Once in a Lifetime

Marlou says she is aware that this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip.  We are talking, trying to talk, and always, it seems, talking around this issue of lifetimes and how long ours together will last.  For reasons that are unclear, this issue has hung over us ever since we emerged from that sledgehammer-on-the-head experience known as jet lag.  By the way, I wisely remember to dread the latter in planning one of these European trips, but mercifully the details always elude me.  The details are unpleasant.  Worse, they are deceptive.  There is that first day of catching up on sleep.  There is a second slightly groggy day that ends in a fairly normal night...allowing for some startling moments of alertness, say around 3 a.m.  And then there's the third night.  And that is invariably the night when the intercontinental time bomb goes off in your brain, in your body, and all biorhythms rebel.  Marlou and I, both of us, were awake much of that night.

That's when this thing about Marlou's cancer, and our mutual mortality, and how much time we have together burst into nocturnal consciousness.  Of course, it wasn't really nocturnal or diurnal, but some terrible, wrenching night-of-the-living-jetlagged time of darkness when the things of darkness manifest.  The night was so disturbing that it didn't seem like a matter of circadian rhythms as much as the emergence of a panicky truth.  Oddly, there is nothing new about it.  The scope of Marlou's liver tumor is well known.  We've had time to worry about it.  This should be a time to forget about it.

With a certain level of background figure and disturbance following us about, Marlou and I have been learning to take it easy.  The region being what it is, the hotel, the everything Tuscan so enjoyable, we arise each day and commit to only the most modest plans.  A drive here.  A stop there.  And on some days not even that.

Our first tourist goal was admirably modest.  Go into the town of Colle val d'Elsa and have a look around.  It's not that simple, of course.  The Tuscan hill towns are located on small fortress-like peaks, and this one is no exception.  Fortunately, the municipality has invested in a new and modern elevator.  It zips passengers from a grotto-like passage, all leaking stones and museum-style lighting, alcoves alive with movies of the region, up to the medieval city on top.  From there, Colle has the feel of being in midair.  Its hill is a narrow one, the town strung out along it, so that glancing over a street or two in either direction, one's gaze falls into space.  You might as well be a ship at sea.  Certando, another hill town we visited the following day, hangs off a different sort of hill.  A funicular railway takes people there, and it's altogether a bigger place, the edges not so close that one feels the rim of the world at hand.  Still, in a wheelchair, both places feel remarkably similar.

Electric wheelchairs like mine do a remarkable job, it must be admitted.  But they do have serious design limits.  And steep hills paved with slick stones are way outside their performance parameters.  My tires are good and my wheelchair skills well honed.  But each moment leaves me slightly adrenal, knuckles whitening, insecurities rising.  Not that I really care.  I am here to enjoy Italy, and the pleasures are so many that a low-level fear, however persistent, simply becomes part of the story.  It's a bit like Marlou's cancer, always there, not an immediate threat, and one takes maximum precautions.

It's 2 p.m. in Certaldo.  It's time for lunch.  It really isn't time for lunch, not by any sane caloric standard.  Just wander down to the breakfast room in the former cardinal's palace, now our Italian country hotel.  One of the waiters is usually playing the piano, just a little mild Euro pop background music to whet your appetite.  Which, being Italy, is whetted to the max.  Never mind the boring array of breads and cheeses and meats and fruits and coffees and almond pastries that stun me senseless each morning.  For the moment, just consider that without trying, one ingests enough at breakfast to keep going for at least a week.  And this hasn't been a week, it's only been four hours, and now it's 2 p.m. high atop the hill of Certaldo.  So, maybe something light for lunch.  Maybe some soup.  Which turns out to be impossibly mouthwatering, an item modestly titled bean soup on the handwritten menu.  And never mind that my wheelchair is perched precariously outside of a café that looks like it might be going out of business, crude wooden tables with legs long on one side and short on the other to accommodate the slope.  My wheels locked, I hope, but the feeling of things slipping always with me.  And the soup.  It is as though someone has gone into the finest backyard garden, plucked out the freshest Roma tomatoes, stirred them into a froth, whipped the beans in a similar manner, cooked everything for approximately 32 hours, and carefully added olive oil in concentric swirls.  One modest bowl of soup is rich enough to serve a family.  And no amount of exercise and can work this off.

But that's Italy.  Coming at you like a good mother.  Reminding you of your past and your present and, yes, our inevitable future.  Where things are old and new and stable and sliding and perched atop hills, reminding us that whatever happens, wherever it happens, there's always lunch.

After which, there's dinner.  As one relaxes into the holiday mentality, meals become major milestones.  Objectives, deadlines, self-improvement, edification, all this has slipped down the hill town, gone and forgotten.  All that's left is that pasta with pistachio nuts that you thought of ordering one night, but got seduced by the day's mushroom sauce.  And it's all out there somewhere, and what the hell, for a change why not motor into town.  Electric motor, that is.  The wheelchair van Marlou and I are using proves to be convenient enough.  But sometimes one wants to go overland.  So, that's what we are doing now.  Marlou, having wandered about the neighborhood, thinks she has found a path into town.  Our hotel is perched high on what is probably the primordial bank of the River Elsa, and the slopes down to the town pose something of a barrier.  Marlou thinks she knows a back route through a neighborhood.  I tell her it's worth a try.  The worst we would encounter would still be picturesquely Italian.  My batteries are charged.

In the 1960s, the film 'Divorce Italian Style' satirized the marital laws of this Catholic country.  'Wheelchair Access Italian Style,' which I am currently filming in my mind, is every bit as entertaining, although not always as funny.  Italians like to drive, and they like to drive fast.  Colle is a relatively placid Tuscan town, but it does not pay to be inattentive when crossing the road.  The reason the chicken crossed the road may still be puzzling some, but the quadriplegic crossed the road because he had to get to dinner and, curb cuts being few and far between, he darted to the other side of the street where he could.  Marlow has found one place near a bus stop where the footpath gives way to the road, and that's where I blast, onrushing Fiats be damned.  Splendid.  And we are now in another, quasi-suburban world. 

The street is lined with pleasant modern homes, four-story apartment houses and gardens.  The latter are bursting with vegetables.  I peer through a wrought iron fence at spinach, lettuce, artichokes and, yes, gradually coming into summer focus, row after row of tomatoes.  The Italians have one simple and seemingly unvaried approach to staking tomatoes.  They cross long poles in a succession of X's, run a long pole at the junction of the X's and bind the whole thing with string.  Presumably the vines grow up one part of the X and dangle their fruit in space.  It's hard to say, but to know for sure, I would have to return.  Like in about two months.  I will be checking the airline schedules when I get home.

Foot paths aren't much in this neighborhood, but the traffic isn't either, so who cares?  Marlou and I wander straight down the pavement.  Until the pavement ends and we head straight down the hill.  I hope the hill will end conveniently, but it doesn't.  Marlou scouts ahead and reports that we are stuck.  The dirt track will dump us directly into traffic, no footpaths, no sidewalks, just a tight road with Alpha Romeos on a slalom into town.  We head back.  An old Italian man stops us, explains that he is 86 and wishes us good health.  It takes us about five minutes to clarify this exchange, running '86' through the phrase books in our minds, then interpreting the 'salud' part, even though the word could not be clearer.  It's not the language that eludes us.  Perhaps it's the health.  The cancer patient and the quadriplegic, having reversed course, are still seeking a land route into town.

Marlou has warned me about the hill.  Just as the dietitian at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation warned me about the scale.  How often do you weigh yourself, she asked during our recent consultation.  I told her that I didn't.  I wanted to tell her that medical people have no imaginations.  That's why the Tuscan diet is so splendid, being Mediterranean and therefore good, transcending caloric concerns and transmuting itself into moments like this one, when the sense of the combined mass of wheelchair and olive-oil-bloated body now are beginning to feel out of control. 

Because I've seen this hill, seen it from the window of our car as we bomb out of the town and up to our hotel.  But I've never seen it this close, never seen it slipping under my tires, as it is now.  True, the footpath zigzags, making switchbacks of the slope that cars assault head-on.  This seems good.  But the last part of the zigzag, surprisingly steep, challenges my wheelchair in unforeseen ways.  I am slipping, the simple truth, with the joystick control bent backwards, my tires spinning in reverse, trying to take me uphill, while the batteries and the motors and more than a week of Italian cooking are taking me down.  I tell Marlou to do something.  I'm not sure what, and neither is she.  My advice probably amounts to 'hold on,' a thought directed probably more at me then at her.  The tilt decreases, things level a bit and we successfully cross the road that feeds in traffic from the autostrada.

Another neighborhood.  This one is poorer, perched right on the river bank, and we are almost at the riparian edge of town.  There's another steep stretch, the effect heightened by smooth paving stones, but we are almost there...except for this curious drop-off, an utterly unnecessary curb at the bottom of the slope.  Weaving through a narrow passage, one of my tires tilts in the air, then, bam.  The wheelchair's front wheels hit the pavement, and we are in town.  From here, we cross the River Elsa, staring down at an enormous duck sitting on a flat stone.  I am certain, though I cannot prove it, that this duck has dined on the remains of last night's fettuccine with wild boar, discreetly scraped from my plate and into its bill by a sympathetic busboy.  There it squats.  No scales, no dietitians, just a flat rock and the Elsa trickling by.