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.