In Chiantishire

What can one say of Italy?  Try sitting in a wheelchair in any sort of public place, a microphone strapped to one's head, laptop computer open and writing away with voice recognition -- that is to say, speaking words onto the screen -- and just see what happens.  A crowd gathers.  As a crowd might well gather in America if one did the same thing.  The difference with Italy?  A certain collective openness.  A gentleness.  And the feeling on my part that I want to share almost anything of myself.

This very day, Marlou and I went driving about Chianti.  We drove north on the Michelin Guide's blue road and south on its red road.  This is definitely the way to design a route through the region -- choose two roads with map colors that don't clash.  Aside from that, forget it.  There is absolutely nothing to plan, and certainly nothing to worry about, in planning one's day in Tuscany.  Simply put, everything is beautiful.  First, the people are beautiful.  They are almost infallibly kind.  Certainly, there are polite.  And the only surprises come in their ways of warmth.

We were somewhere north of Castellina in Chianti, growing a little weary of driving and momentarily lost.  We thought that the centro of the little town we happened to be passing through would be just the thing for some lunch.  But we weren't sure.  More exactly, we could not exactly find the centro.  But, what the heck, here was a square, there was the one apparently open café in town.  And there, modern miracle of Italian miracles, was a disabled parking space.  It must be noted in passing that the EU is now doing for disabled people what the US did in the pre-Bush era.  But we digress.

Lunch wasn't much.  The café wasn't much.  The town wasn't much.  A grilled cheese and ham sandwich, Italian style, two espressos, and we had exhausted the menu.  The problem was the toilet.  In a one-horse town like this, one could not expect an ideal level of disabled restroom accommodation.  Seated outside in the café's terrace, bladder conditions deteriorating, I asked Marlou to do some scouting.  Then I changed my mind.  Yes, there was a low step from the terrace to the café's interior, but the sort of thing I could usually deal with on my own.  So, batteries charged, fully caffeinated, I headed inside. 

The place was genuinely old.  Behind a high counter there were no less than three employees.  If one considers that there were not many more than three customers, and our bill for sandwiches and espressos came to less than five euros, the café's overhead and operational efficiency defied any principle of modern economics.  But this isn't about modern economics.  Italy's economics are doing splendidly, thank you very much, at least in this region.  This was about....  Well, I actually don't know.  It was about Italy.  It was about an Italian café.  And it was about time I found a men's room.  And surely there was one inside.  I could not quite bring myself to approach the trio at the counter with my pathetic Italian, which consist largely of gestures and guessed-at words, all in an accent that sounds suspiciously like Chico Marx.  So I nipped into the back.  Things were looking awfully atmospheric, downright folkloric, what with a smoke-filled room in the dim distance, old Italian men playing cards, drinking and hanging out.  Surely this was a place for a men's room.  And that line in the foreground, that small step down, the one my middle-aged and slow-to-adjust eyes judge to be about two or three inches...bam, well it's about five inches.  Meaning that I am now stuck.  There's no way back up this step after crashing down it.  No, that's not true, because about four old Italian men are crowding around me, pointing, gesturing for ways to deliver assistance and now lifting my chair, with only moderate help from my battery-propelled rear wheels, back up the step.  For which I thank them profusely, and they nod and smile warmly and return to their smoking and their cards.  Most of these guys have seen a war, recall when Mussolini posters dominated the piazza and are not fazed by a cripple rolling in from the adjacent room.

The trio at the counter includes a stunning woman.  Italy is full of stunning women.  They pop up where and when you least expect them, and they inspire the usual hormonal surge mixed with a high level of admiration.  Is it their attire?  Their stance?  Their quality of self-possessed sensuality, understated and uncontrived?  I don't know.  I don't know anything, such is the effect of this woman and all of her Italian national sisters.  I do know, or I am reminded by, my bladder.  It is full and filling and I am wasting precious time, or being wasted by time, both of which are so pleasant in Italy that one cannot tell the difference and ceases to care.  But urinary necessity transcends all this, and I am now at the counter and asking the inescapable question: where are the toilets?  I point helpfully up and down the street, as though this will jog the memory of the counter crew.  But really, I'm just trying to show them that I am not a stupid non-gesturing American, that I know we are in Italy and gesticulating is part of what people do.

An old guy behind the counter emerges and motions for me to follow.  He directs me out to the sidewalk, and we turn right.  We turn together, as we walk together, as we proceed up the street together.  For this man is not only pointing the way, but conducting me personally, point to point, origin to finale.  Veloce, he tells me.  And what can this word be if not the Latin cousin of velocity?  Yes, I nod, my wheelchair goes fast.  Batteria, I say.  Fuerza, I add.  We're still walking.  The men's room appears to be in the neighboring town.  We hang a right, then a left, and even start down the first twenty meters of a country lane when we stop.  There is a mahogany door built into the wall.  It has no sign.  It has no lock.  One side opens quickly, then the man fiddles with the bolts on the other side, until both doors stand open.  This, it seems, is the town's wheelchair-accessible toilet.  It has appeared the way saints appear in old movies.  And when I am done peeing, the man appears too.  He has been waiting for me, waiting to make sure I am okay.  And all I can do is thank him, awkwardly and in a bad version of his own tongue, when what I want to say and does much more than thanks.  I want to say that while he was waiting for me I realized that I had been waiting for him and his countrymen all my life.