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.