Degrees of Separation
I could smell the rain and hear the rolling
thunder. Its early drops lifted dust
into the air that the breeze caught and sent inside through an open
window. The scent of damp, vintage earth
dominated just before the timpani-like pitter patter of more serious
drops. The patina of Italy hung in the
air as it hung on everything, an amalgam of old and familiar worn down by the
centuries. You couldn’t have it any
other way in Italy. It was about then
that I recalled why I loved this place, every aspect of it, the good and bad,
the sweet and sour. Every time I return to Italy, my sense of excitement is immediate, for it's like seeing it for the first time, both its smooth skin and pimply blemishes.
Since birth, my branch on some obscure limb
of the human race went in one direction, my Italian friends and acquaintances, fed
by altogether different
roots, in another.
It’s to be expected. Though much
alike, we differ on how life has been served up, in our experiences, our
inherited traditions, opportunities at hand, the shelter and nurturing of family,
and in many other influential ways difficult to quantify. Each in this chain of individual circumstance has had a hand in making us who we are. They represent degrees
of separation, but degrees nevertheless.
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| Fitting into Italian Culture |
As I sat there, I questioned whether the
tiny bug flitting and bumping across my laptop screen know of the electronics, let
alone anything like the Internet portal it could access? Could it possibly comprehend a different
world so unlike its own? By every measure, we were dimensions apart. Likewise, the experience of Italy for me
differs from that of my Calitri neighbors, for although we may both sense it
the same --- our eyes see the same scenes, our ears share its sounds, our
mouths taste its bounty --- it is again the ‘processing’ behind the screen that
is so different. Just as I’d lately been
hearing ‘Upgrade to Windows 10’, it caused me to pause and wonder, did I need a
new operating system?
For me, an Italian wannabe, ever the
observer,
I might watch their religious processions, but have no feel for the depth of
their devotion. I can inwardly scoff at
their notion of a breeze being the culprit for who knows how many ailments, even
when mouthed by a doctor, but then I was not there on their mother’s lap to
hear the instruction on its whys and whatfors.
I can enjoy a glass of wine mid-afternoon and not understand their
hesitation to join me, preferring instead to only drink wine with a meal, and
one served in courses, not on a single plate, all at once.
But I sense that meals by
installment like these, as Italians prefer, in addition to their claimed
gastronomic advantages, reflect a covenant with family evidenced by the hours they
spend around the table in conversation. To
know each other better, they relate their experiences and share traditions over
mouthfuls. True, Italians pay far more
attention to family, for families are its strengthening agent, their culture’s mortar. Here is an entire country of nation-state
like families, sometimes approaching tribal status in their size, able to
eclipse the notion of nationalism.
Equally
baffling is the male penchant to wear beautifully crafted Italian leather shoes
without socks. Could an Isod or Ralph
Lauren icon adorned sock be so distracting?
I’ve heard it said not to judge someone until you’ve walked in their
shoes, but please don’t make it a long walk for my feet, not accustomed to
living in sockless loafers, would surely blister quickly. The unintended consequence, though I might
look stylish, would be a limp. I doubt
it would be worth it. Hear
me out, I’m not complaining here. These
and many other little mysteries fascinate and intrigue me. Nor, like some proselytizing imperialist, am
I trying to foist what I might think as best.
At most, as I adjust to the culture, I’m reflecting on observations someone
visiting Italy for a week or two might easily miss.
Recently, while we were sitting outside a
café enjoying a gelato, an illustrative incident played out. A local traffic enforcement officer, a Barney
Fife sort, was trying to do his job. It
seemed that a car had parked beyond a sign marking the end of legal parking. Why he cared about this particular vehicle is
one of those mysteries, especially in light of the crazy way vehicles are parked
all over town, even on the sidewalks, sometimes nosed into the curb. If you think double parking as you might see
it in New York or Chicago is bad, you haven’t seen anything. I wondered why he bothered to enforce such a
minor infraction. Seeing we had a new
mayor, maybe the comune was cracking
down or had he a quota to fill? I doubted
either were in play. In any case, the
antics that ensued were what made it so interesting to watch, a street comedy descriptive
of Italian ways.
First
he examined the empty car, walking around the offender’s vehicle as if sizing up
an opponent in the ring. He took notes,
then back on the sidewalk, indignantly paced back and forth for a while. With a jutting chin motion he even gestured
to Maria Elena and me, silently asking if the car might be ours. By
this time the word was out and people began to take interest. I think this was part of his plan … for the
driver to appear and move the car thus avoiding the need for a ticket. It seemed he really didn’t want to write a
ticket. After all, Calitri was a small
town and he had to live among these drivers, regardless of their driving, or in
this case, their parking habits. It was
a tug-of-war between the controls of officialdom verses the continued embrace
of family and friends. How to be
disciplinarian and one of them at the same time must have been an ever present
challenge for him, but he apparently had developed a way to deal with it.
When the strutting, jutting and puffing hadn’t worked, he next blew his whistle and shouted ‘cinque minuti’ (five minutes). No one could say he had not tried to offer a way out, face-saving for both himself and the driver. By this time a pool of limone flavored creamy liquid was my deserved reward for my lack of attention to my cup of gelato. This was entertainment for us. While we had never experienced it, most likely this was standard procedure. As this entertainment continued to unfold, curiosity had gotten my attention, not my tarty confection. The whistle had its effect. If by then someone hadn’t noticed what was going on, it got their attention, testified to by the number of people who emerged from storefronts into the street, many the proprietors themselves in their aprons, some none too happy. Along with them and before the whistled deadline had expired, a man appeared from a nearby doorway, protested loudly to affirm his innocence, and hustled to his car. Funny thing was, so much time had elapsed by then, with cars coming and going, that the offender simple moved his car back a few feet into a freed-up space, out of no-man’s-land. Barney simply adjusted his cap, flipped his ticket book closed and strode off with an added spring in his step, proud of the duty he’d performed in maintaining order.
I
can't imagine getting a break like this anywhere else. I think it is a part of the Italian mindset to
seek to please and thereby avoid confrontation.
Similar to the Japanese, Italians, not willing to lose face or damage
their bella figura (or that of another
person’s), will see a traffic officer opt not to issue a ticket but rather seek
harmony by seeing the situation rectified, no matter how long the delay. He wasn't shirking his responsibility, only
delaying its impact sufficiently to allow the transgressor a chance to correct
the infraction, giving both wiggle-room and a chance to save face, avoiding any
blemishes.
It’s not just cars that are placed in wrong
places. Many times people ‘park’ themselves
in the way. In Italy people tend to
plunk themselves just outside a doorway or stand smack dab in the center of a
sidewalk, oftentimes ‘parked’ there, talking with friends. They also do the same while seated in their
cars, not concerned that traffic is backing up behind them. As you approach, they don’t move aside or
otherwise attempt to step out of the way.
Right of way seems a foreign idea.
Funny thing here is that these human pillars are not oblivious to your presence. They appear to know you are there, but rather
then move to let you pass, they seem to prefer to stand their ground as you
attempt to squeeze by. To this day we
wonder, might it be a ‘king of the mountain’ or ‘I was here first’ attitude’? Next time, I should ask.
At other times, the situation can be far
from amusing. A recent three month stay
in Italy is enough time for blemishes to emerge on any idyllic complexion. I recall one incident in particular. An Italian man, living in Belgium these many
years, in a humoring tone had just uttered, “This is Italy, not the USA.” He couldn’t have spoken truer
words at that
moment just after I’d scooped up our granddaughter, Harper, from the pool. She had somehow managed to cut her toe in a
hotel swimming pool alongside the Gulf of Salerno, not far from the once lost
city of Paestum. Harper’s parents were,
at that moment, off visiting Positano and we were watching our grandchildren,
Harper and Gabriella, for the day. Some
hours at the pool seemed a perfect way to spend the afternoon.
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| Poolside |
At the sight of her own blood, Harper had cried
and carried on like death was at her doorstep.
The lifeguard, who among his many apparent duties also cleaned the pool
and arranged the lounge furniture, hadn’t a clue on what to do in view of the
situation. The term ‘lifeguard’ may just
as well have been an honorary title … we assumed he could swim. You
would have thought this was the first time anyone had injured themselves
poolside --- nothing close to a first aid kit existed. A towel would have to suffice temporarily.
We’d been talking with the Italian
expatriate, now from Brussels, by poolside when this happened. The expat was spot on with his assessment of
the situation and his coded insinuation about the evident lack of preparedness.
While nonna Maria Elena worked to comfort Harper and convince her all
would soon be all-right, I headed for the reception desk for some help or at
least a fasciatura (bandage). My body language was apparently not enough to
relay my urgency, for it only merited a raised finger from the receptionist as
I waited for her to put the phone down. I
should confess, I have no patience these days. I’m pretty sure I may never have had any. As old as I am, I think I have a negative
balance in my patience account. As large
as it is, I’m certain, like the national debt, it will never be repaid. I think it may stem from wanting to do things
for myself, beginning in my youth. A
shrink might be able to better assess the cause of my patience deficiency, but
I lack the patience to wait for him or her to make that determination. The receptionist eventually got the message,
went into the back room and returned with something akin to a BandAid. Soon calmed, patched and once again silent,
Harper fell asleep in her grandmother’s arms.
Raised eyebrows from the Italian-Belgian across the span of a few chaise
lounges served as a silent ‘I told you so’, reaffirming his point.
Another pimple on an otherwise appealing
appearance is my general impression that things are for the most part vague in
Italy. Yes, that’s one way to
characterize it, the ambiguous nature of things. I know I need to embrace and accept it, for
this is the way things are. This quirk
is, along with everything else, what makes Italy so phenomenal and worthy of
return visit after visit. All the same,
it still manages to fray my ghost of a patience further. Even some Italians feel this haze of
vagueness, especially if they have lived elsewhere during their lives. Most often, at least for us, it is best
illustrated in the difficulty of getting a straight, reliable answer.
Let’s say, for example, that you need
someone to repair something in your home.
The best you might get is the promise that they will come by tomorrow or
dopo domani (the
day after tomorrow). If you press them
to be more specific, which is a logical follow-up question, they may go so far
as to specify di mattina (in the
morning) or nel pomeriggio (in the afternoon).
Once in a blue moon you may get some range of time, like 10-12, but how
many blue moons have you seen? In the
meantime, you await their arrival, a prisoner in your home, for fear you might
miss them and have to start over again. Why
this is, remains a mystery to us. We
suspect that whatever they tell you, their intent is to make the current
situation acceptable and keep you happy. It lends itself to their desire not to
disappoint. By providing, and our
acceptance of only the barest of specifics (‘in a few days’, ‘next week’, or ‘I
will call you’), the severity of any failure to appear is mitigated. For our part, we must strive to get over the urgent
tug for the immediate, learn to relax, and remember the Belgian’s words.
Instructions can also be lightweight and
half-measured, requiring return visits to get the full story. Case in point was a Wi-Fi hotspot device we
once purchased. We were given instructions
on how to activate it, but once home, it asked for a password. As said to Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “We
don’t need no stinkin badges!” apparently we did. No one said anything about a stinkin password,
however! True, some of my confusion can
be attributed to miss-hearing and errors in translating what’s being said, but
it’s just too often. Back once again, we
were given the missing password, but that wasn’t all of it. The day we purchased the device we went away believing
we had so many gigabits of data before we needed a replenishment. We therefore watched our usage and husbanded
our bytes. However, well before we’d hit
the magic limit, it stopped working. Once
again we returned to the store, only to be then told the second half of the equation. It turned out there were indeed so many gigs
but with the added caveat of 30 days, whichever occurred first! Ah, so we’d exceeded the 30 days, but why not
tell us the whole story up front? Did
the owner simply enjoy seeing us? I was
a big boy and positive I could handle the full story up front. Apparently, much like an Italian meal,
directions appear to come in installments, where you are fed morsels of
information, piano, piano (slowly,
slowly).
While I'm about verbalizing some of the cultural
practices I've seen or perceived, there is another incident that comes to mind. Maria Elena brought an electric heating pad
with her from the States to deal with aches and pains. I managed to quickly destroy it one midnight
when I was awakened with a nudge. Not
thinking, instead of first connecting it to a transformer, I simply attached an
American to Italian pin adopter and inserted it into a 220V outlet. As you might imagine, something in the electrical
translation didn’t add up. It was a
quick death by electrocution, the only sound my gasping realization at what I’d
done.
At first our fallback was the wet towel in
the microwave approach. But while I
could get them scalding hot if I tried, it was short lived and because of that,
didn’t help Mare one iota during the long night. Besides, telling from my midnight escapade, there
was no telling what I might have managed to do late at night when awakened to
recycle the towel once again in the microwave.
We quickly came to the obvious conclusion - we needed another heating
pad. Our first thought was to borrow one
from a friend. We did this but quickly
discovered it was intermittent and therefore not reliable. We needed to purchase one for ourselves and
thus officially began the saga of the heating pad.
First off, Mare visited everyplace she imagined
might carry them in Calitri including pharmacies and electrical stores. She was looking for something akin to a cuscinetto calda electtrica (electric
heating pad). They seemed to have never
heard of them. About the closest thing
they could produce was a rubberized hot water bottle. This was surprising considering the advanced average
age of the local population, and as you might expect, a resulting high demand. Realize that we come from an on-demand,
consumer society specializing in immediate gratification (certainly I think a
large part of our problem), nevertheless, my nature told me that by then I
could have found a hundred of them, mostly, I was pretty sure, in a single WalMart.
We then entered a heating pad road-trip
phase as we scoured the countryside, not for a hundred, but simply one. Again, I realized I needed to slow down and
give it time. I was after all dealing
with the piano-piano approach of Italy.
Even the search, I suspected, would need
to go slowly. We first drove to Lioni, about
thirty minutes away, to the Euronics
electrical appliance store there. Here
too we had no success and were directed to the Garafolo store in a nearby mall. We had an idea where it was, but again while
they had none, they assured us they could in two weeks. Impatient and unwilling to wait that long, we
kept searching. Later it was suggested
that we try the nearby Para Farmacia. This too proved fruitless. While they had none in stock, the pharmacist, after googling a bit,
said she could have one in a few days if we were willing to return. At least delivery times were improving. We held out hope for a quicker solution
however, and in a last-chance effort, stopped in Conza once on our way back to
Calitri. That too was fruitless. About then I thought that if there was a
business to be had in these parts, it had to be the electric heating pad
business! Having exhausted any chance of
a nearby source, our only hope was to take a chance and order one, sight unseen,
something we like many shoppers don't like to do. We took the plunge at a local Calitri pharmacy,
where we were assured we’d have it the next morning. I wondered what had happened to that
piano-piano Italian style. Was this just
their way to tell us what we wanted to hear?
Saints be praised, as promised it arrived
the next morning.
It was a beauty too,
with five heat settings on a fancy digital control pad, and for more uniform
heat, it was filled with sand. The only
problem was, the best it could do was get warm, not as hot as Mare
expected. Why bother with five temperature
settings when they were hard to tell apart? I hated to see it go but we returned it
immediately, without any problem, and were offered the explanation that the low
heat was a safety feature verses older type pads, apparently the kind we were used
to. My guess the Chinese, who made the
pad (like everything else it seems nowadays) had taken the McDonald's hot
coffee product liability lawsuit to heart. The 1 through 5 selector switch of questionable
utility was apparently a design relic these days, undercut by a desire to not
take any chance of a hot, lava-like sand spill.
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| The Winner by Default |
Days later, we learned of a large pharmacy
in neighboring Bisaccia and in a last ditch effort headed there with fingers
crossed. At first the pharmacist feigned
ignorance and said they had no such devises until I showed him the box of the
one we’d borrowed. Then scratching his
head in thought he went into the basement, promising to return. Something had clicked, although clearly there
mustn’t be much demand for these devices, which definitely dashed my business
model idea. Some minutes later, he
returned with one. Again this design featured
a sand filled pad. It was a nice size and
weight but again when we tested it there in the pharmacy, it didn’t get as hot
as we’d hoped. Just about out of options
by this point, we bought it anyway and learned to live with it. Whereas in the States we were accustomed to a
full throttle blast of heat if we so desired, here again, along with slow food
and a slower pace to life, slow heat seemed to also rule. Like the sliding control on the pad, we would
learn to adjust.
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| A Centuries Old Culture |
A trait that will not go un-noticed to the average visitor is the expressiveness of their friendships. Theirs somehow extends in its intensity into another dimension, appearing to go much deeper than I can identify with. In small, hill-town Italy, where the majority of our experience originates, it is common to see men walk arm-in-arm, something the anti-virus part of my Puritanical American upbringing cautions ‘Danger Will Robinson’. I’m not exactly sure why I feel this way. I suspect it is due to the physical nature of their expressiveness that is so foreign to me. It must be why I at first hesitated with the hugs and the double cheek kisses so common among greeting and parting Italians. Thankfully, we are not in France where three kisses are expected! I can honestly say, patting myself on the back, that I’ve come a long way at least in the hugs and kisses department, but confess I am not yet comfortable arm-in-arm with the guys. The baggage of its symbolism must be weighing me down. Where I come from, men avoid contact unless as part of some contact sport, like American football. Still I envy their ability to express themselves in such an innocent and open manner. I should feel honored, not hesitant, if ever asked to promenade linked with the boys. Not only would it mean that internally my American reserve had thawed, but outwardly convey that I'm comfortable with them. More importantly, it would mean that my linked friends were comfortable with me.
Their friendships can also approach the status of extended family, many times originating in their early school years and extending well on into their senior years. One in particular stands out in my mind. For years, one of my Italian friends has repeatedly received a phone call from a close friend. I have been with him when his home phone rang. Friends since childhood, it rings every night. The caller is not expecting his call will be answered, the ring of the phone is enough, simply saying, ‘I’m thinking of you.’ And mind you, this is every night! How beautiful an expression of camaraderie. Foreign to my experience, I only wish I were the recipient of an equivalent chime.
Is Calitri somehow different, some uncharted Shangri-La? Though we certainly like to think so, the people there can’t be too far different than other southern Italians in other small towns. Yet again, maybe we lucked-out and hit the social mores, mother-lode of courtesy, kindness and hospitality.
Thus were my thoughts, limited to the scope of my observations and peppered with sketchy memories. They swirled through my mind as I wondered if a fly might have a dimensional password, just as another thunderclap bellowed and it began to seriously rain. Could the fly have been a metaphor for me ... attracted to the light of Italy yet condemned by degrees of separation to an inadequate level of comprehension? I'm not an anthropologist, yet even for them, plotting the long course of cultural evolution, so infused with social customs, in order to arrive at an understanding of what Italy is today, has to be a daunting challenge. The southern Italian's characteristic willingness to please, even to the detriment of full disclosure and at times preparedness; their slow paced, laid-back temperament; and their zestful friendships, as flavorful as their gelato, reflect the image of a resilient people.
I am no longer your average visitor to Italy. Yet the more I visit, the less I seem to understand. This is why Italy remains so wonderful and worthy of return after return. There is no explanation for southern Italy. Its face remains a convoluted mystery, beautiful, messy and confrontational all at once, sometimes as smooth as still water, sometimes flawed with ripples of imperfection. But warts are not always offensive. It depends on how we look at them. After all, warts to some are beauty marks to others.
From
That Rogue Tourist
Paolo
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