THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS
July 6 2012
A week has gone by since I last wrote and so now, to sit down before the blank page is somewhat daunting. How will I ever capture and communicate all that has happened since we came home from the sea?
It reminds me of the days of letter writing when I first left England and a week would become 2, then 3 or more and the thought of trying to bring family and friends up-to-date was so overwhelming that I would put if off until it became impossible to undertake. Only a sense of obligation – something that is no longer at work in my life – would finally set me down with a sheet or two of onion skin on which, I’m sure, I wrote absolutely nothing of interest before folding the impoverished pages in 3, slipping them into the airmail envelope and then into the letterbox, the distance between my life and those with whom I had grown up becoming greater and greater. Writing for this blog is somewhat similar, in that I wish to convey something intimate and interesting, to those of you who so kindly read these missives; and with whom, in fact, I feel a deep connection.
Last Sunday, early in the morning, we drove to Arezzo to the supposedly #1 antiques market in Italy. I would hate to think what the others are like. It was a brutally hot day, the peak of the recent heat wave, with a temperature exceeding 100 degrees. We arrived in Arrezo to find the streets littered with broken bottles and other items of modern-day debauchery, although I’m not sure that debauchery is the appropriate word as in my mind, along with ruinous consequences it also expresses pleasure whereas there, on those ancient streets, the spoils of Saturday night appeared violent and desperate. The only traffic moving through town was street-cleaning vehicles, seemingly one for every street.
But enough about the degeneration of today’s generation and really, why should I keep you at the market when there is nothing positive to show you. Suffice it to say that it was filled with stalls of crap that was crap when it was made and that has acquired absolutely no patina with age.
We were back on the road by 10 disappointed and in need of visual sustenance. So thank goodness for Gianni who, having traveled Tuscany for 5 years on horseback – some 25 to 30 years ago – knows every white road in the land. For 2 hours we jounced and bounced along the rutted lanes of eternal landscape, through hills of green and gold and grey, past isolated farmhouses, absent power lines or a single vehicle save ours.
It was during this journey that my friend Murray visited me in the back seat. Murray, whose death in New York in April is synonymous with Daniel’s in Paris 5 days earlier. So entwined were these two deaths in our shocked souls, that it had been impossible to separate the grief for each as, until now, the thought of one immediately conjured the other, leaving me with the feeling that I had not been able to grieve either of them fully. But there, in the infinity of the hills and sky, Murray came alone and I wept silently with the sharp, deep, missing of him.
His wife came to visit us the next day, taking the train up from Rome where she is spending a couple of weeks. She, like my other 2 friends who recently lost their husbands, impresses and inspires me with her courage to rise up and go out into the world.
The 3 of us dined outside under the full moon, sharing memories, memories that made us weep a little and laugh a lot. And I had a new understanding of the meaning of of loss, as when we say, so-and-so lost her husband, when our firend, in talking about the rich life she and Murray had shared said, “Where does that all go?”
And it’s going all the time isn’t it, our lives, ribboning out behind us until they are disappeared in the rear view mirror of memory. There is nothing we can hold onto for more than a moment and it is folly to try and do so by clinging to memory. So, we journey forward, our friend by train back to Rome, and we to Italian lessons, more laundry, a trip to Siena for supplies. We journey on to prepositions hoping that some new verbs will tag along with us. And in the evening we drive the winding roads to Rupert and Esther’s house, deep in the countryside, the last stretch of road so rugged that one wonders if the muffler will be a thing of the past and if Rupert will be willing to adjust our spines before dinner.
We are greeted by their peacocks, strutting their stuff in the garden.
There is salmon and fennel roasting in the oven and while it finishes cooking our friends take us to their yoga room where I find myself introduced to Flying Yoga.
When we finally make it home and into bed the moon illuminates our summer comforter, covering us with a square of white as luminous as any blank page.
And what will remain of this week? Three images seem powerful enough to be recollected some time in the distant future, should I be blessed to have one. The first is the sad remains of a Saturday night, strewn on the ancient streets of Arezzo. The second is the heroic and poignant vision of our friend as the train took her forward into her life. And the third is the sillouhette of Shiva, the splendid peacock, flown now to his night perch in a nearby tree. The latter two images already erasing the memory of the first.