Incontinent on the Continent

by Jane Christmas

  Farther up the coast, in the Emilia-Romagna region, the scenery became more industrial and urban the closer we got to Bologna. By the time we entered Veneto, with its flat, fertile land and abundant canal system, we thought we were in Holland.

  Mom and I had initially agreed that this would be a leisurely drive. I had wanted to spend the night in San Marino, for no other reason than to say that I had slept in one of the world’s smallest and oldest principalities. But as the day progressed, Mom changed her mind and ordered me to press on to Venice. The “leisurely” drive turned into a nine-hour, four-hundred- mile slog with barely a break.

  Even then she was not satisfied. “Why is this taking so long?” she nagged. “I think you’ve taken the slowest route.”

  “Look,” I said, showing her the map. “This is the most direct route there is. And we’re on the autostrada. It doesn’t get any faster than this.”

  She refused to believe me and kept insisting that there was a faster way. At one point she complained because the landscape was boring. I clenched my teeth and gripped the steering wheel tighter. Yes, it was a good thing we were going home early. Another week of this and I could envision the sort of scene that makes the six o’clock news and then gets optioned for a movie of the week.

  By the time we arrived in Venice, both of us had ground our molars to dust. We parked the car in one of the usurious lots at the edge of the city, purchased a pair of twenty-four-hour transit passes, and stepped aboard a vaporetto, one of Venice’s floating buses, to be taken to our hotel.

  “Oh dear, I left my cane in the car,” said Mom as the vaporetto merged into the busy traffic on the Grand Canal.

  “Too late now,” I said. I glanced at the red walker and murmured: “Don’t let me down, buddy.”

  Say what you will about its pollution problems and crumbling architecture; the blend of water, hazy light, and Renaissance dishabille makes Venice the dreamiest place on the planet.

  “I think this is my favorite city,” Mom gushed. “Aren’t you glad I talked you into coming here?”

  I sure was. And I wished it were for more than twenty-four hours. A part of me wished I were spending it with someone mobile, someone other than my mother.

  “I’ve already picked out four places where I’d like to live,”

  Mom beamed as we sailed beneath the Rialto Bridge. “How about you?”

  Maybe I was here with exactly the right person, after all.

  I was as smitten as her by all of it: the Moorish-inspired architecture of the palazzos; the water gently lapping at everyone’s doorstep—How fabulous would it be to step out of your home and into a boat rather than a car?—the elaborate domes of the churches, whose oxidized copper streaked like mascara across the stone facades; the small arched stone bridges on the side canals; the tall, slightly tilted wooden poles of the piers; the hunky but indolent gondoliers in their tight black-and-white-striped T-shirts, catnapping on the sumptuous scarlet cushions of their glossy black gondolas or drawing seductively on a cigarette as they wait for the tourists to descend. Truman Capote once said, “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.” I know exactly what he meant.

  The Hotel Locanda San Barnaba was a short distance from the Ca’ Rezzonico stop, down a lane that barely accommodated Mom’s walker but that mercifully had no steps or bridges. We had arrived early in the day, about 11:00 am, but our room had already been prepared, and the front desk clerk had thoughtfully placed us in the only main-floor bedroom that was both wheelchair accessible and handily located near the front door. The breakfast room was located on the other side of the front desk and had a walkout to a courtyard garden that bordered a side canal.

  We graciously accepted a welcome cup of tea and croissant that were offered to us.

  “Come on,” I said to Mom, hurriedly brushing croissant crumbs off the front of her shirt and dabbing a napkin at the corners of her mouth. “We only have twenty-four hours here.”

  I dragged her back to the vaporetto stop, and we caught a boat to Piazza San Marco and then transferred onto another vaporetto bound for the island of Murano. The light breeze we had enjoyed on shore had switched to a brisker version on the water, but the sun was sparkling and I was lost in the enchantment of Venice’s beauty.

  Standing next to me were two teenagers, English girls with those nasal voices and high-pitched whinnies that hint of upper-class breeding. The taller of the two kept absentmindedly tossing her long blond hair into my face, and one of her elbows kept jabbing me in the breast. Occasionally the boat’s jerky motion would cause her to lose her balance, and she would stumble into me. She never bothered to apologize. Another case of middle-age invisibility, I thought. I aimed my inner death-ray laser at the back of her head.

  While I was busy applying vitriol to enemy targets, Mom fell into conversation with two elderly English ladies. They were sisters; one lived in Bristol, the other in London. There was no mistaking which one lived where: one had the hardy, ruddy complexion of a life spent enjoying the outdoors; the other looked like she was on her way to lunch at a Kensington High Street restaurant.

  They were a jolly pair, and gradually I migrated into their conversation. We were trading stories about the rudeness we had encountered from both natives and tourists, and I was just about to remark on the insolence of the teenage girls next to me when one of the women mentioned that the reason they were in Venice was that they were treating their great-niece and her friend to a brief holiday. The great-niece, they confided— the one who had been assaulting me with her hair and body parts—had lost her mother to cancer a few months earlier. I withdrew the death-ray lasers.

  We made a cursory visit of Murano and its canalside glass shops, then took the two English sisters’ advice and visited the Basilica of Santi Maria e Donato, a small 7th-century church, to admire its intricately designed mosaic floor.

  On the vaporetto back to Venice Mom, despite her sore legs, decided she wanted to see the Doge’s Palace.

  You can’t miss the Doge’s Palace. Its pink-and-white mosaic brickwork and two-tiered arcade and gallery make it look like an enormous wedding cake with stiff white royal icing piped on in the shape of columns and tracery, arches, finials, and statues. The other feature you can’t miss—the non-architectural one—is the ribbon of humanity lined up beneath the palace’s colonnaded arcade waiting to gain admission. Lineups, schlineups, I smiled smugly.

  I guided Mom to the front of the queue and uttered the magic words to the ticket taker: “Mia madre è disabile.” The large doors swung open immediately. That phrase worked like “abracadabra.”

  It was afternoon by the time we got back to our hotel, and Mom needed a nap.

  I took off to explore the winding maze of walled lanes that is Venice, over minibridges and across small piazzas.

  The work day had just ended, and so the lanes and bridges and cafés were crammed with people scuttling home from work, meeting up with a friend for a quick drink, or dashing into a shop for last-minute items for the evening meal. This was what a pedestrian rush hour looks like, and I embraced it immediately.

  A poster announced an evening concert of Vivaldi, Mozart, Pachelbel, and Rossini farther up the Grand Canal; a young woman handed me a brochure for a performance of Così fan tutte and The Barber of Seville; yet another brochure that I had picked up earlier outlined a string program of Vivaldi, Corelli, and Bach. So much music! So little time!

  I studied the map to locate La Fenice, Venice’s famed opera house. It was on the other side of the Grand Canal. I regarded the quickly fading light and decided it would not be prudent to go searching for it now. Another time, I told myself.

  I took the long way back to the hotel—the back streets—and dallied on the small jaunty bridges that grace the quieter side canals, watching the water pass beneath me, listening for the silence that comes when the tourists have retreated to their rooms.

  Twilight fluttered over Venice. On a side canal an incandescent glow form
ed an aura around a shuttered window, and I wondered if the person living in the apartment behind it was still enamored of Venice despite the incessant warnings of impending environmental disaster.

  THE NEXT morning it was time to take our leave of Venice. It hardly seemed fair.

  “You go out and take another look around,” said Mom as we finished our breakfast. “I’m going to take my walker up the street and window-shop. Let’s meet back in an hour. If you see something that interests you, go in and look around. Don’t worry about me.”

  The bright morning air was sprinkled with the sounds of people scurrying along the narrow lanes and of metal café chairs and tables being untangled from their neat stacks and scraped across the stone piazza of Campo San Barnaba.

  I crossed a tiny bridge and saw a woman opening the shuttered windows of her apartment and preparing to hang laundry on her small balcony that jutted over the canal. The Ca’ Rez-zonico museum was just down the lane, and that’s where I was headed, on the recommendation of the two English sisters.

  This palazzo-turned-museum-and-art-gallery was everything I had hoped to see in a museum, and more. A repository for early Venetian art, Ca’ Rezzonico is a stunning masterpiece— historically, architecturally, culturally. If I ever did a tour of Italy again, I would dispense with every gallery and museum except for Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Mod-erna and Venice’s Ca’ Rezzonico.

  I purchased my ticket on the ground level and immediately became distracted by a black-lacquered gondola that had been used by the family who once lived in the villa. I had no idea that gondolas were built from eight different types of wood or that one side of the craft is longer than the other to counteract the weight of the gondolier.

  On the next level I passed through a series of reception rooms sparingly decorated with antique chairs and tables. The scene-stealers were the ceilings. A series of artists had been employed by the Bon and Rezzonico families when the palace was under their ownership, from the mid-16th century through the 17th century.

  In one room with crimson, cloth-covered walls two masters— Gerolamo Mengozzi and Giovanni Tiepolo—had created the Nuptial Allegory, Mengozzi had painted a trompe l’oeil balustrade around an architectural fantasy of plasterwork and richly carved “wood” architraves. Inside this faux frame Tiepolo had painted an airy skyscape with chubby cherubs frolicking among clouds that were so light you felt you could move them with your breath.

  Tiepolo’s characters are always voluptuous creatures with rosy, dimpled bottoms and gently imploring eyes. His skies are dreamy and ethereal; the taffeta on his subjects shimmers, and their skin looks softer, less chiselled than the stern perfection wrought by Michelangelo.

  I moved from room to room, my head tilted back and my mouth open in awe. I had never seen such beautiful art in my life.

  Again I found myself asking the question, How does this stuff get relegated to second- or third-banana status? How come people are waiting eons to get into the Uffizi or the Vatican Museum while work of this caliber—the Tiepo-los, Guardis, Longhis, Molinaris (equal if not superior in my humble opinion) goes largely unnoticed by tourists? And may I just add this fact: There are no lineups at Ca’ Rezzonico.

  Figuring I had seen everything there was to see in the museum, I was about to take the stairs back to the main floor when I spied an arrow pointing up a small set of stairs. I followed it and came upon the top two floors of the palazzo, which now serve as a comprehensive exhibit of Venetian painting from the 15th to the 18th century. Oh my God! I fell into artistic ecstasy.

  I glanced at my watch. Damn, I had already spent an hour and a half there and had only managed the briefest tour. I did an embarrassingly quick trot through the galleries before forcing myself back to the main floor and scurrying back to the hotel.

  “Where on Earth have you been?” Mom demanded.

  “You wouldn’t believe the palace I’ve just been through. It was incredible. So much better than the Doge’s Palace.”

  “You went through it and you didn’t bother to come back and get me?” she scolded.

  “You told me that if I saw something that caught my eye to go in and not bother coming back to get you!”

  “Well, you should have. Really, you’re impossible. Come on. We’d better check out.”

  THREE HOURS later we were holed up in an unappetizing Best Western on the fringes of Treviso. I stood, deflated, on a small hotel balcony looking down at a gas station and a treeless, dusty suburban wasteland where a long lineup of cars waited impatiently at a traffic light. I pined for Venice and the splendors of the Ca’ Rezzonico, for the small stone bridges and narrow, winding lanes.

  I returned to the stultifying blandness of our room to resume the business of repacking. Our luggage was straining the zippers, and I could barely lift any of our suitcases.

  At the airport ticket counter the next morning we faced a clerk who informed me that our luggage was severely overweight. We were frog-marched to a Ryanair kiosk to pay the penalty.

  We were then directed back to the ticket-counter lineup and told by the same clerk that no wheelchair had been ordered for Mom. (I had triple-checked this detail when changing the reservation only a few days earlier.) She said the printout with our amended flight information, the one I held in my hand, was insufficient, and insisted on seeing the original reservation.

  Luckily I still had that piece of paper, but it was buried in the farthest reaches of my suitcase.

  “Open your suitcase here,” the counter clerk demanded.

  “But . . . isn’t there somewhere more . . . private?” I asked.

  Behind me was a line of grim travellers, their arms crossed and their feet tapping with impatience.

  “Right here is fine,” said the clerk. “Hurry up, please.”

  I hate strangers looking in my suitcase. It’s creepy. When I have found myself witnessing other passengers opening their suitcase I have to look away. I just think the contents of one’s suitcase are too personal for public viewing.

  Reluctantly, I crouched down and upzipped my suitcase.

  It sprang open like a jack-in-the-box.

  The red walker, which Mom and I had bound with packing tape, suddenly toppled over with a crash. This drew even more attention to us. People spun around and stared as if I had set off the fire alarm. A few people wandered over and stood just beyond my personal space, peering into my suitcase as if I were about to set up a flea-market stall. I shooed them away angrily.

  My hair flopped in my face as I plunged my hands into every corner of my suitcase, searching for the missing flight document while simultaneously keeping tabs on five bags— well, six, if you count my mother. I could feel perspiration gathering on my brow and around my nose.

  Mom shuffled to my side.

  “There’s no wheelchair,” she said in an agitated voice. “How could this happen? What are we going to do about that? You’re going to have to ask them to find one. Otherwise, they’ll have to carry me. Oh, and I need to find a washroom. Do you know where it is?”

  Tears began to squirt from my eyes. The toetapping behind me grew louder.

  I kept my head down—achieved a small victory when I located the documents—and proceeded to stuff the contents of my exploded suitcase back in place with one hand and force the suitcase top shut with the other.

  Never again, I muttered to myself, my lower lip quivering. Never again will I take a trip like this.

  18

  Making the Effort

  Let’s go to Italy again,” said Mom.

  It was not the first time she had suggested the idea shortly after our return home. I chuckled politely and hoped she would drop the subject.

  “Well, why not?” she pouted, clearly not pleased with my dismissive response. “I’m ready to go again.”

  She said this after having just wheezed out an account of how exhausting her day had been—a day spent picking up a few groceries and playing bridge.

  “Mom, you can’t get around,”
I said evenly. “Don’t you remember the pain you were in? How you barely made it up a flight of stairs? How out of breath you were?”

  “Oh, that was then. I’m fine now,” she said brightly.

  The woman is infuriatingly indomitable.

  “I’m sure you’re fine,” I answered. “But I haven’t fully recovered. I don’t think I could handle it again.”

  She might very well want to take on Italy again, but deep down we both know the possibility is unlikely.

  I wouldn’t say that out loud to her. If there is anything I have learned from our trip it is that the elderly cling to hope. It’s their last resource and their prime motivator. Making plans, voicing possibilities, launching ideas is what keeps them—all of us, when you think about it—feeling vital and in the game. When you’re held hostage by your body’s limitations, hope is all you’ve got.

  “I just can’t seem to get into Christmas this year,” she said one evening when I arrived to help her string some lights on the artificial trees in her home. “But I want it to look as if I’m at least making an effort.”

  That’s what life comes down to eventually—making the effort.

  Since our return from Italy I have become more conscious of my mother’s health, more appreciative of what she has to struggle with daily. Her frequent episodes of dozing off during our trip, for example, were actually an early warning signal of unhealthy levels of carbon dioxide in her system. I am hyperaware of signs of her regression, and I’m also forgiving of them. The best I can do for my mother is, well, mother her. It’s still a learning process for me, but better late than never, as they say.

  She doesn’t come to the door to greet me anymore when I visit her, and I take no offense to that. I know I’ll find her in the den, sitting in her favorite chair, her trusty red walker by her side like a faithful pet.