It is very windy, and we are near a hospital the nuns run. White sails billow through the trees, down and up from the building. Startling white. A young novice about fifteen paces from me is standing underneath a large wooden cross with a plaster corpus on it. Her presence is gentle. The sun is sitting warm on her face. Hands in her pockets, she stands still, looking up, looking up. I'm spying on her through my hair. I wonder what she is thinking. Suddenly sensing the Other, I glance over at the squat lemon tree near me and am startled to see a pair of fierce eyes in a dark, dark face, framed by a veil, staring at me suspiciously through the leaves. A nun is walking by. Staring as only an Italian can stare...Yesterday, the girls and I went jewelry shopping at a street vender's. At Standa's, I bought a coconut, and then a gelato the size of a softball. Next we walked into a bread shop that smelled like fish. We - (OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS! A cat just screamed and I jumped clear out of my seat and half-way across the courtyard. I've never heart a cat scream before. That was the most soul-scraping noise ever.
It is silent now. The wind is tousling the leaves of the palm—black strokes against a blue sky—and the chill breeze is getting down my neck. A girl's laughter, muted from the height, is raining down gently from a hotel room above. It stopped. How can it be so quiet? I hear church bells.)
So we were in the little shop, and an unshaven and easy-going old man was weighing half a loaf of bread on a scale. “No, too small,” one of the girls was saying. “That one,” pointing through the glass. He drew out a loaf the length of her arm.
“You're eating all that?” I ejaculated.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It's not for me. It's for the old woman with the cup.” It seemed that, to her, the Old Woman with the Cup needed no other explanation. She just was.
Shivers ran through me. “May I come?”
“Sure, but I have to find her. I think I last saw her at the piazza. See, I met her before, gave money to her, then saw her the other day. But I didn't have any change on me, so I felt bad. She recognized me! I hope we can find her.”
But lo and behold, she was sitting right outside the bakery shop, crouched against the dingy wall. My friend put the bread into the woman's brown hands.
“Grazie,” she said. Who knows how old she was.... I want to describe her face, but I can't right now. It's not that I don't have the words, it is that, with my American inhibitions (“politeness”) and my instinctive feeling of awkwardness for her position, I didn't stare like an Italian. I can't remember her face. I can't even recall her eyes.
It's funny; they are not afraid to bore their eyes into you, even from across an almost-empty pizzeria; you feel their eyeballs slide tangibly down your nose and the curve of your cheek. It is rude in America to stare. There are definite personal spaces and we are aware of ours and other people's. We apologize even if we brush arms on the bus.
But now I wish I had been rude. I wish I had been beastly rude. I wish her face was burned into my mind. All that I can remember, oddly, was her tooth. It was large and rectangular and stuck out really far – yellowed, and with brown stains.
Moved by the woman's apparent plight and my friend's generosity, I dished out a two-Euro piece from my pocket and clinked it into her paper cup. Tears filled her eyes! This unhinged me; I was disconcerted. Could she cry on command? Whip up a batch of dramatic tears at the perfect moment? I don't care; I didn't care.
The weeping woman was trying to tell me something. “Cinque bambini, cinque bambini,” she wept.
“Aw,” I said, not understanding. She kept pointing to her tooth. I thought she was saying she would feed her five babies with my money. “Aw,” I repeated.
“Non, segnora,” she said persistently, pawing at my hand. “Cinque.”
I couldn't understand why she was delaying me. She smiled a little at my stupidity and held up five fingers. “Signora...” Then it dawned on me. She wanted more money!
Now I remember her eyes. They were absolutely nondescript. Maybe red-rimmed, perhaps darkish, dingy-gray – smallish? Her clothing? I can't remember the color. Maybe there was no color. Maybe you couldn't bore through her eyes to her soul. I wanted to say, “Show me your children. I want to wash them, feed them...” Maybe she was faker. Maybe her cup was empty because she sat on the coins already given to her. She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her shawl. Maybe she wasn't real. Maybe she would hide the loaf on her lap, under that shawl, so people would still have pity on her. There was such a mix of cynicism and pity in me, it was confusing and bothering.
I remember perfectly the nun's eyes in the lemon tree, even though I only saw them for 1.6 seconds. Fierce dark eyes set in white. Bushy thick brows wisped with gray. Flitting through green leaves, wide-eyed, angry near the pale lemons.
There was a five-Euro note in conveniently (or providentially?) in my pocket. Maybe she did have five children; maybe she didn't. But it was the “maybe she did” that made all the difference, that drowned the second, nixed my suspicions.
She took it and started sobbing. Her shoulders shook.
I didn't know if it was play-acting. Maybe she was pretending to shake her shoulders. I didn't care. I looked at her, and our hearts touched.
You know those instances, disturbing, exhilarating, when hearts touch? It stays with you forever, like the stubborn prickles I got today on my palm, from picking the purple fruit of a prickly pear.
Be it farce, I saw love in her. I was jolted by the knowledge that she loved me. And this was only by standing awkwardly in front of her. I wanted to physically touch her, but with my English inhibitions I didn't know how to make the move.
“Ciao! Deus – benedictus?” I said awkwardly, and turned to go, but she caught my hand.
“Gratzie, bella,” she said, reaching up her other hand and touching my cheek – cupping my cheek. The hand holding mine was dirty, warm, human. She was like Queequeg throwing his arm over Ishmael in bed.
She brought me down closer, as if she wanted to tell me something intimate.
“Me, Olga,” she confided, speaking slowly to the dumb American. She had not let go of my hand.
“Me, (my name).” She came close to pronouncing it.
“Si.”
Then I was brave and squeezed her hand before letting go. In fact, she held so tightly, so stickily, to my fingers, I almost had to pull a little away, like tweezing out the prickles from my palm.
She was not a plaster corpus, even if she didn't have the honest fierce stare of the lemon tree nun. She was human, even if I doubted her plight. And I think I remember her blank gray eyes, and love her.
--By a Thomas More College sophomore
No comments:
Post a Comment