Manifesting Miracles

Yesterday after a Reiki session with Milena, full of my usual Thursday afternoon health resolves but unusually exhausted, I stopped by the COOP for the lemons I use for my relentless tall glasses of stevia-sweetened lemonade. On my way to the check-out, I passed a freezer that someone had moved from a hidden corner of the supermarket to a prominent, far too visible place by the check-out aisles. Instantly a vision of Magnum Bars and a hankering for one rose before me. It was the six-pack of the Mocha Magnum Mini that made me swoon. Six Magnum Mini’s, each of the six the mere size of my thumb, but filled with a distinct variety of coffee gelato, ranging from espresso to cappucino to cafe corretto, I think with rum as well as coffee in the coffee. How readily I could use my incessant bike-riding as excuse to load up on carbs, until I remembered that the forecast for the weekend is rain. How readily I could imagine cancelling dinner at Canasta with Alberto, Pranzo at Tric Trac with Milena for the sake of a wild orgy of Magnum Mini indulgence. I did not kid myself believing I had the power to eat just one. I knew they would become mere bon bons, some of them disappearing before I made it up the hill towards home. It’s here where I acknowledged the perniciousness of my cravings and discovered within myself a merciful forebearance.

I really did not think about Magnum Bars as I went about the rest of my evening errands. I stopped by Boba Wash to pick up the dog treats the puppies like for their obedience training and got lost in gossipy conversation with Anna Lisa. I stopped by the TIM store and faced the desperate frustration of learning that their computers were down and I would not—yet again (this had likewise happened the day before)--be able to pay the fee for my internet service. I ran into Fiorella with her ancient mother who had just had aperitivi with Paolo and Iolida and I had to explain to her what Reiki is and why sometimes going to Reiki fills me up with energy and other times, like right then, it empties me out so that I cannot even make it up the hill and so need to take the bus. Then when I got on the bus, guiltfully, admonishing myself for the money spent and the conditioning foregone, round about the second stop, a man some people call my spassamante —a term that has no real English equivalent but is essentially someone who loves from afar, while “a spasso”—out and about—got on the bus and a took a seat behind me. I made due note of how civil and un-predatory Domenico had become in recent years after a peroid of relentless phonecalls and harrassment. Now he was gentle as a priest with me, patting my cheek, nodding buongiorno or buona sera, then slipping back into whatever thoughts he’d brought onto the bus before he’d seen me and taking a seat some distance away.

There was something for me to learn from him in the control he’d attained over his strange passions, I thought, riding up the hill. He’d worked for years in the San Eufemio Medieval library on ancient texts, a position I found extremely curious because his expertise was so venerated by the Church that he was brought to Spoleto weekly to tend the San Eufemio collection despite the fact that he was some kind of criminal with a life-sentence at Capanna prison. A jolly, moustachioed prison warden would accompany him via train routinely, without handcuffs or shackles, and I would find the two men having a cappucino together mornings as I was headed the other way, to teach in Perugia. Always Domenico would ask could he buy me a coffee and cornetto; always I would refuse but thank him for the gesture. Always I would think back to my own days of prison teaching and how unlikely it would be to find a warden and a prisoner having breakfast together or find a prisoner a spasso or if a spasso without handcuffs or shackles. I was deeply curious about Domenico and his crime and slippery sentence, but no amount of gossip ever clarified things for me, and Domenico himself mentioned only that he was from Sicily, his family was in Sicily. It would be wrong to assume Mafia, especially of a man so delicate, whose chief joy in life is pointing out to others that the chiocciola or @ sign we assume was spawned by email, is ever present in 15th century texts here, here and here. Guarda!

“Be careful with Domenico,” my friend Cally had warned me. She’d been pursued by him and didn’t think it prejudice that made her wary. She’d had coffee with him often back when she lived in Spoleto and would stop by the library from time to time, but there had been true evidence of a kind of imbalance that made her believe he must be in prison for some kind of crime of passion. I couldn’t be quite sure if Cally’s warning had prejudiced me against him the day I took my daughter to the library and suddenly discovered all exit doors locked. He’d given Margaret a lovely a gift: a guide book to Spoleto. He’d given me a gift, too, a narrative in Italian about an Italian man who falls in love with an American tourist who comes to Spoleto for the festival. “I need to go,” I’d insisted to Domenico. “Why are all the doors locked? I need to go.” There seemed a sinister delight in him over seeing me squirm that disturbed me. For a small eternity I feared for my life as he pretended he couldn’t find his keys. Later Cally would nod that Domenico had given her the same book and the same fright. “Be careful,” she’d insisted.

And yet, I really hadn’t needed to be, I was beginning to realize. In recent months he seemed even a free citizen and, in his freedom, self-assured, calm, courteous and endearing, with his tidy gray goatee and kind eyes twinkling behind John Lennon reading glasses, every bit the gentleman and the scholar. I loved that he and I had weathered something odd and alarming, yet had arrived at this place of tender, deferential friendship. Life is good, I kept thinking on the way up the hill. Our worst fears are usually so unnecessary.

No sooner had I thought these thought than Domenico called my name. “Cinzia,” I heard from the back of the bus and turned around. He was sitting there politely, eating an ice-cream, a kind of gym bag across his knees. When I turned, he reached into the bag and produced a Magnum Bar and offered it to me. For a split second, I refused it, arguing that I don’t eat sugar, need to watch my weight. He looked at me impatiently. “Cinzia, take it, it’s melting…I can’t eat it. It’s for you.” I suddenly got chills as I recognized it was precisely the Magnum Bar I’d been drooling over at the supermarket, the coffee mocha kind, but the full-scale variety, not the Mini, offered so graciously. Domenico’s eyes sparkled behind the thick lenses of his glasses as though he knew he were ushering me into the supernatural. The silver wrapper of the Magnum Bar shone iconically. It felt like such a tremendous gift--the universe offering me my heart's desire, assuring me of endless possibility. I’m not sure why. And I'm not sure why if felt so right that Domenico was the one to deliver what I have to call a kind of promise. I can’t explain any of it though it all makes wonderful sense.

New Moon Eclipse

A new moon eclipse carries the punch of I don’t know how many new moons. It is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, a time to wish upon a star, pull out the spiral note book, hop on the bike and ride out to the Fonti di Clitunno to cast intentions. It’s a time to look around oneself and take stock: What is right here in my new moon moment that is pulsing with promise, incipient with happening, trying to burst into being, destiny lying in wait?

First joy of my new moon is Marisa leaning out the kitchen window, Marisa standing at the window to greet me and the dogs as we leave the house at six, standing there on a brand new hip, just created for her on Monday. Marvel of marvels she is already walking around on it, making the coffee at six, responding to the squeal of eager Evangelina as she races manically to the gate, tugging ZuZu tumbling along with her, given they are yoked together with the coupler hooked to the leash buckled around my waist. “What happened to rehab?” I call out to her and she shrugs, claiming she does better rehab on herself moving among the things she loves, entrusting her body to well-established routines. Staying in good spirits is everything when trying to heal.

Second joy of my new moon is Daniela appearing in Piazza Campello at the same moment I appear, the Grace of a private moment before others arrive, all our dogs facendo la festa (making a party) rather than barking as they once did, evidence that Dog Obedience is still paying off even if we skipped our lesson yesterday because of the heat and Giulia visiting from Naples. How wondrous the dogs no longer tira or snap at each other and seem instead to love keeping step with each other, the walking calibrated so finally Daniela and I can stay shoulder to shoulder if not arm-in-arm without even one of our seven fuzzy darlings underfoot, Sesamo only mildly curious about Desiree’s culo (she’s in heat); Zuzu nipping only Usque once; not one hysterical barking conniption, even when Giulia joins us with her three smooth-haired dachshunds, la piccola only four months old and adored by Irma who hands me back Desiree’s leash so she can give la piccola coccole (little cuddles). Ten dogs doing giri della Rocca with four women, their hearts a-swell. “It is time for a new family portrait,” Daniela reminds me. “Tomorrow after I put Giulia on the train, bring the good camera, ask that man you know who takes such good photos to capture us—let’s fix the moment, make an icon of it, hold onto this as the surest thing we know, her new moon being in the 6th house of relationships, mine being in the 12th house of spirit, intuition, mystery.

After three hours of walking, I return home to find Marisa outside in the garden pruning the geraniums, a chair set up on the front porch with a pillow in it should she need to sit down, but after all that time in a bed in a hospital, who needs to sit, especially with the garden begging for love and her attention. Why go to a rehab facility when she can be in her garden and get someone to come to the house and make sure she’s moving her parts right? Of course she’s moving her parts right, just look at her—moving! Now she’s eager to teach me all she knows about geraniums, which parts to pinch off so the plant won’t lose its limf…and I think how much I love the word limf in Italian, a word I first read and couldn’t translate in the theological writings of the Hermit of Monteluco when speaking of the stuff of spirit that gets passed on from soul to soul, as we love each other, and as we move from being to being throughout our incarnations. How crucial it is, to keep watch over the limf, to make sure it is not squandered or damaged or misdirected. Do Americans even think of limf? I don’t think it’s quite the same as chi or prana, but maybe close. Something tells me limf is thicker, like the shimmering sap I see in the place where Marisa has pinched off a stem, a kind of silver blood that runs through all of us, sustains us—limf. My new moon, my new chapter, is all about limf, I make up my mind as I make my way up the stairs to the house I’m ready to put in order, but only after I have pruned the geraniums and, while pruning them, the tomatoes and anything else whose limf needs my attention.

Taking care of the limf, I realize, has something to do with moving slowly, offering Reiki to the dogs as I groom them, practicing our new Dog Obedience trick: Terra. It takes infinite patience to hold a dog with your eyes for a full half hour of “terra”—“Terra” being “on the ground”, the dog lying on its belly, its head on its paws. My new moon is about the kind of discipline required to hold a dog, and then another dog, and then another dog in my gaze, each for a half-hour so that the discipline is not so much a matter of teaching them how to behave but more the discipline of meditation that slows my own limf down to pure communion with the animal who stops time with me in this way.

How grateful I am that my new moon eclipse issues a beginning like silver limf from this particular moment, this love, this joy. this tender unharriedness. I do entrust myself to all the well-being I am fortunate enough to know on this day and vow to the eclipsing moon that I will help carry the goodness forward.

Remake me!

I have a dress that I spent far too much money on ten years ago that I have not been able to throw away. I wore it once—to Margaret’s high school graduation. Margaret is now 28 and mother of my grandson, Finn. The dress has traveled from Georgia to Italy, from Italy to Georgia, from Georgia to Italy, I don’t know how many times. When I bought it, it almost fit but was tight in certain places. I’d assumed I would lose the weight and wear it all the time to church back when I lived in Georgia and went to a church that required dresses. But instead I had gained weight and moved to Italy where people go to church in jeans. Then a few years ago, I lost weight and remembered the dress, but now it was too big. I thought then to throw out the dress with all the other clothes that were too big as a kind of Feng Shui manuever a friend insisted was crucial: If you hang onto anything too big for you, you are simply inviting your body to get fat again. Only keep clothes around that you want to fit into and wear. Only keep clothes around that define you. I loved this philosophy, and yet I could not throw out the dress.

This might have made some sense if I were the kind of woman who wears dresses, but I rarely wear dresses, and certainly have no use for one that gapes in the bust and hangs down to my ankles. I don’t like sleevelessness either because of my old-lady flabby arms and this dress, what my mother would call a summer “shell”, is lined with silk and therefore too hot, really, for summer wear. Why ever would I need to hang onto it?

Milena, my Reiki coach, told me to trust the dress, to follow the dress. Maybe the colors were calling me. Maybe my soul needed those particular shades of gold and green-- autumn colors. She could feel in my aura a need for autumn colors; I wore green a lot, she had noticed…maybe it was the gold or the particular blend of gold with the specific vibration of green. Or maybe the fantasia of vines and leaves, inviting new growth in me. Or maybe the dress did not truly belong to me, but had entrusted itself to my safe-keeping so I could pass it on to someone else, one of my daughter's perhaps, even Margaret herself, for whom I had in fact bought it, if indirectly, given I had worn it only to her graduation. Or maybe I was destined to put it in a Goodwill bin the year, the month, the day, the moment that some unknown someone was seeking just such a dress and would recognize mine as the one she'd been seeking for who knew what occasion. Puo darsi, I thought, somewhat skeptically, but also somewhat credulously because I did once have a dress I bought on impulse, then lost, then found again, that became a crucial aspect of a romance and a symbol in a novel I wrote: the dress that attracts the right suitor, the dress that changes one’s destiny.

The other day, I was doing Giri della Rocca with Zia Paola and her friend Orieta, the town Sarto, or tailor. Paola remarked that she had gotten Orieta to make her two “tubini”—or tube dresses—for the opera season, one in white, one in tourquoise. She has Orieta make all her clothes because that way Paola can invent precisely the look she wants and also rest-assured that the clothes will be the right color and fit her perfectly. “She can make anything, Orieta. Just come up with a vision and “poof!” it’s like the Fairy Godmother in Cenerontola (Cinderella)—she will turn your rags into elegant garments with the wave of her magic wand! She will turn the pumpkin into a coach and the orphan into a beloved princess."

For some reason I thought of the ten year old dress in my closet. I told the gaggle of women walking with me the story of my having held onto it. I’m sure it was out of style and not worth saving. Plus had they ever seen me in a dress? Would I even wear it if it fit right and were shortened? I am not the kind of woman to wear dresses. “Ah,” Orieta, looked at me, her eyebrows raised, her eyes themselves spalancata as she tried to appraise something in me. “Sounds to me like the dress is begging to be worn! Stop by my place this afternoon. We’ll inquire of the dress what it wants!”

I had never been to Orieta’s before, nor to a sarto before. In the grandiose palazzo, halfway up the marble staircase, a gargantuan bronze statue of Apollo stood, his lamp lifted though it was not lit and did not need to be lit in the middle of the afternoon. He seemed to stare down at me; he seemed to note my passing as though he knew, on my return down, I would be changed somehow, be someone else. I was overcome by a feeling that something marvelous was happening.

When I’d arrived, Orieta ushered me into her glorious tailor’s room…the huge expanse of cutting table covered with patterns and pins; the shelves festooning bolts of fabric; the credenze heaped with notions and ribbons and lace and bottons flashing up their colors from tiers of clear plastic drawers and boxes. On the walls, portraits of brides in wedding gowns she had made, of Opera gowns and costumes. However had I come to land in this mythic place of costumery, creativity, invention?

It was actually quite magical what she did with mere pins. I stood before her three-way mirror, at first naked (well in panties and bra), then in the dress that didn’t seem to belong to me, be right for me, the way the bodice gaped and sagged and the skirt hung around my ankles. But within minutes, using only the pins, the darts of the bodice fit my breasts, the shoulders aligned where they should across my collar bone, the length struck just right, above my knees.

What was odd is that it didn’t quite seem that she had made the dress fit me so much as she had made me fit the dress. I did a double-take--who is that woman? I looked at myself as though meeting myself for the first time. I never knew I looked like this, I think I may have even said to her. Orieta’s eyes met mine in the mirror—wise, pulsing slightly with insight and knowing.

“You’re ready,” she said as though we were embarking on some kind of quest together. “I think this is the first of many magic mantles I will make for you!”

Signs of Arrival

When Daniela and I are ecstatic, we see fiocchi: those quite ordinary ribbons that people tack to a door or mailbox after a baby is born, or use to decorate gift-packages or get-away cars for newlyweds, the kind with as many loops and flourishes and frizzy tassles as possible. We are usually driving along in her car, usually newly reconciled after some minor or major difficulty, and suddenly the ribbons will start concatenating around us like paper fireworks. “Guarda, Cinzia, i fiocchi!” she will call out in utter wonder. It’s not simply a matter of our passing a mailbox and seeing a single pink ribbon-blossom hanging from a post. Our fiocchi announce themselves in excess, in garlands, in impossibile hyperbole. How do we account for an entire clothes-line of fiocchi the size of cabbages? A single “just married” car makes sense, passing us, trailing streams of white fiocchi, but how account for five such cars during a half hour drive from La Bruna to Spoleto? Five weddings, five couples making their honeymoon escape within moments of each other. “Guarda Cinzia, i fiocchi,” Daniela calls out to me, but doesn’t have to call out. I see them, too. I recognize them, too. I feel them blooming inside me, too, as surely as we see them happening beyond us. They somehow belong to our shared emotional life and moments of sudden arrival.

My friend Milena told me her sign was a pumpkin. She wanted some evidence that her sense of the ephemera she thinks are signs comes from a governing and responsive intelligence and are not flukes, simply random. If you are there God or Goddess, send me a pumpkin,” she’d asked and then had let go and gone about her day working at the Centro di Benessere. About half way through the morning, a client came in, and wanted to show her a new product said to be good for the skin. She held the magazine in her hand and already Milena felt that tingle tingle shift in energy, alerting her to the presence of the supernatural. The woman opened the magazine and—BOOM—a full color page of a pumpkin; the product’s chief ingredient was pumpkin. But as if that had not been answer enough, proof enough, she had found herself that very afternoon driving through a field with her husband. Plants she did not recognize filled the landscape. She knew it couldn’t be tobacco. “Honey…what is that world of green?” The plants seemed to go on forever…”Pumpkins,” he told her. Pumpkins.

These mystic flashes happen all the time, everywhere, to everyone, but most of the time we either bat them away like ordinary gnats, fastidious creatures of peripheral vision. Or if we see them and feel the blossoming of light in our hearts that such signs deliver, how soon we talk ourselves out of believing. What can such echoes and signs mean anyway? Am I to base my faith, my love, my work on such ephemera as fiocchi and pumpkins?

Of course I am and I do! Signs are not linguistic tricks or literary conventions, but living pulses from another dimension that fill our souls with light and helium, give us lift. I used to think of such moments as rendings of the veil between this world and the other, and the metaphor does to some extent hold true. But it seems that when one’s heart is full, one’s cup runneth over, so to say, the fullness is so seamless, the wholeness so complete, there’s no room for rending anything, no room for separateness or brokenness of any kind—only joy and only love, only awe. Can I believe in such a place, can I stake out residence here? How believe in anything else?

Ah, Sweet Madness!

Every morning when I walk the dogs home from morning giri della Rocca, I encounter a man miming a formal lecture. His only visible audience is the landscape across the Viale Matteotti, a street also known in Spoleto as “La Passaggiata” or “place of the evening stroll” because of its tree-lined shadiness, and infinite views. One side of the street, the side I live on, invites passersby to sit and rest and look—thanks to a series of confortable green slat benches that face out toward the view across the street. The view is hardly disrupted by the underground parking lot marked by a huge polyhedron that discretely points out where the elevators leading to the under world are situated. Rather than pave paradise for a parking lot, here they have covered up a parking world with a veneer of paradise that gradually fades into the true paradise of lush hills and valleys adorned with peach and yellow-colored villas. Mostly elderly people with their badanti or care-givers stake out places on these benches, sometimes for entire mornings. I often find myself sitting on the bench outside my house waiting for Iolida or Daniela to pick me up for an outing. The man I encounter every morning on the bench not far from mine is neither old nor waiting, nor does he seem the least bit derelict. I am convinced he is full possession of his faculties and speaks to someone the rest of us can’t see.

He’s a handsome man: bright intelligent eyes, fit, well-groomed, hovering around sixty I’d say, already gray, crisp shirt, creased trousers, clean socks, good leather shoes. Looking directly at him without consideration of his context, he does indeed look like a professor, well-trained in elocution, delivering a speech, maintaining proper poise and eye-contact, his gestures neither too exaggerated nor too restrained, certainly grandiloquent in the Italian sense, and lively with ecstactic dips and sweepings, but controlled, artful, clearly orchestrated by the music of his speech, every syllable enunciated with articulate care, though silently. I find this man at his perch, daily, Monday through Saturday, giving his lecture to apparently no one…lost in his lecture, adament, spittal frothing at the corners of his mouth, that is until I somehow make myself known in his peripheral vision. It’s at this juncture I know he must be sane: the fact that he stops when he sees me, cuts the performance short to gather his wits about him so that he can greet me. He is utter politeness and charm: “Buongiorno, Signora…and how are our little dogs today.” Further proof of his sanity: the dogs adore him.

I talk to myself, I know I do, because my children tell me I do, especially Lucy tells me I do…and they tell me further that I look ridiculous, as though I am carrying on a conversation with someone actually there, punctuating sentences with sudden hand-gestures. I am utterly unconscious of being so flagrantly demonstrative when I talk to myself and a little bit embarrassed that people have caught me in the midst of such antics. And to be sure, I never do talk to myself, but talk to sundry people on my path, perhaps the friend I plan to see at lunchtime, perhaps a lost lover or my dead mother…or even the shrink I have not seen in twenty-years or to my Muse who has a human (secret) counterpart. I rehearse how to best tell the day’s stories…or explain a conundrum or justify bizarre behavior or merely name the things I long to have happen in my life, as though in naming them, I create fresh possibilities. Please tell me everyone does this: holds conversations with their inner guides, even half-consciously, not quite aware that the conversation is taking place as one makes one's way from home to the bus stop or waits for a train. I believe in such conversations. I believe that, without them, our souls freeze over and lose sense of how to navigate the world’s often arid terrain.

I love the fact that the interior monologue of the man I encounter on his bench has attained such formal eloquence. I love that the ghosts who listen to him, whoever they may be, fill up such a glorious landscape. I imagine he must see a multitude of faces, a Lincoln Center worth of people dead and alive who sit there day after day, a captive audience, yet somehow also free as only these hills make one feel free, listening to the sagacity he must be uttering, each thought coined with a scholar’s deliberation. I know the difference between a drunk, a bufoon and a wiseman. The man I encounter is undeniably wise.

I met this man this morning, out of context. He was standing by the fountain in the Piazza del Mercato, filling his water bottle as might have been any passing tourist. He recognized me as I slipped past him with the dogs, though I had to do a double-take to recognize him. The look we exchanged ran deeper than mere acquaintainceship. I felt a kind of embarrassment rising in me, as though I’d accidentally caught him naked somewhere, or caught him in a lie—our complicitly declared through unsuppressible blushing.

Acceptance

Visiting hours at the Spoleto hospital make no sense and therefore no one really observes them. Who is going to visit anyone during the single window of the pranzo hour in a country where people eat only during meals and the first meal worth eating happens promptly at 1:30, without deviation? Who in his or her right mind would forgo food to dash out to the hospital and fight the crowds swelling behind the locked ward door that may or may not open promptly at one, given the whims of the nurse in charge? And then there’s the rule of one guest at a time in the room of the infirm who must share a room with someone else and that soul’s guest. Why fight the crowd of bona fide family to visit the friend who has been lying wide eyed all night and all morning waiting for that one hour of random company, the fluke person who makes it through the turnstyle past Nurse Ratchett’s watchful eye?

Irma tells me we will visit Marisa at eleven before I know there’s even such thing as visiting hours that we are violating. In the States such hours are almost obsolete. I have spent enough time in hospitals with aging parents to know Nurse Ratchett doesn’t watch nor does she probably exist given the epidemic wiping out nurses in American Hospitals. We will meet in the shade of the loggia a few minutes before 11 and then go visit Marisa together, Irma assures me, Irma who must know what she’s doing given her medical training (nurse or doctor, I’m not sure) and her having been appointed by the family to be Marisa’s “assistente.” I trust Irma knows what she’s doing and trust that I will have a chance to sit for a good long while with Marisa so we can work out what I can do in her absence for the cats, for the garden, for whatever needs care during the weeks that she will be away in a rehabilitation center in Caccia learning how to walk with her new hip.

Whatever one believes or believes about belief, there’s no doubt that when two people discover that they believe the same thing it’s like the stroke of a tuning fork that aligns disharmonic tones to turn them into music. On the long walk down the loggia, Irma and I bond first in our belief about animals and how we should go about feeding them (we will share responsibility for Marisa’s cats) and then in our belief about Timing and how things work out, even amid tragedy, to bring the right souls together. I tell Irma that, the day before Marisa fell, I had told her about Iolida and the upcoming surgery to remove a mysterious tumor. Deeply saddened by this news, Marisa had shook her head proclaiming: “It’s happening everywhere, an epidemic—out of the blue, people being struck down. You never know when you will be struck down, your life pulled out from under you, everything changed.” Marisa had said this and then, the very next day, it had been Marisa to get struck down. Now oddly, ironically, Marisa and Iolida are both facing surgery in the same hospital, on almost the same day. “Pensa!” Irma says and I feel that kind of ironic wonder for which there is not an equivalent English expression.

The ward doors are indeed locked when we reach the orthopedic wing, and sundry people are lined up on benches in the hallway, waiting. Irma, who believes her status as “assistente” might gain us entrance, pushes the botton on the citafone to announce our presence and desires; a gruff responding voice asks us, Can’t we read, haven’t we seen the notice posted to the door that states plainly that the visiting hour is between one and two? Irma shrugs. I stake out a place to wait and start playing Scrabble on my iPhone with my children across the Atlantic. I don’t know why every word we play in the game seems leaden with meaning. The word my son in California has played is “Dolt.” I’m sure he’s somehow in cahoots with the situation and is talking about the man whose voice I just heard on the citafone telling us to wait. It seems remarkable to me that the word I find to play back at him is: "Agent".

I am sure I am naive to trust Time the way I do—naive, and tired enough of the work of translating to enjoy any compulsory-seeming reprieve. All the anxious waiting faces lined up against the far wall, turning as though synchronized with every creak of the door, meeting my gaze from time to time with a knowing that seems deeper than understanding, seem suspended here with me to do unseen work as private and silent as prayer. “Permesso,” Irma says to me the next time the door creaks open. Somehow she manages to disappear behind it and for some reason I feel a sudden flutter of panic as though I could be stuck here indefinitely, unable to either move forward or retreat and go home, locked in place with these others in some kind existentialist non-drama of doing nothing.

It happens so quickly when Irma returns, telling me to hide the flowering plant in my tote bag, telling me to scurry lest Nurse Ratchet see me. Marisa is beautiful, there in the bed in her silk gown, her face even radiant despite the pain she must surely be in…her eyes beaming the joy of our friendship and instant forgiveness for how I have failed her. I have not, however, arrived undetected. “The nurse says you have to leave, we have to leave,” Irma laments, apologizing as though her efforts in trespassing had been an abject failure. Marisa squeezes my hand, and beams something into me that takes my soul to a new place. It’s okay, she says. The time we’ve had is enough.

After the Fall

I was pumping up the hill after a lovely evening ride to the Fonti di Clitunno when my iPhone started bleating in my fanny pack. I don’t know why I even thought to brake to answer it. I even caught myself thinking as I screeched: Why are you stopping to answer this? You are almost home. You never answer your phone. You have a reputation for being one of those people who never answer their phones but also have a reputation for being one to call back at your own convenience. Answering the phone when pumping up the Viale dei Martiri della Resistanza (Street of the Martyrs of the Resistance---don’t you just love Italian street names?) is not a convenient time to answer. And yet I answered and knew, when I finally identified Irma’s voice, that something was wrong.

This alarm over there being something wrong came in the midst of feeling everything was right with the world--and possible. I’d just discovered yet another irresistable biking incentive-- the 1 euro aperitivo plate, all you can eat —an entire dinner’s worth of stuzzichini: little ham and cheese sandwiches, slices of eggplant and zucchini, a smorgasboard of cheeses, pickles tinier than my toes, sauces made of truffles and radicchio and other colorful things I could not identify for dipping toasted strips of bread. Can you think of a better way to spend a summer evening? Body humming after a rigorous bike ride, a cold Beck’s frothing in a mug and a plate filled with a meal’s worth of stuzzichini that costs only one euro, the cyprus shade, the evening breeze, the swans gliding by on the ink black water of the spring that inspired Carducci’s famous poem. I’d sat there almost an hour obeying Milena’s instructions that I sit there and work on my list of intentions. What did I want to create for myself? What kind of new love did I want to manifest? What kind of stories or projects? What kind of money? What kind of car? What kind of house? She had asked me to do this during my afternoon Reiki treatment when I’d confided in her that I really found it hard to believe in the more mystical dimension of intention casting. Goal-setting, naming what you want and going after it, okay. But saying to the universe: Put $10,000 in my account by August 1st and trusting the money to appear? Well, that’s where my credulity began to balk…as it also balks before believing a certain someone will come back to me.

But I’d made a glorious evening out of casting my intentions on paper while sitting before the inky mirror of the Fonti di Clitunno, Carducci singing almost audibly in my ear. I did believe that I had invited something good into my life by virtue of having simply alligned myself with such Beauty.

At first I thought Irma’s voice over my phone was Sofia’s, because never, ever in my life has Irma called me. “Do you know who this is, Cinzia?” She challenged me, and I even almost said "Sofia", which would have been a terrible offense. But the minute Irma said "Irma" I knew she had to be calling about my landlady, her cousin, Marisa. Suddenly I recalled that Marisa had been mysteriously absent from my day. I’d stopped by her kitchen window three times to pay rent, surprised to see the green shutters closed when it’s her rite to open them first thing in the morning. One of the cars was missing from the garage so I’d assumed she had gone on a trip, even though she usually tells me when she’s going on trips or going anywhere that will take her away from the house for more than a few hours.

The horror is that Marisa had been in the hospital for more than 24 hours without my even knowing it. She had fallen the night before while working in the garden and had broken her hip. “She kept calling you, Cinzia.,” Irma chastised me in accusatory tones. “She kept calling out to you and yet you didn’t come. She lay in the driveway for half an hour just below your open bedroom window, calling you. Where were you?”

I never do not hear when Marisa calls. We daily greet each other through our open windows—I passing her kitchen window during my comings and goings, she calling up to my bedroom window, when there’s mail for me or fresh cherries from the trees. I always hear Marisa. I always answer. I’m always here. For how many years has she told me, has Irma herself told me: We are so glad you are there, should anything happen. So please explain to me why, on the one night something did happen, on the night that she really needed me to hear her, to answer, to come post haste to help her, I who never watch TV, was watching of all things a Greta Garbo movie and heard nothing. Whatever possessed me to watch a Greta Garbo movie, this Wednesday night that would be the night of Marisa’s fall, her feeble voice calling out to me, and my hearing nothing? It breaks my heart to imagine it.

I dare not make too much of my inattention and negligence. I dare not make too much of the fact that just last week Daniela fell on the Giro dei Condotti and broke her nose, bruised up her face, or my friend Ann’s son tripped over the baby gate and dropped the baby, hurt the baby. Falls happen. Gravity is still a force to be reckoned with. I float around on my lofty visions of how I’d rather things be, willing the future to bend to my often misguided and certainly limited understanding. And while I make my lists, telling the universe what I want it to provide, the universe talks back, telling me things that I don’t want to hear, telling me most of all to turn down the noise of my incessant wanting so I can listen, simply listen.

Leaping Lizards

I’ve gotten to the part in San Giuseppe where the animals start behaving in ways I don’t want to believe. There is a sparrow that has been sent to teach the nuns how to behave. It flies in the window during Matins and Vespers before the nuns can get situated in the choir. Miraculously it knows what page in the psalter they are singing from before they do and chirps out the tune so they will sing at the right pitch. If one of the nuns is inattentive, the sparrow pecks at her. If two of the nuns get in an argument, the sparrow comes between them and flaps its wings like mad and even claws at them until they are subdued. The story reads like a Hitchcock inspired version of “Snow White.” When the nunnery goes haywire, send in the Birds.

I’d written awhile back to Rosellen and Michael that, working so intimately on the translation day after day, I’d begun to identify with San Giuseppe. I wrote this the day before I got to the chapter about his hair shirt and the chain he wore clenched around his loins and kidneys and the cord with bent needles he’d whip himself with to tear off his skin. I’d written this without thinking that perhaps I’d given the impression that I’d begun to think myself destined for martyrdom and sainthood, but of course my tastes and longings do not run the way of martyrdom, self-flagellation or sainthood. What I really meant was that I identified with some of his ways of seeing things, especially his way of seeing how animals are more intimately connected to us than we realize and desperately try to teach us things.

When my life was in crisis a couple of summers ago, every time I went to sit in the chaise lounge on the terrace two doves would fly over from the steeple of San Rocco and swoop down onto a branch suspended just above my head and start cooing at me. I have binoculars and books about birds and I could tell by ring-markings on the throats of these doves that indeed it was the same pair, day after day, holding some kind of vigil over me. They would talk to me in low throaty coos which, if I had known then what I know now about Animal Communication, I might have learned how to interpret and perhaps understand, but sometimes I think it is all hooey, our attributing human words to a kind of communication that pulses at some deeper preverbal place. It seemed enough, just the music of the cooing, the song mantra and how it worked on me, the mere wonder of the doves’ presence, there in the piney overhang, pulling me out of some deep well of a bad mood into the animus mundus—the mystery of the moment I participate in.

About that time, my friend Jill came to visit. No coincidence I am sure that Jill studies animal totems. The doves, in their faithfulness, came to sing the evening she was here drinking wine with me on the terrace. “Ah, you know what the doves mean, don’t you,” she said without the slightest wince of skepticism. “It’s a new beginning. It’s the lifting of the veil between this world and the other. Doves mate for life—it’s a message about your relationship.” As she was saying these very words, a grasshopper leapt on my foot and suddenly startled me. “Don’t shake him off…that’s a very good sign. You are about to make a dramatic leap!”

I suppose I remain suspended somewhere between belief and disbelief as far as all these mysteries go, but I must confess that I take no terrace visitor for granted. A ladybug lands on my sleeve and I close my eyes and send my radar out in search of mysterious inner voices. I google “ladybug totem” and wryly see what the cyber goddess has to say. You’d be amazed at the vicissitudes I’ve lived in these years of communing with the creatures that daily find me. My own talking dogs notwithstanding—I am never alone.

Most recently I have been assaulted by lizards. When I am out walking the dogs, they skitter stealthily across the path, stirring the dogs into a desperate frenzy, frustrating me because they dart by so fast I can’t get a good look at them, can’t tell what kind they are, can’t look them in their eye to further penetrate the mystery of them. “Look at my iguana,” the man who sells me dog food said the other day. Out of the blue, he’s come into possession of an iguana. He’s put his iguana in a huge aquarium behind the cash register where it watches his customers all day. All the skittish lizards I’d been seeing the past few days seemed to see me through the iguana’s deep reptilian stare. “Detach. Listen to your intuition. Listen to your dreams. Your dreams are about to manifest as reality,” the site on lizard totems tells me. Oh good, I think, not entirely trusting my relief. I am definitely in a lizard phase.

I have six pages left to translate of the chapter pertaining to San Giuseppe and animal miracles. Wouldn’t it be something if the lizards find me even there—in the deep mysterious mirror of this work across centuries. I wouldn’t be surprised, nor surprised by my own fickle credulity.