Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  Forget Satan, forget the seven deadly sins, nothing confounds the Eternal City like a walker. The cab driver who arrived at our hotel to take us to Saint Peter’s was stymied when confronted with it. He scratched his head and with help from the doorman tried stuffing in to the trunk, to no avail. They let it sit on the hotel driveway and stared at it as they pondered various solutions. Eventually the walker wound up in the front seat of the cab and Mom and I in the backseat.

  Saint Peter’s Square is a vast and daunting plain of cobblestones. You might as well have asked Mom to walk across the Prairies. There were no directions and no signs of assistance for anyone with physical limitations.

  Web sites will tell you that Saint Peter’s is “accessible,” but that’s a lie unless “accessible” means that there is room for people to push a walker or wheel themselves in a wheelchair. It is a lot to ask of a disabled person to cross that square without assistance, especially over rough cobblestones.

  Police officers and the Papal Swiss Guardsmen in their smart gold, blue, and red pantaloons and matching spats were out in full force that day making sure we didn’t have bombs strapped to our bodies. Aside from that they were useless. They saw my Mom huffing and puffing, her face red with distress, but they showed not a smidgeon of concern.

  We wandered into Saint Peter’s Basilica only because we saw threads of people scurrying in and it seemed the right thing to do at the time. I nearly tripped over myself while trying to take in the scale of the interior: columns twice the size of tree trunks, mammoth marble statues hanging off the walls or suspended from the ceiling, paintings the size of small homes adorning the walls. The treads on the steps were the depth of a pantry.

  “There must be a Mass,” I said to Mom as the pews began filling up.

  “Oh goody,” she replied. “It is Maundy Thursday, you know.”

  We stuffed ourselves into a crowded pew as a posse of priests assembled around the altar. Out of their midst came none other than Pope Benedict xvi.

  When he started chanting the first few lines of the Gloria, I thought Tom Waits had hijacked the microphone. It appears His Holiness is, like the rest of us, groggy of voice first thing in the morning.

  Benedict may lack the natural charisma of his predecessor, but there’s something about a man in white robes that makes the girls crazy. A gaggle of nubile and not-so-nubile nuns were jumping up and down in front of us, flashing their cell phone cameras at their idol while being restrained by the Vatican guards in their silver, centurion-type helmets.

  Mom nudged me.

  “See, even the nuns have cell phones,” she nodded approvingly.

  “SISTINE CHAPEL?”

  I nodded affirmatively to the young security guard in the Vatican Museum.

  “All the way to the end and turn left,” he said.

  I stared at the dot on the horizon and calculated that the distance might reasonably require overnight accommodation or at the very least a meal stop. Mom had taken to using museum wheelchairs as walkers rather than riding in them, but I convinced her to let me wheel her this time.

  After a long journey we were standing in the middle of the Sistine Chapel, shoehorned in with a percentage of the three million people who visit the chapel each year, a number of them walking around with their heads tilted up, oblivious to the fact that they were bumping into others. People squeezed closer. I felt myself poked and groped and grazed. I couldn’t tell whether I was being shoved or assaulted. It took all my self-restraint not to snap, “Will you kindly fuck off?” to everyone who invaded my personal space. There was a creepy guy with short dark hair, dressed in a plaid, short-sleeved shirt and khakis, walking around with an air of innocence. I was certain he had intentionally copped a feel.

  These are not the conditions under which I enjoy appreciating art and culture. It was guerilla tourism of the worst kind.

  “What did you think of it?” Mom asked me as we barrelled through the crowd to escape.

  “No roaring hell,” I said. “Michelangelo strikes me as an angry man with obsessive-compulsive disorder. You?”

  “I can’t see what the fuss is all about,” she said. “I expected better.”

  ONE AFTERNOON I was surprised to find myself with nothing to do. Zippo.

  Mom was napping, the sun was bright, and I had a good three hours to do as I pleased. I cast about for a destination.

  I wanted something removed from the hordes, something that would encourage quiet reflection. Not quite certain where I was going, I slipped out of our luxurious Alcatraz and sauntered down a virtually empty Via Ulisse Aldrovandi beneath a hot sun. I crossed into the Borghese Gardens, attracted by the shade of soaring trees, and followed a long, narrow, quiet path that disappointingly delivered me to a wide, chaotic street of blaring horns and busy people.

  I took one look at the mayhem and was about to turn my back on it when I noticed a gypsy mother in a long, tattered, rose-colored skirt cradling a sleeping baby and approaching people with her hand outstretched. We had been warned about the gypsies—by Rome’s cab drivers, by the hotel concierge, by newspaper articles, by anyone who we told we were going to Rome—and I had seen a number of them, especially around the Vatican.

  I knew gypsies were considered a huge problem all over Europe, but I was unprepared for the hostility directed at them. Passersby literally swatted the young mother away. One well-dressed man came up to her and cursed her loudly just inches from her face—I could hear his bellowing across the street from where I stood. The gypsy mom did nothing, oblivious or simply inured to the abuse.

  I returned to the gentility of the Borghese Gardens. The scent of Spring was in the air, and the soft colors of the early f lowers—pale pinks, lavenders, and buttercup-yellows— bestowed a cheerful, innocent serenity.

  I walked the narrow crushed-gravel paths pondering the gypsy mother, and those thoughts led me to think about myself as a mother. There was a time when I lost my job and had thought that it would be only a matter of time before my life resembled that of the gypsy mom. But I refused to let that happen, and today my resilience is my most hard-won and satisfying achievement.

  Then, as ever, my mind flipped back to my mother. She had been a model of resilience and self-sufficiency. Those traits alone were reason enough to be grateful for having been born to such a woman. And yet I could not quell the quiet anger that sporadically rose in me whenever my thoughts moved toward the relationship I had with her. I still wanted to broach the three grievances that she had not allowed me to share that night in Viterbo. I was fearful about bringing them up myself because as much as I wanted an honest relationship with her, I was too exhausted to argue with her anymore. Maybe she felt the same way. Still, my mind continued to scream for resolution. How much longer did I have to carry this crap around with me? Why was it always me having to bring it up?

  Along the path, with my hands stuffed in my pockets and my head bowed in thought, I came across an elderly woman in a wheelchair. A dull, thick blanket covered her legs; a little wool cap sat on her head, which hung to one side; and her face wore an expression that could charitably be described as checked out. Beside her, seated on a wooden park bench and staring ahead, lost in thought, was, I assumed, the woman’s adult daughter, about my age. She jolted slightly out of her reverie as I approached. I smiled a greeting of solidarity to her. Caring for elderly parents is a lonely, solitary labor of love, duty, and perhaps guilt.

  The path I was on eventually led me back to Via Ulisse Aldrovandi. Across the road was the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, a stark white, classical-looking edifice that I had passed numerous times during our stay in Rome. Unlike the Uffizi and other famous art galleries, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna did not appear to get many visitors, so I seized the opportunity to take a look. Modern art, by Italian definition, refers to anything produced from 1850 to the present, and soon after purchasing my ticket, I was lost in the simple delight of conducting a lazy, random gander through the gallery’s many bright
, arresting, and blissfully crowd-free rooms.

  Across one of the galleries, in an adjoining room, a life-size statue of ghostly white marble caught my eye. I made a beeline for it, as if drawn by a magnetic force. As I stood in front of it, tears gathered in my eyes.

  La Vedova, sculpted in 1888 by Ernesto Bazzaro, depicts a girl of perhaps six or eight years of age and her young mother. The girl looks as if she wants to play or at least get a moment of face time with her mother—her small hand is on her mother’s chin, as if trying to physically turn her mother’s face toward her. The mother, however, is lost in a long gaze of worried distraction— Bills? Domestic strife? Loss? How to be smarter? More stylish? How to get ahead? Or perhaps how to get to the end of the week without slitting her wrists? The looks on the faces of both mother and daughter were achingly familiar.

  My mother had been distracted during my childhood— distracted by her weight gain, by the need to be her own person and develop her own talents, by her commitments to various volunteer organizations. I was the little girl in that statue, always trying to get her to notice me, to listen to me. Even then, when her hearing was perfect, I had to repeat things two or three times to get her attention.

  But hadn’t I also been a distracted mother? Are we all distracted during early marriage and motherhood at some point? Don’t we all stress about how to make ends meet, how to make our children’s lives easier and richer, how to maintain the other relationships in our lives—with spouses, in-laws, parents, friends, bosses—how to keep from losing ourselves? In the process we let slide the relationships we take for granted, the relationships that are in fact most important to us.

  My mind rewound to ten years earlier, when my daughter would come out of school at the end of the day and scan the crowd of waiting parents. When her eyes landed on me, she would shoot me a thousand-watt smile, yelp happily, and race across the school yard into my waiting arms. So swamped was I with the pressing matters of daily life that I often did not return the same devoted attention to my daughter or my sons at the very moment they offered it. I would hear them excitedly spill out the events of their day and about their happy discoveries, but I didn’t always listen. Why does it take us so long—and until so much later in life—to realize the value of our undivided attention?

  As mother and child age, the balance shifts. The mother’s time is freed up from myriad responsibilities; the child’s time becomes dominated by social interests outside the home.

  Eventually it is the mother who is begging the child for face time and undivided attention. Funny how that happens.

  The therapeutic discussion I had hoped to have with Mom in Viterbo was one-sided, and not once since then had she asked about my grievances. Was she scared of what she would hear? Were her regrets as a mother the same as my regrets, but she was simply unwilling to be put on the defensive? I guess if I were a different person, I could have challenged her brazenly.

  But the hour of our lives was late, and looking at that statue, I understood that I no longer wanted to be controlled by the past. As much as I wanted to have it out with my mother, I also wanted a happy peace between us. And you simply can’t have it both ways. I had wasted so many years hanging on to old hurts, coaxing them along like tender plants so that the bitterness would continue to bloom, watering them with my resentments.

  Standing in front of Bazzaro’s statue, I began to see the work I had to do to correct my behavior and to make peace at my end. How she chose to deal with the past was her business; I had a responsibility only to mine. What’s more, I understood that for better or for worse, I was my mother’s daughter. And I accepted that.

  Perhaps that was the only lesson I needed to learn on this trip.

  I reached into my purse, withdrew the small sheet of lined, white paper on which I had jotted down my three grievances, ripped it up, and tossed the pieces in a nearby bin.

  EASTER SUNDAY. The day of redemption and rebirth. How perfect, how apropos. Mom and I were sitting in an enclosure in Saint Peter’s Square waiting for Easter Sunday Mass to begin. We had arrived two hours before it was to start. Elderly people have a compulsion about arriving early. Not that I minded in this case; the sky was bright blue, and the cheerful sunlight warmed my spirit.

  A pretty young nun—wearing foundation and lip gloss, no less—was scurrying to secure seats for anyone who belonged to a religious order. Occasionally she held her cell phone above the throngs and snapped photos.

  “She has a cell phone,” Mom said, in case I hadn’t already noticed. “Should I get one?”

  Everyone around us seemed to have a cell phone, using it as a camera or a phone. Some used them as gps devices to locate friends and relatives lost in the crowd. A person would stand on their chair, barking instructions into their cell phone while waving frantically so that the person on the receiving end of the call could see them. I have a recurring nightmare about a not-too-distant future where people of my generation, most by then with acute hearing loss, are yelling into their cell phones, or worse, putting their devices on speaker mode.

  In a crowd of this size locating people seemed beyond futile. But people don’t give up, bless their hearts, and so they barked and waved with abandon.

  “Where are you? OK , turn around and face the Basilica. Now look to your right. Do you see a man waving a striped umbrella? That’s me! Yes!”

  An hour before the start of the service Mom leaned over and asked, “Do you know where the washrooms are?”

  “You’re joking,” I said. “You can’t go to the washroom here.

  Have you looked behind us to see how many people are here? There must be a million. Why didn’t you just wear a diaper?”

  “I’d rather use a washroom,” she sniffed proudly. And then, “Maybe I should have worn dark pants.” Those are words I do not like to hear.

  “I cannot believe you’re doing this,” I chided her as she prepared to set off with her red walker. I had visions of her evacuating in Vatican Square.

  “I’ll be fine. You stay here and guard our seats,” she said.

  I can only describe the moment as akin to bidding farewell to someone who is about to embark on the expedition of a lifetime and whose return cannot be guaranteed. Frankly, I did not expect to see her again.

  Miraculously—and on an Easter Sunday in Saint Peter’s Square this counts as a true miracle—she returned about forty minutes later.

  “Have I got a story for you,” she smiled triumphantly as she pushed her walker into our row. I folded it up and placed it beside me.

  “The women’s washrooms are so overcrowded that the women have taken over the men’s washroom!” she said, taking her seat. “The men sure aren’t happy about it, either. When my turn came for a stall, a man pushed me out of line. Imagine the nerve! So I left and went to the Red Cross office. It’s over there.” She pointed out the location of the office, a distance from our seats roughly equal to that between Venus and Mercury. “I asked to use their washroom, and they said they didn’t have one. But I persisted, and eventually a nun intervened and led me to the washrooms reserved for nuns.”

  When my mother tells me stories like this, I don’t always believe what she says. I suspect she embellishes her stories and I tend to regard them as more metaphor than fact.

  Nevertheless, I play along.

  “Wow! What an ordeal!” I said gamely, still amazed that she had found her way back on her own. “But you’re ok?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she smiled. “You gotta be pushy around here you know.”

  A young seminary student—the spitting image of Tom Cruise—asked in Italian if the seat beside Mom was free. I nodded and moved my knees and the walker out of the way to let him pass.

  He turned out to be an American, from northeast Texas, he said, introducing himself as Nolan. He had spent five years in seminary and had three left to go until he was ordained.

  “This is my first year in Rome,” he gushed.

  “They make you spend eight years i
n school before you get ordained?” I asked.

  I believe you can get through law school faster than you can get into the priesthood.

  A nun abruptly stood up in the row in front of us and began shooting random photos with her cell phone. It’s a sad day when a nun has more technical literacy than someone like me.

  “I can’t get over all the nuns with cell phones,” I said to Nolan.

  “Just wait,” he said. “I heard there’s a hand-held gadget— like a BlackBerry—being considered by the Vatican that contains the entire missal, prayers and all.”

  Mass began in all its low-tech Latin glory. It was hard not to be awestruck. Sitting on your folding chair twenty rows from the Pope, it hits you that, wow, this is Saint Peter’s Square and I’m sitting here on Easter Sunday and that’s the Pope talking. Even for a non-Catholic like me it brings on goosebumps.

  “This must be pretty exciting for you,” I said, leaning over to Mom.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied excitedly, and then promptly nodded off.

  17

  Venice

  THE NEXT morning we checked out of our luxury hotel and sped off to Venice. The air was fresh from a sprinkling of rain the night before as we scooted through the quiet Easter Monday streets of Rome. The sun was out, and it felt as if the temperature would easily surpass the expected high of sixty-eight degrees.

  The A24 spit us east clear across to the Adriatic, through three regions, each with distinct landscapes—the gently rolling hills of Lazio, the drier soil of Abruzzo, and the soaring, snow-capped Gran Sasso mountains, through which a portion of the a24 has been breathtakingly tunnelled. One tunnel was six miles long, and I had never been so glad to see daylight at the end of it.

  At the Adriatic the road splits north and south, and the terrain flattens. We turned north. It must have been Public Urination Day; I counted no fewer than six men at various points relieving themselves at the side of the road. They seemed unconcerned with issues of modesty or manners. They stood with legs brazenly akimbo, some with hands resting on the back of their heads or on their hips (“Look ma, no hands!”) and pelvises thrust forward. Surely there’s an international law being drafted somewhere to prohibit such behavior once and for all.