But the cough I got settled down deep yesterday, Monday, moving from my throat to my sternum, and, on waking today, into my gut, belly, and limbs. Not only a cough now, but an ache that manifested itself as a shivery cold in my joints, and, more disconcertingly, acute nausea in all the places where acute nausea can occur.
My husband and daughter were off with the photography class early this morning, exploring a cemetery outside of the city limits. My son stayed sleeping as I made like everything was A-OK. I managed to dress and get in other ways ready. I managed to bike from our apartment, up and down the narrow, cobblestone central Corso of Orvieto to the convent where Gordon’s program is located.
I was clammy upon arrival at the school, but I managed—with a few, distressing breaks—to teach my three-hour class. The students, wonderful students, while compassionate and concerned, politely remained focused on the discussion and writing. I swallowed hard, breathed slowly, pushed thoughts like green about the gills from my mind. As we talked about scene, I tried not to make a scene. We created body maps as my body became an increasingly unknown landscape to me, one I would have preferred to detour, if possible.
A friend of Gordon’s program, Alessandro, who has lived his life in Orvieto, as have his parents before him, and who knows how far back, came upon me after the class, collapsed upon the low, black couch in the entryway. He asked my symptoms, and said this happens sometimes, when people come from the U.S. to Italy, but mostly to children and the elderly.
Children and the elderly. The words, as he said them, might have been synonyms for the fragile and the infirm.
Perhaps RA, autoimmune disease that it is, has put me in this camp? I took my injection yesterday when I was in a deep bout of coughing; I remember now that the doctor told me to hold off on a dosage if I was under the weather. Lesson learned. But, oh, I miss the hardy me. The Karen who had a stomach of iron and stamina of steel.
(Side note: I have since learned that the students, too, were afflicted with a “plague.” We are never as alone as we think we are.)
Alessandro kindly offered to drive me home. We took the back way. Orvieto, it turns out, is a labyrinth. Until this car trip, with the exception of one wild and madcap bike ride with Greg on Easter afternoon down the steep hill outside the city to the Etruscan Necropolis, I have stuck pretty much to the trusted, straight and true, Corso.
(The Necropolis looks like this on a late Easter Sunday afternoon in 2014.)
Three evening strolls have I made on Orvieto’s Corso Cavour, one among the throngs who have descended upon Orvieto this past Easter weekend, which extended to the Little Easter holiday, which was yesterday, day of solo coughing. Now today, Tuesday, day of nausea, I rode the back streets (far, far narrower than a Chicago back alley) with Alessandro, twisting and turning with amazing agility, as he made impossible maneuvers possible in his silver Cirtroin. I just managed to stay upright, containing myself and all that was inside myself, until we swung around a corner I’d yet to notice, and parked abruptly before the large green doors that lead into the sixteenth century palazzo where Greg, Magdalena, Teo, and I currently make our home.
I thanked Alessandro (hail, Theseus!), then lugged my backpack and my body through the green doors and across the elegant, weather and war-worn courtyard, and into the lovely, if funky—at turns, cavernous and cramped, renovated-sometimes-and-sometimes-not—place in which we, like many of the other profs who teach at Gordon’s program, are able to live during the term.
Apparently others live here, too, in various rooms and apartments. Members of the original family—three generations of them. I cannot imagine knowing my origins that far back. I want to learn this place’s history. So, it seems to do the many tourists, who drift in and out of the courtyard, asking me in Italian for some information about the palazzo (almost everyday people ask me things in Italian—directions, usually, and, in Rome, information about public transportation—and always, I lift up my hands in despair). Here in the palazzo, when the tourists and passersby see me holding the set of keys that I am still struggling to work in the ancient lock, they ask me in Italian if I’m about to give a tour, and I say something like apartmento, and their faces shift from the expressions that so resemble mine much of the time (hopeful, yearning, appeal), to the bemused, contained, vaguely regal (to my mind) visage of a true Citizen.
Today, from the corner of my eye, just past my green gills, I saw two men taking pictures of the garden. I staggered on, lest they stop me, and after only a couple of gut-wrenching tries, managed to turn the key in the lock and open the next set of massive green doors. Apartemento.
No one was there. I’d missed Greg and the kids, who no doubt walked the straight and true Corso, and were now eating lunch at the convent with the students, and then they were going to participate in a jolly soccer game with the students, and I couldn’t begin to imagine doing either of these things with anybody today. Barely could I imagine climbing the stairs and falling into bed.
There is a chapel just off the kids’ bedroom, hidden behind a wooden door. I didn’t go there and pray.
I didn’t make a fire and lie down, or, possibly because I was so cold, in the immense fireplace.
Nor did I turn to my laptop and check on how things were going with my just-released novel, Sing for Me (actually, I can’t check on this as there is no wi-fi–more on this at some point, I’m sure, because it’s been quite a change/challenge/catharsis—or work on a blog post like this, or write the next book.
I climbed the stairs and fell into bed. I slept. Woke and slept. Woke and slept. Woke and looked at the bedroom ceiling as the light changed, and by five o’clock in the evening—the stores outside just opening after siesta, the children and adults passing by down below and calling to each other in voices that reminded me of nothing so much opera stars—the ceiling looked like this.
This was the first I’d moved in approximately four hours. Reach for phone, check time, snap picture. Feel better.
Soon after the photo opp, Greg and the kids came home, and he braved the Farmacia and got me the Italian equivalent of Tums (making a sad face, gripping his belly, moaning, he communicated with the woman behind the counter). The Italian equivalent of Tums is called Citrosodina, and it tastes like lemon Zotz. (Zotz, if you haven’t had them, are an Italian candy—hard, fruity, sweet shell, which incases the surprise of a fizzing, white, sour powder. I have liked them since I was a very little girl, though they inevitable make my tongue raw.)
Also Greg brought Sprite and Acqua Minerale Naturale—fizzante, thank the good Lord above. I ate some crackers. The familia went out for pizza. The plumbing pipes in this old place are doing something foul, and when they returned, they think it’s me making that noxious odor, but it is not. I am recovering, though the pipes—Greg testifies, having just entered the bathroom—are not.
Look at me, writing in the present tense. I must be doing better. I hope I can teach tomorrow. Character. That’s what will be talking about. How change is essential, among so many other things.
Outside our windows, open against the fumes, a man from down below in the street laughs throatily and says Ciao. A car motors by. The birds are quiet now that the day has gone dark, and Greg and the kids are in bed asleep. I am still not hungry, but, oh, I am wide awake. Now someone whistles. There’s a motorcycle or Vespa. (There’s always a motorcycle or Vespa.) And it’s so quiet now—the throngs seem of another town, another world—and the bit of clay tile roof I’ve been looking at all day has shadowed to dark gray.
Here are the light footsteps of a women in low heels. She is singing. I recognize the song, though she is singing it in Italian. Her voice is high and thin and lovely—filled with yearning. She is singing that song from Les Misérables. She is singing I Dreamed a Dream.
