I had heard rumors about Alberto’s new dog long before I met the dog yesterday morning, limping along Viale Matteotti unaccustomed to an obviously new collar and leash—bright purple! I’d heard Alberto had found the puppy at the market in Pissignano Sunday before last, and I’d imagined the kind of creature one would cup in two hands and rub against one’s cheek, a true cucciolo, eight weeks old, say, just leaving its mother, which would explain why Alberto had not brought the dog out for giri around the Rocca. This morning I collided with Alberto as I was taking a sharp right out of my driveway while headed toward the bus to catch the train to get to work. I looked down and found a quite adult looking dog—white with flame-like orange markings, border-collie-ish, but whippet-fragile looking, cowering at Alberto’s feet. The dog looked up at me, it's head half-ducked as though apologizing for itself. “Ti presento, Cockie,” Alberto said with a kind of gallantry. Then to Cockie: “Ecco Cinzia.”
I had not understood why it had taken so many months for Alberto to find a new dog after the death of Brill who had somehow gotten fatally ill after devouring a platter of party meats at Giampy and Brit’s open house at the art gallery. This had in fact happened the day before I left for France in July—on the 4th of July, in fact, not that the party or the dog’s death had anything to do with American Independence Day. As Daniela and I were saying our goodbyes on the morning of my departure, Brill was at Albigini’s on an I.V. drip and Alberto’s call had come in to announce kidney failure. “E’ morto Brill," Daniela’s text message had awakened me with its barely audible tingle as I'd tried to sleep on the overnight train to Paris.
It is so hard to imagine the loss of a dog when your own beloved companion is snuggled up next to you on the bunk in a train’s sleeping car, its eyes shining so trustingly in the light spangled darkness. The death of Brill seemed more than the death of a dog. Certainly from loner-Alberto's point of view, Brill was the boon campanion, the kind of canine spouse late-middle aged men and women both seem to acquire as though reaching beyond the human to the angelic for a more refined kind of union. Brill was the dog that accompanied the Fool in the Tarot Card and Alberto the Fool--a self-proclaimed Barbone/Tramp who refused to put a leash on his free spirit animal and provoked the ire of all Spoletini when the dog shit in people's doorways or allegedly caused cars to crash into stone walls as they swerved to avoid his trickster presence.
Brill had played a special role in my own life while serving as my personal fertility alert system when it was time to mate Desiree. Daniela had claimed he'd be more reliable than the striscia-test at Albigini’s--one sniff from a trustworthy male dog and Desiree would "sposta la coda" (an eerie phenomenon, that tail twisting) and thereby tell us when to rush Desiree to Rome to cast her amid the lascivious scramblings of Wolfgang Amadeo. I'd felt such compunction for using Brill in this way--truly using him!--poor mongrel creature who didn't stand a chance of being anyone's chosen stud.
There is a gallery on Via Fontesecco that features a still unfinished portrait of Brill, looking fox-like and mischievous as he glances up at the viewer from the stone gutter. The artist is known for his capacity to render stone as though under intense magnification, with living, breathing texture --actual pores and almost visible respiratory swellings, hairline cracks like those in the skin of someone's hand. The portrait is all living stone, cobbled street, curb, marciapiedi, monochrome save for Brill as the central watching figure, his eyes painted to surreal perfection, also the black, gray, white bristles in the reddish fur of his muzzle, but otherwise utterly unfinished, a gessoed-swipe of burnt orange against the gray. The portrait had cost an occhio della testa (an eye out of Alberto’s head), and Alberto did not have the means to pay for it, though certainly, after the death of Brill, Spoletini raised enough of the money to ensure the painting get done, though the artist himself, I believe I heard tell, is now somewhere in Sicily.
When first I'd heard Alberto had a new dog, I suspected it would be disorienting to see him with any kind of dog other than the street-smart, elusive Brill. And true enough the pitiful creature I discover collapsed at Alberto's socks-in-sandals feet makes no sense to me. Alberto explains that he hasn't been walking Cockie at the Rocca because of a gimp leg; he shows me the hind leg, much shorter than the other three, curling up a bit, floppy as though missing a joint or piece of bone, something. He tells me that when he first saw the dog in Pissignano, he had been cowering in a cage, one stray among a half-dozen other strays, but Cockie clearly the most downtrodden and in need of a special touch. The poor animal had been terrified of Alberto, of the car-ride back to Spoleto, of the creeking of doors, fall of shadows, clatter of dishes. After just a week, though, Cockie won’t let Alberto out of sight. They sleep together, the dog curled up right against Alberto’s chest, mysteriously attentive to the nocturnal beating of Alberto's heart.
After I bid Alberto and Cockie a buona giornata, I mill around Piazza delle Liberta' a bit while waiting for the bus. I stop by the post-office to pay my Amici di Bassotti Club dues, stop by Bar Canasta for cornetto and cappuccino. The few minutes it takes me to do these things feels like a small eternity. I lose sight of Alberto and Cockie, even in memory. But by the time I find myself standing at the bus-stop, I find also a sight that seems suddenly familiar: Alberto and Cockie crossing the pizza, the dog a few paces behind Alberto, trying to keep up but barely able because of the limp. “You have been waiting for the bus all this time?” Alberto wants to know as though he too were conscious of the trap door in Time I have just fallen into. We chat as though days and days had passed and there was so much to say. Ages have indeed passed, so much Time that the spectacle of Alberto crossing the piazza with his purple-leashed, limping animal is common place, an intrinsic part of the glorious scenery.
martedì 12 febbraio 2008
lunedì 11 febbraio 2008
When Worlds Won't Collide
I don’t know why I believe that my life in Spoleto should have anything to do with my life in Perugia. I suppose it has something to do with a vague sense of integrity and not wanting things to stay forever compartmentalized: the personal over here, the professional over there. It is not that my soul’s mirror cities are that far apart: only an hour by train, though admittedly the frequency of trains leaves a lot to be desired and so to invite a Perugia friend to Spoleto is to ask for an entire day of his or her time, the kind of time not usually available to professional people who have what Italians call impegni, commitments, obligations, things to do, people and places to see. But yesterday was a glorious day rapturous with the kind of sunshine that begs to be celebrated and there is no better way to celebrate than to hike up Monteluco and then eat an endless meal at Ferretti, a hike I’d planned a full week earlier not knowing what the weather would do, but lately the weather and I seem in cahoots, even if I am not in cahoots with the powers that will let my two worlds collide.
I do admit that, as I was sitting in Bar Canasta with Daniela, an hour too soon for Campari but too late for cappuccino, waiting for Perugia to encroach on our tender vita canina, I had my doubts that such a merger could ever happen but then doubted my doubts because, after all, we were sitting there waiting for it to happen. My boss Carol and friend Marie were in route via Honda car and had even called before I’d left the house saying that they had hit the road and would stop for gas and probably arrive at Bar Canasta a few minutes later than the time Daniela and I had agreed to meet them before students and other colleagues arrived later still via a train that was also in route.
With the sun as hot at noon as it was proving to be, Daniela was squirming in the thick turtleneck she’d put on in defense of morning cold, pulling at the collar, her face scrunched with discomfort, cranky enough that I ordered our Campari Sodas even after she’d told me to wait for the others who would surely arrive at any moment. In the meantime we would work out the renewal of our membership to the ABC—the Amici di Bassotti Club—friends of dachshunds club, because our annual dues had come due and for some bizarre reason only I had gotten the paperwork for renewal, despite having been a member for maybe two years while Daniela is Queen of ABC having bred world champions for more than 20 years, having owned a pet shop, having navigated these circles endlessly, and certainly should be at the top of their mailing list. My task for the morning was to bring her my paperwork so she could photocopy it, and then after I paid my dues, she would fax our forms and evidence of our having paid our dues to the office in Rome in time for us to vote at the upcoming election of delegati. For some reason I could not wrap my mind around either the idea that a dachshund club needs delegates and elections, nor the idea that I would pay my dachshund dues the way I pay the light bill or telephone bill at a special counter in the post office, first pulling a ticket out of the machine that says bollette corrente—current bills—finally getting the stamped and faxable receipt. “You have never paid a bolleta corrente?” Daniela assaulted with a sarcasm that irks me. Of course I have paid bills, I bristled with my defense...but since when have dachshund dues become the province of whatever bureaucratic process deals with real bills? “Cinzia,” she glared, “our dogs are as real as electricity, maybe even more real, per carita.”
The mood was not right, I think I told myself. Where was joy? Where was light? Where was deliverance? How possibly could we seguey from a conversation about dachshund dues to whatever conversation was being imported from the academic world in Perugia? Daniela was not dressed right, I think I saw. We Americans would all be hiking and so were clad in boots, and tights, and t-shirts, while there she was in lipstick and tweed and the suffocating turtleneck, her eyebrows suddenly not right on her face, plucked too thin, her mouth too pursed with evident impatience. What’s more, I crashed headlong into her Italian-ness, which is never apparent to me. Suddenly she was only Italian, the kind of exotic Italian one finds poised mysteriously in black and white Fellini films or in old textbooks of Italian culture—beauties from a world seeped in otherness, remote and inaccessible.
“Five more minutes and then I must run to Giorgio’s for pranzo,” Daniela sighed, checking her square bracelet watch, relief melting her tense features, or maybe it was the Campari, having its effect. “It would be maleducata for me to say “hello” and then run off to Giorgio’s," she considered. "Okay. Io vado. I’m going.” It was indeed 1:00 and we’d been waiting an hour.
My heart kept clutching at lost opportunity—stay! I want you to know these women and them to know you!—while at the same time I felt strangely rescued from an eventuality that did not eventuate. I could not imagine what possible disaster could have been lurking to require divine intervention, but had a certain clarity that she had left in the nick of time.
Bar Canasta faces Piazza delle Liberta and, through the plate glass doors of the bar, I could follow Daniela as she scurried up the Via Brignone while I could also see Carol and Marie approaching the bar from an adjacent street that converges on the piazza. The timing did indeed seem miraculous, the progress of these women even geometric as they followed their respective trajectories from where I sat, Daniela’s movement away from me calibrated mysteriously with the others’ approach. Had she stood up from the table even one moment earlier, we’d have all collided in piazza. But no. The timing was indeed impeccable.
I do admit that, as I was sitting in Bar Canasta with Daniela, an hour too soon for Campari but too late for cappuccino, waiting for Perugia to encroach on our tender vita canina, I had my doubts that such a merger could ever happen but then doubted my doubts because, after all, we were sitting there waiting for it to happen. My boss Carol and friend Marie were in route via Honda car and had even called before I’d left the house saying that they had hit the road and would stop for gas and probably arrive at Bar Canasta a few minutes later than the time Daniela and I had agreed to meet them before students and other colleagues arrived later still via a train that was also in route.
With the sun as hot at noon as it was proving to be, Daniela was squirming in the thick turtleneck she’d put on in defense of morning cold, pulling at the collar, her face scrunched with discomfort, cranky enough that I ordered our Campari Sodas even after she’d told me to wait for the others who would surely arrive at any moment. In the meantime we would work out the renewal of our membership to the ABC—the Amici di Bassotti Club—friends of dachshunds club, because our annual dues had come due and for some bizarre reason only I had gotten the paperwork for renewal, despite having been a member for maybe two years while Daniela is Queen of ABC having bred world champions for more than 20 years, having owned a pet shop, having navigated these circles endlessly, and certainly should be at the top of their mailing list. My task for the morning was to bring her my paperwork so she could photocopy it, and then after I paid my dues, she would fax our forms and evidence of our having paid our dues to the office in Rome in time for us to vote at the upcoming election of delegati. For some reason I could not wrap my mind around either the idea that a dachshund club needs delegates and elections, nor the idea that I would pay my dachshund dues the way I pay the light bill or telephone bill at a special counter in the post office, first pulling a ticket out of the machine that says bollette corrente—current bills—finally getting the stamped and faxable receipt. “You have never paid a bolleta corrente?” Daniela assaulted with a sarcasm that irks me. Of course I have paid bills, I bristled with my defense...but since when have dachshund dues become the province of whatever bureaucratic process deals with real bills? “Cinzia,” she glared, “our dogs are as real as electricity, maybe even more real, per carita.”
The mood was not right, I think I told myself. Where was joy? Where was light? Where was deliverance? How possibly could we seguey from a conversation about dachshund dues to whatever conversation was being imported from the academic world in Perugia? Daniela was not dressed right, I think I saw. We Americans would all be hiking and so were clad in boots, and tights, and t-shirts, while there she was in lipstick and tweed and the suffocating turtleneck, her eyebrows suddenly not right on her face, plucked too thin, her mouth too pursed with evident impatience. What’s more, I crashed headlong into her Italian-ness, which is never apparent to me. Suddenly she was only Italian, the kind of exotic Italian one finds poised mysteriously in black and white Fellini films or in old textbooks of Italian culture—beauties from a world seeped in otherness, remote and inaccessible.
“Five more minutes and then I must run to Giorgio’s for pranzo,” Daniela sighed, checking her square bracelet watch, relief melting her tense features, or maybe it was the Campari, having its effect. “It would be maleducata for me to say “hello” and then run off to Giorgio’s," she considered. "Okay. Io vado. I’m going.” It was indeed 1:00 and we’d been waiting an hour.
My heart kept clutching at lost opportunity—stay! I want you to know these women and them to know you!—while at the same time I felt strangely rescued from an eventuality that did not eventuate. I could not imagine what possible disaster could have been lurking to require divine intervention, but had a certain clarity that she had left in the nick of time.
Bar Canasta faces Piazza delle Liberta and, through the plate glass doors of the bar, I could follow Daniela as she scurried up the Via Brignone while I could also see Carol and Marie approaching the bar from an adjacent street that converges on the piazza. The timing did indeed seem miraculous, the progress of these women even geometric as they followed their respective trajectories from where I sat, Daniela’s movement away from me calibrated mysteriously with the others’ approach. Had she stood up from the table even one moment earlier, we’d have all collided in piazza. But no. The timing was indeed impeccable.
mercoledì 6 febbraio 2008
Carnevale
Michelle, Lewis and I were heading toward Tre Fontane for a Fat Tuesday pizza when we thought we saw a ghoul, leaning against a stone wall, a child dressed up in Carnevale costume. I was the first to spy him or her—the black hooded cape, the mask of a strega/witch, maybe the befana herself with the squinty eyes and hooked nose. “Look, look,” I called out to them and made them veer with me toward the child, but then proximity proved the ghoul was neither a ghoul nor a child, but an old woman standing there being herself.
I am not sure why Carnevale kept hoodwinking me this year, kept passing me by. Sunday before last I definitely heard the music, but didn’t make sense of it until the party was over and all the people gone. I was on the computer, instant-messaging with Anny : “That’s strange,” I even wrote her, “suddenly Spoleto is suffused with the pumped up sound of Disney show-tunes. I wonder what on earth could be going on. “ By the time I’d finished chatting on email and grading papers, by the time I’d gathered shoes and Desiree, the only thing left to discover were the spoils: heaps of confetti as well as a blanket of it covering the asphalt of my street.
I assumed the big day would be Fat Tuesday, Martedi Grasso…Mardi Gras. So it didn’t even occur to me to seek out parties on Sunday. I did solitary giri della Rocca, early for me, but at a time when Spoletini are just getting out of morning Mass so that right away I found Merisa near her hotel trying to walk in new shoes, walking as though on her heels, trying to break them in, waving her hand to tell me not to even worry about walking with her, given the shoes and how her feet hurt. Spiderman and a creature I could not identify walked past us, each holding the hand of a gargantuan looking father. I did a double-take, mostly to figure out if the other was a dragon…do dragons have spikes prickling out of their skulls and necks? Do they wear spats? For the life of me I could not figure out what kind of creature was accompanying Spiderman and the gargantuan human who seemed to float past Merisa and me while she proudly showed off the new shoes that made my own toes ache just to imagine walking in them.
“I don’t suppose we should go to the party at Pecchiardo and then also out for pizza,” Daniela mused as we were drifting down Via Brignone a little high from our Campari sodas mid-day on the Tuesday I didn’t remember was Fat Tuesday until she mentioned the meranda at Pecchiardo. I remembered that I’d also made plans with Michelle and Lewis to check out a new pizzeria near my house, one that boasted Wi-Fi access. We were going to each bring our laptops and download music and movies—go hog wild with a real internet connection rather than dial-up. You’d think that on Fat Tuesday the restaurants would be teeming with people primed for debauchery, but the Wi Fi pizzeria was closed and there seemed no one whatsoever on the streets, save an old woman I wanted to be a ghoul who turned out not to be.
This is ridiculous, I found myself telling Daniela, telling Michelle, telling Lewis, telling friends I emailed after dinner, telling my children when I spoke to them on the phone: Here is the one day of the year when the church allows me to ritualize debauchery and the best I could come up with is profiteroles.
“Profiteroles are pretty decadent,” my daughter assured me. “All that cream…all that chocolate mousse. And you are on a serious diet, which makes it outright temptation…you did indeed succumb to temptation. That’s decadent.”
I had a list of things I was going to give up for Lent. Sex, maybe. Chocolate, maybe. Alcohol. Self-indulgent emails. Complaining. Putting off until tomorrow what can be done today. But suddenly it comes as almost an epiphany: I am what I am, the face of the Befana is my own and she is wryly smiling over all my unlived Fat Tuesdays, the darkness I have failed to court, the breast I’ve failed to flash from a parade float overflowing gardenias. Smiling especially over the purity I've failed to embody in the aftermath of my failed Fat Tuesdays.
This year I think I am going to observe a kind of anti-Lent: give myself and others little gifts of chocolate, wine, little kisses of titillation. I am going to dance around the Rocca during giri. And if my shirt wafts up in the breeze...watch out. You never know what may be winking at you.
I am not sure why Carnevale kept hoodwinking me this year, kept passing me by. Sunday before last I definitely heard the music, but didn’t make sense of it until the party was over and all the people gone. I was on the computer, instant-messaging with Anny : “That’s strange,” I even wrote her, “suddenly Spoleto is suffused with the pumped up sound of Disney show-tunes. I wonder what on earth could be going on. “ By the time I’d finished chatting on email and grading papers, by the time I’d gathered shoes and Desiree, the only thing left to discover were the spoils: heaps of confetti as well as a blanket of it covering the asphalt of my street.
I assumed the big day would be Fat Tuesday, Martedi Grasso…Mardi Gras. So it didn’t even occur to me to seek out parties on Sunday. I did solitary giri della Rocca, early for me, but at a time when Spoletini are just getting out of morning Mass so that right away I found Merisa near her hotel trying to walk in new shoes, walking as though on her heels, trying to break them in, waving her hand to tell me not to even worry about walking with her, given the shoes and how her feet hurt. Spiderman and a creature I could not identify walked past us, each holding the hand of a gargantuan looking father. I did a double-take, mostly to figure out if the other was a dragon…do dragons have spikes prickling out of their skulls and necks? Do they wear spats? For the life of me I could not figure out what kind of creature was accompanying Spiderman and the gargantuan human who seemed to float past Merisa and me while she proudly showed off the new shoes that made my own toes ache just to imagine walking in them.
“I don’t suppose we should go to the party at Pecchiardo and then also out for pizza,” Daniela mused as we were drifting down Via Brignone a little high from our Campari sodas mid-day on the Tuesday I didn’t remember was Fat Tuesday until she mentioned the meranda at Pecchiardo. I remembered that I’d also made plans with Michelle and Lewis to check out a new pizzeria near my house, one that boasted Wi-Fi access. We were going to each bring our laptops and download music and movies—go hog wild with a real internet connection rather than dial-up. You’d think that on Fat Tuesday the restaurants would be teeming with people primed for debauchery, but the Wi Fi pizzeria was closed and there seemed no one whatsoever on the streets, save an old woman I wanted to be a ghoul who turned out not to be.
This is ridiculous, I found myself telling Daniela, telling Michelle, telling Lewis, telling friends I emailed after dinner, telling my children when I spoke to them on the phone: Here is the one day of the year when the church allows me to ritualize debauchery and the best I could come up with is profiteroles.
“Profiteroles are pretty decadent,” my daughter assured me. “All that cream…all that chocolate mousse. And you are on a serious diet, which makes it outright temptation…you did indeed succumb to temptation. That’s decadent.”
I had a list of things I was going to give up for Lent. Sex, maybe. Chocolate, maybe. Alcohol. Self-indulgent emails. Complaining. Putting off until tomorrow what can be done today. But suddenly it comes as almost an epiphany: I am what I am, the face of the Befana is my own and she is wryly smiling over all my unlived Fat Tuesdays, the darkness I have failed to court, the breast I’ve failed to flash from a parade float overflowing gardenias. Smiling especially over the purity I've failed to embody in the aftermath of my failed Fat Tuesdays.
This year I think I am going to observe a kind of anti-Lent: give myself and others little gifts of chocolate, wine, little kisses of titillation. I am going to dance around the Rocca during giri. And if my shirt wafts up in the breeze...watch out. You never know what may be winking at you.
martedì 5 febbraio 2008
Affinity
The lone woman making her way around the Rocca in her full length mink buttoned to her chin knows that she knows me and that I know her but refrains from looking toward me, I think because we both realize we do not remember each other’s name and do not have anything to say to each other. She stands by the rail that prevents walkers from toppling over into the valley, clutching her mink collar tightly around her throat, poised with her face in the wind, looking dramatic. She belongs to another era, my mother’s era, coming-of-age in the 1950s, aspiring to be Katherine Hepburn; she looks like Katherine Hepburn, but a diminutive version, tiny as only Italian women can be, and with her hair poofed up the way Katherine would never poof up her hair, sealed in hairspray as crisp as fiberglass so that not a finger-curl blows in the gale.
What I remember about this woman is a crostate filled with blackberry marmalade that she brought to the convent of Monteluco during the Festa di San Francesco. She was from Rome but came to Spoleto often, perhaps because she had grown up in Spoleto and still owned a home here and found herself returning more and more to her past and childhood friends, one of which may have been Merisa, my landlady. She had in fact been introduced to me by Merisa and had sat with us at the feast the fratti had prepared and I had instantly liked her for reasons I tried to seek out in her eyes and face, which moved in close to me and seemed to recognize me as well. In the middle of the meal her son appeared from nowhere—everyone commenting that he looked just like his mother though I could not see it; her face was so familiar to me, while her son’s was not. It was her birthday, we learned, and the son had driven all the way from Rome to surprise his mother on her birthday. Imagine, she was born on the Festa di San Francesco and was turning eighty this very day.
It is not cold today; I’m not even wearing a jacket, just a sweatshirt, but at the Rocca, weather is a fickle thing. At noon on the Bar Portella side there is sunshine, springtime, a cluster of people in the plastic chairs at the plastic tables sitting out with their Campari sodas and spicy rice-crackers, holding their faces up to sun that beams in across the valley in a direct way as though someone stood on the opposing mountain flashing light with a trick mirror. Walk a few paces beyond the Gattapone Hotel, past the Ponte, around the bend, and the season changes—the sun is lost, the temperature drops by ten degrees, fog creeps past the guardrails in eerie wisps and you think of coming rain and the drops you may or may not be feeling; certainly the air is wetter, denser. When I see the woman poised at the rail trying not to see me, I feel we have lost something that we had almost found that day at the convent, something inexplicable and fleeting, perhaps illusory.
Daniela and the dogs arrive and create a flurry—there is so much to say and think and talk about as we do our giri that are no longer giri, because of the walls still sealing off construction of the escalator that will someday scale the mountain from train station to the top. Luciana arrives and wants a dog to walk and Daniela untangles Tarontola’s leash and lets Luciana walk Tarontola even though Tarontola keeps looking back at us over her shoulder saying with her eyes veiled by wire-hair eyebrows, Why did you give me to this strange woman? I am yours. "Eccoci," Daniela and I both say to Tarontola at the same time and I love it that we can say “eccoci”—here we are—rather than “eccomi”—here I am--to the sweet-faced animal whose sense of belonging informs my own.
Soon enough, Daniela and I are the ones sitting in the sun at Bar Portella stirring the orange slices in our Camparis with our fingers, watching the ice melt, letting our mid-day aperitivo stretch as long as it will as we talk about this, that and the other, our dogs tied to a table leg, poised angelically for the rice-crackers they know we will offer. “Bianca Maria,” Daniela’s voice sings out and her face lights up and now I remember the name that made me think of “Snow White,” Bianca Maria, the woman now approaching us that I had seen trying not to see me.
Bianca Maria responds to Daniela’s greeting and then tip-toes in her pumps toward our table and toward me. “Well, it is you,” she says…raising her gloved hands to pat my cheeks and examine my face. “I was afraid to look twice for fear I was mistaken.”
I love the feeling of inevitability that comes over me when, later in the day, I run into Bianca Maria twice again in unexpected places, in Piazza del Mercato mid-afternoon, shopping for eggplant, along the park side of Viale Matteotti, well after dark, perhaps out for an evening stroll and coming across me under a street light. We stop and stand before each other, though we clearly have nothing to say. “Cinzia,” she says when she looks in my face. “Bianca Maria,” I say back and grin though I’m not sure what I’m grinning about.
What I remember about this woman is a crostate filled with blackberry marmalade that she brought to the convent of Monteluco during the Festa di San Francesco. She was from Rome but came to Spoleto often, perhaps because she had grown up in Spoleto and still owned a home here and found herself returning more and more to her past and childhood friends, one of which may have been Merisa, my landlady. She had in fact been introduced to me by Merisa and had sat with us at the feast the fratti had prepared and I had instantly liked her for reasons I tried to seek out in her eyes and face, which moved in close to me and seemed to recognize me as well. In the middle of the meal her son appeared from nowhere—everyone commenting that he looked just like his mother though I could not see it; her face was so familiar to me, while her son’s was not. It was her birthday, we learned, and the son had driven all the way from Rome to surprise his mother on her birthday. Imagine, she was born on the Festa di San Francesco and was turning eighty this very day.
It is not cold today; I’m not even wearing a jacket, just a sweatshirt, but at the Rocca, weather is a fickle thing. At noon on the Bar Portella side there is sunshine, springtime, a cluster of people in the plastic chairs at the plastic tables sitting out with their Campari sodas and spicy rice-crackers, holding their faces up to sun that beams in across the valley in a direct way as though someone stood on the opposing mountain flashing light with a trick mirror. Walk a few paces beyond the Gattapone Hotel, past the Ponte, around the bend, and the season changes—the sun is lost, the temperature drops by ten degrees, fog creeps past the guardrails in eerie wisps and you think of coming rain and the drops you may or may not be feeling; certainly the air is wetter, denser. When I see the woman poised at the rail trying not to see me, I feel we have lost something that we had almost found that day at the convent, something inexplicable and fleeting, perhaps illusory.
Daniela and the dogs arrive and create a flurry—there is so much to say and think and talk about as we do our giri that are no longer giri, because of the walls still sealing off construction of the escalator that will someday scale the mountain from train station to the top. Luciana arrives and wants a dog to walk and Daniela untangles Tarontola’s leash and lets Luciana walk Tarontola even though Tarontola keeps looking back at us over her shoulder saying with her eyes veiled by wire-hair eyebrows, Why did you give me to this strange woman? I am yours. "Eccoci," Daniela and I both say to Tarontola at the same time and I love it that we can say “eccoci”—here we are—rather than “eccomi”—here I am--to the sweet-faced animal whose sense of belonging informs my own.
Soon enough, Daniela and I are the ones sitting in the sun at Bar Portella stirring the orange slices in our Camparis with our fingers, watching the ice melt, letting our mid-day aperitivo stretch as long as it will as we talk about this, that and the other, our dogs tied to a table leg, poised angelically for the rice-crackers they know we will offer. “Bianca Maria,” Daniela’s voice sings out and her face lights up and now I remember the name that made me think of “Snow White,” Bianca Maria, the woman now approaching us that I had seen trying not to see me.
Bianca Maria responds to Daniela’s greeting and then tip-toes in her pumps toward our table and toward me. “Well, it is you,” she says…raising her gloved hands to pat my cheeks and examine my face. “I was afraid to look twice for fear I was mistaken.”
I love the feeling of inevitability that comes over me when, later in the day, I run into Bianca Maria twice again in unexpected places, in Piazza del Mercato mid-afternoon, shopping for eggplant, along the park side of Viale Matteotti, well after dark, perhaps out for an evening stroll and coming across me under a street light. We stop and stand before each other, though we clearly have nothing to say. “Cinzia,” she says when she looks in my face. “Bianca Maria,” I say back and grin though I’m not sure what I’m grinning about.
sabato 2 febbraio 2008
Hair of the Dog
I’ve been told for about three years that I need a haircut. Both my daughters cut their waist length hair this Christmas because they said, looking at me, they realized how gross long hair could get. Almost-50 year old women are not supposed to wear their hair below their shoulders. The cut-off age is 30, according to my now dead mother—no one over the age of 30 should wear their hair like a girl’s. Rules notwithstanding, the problem, according to my girls, was not my age, but the hair, the kind of hair I have, the stringiness and wispiness and colorlessness of it. I just didn't need too much of a bad thing.
Last March when Anny and Michael were visiting she would sometimes look sidelong at me and say as sweetly as possible: “I wonder what you would look like with a kind of bob. You have the kind of hair that would sway if you had the right kind of bob, cleanly cut—you know—just below your chin.” I looked at Anny and looked at Anny’s hair. Since when did you rule the cult of makeovers? I wanted to say but didn’t.
“Do I need to cut my hair?” I asked Daniela. She turned me around by the shoulders to guage something I couldn't see behind me as though the thought had never occurred to her. She lifted my ponytail. “Si,” she said, matter-of- factly.
I have to be in the right mood to face myself in the 3-way mirror of a beauty shop, face myself trussed up in one of the gowns they make you wear with your hair all goopy on top of your head so your face is all face and all its wrinkles and imperfections and something else that has nothing at all to do with the flesh but more with what is unknowably in your own eyes staring back at you. And for some reason, I have never had the courage to go to a beauty parlor in Spoleto even though Daniela knows every parucchiere in town, or maybe it’s because Daniela knows every parrucchiere in town and I am wary of her habits becoming contagious so that, before I know it, a trim could become layers, become a bob that sways at the chin with a 100 euro a week highlight-to-hide-the-gray habit.
Last March when I took Anny and Michael to Assisi to photograph the Green Man on the altars of the Basilica, the guard would not let me in the church because of Desiree. “No problem, we’ll just take a little walk,” I told them and we agreed to meet up in an hour. I’d had no intention whatsoever of going to the beauty parlor but, walking up a lonely street, I met a woman sweeping wisps of hair into a gutter. She liked my dog. She called and clucked and asked me what her name is and how old she was and could she caress her and Desiree responded as she does only to true dog lovers and, before I knew it, I was in her chair, trussed up, facing that face you find only in a 3-way mirror. She cut enough for Michael to notice I’d had a haircut, though Anny swore she could not tell a difference and thought I was lying just to tease her. I felt lighter. I felt like my haircut was providential and I kept the woman’s card. I like haircuts that do not announce themselves.
Friday I took a group of 20 students on a fieldtrip to Todi. I think the thing about me and haircuts is they must always take me by surprise. The last thing I’d have imagined myself capable of doing is cutting off my hair in the middle of a student field trip. But the intern, Marijana, and I were walking along talking about how best to get to know a town, after you’ve seen all the churches and museums. It just occurred to me that that the best way to learn about the underbelly of a culture is to find a beauty parlor and allow the man who cuts the hair of the heads of the townspeople cut yours.
Marijana claims she was instantly worried for me when she saw how old the parruchiere was and how suspect his old-fashioned pompadour and how feeble and fumbly his arthritic hands. She worried about the funny thing he did with the scissors, sliding the blade up and down the hair shafts as though to tease them into split ends. And then I’d told him no more than two centimeters and she’d watched him lop off hanks, great lengths of hair, cascading down the glossy black cape I was wearing to pile in endless heaps on the floor while I seemed oblivious, seemed to be transfixed by Desiree’s eyes watching me in the mirror.
It was a haircut that announced itself, but my students, when we met them at the restaurant for pranzo, were polite, deferent, waiting for me to explain to them why I’d done what I’d done before they gasped in horror. “It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would,” Marijana kept telling them. “I’ve never seen anyone do what this man did with scissors. But then I looked around and he’d won some awards and…well, it’s short, but…it looks normal, as far as haircuts go.”
I thought I should be more devastated than I was, thought I should feel some pang of remorse for lost self-image or identiy. But my unique experience of Todi had cost me nothing but 15 euro and a fistful of hair. For some reason I felt I had gained far more than what they believed I’d lost.
Last March when Anny and Michael were visiting she would sometimes look sidelong at me and say as sweetly as possible: “I wonder what you would look like with a kind of bob. You have the kind of hair that would sway if you had the right kind of bob, cleanly cut—you know—just below your chin.” I looked at Anny and looked at Anny’s hair. Since when did you rule the cult of makeovers? I wanted to say but didn’t.
“Do I need to cut my hair?” I asked Daniela. She turned me around by the shoulders to guage something I couldn't see behind me as though the thought had never occurred to her. She lifted my ponytail. “Si,” she said, matter-of- factly.
I have to be in the right mood to face myself in the 3-way mirror of a beauty shop, face myself trussed up in one of the gowns they make you wear with your hair all goopy on top of your head so your face is all face and all its wrinkles and imperfections and something else that has nothing at all to do with the flesh but more with what is unknowably in your own eyes staring back at you. And for some reason, I have never had the courage to go to a beauty parlor in Spoleto even though Daniela knows every parucchiere in town, or maybe it’s because Daniela knows every parrucchiere in town and I am wary of her habits becoming contagious so that, before I know it, a trim could become layers, become a bob that sways at the chin with a 100 euro a week highlight-to-hide-the-gray habit.
Last March when I took Anny and Michael to Assisi to photograph the Green Man on the altars of the Basilica, the guard would not let me in the church because of Desiree. “No problem, we’ll just take a little walk,” I told them and we agreed to meet up in an hour. I’d had no intention whatsoever of going to the beauty parlor but, walking up a lonely street, I met a woman sweeping wisps of hair into a gutter. She liked my dog. She called and clucked and asked me what her name is and how old she was and could she caress her and Desiree responded as she does only to true dog lovers and, before I knew it, I was in her chair, trussed up, facing that face you find only in a 3-way mirror. She cut enough for Michael to notice I’d had a haircut, though Anny swore she could not tell a difference and thought I was lying just to tease her. I felt lighter. I felt like my haircut was providential and I kept the woman’s card. I like haircuts that do not announce themselves.
Friday I took a group of 20 students on a fieldtrip to Todi. I think the thing about me and haircuts is they must always take me by surprise. The last thing I’d have imagined myself capable of doing is cutting off my hair in the middle of a student field trip. But the intern, Marijana, and I were walking along talking about how best to get to know a town, after you’ve seen all the churches and museums. It just occurred to me that that the best way to learn about the underbelly of a culture is to find a beauty parlor and allow the man who cuts the hair of the heads of the townspeople cut yours.
Marijana claims she was instantly worried for me when she saw how old the parruchiere was and how suspect his old-fashioned pompadour and how feeble and fumbly his arthritic hands. She worried about the funny thing he did with the scissors, sliding the blade up and down the hair shafts as though to tease them into split ends. And then I’d told him no more than two centimeters and she’d watched him lop off hanks, great lengths of hair, cascading down the glossy black cape I was wearing to pile in endless heaps on the floor while I seemed oblivious, seemed to be transfixed by Desiree’s eyes watching me in the mirror.
It was a haircut that announced itself, but my students, when we met them at the restaurant for pranzo, were polite, deferent, waiting for me to explain to them why I’d done what I’d done before they gasped in horror. “It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would,” Marijana kept telling them. “I’ve never seen anyone do what this man did with scissors. But then I looked around and he’d won some awards and…well, it’s short, but…it looks normal, as far as haircuts go.”
I thought I should be more devastated than I was, thought I should feel some pang of remorse for lost self-image or identiy. But my unique experience of Todi had cost me nothing but 15 euro and a fistful of hair. For some reason I felt I had gained far more than what they believed I’d lost.
Iscriviti a:
Post (Atom)
