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.