its world-inspiring hay-day, attracting everybody who was anybody, Pavorotti, promenades of suave Marcello Mastroianni look-alikes, glamour divas in their bouffants and bug-eyed sunglasses. One steps off a train from anywhere, walks through the station into the light of day and finds Teodelapio waiting. Forget the Romans, the Lombards and the Borgias; Spoleto is not as medieval as it seems, brandishing its cross and fortified Rocca way up on yonder hill. It’s a trend-setting modern town, in gamba. It’s home of the festival. Calder came here. Calder left his mark.

In the Museo di Arte Moderne on Piazza Collico there is an entire room devoted to Calder, several of the images framed on walls lampooning the train station sculpture, which—if one blinks twice, looks closely (and one should!) is actually an erect penis: what seems the animal haunches is indeed the testes; the giraffe-like head’s the proud phallus with its distinctive, albeit pointy, functional head. The caricatures always depict it spouting…a kind of central fountain, bacchanalian, the jouissance of a creativity gone wild, perfect muse for a town dedicated to the arts, even if in recent years things seem a little “petered out.” Teodelapio reminds us there’s always hope of a comeback.

After Le Feste

Today all the women of Spoleto are complaining about their livers. They do their daily rounds of the Rocca, hoping to walk off yet another zillion calories from yesterday’s Feast of the Epiphany, but no one’s feeling very peppy. The weather is partly to blame: the air is heavy, the sky grey; over toward Assisi a strange darkness prevails, could be rain, could be nebbia or fog, could be some atmospheric beast with an underbelly so dark it is dragging across the horizon and coming after us. “Did you feel una goccia di acqua—a rain drop?” The women don’t know what to wish for: They really should do six, seven, eight kilometers to make up for the giri they did not do yesterday, but how nice it would be to have an excuse to go home. "My liver is proprio crazy.” “Mine, too!” the women confide, clutching their sides, relishing the opportunity to complain and compare symptoms.

It has always amazed me, how in touch Italian women are with their inner-organs. They seem to know exactly where yesterday’s pranzo has wound up, stuck, fermenting, agitating or simply refusing to behave. They complain about the taste of gastric juices, making little tsking sounds with their tongues or sticking them out to prove they are coated. They probe around under their ribs, trying to jab a lazy gall-bladder into functioning, trying to massage up fresher bile. “That pizza I ate last night, non mi va…didn’t go well…is still right here,” a friend will point, as though I can see straight through her parka, her skin, her abdominal wall, to the exact spot in her intestine where the wad of bread and cheese is stubbornly sulking. And it is sulking, behaving like a recalcitrant child, defying every effort one has made to stay “leggera”—light, unencumbered by the internal heft of over-eating.

Italian women do not follow the same health fads that American women do. Theories concerning anti-oxidants or Vitamin A or fiber or eating vegetables everyday are intellectually interesting and certainly worth reading about in the magazines while waiting for the hairdresser or a train, but ideas about nutrition are not nearly as important as how one feels after eating. Most women are not convinced it’s important to take vitamins. Water makes the belly bloat and, besides, who wants to be running to the bathroom to pee all the time—they’re not convinced drinking all that water is necessary. What is crucial is a kind of inner-hum of efficient digestive functioning. Women drink aloe vera, believe in aloe vera, said to heal the digestive track and keep it slippery. Intestinal flora is also something that makes perfect sense to them. The dairy section of the grocery store is over-stocked with a variety of yogurt products, mostly drinkable in little vials guaranteeing a certain proficiency of pro-biotics. Little pictures of transparent torsos show the probiotics at work: Golden stars of vivaciousness move happily from throat to colon, guaranteeing regularity and a tingling inner-freshness and leggerezza. The women trust the picture—viscerally it makes sense.

They want to be thin and generally are thin. When one eats too much one day, one fasts the next—simple. One can drink tea, perhaps a little fruit juice, if desperate. But then, if the liver is really agitated, one can always resort to artichoke soup—curried artichoke soup, which is the perfect antidote for cantankerous livers. The artichokes contain a chemical called “cinerina”—which works as a diuretic and also stimulates the bile—and the curry also stirs up gastric juices. After le feste, even if one is careful, even if one eats small portions, the variety of foods will make the liver sluggish. A few days of artichokes may well be the answer. This is a known remedy—one can feel oneself deflate and the organs start to tingle.

I do not think I over-ate yesterday. My liver seems just fine, though I’d be hard pressed to know precisely where it is in my abdomen, nor would I know how to poke my gall-bladder. Lord knows, I could lose several pounds, but I haven’t eaten breakfast and after eight rounds of the Rocca, eight kilometers of talk about digestion, food, stomachs, livers, hunger, I am ready for pranzo, something, perhaps just a drink at the bar.

“Let’s go out to lunch today,” I suggest to Daniela as we near the end of our last lap. She thinks I am kidding, making a joke. Food? Food? Who can think of food after un giorno di festa? I suggest a Campari Soda instead and again she’s incredulous: “Like alcohol and sugar are any better for us!” It’s one thing to drink at a café when the sun is shining, we try to convince each other, but quite another thing to stop with all our dogs in the rain.

“Perche’ no?” I insist as we approach the few tables the barista leaves out during the winter season.

Suddenly her face is transfigured by an insight. She almost squeals, recalling that Cynar is a bitter aperitivo made from artichokes! We can drink Cynar! It does indeed stimulate the gastric juices. It might not hurt us after all…it may indeed cure us...to stop for a drink.

And of course the pistachios and potato chips and spicy rice-crackers Mira brings with our drinks do not count. They are cosini, “little things,” and can hardly be considered food.

Epiphany: Embracing the Befana

In U.S. religious practice, Epiphany is at best a Sunday sermon on the Wise Men. It was on the Epiphany (twelve days after Christ’s birth) that the Wise Men finally arrived with their gifts at the manger. Most sermons explore what this meant for the dissemination of Christianity in the world: Melchiorre, Baldassaree, Gaspare were of different races, hailing from different countries—they were the first non-Jews to know of Christ and take news of his presence into the great beyond. Who were these Magi? Theologians inquire. Were they really astrologers? Was there really a star? Was it a comet? Was it the rare conjunction of Mercury and Venus which happens every 480 years to light up the sky and can indeed be traced to 6 B.C., perhaps the time of the birth of Christ? Certainly there is enough intrigue in the brief Biblical verses devoted to the Wise Men to keep protestant preachers sermonizing year after year, but they are a little wary of pushing the astrology theme or letting the Wise Men upstage the little Christ child, lying there so meekly. Epiphany—as revelation of Christ—is certainly important, but by the time January 6th rolls around who needs more parties, more gifts to buy, more Christmas. Our superstition has it that Christmas decorations must be down and ordinary life restored by New Year’s Day. Epiphany warrants only a nod.

In Italy, however, decorations and holy observances persist through January 6th and, traditionally, the feast of Epiphany was the season’s grand finale, the day when children were showered with gifts—and not by the jolly fat Babbo Natale, or Santa Clause (who is in fact a recent “laughing servant of consumerism” imported from the states) but by the broken shoed, raggedy old-lady, Befana, the precursor of all stocking-stuffers, a witch-fairy scoping the heavens on her broom.

Legend links the Befana to the Wise Men. There are two versions concerning how she met them: one is that she ran into them by chance as they were following the star to find the Christ Child; the other is that the Wise Men stopped by her hut (while she was sweeping, hence the broom) to ask for directions. In either scenario, she was asked by the Wise Men to accompany them, but refused, only to have second thoughts and take off after them. She never found them, nor the Christ child either. That's why, on the anniversary of the Wise Men's visit, she scours the heavens, giving away the gifts she would have given the baby Jesus to all the children in her path (save, it would seem, the American children who are already back in school and doing homework when she passes).

The Befana certainly pre-dates Santa Clause, and is considered one of the earliest “pedagogical figures,” rewarding good children with stockings full of sweets and toys, punishing disobedient children with lumps of coal and onions. Her actual origins are unknown though the name “Befana” comes from the Greek word for epiphany, “Beffania,” and she has certainly been a vivid presence at this most popular of Italian feasts since early in the 13th century. She also does double-duty in serving as a kind of female “father time”—the old year leaves with her as she scatters gifts in her wake.

I have also read that the Befana represents the passing of the pagan era into the Christian:
The pagan goddess has grown old, withered, is passing on…but leaving gifts behind for those of the new Christian faith. Another version of the “witch” harks back to certain rites by Celtics who peopled the Pianura Padana and parts of the Alps. They would fashion wicker puppets of her and set them on fire to celebrate not only the end of the year—but all ends and new beginnings.
I rather prefer the idea of keeping the goddess alive, even if she's a bit withered. She's mindful of new seasons of religious thought, yet waiting in the wings to surprise us with her presence and whimsical gifts.

Even though Italian children, like American, now expect toys from Babbo Natale on Christmas Eve, the Befana has not deserted them. In Spoleto, stores are teeming with burlap stocking-packages of various sizes and value, each stuffed with candies and trinkets, each adorned with some kind of witch doll—stuffed, plastic, ornamental—riding her broom. Twelfth night, the eve of Epiphany, is a wild bazaar of open markets, carnivals, and women dressed up as witches tossing candy into crowds. In Perugia, there’s a carousel and a ferris wheel. The Befana walks on stilts with a huge over-sized plastic head replete with tell-tale hooked nose, reaching into her enormous burlap bag to shower Corso Vanucci with candy. Children squeal when they see her, both delighted and afraid. They go to sleep praying she will not bring them coal (and yet she does—a popular candy of the season is blackened rock candy, looks just like coal). Christmas lights still twinkle from the strings suspended across the streets. While Christmas Eve was holy, truly a reverent vigil, the celebration of Epiphany is about magic, fun, goodies, gifts…and giddiness.

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.