Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  When it came to my mother I knew this intellectually, but still I felt a sense of irritation around her.

  “OK, here’s an idea,” I offered Mom, as a gesture of goodwill. “Let’s go out for dinner tonight. Even though I look like a Cyclops and I’m feeling about as attractive as one, we’ll go out. And let’s try to be Italian and eat later than five thirty.”

  Around 6:00 pm, we drove into Alberobello. We trolled the tacky souvenir shops to kill time, passing groups of old men who were clustered on the café patios enjoying an early evening coffee.

  Italian men seem to have more time for socializing than their counterparts anywhere else in the world. They were always outside in small groups, pondering or arguing one issue or another. When they aren’t honing their debating skills, they stare unapologetically at anyone who passes by. The appearance of Mom’s walker as she steered it toward them caused a stir. As if catching a whiff of their interest, she veered the walker off the sidewalk and onto the road, walking behind the parked cars to avoid a full and close inspection.

  There was also a practical reason for her detour. Italian men refuse to step aside for anyone. We encountered this situation a few times throughout Italy—never once did a man get out of the way to let my mother through. It was left for me to clear the path, and not always nicely.

  “C’mon you lazy bastards; move over.” A few of them grudgingly shuffled a couple of centimeters to one side while casting heavy-lidded, indignant looks; others stood gape-mouthed at the metallic red contraption Mom was pushing.

  Farther along the promenade, a huddle of Japanese tourists turned away from a display of tea towels and postcards to observe this fantastic device. They began a furious discussion that included pointing.

  “Just you wait,” Mom said to me. “Next year, all the Japanese will have one of these.”

  A promising restaurant presented itself up a side street, and I scampered ahead to scope it out. Once there, I noticed its entrance had steps that Mom would have difficulty negotiating, plus the restaurant did not open until 8:00 pm.

  “I don’t know how any of these people stay in business with these hours,” Mom said when I returned with my report. “It’s ridiculous.”

  There was only so much walking we could do before Mom began to tire. I fetched the car, and we drove around the tight, snaking streets of Alberobello with the car’s heater on full blast.

  We eventually found a restaurant in a converted trullo. We took our seats in a charming but empty dining room and asked for a bottle of wine.

  This particular day had special meaning for us. A year earlier Mom had been rushed to the hospital with heart problems. I raised a glass to her recovery and health.

  “Well, it wasn’t really a heart attack,” she said coyly. “It was an angina attack.”

  “Did you say a vagina attack?” I asked with mock horror.

  She wheezed with laughter.

  “Oh you,” she playfully scolded me. “No, it was congestive heart failure.”

  “Well, look at you anyway,” I said. “Did you ever imagine a year ago that we’d be in an Italian restaurant . . . ”

  “ . . . and eating shitty food?” she said conspiratorially.

  More patrons had materialized, and their presence gave the place a bit more ambiance.

  We dined on a dish of orecchiette pasta (locally made, the owner assured us) with boiled tomatoes, parmesan, a scant amount of basil, and enough olive oil to lube a car. It was quite possibly the second worst meal I had eaten. Ever. The soup in Racalmuto held first place.

  The TV, a ubiquitous presence in restaurants these days, hung from the corner of the ceiling and was broadcasting a program that had captured the attention of our fellow diners.

  “What’s everyone watching?” Mom turned rigidly in her seat to face the tv. It was a football game. “Oh, those overpaid idiots.”

  The owner arrived with our coffee and glumly set the cups on the table.

  “Il conto, per favore,” I smiled, asking for the bill.

  “Well, this is the worst coffee I’ve tasted,” Mom commented, after taking a delicate sip and puckering her lips in distaste. “Why can’t these people ever get it right?”

  We gathered our things and were about to leave the restaurant when a worried look crossed her face.

  “I need to use the washroom,” she said.

  She moved toward the restroom while I hurriedly paid the bill. I dashed off to get the car and sprinted back into the restaurant just as Mom was emerging from the washroom. She looked a little pallid.

  “You didn’t make a mess in there, did you?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “I got the car for you anyway . . . you know, just in case we had to make a quick getaway.”

  “Really, Jane, I’m not that bad,” she chuckled.

  “I think they have bylaws here about bathroom usage,” I said, holding open the car door for her.

  Another round of wheezing laughter.

  IT WAS cold the next morning, so Mom stayed in bed. She remained there for three days.

  I could tell when she was out of bed by the rhythmic clicking of her cane on the terra-cotta tiles.

  Her breathing had taken on a Darth Vader–like draw, and to amuse myself—I know, this sounds so cruel—I would hum the Star Wars music that signals Vader’s approach.

  Nothing made me more tense, however, than hearing her go into the kitchen to make tea. She is not accustomed to gas cooktops, and I would hold my breath whenever she turned on the gas. I would hear the click-click-click of her attempts to spark a flame with the barbeque lighter, and then a sudden loud whoosh! as the flame made contact with the gas. An anxious silence would follow.

  My breathing resumed when her puttering did: the sounds of her rifling through bags of potato chips, bread, pasta—everything seemed to come in cellophane bags that were irritatingly loud—or she would fidget with the packages, occasionally emitting an exasperated “oh, dammit” as she struggled to pry something open. The rustling and the crinkling would shatter the quiet. Then Mom would shuffle back to her bedroom and close the door, and silence would reign once again.

  Her coughing made it difficult for me to sleep, and with the combination of the relentless rain and the cold—the temperature could not have been more than a few degrees—I, too, found myself retreating to my bed and wondering whether spending six weeks in Italy with her had been an insane idea. I wasn’t certain she would physically make it to the halfway mark of our trip. I wasn’t certain my patience would hold out that long either.

  The rain continued to pelt our hilltop trullo, and I mulled over the idea of whether I should broach round one of The Talk that I was desperate to have with Mom. But it didn’t seem right to suggest it, given how ill and tired she was.

  The more time we spent isolated in the trullo, the more boredom and frustration poked and prodded me. Maybe it was folly to think we could mend our fences here, or anywhere. While the storm raged outside my window, another one was brewing inside me, one that included thoughts of hurling the red walker to kingdom come.

  WHEN I wasn’t holed up in bed memorizing sexy sentences from the Italian phrase book, doing a Sudoku, or stewing about the negative energy in my relationship with Mom, I was hunched over a road map of southern Italy.

  One morning, I had smoothed it out on the dining room table and was sounding out some of the place names—Ostuni, Galatina, Copertino, Squinzano, Grotta San Biagio—feeling the vowels exercise my mouth, rolling the gr in Grotta, enunciating the sharp t’s, stretching the u in Ostuni until it pursed my lips.

  Time was running out on our stay in Alberobello, and there were at least half a dozen places I still wanted to visit. The story of Saint Joseph, the flying friar of Copertino, was so fantastic that I just had to see for myself the town and the church where Joseph had launched his fame. Then there was Padre Pio, the Capuchin priest who bore the stigmata. The 40th anniversary of his death was the following year (his body
would be exhumed for the celebration), and I had a hankering to spend a day in San Giovanni Rotondo, where Pio had lived, to get a sense of the buzz. With crushing disappointment I resigned myself to the reality that I would not make it to any of those places in the two days we had left in this region.

  I glanced at the trullo’s front door, which was open to the stone patio. Sunshine lapped tauntingly at the doorway. A dog barked in the distance, the birds twittered, and a light breeze caused a rustle among the olive-tree leaves.

  I left the map and walked outside to assess the conditions more closely. I squinted at the sky: it was sunny now, but the temperamental Italian climate is not to be trusted.

  I walked around the outside of the trullo and saw Chris, the property manager, skimming leaves out of the swimming pool. I wandered over to join him. That’s when I learned about the “stupid tax.”

  “Yeah, you want to watch out for that,” he said as he turned the skimmer’s net to scoop up a bug. “It’s the Italian revenge against tourists who come here and don’t bother learning the language or the monetary system. You go into a store and you see these Americans standing with their hands cupped, loaded with coins, and asking some store clerk to take the amount owing for a cup of coffee or their lunch. The Italians always help themselves to more than what the bill has come to. And who can blame them? They figure it’s the price for putting up with ignorance.”

  It seemed unwise to tell him that that was precisely how my mother operates in a foreign country.

  Mom was sitting at the other end of the patio reading a book. Oversized, owl-like glasses were perched on her nose; her hair was in curlers.

  “Let’s go somewhere today,” I said.

  My eyes were improving, and though my cough was worsening, and Mom’s cough was still bad, staying cooped up in our Italian Alcatraz was making me antsy.

  “I’d better not,” she said. “I’ve taken a laxative.”

  “Why would someone with incontinence take a laxative?” I asked.

  “Because sometimes I can’t get my system working and I have to help it along,” she said with an air of petulance.

  “How long do you think that will take?” I asked.

  “Give me a couple of hours,” she said.

  “Wait for laxative to take effect” had not been on my list of things to do in Italy.

  I stood for a moment, thinking of ways to pass the next few hours.

  The air had warmed up, though it could not be called hot. It was still too cool to swim. Twice that morning I had stretched out on the chaise longue with a book, but each time, as soon as my bum hit the chaise, the sun scurried behind a cloud and the temperature dropped.

  I decided to take a stroll around the hilly terrain that encircled the trullo, mainly to escape a squawking magpie that had taken to hectoring me on his territorial prerogative vis-à-vis the patio. I climbed to the highest point on the property and surveyed the undulating Apulian terrain. All was silent and in a state of reverential repose. The hurly-burly of life felt eons away.

  I picked my way slowly back toward the trullo, stopping to admire the variety of trees along the way—olive, fig, walnut, apple. Against a weathered wall, a tall stand of bamboo had begun to sprout shoots. That little excursion killed twenty minutes.

  With Mom needing to stay put, I gave her a peck on the cheek and got into the car.

  The trepidation I had experienced two weeks earlier was long gone. I felt an easy familiarity with my surroundings now and began to entertain thoughts of moving here permanently. I always do that—it is how I take the measure of a place I’m visiting. I have a nomadic spirit that is always on the lookout for a new place to settle.

  On the outskirts of Alberobello I spied a dok grocery store. The information package that had been left for us at the trullo mentioned this place, but each time we went searching for it we couldn’t find it, no matter how intently we followed the directions or studied the landscape. Today, for some reason, it appeared loud and clear.

  Inside the store I grabbed a metal buggy and started rattling up and down the aisles admiring the products.

  The more I wheeled around the aisles, the more confident and less intimidated I became. By the time I hit the checkout counter, I felt practically native. I heaped my cartload of groceries onto the conveyer belt, casually commented on the sunny day that lay outside, paid the bill, and wished everyone ciao. Hmm, I thought to myself, maybe I could live here.

  In the parking lot, while I was swinging the grocery bags into the car, an imposing edifice up the road caught my attention: two courses of six thick columns flanked by two small, squat square-shaped towers. On a rise just behind the entrance was a white building in the Greek style, sporting four Ionic columns. Intrigued, I drove toward it, found a place to park by the side of the road, and got out to explore. I walked purposefully through the entrance and evaded two security guards, who were busy exerting their authority on an older couple, who I guessed were tourists.

  That’s how I ended up in il cimitero monumentale, Alber-obello’s cemetery.

  The entrance, hailed as the most beautiful of its kind in Europe, was designed in the Egyptian style in 1890 by Antonio Curri, an architect from Alberobello. I climbed steadily up a set of stone stairs and found myself amid a colony of midsize mausoleums arranged in a way that resembled a small neighborhood street. I followed a second flight of steps to the top level and arrived at a large expanse of land. A tidy crushed-gravel pathway, lined with cypress, tall and stately like soldiers, stretched serenely toward the horizon. On either side of this treed border lay a glossy green park studded with statuary and raised stone graves. Curri had designed all this according to his vision of Heaven, and it was every inch that.

  The place was teeming with people. Never have I seen such bustling activity in a cemetery. Ninety-nine percent of them were women, devotedly scrubbing away the grime that had accumulated on the headstones of loved ones. Others were pushing huge ladders against a wall of burial niches to wipe the dust from the nameplates or replace flowers in the vases attached to them. And there were many more sweeping dirt out of the mausoleums or from around the monuments, or tending the burial plots that were landscaped like mini-gardens around the crypts. A flurry of spring cleaning had gripped everyone.

  The mood was very un-cemetery-like. The cemetery was a happy place, a world away from the blaring traffic and commerce on the street below. The women—many of them young and attractive—chatted amiably with one another while their young children skipped along the paths and played hide-and-seek among the crypts. If you were a guy looking for female company, this would be a good place to come on a Saturday morning. It was a very different atmosphere from what you would find in a North American cemetery, and I suspect this has something to do with the Italian attitude toward death.

  I was driving back along the winding country roads when another sight caught my attention: a derelict trullo. It was another landmark I had passed several times, but I had never mustered the courage to stop and take a closer look. Now that I was fired up with confidence—after all, I’d been to a grocery store and a cemetery in a foreign country all by myself in the last hour—my boldness was boundless.

  I parked the car on the side of the road and walked through tall grass to the front entrance of the ruin. The interior walls were stained with age, and the place was littered with oil drums and an old, rusting vegetable display case that probably came from a grocer’s.

  Still, the building’s stone bones were good. I appraised its location thoughtfully, paced back and forth in front of it a few times. What about the cost and the work? How would I get plumbing and electricity into it? What about the insurmountable headaches of renovating a property in a foreign country? How would I furnish it? I fantasized about my family and friends coming to visit me—the lazy al fresco luncheons that would turn into wine-soaked conversations and laughter that would last into the evening.

  I noticed a farmer working in a far-off field and figure
d the property must be his. Dare I approach him?

  I came to my senses and got back into the car.

  “I found a neat trullo down the road that needs renovating,”

  I told Mom when I returned to our trullo and was unpacking the groceries.

  “How exciting! Maybe we should take a closer look at it,” she said, gleefully rubbing her hands together. These are the moments when I know she’s my mother and I realize that I come by this renovation madness honestly.

  Then, noting the grocery bags on the counter, she said, “Why did you buy all these groceries? We’re leaving in a day or two.”

  “I finally found that grocery store we were always looking for,” I said. “The dok? I guess I was so excited that I bought more than we needed. Sorry.”

  “You didn’t happen to see any clothing stores, did you?” she asked. “I need clothes. My wardrobe looks like a three-year- old packed it. I left all my nice outfits at home.”

  “Why didn’t you bring them?”

  “I was saving them for a special occasion,” she said, trying to sound prudent. But who was she kidding? What’s not special about a trip to Italy?

  “Truthfully,” I said as I put a carton of milk in the fridge, “for someone who suffers from incontinence I don’t know where you got the idea that white slacks would be practical. Speaking of which, are you able to go out now?”