Withal, the single most educational aspect of the stunt I pulled off--or, if you will, of the hoax that I perpetrated--in going back to school in my late fifties, and becoming what universities, in their innocence, call a "non-traditional student" (i.e., a somewhat old candidate for a dual Bachelor of Arts Degree in French and Italian), and, by dint of combining my by-then well-honed skills as a Welfare Queen (I continued to draw my unearned stipend) with the prodigal scam of Student Aid, such that awards and scholarships (that I, in my advanced age had somehow got the knack of acquiring), were virtually showered upon me (along with various credit cards which I welcomed, but had in no wise solicited), to finance the "finishing" of my education with a decently leisurely eight months' Grand Tour of Italy and Europe, was: As a student at university (of Perugia and Siena, respectively) being totally, promiscuously immersed, on terms of absolute social equality, with the greatest conceivable variety of my fellow humanity (well, high-income fellow humanity), with no common bond among us but our several needs and desires and capacities to learn the Italian language. You never know in such a situation who your friends (among, say, a couple of hundred fellow students)--the ones that you will sit and drink coffee with on breaks--will be. You have no guide but elective affinity, and a good-humored determination to make the best of chance encounters.
So it naturally fell out that at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, beginning in June, I had a sort of circle, after a few days (and long schooldays they were, starting at eight in the morning and running till past two in the afternoon), of friends that I found charming: The Russian Lithuanian, Alexei, whom I have mentioned before; a smart young woman, Eva, from Boulder, Colorado; a Polish Friar Minor, Zbigli (in plain dress--I called him, teasingly, "Padre."); a Romanian computer technician; a couple of Taiwanese businessman; and a handful of Moslems, business men from Libya and Egypt, and one bare-footed, be-turbaned, long-robed, bearded holy man, Mohammed, from Iran, whom his fellow, younger Moslems treated with great respect and deference, and who, somewhat to my embarrassment (probably because of my age), treated me with great politeness and respect, which I was always at pains to reciprocate. Part of the embarrassment and the difficulty was that the Blessed One's Italian was easily the least proficient in the class.
Of all my fellow students, the one I saw most of outside of school was Ahmed the Libyan. We often encountered one another on walks and on municipal buses, and I had the honor on a couple of occasions, at his invitation, of visiting him in his lodgings. Our Italian was adequate for the discussions that by mutual consent we engaged in on the nature of God, of Abrahamic religions generally, and of Islam in particular. Ahmed was certain, in the way that a sincere and well educated class of Moslems tend to be, that just my evident good faith and intellectual probity would bring me to an appreciation of Islam as the purest, simplest, and truest of the Abrahamic religions--He reminded me for all the world of one of those pure, sweet-souled university converts of Cardinal Newman, and talking with him I felt very much that I had drifted back into a kind of Islamic Oxford Movement. Indeed, I had no objections to Islam more than to other sorts of monotheism, and I have always had a good deal of respect for its practices (except of course for circumcision), and its historical importance as conservator of arts and knowledge. Still, as a heedless American Transcendentalist, Buddhist, atheist, individualist, there are some places I will not go: Goddess worship, no thank you very much.
A couple of weeks before term ended, around the first of August, I ran into Ahmed one afternoon on a municipal bus, and he had a hot new topic to discuss with me: la Vergine Santa. Didn't I admire the holiness and purity of her Cultus, especially as practiced here in Italy? Harshly and curtly--speaking rapidly because I didn't have much time before my stop--"La santa puttana, vuoi dire? Mio nono diceva sempre che la Vergine è una Puttana. Non lo sò io. Devo scendere qua. A domani. Ciao, Ahmed!"
Next morning before classes, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Prosciutto, the mood of the fifty or sixty students gathered there was subdued, expectant. The few that I waved to when I walked through the outer portal seemed embarrassed and hesitant to return my greeting. Then, as though choreographed, everyone stepped away from me, and I found myself, and the holy man Mohammed alone together in the center of the courtyard. There was absolute stillness. Slowly, clearly, holding me fast in his gaze, he said,
"È vero che tu, Anatole, hai detto che la Vergine Santa è una Puttana?"
A great many things went through my mind as I looked at the unsmiling, silent faces around us, and at the face of the holy man in front of me, in which compassion and pity and a kind of noble regret were oddly mixed with zealous contempt and indignation, until finally my own sense of indignation and defiance seized me, and I replied,
"Sì, l'ho detto, e dico io, ora e sempre: la santa Vergine, così chiamata, è una Puttana."
The holy one smiled a bitter little smile, quite like the curses of Gypsies (as I came to know them), bowed, and stepped back. I returned his bow and swept past him, with an obdurate little smile of my own, to my classes on the first floor. And all the rest of the day, and a mostly sleepless night, I felt doomed. The next day, hurrying to class through the stony streets, I fell and broke the ring finger of my left hand. As I stood up and looked at it, remembering that I had twice called the Virgin a Whore, I said, "That's one!" A week later, having been to hospital and got my hand and arm in a cast (with funny wires through the fractures), hurrying again to my morning classes, an "illegal" young Albanian woman who worked in the school bar without a valid work permit, backed over me with her car in the school parking lot, breaking the same finger, in the same place, again--and I said, somewhat relievedly, "That's twice!" The young Albanian woman was never seen again.
I gotta say that the two weeks that I spent then in hospital, instead of going to school, while having my left-hand ring finger reconstructed, wired, braced and encasted, were the most educational of all my time in Italy: Long hours' waiting, such as you expect in dealing with any official Italian institution, and wouldn't dream of protesting (because, for heaven's sake, that's the way things are), put me in close contact with others similarly detained, of all ages, sexes and conditions, with whom there was nothing to do but pass the time chatting about everything under the sun. I even got to understand and appreciate a little bit about the social and humanitarian organization of a large, fully-functioning Italian hospital, from the god-like specialist surgeons, terribly over-worked interns, and the army (armies, actually) of nurses who actually did everything. And how beautiful they were those nurses! As if pulled from the wall-paintings of Etruscan tombs, with wasp-waists, "heifer" eyes, coal-black hair in ringlets, and voices like harpies, that would startle me awake for my 2:00 a.m. injections, and leave me laughing hysterically at their hopeless attempts to sound soothing and soft-spoken.
In light of my real-life experience, and in the Italian tradition of grading you as much by what you deserve as by what you've earned (with the recognition that those can be somewhat different things), the university gave me a grade of 3.85 for the quarter.
Footnote: For the final, more extensive surgery on my poor, much-broken left-hand ring-finger, I was more heavily sedated than I had been for the first, and while the sedatives took effect, and to be sure that I was completely under before they began, my surgeon (a courtly, whimsical, middle-aged gentleman from Bologna) and his chief assistant (an alarmingly beautiful, volatile, twenty-something Neapolitan, like a Sal Mineo with muscles)--the latter virtually holding me in his lap--talked me into somnolence. First the assistant (whose chief job was to hold me still, while the surgeon operated) berated me uproariously in his half-comprehensible Neapolitan dialect, for the idiocy of twice-breaking my finger, in a fantastic rant, straight out of Don Basile, that left me shaking with laughter. I told him not to mind, that in their care, though an utter fool, I was completely confident, e che non ero affatto inquietato--the classical tone of which causing them both to chuckle. Then, as consciousness began to recede, the surgeon, leaned toward me, and said, in English, "But tell me now, was there not somewhere, when your finger was broken, a woman?" And he repeated, in Italian, "una donna?" I pretended to have fallen asleep and did not answer.
Capri, Island of Pleasure, by James Money, first published in Great Britain in 1986, is one of those books essential to one's sanity, and to one's over-all sense of well-being that one picks up at random, reads desultorily--skipping from this oddity to that quizzical reflection over the space of a week or so till it dawns on you: This is the most important damned book that you have read this past decade. It even has the true story of that perfect little wine called 'Tiberio' that we had at lunch--with the absolutely fucking sublime spaghetti alle vòngole--at that quite reasonably priced (on Capri!) little resort that Alexei, the Russian lad from Vilnius, and I, spotted down at the end of the goat path running down from, and for a little ways along side, with but a low stone wall between them, the suffocatingly glitzy Rodeo Drive that flaunts its treasures on the top and in the middle of the island, and which we venturesomely jumped over the wall of and scouted out, and where we (our guided tour group far behind us) spent the afternoon swimming ("bathing," as Somerset Maugham called it), sun-bathing, and, like I say, having lunch with real, moderately priced Italians and their squealing kids: True story being that, along with the vintage from the vines you see growing under the funicular, it's a blend, with other white wines of the Campania, and so maybe not as special and grand cru as its nom d'empereur suggests--but I defy anybody, though with white burgundy which it resembles, or champagne, to make a more delicious wine-pairing with spaghetti alle vòngole, plain and simple, perfectly seasoned and cooked, and at first blush almost too chewy. Oh God. You may believe that I tipped 20%.
