The Hermit of Monteluco

Before I became acquainted with the hermit of Monteluco (known in these parts simply as “L’eremita”) I’d heard stories about her. Spoletini do not trust her. The religious bookstore in Spoleto basso will not carry her books. She is a “heretic.” She isn’t really a hermit because she has a car and actually drives into town now and then to buy things like toilet paper. Imagine! A hermit out shopping for toilet paper! No one really believes she stays up on top of the mountain during winter when snow would make it impossible for her to drive down. She is rather a theatrical figure, a poseur—not really a hermit at all, just a social outcast that had somehow hoodwinked the church into supporting her in an unorthodox fashion. At least people believe the church supports her. How else could she survive?

Daniela claimed she’d been to see L’eremita once years ago with her friend, Maria Sofia. Daniela wasn’t sure what she thought of her. She didn’t much believe that someone could sit alone on a mountain top and help other people and Daniela believed Christianity was about helping others, serving others; so yes, Daniela had doubts about the hermit. Plus the hermit does not like dogs and Daniela has four wire-haired dachshunds and had them with her, hiking through the mountain, when she and Sofia had first stopped by to see the woman. The hermit accused her of loving dogs too much and God not enough—of being an idolatrice, and that had rubbed Daniela the wrong way. On the other hand, Daniela had found her extraordinarily serene and so would not judge her. Perhaps she had found the path God intended for her, however suspicious it might seem to others.

I must confess I was dying to meet L’eremita and, early in our friendship, convinced Daniela to take me to see her. I was inclined to believe entirely in her calling and am solitary enough in my own inclinations—contemplative enough—that I’m always curious about what could happen if I pushed the inclination to its extreme. Here was a woman who had followed her star over the brink. Some mysterious crisis had happened between her and the church, one that both resulted in her ex-communication and status as “heretic” but had also, presumably, kept the church involved enough with her that they had supported her life on the mountain for nearly thirty years. I desperately wanted her story.

But getting the story is at least as difficult as driving to the hermitage. One certainly cannot walk there, up and across the mountain from Spoleto, or even from the parking area near Monteluco’s Sacred Grove (unless one can camp out somewhere for the return trip). And driving is a precarious enterprise of hair-pin turns, slippery gravel, no guard-rails, sudden chassis-banging dips and logs in the road. Even in Daniela’s rugged jeep we did not think we’d make it and she will never attempt the drive again. But how stunning the views from the cliff-edges one must traverse! One drives for maybe an hour believing it’s not possible to climb any higher or find vistas more encompassing. With each wend in the road one wonders more and more how anyone could live so remotely, lunatic or no, it would have to be a special calling, a special destiny, a marvelous intervention of circumstances to even arrive at the place on the geographical map, let alone at a state of mind that would enable one to hold fast to such aloneness.

At about the moment we were letting go of our own hopes of ever getting off the mountain (where would one turn around?), we arrived at a dead-end before a gate and spied the little stone house that belongs to the hermit. Indeed signs assure us we’ve landed in the right spot: Sacro Eremo (Sacred Hermitage), painted on a rock; a shrine by the gate with the words: Qui Dimorano Silenzio e Preghiera (Here dwell Silence and Prayer). The little stone house is perched truly on the edge of eternity, looking over vast, undulating distances of sky and green becoming purple Appenines.

Teresa Bertoncello (the hermit does have a name) built the hermitage herself, hand-picking each stone from the mountain. The house is completely solar powered, at least nine months of the year; the three winter months she lives by hearth and candle. It’s the kind of cottage one would imagine a crone to have, the shuttered windows and chimney, the herb garden and roses, slate paths that wind hither and yon among gnarled thick leaved plants we could not identify. The effect is something overgrown and root-bound suspended over an abyss. Someone gave her the land, a wealthy Spoletino. She has a benefactor. Who knows if it’s truly the church.

No one had mentioned anything about the hermit’s face—every inch of it burned and covered perhaps with skin-grafts that seemed more mask than skin; even her eyes seem to peer out of slits cut into a mask of satiny, patched-together crinoline. She has no lips whatsoever and the funny skin around her mouth is so tight that she seems a ventriloquist struggling to hide both her speech and the twitches of smiles she can never quite achieve. I’ve heard two different explanations for the fire that disfigured her: a bombola (gas stove canister) exploding; a car wreck. There are so many questions I would ask her, but one enters her presence and becomes stunned, still, sentient. Busy-mind, the hunger to rape and pillage for stories, dissipates.

What was most astonishing that first visit was how current she was with everything going on in the religious world-at-large. She’d read all she could of Elaine Pagels and the Gnostic gospels. She could speak cogently to all the hot-press controversies—the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Her heresy, she explained, was a result of her belief in reincarnation and the Holy Spirit actually being “Mother God”, Sophia. I thought: ah, a feminist, a woman who would be on the cutting edge of the liberal mainstream in the states. I had a sudden desire to introduce her to Cynthia Bourgeault, the Canadian, Episcopal Priest contemplative, who had been my spiritual director at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia; Cynthia a student of Thomas Merton. L’eremita, it turned out, is also a great believer in the teachings of Merton, contemplative prayer and in Lectio Divina. She was not, however, as liberal minded as she appeared. She believed homosexuals were “sub-zero” not even to be classed as human. She believed, also, to Daniela’s and my amusement if not shame, that our dogs were incarnations of condemned souls (we’d brought only two with us this time!)—which explained her mistrust and dislike of them, and perhaps also why Zizannia was inquieta in the hermit’s holy presence.

It wasn’t until the second visit that I earned enough of the hermit’s trust to be offered her writings to translate. The Hindu writer, Lakshmi Lal, was in Spoleto for the summer writing conference I’d, in the past, attended. My friend Anny introduced us and the three of us soon began dining regularly together and my earlier experience of the hermit came up. This time Daniela had no interest, so we hired a taxi (poor Salvatore—he had no idea what he and his Mercedes were in for!) and revisited, the three of us—me, Anny, Lakshmi. It was a beautiful, East meets West moment, with L’eremita actually bowing, with tears in her eyes to be graced with the holy presence of the Hindu writer-on-world religions. They discussed reincarnation especially, the difference between a Christ-centered approach to theories of reincarnation as opposed to Hindi. At this point L’eremita appointed me her official translator and offered me copies of all her works. What a monumental task I have before me, one I’m not sure I am prepared to undertake! But my art historian friend, Ann, who lives in Chapel Hill but spends her autumns doing research in Spoleto, assures me Teresa’s scholarship is sound: she knows her stuff.

“Scrivammi,” the hermit asked this last visit in July. Write me. I asked for her address. She looked at me a little smug. “L’eremita. Monteluco.”—easy.

Now and then I get a lift home up the hill from Salvatore-the-taxi-driver who drove Lakshmi, Anny and me up to see the hermit in July. He’s always got some new story he’s dredged up about why l’eremita must be a fraud. “No way she lives up there during the winter months. She couldn’t drive in the snow. She’d starve. She’d freeze.” I remind him that we did not see a car parked anywhere up there, did we? Can we imagine a woman that old, that feeble, driving those winding roads if he in his Mercedes and Daniela in her jeep had such difficulty? “Boh!” Salvatore scratches his bald head…and assures me he will get the real story for me one of these days.

I sit alone on my terrace every morning, staring at the cross atop Monteluco, imagining Teresa miles and miles across the valley living so happily in the ethers of her thought. “It’s a privilege to live alone with God, you know,” she’d proclaimed when Lakshmi asked her did she ever get lonely. “Not all are called to such intimacy or to such joy.”