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.