“Yes,” I would sigh to myself as I quietly put away the razor blades. “There’s still Italy.”
After five decades of pining, this was a long-awaited visit to my true homeland. I wanted to experience what Stendhal meant when he said, “The charm of Italy is akin to that of being in love.”
Through one of the plane’s windows I saw the twinkling lights along the Adriatic coast come into view. I was on the verge of slipping into a state of profound contentment when...
“Did you ask about a wheelchair?” Mom asked as the plane’s wheels bounced on the tarmac of Bari’s airport.
Christ. The wheelchair again.
“Yes,” I assured her with a forced smile.
“I don’t see one out there,” she clucked, peering through the window to scan the runway.
“Well, it is nighttime so it would be difficult to see a wheelchair,” I said. “Just be patient.” I bit back the urge to add, “Your Majesty.”
Portable stairs were wheeled up to the plane, and the able-bodied passengers shoved, elbowed, swore, and kicked their way off the plane as if someone had shouted “sars!”
Mom and I remained in our seats. A few rows ahead sat a woman with her leg in a cast.
Four airport workers appeared onboard with a single wheelchair. Mom struggled to her feet and was about to make a hasty beeline for them when I grabbed the back of her pants and pulled her back in her seat.
“If you do that they’ll think that you really don’t need a wheelchair,” I whispered sternly.
“But what about . . . ?”
“Just. Wait.”
The crew gingerly moved the young woman from her seat to the wheelchair, then proceeded to discuss her injury (a broken knee) and how they were going to get her off the plane.
The woman was accompanied by an older man who might have been her father, though you can never tell these days. She explained in Italian to the crew that her injury—a fall— had occurred in England. A vociferous discussion ensued. I did not understand everything but gathered they were talking about the English medical system and whether English surgeons were capable of properly resetting a broken bone.
There were lots of furrowed brows, flailing arms, gesturing hands, shaking heads, and pointing fingers aimed at the young woman’s cast. It was like performance art.
Italians love problems and puzzles. Everyone is a closet Galileo who believes he or she alone holds the key to enlightenment on any subject. If you are brave enough to dispute someone’s solution or opinion, he (or she) will shrug his shoulders as if to say, “Suit yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Ah, the utter loveliness of hearing people converse in Italian, I thought.
Mom, meanwhile, was getting impatient. She gave a little cough to get their attention.
“Momento,” a crew member replied tersely, and the group resumed their discussion.
About ten minutes later, having exhausted the subject and any possible solutions, the crew turned their eyes to my mother.
They finally twigged to the bigger problem—two disabled women, one wheelchair. Another heated discussion arose. Finally, the fellow who seemed to be in charge of the crew said something to one of his coworkers, a tall, dark-haired, strapping young man, and gestured to my mother.
The woman in the cast was wheeled into a portable elevator that had materialized at the cabin door while the young man strode over to my mother and, with great gentleness and purpose, took her hand and walked her to the lift. He held her hand during the descent in the elevator, he held her hand as he walked her into a second portable lift that lowered her to the tarmac, and he continued to hold her hand as he patiently and slowly walked her across the tarmac to the terminal. I suppose they had decided that as long as someone was holding her hand, my mother could magically walk better.
A baggage handler had spotted my mother’s metallic-red walker in the luggage compartment of the plane and had placed it on the tarmac.
The young man left my mother’s side and joined the baggage handler. Together they valiantly struggled with the packing tape and a shoulder strap from an old carry-on bag, which had held the walker tightly throughout our journey.
“I did a good job tying that, didn’t I?” Mom whispered to me proudly.
Suddenly, the walker sprang from its bounds and into position. Mom toddled unsteadily toward it like a child who suddenly spies a favorite toy.
The young man placed his hand under my mother’s elbow while she pushed her walker. He took us through passport control and to our waiting luggage.
“Do you think he’ll stay with us for the entire holiday?”
Mom tittered. “He’s very handsome, isn’t he? I like his hair.
Should I give him a little something? He seems to be waiting for a tip.”
While the young man sat impassively with my mother it was left to me to heave our luggage off the baggage carousel, drag it over to the rental car counter, and haul it all through the parking lot while trying to locate our rental car.
“Really, someone should be helping you,” admonished Mom when she caught up to me, having finally bid ciao to her handsome attendant. She had managed to find time to touch up her lipstick and face powder.
“Unfortunately, airports do not offer Italian stallions to single, able-bodied, middle-aged women,” I grumbled.
I loaded our two large, heavy suitcases, our two carry-on bags, and my mother’s red walker into the backseat of the rental car, a silver Ford Focus station wagon that shone under the glare of a nearby street lamp. Three men stood nearby, idly watching me, dragging on their cigarettes.
I slid in behind the wheel and started up the car. I placed Mom’s disabled parking permit, which she had brought with her from Canada, onto the dashboard, and also retrieved from my purse the directions to Alberobello, about an hour and a half from the airport.
Two weeks before we left for Italy I had awakened in the middle of the night in a sweat-soaked panic, overcome with fear about the prospect of driving in Italy. I had sprung out of bed, dashed downstairs, and Googled “driving in Italy,” which led to sites that either described the experience as insane (confirming my fears) or not so bad (confirming Google’s unreliability). I focused on the former and perused information about petrol stations, how to pump gas, horror stories about dealing with masses of directional signs, Kafkaesque roundabouts, and the nuances of Italian highway etiquette. None of what I found put my mind at ease.
I telephoned a friend who had rented a car in Italy a few years earlier.
“Are you an aggressive driver?” he asked.
I was unsure whether it was wise to ask him to define “aggressive.”
A survey by Britain’s Automobile Association ranked Italy as the second-worst country for bad drivers (the honor of first place goes to Spain). There was also the worrying fact that nearly 5,500 people had been killed in Italy the previous year in traffic accidents. That’s the sort of statistic that makes you wonder whether a travel advisory ought to be issued.
It was bad enough that I was driving in Italy, but to do so after a transatlantic flight and late at night was exceedingly reckless. It took three attempts to locate the on-ramp to the highway, but after that, to my surprise and relief, driving in Italy proved no different than driving at home. Within minutes of hitting the autostrada I was passing other vehicles with confidence.
Then we got lost.
“Where’s the map?” I asked.
Mom