Hill Towns (9 page)

If you don’t need it, fine. Italy’s beauti HILL TOWNS / 67

ful, Cat. It’s really extraordinary; in one way or another, it’s where we all came from. Don’t miss any of it. It ought to be yours alone, not just yours and Joe’s.”

“Have you been?”

She smiled and paused.

“I’ve been,” she said. She said it in such a way that I did not ask when or with whom. Italy meant something to Corinne. I thought suddenly how well I knew her—and how little.

“So,” I said. “What should I pack?”

“Toilet paper and antiperspirant.” She grinned. “And leave all those sweaters and shawls here. I’ve seen your suitcases.

Rome and Florence will be ovens, and Venice will be a steam bath.”

“It’s funny, but when I think of this trip, I don’t even think about Rome and Florence and Venice,” I said. “I mean, I know we’re going there first, but what I see in my mind is the hill towns. The Tuscan hill villages. Up there in the shadow of those old walls, you’d want sweaters and shawls.”

I heard Joe at the living room door greeting Colin and Maria. I dried my hands and Corinne snatched a last bite of bread and we turned toward the living room.

“When you get back, Cat,” she said over her shoulder,

“we’re going to have to talk about those hill towns. We never did, not specifically. I’m hoping once you’ve been through Tuscany you’ll see that a fortress on a hill isn’t anything special; it’s just a place like any other place.”

“I never said it wasn’t,” I said, the panic nibbling and then fading.

“Yes, you did,” she said. “In a thousand different ways.”

68 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

About an hour into a thick, heavy sleep, after a barely touched steak dinner and an unwatched movie, I woke with the heart-pounding sense of a missed appointment and looked around the silent, darkened cabin of the huge jet. People slept slumped in their seats or twisted against bulkheads and partners’ shoulders, as Joe was twisted against mine, his fair head half buried in the little paper pillow the flight attendant had issued us, along with the stale-smelling airline blankets.

I believed almost everyone slept. I had the strong feeling that I alone was awake in the plane. It was one of the loneliest feelings I ever remember having, but I did not want to waken Joe. I sat and tasted the sensation, to see what would come.

Not much did. Soon even the chilly loneliness retreated somewhere inside me, and I could feel and hear only the slight elemental buzz in my veins and ears of the double dose of tranquilizer I had swallowed as we left the Mountain. It had been sufficient to see me incredibly through the maze of freeways around Atlanta, the great teeming, echoing maw of Hartsfield International, the endless wait in the International Departures lounge, and finally the boarding of the Delta flight that would deposit us, some nine hours later, on another continent.

“You OK?” Joe would ask me at one juncture or another.

He wore chinos and an oxford-cloth shirt the color of his eyes and carried an old blue blazer over his shoulder with a paperback of Dante in the pocket. Unlike almost everyone else on our flight, he carried no hand baggage, not even our camera; I had that. He looked as if he had left for Europe many times before; he looked fifteen years younger; he looked wonderful. I had seen more than one pair of female eyes among our

HILL TOWNS / 69

fellow passengers look at him and then look again, longer.

“I’m great,” I would say, smiling through the lovely deep surge of my sedated blood.

“You look great,” he said. “You look like the prettiest girl in college, on her way to Europe for her senior trip. You certainly don’t look like an old married lady who just got humped on the living room sofa not six hours ago and is coked out of her skull on tranquilizers.”

“Yeah, well. You want to try the humping again in another six hours? Did you ever hear of the Mile High Club?” I felt one eye blink away from giggling endlessly and insanely.

“Your six hours are up,” I whispered now to Joe, but he did not stir. I reached into the pocket on the seat back in front of me and pulled out the itinerary I had stuck there and looked at it again. In the dim greenish light, the printed columns looked suddenly absurd, totally unbelievable. It seemed in that instant such a
huge
thing we were doing, and on the strength of such tenuous bonds. How was it that all those fragile promises made all those weeks ago, between the airline and the hotels and us, could possibly be strong enough to guide and sustain us on this immense journey? A four-thousand-mile bridge of words across an endless sea….

After the movie ended, the flight attendant told us to leave down the shades that had shut out the summer twilight, so the breaking day would not disturb the sleepers among us.

We were outrunning the very night on this journey and would meet the dawn just off Land’s End, on the coast of Britain. It seemed so strange, just a nod to the darkness, and then the new day….

I tried to sit very still and empty my mind for whatever would come. I knew I had slept very little, and my 70 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

circadian rhythms were being savaged, and by all rights I would feel the legendary effects of jet lag soon. But at that moment I felt nothing except the purling of the drug past my wrist pulses and a kind of huge, calm waiting. In an hour or so, about 5 A.M. on my reset watch, the cracks beneath the opaque shades began to lighten and I knew that, below us, Cornwall would soon be waking. I lifted a corner of the shade and peered out but saw only clouds, thick and even as whipped cream on a vast pie, beneath us. I had the fancy that if I could see the earth beneath the cloud layer, I would see, far below, the tiny tribal fires of the first dark little Celts to come out of the rock caves into the air of England.

Then all of a sudden everyone was awake and stretching and rubbing grainy eyes and straightening rumpled clothing, and the flight attendants were handing round a hasty breakfast of cold croissants and coffee, and people were queuing up at the lavatories. Hurry, we must all hurry; we were over Germany; we were within tower range of the Munich airport; fasten your seat belts and return your tray tables to the upright position….

The intercom made a frying, crackling sound, and the pilot came on. There was, he said, a line of rather violent thunder-storms coming across the Alps into Munich, and we were going to circle for a bit. Things would, he said, be a little turbulent, but there was nothing to worry about, just a little rough air. Before he finished speaking, we hit it.

Since I had never been on a plane before, I had nothing with which to compare the next ten minutes. But Joe talked of the experience for a very long time afterward. The plane seemed to yaw and stall; it would drop sickeningly, then be tossed horizontally, then drop and HILL TOWNS / 71

buck and yaw again. Some of the drops seemed endless, and people stopped gasping and exclaiming and fell deadly silent.

Soon, at each great lurch there would be stifled screams, and I heard sobs of fear all around me. I clutched Joe’s arm and shut my eyes and braced my feet against the seat in front. I realized, even in the midst of the worst tossing, that it was not death in a crash I was afraid of—even then, this seemed simply unbelievable—but that the atavistic fear of falling would waken the other primal fear that lay at the pit of my being, which therapy and drugs had driven back, and call it out again.

We fell abruptly out of the clouds into slanting rain, and red earth and small round green hillocks, like women’s breasts, rose up rapidly to meet us. Indeed, we seemed almost upon them. The plane roared and rose steeply and then leveled off and began a slower descent. Behind us, the last line of jagged Alps was fast disappearing in the rain, and the earth beneath us looked like a page from a storybook. The wet red fields and black-green forests and foothills of Bavaria were studded with neat round stacks of hay and tiled roofs that should have had storks clustered on them, and on a winding road immediately below us a farmer drove a wagon piled high with hay and pulled by two white oxen. The intercom crackled again, and the unseen pilot told us, laconically, that he had not been able to outrun the storm or get above it and the Munich tower had talked us down.

The entire plane erupted into applause. “Welcome to Munich,” Joe said. “From here on, it’s downhill all the way.”

72 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

There is almost no way to prepare a first-time visitor for Rome if he has come via Germany. There is probably no way to prepare a first-timer for Rome anyway, but Germany is the wadding and shot that makes of the trip over the Alps a blast from a cannon. After a cool, gray, rain-washed, and fatigue-smoothed day and night in Munich, landing at Fiumicino was like being spewed out into the maw of a volcano. Soothed by the remote majesty of the Austrian Alps and an excellent bottle of Orvieto Classico on our noon Alitalia flight from Munich, I literally stumbled and half fell into the roaring, jostling airport in Rome. Only Joe’s hand on the back of my blazer and the press of passengers ahead saved me.

Maybe it was a good thing, my abrupt initiation into Italy.

I think if I had arrived at a normal pace, seeing and smelling and listening as I came, I would have literally drowned in the old fear. Leonardo Da Vinci Airport is an unceasing twenty-four-hour assault on the senses. But I was well into it and heading for the baggage area in a ragged double line of passengers before I got myself together. Joe was firmly at my back, his hand a vise on my elbow, and the tweed back of the man in front of me was as solid and comforting as a mountain. The fear slunk back into its lair. I took a deep breath and looked around.

“Why is it so dark?” I said to Joe. They were the first words I spoke on Italian soil.

The great space of the airport was not only dim, it was stifling hot. Straining to see, I turned in a circle, half sensing and half seeing the shifting masses of people all around us.

The murk was nearly impenetrable. Something felt very wrong; the hair on the back of my neck began to tighten at its roots. Others in the crowd

HILL TOWNS / 73

were looking around too, and the buzz of uneasy conversation swelled.

“Holy shit,” Joe half whispered in my ear. “There are machine guns all over the place. That guy on the balcony has one trained on
us
.”

I looked up. On the gallery overlooking the main level where we were a whip-thin young guard in a tightly tailored uniform stood, a sleekly evil machine gun held at waist level in a loose firing position. I stared into his dark face, and it seemed to me that he stared into mine for a long moment.

Neither of us moved. I did not want to take a deep breath.

Slowly, as if they were figures in a negative bathed in developing fluid, other armed guards materialized on the balcony.

All had guns fixed on the crowds below. None moved.

“Joe, what is this?” I said in an airless whisper.

“I don’t know. Nothing, probably. The goddamn
nerve
of those guys.”

He turned quickly and made to leave the line and approach a guard standing against a pillar not far away from us. I had not seen him, but once I did, I saw many others, all armed and grim and very still. It reminded me, insanely, of those

“Can you spot the wild animals in this drawing?” puzzles in children’s magazines. Machine guns and guards were suddenly everywhere.

At Joe’s movement, the guard nearest us took one step forward and brought the gun to firing position and aimed it at Joe. He said nothing and his face did not change. Joe stopped.

In the murmur of the crowd I caught one word, “
terrorista
,”

and my heart all but stopped. Dear God, had there been a bomb threat, or was some unspeakable act of political terror-ism even now under way? I thought of the newspaper photographs I had seen of slain women 74 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and children in Mediterranean banks and railway terminals and other public locations; I thought of Aldo Moro’s pitiful bloody body in the trunk of a car on a Roman street; I thought of my blind child, an orphan….

Joe heard it too and pulled his Italian phrase book out of his pocket and began thumbing it rapidly. Wildly, I wondered what the Italian was for “bomb.”

Then, up and down the line, we heard a word we did not know but that seemed to put our fellow passengers from Munich at ease: “
Sciopero, sciopero
.”

The line relaxed, and we heard snorts of disgust and one or two bursts of weary laughter.

“
Mi scusi
,” Joe said to the tweedy man ahead of me. “
Che
cosa significa…ah, sciopero
?”

Joe has a sort of combined Ivy League and southern drawl.

It gives a languid, cultivated elegance to his speech. All at once I seemed to hear it for the first time. It rendered his Italian virtually unintelligible, even to me, who had been listening to it for weeks. The large man turned and stared at him in perplexity.

“Why the guns?” I said slowly, hefting an imaginary one to my waist.

“Oh,” he said, in what must be pure Brooklynese, or perhaps New Jersey. “It’s another fucking strike. The electricity this time, probably just the substation that controls this part of Rome, or maybe just the airport. It’ll be over in an hour at the most; they save the longer ones for weekends. There’s one of some kind about every fifteen minutes; last night the buses were out for three hours, and last weekends the air traffic controllers got pissed and quit for a day. We’re lucky this is just the electricity. They’re on auxiliary now, and at least the taxis and buses will still be running. It’s deep shit when the taxis stop. The Uzis are just because the lights are HILL TOWNS / 75

out and you never know when that happens in Italy. I wouldn’t make any quick moves, though.”

“Thank you,” I said, faint with relief.

“Don’t mention it,” he said, turning away.

Joe crammed his phrase book back in his pocket and said nothing.

By the time we cleared immigration and were handed back our passports the twilit murk still lingered, and we made our way down the stilled escalator to the lowest level, where our baggage was said to be, as if it were a staircase. I could see the parking lot and bus lanes outside, shimmering in a blaze of white sun. It looked as if it should be cool in the dimness of the terminal, but it wasn’t. My stockings and underwear were damp with sweat, and my skirt and shirt stuck to me.