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.