Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  Once I’ve taken off my coat and slipped off my shoes, and we’ve given each other a warm hug or a cool air-kiss, depending on our mood, she will eventually pull herself up out of her chair and with shaky, arthritic hands grab hold of the handlebars of her walker, and shuffle slowly toward the kitchen to stir something in a pot on the stove or check on what she’s got in the oven.

  Her dark brown eyes have paled and become watery over the years. The once feisty twinkle is dimming, as if the bulb is sputtering. She can still be defiant, but on closer examination the look in her eyes is wary, unsure, a little frightened.

  Years ago, when she and I fought bitterly, I thought the only thing that could bring her down was a silver bullet and a wooden stake. Now I see that it will take much less. The thought of her dying makes me gasp for air. I love her—her quirky, impatient, irritating, food-drooling, incontinent self. Well, maybe not the incontinent part.

  I have come close to losing her a few times since our return from Italy—one night in Guelph General Hospital she was given just hours to live—but she’s a tough old gal, and each time she bounced back. During one stay in the hospital she actually said “I love you” to me without me saying it first to her. I’ve always known she does, but I need it said to me to make it real. It was when I saw her with a ventilator strapped to her face, surrounded by enough tubing and cable to dial in a planet, and with the staccato beep of the heart monitor marking time, that I realized I truly loved her, and that the sparkle of my own life will diminish when hers is over.

  My relationship with my own daughter is one that I have come to appreciate more and more, too. I never want her to regard me as an adversary, and I don’t want her to think that a bond between people just happens, especially among family members; it has to be nurtured.

  During the holidays I took Zoë to Toronto for a matinee performance of the National Ballet of Canada’s Nutcracker. We were the oldest mother-daughter duo there. All around us little girls bounced excitedly or pirouetted in their fancy red velvet Christmas dresses while their mothers fumbled with ticket stubs and tried to locate their seats.

  The outing was something I had put on my mother-daughter to-do list the moment I learned that I was pregnant with my daughter. It took seventeen years for the stars of Opportunity, Time, and Money to align. Or maybe it was Desperation: The following year, Zoë would leave for university.

  The Nutcracker provides a magical subtext that I doubt Tchaikovsky realized when he composed it. It is the mother-daughter dance. The young leads in the ballet, who fight constantly, as brothers and sisters do, could easily be replaced by a mother and daughter whose day-to-day bickering gets suspended at times by moments of awe and shared hopes for fantasy and exoticism. The reason we fight is that we are so much the same and we want the same things.

  I told Zoë that this outing to The Nutcracker was much more than a chance to go to the ballet—I told her from my heart what it meant to me and what she meant to me. Such candor makes teenagers cringe. I didn’t care. I continued to tell her so that she would never forget. Eventually, she was reduced to rolling her eyes and yelling, “I KNOW HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS!” But in the car on the way to the performance she glanced at me and said with a quiet smile, “I’m really excited, too.”

  That was all I needed.

  I telephoned Mom a few days later and told her about my outing with Zoë. “I don’t suppose you remember when I took you to The Nutcracker?” Mom asked tentatively, almost resigned to the fact that I would not remember it because, as she so often has said, “You only remember the unpleasant things from your childhood.”

  But she was wrong this time. “Yes, I do,” I replied excitedly. “It was at Eaton Auditorium on College Street. I can even picture us in our seats and what I was wearing—a red wool coat and matching hat. I remember us watching people come into the hall.”

  I detected a smile and a sigh of relief at the other end of the phone.

  And then, “Remember Italy?” she said, her voice softening.

  “Wasn’t that fun! What was it that you said to the gas station attendants about playing piano for a whore?”

  We both broke into laughter.

  She fell silent for a moment, and I pictured her with a faraway look in her eyes, flipping through her memory reel and reliving moments of our road trip—Alberobello’s countryside woven with ribbons of drystone fences and studded with little trulli, the cargo-ferry ride to Sicily, the caves of Matera, Easter Sunday with the Pope, the thrill of sailing down Venice’s Grand Canal past endless renovation possibilities.

  Perhaps she was thinking back to when she paused at the massive windows of a disappointing hotel room and gazed down onto a bustling Florentine piazza, imagining herself— the version of her that is young, carefree, and able to move her limbs freely—striding confidently across the piazza, twirling coquettishly, arms outstretched, and filled with the joy of simply being alive and being in Italy.

  From the sidelines, a grown daughter wonders whether she has glimpsed herself twenty-five years hence.

  Acknowledgments

  FRANK MAINOLFI, the owner of Bar Michelangelo in Hamilton, Canada, first suggested I take an extended trip to Italy (I think he meant this in a nice way), and I am grateful for his push.

  Thanks also to Tony and Sofia Verna for their kind hospitality and invaluable research assistance. Ideas often remain unvoiced within us. Such was the case concerning the title of this book, until Mary Lou Atkinson acted as midwife to my creative process one laughter-filled afternoon and coaxed it into the open.

  I’d like to express my deep gratitude to the folks at Greystone Books, particularly Rob Sanders, Corina Eberle, and Emiko Morita for their ongoing encouragement and behind-the-scenes magic. Many extra gold stars go to my editor, Nancy Flight, who guided this project from start to finish. Her wise suggestions helped me tell a story that was, at times, difficult to articulate.

  Finally, to those nearest and dearest to me, a heartfelt grazie mille.

  AN EXCERPT FROM

  What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim

  Whoa! what the hell are you doing in May?”

  Thus spaketh the psychic, definitely not the type who holds her tarot cards close to her vest.

  She had done a couple of readings for me in the past, and I decided to visit her just weeks before my pilgrimage—part due diligence and part perverse desire to see whether her psychic powers were still sharp.

  Lori is a youthful, slim, pretty woman with long brown hair and green eyes that freak you out a bit because they look like lizard eyes. She wears faded jeans, a pink o¤-the-shoulder sweatshirt, and bare feet. She looks more like a pole dancer than a psychic.

  Tarot may well be her specialty, but subtlety is not her strong suit. “Whoa!” was the tip-o¤.

  So, just what was I doing in May?

  “Well,” I began tentatively, “I’m going to Spain in May. I’m walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. It’s an ancient pilgrimage route that runs through northern Spain. About eight hundred kilometers long.”

  My speech began to speed up, gaining momentum like a horse o¤ the rein. I was excited about the Camino, and I wanted her to be excited, too.

  “It’s not an organized trip,” I continued. “You have maps, and you just follow the signs and arrows along the way. You start o¤ crossing the Pyrenees; that’s the mountain range that divides France from Spain. You carry a pilgrim passport with you, and it gets stamped in each town you stop at the end of the day. When you reach the end—in Santiago—you present your pilgrim passport and receive a parchment certifying that you completed the journey.”

  Lori stared at me. Her lizard eyes flashed. I half expected a tongue to fly out and slap me.

  “But you’re not going alone,” she said matter-of-factly. Her brow furrowed as she puzzled over the tarot cards laid out before her.

  “No,” I replied brightly. “I’m leading a group of fourteen other women.”

  Lori raised her head and
gave me a look of profound incredulity. “Fourteen other women?” She said this in a tone of voice that indicated that I should know better. She rolled her lizard eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. I sat chastened, my eyes downcast.

  “No!” the Little Voice Inside urged. “Don’t you dare shrink. Don’t let anyone screw your dreams.”

  I raised my eyes and looked defiantly at Lori. Come on, Lizard Eyes, I dared her. I can take it. I leaned in a little to show her I was unafraid of what she had to dish about the fourteen women.

  Instead, she gathered up her cards and changed the subject.

  “How much hiking have you done?” she asked tauntingly, glancing at my long skirt and pointy-toed stilettos. I might not look like a hiker, but, damn it, she didn’t look like a psychic either. I refused to let her stare me down.

  “Actually, I’ve been hiking the Bruce Trail and the Hamilton Waterfront Trail,” I answered haughtily. “Been hiking for, oh, let’s see, about seven months.”

  A sarcastic smile crept over her lips. Now it was her turn to lean toward me. “Have you ever been camping?”

  The word “camping” caused my body to jerk.

  “No, I haven’t camped,” I said, sti¤ening my resolve. “We won’t be camping anyway; we’ll be staying in refugios—pilgrim hostels.”

  Lori shuffled the deck and peeled o¤ one card at a time, dramatically snapping each one face up against the shiny surface of her dining room table.

  “You might find that this experience is a bit more… rustic than you want,” she said with forced diplomacy. She began flipping the cards faster. I watched her and wondered whether I had wasted my money coming here just to be scolded.

  “Watch your money,” she blurted. “There’s the possibility you may overspend.”

  I’m paying fifty dollars to hear that? There’s always the possibility of my overspending. It’s in my dna.

  “Be frugal,” she added, narrowing her eyes on me. My cheeks flushed; I hoped she wasn’t a mind reader.

  She arranged a new round of cards in a semicircle, studied them, gathered them up, and reshuffled.

  “Don’t take jewelry.”

  Reflexively, I fingered my necklace that held a few personal totems—a silver cross, a gold pendant in the shape of Pelee Island, a small filigreed gold heart with the words “#1 Mom” (a gift from one of my sons), and a tiny gold shell, the Camino’s universal emblem, given by a friend as a token of pre-Camino courage.

  “I wear this everywhere,” I told Lori. “I almost never take it o¤. And these earrings”—my hands moved to touch the gold hoops and diamond studs that decorated my ears. The hoops were a gift to myself when I was downsized out of a job and barely had money for groceries; the studs were a gift from a man who later downsized our relationship.

  “If they’re important, don’t take them. You’ll definitely lose something.”

  Lori dealt the cards again and pondered their message. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her brain.

  Finally, she exhaled audibly. “Well, this trip may not be awful, but it won’t be fabulous. You might write a book about it. You’ll meet two celebrities.”

  My ears pricked up. “Like Harrison Ford?” I asked eagerly. “Or Robert Redford?” I hastily added Redford’s name because in my excitement I forgot that I had removed Ford from my Hot Men list when he dumped his wife and kids for Calista Stickwoman. Now visions of hiking with movie stars raced into my mind. There I was with Redford, walking along a moonlit path as we murmured to each other about spiritual destinies… “Not men,” said Lori, interrupting my reverie. “Two women.”

  Crap.

  “It won’t be the trip you hoped it would be,” she continued, “but oddly enough…”—she paused to double check her dog-eared cards as if disbelieving their message—“yup, looks like you’ll do this sort of thing again.”

  Table of Contents

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CONTENTS

  1 · EXTENDING THE OLIVE BRANCH

  2 · EN ROUTE TO ITALY

  3 · ALBEROBELLO, MARTINA FRANCA, LOCOROTONDO

  4 · ALBEROBELLO

  5 · SAN MANGO D’AQUINO, REGGIO DI CALABRIA, TAORMINA

  6 · SICILY: RACALMUTO, AGRIGENTO

  7 · MESSINA, CATANZARO MARINA

  8 · ALBEROBELLO, MATERA

  9 · CASTEL DEL MONTE, POTENZA

  10 · AMALFI COAST, SORRENTO, CAPRI

  11 · POMPEII, MOUNT VESUVIUS

  12 · VITERBO

  13 · FOLIGNO, MONTEFALCO, SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI

  14 · CIVITA CASTELLANA, SIENA, SAN GIMIGNANO

  15 · PISA, FLORENCE

  16 · ROME

  17 · VENICE

  18 · MAKING THE EFFORT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS