Epiphany: Embracing the Befana

In U.S. religious practice, Epiphany is at best a Sunday sermon on the Wise Men. It was on the Epiphany (twelve days after Christ’s birth) that the Wise Men finally arrived with their gifts at the manger. Most sermons explore what this meant for the dissemination of Christianity in the world: Melchiorre, Baldassaree, Gaspare were of different races, hailing from different countries—they were the first non-Jews to know of Christ and take news of his presence into the great beyond. Who were these Magi? Theologians inquire. Were they really astrologers? Was there really a star? Was it a comet? Was it the rare conjunction of Mercury and Venus which happens every 480 years to light up the sky and can indeed be traced to 6 B.C., perhaps the time of the birth of Christ? Certainly there is enough intrigue in the brief Biblical verses devoted to the Wise Men to keep protestant preachers sermonizing year after year, but they are a little wary of pushing the astrology theme or letting the Wise Men upstage the little Christ child, lying there so meekly. Epiphany—as revelation of Christ—is certainly important, but by the time January 6th rolls around who needs more parties, more gifts to buy, more Christmas. Our superstition has it that Christmas decorations must be down and ordinary life restored by New Year’s Day. Epiphany warrants only a nod.

In Italy, however, decorations and holy observances persist through January 6th and, traditionally, the feast of Epiphany was the season’s grand finale, the day when children were showered with gifts—and not by the jolly fat Babbo Natale, or Santa Clause (who is in fact a recent “laughing servant of consumerism” imported from the states) but by the broken shoed, raggedy old-lady, Befana, the precursor of all stocking-stuffers, a witch-fairy scoping the heavens on her broom.

Legend links the Befana to the Wise Men. There are two versions concerning how she met them: one is that she ran into them by chance as they were following the star to find the Christ Child; the other is that the Wise Men stopped by her hut (while she was sweeping, hence the broom) to ask for directions. In either scenario, she was asked by the Wise Men to accompany them, but refused, only to have second thoughts and take off after them. She never found them, nor the Christ child either. That's why, on the anniversary of the Wise Men's visit, she scours the heavens, giving away the gifts she would have given the baby Jesus to all the children in her path (save, it would seem, the American children who are already back in school and doing homework when she passes).

The Befana certainly pre-dates Santa Clause, and is considered one of the earliest “pedagogical figures,” rewarding good children with stockings full of sweets and toys, punishing disobedient children with lumps of coal and onions. Her actual origins are unknown though the name “Befana” comes from the Greek word for epiphany, “Beffania,” and she has certainly been a vivid presence at this most popular of Italian feasts since early in the 13th century. She also does double-duty in serving as a kind of female “father time”—the old year leaves with her as she scatters gifts in her wake.

I have also read that the Befana represents the passing of the pagan era into the Christian:
The pagan goddess has grown old, withered, is passing on…but leaving gifts behind for those of the new Christian faith. Another version of the “witch” harks back to certain rites by Celtics who peopled the Pianura Padana and parts of the Alps. They would fashion wicker puppets of her and set them on fire to celebrate not only the end of the year—but all ends and new beginnings.
I rather prefer the idea of keeping the goddess alive, even if she's a bit withered. She's mindful of new seasons of religious thought, yet waiting in the wings to surprise us with her presence and whimsical gifts.

Even though Italian children, like American, now expect toys from Babbo Natale on Christmas Eve, the Befana has not deserted them. In Spoleto, stores are teeming with burlap stocking-packages of various sizes and value, each stuffed with candies and trinkets, each adorned with some kind of witch doll—stuffed, plastic, ornamental—riding her broom. Twelfth night, the eve of Epiphany, is a wild bazaar of open markets, carnivals, and women dressed up as witches tossing candy into crowds. In Perugia, there’s a carousel and a ferris wheel. The Befana walks on stilts with a huge over-sized plastic head replete with tell-tale hooked nose, reaching into her enormous burlap bag to shower Corso Vanucci with candy. Children squeal when they see her, both delighted and afraid. They go to sleep praying she will not bring them coal (and yet she does—a popular candy of the season is blackened rock candy, looks just like coal). Christmas lights still twinkle from the strings suspended across the streets. While Christmas Eve was holy, truly a reverent vigil, the celebration of Epiphany is about magic, fun, goodies, gifts…and giddiness.

Save Me, Taxista!

Spoleto is a small enough town that all I need to do, when I see a sparkling white taxi poised by the curb outside the train station, is say “Ciao Roberto,” or “Ciao Salvati” and one of these men will know what to do with me. The history I share with them seems matrimonial; the moves they’ve helped me make, the suitcases and boxes from Spoleto to Perugia, Perugia to Spoleto, were intimate adventures into new ways of being.

Salvati carried me over the threshold of my first home on Via Pompili in Perugia’s Monte Luce, helping me find the landlady, the key, the light switch—boiling espresso for me at my first stove while a low hanging bulb shone on his bald head and I noticed how blue his eyes were and felt suddenly bashful as I stuffed cash in his hand and told him I was okay , he could leave. It was likewise Salvati who drove me, Anny and the Hindi writer Lakshmi Lal across mountain ranges to pay homage to the Hermit of Monteluco, banging the chassis of his new car as he heaved over bumps, without complaint. How patiently he waited for us outside, pacing, his hands folded behind his back, his goateed chin folded into his neck, while we held our inquisition. it was also Salvati who nearly broke my heart one night when he told me about his little cagnolino losing its tongue after a snapping turtle snapped it off, so that the poor dog could no longer eat and had to be euthanized. We parked the cab in Piazza Liberta’ and drank a bottle of wine together at Bar Canasta, both of us staring at Desiree in my lap, suddenly so vulnerable seeming and ephemeral, all of us, especially dogs—here today, gone tomorrow.

My emotional life does not run as deep with Salvati’s counterpart, Roberto, but his is the card I keep in my wallet, the number I dial when I find myself on the late train, after the buses stop running at nine. It is always, always such a desperate decision—to spend 10 euro for a ride up a hill I used to climb on principle the way people sometimes dash up stairs, to burn enough calories to justify pizza. His card seems always to surface as celestial announcement—white among colorful euro bills, the grill of his taxi in watercolor, the headlights staring eyes, and his phone-number, already programmed into my cell-phone, announcing itself like a dare. Roberto is, frankly, a gorgeous young man, a Prince Charming with flowing golden locks, deep dimples, a William Hurt moody stare and granny glasses. He doesn’t tell me stories about dogs losing their tongues or hermits buying toilet paper in the supermarket; he simply beams his mysterious presence over my comings and goings. It’s Roberto who blinks in on the ethers when I return by train after weeks or even months in the states. It’s Roberto who appears when girl friends visit and pool their resources for a 4 a.m. taxi to Rome. And never does his appearance seem incidental, but rather angelic visitation, timely intervention, as though he were a fleet footed courier responding to my silent—or not so silent—call.

Last night I got stranded in Foligno. I was late breaking away from school anyway and then discovered that my train connection in Fologino was running two hours late, meaning that I would not get home until nearly midnight. I knew I could walk up the hill and should walk up the hill—I wasn’t even lugging my computer as I usually do, and what a lovely night full of stars it was to be out in the fresh air walking. But I started worrying about Desiree, poor abandoned Desiree, sitting there so pert and trusting on the lamb-skin cushion of her imprisoning crate. Twelve hours she’d been waiting for me, her little bladder had been waiting, her little soul—and certainly she deserved any possible strategy I could come up with to expedite my return.

“Ah, Cinzia, mi dispiace, non posso,” Roberto’s voice reached me over my cell phone coming out in an almost annoyed sigh. I didn’t want to imagine what I may have interrupted.

There are other taxisti in Spoleto—maybe four in all, but for some reason the older two are never waiting for me, do not know me, cannot call me by name; in fact, I do not think that in six years I have ever taken a ride in either of their taxis. I thought perhaps that this night of nights I’d break the spell Salvati and Roberto have cast on my life; I’d find one of the others awaiting me, a groom beside his golden pumpkin of a coach, a gloved hand poised to open the door to my deliverance. But a part of me knew better than to expect any taxi to be waiting in the off-season after midnight and I steeled myself to climb a mountain.

How astonished I was, stepping off the train, to discover a town too giddy with life to belong to so late an hour—teenagers in silvery shoes, gunning their engines, a scintillating giggly essence to the air, and I so much a part of the night that penetrating it, on foot, directly, intimately was so natural as to eclipse all memory of taxis or taxisti. My only regret was that I did not have my puppy-dog prancing at my heels—but in no time we were dancing together under the moon on the terrace, thoughts of abandonment, of momentary exiles in train stations and dog crates, snuffed out as though by anesthesia.

What to Wear with Cancer

The woman dying in the bed next to Mallary’s really was reading a book called, What to Wear with Cancer. That’s the second thing Mallary had noticed about her after noticing the contents of the suitcase the woman had unpacked— the silk pajamas and cashmere wraps, the satiny underpants and bras with lace that didn’t curl, the hospital wardrobe that immediately confirmed all Mallary’s notions about Italian women and fashion, perhaps an absurd obsession with fashion, given that this woman had come to have her stomach removed and radiated outside of her body for days in a new last-resort experimental procedure to extend her life.

Mallary could not believe that the woman was as sick as she was, given her cheerfulness and insistence on popping out of bed every time Mallary moaned in order to rub Mallary’s temples or kiss her cheeks or show her a picture of a beautiful dead sister; Mallary looked just like the sister, the woman insisted—the exact same waist-length dark curls!-- though Mallary couldn’t see it, despite how flattering the comparison. The resemblance was such a comfort to the woman who had not yet gone in for her surgery; it seemed as though the sister had stepped into the room to watch over them both—a guardian angel. Mallary had been in Perugia only two days when her appendix burst and she’d been rushed to Silvistrini Hospital not knowing a word of Italian, her parents in route but still 24 hours away. The cancer-riddled woman had kissed the picture of her dead sister, uttering prayers, possibly weeping as burly attendants hoisted Mallary onto the gurney to wheel her toward surgery. When Mallary woke up with a drain in her side, the first thing she’d seen was the woman’s pixie face, made up to perfection, hovering over her like an angel; nothing about her had looked sick.

The time came for the woman to go under the knife and, the night before, Mallary wished she were capable of standing up, getting out of bed, getting out of the room, out of the way so her room-mate could say what she needed to say to her husband and seven year old son and mother and mother-in-law and cousin Agnese, and brother Filippo, and the priest who came and prayed over her, kissing the cross and waving it over her like a wand. Everyone was crying, everyone except the woman who kept saying things in words Mallary could not understand and blowing kisses while her son with a wizened, knowing face sat at the foot of her bed twisting the sheet around his arm.

When the woman awoke from anesthesia the first thing she did is smile at Mallary as though greeting a friend she’d thought she’d lost. She seemed too happy to have been through such physical trauma and Mallary felt sudden shame that she had moaned and carried on like such an American over a mere appendix. Now this woman was to learn that the cancer had invaded too many of her organs for the surgeons to do the trick they’d had in mind with her stomach . They had opened her abdomen, stood back in horror, then closed her up again to let her die of the same kind of cancer that had killed her sister.

A mere two weeks after surgery, Mallary has caught up with her school work, comes to class, is going with me this weekend to an agriturismo near Gubbio—ready, she says, to walk in the wild and see the sights that had originally drawn her to Italy. But the real beauty of Italy exists elsewhere, she’s sure, and she’s still trying to find it and name it as she makes her daily visits to the hospital, bringing her new friend bright scarves, flea-market bracelets, trendy camouflage vests embroidered with roses—outfits sure to shock and dazzle the many visitors who flock to the woman’s bedside to discover what on earth she’ll wear next.

My Pranzo with Vincenzo

He approached my table to borrow a chair, explaining that his two wives would be joining him as soon as the train arrived from Rome. He lived in Spoleto now, with his nurse, because it was easier for him in Spoleto where people could come take care of him and he could paint all day—he was a painter, had in fact done all the paintings in the restaurant, watercolors of fruits and vegetables. He had a sack—you know, what they give you when they cut out your intestines. He patted it gently. Diverticulitis, he explained. In Spoleto the nurse comes and takes care of him and someone else comes to cut his toe-nails and his wife stays in Rome with her mother who is missing a leg. If he ever needs her, though, she hops on the train and gets here in a flash. He can call at two in the morning—anytime, and she will come. She and the nurse (wasn’t really his second wife, but he liked to pretend) would be here any minute to join him for pranzo. That’s why he needed the other chair—so he’d have two free and another on which to put his folded up overcoat and red scarf and hat.

He was a dapper fellow in a baby blue cashmere V-neck and bow-tie, white haired, eyes as blue and soft as the sweater; he smelled like baby-powder. He asked me if I was Dutch or German and when I told him I was American he said he’d been to every country in the world at one time or another except the United States because he had been sure it held no surprises. India, China, Peru were interesting because so different; to see America all he had to do was turn on the TV. He showed me he knew how to speak English by uttering phrases he remembered from a textbook: “How are you today? Would you like some tea?” He giggled at himself and asked me how I’d come to know Italian. I told him about my life and job and interests.

He told me that when he was in the hospital getting his intestines cut out, they had given him more than the usual dose of morphine. They had promised him, while giving the morphine, that there is one thing in life one can never lose, even under the influence of morphine: and that’s intelligence and culture. You can lose your mother, lose your wife, lose all your relatives, lose your legs, lose everything, but even in a concentration camp they can’t take away your intelligence and culture. His father had been in a concentration camp for two years. They’d all been fascists till they caught on to what fascism was. A pack of lies is what Mussolini had told them. Everyone was fascist until they caught on. Spoletini are still fascists—I had to watch out for them. But even his father had said what the nurse had told him: you can never lose intelligence or culture.

He’d met a woman in the hospital who had lost one leg to diabetes and had just learned that she would have to have the other leg amputated. She told the doctor she would rather die than have her grandchildren see her with no legs. She was adamant: no way would she endure the operation. “Do you really think your grandchildren would rather lose you altogether than see you without legs?” the man told me he’d asked the unfortunate woman. “I said this because it came in mind for me to say it. It just came out of my mouth.” Then he’d heard much later from the doctor that those words had changed the woman’s life. She’d had the operation and was doing fine and had even told the doctor to thank the man, Vincenzo, who had calmed her down that day.

This is the beauty of life. You do something so small and it turns out to be so big. These are le belle cose…the beautiful things of life.

I finished my zuppa di farro about the time two young-looking women arrived, taking the chairs on either side of Vincenzo. They both looked like ageing fashion-models, in elegant wools and boots. “My two wives,” Vincenzo grinned at me and then told his wives he’d like to introduce them to his American lover. As I was leaving the restaurant I could hear him telling them stories about me, stories I hadn’t remembered even sharing with him that were nonetheless true.

Pizza Night Puzzlements

We are gathered at Sacrestia to re-establish our Saturday night rite: Pizza Night with Bente and Merisa. For a time we went to another a pizzeria because Daniela wanted to support the young family who had opened it, especially after a group of my students nearly burned down their Monteluco hotel while building a bonfire in their fireplace. Then Bente had been diagnosed with liver cancer and had spent most of the winter in the hospital and the summer and fall adjusting to a specialized diet the doctors had prescribed and subsequent months adjusting to the impact of chemo on her appetite. It really is the first time the four of us have celebrated Pizza Night together in a year. Bente has lost 16 kilos she never had to lose and looks gaunt in her gabardine suit with a spilla—lapel pin—shaped like a leaf or a feather of tiny pearls. Merisa remarks how much she likes the pin and Daniela remarks she has one just like it that her mother had bought her in Spain when they’d traveled there, just the two of them, when Daniela was a girl. Bente remarks that she likewise bought her pin in Spain but was already married and so not a girl—but it could have been at the same time Daniela had gotten hers, given Bente is so much older. I tell them both I’ve decided it is a feather—because the fronds of pearls are so delicate.

The boy named Matteo who knows I eat only the Mezzanotte—arugula, tomato and smoked provola cheese--says outright that he will make it a quarter of the normal size out of respect for my diet. He likewise knows also what each of my friends will order, even after a year, and it amazes us all that he remembers and, not only that he remembers, but that we are all so predictable without knowing how predictable we are…or was it the power of suggestion, his telling us what we liked and reminding us how good it was the last time we were here, so that the idea of choice and full menus of choices, eludes us or seems to interfere with the more crucial things we have to talk about.

Tonight the gossip concerns a woman in town who was once engaged to a twin. For years the woman was the lover of this man we will call Federico. Then they’d had the kind of lover’s spat that lovers tend to have and she’d gone along mourning him for maybe a year until they’d suddenly encountered each other per strada not too long ago—must have been six or seven months ago, given the size of her pregnant belly. The thing was: It was not Federico she’d encountered and gone to bed with, but the twin, Franco…and after one night of love making she’d conceived a baby without knowing that the baby was the baby of a stranger. The deceit had so enraged the woman that she’d sought DNA testing and taken the imposter to court to sue for moral damages. She had learned that identical twins have the exact same DNA so that it was impossible to prove which twin had fathered the baby, but she’d nevertheless won the law suit—50, 000 euro in “moral damages” plus eighteen years of child support for the offspring of that one night of dark pleasure.

I think it’s hilarious, Daniela hoots—perfect justice. She could have taken the pill or, better yet, practiced abstinence. “Pensa!” Merisa says, astonished, as this is the first she’s heard the story and was widowed recently after having been married to only one man for fifty years. Bente is the one who loves to chatter and has recounted the details of this tryst, both for its surprise value and the mystery—just imagine, she turns to Merisa—if Maurizio had had a twin and you’d made love to his double! Merisa turns a little pale at the thought and then blushes.

I don’t buy it, I interrupt—I’m sorry. I don’t believe she could not tell the difference. Even if the two men had the exact same body (the one twin was shorter, Bente interjects) their maniera would be different, especially in bed. Tell me you wouldn’t know the touch of your lover from that of a stranger! I just don’t buy it!

Certo, certo, any woman would recognize her lover’s touch, Daniela proclaims as though she and I had reversed the court’s verdict and could now set right all the world’s injustices. “Vero, Merisa? Vero, Bente?” You would think I were the oracle given the queasy way the two older women look at me, perhaps assuming I've known too many lovers if I have figured this out. Daniela alone is delighted that we have stumbled upon such clear and irrefutable evidence.

Matteo with his sweet always-sleepy looking face and murmur-y way of addressing us, dispels the sudden awkwardness with an on-the-house plate of struzzichini—fried mozzarella, a rice ball, a potato ball, each of which Daniela cuts into four liliputian slices in honor of Cinzia’s ever-precarious diet.

“I think I agree with Cinzia,” Merisa suddenly announces—la spilla, your pin, Bente—it is a feather. All this time I saw a leaf, but now that I see a feather I can’t stop seeing the feather. Do you agree Daniela?

Per dire la verita, Daniela says to all of us, amused by her own silliness—I see una spilla, a piece of jewelry, white gold that is not really white gold and tiny pearls that at any moment could fall off the fragile wire they’ve been clinging to for fifty years. Mine is bent entirely out of shape at this point. Bente, how have you kept yours intact?

We all look at Bente’s pin and then at Bente, who we remark looks extraordinarily well for all she's been through. How delighted we are that she’s going against doctor’s orders and splashing red wine into her water.

Barbabietola

I think I resisted beets as a child because they reminded me of some inner organ, like the liver, a little calcified, at least hardened by maybe cancer, as it sat there, cross-sectioned, bleeding on my plate…bleeding all over my plate, staining the respectable broccoli and even the mashed potatoes, its presence far too vivid and insistent. The taste was too strong as well. I think the beets my mother pushed on me were pickled and too vinegary, the beet’s inherent sweetness also strangely per-fumey, the fumes doing something to the inside of my sinuses and the back of my throat. It seemed utterly duplicitous the way my mother would carve off a little piece of beet-flesh, caught almost squirming on her fork prongs, and bring it so reverently toward her mouth, saying it’s fine, fine if you don’t like them because that merely means more for me.

I think I recall even Beet Gerber baby food, poised on the shelves looking like jars of coagulating blood. I think I recall her dipping the baby spoon in the jar to feed the clots to my little sister. There are very few foods I resist on principle, very few foods I frankly do not like. “I will eat anything that does not eat me first,” I used to joke with friends, because truly my tastes are encompassing and eclectic. “Except beets,” I would qualify. Beets, I surmised, may indeed have the capacity to “eat me first”—or perhaps suggest something that has already been eaten, digested, and converted into something else I didn't want to know.

Then arrived this past summer and the month of July when I was visiting my friend Anny, helping her, when the weather would permit, in her lush garden in Lisores, France. “We’ve got to do something with all these beets,” she proclaimed early in the adventure, yanking them up in great clumps of dirt by the purple stained greens that grew so innocuously from the muddy earth. She’d already initiated me by cooking the purplish Swiss Chard in Crème Fraiche du Normandie—there was a slightly beety tang to the chard, and a diluted bloodishness to the purple that puddled my plate. I did not want to offend or seem too childish in my disdain; I confessed that in truth I did not like beets, but insisted that I would face one, come to terms with one, if she insisted.

How generous she was the night she made red flannel hash to offer to leave the beets out of my portion, cook simply the corned beef and potatoes in a cream sauce for me. I was tempted to allow her to do this for me though it seemed like cowardice on my part and also seemed incomplete somehow, a recipe stripped of its essential ingredient so off-balance as to be genetically defective in a certain sense and liable to do the body harm. No, no, no, I insisted, I would go the distance.

Everyone remembers the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, and remembers the wordless two pages on which Sam-I-Am pauses before the fork offering his mouth the green eggs and ham. The silence is iconic, the certain adjustments taking place in the psyche of the one who is going to ingest what once disgusted him. I faced a Sam-I-Am moment before Anny’s red flannel hash, but then found as did in fact Sam-I-Am himself—I do, I do, I do like Anny’s red flannel hash; the French mustard and salty corned beef somehow cut the beet-sweetness in a way that made it palatable, more than palatable, even good, even wondrous, even delicious enough that I think I ate the leftovers three meals running, long after others at the table had moved on to duck and certain pates.

I still would not have considered myself a convert to beets. Even having enjoyed Anny’s red flannel hash, I was not convinced that it was the beets that had made the dish for me or that I would ever want to replicate the dish and certainly I did not imagine that I would buy beets on my own and figure out a way to deal with them. This moment of truth arose just the other night as I was following my resolution to eat only locally what I can buy at Antonio’s alimentaria up the street. Antonio is a co-conspirator in my diet and effort to live the politics expressed in so many of the books I’ve recently been reading. Desiree and I drop into Antonio’s daily after giri and he will announce what new variety of epicurean delight he has to offer my day--watermelon, zucchini flowers, a certain golden apple. And then Tuesday, he announced he had fresh barbabietole. I did not even know the word, did not know what barbabietola was, but it sounded promising. In the spirit of my newfound lust for the unusual, for getting past certain cravings and learning to want only what IS…I agreed to a cena of barbabietole and Antonio reached his hirsute hand into one of the crates gaping open near the cash register and did a little Ta-Da as he pulled out the globulous bunch of beets.

Oh, beets, I thought. Barbabietola means beet.

Two beets last forever if you are a single woman. These two were bigger than my fist, the waxy uncooked purple hardly indicative of the bleeding beasts themselves. I spent half a morning on the internet seeking out beet recipes. Borscht and pickled beets seemed most prevalent and I knew I needed mustard on mine, even if the corned beef was impossible given my resolutions and uncertainty that corned beef exists in Italy. It took all day for me to learn how to roast them and make a creamy mustard sauce, but I did, and perhaps they were as delectable as they were less for their intrinsic value as unique food as for what they represented in my quest to live in deeper more open and adventurous ways. I had mastered the beet and rendered the disgusting delectable. Now I could practice with the Buddhist meditation Tonglen—breathing in all that is bad in the world to breathe out only goodness, peace and joy--and somehow mean it in a more convincing way.

How delighted I was to find an email from Anny that night after gorging on the very meal she had somehow made possible for me. It was communion, I told her, a kind of pagan eucharist—how our souls had found each other this day of days that I had chosen to conquer my resistance to the Is-ness of Beet-ness. She’d been trying to call the entire time I’d been seeking out recipes. How wondrous is this? I wrote back. I thought perhaps she believed I was making too much of too small a thing, as usual. But she gets it.

Deus est Caritas

We had already done eight giri—eight kilometers!—when Daniela asked me to climb the mountain with her. It was the Festa di San Francesco—October 4th, the anniversary of his death—and she’d heard from Bente and Merisa that there would be a special mass followed by a cena at the Chiesa di San Francesco at the top of my mountain, in the very chapel where I’d experienced a miracle my first summer in Spoleto. All the little old ladies would be driving up with their offerings of pizza and lasagna and crostate. She thought it would be just the thing if we hiked up with the dogs and met them at Mass, participated in the feast, and then got a ride back down the mountain with one of them—since it would, by nine o’clock certainly, be dark.

It’s not as easy as it used to be to get to the summit of Monteluco. First of all they closed the ponte—the lovely aqueduct that traverses the valley between the hill Spoleto Centro sits on and Monteluco. Now you have to walk down to the Agip gas station and cross the highway, walk on the shoulder of the curving main road up the mountain and pray that a motorist doesn’t come hurling around a hairpin turn to knock you to your doom. Then technically one is supposed to be able to pick up the Monteluco path where the road meets the other side of the ponte, as Daniela and I had done a mere two weeks before, but now discovered we could no longer do—because a huge wall had suddenly been constructed to prevent hikers from climbing up the first gravely tier of the path.

What were two women and two dogs (we’d brought only Desiree and Tarontola) to do?

Valkyrie-like, two cyclists whizzed by us as we stood in the middle of the asphalt cursing the wall and construction in general that had rendered Spoleto a rat’s maze full of dead-ends and impossible detours. I had the sudden sense to call out after the cyclists—did they know a way up to Monteluco?—and one called back over his or her shoulder (impossible to tell whether man or woman given the helmet and goggles and blur-of-colors; even the voice itself was wind in my ears) that we could pick up another path just up ahead on the left and follow the red marks—on stones or tree-trunks—to our longed-for destination.

We trusted and did as we were told, but there followed a struggle against time, against the limitations of the human body, against the limitations of canine bodies that weigh less than 4 kilograms and wend their way on wee little dachshund legs. We faced a veritable allegory of trust and persistence, not knowing the path or believing it would lead us where we wanted to go, not having any way of gauging where we were on the path, how much distance we had covered or how much distance yet remained. The minute hand on my fat-faced watch quivered strangely as though will or might could hold back time just long enough for us to reach the pew in the church where Merisa and Bente and other women were awaiting us, their purses poised discretely to save our seats. I’d breathe deeply and trust only to blink my eyes and find the minute-hand bounding forward, twenty minutes, now only ten minutes left to get there and not knowing even if we could get anywhere following the path we had found. Time and space seemed to reach mysterious conjunctions, to participate in a new physics, as we negotiated stopping for a moment to catch our breaths and chug at our Nygene bottles bursting with tap water, splashing a bit in our palms for the dogs to lap at, though they would not lap, so eager did they seem to yank us toward our destination.

We made it to the Mass before our old lady-friends arrived in their gabardine suits, silk scarves, polished pumps. We took up an entire back row of chairs in the chapel specially opened for the occasion. It wasn’t a Eucharist Mass, but a Rosary Mass—all the decades of the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Marys and Gloria Patrias. The dogs were panting and we were sweating; it seemed almost sacrilege to be among these primped and powdered worshippers with our sweat rings so visible under the arms of our cotton tees, my entire back so sweaty that when I’d stand to sing between decades I could see little puddles of myself evaporating in the seat behind me. But there was something so mystical about a mountain high—that amazing rush of adrenaline and too much oxygen—heightened by the the incessant reciting of the rosary prayers. In between decades, after the Gloria patria, reciting da secoli a secoli all the congregants would wink open one of their prayer-closed eyes to watch the mystery of dogs in church, sitting there on our laps so sentient as though the dogs themselves were likewise deep in prayer, a witness to the movement of the spirit.

Time fell away from us completely when we stepped into the brother’s medieval dining hall and climbed up high on the benches, our backs against the wall as we faced the narrow boards that serve as tables. Ten fratti and four priests live in this particular convent, replete with their brown hooded robes cinched by ropes around the waist, their bare toes wiggling out of Birkenstocks. Six or seven postulants in jeans and sweatshirts were including among them, boys really, hippy-ish adolescents no older than my students, on the brink of committing their lives to the church. How young and full of pranks they seemed as they danced platters and platters of food before us: here a plate of salame, of prociutto, of pizza a rosmarino; here the pasta dishes, Bianca, Spoletina, Lasagna; here the fresh tomatoes, cut in oblong halves, too pink inside, but nevertheless garden-tasty, now the wild boar in a secret recipe, the roast pheasant and game hen; here the zuppa inglese, the tiramisu, and the crostate di moro made by Merisa. While we ate, the boys played guitar and sang folksy songs about new life in the spirit—jumping up and down and swinging their arms in gestures meant to indicate how each of us was included—embraced by the occasion. Bente sat to my right whispering to me that even the jugs of wine were blessed by God –vino benedetto--and could not make me drunk or hurt her liver—just a little more, a little more—dai!—what an occasion it was.

I had the distinct impression that something metaphysical had shifted at the moment Daniela and I had lost our habitual footing on the path we knew. I turned to fill her glass from the jug of deep red Montepulciano wine and found her so radiant on the bench beside of me, Tarantola poised sleepily in the crook of her elbow as Desiree was poised on the crook of mine. Out of her eyes a new light seemed to shine, her smile, her entire face seemed to have taken on a deeper resonance of some mysterious familiar as we nodded in recognition and agreement about something we are still at a loss to name.