Another Rollicking Ride Home

I could have stayed home. I should have stayed home! --I kept saying to myself as I stood at the curb in the late night downpour not knowing what to do.  I always fear getting stranded in Foligno far away from my dogs, who spend too much time in their crates as it is.  Marisa had warned me about the storm, claiming it would be torrential as she poked around with a broom handle to make sure that I had cleared the pine needles from the holes that drain rain-water from the terrace. I had refused to believe in her panic. Maybe she knew something, but maybe she was paranoid. What’s a little rain? Morning had promised something else with its dome of blue sky and its few clouds rising like truce-seeking smoke-signals. I believed and then stopped believing in the storm. I couldn’t justify skipping work because of a dubious forecast. Yet here I stood amidst the tempest, as stranded in Foligno as I’d forgotten I’d feared being stranded, thanks to a derailed train.

I work hard at trusting life and most of the time I do trust. My mantra is: Accept. Allow. But there are moments when the old anxieties assault me, when thinking of five hungry dogs in Spoleto, growing hungrier by the minute, their bladders bursting, their own sweet trust in me going spastic and derelict, when I find myself in a downward spiral believing that sometimes we are beyond the reach of benevolent forces. The train goes off the tracks and all mayhem breaks lose. The lives of hundreds of stuck passengers meet entropy the way my life on this curb in the downpour has met entropy: dogs, children, husbands, wives, hungry and getting hungrier, medicine not arriving on time, everything held back in time, a warp of time that makes no sense, the train itself a metaphor for something else going on in my life and in the lives of the others who participate in this inconvenience becoming near-tragedy in my rising but suppressible panic.  Breathe, breathe. Accept. Allow.

My savior this time is the taxi I had stopped expecting, arriving suddenly in the rain-spangled darkness, his headlights igniting the spangles, a taxi when I had stopped believing in the possibility of taxis at this hour, a gruff, troll-like man at the wheel, asking for exactly the amount of money I had in my purse, insisting that I sit up front with him, rather than in back. My last spasm of anxiety was vanquished by gratitude, until I discovered a pernicious new variety, creeping up my spine as we drove blindly through the deluge, the windshield wipers whacking ineffectively, the tires of our vehicle making rubbery skidding sounds on the asphalt that we seemed to make contact with only occasionally. He furthermore seemed more focused on me than on the road or his driving. In two minutes, he had ascertained that I teach writing and so wanted to introduce me to his writing. He’d turned on the dashboard lights and produced a stapled together pamphlet that he called his novel.  He told me he also wrote poetry and songs.  “We are soul mates,” he beamed, taking his eyes off the road to shine them on me as his teeth also shone in the dashboard lights through his grin as he steered the car back from the shoulder into the lane with one hand.

I pretended to read his novel, thinking my concentration on it might inspire his concentration on the road, but instead we passed Trevi and he broke out in song, waving his arms in the air operatically, his wavering voice conveying mandolins though he claimed to play the accordion. I thought the music uncannily perfect to serve as background music to a sudden collision and our poignant deaths, the death itself perfect especially for me, given it seems I have come to the end of the road of my Italian life and can muster no fantasy of a future elsewhere.  It wouldn’t be so awful to die right here, tonight, being sung to by the singing taxista, I’d actually thought. We die. We all die.  Does it really matter so much whether we die at 50 or 80 or 100, so long as our deaths are poetic and meaningful?   He had written a song for every town in Umbria, he claimed, and soon began singing the Campello song, the Eggi song as we skid from here to there, and on-coming trucks with blinding lights blared their claxons at us. During a stretch of city-less road, he backtracked to the Foligno song before moving forward to the Spoleto song just as Spoleto’s Rocca appeared in the mist above us, then  a veritable aria of reverberating vowels as we passed through the tunnel that pierces the mountain I live on-- my sure sign of near-arrival.  

He was almost paternal as he dropped me by my gate, making sure to line up the headlights so that I could see my way down the drive and through the front door.  I’d told him about Paolo and his interest in publishing local lore.  The taxista was certainly local lore. He handed me a tablet.  The pages were filled with over-sized, over-dark scrawl, mostly phone numbers, save on the first page, where he had rubber stamped his name and phone numbers twice on the graph-paper.  I found a clean sheet after riffling through most of the pages and wrote down Paolo’s name and number and my name and number.  The taxista ripped off the page with his name and numbers and gave it to me. It seemed a mystery to me even then: that single page stamped twice with his name and numbers; the fact that it was the very first page in an over-filled tablet…hundreds of pages between that first page and the blank page I’d found to write my own information. If this page was his poor man’s calling card, wouldn’t he have stamped more possibilities for himself and wouldn’t they be toward the end of the tablet, given the infinite numbers he had already doled out to previous passengers?  Either I was privileged, one of the few he offered his identity to, or maybe he had not been driving in awhile. Antonio Silvestrini, I read.  Okay, Antonio. Arrividerci Antonio.

Not only was I surprised to be alive and at home with all my happy pup-pups, but I was also amazed to have arrived several minutes before I would have arrived had the train gotten me to Spoleto on time.  The dogs and I danced in the rain on the well-drained terrace, my heart and entire being swelling with joy and thanksgiving disportionate, I presumed, to what I had actually lived.  

My friend Ann in the States  and I write each other every day, a sweet habit. She is going to bed in Chapel Hill just as I am waking up in Spoleto. She misses Spoleto and I miss her being here, so she’s the perfect audience for my Spoleto stories. Of course the morning after my adventure with the singing taxista, I had to give a little testimony of being lost and found, stranded and rescued. I think I mentioned that he sang, but not necessarily what he sang.

She wrote back to me uncharacteristically early, with “The Singing Taxista” in the subject line.  She knew him!  She’d once been stranded in Foligno years and years ago.  He’d come to her rescue.  He’d sung songs she did not understand to every city along the way.  She’d so enjoyed the trip that she’d asked for his card, but instead had been given a piece of newsprint with his name stamped on it twice. Antonio Silvestrini was his name. She knew this because she’d saved the piece of paper and had even framed it. It was on her bedside table. A symbol of something. She had in recent visits tried his number and even asked other Foligno taxi drivers about him.  She’d been told he was retired or even dead.  How amazing that I had found him, or he had found me, depending on how one looked at it! If I saw him again I should tell him she said hello and even tell him she still had his piece of paper with his numbers on it and had tried to call. I didn’t have to tell him that she’d framed the piece of paper. She couldn’t quite explain why she had framed it.

I quickly went to my purse to make sure I still had the piece of paper he had ripped from his tablet.  It suddenly seemed like something that had come to me in a dream rather than in real life. But there it was like evidence of another dimension: the palpable piece of graphed news print, the name Silvistrini Antonio stamped mirror like above a stack of phone numbers…and stamped twice, thunk, thunk, one rubber stamping just above the other. Why twice?

I snapped a photo of my piece of paper with the iPhone to send to Ann—evidence, proof, the exact same piece of paper framed in your frame is in my hand here in Spoleto. Meraviglia.

Even if he’s still alive, I believe that Antonio Silvestrini is a ghost. My heart called out to him and he came—appearing through the mist—and got me home in what today, as I write this, still feels like the nick of time.