Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  “Not quite, but soon.”

  So I returned to the patio and the chaise longue with my book of Sudoku puzzles.

  Not ten minutes later I heard Mom calling my name. I turned my head and saw her looking around frantically near the back door of the trullo.

  “Jane? Where are you?”

  She shuffled jerkily from one corner of the patio to the other calling my name.

  “Over here!” I called out. “Here! here!” I waved my arms, but she still couldn’t hear or see me. God, I wish she would get a hearing aid.

  She disappeared around a corner of the trullo, still searching and calling my name.

  I got out of the chaise and ran after her. No matter how close I got to her and yelled, “Here I am!” she could not hear me.

  When I finally caught up to her I was about to tap her on the back, then thought better of it. I doubled back around the other side of the house so that she would see me approaching rather than be frightened half to death by my coming up behind her.

  “Where were you?” she asked worriedly. “I thought you were lost, or that you’d fallen into a hole and I’d be stuck here alone forever!”

  “I was just sitting over there, in the chair beside that shrub,”

  I said calmly, pointing to my spot in the sun.

  “I guess you blend in with the bush,” she smiled, collecting herself. “What are you going to do about that hair?”

  “Let’s go out sightseeing,” I said brightly. “Has your laxative taken effect?”

  “I think I’ll be fine,” she said.

  OUR DESTINATION was Matera, an hour or so southwest of Alberobello.

  Matera is one of the oldest towns in the world, and the area has yielded evidence of settlements dating back to the Paleolithic Age—more than ten thousand years ago—when hunters found shelter in the caves hollowed out by the receding Ice Age.

  Even a cave dweller yearns for upward mobility at some point, and so, with flint axes in hand, they began to carve homes and places of worship out of the natural caverns and clefts of the massive limestone rock face that dramatically dominates Matera’s landscape.

  When we got out of the car to look at Matera across the gaping Gravina canyon, we forgot for a moment that we were in Italy. The sight was more suited to the Middle East: tier upon tier of bleached-stone homes and caves. Mel Gibson thought so too, which is why he chose it as a stand-in for Jerusalem in The Passion of the Christ.

  “This is incredible,” enthused Mom. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Turning to me, she added, “You must feel very at home here.”

  She was referring to my teenage desire to be a troglodyte.

  I stretched an arm across her shoulder and gave her a little squeeze of thanks for having remembered. It had been so long ago.

  One evening—I was about eighteen at the time and just finishing high school—the dinner table conversation casually (though in hindsight it perhaps wasn’t so casual) drifted to a question about what I planned to do with my life. I matter-of- factly told my parents that I had decided to live in a cave in Switzerland, grow my own vegetables, and play guitar. It did not matter to me that I had never been to Switzerland, had never grown a vegetable, and did not play or own a guitar. It was the early 1970s and I had a hippie’s soul.

  I gathered from the quick, shocked glances my parents gave each other across the dinner table that they weren’t exactly on board for this, but they did not dismiss my idea, which I thought was rather decent of them, and the subject was gently changed.

  Two weeks later, I came down for breakfast to find a return plane ticket and a note from my parents. The note informed me that they had taken matters into their own hands and submitted an application under my name to Carleton University, in Ottawa. I was instructed to fly to Ottawa that day, properly register, find a place to live, and be back by dinnertime with a full account of my expedition.

  I did what I was told. You might imagine that I would be angry about this, but I wasn’t. Sometimes I need a kick in the ass. They could have kicked me toward university or kicked me toward Europe. The point is, I needed a kick in some direction to get me started. At the time I had no idea what to do with or make of my life.

  “I think your father and I made the right decision for you,” said Mom. “You were . . . well . . . what do you think of the idea now? Would you have been happy living in a cave?”

  “Only if it had been a cave with a modern bathroom and a kitchen,” I joked. Here was a colony of caves the likes of which I never thought existed and, as often happens when a piece of my past resurfaces, I tried to envision what my life might have been like had I heeded my heart rather than parental intervention. I might not have had the stability or the means to become a parent, and that would have been a shame. I love being a mom. Then again, I’m a pretty resourceful soul, and I would have made my situation work. I would have eventually found a job. I can’t say that Switzerland would have been my first choice as a place to live, but maybe someone might have told me about the Italian caves, and I would have relocated here. I would have learned Italian. Maybe met a rich, sexy Italian. So many maybes.

  We drove across the canyon into Matera itself to see the place up close.

  If any place deserves to be walked it is Matera. Apparently, the Italian authorities concur: It is illegal to bring a car into the centro storico of some towns, and security cameras are constantly on alert, whirring into position to pick up the license plate of transgressors. (Six months after our trip, a traffic ticket from Matera arrived in my mailbox. I considered fighting the fine just for the chance to return to Matera, but the rental car company had already conveniently deducted the amount from my credit card.)

  “You get out and look around. I’ll be fine,” said Mom after we had driven along the Via Madonna delle Virtù at the canyon’s edge.

  “It’s OK,” I lied. “It’s not fair to leave you in the car.”

  But she insisted, and so I pulled the car over to the side of the road, jumped out, and ran up a narrow flight of worn stone steps, two at a time, nearly knocking heads with a gargoyle. The stairs delivered me to the courtyard terrace of a charming hotel. A few white iron patio tables and chairs were set out. Green plants in terra-cotta urns contrasted vividly with the sun-bleached stone walls.

  From the terrace I looked down on a maze of cobblestone streets and lanes. Roads ran across the rooftops of some of the cave homes; tier upon tier of tufa stone dwellings, some with elaborately carved door frames, were packed tightly together. The small windows and doorways were starkly silhouetted in the glare of the afternoon sun. I made a mental note to return here one day soon.

  I dashed back down the steps to the car. Surprisingly, Mom had not fallen asleep.

  We drove through as much of the town as we could, passing caves that had been transformed into stunning modern boutiques, restaurants, and wine bars. A call center had taken over one entire cave complex, housing its computer system in one part of the cave and the call center of five hundred people in another. From Stone Age to high tech—this is the sort of mix of ancient architecture and modern life that I find riveting.

  Not that long ago Matera was Italy’s shame. As recently as the 1970s people still lived in caves—and I don’t mean the renovated models. Health and hygiene were appalling; the child mortality rate hovered around fifty percent. When malaria began claiming the lives of many of the residents, the Italian government was stirred to action. Modern-day troglodytes were evicted and relocated to suburban apartments.

  Daylight was waning as we began the return journey to Alberobello, driving though the countryside rather than taking the main roads. We passed gigantic stone gates marking where a large villa, monastery, or convent had once stood and drove through small towns where filigreed iron balconies created canopies over shop entrances and where children played football and rode their bikes in piazzas dominated by churches.

  “It’s too bad we only get one kick at the can of
life,” Mom sighed sadly as she gazed out of the car window.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Now I know what’s available, and it’s too late,” she replied.

  “What would you have done differently?”

  “I would not have changed my man or my children, but maybe I would have bought a grand old gate in Italy and built something beautiful behind it. I might have chosen to live somewhere different.”

  We turned off the ss172 onto the road that led to our trullo, and I pointed out the abandoned trullo I had snooped around earlier that day.

  “It’s adorable!” gasped Mom. “You need to find a real estate agent.”

  9

  Castel del Monte, Potenza

  HAD WE stayed in Alberobello a few more days, I might very well have called a real estate agent. I had become quite attached to the area—to the hobbitlike trulli, the low dry-stone walls embracing broad fields, the quiet, simple rural life, and the ancient olive trees with their gnarly trunks and sprawling limbs. It seemed an easy sort of place, an authentic place; the kind of place that might show patience to a newcomer.

  The next morning, with rain shelling our car like gunfire, we bade a final farewell to our trullo and set our sights northward to Castel del Monte, between Bari and Melfi. I wasn’t entirely certain where we would be spending the night, but based on my map, Melfi looked as good a destination as any.

  Our first stop was a gas station.

  I had developed a fondness for Agip gas stations. I’m not sure why—perhaps it was their medieval-style logo of a fire-breathing wolf with six legs, or maybe that their corporate colors of red and yellow reminded me of the gas stations I frequent at home.

  “Il pieno, per favore,” I said to the gas jockey.

  A chuckle came from the passenger seat.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked Mom indignantly. I mean, had she bothered to learn a word of Italian?

  “What on earth did you say to that man?” she giggled, trying unsuccessfully to restrain her mirth.

  “I said, ‘Il pieno, per favore.’ It means ‘Fill it up, please,’ and before you start criticizing my pronunciation may I remind you that . . . ”

  Mom clutched my arm and, her eyes brimming with tears of laughter, gasped hysterically: “I’m . . . sorry . . . but to me . . . it sounds . . . like you’re saying . . . ‘I play . . . piano . . . for a whore’!”

  Well, we had a good laugh about that one. I almost joined her in the incontinent department.

  Thereafter, on a couple of occasions when I was feeling cheeky, I would quickly mutter my mother’s English version to the gas jockeys, and without so much as a raised eyebrow they dutifully filled up the tank. Mom and I would crack up like schoolgirls.

  We followed the highway north to Bari. I had considered taking a brief tour of the city, but the amount of traffic turned me off the idea immediately, and I decided we would simply press on.

  “Look! IKEA!” said Mom with the same sort of excitement Columbus probably displayed when he first set eyes on North America.

  “You aren’t serious about stopping at ik ea,” I said.

  “Why not?” she pouted. “My friend Kitty’s daughter is a buyer for IKEA; I could take a photo of the store for her. Besides, I like IKEA.”

  I felt it best to ignore her.

  The rain had finally subsided and the sun was doing its best to apply some much-needed heat to the air. We turned off the E55 and followed the signs to Bitonto, which was en route to Castel del Monte, one of the homes of Frederick ii. Everywhere I went in southern Italy I encountered references to old Freddie, so I felt obliged to pay his ghost a visit.

  Entering Bitonto, I shared a historical nugget with Mom:

  “The funeral cortege of Frederick ii passed through this very town—and right through that piazza—in December 1250, on its way to Taranto, where a ship was waiting to take his body to Palermo for burial. And just think, we’re heading to one of Frederick’s castles right now.”

  “Look!” Mom said excitedly. “stop! A clothing store!”

  I swerved the car into the first available parking spot. The passenger-side door was open before I had the car properly stopped and the hand brake engaged.

  She didn’t give two hoots about Frederick; she wanted to shop.

  I could hardly blame her: both of us were in desperate need of warm clothing. I had tried to make do with the clothes in my suitcase—a wardrobe fit for a heat wave—but no amount of layering could sufficiently warm me up.

  We descended on the boutique like a swat unit and emerged fifteen minutes later with sweaters.

  The fabled Via Appia conveyed us out of Bitonto into the flat, big-sky countryside. Distant snow-capped mountains abutted lush green fields and gentle valleys arrayed around their bases.

  There was so much to take in, and to some eyes the ordinary looked extraordinary.

  “Look at all those crosses,” sighed Mom, pointing to a series of structures along the roadside. “Isn’t that a marvellous sight?”

  “Those are electricity poles, Mom.”

  IT WAS around noon when we drove up to Castel del Monte, the perplexing octagonal fortress that was built, and some say designed, by Frederick ii in 1240 to secure his control over the Apulian territory. It is one of more than two hundred buildings he erected during his thirty-eight-year reign. The construction guild of the day must have been giddy with gratitude to him. The creamy-pink-hued limestone facade and crownlike shape give it an almost playful innocence when you first lay eyes on it, but as you draw closer you get a distinct sense of the creeps.

  The castle has baffled historians and archaeologists. It is not grand enough to be a pleasure palace, not menacing enough to be a fortress, too pretty to be a prison, too geometric to be a hunting lodge. Castel del Monte proved perplexing for us, too. Frederick had obviously not built it with Mom in mind. There were no signs anywhere to indicate access for the disabled.

  We parked the car in the parking lot—a long distance from the castle—unfolded Mom’s trusty friend the red walker, and made a slow, torturous journey along a rough dirt-and-pebble road and then up uneven steps leading to the castle.

  It nearly killed her. She walked for several minutes with labored breathing and a pinched look of agony on her face. She was so out of breath and in such pain that I feared she would collapse.

  “Stay here and let me find out if there’s a better way to do this,” I finally said.

  I sprinted ahead and up a dozen steep steps to the castle door.

  “Mia madre è disabile,” I explained impatiently to the young man at the ticket wicket. It might take a village to raise a child, but it takes a loud, edgy voice to advocate for a disabled senior. I hoped he would be able to allow me to drive my mother right up to the castle, where a ramp or something would make climbing the stairs easier for her. He conferred with a colleague and then told me to ask my question to someone at the restaurant down the road from the castle, across from the parking lot. As for entering the castle, he said, Mom would still have to climb the dozen steps to the front door.

  I ran back to Mom to relay the information. Her face was glistening with perspiration.

  “I’m afraid we have to walk all the way back to the car,” I winced, wishing with all my heart that I could have given her different news.

  The look on her face did not match her words: “I’ll be fine.”

  Off we set, slowly and painfully, back to the car. Once I got her settled and stowed the walker back in the trunk I went into the restaurant and asked that the chain rope barrier be unlocked so that we could drive up to the castle.

  “Momento,” I was told.

  Why is my “Andiamo!” so often met with “Momento” ?

  After a wait, during which time I was able to tap out the score to the William Tell overture on the steering wheel, we proceeded over crushed stone to the castle. I parked the car as close as I could to the entrance steps.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked Mom.
“Those steps look steep.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said determinedly, and struggled out of the car. “There’s a railing, so that should help quite a bit.”

  She slowly worked her way up the steps, using the railing to pull herself up one stone riser at a time. My mind drifted back twenty-some years to when I had patiently ascended many stairs with my toddlers, teaching them to move one leg up a step before bringing the second leg up to join it. Then the next step, and the next. Where had those years gone? No one told me then that I would be repeating the lesson with my mother.

  Once Mom reached the top, I bent down slightly and gave her a look of victory along with quiet applause, in much the same way I had done for my children. The term “second childhood” was beginning to make sense to me.

  The next hurdle for Mom was lifting her legs—which have difficulty bending because of a mass of arthritis strangling her knee joints—over the foot-high threshold of the castle door. She steadied herself on a door frame nearly a millennium old and, taking a deep breath, managed this too.

  At the ticket wicket I faced the same young man I had earlier. This time I asked for a wheelchair. He looked just as dumbfounded as he had about my first request. Again, he conferred with his colleague.

  “No wheelchair,” he said officiously.

  “What is it with you people and your fucking lack of services for the disabled?”

  Well, that’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I turned to Mom and rolled my eyes.

  “I’ll manage,” she said, forcing a smile. “Come on, let’s take a look around this joint.”

  Now, I know things like osteoarthritis and asthma and guiding one’s mom and her infernal red walker around the kingdom were not uppermost in Frederick ii’s mind when he embarked on his Italian building spree, but eight hundred years later the issues are still ignored. I found this especially surprising at tourist attractions where every possible means is often used to entice visitors. And it’s not just the disabled that this concerns, it’s people like, well, like me, who accompany a disabled person. I had lost count of the number of times I had run back and forth and hither and yon to make sure my mother saw the things I wanted to see. My knees aren’t getting any younger, and once they’re shot, then my mother’s care declines exponentially. Doesn’t it make sense to design and plan things for the enjoyment and use of all ages? Wouldn’t accessibility benefit us all—from the elderly in wheelchairs all the way down to tots in strollers?