I was drawn to the surface of Italy for its perched towns, the food, language, and art. I was pulled also to its sense of lived life, the coexistence of times that somehow gives an aura of timelessness—I toast the Etruscan wall above us with my coffee every morning—all the big abstracts that act out in everything from the aggression on the autostrada to the afternoon stroll through the piazza. I cast my lot here for a few short months a year because my curiosity for the layered culture of the country is inexhaustible. But the umbilical that is totally unexpected and elides logic reaches to me through the church.
To my surprise I have bought a ceramic Mary with a small cup for home use of holy water. As a fallen-away Methodist, then a fallen-away Episcopalian, I suppose my holy water is a sham. However, I have taken it from the spring I discovered near the house, the artesian spring where clear water rises in a declivity of white stone. This looks like holy water to me. It must have been the house's original source. Or it's older than the house—medieval, Roman, Etruscan. Though some interior juggling is going on, I do not expect to emerge as a Catholic, or even as a believer. I am essentially pagan by birth. Southern populism was boiled into my blood early; the idea of a pope with the last word gives me hives. “Idolatrous,” our minister called the worship of Mary and the saints. “Mackerel snapper,” my classmates teased Andy Evans, the lone Catholic in our school. Briefly, in college, I was drawn to the romance of the Mass, especially the three A.M. fishermen's Mass in St. Louis's Cathedral in New Orleans. I lost interest in the whole show when my good friend, a New Orleans Catholic, told me in complete seriousness that mortal sin began if you kissed longer than ten seconds. A ten-second French kiss was O.K., but a dry twenty-second kiss would land you in trouble. Though I still like rituals, even empty ones, what magnetizes me here feels more radical.
Now I love the quick Mass in tiny upper Cortona churches, where the same sounds have provided a still point for the residents for almost eight hundred years. When a black Labrador wandered in, the priest interrupted his holy spiel to shout, “For the love of God, somebody get that dog out of here.” If I stop in on a weekday morning, I sit there alone, enjoying the country Baroque. I think: Here I am. I love the parade of relics through the streets, with gold-robed priests travelling along in a billow of incense, their way prepared by children in white, scattering the streets with petals of broom, rose, daisy. In the noon heat, I almost hallucinate. What's in the gold box held aloft with banners—a splinter from the cradle? Never mind we thought Jesus was born in a lowly manger; this is the splinter of the true cradle. Or am I confused? It's a splinter of the true cross. It is on its way through the streets, brought out into the air one day a year. And suddenly I think, What did that hymn mean, cleft for me, rising years ago, perpendicular from the white board church in Georgia?
IN MY SOUTH, THERE WERE SIGNS ON TREES THAT SAID “repent.” Halfway up a skinny pine, up beyond the tin trough that caught the resin, hung a warning, “Jesus is coming.” Here, when I turn on the car radio, a lulling voice implores Mary to intercede for us in purgatory. In a nearby town, one church has as its relic a phial of Holy Milk. As my student would say, that's from, like, Mary.
On the terrace at noon, I'm tanning my legs as I read about early martyrs and medieval saints. I'm drawn to the martyred San Lorenzo, who was put on a grill for his troublesome faith and seared until he reportedly said, “Turn me over, I'm done on this side,” and thereby became the favorite saint of chefs. The virginal young women martyrs all were raped, stabbed, tortured or locked away because of their devotion to Christ. Sometimes the hand of God reached down and swept one away, like Ursula, who did not wish to marry the barbarian Conan. With her ten thousand virgins (all avoiding men?) loaded into boats, she was lifted miraculously by God and sailed across the unfriendly skies, then deposited in Rome, where they all bathed in lime-scented water and formed a sacred order. Stunning, the prevalence of the miracle. In the Middle Ages, some of the venerated women found the foreskin of Jesus materialized in their mouths. I don't know if there exists a relic of that. (Would it look like a chewed rubber band? A dried wad of bubble gum?) The foreskin stops me for a good ten minutes and I stare out at the bees swarming the tigli trees, trying to imagine that event happening, and not just once. The moment of recognition, what she said, what the reaction was—a boggling speculation. Somehow, I'd never heard of these kinkier saints in America, although someone once sent me a box of new books, each one about a saint's life. When I called the bookstore, they told me my benefactor wished to remain anonymous. Now I read on and find that some had “holy anorexia” and lived on the wafer alone. If a saint's bones were dug up, a flowery fragrance filled the town. After Saint Francis preached to the birds, they flew up into the shape of a cross then separated into the four directions. The saints would eat the pus and lice of the poor to show their humility; in turn, the faithful liked to drink the bathwater of a holy person. If, after a death, a saint's heart was cut out, perhaps an image of the Holy Family carved in a ruby would be found inside. Oh, I realize, here's where they put their awe. I understand that.
I understand because this everyday wildness and wonder come back so naturally from the miracle-hungry South. They almost seem like memories somehow, the vertebrae of the Virgin, the toenail of San Marco. My favorite, the breath of San Giuseppe, foster father of Christ. I imagine an opaque green glass bottle with a ground stopper, the swift exhaling of air as it opened. At home when I was small, our seamstress kept her jar of gallstones on the windowsill above her Singer. Marking my hem, her mouth full of pins, she'd say, “Lord, I don't want to go through nothing like that again. Now you turn round. Those things won't even dissolve in gasoline.” Her talisman against sickness. Emblems and omens.
Santa Dorotea immured in her cell for two years, against a high-walled pit in the dank cathedral. Communion through a grate and a diet of bread and gruel. I hated visiting Miss Tibby, who treated the corns on my mother's little toes, shaving yellow curls of skin off with a vegetable peeler, then rubbing her feet with thick lotion that smelled like crank case oil and Ovaltine. The bare bulb lit not only my mother's foot on a cushion but also a coffin where Miss Tibby slept at night so there would be no surprises later.
In high school my friends and I parked a block away and secretly peered in the windows of the Holy Rollers, who spoke in tongues, sometimes screaming with a frightening ecstatic look on their faces and falling to the floor writhing and jerking. We were profane, smothering our laughter at the surely sexual fervor and the contorted postures. Later we'd sit in the car, Jeff smoking, and watch them file out of the peeling church, looking as normal as anyone. In Naples, the phial of San Gennaro's congealed blood liquifies once a year. There's also a crucifix that used to grow one long hair of Jesus that would have to be barbered once a year. That one seems particularly close to Southern sensibilities.
In the United States, I think there is no sanctioned place to put such fixated strangeness so it just jumps out when it has to. Driving through the South recently, I stopped near Metter, Georgia, for a barbecue sandwich. After the sweet salty pork and iced tea, I was directed out back to the bathroom by the owner; pork-bellied, sweating over his pit, he merely nodded toward the rear. No sign at all that as I opened the screen door I would encounter two molting ostriches. How they came to be in that remote town in South Georgia and what iconographical necessity led the family to gaze on and house these dusty creatures is a philosophical gift I've been given to ponder in nights of insomnia.
Growing up in the God-fearing, faith-healing, end-of-the-world-is-at-hand South gave me many chances to visit snake collections beside gas stations when my parents stopped to fill up; to drive past roadside religious ceremonies in which snakes were ecstatically “handled”; to see shabby wonders-of-the-world exhibits—reliquaries of sorts—in the towns bordering the swamps. I know a box of black cat's bones makes a powerful conjure. And that a bracelet of dimes can ward it off. I was used to cages of baby alligators crawling on the ba
ck of the mother of all, a fourteen-foot beauty who opened her jaws wide enough that I could have stood in them. The sagging chicken-wire fences couldn't save you if those sleeping logs rose up and decided to take off after you—alligators can run seventy miles an hour. Albino deer covered with ticks that leapt on my hand when I petted their mossy noses, a stuffed painter (panther) with green marbles for eyes, a thirty-foot tapeworm in a jar. The owner explains that it was taken from the throat of his seventeen-year-old niece when the doctor lured it out of her stomach with a clove of garlic on a toothpick. They waited until it showed its head, lured it out further, then grabbed, chopped off its head with a straight razor while hauling the thing out of Darleen's stomach like a rope out of the river.
Wonders. Miracles. In cities, we're less and less capable of the imagination for the super real, ground down as we are by reality. In rural areas, close to the stars and groves, we're still willing to give it a whirl. So I recover the cobra, too, so much more impressive with his flattened head than rattlesnakes, whose skins paper the office of the owner of the Eighth Wonder of the World, where we have stopped for gas at the Georgia border. We are close to Jasper, Florida, where my mother and father were married in the middle of the night. I am amazed, despite my mother's warning that the owners are carnival people and it is not worth seeing and I have exactly ten minutes or they will go on to White Springs without me. The slight thrill at the possibility of being left behind on this curve of road lined with moss-draped oaks, the silverbullet trailer set up on concrete blocks, a woman glimpsed inside, washing her hair over a tin bowl and the radio blaring “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.” I knew then and still know that the man with the phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark torch tattooed on his back and the full-blown roses tattooed on his biceps believed his wonders were real. I follow him to the bamboo hut, where the cobra from darkest Calcutta rises to the song made by blowing on a comb covered with cellophane. The cobra mesmerizes the mangy dog thumping his tail in the doorway. The peacock gives a powerful he-haw, shakes himself into full regalia, the blues in his fan of feathers more intense than my own or my mother's eyes, and, as everyone knows, we have the purest sky-blue eyes. The peacock's eyes look exactly like the snake's. The owner's wife comes out of the trailer with a boa constrictor casually draped around her neck. She checks on another snake, to whom she has fed a large rat without even cutting it up. The rat is simply disappearing, like a fist into a sweater sleeve. I buy a Nehi and an oatmeal cookie sandwich, run out to the Oldsmobile vibrating in the heat. My father scratches off; gravel spumes behind us. “What have you got?” My mother turns around.
“Just a cold drink and this.” I hold up the large cookie.
“Those things have lard in the middle. That's not icing—that's pure-T lard with enough powdered sugar to make your teeth crack.”
I don't believe her but when I break open the cookie, it is crawling with maggots. I quickly throw it out the window.
“What did you see in that awful gyp joint?”
“Nothing,” I answer.
Growing up, I absorbed the Southern obsession with place, and place can seem to me somehow an extension of the self. If I am made of red clay and black river water and white sand and moss, that seems natural to me.
However, living as a grown woman in San Francisco, I never have that belonging sensation. The white city with its clean light on the water, the pure, heart-stopping coast, and the Marin hills with the soft contours of sleeping giants under blankets of green—I am the awed tourist, delighted to have made this brief escape, which is my adult life. My house is just one of thousands; my life could be just another story in the naked city. My eye looks with insouciance at the scissors point of the Transamerica pyramid and jagged skyline I can see from my dining room window. Everyone seems to have cracked the door two inches to see who's there. I see you through my two inches; you see me through yours. We are monumentally self-reliant.
I NEVER TIRE OF GOING INTO ITALIAN CHURCHES. THE vaulted arches and triptychs, yes. But each one also has its characteristic blue dust smell, the smell of time. The codified Annunciations, Nativities, and Crucifixions dominate all churches. At the core, these all struggle with the mystery of the two elementals—birth and death. We are frangible. In the side altars, the high arches, the glass manuscript cases in the crypts, the shadowed curves of the apse, these archetypal concerns and the dreamland of religious fervor lock horns with the painterly subject matter in individualized ways. I'm drawn to a bizarre painting that practically leaps off the wall. In a dark, high panel close to the ceiling in San Gimignano, there's Eve rising boldly out of supine Adam's open side. Not the whoosh of instantaneous creation I've imagined from reading Genesis, when she appeared as easily as “Let there be Light.” This is graphic, someone's passion to be present at the miracle. As graphic as the wondrous cobra of Calcutta spiraling up in the humid air of South Georgia before my very eyes. Adam is meat. The vision grabs the viewer like the glow-in-the-dark torch. Now hear this, loud and clear. In Orvieto's Duomo, Signorelli's humans, just restored to their flesh on Judgment Day, stand grandly and luxuriously beside the grinning skeletons they were just moments before. Parts of the body still glow with the aura of the bare bone, a gauzy white light emanating from the firm, new flesh in its glory. A strange turn—we're used to thinking of the decay of the flesh; here's the dream of rejuvenation. Flitting around in the same arena of that cathedral are depictions of hell, green-headed devils with snaky genitals. The damned are twisted, poked, jabbed, while one voluptuous blonde (no doubt what her sins were) flies away on the back of a devil with stunted, unaerodynamic wings. Clearly we are in someone's head, midnight imaginings of the descent, the fall, the upward turn. The paintings can be sublime but there is a comic book aspect to much church painting, a wordless progression of blunt narrative very close to those of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists who still hold forth in the South. If there was more than one word, Repent, hanging on those Southern pines, it was bound to be Doomsday.
Wandering around in churches, I see over and over San Sebastiano pierced with arrows, martyred Agata holding out her breasts on a plate like two over-easy eggs, Sant'Agnes kneeling piously while a lovely youth stabs her in the neck. Almost every church has its locked relic box like a miniature mausoleum, and what does this mean? Thorn from the crown. Finger digits of San Lorenzo. The talismans that say to the viewers, “Hold on; like these, have faith.” Standing in the dim crypt in a country church where a handful of dust has been venerated for several hundred years, I see that even today, toward the end of the century, the case is remembered with fresh carnations. I uncover my second realization: This is where they put their memories and wants. Besides functioning as vast cultural repositories, these churches map intimate human needs. How familial they begin to seem (and how far away from the historical church, the bloody history of the Papacy): the coarse robe of St. Francis, another phial of Mary's, this one filled with tears. I see them like the locket I had, with a curl of light brown hair, no one remembered whose, the box of rose petals on the closet shelf behind the blue Milk of Magnesia bottle and the letters tied with frayed ribbon, the translucent white rock from Half Moon Bay. Never forget. As I wax the floor tiles and wring out the mop, I can think of Santa Zita of Lucca, saint of housekeeping, as was Willie Bell Smith in my family's house. Basketmaker, beggar, funeral director, dysentery sufferer, notary, speleologist—everyone has a paradigm. I once was lost but now I'm found. The medieval notion that the world reflects the mind of God has tilted in my mind. Instead, the church I perceive is a relief map of the human mind. A thoroughly secular interpretation: that we have created the church out of our longing, memory, out of craving, and out of the folds of our private wonders.
If I have a sore throat from drinking orange juice when I know I'm allergic to it, the saint is there in his monumental church at Montepulciano, that town whose syllables sound like plucked strings on the cello. San Biagio is a transubstantiated metaphor and a handful of dust in a wrough
t box. Its small keyhole reminds us of what we most want to be reminded of, you are not out there alone. San Biagio focuses my thoughts and throws me beyond the scratchy rawness of my own throat. Pray for me, Biagio, you are taking me farther than I go. When the TV is out of whack and the buttons won't improve the picture, nor will slapping the side soundly, Santa Chiara is out here somewhere in saintland. Chiara, clear. She was clairvoyant and from there is only a skip and jump to receiver, to patron saint of telecommunications. So practical for such a transcendent girl. A statue of her on top of the TV won't hurt a thing. Next year on July 31, the wedding ring of Mary will be displayed in the Duomo in Perugia. The history says it was “piously stolen”—isn't that an oxymoron—from a church in Chiusi. Without a shred of literal belief, I, for one, will be there.
AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, I TOUCH THE SPRING WATER IN my ceramic Mary with my fingertip and make a circle on my forehead. When I was baptized, the Methodist minister dipped a rose in a silver bowl of water and sprinkled my hair. I always wished I'd been baptized standing knee deep in the muddy Alapaha, held under until the last moment of breath then raised to the singing congregation. My spring water in Mary's cup is not transformed to wash away my sins or those of the world. She always seems like Mary, the name of my favorite aunt, rather than Santa Maria. Mary simply became a friend, friend of mothers who suffered their children's pain, friend of children who watched their mothers suffer. She's hanging over almost every cash register, bank teller, shot giver, bread baker in this town, and I've grown used to her presence. The English writer Tim Parks says that without her ubiquitous image to remind you that all will go on as before, “you might imagine that what was happening to you here and now was unique and desperately important . . . I find myself wondering if the Madonna doesn't have some quality in common with the moon.” Yes. My unblessed water soothes. I pause at the top of the stairs and repeat the lovely word acqua. Years ago, the baby learned to say acqua on the lake shore at Princeton, under a canopy of trees blooming madly with pink pompons. Acqua, acqua, she shouted, scooping up water and letting it rain on her head. Acqua sounds closer to the sparkle and fall, closer to wetness and discovery. Her voice still reverberates but now I touch my little finger as I remember. The gold signet ring, a family treasure, slipped off in the grass that day and was not to be found. Water of life. Intimacy of memory.
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