Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  Morning brok e, and the heavens looked ready to do likewise.

  I stood at the window of our hotel room, surveying the landscape and wondering whether it was possible for it to rain every day of our trip.

  “Good morning!” Mom chimed perkily as she emerged from the bathroom. She was already dressed and had her makeup bag in her hand.

  “It’s going to rain . . . again,” I said. On cue, big drops began to splatter the pane.

  “That’s OK,” she smiled. “We’ll be in a car.”

  I peered at the choppy gray Ionian Sea and the red-clay-tiled rooftops of Taormina. We were so high up that vertigo began to grip me. I gave a sigh of resignation and headed into the washroom to take a shower.

  In the bathroom sink, several small white pills were scattered around the drain stopper. One or two were strewn around the basin’s edge. They had obviously dropped from Mom’s hand as she was taking her morning dose. I glanced at the floor and found a few more.

  Back at our trullo in Alberobello I had come across a stray pill or two beneath a loaf of bread as I was wiping down the kitchen countertop one morning, and then another on the floor of her bedroom. I had encountered the same stray pills in her home, but I had never said anything to her about it, assuming the pills had simply tumbled out of their packaging.

  Now I saw it as a worrisome pattern, and I wondered how best to broach the subject without her feeling that her faculties were being questioned. I settled on the direct approach.

  I emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around my wet hair and a toothbrush in my mouth.

  “Hey, I found some of your pills in the sink and on the floor,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s where they went,” Mom said absently. She was sitting on the edge of the bed drawing on her coral lipstick and pursing her lips together to evenly coat them.

  “How many pills do you take a day?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Um, isn’t it rather critical to take all of them?”

  “I do!” she exclaimed.

  “Well, actually you don’t if you’re dropping them in the sink and on the floor. This isn’t the first time I’ve found your pills scattered about. Are you ok?”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, of course I’m OK . I haven’t died, have I?”

  “You’re right,” I said, pausing with the toothbrush in my mouth. “Maybe that means you don’t really need to take all those pills.”

  “My doctor says . . . ”

  “Do you always believe everything your doctor tells you?” I cut in. Her unwavering belief in the absolute wisdom of the medical profession exasperates me to no end. “Maybe you should take me with you to your next appointment. I’ve got a few questions for him.”

  “If I took you with me I’d be blacklisted by every doctor in the city.”

  “Sort of like that time I came to church with you when . . . ”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said abruptly and looked away. “That was terrible.”

  That was when I had accompanied my mother to her church one Sunday years earlier. I had endured a sonorous homily by the priest and was going down for a final head-nod when he said something that snapped me back to life. “The Roman Catholic Church is the only true religion in the world.”

  I had snorted disbelievingly—the nerve!—and twisted around in my seat to see if his words had had any effect on the congregation. But no, they sat there doe-eyed and passive. I couldn’t tell whether they had accepted the priest’s statements as truth or whether they were all thinking about how they were going to spend their afternoon once they were sprung from church.

  After Mass we shuffled out of church in a line, everyone shaking hands with the padre. When our turn came to press the flesh I confronted the priest about his sermon.

  “You’re sowing the seeds of intolerance,” I said brazenly.

  “And you’re holding up the line,” the priest glowered, turning his glare from me to my red-faced mother.

  She felt it best that she find a new church immediately . . . in another town and, just to be on the safe side, with another denomination.

  “Well, he had it coming,” I protested as I swished the toothbrush around my mouth.

  “Your problem is that you don’t know when to keep your mouth shut,” she said primly.

  “But . . . ”

  “ENOUGH!” she boomed. Then, smoothing out the wrinkles of her white pants, she collected herself and said softly and evenly, “Now let’s get some breakfast.”

  AFTER BREAKFAST, I wandered out onto the hotel’s upper-level patio for a panoramic survey of Taormina. I threaded my way through a gaggle of the ubiquitous white plastic patio tables and chairs, across the terra-cotta-tiled deck, toward a small black railing. I wanted to see the hotel’s promised grand view of Mount Etna, the undulating coastline, beaches galore, and the Greek amphitheater. I peered into the moody, misty air and saw nothing more than a vague squiggle of coastline. Then the rain came pelting down and forced me back inside.

  There was nothing left to do but check out.

  Navigating your way out of Taormina requires the sort of stamina that is unreasonable to expect of someone first thing in the morning. We had been on the road just six minutes, and already I was tense and thinking of something alcoholic.

  Tight, narrow laneways gave way to one twisting road after another, as if we were steering through an intestinal tract. Then, like a little miracle, a road sign appeared and pointed the way to the autostrada. Before we knew it, we were hurtling through long dark tunnels and being spit out the other end into a landscape of inexpressible beauty.

  Rolling green hills surrounded us; ruins of various vintages were silhouetted against distant hilltops, soft lush meadows stretched to infinity—all this beauty despite cloudy skies. It did not matter. With wide open space in front of me, I took a deep breath and exhaled with immense satisfaction, leaned back in the driver’s seat a bit, loosened the death grip on the steering wheel, and relaxed my legs where the opened road map had been permanently clenched between my thighs.

  On a map, Sicily looks small, but it is actually quite large— the largest island in the Mediterranean—with a population of five million. Agriculture is the leading industry, and vineyards and groves of olives, almonds, oranges, and lemons abound.

  But mention to anyone that you are going to visit Sicily and you’ll be met with either awkward silence or one word: “Eeew!”

  People who visit Italy always make excuses for not including Sicily in their itinerary, saying that it’s a shame the place is so off the beaten track, or that it’s too remote for a side trip. That’s a lame excuse. From Naples, you can drive to it in a day.

  One problem, I suspect, is Sicily’s inability to be heard above the travel-industry hucksters urging tourists to visit the more “civilized” northern end of Italy. Another problem could be Sicily’s flag. It is red and yellow and features a creature with three hairy legs and the head of Medusa. Doesn’t exactly scream “Hey, come for a visit, and bring the kids!” does it?

  Poor, lovely Sicily. At one time it was a sophisticated cultural hotbed, an exotic place of diverse backgrounds where art and academia intermingled. It was a linchpin in both Magna Graecia and the Roman Empire before becoming a full-fledged country in its own right in 1130.

  But Sicily seemed to get tangled in the power plays of every tribe or nation itching to flex its territorial muscle, and that ultimately led to its undoing. By the 13th century, its economy was an unholy mess, and Sicily began a steady slide toward economic hell. When it seemed life couldn’t get any worse, an earthquake ripped through the place in 1639 and killed sixty thousand people.

  Sicily joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, but labor unrest was rife, the economy collapsed, and Sicilians left their homeland in droves. The only thing that flourished there was organized crime, and the place became known as a thug’s paradise.

  It still is. We drove past Catania and there, lashed to a chain
-link fence, was a piece of cardboard upon which someone had scrawled in big black letters, “Vergogna.” Shame. It was a reference to a horrific incident that had occurred the previous month. Following a football match between Cata-nia and Palermo, forty-year-old police officer Filippo Raciti, a husband and father, was killed when a homemade rocket was hurled into his squad car.

  An international outcry erupted. Public attendance at football games was immediately and indefinitely banned, and the president of the Catania team resigned. Everyone, from the cops to the Vatican, castigated the light punishment Italy’s judges doled out to sports hooligans, and put much of the blame on the Mafia. Raciti himself had had firsthand experience of the Sicilian justice system: A week before he was killed, he attended the court appearance of a football goon he had arrested. After the judge delivered a mere slap on the wrist to the accused, the goon walked right up to Raciti in the courtroom and laughed in his face, then strolled out the door to freedom.

  That’s the thing with Italy; it can be achingly beautiful and at the same time heartbreakingly ugly.

  Between Catania and Enna we drove through the predictable swath of boxy, bland shapes that is sadly characteristic of suburban highway architecture—a sight that always sends me into a stupor—and then somewhere on the outskirts of Enna the scenery changed dramatically. We found ourselves meandering through pure, unadulterated, empty countryside, on a fluid ribbon of highway. The road was an architectural marvel built upon colonnaded, f luted underpinnings that must have been inspired by a Roman aqueduct. The loveliest thing about this drive was that it lacked the astonishing mass of visual distractions normally found on superhighways. There was nothing around it. No billboards, buildings, signs, or service stations whatsoever; the elegant band of asphalt with contours that mimicked a river weaved silently through a rich, lush landscape. It was one beautiful drive.

  Italy’s reputation as the purveyor of pleasure and passion clearly extends to its highways. When Italians construct a road, I don’t believe for a minute that they merely survey the area, draw a plan from A to B, and then summon a squad of bulldozers. I imagine they ruminate on it, ponder the landscape over a steaming cappuccino, then walk it, talk to it, take in both the dominant and the subtle changes in elevation. A sketch begins to take form, infused with the rich repertoire of the Italian experience. The soft curve of this autostrada, for example, might have been the curve of a voluptuous woman glimpsed striding through a piazza, or a coastline driven in the summertime, or a path strolled hand in hand with a lover, or a ski run mastered on holiday.

  And if I may be permitted to take this a few steps further: When Italians design something, they don’t design it solely for themselves, they design it for their lovers, in-laws, friends, neighbors, priest, and God, not necessarily in that order. I simply could not imagine it being done any other way.

  It also occurred to me—and of course by now I was an expert, having been in Italy a total of six days and having driven almost four hundred miles—that Italian engineers never build straight roads. They intuitively know that the ideal is never what is most expedient and cost-effective; the ideal is to make a driver jump out of her car and stand in such awe of a section of road she has just travelled that she can do nothing else but squeeze together five fingers, kiss their tips, and release them with a shout of “Bravo! Bellisimo!” Which I did. And then I took a photo for good measure.

  Sure, you can believe that the decision to build a winding road rather than a straight road has more to do with slowing down speeders than about design, but then you would completely misunderstand the Italian mind. And frankly, such roads don’t slow anyone down; they just make drivers (like me) revel in the thrill of leaning into a curve like Mario Andretti, feeling your body sway in a gentle rock until your back arches slightly and your pelvis starts to tingle. Driving in Italy is a rapture of passion and gasoline.

  I glanced over at Mom to share with her this sparkling observation, only to discover that she had nodded off, her head tilted back against the headrest and her mouth slackly agape.

  Not again! How could someone travel all this way just to fall asleep in the midst of such beauty?

  My mind do-si-doed back to our earlier conversation about love. Perhaps my mother didn’t really care that she was in Italy, or anywhere for that matter, she just wanted to be with me. I guess that’s love—the unexpressed variety.

  I pumped the brakes slightly to see if the sudden movement would jerk her awake.

  “What on earth are you doing?” she said with obvious irritation.

  “Oh, hi. You’re awake,” I smiled.

  “I was not sleeping; I was just resting my eyes,” she snapped. She surreptitiously wiped away a small pool of drool that had collected in one corner of her lips.

  “How can you sleep?” I protested. “Look at this! We’re in Italy. Look at this road. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

  “Jane, it’s just a highway,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, I think you’re the one who needs a rest.”

  I steered the car toward an exit heading south—a smaller, less impressive highway—and bade a reluctant farewell to the A19.

  We passed a small construction crew doing road repairs; all of them were working with their hands. Two or three were wielding scythes—scythes!—to cut back the roadside brush; another was on his knees with what looked like a screwdriver, picking away the old tar from the road. There wasn’t a piece of gas-fuelled machinery around, a point that pleased me greatly.

  I took a quick look at the map as our car picked up speed again.

  There are a number of enchanting, well-known places to visit in Sicily, but our destination this day was a not-so-well-known one: Racalmuto, which shares a bond with Hamilton, Ontario, the city where I have lived for the last twenty years. During much of the 2 0th century, boomtown Hamilton was the industrial and manufacturing heartland of Canada. Around 1945, the city put out an urgent call for skilled workers. When the people of Racalmuto, where poverty was rife, heard this news, a few brave Racalmutese boarded a ship and headed west to check it out. Within weeks they were writing home to confirm that—mamma mia!—jobs, good wages, new housing, and an economy in breathless overdrive were up for grabs.

  The news triggered an incredible exodus. By the mid 1950s, much of Racalmuto’s population of sixteen thousand had emptied out and relocated to Hamilton. Today, there are more people in Hamilton who hail from Racalmuto than there are people in Racalmuto (its current population is under nine thousand).

  And so with great anticipation I steered the car toward Racalmuto. The verdant rolling hills and the fact that I have long harbored a dream to live in Italy gave me an idea. Maybe I could be the first Hamiltonian to relocate to Racalmuto! I kept my eye open for a suitable property.

  “There’s a place for you!” crowed Mom. She has a way of reading my mind.

  It was a sprawling ruin with small windows, none of them with glass and all of them of different shapes and sizes. The roof had fallen in on itself. A string of arches and the remnants of an arbor indicated what might have been a garden. Two smokestacks at either end of the property made the place look like a crematorium.

  “Isn’t it perfect,” sighed Mom. There is no ruin too hopeless or too eerie for her imagination.

  And then it all changed. As we plugged farther west, the lush rolling hills gave way to a landscape of scrub and stone. By the time we reached the exit for Racalmuto, conditions were downright pitiful.

  We followed the road leading into town. Large weeds had sprouted where the road met the sidewalk. We drove past a small, desperate-looking olive grove with nary a leaf in sight, and I offered a quick prayer that its owner would have a decent yield—or at least a yield.

  Racalmuto is built in a bowl surrounded by hills, so as we descended the streets I scanned the horizon for a landmark that might point us to the center of town. A church steeple came into view, and I steered the car toward it, but road construction detours forced us
off in another direction. We kept looking for a sign directing us to the centro storico, signs we had become familiar with in every Italian village, town, or city we had visited, but we did not see one in Racalmuto.

  We drove down cobbled streets where the road abutted the front doors of homes. This is a quaint feature of almost every European town, but here it just looked dangerous and pitiful.

  The buildings were all painted in the same worn color of buff, or at best a deep but dirty yellow. Paint was peeling off iron balconies, and the buildings themselves showed signs of advanced neglect.

  “No wonder they all left,” Mom deadpanned.

  I would later learn that the name Racalmuto comes from the Arab name Rahal-mut, which translates to il casale dei morti or “farmhouse of the dead.” Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

  I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from Racalmuto, but it was something better than this. The place had an air of suspension, as if waiting for all those men who had departed for a better life in Hamilton to swagger deliriously into town with sweat lighting up their grimy faces, their fists and the pockets of their work trousers bulging with gold coins and dollar bills.

  Perhaps this was the bad side of town, I thought. I tried another route and hoped for a prettier streetscape.

  “I believe someone once told me that there is a Hotel Hamilton here,” I said. “Let’s try to find it.”

  We drove around and around. The streets were largely deserted except for the requisite clusters of old men in dirty white undershirts standing outside a bar gesturing to one another.

  I got out of the car and approached one such group, asking directions to the Hotel Hamilton. I was met with polite shrugs. When the men asked where I was from and I answered, “Hamilton,” the word produced a glimmer of recognition, as if it had rekindled a dim but bittersweet memory. But the men were not helpful, and as is so often the case in small, insulated towns, they did not seem acquainted with the world beyond the next street corner.

  On another street I approached a group of women and had better luck. One of them attempted to give me directions but said it would be easier if we just followed her in her car. She drove to the autostrada and pointed to the other side of the highway.