Today is 28 November 2009, two days short of nineteen months since our return from Verona Italy to our home in Long Valley, New Jersey. This is the first time I have really wanted to write about anything. A long time processing and a long time to gain perspective.
This morning I am sitting in my rocking chair, Emily the cat on the ottoman, Angel nearby at his computer with our little Italian cat Annie on his lap, and I am reading the NYTimes online. The article is about living in the city of New York and what people see out their windows. Mostly, the article is about the comradeship in a big city that is gained from seeing someone across the street in their apartment at night, doing what you do, living a life. Not voyeurism, as some commenters complained, but a common humanity lived side by side but in separate bubbles.
And I am thinking of the apartment across from mine in Verona, both on the third floor (American numbering) above a narrow strada. The street is so narrow that one car at a time can pass by when there are cars and motociclismi parked on both sides. The residents across the way go away from November to May to their home in the mountains, living in the city for the spring, summer and early fall. This seems a little crazy to me, since the summer weather in Verona is brutally hot and humid. However, this is the time of the most activity outside in the city streets, so this must be what they love.
I had lived in my apartment for almost three years before I found out that the woman I nodded to and assumed to be la signora of the house was actually the hired help. I should have known: she was too friendly to be a Veronese, who can be very closed and would never nod at a stranger in another apartment. Now, with the distance of time and space, it occurs to me that the nodding woman thought that I was also the hired help. I was always in the kitchen cooking, or taking care of my herb garden on the balcony that was beyond the French doors in the kitchen. These are things that the help does in the neighborhood in which we lived. So, she must have thought I was one of her own.
I was able to put this particular two and two together after actually meeting the signora of the apartment in the shop of my friend Agnes. Agnes told me that the signora lived on my street, in the first block and was preparing to leave for her home in le montagne for the winter. This could only be the owner of the apartment across from mine. But this woman was a coiffed blonde in furs, who responded uncomfortably to the introduction made by Agnes. Maybe her housekeeper had told her about the silver haired woman who worked for the invisible signora (both would be me!) and so we could not be introduced as equals.
I think of the kind dark-haired woman who worked for the blonde in furs, and hope that she is treated well, that she has a contented life. And I imagine that today the apartment is closed, the window boxes empty once again, the shutters drawn, the apartment waiting quietly through the winter. I always felt a sense of loss when the apartment was closed up because it was comforting to see the life playing out across the street. And I was always glad to see the apartment come back to life in the spring.
So I understand the article in today's Times about New Yorkers who feel a kinship to the people across the avenue whom they have never met.
