Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  “Sorry about my Mom,” I said to Tony as we set off. “She’s hard of hearing, as you may have noticed, and it’s really hard for her to get around. We’re finding that Italy isn’t really cut out for people with disabilities.”

  “I don’t know why it’s taking Italy so long in making itself accessible,” he acknowledged. “The population here is aging, too—did you know that Italy has the lowest birth rate in the world? Most Italians are now over the age of fifty, but the country is just getting around to putting in ramps to help the disabled.”

  “If the population is so old, how come we haven’t seen another person with a walker? We feel like freaks,” I said as we nimbly negotiated various sidewalk obstacles and detours as a result of construction work. “People stare at my mom as if they’ve never seen a person with such a contraption.”

  “I don’t know; it’s not that physical disabilities are unheard of in Italy,” mused Tony.

  Yet, even in nontouristy Foligno, a bustling city of fifty thousand people with a largely older population, there were no signs of anyone with a physical disability—not in the streets, in the shops, or in the square. Sure, one or two people used a cane, but nothing more than that. By contrast, you cannot walk down a sidewalk in a North American town or city without encountering someone with a walker, tripping over a cluster of them parked outside a café, or being accosted by one of those motorized scooters that are quickly bringing pedestrian road rage to a new level.

  Our walk took us to the expansive Piazza della Repubblica— every settlement of consequence in Italy has a Piazza della Repubblica—where groups of teens freed from school were hanging out with friends, young professionals were chatting idly with one another at café tables, young moms were pushing babes in their strollers, and older couples with the tired look of hard living etched on their faces sat side by side, seemingly oblivious to one other.

  Tony pushed open a massive oak door into the Church of San Francesco. I had specifically asked him to bring me here—it is the resting place of Angela of Foligno, patron saint of fallen women and sexual temptation.

  Hers is a story of hot sex, sudden conversion, and hard-won redemption, all things for which I have an unhealthy fascination. Born in 1248 to a wealthy family, she was married off in her midteens, at which point she proceeded to live, according to Catholic legend, “wildly, adulterously, and sacrilegiously.”

  There is no mention of the type of man Angela married, which might have provided a clue as to what sparked her hot, wild stray ways. He was understandably appalled at her loose behavior, but when she turned from a good-time girl into a God-time girl, he wasn’t thrilled either. I suppose there is no solace in being cuckolded by God.

  Angela became a mystic, bore the stigmata of Christ, and devised a thirty-step plan to spiritual salvation. Her grave inside the Church of San Francesco became the locus for a number of miracles.

  There is a sense of both shock and sympathy when you read Angela’s account of her sudden reversal of behavior. Here’s a taste:

  And then I began to reject fine foods, fancy clothing and headdresses. But there was still shame and sorrow, because I did not yet feel any love. And I was still with my husband—and so there was bitterness when I was spoken to or treated unjustly; nevertheless, I endured as patiently as I could. And then in accordance with God’s will, my mother died; she had been a great hindrance to me. Later, my husband and all my children died within a short time. And because I had already begun the way of the cross and had asked God that they should die, I felt a deep consolation following their deaths. I knew that God had accomplished these things for me, and that my heart would always be in God’s heart and God’s heart would always be in mine.

  Granted, praying for the deaths of your mother, your husband, and your children so that you can serve God doesn’t strike me as the most positive first step to sainthood. Still, I felt sad for Angela, sad that her spiritedness—however misguided— had been tamped down, and sad that her path to redemption was littered with so much family strife and so many bodies. As I gazed upon her small shrunken body that has, for the last seven hundred or so years, been displayed under glass, I thought about family dynamics yet again and wondered whether the sacrifices Angela had made as a daughter, wife, and mother had brought her the contentment she so ardently sought.

  Tony and I left Angela and returned to the energy of Foli-gno’s streets.

  Like many parts of Italy, Foligno was going through a building boom. Scaffolding covered almost every surface, and boardwalks lined the streets where infrastructure improvements were being made.

  “It’s all government money,” said Tony above the banging of hammers and the buzz of circular saws. “They’re converting palazzos into apartments and interior courtyards into parking space.”

  They were gorgeous, elegant buildings, and my mind leapt once again to thoughts of whether Foligno would be a good place for me to live.

  We returned to the small park where we had left Mom. She was not there; she was in Tony’s car. Asleep.

  “Hey, wake up,” I said with some embarrassment. “We’re in Italy, for God’s sake. Look at all this history!”

  OUR DRIVE-BY history lesson continued the following day in Spello, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi, Spoleto, and the unfortunately named Bastardo.

  “The town actually took a vote to change its name,” said Tony, “but decided against it.”

  We arrived at the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, on the outskirts of Assisi, where Saint Francis spent a good portion of his life.

  Tony wanted us to see the Porziuncola (“little piece”) that sits smack-dab in the center of the Basilica’s nave.

  “When Francis approached Pope Innocent in 1209,” began Tony as we walked toward the Basilica, “he told the Pope— quite boldly and without the slightest sense of ego—that he wanted to be the church within the Church; in other words, Francis wanted to attend to the core values of the Church that he felt were being eroded. It was a rather presumptuous statement, especially to a Pope, but Francis got away with it because of his charm.”

  The Porziuncola is an adorable piece of architecture—it seats about twelve people—and it is the sort of stone structure you might stumble across in the woods. In fact, that’s precisely what surrounded it back in ad 350 when it was built. And here’s the remarkable thing about this wee church: It was not moved into the Basilica as most people assume; the soaring Basilica was constructed entirely around it.

  We shuffled through the Basilica and arrived, as all visitors inevitably do, at the souvenir shop.

  You have to hand it to the Catholics. Give them a saint and they can spin a marketing sensation that defies imagination.

  This shop alone had plenty of Saint Francis swag: books, cds, dvds, postcards, calendars, wooden icons, terra-cotta icons, and rosary beads by the bundle, some with matching earrings. There were key fobs, candies, fridge magnets, crucifixes, statuettes, posters, jewelry, religious medals, candles, bookmarks, religious cards, Christmas ornaments. It was endless.

  I was flipping through a clothes rack crammed with cassocks, albs, chasubles, and other religious vestments when Mom sidled over.

  “Are you thinking of those for the boys?” she asked in earnest.

  “Religious garments? For my sons? Seriously?” I went through them again to see if any were printed with the slogan, “My Mom visited Italy and all she got me was this lousy chasuble.”

  THE NEXT day we bade a hug-filled good-bye to Sofia and Tony, who in the space of two days went from being relative strangers to our new best friends. Their hospitality had offered me and my nerves a breather from driving and decision making.

  “That was lovely,” said Mom as we drove down our hosts’ driveway. “What nice friends you have.”

  I smiled in a distracted way. I was preoccupied with a troubling dream I had had the night before.

  In the dream, Mom was being coerced into a long-term care facility where the walls were painted t
hat putrid shade of green that is favored by the hospital world. I was screaming at people to leave her alone, but some authority figure felt Mom needed better care than I was giving her. No matter what I said, they would not release Mom or let me talk to her alone. Instead, the people in charge formed a barrier across the long hall and walked slowly toward me, forcing me out the door.

  And then my mind moved from the dream to Mom’s real-world complaints. Her back was sore, she said, and her legs felt unusually heavy. Her scattering of pills continued. She seemed forgetful—not exactly disoriented but a tad out to lunch. She didn’t seem interested in the sorts of things that normally grabbed her—I could actually drive past antique shops and she would not shout “stop!”

  It rattled me, this difference between how I had perceived my mother from sporadic visits and how she was when I was with her every day, all day. Had I been too busy to notice a decline in her health, or had I unconsciously avoided dealing with the reality?

  As we motored along the ancient Via Flaminia toward Civita Castellana, I suddenly wanted to go home. Sure, I was tired of the driving, organizing, caregiving, and living out of a suitcase, tired of seeing Italy through a windshield. But I also wanted life with my mother to return to normal, back to when we saw each other once every few weeks, when I was so distracted by my own life that I could absolve myself of the responsibility of caring for her every day. I craved it as much as I felt ashamed for even thinking of it.

  14

  Civita Castellana, Siena, San Gimignano

  ACONTRAIL was unzipping a clear blue, sunny sky, and that got me thinking about Colin. He was meeting us at our next stop—Civita Castellana. I wanted to get there quickly, get a hotel room, and spend a chunk of time doing some serious primping. I could feel myself deteriorating into an old hag, and I worried that I was beginning to smell like an old-folks’ home.

  On top of that, it had been days since Mom had made a wisecrack about my hair. Either it looked acceptable to her, which would be cause for immediate alarm, or it was in such a wretched state that she was privately hoping its appearance would cause Colin to run screaming back to England. Then she could have me all to herself.

  Conspiracy theories aside—though I made a mental note to pick up some hair conditioner—I was looking forward to being off leash for a while. Colin would be a second pair of hands and a conversation buffer between my mother and me. His soft English accent makes my mother feel that she is in the presence of British royalty, and I hoped that his company would divert her attention away from me and my flaws.

  I could hardly wait for his arrival. When Mom went down for a nap, Colin and I would be able to go off together and amble down twisting, romantic cobblestone lanes. We could hold hands, my hand slipping into his strong one, rather than into the hand of someone who was gripping me like a banister. I could walk at a brisk, jaunty pace, and I could do so without dragging along an annoying red walker. I would not have to brush fallen bits of lunch from someone’s shirt or keep asking that someone if they needed to use the bathroom. I would be able to have a conversation without using the words “medication” and “adult diapers.”

  Colin was flying to Rome—he was probably boarding his plane in London at that very moment—and then catching a train to Civita Castellana, where we would rendezvous at 6:50 PM. Just in time for a candlelit dinner in some dark oste-ria. I pressed down on the accelerator pedal.

  Mom and I arrived in Civita Castellana in late morning. We circled the small town center four times to find a hotel, then ventured to the outskirts across a long bridge to conduct the same search before returning to the town center and repeating the exercise. Finally I spied a tourist office. Even before I got out of the car I knew that I was just asking for disappointment.

  The tourist desk was closed, said the young man with a “Turismo” logo on his shirt. Undeterred, I asked him to recommend a hotel.

  “No,” he answered. “The turismo office, she is closed.”

  “OK, but if the tourist office was open,” I posed, “and someone asked you to recommend a hotel, what would you say?”

  He stared at me with a stunned look, then turned to consult with his supervisor, an unhappy, irritated woman in a very tight blouse who shooed him away and eyed me with contempt.

  “Mi dispiace,” I said softly. “Mia madre è nella macchina, è disabile, e vorrei un hotel.”

  OK, it wasn’t perfect, and I was well aware I was using my mother’s disability for gain. At some point in any journey you succumb to guerilla tactics to score a smidgen of cooperation.

  “Hotel Palace,” the woman snapped, swatting the air in a gesture indicating that what I was looking for was outside and around a corner.

  I returned to the car and set off on another round of circling the town for the elusive hotel, or any hotel for that matter. We asked people on the street. One fellow stroked his jaw as if conjuring up a distant memory, a woman shrugged her shoulders, a man in a suit looked at me as if I had just asked for heroin, and then one old chap gestured that it was just ahead. In Italy, life is conducted through gestures. If you were a blind person you would just never find anything in Italy.

  “Well, how can it be?” I thought as I followed the old guy’s gestures. “We’ve passed this way at least a dozen times. There is nothing here!”

  I drove extra slowly, making sure that absolutely every establishment we passed was not a hotel. And then a small sign presented itself, with a faded arrow pointing through a small arch flanked by rounded wooden gates. It was no longer the Hotel Palace but the Relais Falisco. Well, so much for the help from Civita Castellana’s tourist office.

  The driveway led into a courtyard with crunchy gravel and a central fountain that was burbling excitedly. A small patio area with chairs and tables and bright white umbrellas was inviting. The hotel looked posh and held the promise of well-heated rooms, thick coverlets on the bed, and an endless supply of hot water in the bathrooms.

  We booked two rooms, one for Colin and one for Mom and me.

  After a quick lunch and a long, hot bath and lots of girly pampering, I set off for the train station in Civita Castellana. I had washed my hair and styled it with the hotel’s blow-dryer to a smooth, glossy sheen, flipping the ends slightly. When I was not two blocks from the hotel the weather did a dramatic one-eighty, and rain began to fall. Within seconds my smooth, tidy hair sprang into a ball of frizz. I don’t know why I even bothered to try in the first place.

  As I made my way through town I noticed people staring at me. Passersby gave me a head-to-toe appraisal, shopowners came out from behind their counters and stood in their doorways to have a gawk, and widows flung open the shutters of their tall second-storey windows and leaned out over their sills, clutching their knitting. A few men eyed me lasciviously. It was as if someone had instigated a phone chain alerting the population to the new kid in town. Ahead of me I could see people already craning their necks in my direction as if I were an eagerly anticipated float in a parade. At one point I paused in front of a store window as if checking out the merchandise, but in reality it was to assure myself that an enormous tumor had not erupted on my face. I could not understand the unwelcome attention. It was very unsettling.

  This was one of the things I learned about Italians. They stare. They stare piercingly and without shame. They stare without a care for the obvious discomfort it might cause the object of their stare, oblivious to the fact that their staring might give offense or be construed as rude by those from another culture. Italians stare, and they do so in a deeply penetrating way.

  We humans rely on eye contact with our colleagues on this planet for many reasons—for affirmation, for love, for help, for camaraderie, to let our displeasure be known, to show sympathy and solidarity. Not in Italy. When an Italian stares, especially an Italian man, he’s doing so for the same reason a dog licks his balls—because he can. Furthermore, he wants you to know he can. Italian stares are all about territory and power.

  On the o
dd occasion when I was brave enough to meet their stare, they did not avert their gaze or offer a sheepish smile to acknowledge that they had been caught in the act. They stared harder and raised their chins defiantly. I suspect that staring also has something to do with the fact that people in places such as Civita Castellana do not get out a lot. They stay so rooted to their little corner of the world that the appearance of a stranger is cause for excitement—or for outright jubilation, depending on how much money you drop in their town.

  I reached the small train station on the other side of a bridge that spanned an abyss. It was a weathered station, simple in a quaint sort of way. I took a seat on a bench on the platform and waited. At varying intervals, trains three or four carriages long skittered along the tracks to the station with a clickety-clackety sound and then shuddered into the station alongside the platform, rolling to a long, screeching halt. Great gusts of steam billowed out from beneath the carriages.

  I imagined Colin and me running toward each other through these very clouds of steam, locking into a tight, desperate clutch and warm, nuzzling kisses.

  Before long I had embroidered the scenario into the sort of fantasy best suited for late-night tv viewing: Tender embraces with saliva-filled kisses and much bodily groping. We would then dash back to the hotel, hand in hand, splashing through puddles on dimly lit streets. We would fumble with the key to the hotel room, giggling nervously, and once inside the room we would launch into a session of urgent, writhing lovemaking.

  Well? What else are you supposed to think about at a train station? I continued to sit on the platform bench and wait and wait some more.

  The train station attendants eyed me with bemused curiosity. Occasionally I would get up from my bench and wander over to ask them when the next train from Rome was arriving. They would look thoughtfully at their watches, consult the train schedule, and murmur an expected time of arrival.