Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  I continued making my way back to the hotel past shops displaying goods fit for modern Medicis—sumptuously trimmed brocade bedding, tightly tailored dark navy power suits, and important-looking leather handbags and briefcases.

  When I strode into the hotel Mom was sitting in the lobby reading a paperback and looking very elegant and coiffed.

  “I dyed and set my hair,” she said proudly. “How do I look?”

  “Lovely. Why don’t we go for a drive and do some sightseeing?” I suggested.

  The destination I had in mind was the Terme dei Papi, located on the outskirts of Viterbo. In days of yore it was the go-to spa for popes and other ecclesiastical figures when things got stressful in Rome.

  A huge sign at the entrance of Terme dei Papi’s sprawling American-style parking lot announced a client list that included Dante and Michelangelo.

  “I do like the parking lot,” enthused Mom. “Now this feels like home.”

  The waters in Terme dei Papi are drawn from the Bul-licame hot springs, as they were in the third century by the Etruscans, and its mineralized mud, enriched with sulfur, magnesium, and sodium bicarbonate, is used in the spa’s treatments. These days a shuttle bus arrives daily from Rome with a load of stressed souls looking for rejuvenation in the 100,000-square-foot thermal pool. Not surprisingly, the pool was closed the day of our visit.

  Disappointingly, little evidence remains of Terme dei Papi’s ancient past. The place is large and sterile looking, cleansed of its medieval architecture and replaced with the usual charmless, mall-like design. A handful of relics— marble bathtubs, sinks, the occasional Swede and German— are found around the complex as reminders of the pedigree.

  I noticed a surprising number of men checking in at the reception desk, their tanned skin and trim physiques indicating that the Italian concept of the bella figura is as much a male phenomenon as a female one.

  In the sparkling, antiseptic lobby, Mom and I sat down on a modern, white faux-leather sofa. I grabbed a brochure and ran down the list of services and treatments. They were not like any I had encountered at North American spas. In addition to the usual mud baths and massages you could have a Pap test (twenty-six euros), colonoscopy (fifty-two euros), vaginal irrigation (thirteen euros), or ear flushing (twenty euros). They didn’t do manicures, waxing, hair, or makeup, which was exactly what I was in the mood for. Vaginal irrigation was definitely out of the question.

  “Let’s see if we can book something,” I suddenly said to Mom. “We’ve been driving for three weeks. We’re due for some pampering. How about a mud wrap? My treat.”

  Before she could quibble I had launched myself toward the reception desk and booked us in for an eighty-minute treatment.

  We were directed to the elevators and taken to an upper floor, then to a smaller, deathly silent reception area where we waited for our respective attendants.

  “I’ve never done this,” whispered Mom nervously. “Do you have to take off all your clothes?”

  “I should hope so,” I said. “A mud bath isn’t much use when you’re clothed.”

  An attractive young woman, her hair pulled tightly into a smooth pony tail—she looked like an extra in that old Robert Palmer video Addicted to Love—approached me. She had all the warmth of a three-day-old cadaver.

  She cocked her head as a sign for me to follow her.

  I smiled “see ya,” to Mom and followed my attendant down the hall.

  She opened the door to a spacious, utterly bland room that was tiled—walls and floors—in dull beige-pink and lit by fluorescent lights. It was kitted out with pipes, hoses, and floor drains. There was a small window at the far end and a counter and small desk area near the door. A sink and a shower stall were on one side of the room; a stainless steel table dominated the center. A humble wooden bucket, the only evidence of warmth, cowered nearby. Was I going to have a spa treatment or an autopsy?

  My grim attendant ordered me to strip down and handed me a paper thong at arm’s length. She directed me with brusque gestures onto the cold, hard surface of the table. I did a quick scan of the room for sharp objects. Then she filled the small wooden bucket with goop from a pump and began thickly slathering the viscous substance on me from neck to toe on both sides of my body.

  I tried to summon my inner goddess, but it was difficult to do amid the attendant’s constant groans. I couldn’t tell whether it was the rotten-egg smell of the mud that offended her or the fact that she was mudding down flabby middle-aged bodies for a living. No part of my anatomy was deemed out of bounds, and I wondered how Mom, who shies away from stripping in a doctor’s office, was handling it all.

  I was glad I hadn’t purchased the small plates in the Vit-erbo antique shop for Mom. She has enough stuff. This trip, I decided, would be about physical pampering, not about filling suitcases with more junk to sit on a shelf.

  When Mom and I met up in the reception room an hour and a half later, all evidence of her ministrations from earlier that day had been undone. With hair askew and face flushed, she looked as if she had just spent an hour hoeing a field.

  “What a lot of work!” she said, collapsing onto the sofa. “Taking off clothes, putting on that little paper bikini, being rolled over and wrapped up, the showering, and then getting dressed again. I’m worn out!”

  That night we lay in our beds in the dark silence, waiting for sleep to overcome our newly cleansed bodies. I was mouthing a prayer of thanks to God for keeping us safe on our journey (to me, this is like spiritual insurance coverage) and for providing us with a positive memory of Viterbo.

  Out of the void came Mom’s voice: “Jane, you’re a pain sometimes, but life with you is never dull, that’s for sure.”

  I took that as Momspeak for “thanks.”

  13

  Foligno, Montefalco, Santa Maria degli Angeli

  WE LEFT Viterbo early the next morning and headed northeast to Foligno to accept the hospitality of someone I barely knew.

  I don’t like imposing on others, especially when it means upsetting their routine and scarfing food from their refrigerator. It is one thing when this behavior is visited on relatives, who on occasion deserve to be disturbed; it is entirely another thing when the victims are people you like and who you want to like you back.

  “So, these are good friends of yours?” Mom asked as we sped along the highway.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “How long have you known them?” she inquired. “Where did you meet them? How come you have never told me about them? Why don’t I know your friends?”

  I started to answer, but her head was turned toward the window and I could not be certain that she was listening to me. At times she asks questions for the sake of asking them, without really caring about the answer.

  I met Sofia about twenty years ago when I began frequenting Ms. Emma Designs, the small chain of clothing boutiques she owns. She is also the designer, and on the rare occasions when I found myself with money to spend on real clothes, I would visit her shop.

  I was drawn to Sofia’s laugh-out-loud nature and the fact that she is the antithesis of a fashion designer. No big dark glasses, outlandish clothing, or imperial attitude. She had struck me as the type who was more comfortable stomping through the countryside in rubber boots than sucking up to fashionistas. I had dropped in to her Toronto shop a few months before this trip, knowing that she had relocated somewhere in Italy and might be able to offer advice about places to see. She had suggested at the time that my mother and I come to stay with her in Italy, but the idea seemed remote. I never guessed I would have to use the phone number she gave me to call her.

  Beyond that, I really knew nothing about Sofia. I prayed the visit would be favorable and that Mom would behave.

  On the outskirts of Foligno we tentatively edged our car up a gravel driveway toward a broad stone farmhouse. I recognized Sofia immediately. She was wearing rubber boots.

  “Welcome! Buongiorno!” she cried as she and her husband, Tony, came
toward us with open arms. They took us in their embrace as if we were the oldest of friends.

  “Are you tired from your journey?” she asked. “Do you need a rest? No? Then I hope you’re hungry, because I’ve made lunch,” said Sofia, grabbing our luggage. “Nothing fancy, just a little spaghetti.”

  Mom and I gave each other pained looks: Both of us were already sick of pasta.

  However, as often happens when you have tired of a dish, someone will serve it up in a different way and your appetite for it returns. And so it was with Sofia’s spaghetti, tossed with herbs, black olives, olive oil, and a few chopped tomatoes. We tucked into it with gusto, and after a mouthful Mom and I looked at each other long enough to acknowledge that it was the best meal we had had in Italy. After I returned to Canada, I tried to replicate this recipe many, many times, but it just never tasted as good as Sofia’s.

  “How did the two of you wind up in Foligno?” I asked as a basket of warm bread was passed around the table.

  “Tony had a heart attack several years ago,” Sofia explained. “Our doctor told us that Canadian winters aren’t the best for people who have trouble breathing in cold weather. Tony is Italian by birth, so he wanted to come back to Italy. It’s perfect for me, too—did you know that Italy has the best fabrics anywhere? And, of course, we both love the lifestyle here. It’s not as mental as it is in Canada.”

  “I was a baby when my family moved to British Columbia,” said Tony as he began uncorking a bottle of red wine. “The Okanagan Valley. Are you familiar with that region? My father started a vineyard there. Canada had always been my home, but when I began thinking of retirement something tugged at my soul and led me back to Italy.”

  He smiled.

  “Wait until you taste this,” he enthused, pouring into my glass something that I can only describe as liquid garnets. “This is wine from this area. Around here you don’t go to a store for wine, you go directly to the winery. These are small wineries with an equally small production.”

  I apologized for lacking a discerning palate when it comes to wine. I don’t know why; I have certainly drunk enough of it in my time.

  “Don’t worry,” he smiled. “It’s like anything; you have to take your time learning about something to really appreciate it. It’s like Foligno and all of Umbria, for that matter. It doesn’t seem like much until you delve into it and learn its stories.

  “That view, for instance,” he said, pointing out the window to the hill opposite, where a cluster of ordinary homes had been built halfway up the hill. “If you had looked out this window early in 1997, you would have seen a medieval village. But later that year an earthquake hit this region, and it destroyed that village. It was called Capranica.

  “Capranica was never anything more than an agrarian community—that hill is Mount Subasio, an area known for its rich and fertile soil. Dante mentioned it in his Divine Comedy. Its narrow streets, the red stone and mortar construction, its massive walls—there was a certain medieval charm to the place, which the few families that opted to stay there fought in vain to preserve.”

  “An earthquake? Here? What happened?” I asked, reflexively gripping the sides of my chair.

  Tony circled the dining room table filling our wine glasses.

  “What happened to Capranica was emblematic of what happened to many other small towns in Italy. When national governments and the European parliament decide to finance your projects, you have very little chance of calling the shots. But the residents of Capranica resisted the idea of rebuilding their town in a geologically safer area, and in the end they won. That’s no mean achievement when one considers the incredible power of money these days.”

  “We had just bought this place, and we were in the midst of renovating it,” added Sofia, her voice tinged with remnants of a German accent. “We had some damage to our home, but not much, thank God. Our contractor said that what saved the place was its strong foundation. This,” she said, waving her hand around at the upper level where we were sitting, “the part that everyone sees—that can be changed and fixed because it’s basically cosmetic, right? But what holds it all up, that’s the critical part of a home.”

  The conversation over lunch was rapid and free ranging, and I was thoroughly enjoying it. I frequently looked over at Mom to keep her included in the discussion. Once or twice she entered the conversation with a non sequitur, the obvious clue that she could not hear a damn thing we were saying. She refuses to get a hearing aid on the grounds that it makes her look old.

  Sofia and Tony were eager to hear where we had travelled in Italy. I regaled them with stories about our excursion to Sicily and shared my observations about the social division between north and south.

  “There’s definitely a class system in Italy based on dialects,” confirmed Tony. “As recently as twenty years ago you could not get a job on r ai”—Italy’s national broadcaster—“unless you had a Florentine-Roman accent. Today, you run across the odd Neapolitan who attempts to speak like a Florentine, but those distinctions are rapidly disappearing.”

  “The real difference between northern Italy and southern Italy,” said Sofia, “has less to do with accents and economics and more to do with dynamics. The north is a matriarchal society; the south is a patriarchal one. Did you notice that?”

  “Well, I saw a lot of men hanging around with each other in cafés,” I replied. “Are Italian men involved at all in running a household?”

  “Women have the psychological upper hand here,” added Tony. “But not the legal one. The groups of men you see in cafés and the like are there because their women want them out of the way.

  “Conversely, you likely saw women and children together a lot. Italian mother love is intimate, primal; it is all encompassing. It is Madonna worship on a human scale.”

  “Actually, for all the talk about the mother cult in Italy,” Sofia cut in, “the image of the tough matriarch presiding over the Sunday meal is a fantasy now. Mama is losing her importance in the Italian family. Italy has something called the badanti system, in which a woman, usually from the Philippines, is hired by a family to look after Mama.”

  In other words, love and caregiving, like so many things in the modern world, is now subcontracted. I cast a look at Mom, who was silently mopping up her spaghetti with a slice of Sofia’s bread. Would I eventually hire a stranger to look after her?

  “I’m sorry,” interjected Sofia, “but I have to go to work this afternoon. Did I tell you I have a shop here in Foligno now? Tony would be happy to take you sightseeing if you’re up to it.”

  We accepted the offer heartily; after all, Tony seemed to know a lot about Italy.

  I buckled Mom into the front seat of his silver Nissan and climbed into the back.

  “What sort of work did you do in Canada?” I asked Tony as he started up the car.

  “I was a professor of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto,” he smiled.

  Well. I’d hit the jackpot!

  OVER THE next two days we scoured an area of Umbria that takes up less than two inches on a road map of Italy and contains more than two thousand years’ worth of history.

  Tony proved to be a font of knowledge and kindness. He was also skilled at navigating his way around the villages’ narrow cobblestone lanes, apparently unconcerned about doing damage to his car.

  “There must be a brisk trade in side-view mirror replacements in Italy,” I remarked as an ancient stone wall grazed one on the passenger side. “How many of them to do you go through in a year?”

  “About half a dozen,” he replied with a laugh.

  He applied more pressure to the gas pedal as the car nosed its way up the steep, shadowy, skinny road. Mom muttered a prayer and tilted her head against the headrest until the road levelled out at Montefalco’s Piazza della Repubblica.

  An azure awning over a shop window, a gleaming copper urn filled with flowers the color of sunshine, a fire-engine-red letterbox on the side of a building—all provided inte
nse bursts of color against the bleached stone of the buildings.

  “This is very much a regular working town,” said Tony as he steered the car through a portal and exited the town’s walls. The words “Fuck Police” had been spray painted on a metal gate. “The Slow Cities movement has spurred a tremendous migration throughout Italy back to small-town life,” Tony continued.

  Established several years ago in Italy to stop the unrelenting erosion of la dolce vita not just in Italy but throughout Europe, the Slow Cities movement aims to improve sustainability and the quality of life of its citizens by stopping the creeping North Americanization of its cultures, and the attendant horrors of fast food, eating at your office desk, sedentary lifestyles, and rampant consumerism. It is a gentler appreciation of life, exactly the type of life the tourist brochures portray and that lulls Westerners into an idealized vision of European life—the same vision I had fixed in my mind all these years.

  We sped by cascading acres of tranquil vineyards, their crops neatly lined up and cultivated to perfection. To a neat freak like me the sight of tidy rows of almost anything makes me swell with contentment.

  “Why is there a rosebush planted in front of each of the rows of vines?” I asked. It seemed a curious practice; then again, maybe the Italians just like to beautify all of their surroundings.

  “The rosebushes provide a litmus test for aphid infestation in the vineyards,” Tony replied. “When a bush gets infested, grape growers know it’s time to spray their crop.”

  Was there anything this man didn’t know?

  In Foligno, about a dozen miles from Montefalco, Tony and I settled Mom on a park bench so that he and I could take a quick walking tour of the city.