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.