by David Yeadon
FELICIA
And that was Step One: getting inside. I thought I’d stepped into some kind of revolving door, but once I was in the glass cylinder, the sliding door closed quickly behind me and I found myself being stared at like a goldfish in a bowl by video cameras and a very officious, overuniformed young man, who, scowling furiously, looked me up and down—presumably to discern where I had hidden my Uzi automatic. (I certainly was left in no doubt where his was.) Then he nodded and pressed some hidden button. The inner glass door whizzed open, and I left the cylinder and entered the bank itself.
Step Two: Another uniform, demanding (I think) precisely what I wanted in his bank. I waved my traveler’s checks in his face. He took them from me, looked at them scrupulously, held them up to the light, and appeared very suspicious. “They’re American Express,” I said, assuming the revered name would transform his attitude into one of fawning subjugation. Unfortunately, it seemed to have just the opposite effect. He handed them back to me with two fingertips, holding them like a fish that had been out of the ocean for far too long. He pointed to a cubicle. I looked longingly at the counter, but I guessed I had to visit the cubicle first.
Step Three: An empty, very small, very tidy cubicle—so tidy, in fact, it looked as if no one had ever worked in it—but definitely empty. I peered back at the uniform and he nodded serenely. Apparently this was where I was supposed to be. So I stood and stood and then thought, there’s one chair in here, so I might as well use it. And just as I was lowering myself onto its cushioned seat, in walked an elderly man immaculately dressed as only elderly Italian men can dress. He stopped abruptly and looked at me in amazement. “Ah, mi scusi,” I said, and immediately stood back up. Obviously it was his chair. “Prego,” he said very slowly and disdainfully, and brushed the chair’s seat carefully before sitting down and extending an elegantly manicured hand.
I gave him the traveler’s checks. “Two, please. I’d like to cash two hundred-dollar checks, please.”
Just like the Uzi-wielding security guard, he gave the checks a very detailed analysis. I felt sorry for American Express. They’d gone to so much trouble to make their checks look utterly foolproof and forge-proof, with little holograms and watermarks and all kinds of fancy colors and shiny bits, and yet this fellow obviously thought that I might be trying to pull a fast one on him. He examined them as meticulously as Berenson would have his beloved Renaissance artworks for the slightest sign of artifice or forgery.
Eventually he seemed satisfied, so I pulled out my pen and started to countersign them.
“No, no, no!”
Apparently I was not supposed to countersign yet. He seemed most upset, again. I was obviously making his day very difficult. He pulled a long form out of a drawer and said in petulant English, “Fill, please.”
I looked at the form. It was worse than an IRS tax sheet, and of course all in Italian.
“I don’t read Italian,” I said.
He’d obviously had this problem before, and I gathered he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. He sighed resignedly and then with an extended manicured index finger, led me from line to line.
“Last name here. First name here,” etc. I think I had to fill in at least twenty different items of information, some of them so personal that at one point I almost rebelled. “Why do you possibly want to know my mother’s birth date?”
“Please, fill in,” he said in an utterly weary voice. I couldn’t remember the year, so I invented it.
He checked my responses, again with that suspicious grimace, and finally dragged out a large, red stamp and stamped each of the four copies.
Again I prepared to sign the checks.
I could have sworn he was chuckling with glee behind that stoic, bureaucratic façade when he made it clear that I had now graduated to…
Step Four: I had to sign them somewhere else. At the counter. And the queue was long, except it wasn’t really a queue at all but rather a typical Italian huddle of first-off-the-line-wins contenders. My reluctance to involve myself in queue-jumping meant that it was fifteen minutes before I reached the counter to find…
Step Five: My counter clerk rapidly disappearing out of his seat. I looked at the other clerks, but they were either involved with customers or taking one of those gesticulate-and-shout breaks that no one interrupted or would ever dream of interrupting.
Six minutes, and still no clerk. Then I saw my elegant form-man passing by. I gave him one of those “what the heck is going on here?” gestures. (I was being very Italian—spread arms, open palms, open mouth, and raised eyebrows.) He completely ignored me.
Finally the clerk returned with no explanation or apology—in fact, he looked at me as if I’d kept him waiting. I showed him the two hundred-dollar traveler’s checks and said, “I sign, right?”
He nodded wearily, but at least I was finally able to sign.
He studied the countersignature and then my signature on the form, and then he peered at my original signature. Perhaps in my haste and frustration at the whole process, I had penned a signature that was not identical to the original, but I was fed up. “Look, I’ve been here for almost forty minutes,” I said. “Will you please just give me the money?”
He obviously didn’t understand the words, but he got the meaning. It didn’t work. Hence the final eight steps.
Step Six: Clerk goes off to have someone else verify the signature. (Guess who? Of course. The man with the manicure.)
Step Seven: Clerk returns but seems to have lost the latest dollar/euro rate sheet. Goes off again.
Step Eight: Laborious calculations on a dollar-store calculator that appeared to keep giving him different answers each time.
Step Nine: Clerk finally decides that three consecutive and identical figures must be right. Fills in yet another form with the figures. Opens up cash drawer.
Step Ten: Clerk counts out cash. Interrupted by phone call. One of those very verbose calls. Loses count with talking. Stops counting and just talks.
Step Eleven: Clerk puts phone down. (It was obviously a woman. He looked quite starry-eyed.) Starts the recount.
Step Twelve: Clerk pushes money out under grill. At last! I don’t even bother to check the cash. I just turn and walk away (run, actually).
Step Thirteen: Clerk calls me back and points to yet one more piece of paper, my receipt. I look at him very intensely, and I trust that he has no doubt whatsoever as to where I am willing him to shove that final little bit of paper.
But wait. There weren’t thirteen steps; there were actually fourteen. I forgot to mention the power cut (somewhere between steps six and nine). Admittedly a very brief one. Less than ten seconds. But enough to cast the whole bank into a cavelike gloom before the lights turned back on automatically. Unfortunately, the computers did not. Maybe they hadn’t heard of surge protectors or backup batteries in Italy. So there the computers sat, dozens of identical gray-plastic boxes, utterly impotent, with their little blank screens as black as the mood that had suddenly descended on tellers and customers alike. And it was obvious that this was a regular occurrence. Far too regular, by the look on everyone’s faces. But the exasperating thing was that nobody seemed to know what to do next except throw their arms up in frustration and start lighting cigarettes. Apparently a computer blackout negated all the No Smoking signs pinned to the walls. At least for the staff. I noticed the Uzi-toting guard stride to a young male customer in line, who was just about to flick his Bic and light a rather wrinkled cigarette he’d pulled from behind his ear, and order him to desist. The young man pointed out that the tellers were all puffing away like burgeoning Bogarts, but his appeal sort of faded away as he noticed the guard’s itchy trigger finger.
I think it took about twenty minutes before a laborious rebooting was performed, and the system began to move on again in its tediously officious way. I was beyond the limits of patience when I left and had to resist the urge to kick my way past the guard and the cameras and through the fancy security d
oors. When I finally emerged back into the soothing sunshine, a well-dressed man who had also just left the bank turned to me with a grin and asked in eloquent English what I thought of the Italian banking system.
I said I found it hard to believe that customers had the tolerance and stoicism for that kind of bureaucratese nonsense.
“Ah,” he said, smiling even wider, “We Italians have a different concept of time, I think. We always assume that things will take far longer than one expects. And so long as we have someone to talk to, the time passes pleasantly, eh?”
“I don’t see much of that kind of attitude on your roads!” I responded, thinking of the autostrada racing-tracks and the up-your-rear-end antics of frantic drivers on tornanti mountain roads everywhere.
“Yes, so true. But driving is another matter. That is an expression of…how should I say politely?…a man’s man-ness. Which is very different from the situation in a bank.”
“But your banks all look so efficient: computers everywhere and enough security to protect the Queen of England’s crown jewels.”
My elegant informant paused for thought and then offered another telling insight into the “Italian Way.” “It’s all a front, you see. Front, figura, is so very important. Even when everything is chaos you must have lots of papers and rubber stamps and signatures. Sometimes I watch the old ladies picking up their pensions. A simple job, eh? But in Italy it can be like taking out a mortgage! All front y’see.”
He paused again, and it was obvious he was trying to think of a final riposte, one of the philosophical aphorisms with which Italians loved to round off their conversations. “But of course we all know this. And we all do it. And we know too” (that sly touching-of-the-cheek-below-the-left-eye gesture that meant so much in Italy) “that all this fancy security and paper-pushing is just a front to divert attention from the truth: The real ‘organization’ is not what you see but what you don’t see. And the real crime, for which there is no security, takes place much higher up” (he pointed heavenward, but I don’t think he was talking about eternal powers) “at the top. Far away from all this nonsense at the bank counter. In the quiet places, particularly in poor Calabria, with the ’Ndrangheta. So greedy. Far worse than the Sicilian Mafia. And then also of course in the old palazzos and clubs. And on the golf courses that you never see, and in the beautiful, large villas hidden behind all those trees…
He gave a final chuckle before bidding me farewell. “And in Italy, as you know, we have a very lot of trees.”
A Dawdle Day
These occasional tangles with Italian bureaucracy can leave me exhausted and in urgent need of a do-nothing respite, a period of calm and quiet introspection and contemplation.
NORMALLY I CONSIDER myself a master of the day’s momentum. I’m a lover of things-to-do lists and a celebrator of check marks, each signaling a task performed, an aim achieved—all small, but satisfying, indications of organized movement and intent, reflecting a continuum of new tasks and new challenges.
Anne doesn’t share my list-lust, my daily litanies of perceived progress. She has a remarkable knack of getting things done without the structured formality of lists and checks. She carries each day’s regimen in her head and seems to accomplish just as much as I do. And on the rare occasions when she “just forgets” to do something, her rationale is that it obviously couldn’t have been that important a task in the first place. Nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Or beyond…
As with many nuances of our married life, we celebrate our differences and our diverse ways of doing things. Anne smiles and tolerates my little lists (and even the rare “list of lists” when my life gets really overhectic); I nod understandingly when she admits to an overlooked obligation, because I know that everything needing to be done will eventually get done.
But some days are different. These are the days when I allow myself to float, “list-less” (and listlessly), freed from the constraints of all those little reminders that usually give my life a sense of organization and accomplishment.
Such diversions from my strictures and structures usually come about spontaneously and in response to some sudden urge to lose myself in a “dawdle-day” mode, whether it be a long, rambling walk or drive, a flurry of painting or experimental photography, or a sudden surge of cooking, which can produce the occasional bizarre “improv” dinner.
A day like today, for example, when Anne wanted to spend some time with friends in Accettura and I felt like doing absolutely nothing at all. I usually blame such urges for indolence on things like the traveler’s check fiasco or similar frustrating confrontations with local “petty tyrant” rituals. And I attempt to justify such desires by convincing myself that even when we try to do “nothing” we’re invariably doing something and thus contributing to our mental well-being, our imagination, our aesthetic sensibilities, or our overall sense of physical relaxation and spiritual nourishment.
Of course, it’s not always easy, despite all the tedious tirades of modern-day gurus and New Age enthusiasts, just to flip a switch in our heads, turn off our restless, wriggling minds, and exist, thought-lessly, in the limbo of meditative nothingness.
But some days—a day like this one, for example, when the dawn comes slowly, in rainbow richness—seem to carry within them an enticing balm so calming that you just surrender to the wonder of being alive, the gift of mellow perceptions, and a peace so all-encompassing that, for a while, you know you need no more than this.
This being a perfumed breeze, barely perceptible, that eases in over the rooftops of our little village, quietly announcing a new morning. The low horizontal layers of light over Montepiano ease from mauve-lemon to salmon pink to a slash of scarlet, and finally into a lush, plush gold. The sun flows up over the bare hills by Stigliano and Cirigliano and gilds the eastern face of the church tower, the edges of the roof pantiles, chipped, cracked and moss-flecked, and the ancient, peeling stucco walls of the houses. There the houses stand, released once more from the anonymity of the night, bold and bulged with age and the weight of their massive stones that have stood for centuries, somehow resisting all the insults of earthquakes, sudden landslides (an all-too-common occurrence in these Basilicatan hill villages), and the violent vicissitudes of storms and hurricanes hurling their fury across the Pollino ranges to the west.
On this particular day the village feels solid and enduring as dawn merges into morning. I become totally aware, once again, of all the little scurrying rituals of its daily awakening, the salivary aromas wafting up to my terrace from the bakery across the piazza, the viscerally strong coffee and cappuccino aromas from the bar next door, the slurred movement of sleepy feet and donkey hooves, the skim of a bicycle or two, a few early morning “octos” lighting their first cigarettes of the day, and the smoke, blue with honeyed curlicues, coiling upward past still-shuttered windows and tiny laundry-drying terraces laced with strands of brilliant red peppers, crisping over the days in the crackling-dry mountain air.
We breakfast together at our table on the terrace, dunking our golden-crusted rolls into our coffees, as the new warmth of early morning strokes our backs and shoulders and makes our scalps tingle with anticipation. It’s going to be a beautiful, cloud-free day again, for the fourth time this week. The light is crystal, polishing everything and making the mountains appear so close they’re virtually breakfast guests. And while Anne drives off to see our friends, I know I’m going to do little more than let the day, almost erotically, have its way with me. My beckoning lists will remain in the living room, untouched and irrelevant on this morning of slowly moving shadows and cubist patterns of brilliant light—a morning where the early dawn pastels of Monet merge slowly into the bold Cézanne-like structurings of mountains, forests, and sinewed valleys. And then, as the light intensifies and the heat shimmers the air, and you feel you’re seeing everything through a diaphanous sheen of waterfalling colors, a van Gogh vibrancy emerges. Buildings, tiles, chimneys, the lines of laundry, those strings of
peppers, nearby fruit and olive trees, and even the herbed pots on our terrace, undulate with intensity, as if being brushstroked with inspired urgency and visionary fervor onto a canvas filled with writhing forms—alive, vital, and totally tangible. A reality so spirited that, for a while, nothing else seems to exist and time passes without seeming to pass at all.
I’m enveloped in a warm cloak of peace and utter contentment. Ideas, dreams, and possibilities, released from the mind’s secret places, rise like champagne bubbles into mellow consciousness. And my eye moves slowly, panning like a camera lens from the broad vista of high ranges, the shadowy calanchi canyons, and the last remnant of night mists over the distant sea, to zoom into a single white daisy set perkily amid an explosion of daisies in a pot by the terrace railing. I can see the faint veins in each petal descending in graceful arcs to the mounded central cluster of the bee-luring stamen. The green of the ragged stem leaves, frilled and lacy like Italian parsley, intensify the whiteness of the flower as it moves enticingly in the faintest of breezes.
And nearby is our large terra-cotta container of basil—an exuberant burst of aromatic greenery thrusting hundreds of gentle, curving leaves into the morning air. I stroll over and pick one, and the day comes alive in a rush of anise-tinged freshness. I tear off a small piece of the leaf and let it rest on my tongue. At first there’s a little hesitancy, as if the herb is reluctant to release its richness, and then, pow! All my taste buds rise in grateful unison to savor the rush of flavor, my saliva glands pumping riotously to saturate every nook and cranny of my mouth with the intensity of that gloriously aromatic plant.