by Teresa Mastrobuono

The Woman on the Piazza
On my way back from the Saturday market I greeted a woman sitting outside her house on the main square. She and I exchanged pleasantries, which always lately seem to begin with "Fa caldo! [it's hot]" Then she turned a bit sad and described her inability to leave the house for any length of time. She gestured towards her open door and said something about her "marito" who had been something for 7 years. Dead, I thought. Then she waved me inside. As soon as I entered, I saw an old man sitting in a Barcolounger, the kind that pushes you to standing with the flip of a lever, like the one my dad used at the end of his life. The man was very slowly placing cut up cubes of cheese into his mouth. He looked at me with a distant, beatific face and gently took my hand. I introduced myself. He responded in a hoarse whisper. A non-sequiter sentence. But his smile widened. Clearly he was in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. Rina, the woman on the piazza, his wife, shook her head. His name is Tomaso, she told me. And he has been that way for 7 years. "Piacere, Tomaso", I said. He smiled even more beatifically as he stared at me, trying to think of a response. Rina reminded him "Mangi, Tomaso." Then, of course, came the invitation to coffee. I apologetically declined. Rina looked embarrassed and asked if tea would be more suitable. I put down my groceries. "No, grazie," I said. "Prendo un caffe' con piacere." [No, thank you. I'll take a coffee with pleasure.]. She made me one of those amazing espresso's, served in a tiny, delicate, beautifully decorated china cup.

In the open door then came another older woman. Solid. Square. Thinning hair dyed the reddish-brown tint standard in Italian women over 70. Her voice was booming; just her greeting echoed in the room. She sat down across from Rina; I sat at the head of the table between them. The new woman, whose name I cannot remember, launched into an introduction, and then, without pausing, swelled into intense conversation about all the houses for sale in town, punctuated by jabbing hands and sweeping arms. The two of them slipped into dialect. I couldn't understand a word. Suddenly, I was 6 years old. Sitting with my grandmother in her cousin Concetta's kitchen. Listening to Concetta's booming voice. Watching my gentle grandmother, like Rina, listen and nod. Slip in an occasional short response before being run over by that thunderclap voice. The delicate cup, the bitter aftertaste of my first espresso. And though I couldn't understand anything of what was being said then, either, like now, I knew/felt safe and secure in this singular world. Intuiting that because it was a world particular to us, I would always be an integral part of something that would hold me and care for me. We had the bond of being like beings. As I sat at Rina's table, existing in two time zones simultaneously, I was hit with a magnum force - this is the reason I am here, to go back and exist in the only extended time in my life when I have felt completely safe, happy, and loved. Completely immersed in the comforting sphere of cultural identity. To know I belong.