We were making our way along the narrow concourse of stalls when we came upon a small medieval church in the middle of a small piazza. We were about to enter it when my ears pricked up at the sound of two women speaking English. I sidled closer to them to be certain my ears hadn’t deceived me and then dove onto them as if they were long-lost relatives.
“You speak English!” I said, with perhaps a tad too much enthusiasm. A raft of questions tumbled from my mouth. “Can you explain this place to us? Why do entire towns shut down midweek? How do we find our way around?”
The women were from Scotland but had been holidaying in these parts for many years, the jolly one with dark hair, protruding teeth, and a chubby smile told me. The other, of slight build with spiky, gray hair and a severe expression, never spoke.
“We’ve just purchased a trullo,” the chubby one gushed in a thick brogue. “We’re getting ready to renovate. We saw the plans yesterday.”
I congratulated them. Buying and renovating property in a foreign country requires a definite leap of faith.
“You must be very good with the language,” I said, privately entertaining fantasies of their taking Mom and me under their wing for the duration of our stay in Alberobello.
“Oh, we’ve been coming here for fifteen years and we still can’t speak Italian,” the chubby one giggled. “Just say to them, ‘Il mio italiano è poco e male.’ It means, literally, ‘My Italian is small and bad.’ ”
She sounded the phrase out slowly and deliberately and prompted me to repeat it. She must have been a schoolteacher.
“What’s with the weather?” I asked. “I thought southern Italy was warmer than this.”
“It is chilly today, isn’t it?” she said, pulling her sweater tightly around her big bosom. “You should have been here last week. It was seventy-five degrees and beautiful.”
That sentence would be repeated many times during our trip. I wished the women well and headed off to find Mom, who had wandered away at some point during the conversation.
When I located her, she was poking around a stall that sold kitchenware, and was holding a plastic spatula as if considering its purchase. I gently pried it out of her hand and placed it back on the table.
“How on earth were you able to converse with those women?” Mom asked.
“They spoke English, so it wasn’t too difficult for me,” I answered.
“That didn’t sound like English to me.”
We walked a little more, but Mom was now tiring.
“Had enough?”
She nodded.
“Then let’s go home.”
I steered her toward a rendezvous point and accompanied her across the street. Then I took off to get the car. In my absence, the parking lot had devolved into a hodgepodge of vehicles parked at random angles. There was nothing remotely organized about the arrangement. It looked like someone had given Stevie Wonder the authority to park cars.
I located my car, boxed in by an old, faded-red Fiat, and before I had time to react, an elderly man came hobbling quickly toward me, got into the Fiat, and moved it out of the way. I gave him a wave of thanks, but he had already scooted off to find another car to block.
I eased out of the lot—how I managed not to scrape every vehicle in the vicinity remains a mystery—and drove to the prearranged corner of the market area to pick up Mom. I threw the car into park, pushed a button to pop the trunk, jumped out, opened the passenger-side door for Mom, grabbed her walker, and folded it up and wedged it carefully into the trunk, then returned to the driver’s seat, did up my seat belt, and prepared to drive off. In the amount of time it took me to accomplish all those small tasks, Mom had managed to lift one leg into the car.
Adjusting to the pace of someone at least ten times slower than normal speed made me feel as if I were in a perpetual state of slow motion. It drove me mad. I held back the urge to snap, “Andiamo!”
Leaving Locorotondo, we slipped out onto the rural roads and headed toward our trullo, relying solely on instinct and vaguely familiar landmarks as we sailed through a sweep of empty pastures, ancient olive groves, vineyards, and farmland. In a distant field a lone, bent figure with a scythe methodically thwacked around the edges of his property while a small brush fire burned. Smoke curled from the chimney of a modest home. Those were the only signs that anyone was about. It was an eerily empty countryside.
Then a movement indicating life materialized on the road ahead. Coming toward us was a man on horseback. I eased up on the gas pedal.
He was a handsome fellow—I’m referring to the man, not the horse—well into middle age and elegantly attired in the chaps and fitted tweed jacket favored by lords of the manor. He looked not to have a care in the world as he swayed confidently and languorously on his steed. One of his brown-leather- gloved hands clutched the reins, and the other was raised to his ear: He was chatting merrily on his cell phone.
As we passed he gave us a smile and a wink.
“See?” harrumphed Mom. “Even he has a cell phone.”
THE RAIN and cold persisted, and within days Mom had developed a worrisome bronchial cough. It was so bad that I wasn’t sure whether to be concerned that she would develop pneumonia or that she would have a stroke brought on by her constant hacking. The worry and the hacking kept me awake at night.
Early one morning, shivering from cold and heavy with sleep deprivation, I peeled off one of the blankets on my bed and took it to Mom.
Knock, knock. No answer. I rapped again a bit louder. Still no answer. Finally I opened the door a crack. Mom was lying on her back, staring happily at the ceiling, occasionally coughing. She had obviously not heard me enter. I gave a little cough, but again she didn’t hear.
“For God’s sake, get a hearing aid, woman,” I said. Still she didn’t hear me.
So I shut the door quietly, then knocked quite loudly and opened it noisily.
“Hi there!” she said, turning her head toward me.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I brought you another blanket.
Your coughing kept me awake.”
“How did you sleep? I bet my coughing kept you awake.”
“Yes,” I replied wearily.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well either.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Well, I need to take my blood-sugar reading. The diabetes, you know.”
I fetched her kit from the bathroom.
“Can you help me up?” she asked, extending an arm.
I pulled her five-foot-two-inch frame up and helped her swing her legs around to the edge of the bed. When she was seated, her feet just grazed the floor and swung slightly, like a child’s. A surge of protectiveness welled up in me.
“Let me show you how I do it,” she said, eagerly opening her diabetes kit.
It has come to this, I thought, as I took a seat beside her on the bed. Watching my mother prick her finger to extract blood for a diabetes reading was now passing for entertainment on my Italian holiday.
She pricked her finger with a tiny needle, which automatically drew a small amount of blood and registered the reading on the kit’s lcd display.
“Five point four?” she gasped, taking a closer look at the results.
“Is that bad?” I asked with concern.
“It’s incredible!” she said.