"Birthday Cherubs"
Venice, Italy
June 2, 1984
Dear Folks,
May 31 was my second birthday on this walk, my 30th overall. Normally I don't pay much attention to my birthdays, but still I couldn't help contemplating at the time how eventless the day was turning out to be. Afterall I was in northeastern Italy, and I had hoped on this day of my transition into my fourth decade to treat myself to the gondolas and arched bridges of Venice. By noon, however, I had to admit that the fabled canals of Venice were just too far away to reach before sunset.
A little forlornly I surrendered to the shade of a sycamore tree that towered over an abandoned lane of weeds and crickets. No friends...only myself...not much a birthday at all, I mused, as I settled down to a long afternoon of writing and waiting for what I wasn't sure.
Many hours later, in that period of the day when dusk is born, a mass of panting fur and saliva startled me from my thoughts. I looked up to find a collie dog and its teenaged master only a few tails lengths behind.
"Are you in need of anything?" the conservatively-dressed lad asked in a soft and refined manner.
Still confused as to where he and the dog had come from, I answered that I was thirsty and out of water. The boy told me to grab my goatskin water bag and to follow him and "Yudda" into a nearby forest.
Hidden deep in the trees was an ancient barn that had surely been used by a race of Goliath-sized farmers. The barn was set into a tall and massive stone wall, as if it had once been a guard tower of an ancient city. It took all the strength that Guiseppe could muster in his thin arms to pull open the wall's thick, 20-foot-high doors. We then passed beneath one yawning archway, and another, and at last stepped onto a football-sized courtyard of sculptured shrubbery and manicured grass so emerald in color that it hurt my eyes.
I stood as still as the many statues about us. Stretching far to our right was an immense yellow home. It was dressed in wrought iron frills and white hems that rivaled the roses in cheerfulness.
From the house emerged a man in faded jeans, sun-reddened cheeks, and with a strong handshake. His smiling eyes met mine on the same plane, a rarity in this long nation of short people.
"How many live here?" I asked, as I mentally guessed perhaps a few dozen.
Romeo, Guiseppe's father, laughed. "Sempre uno famiglia," he replied merrily.
A blonde-haired bundle of energy that was Romeo's wife shouted at us in perfect English from one of the crystal-paned windows. "Hey! Anyone for some coffee?"
In the kitchen, all of us shared a pot of the coffee, poured into cups of warm milk and sugar. And then, a little later, there was to be the customary replenishing glasses of wine. In addition to being a farmer of sugar beets and corn, Romeo also had a vineyard.
It seemed that time passed unnoticed, and that the worldwalk's stories had captured yet another audience of crossed legs and chins on palms. Eventually someone yawned, and Francesca made a show of rising from the table and poking her head outside. She pulled it back into the light of the kitchen with a tsk, tsk and an offer to me of a spare bedroom. It was beginning to rain, she said in the peculiar melancholy tone all Italian women use when the world about them is not in perfect order.
Flashlight in hand, I raced out into the dark night, to where Guiseppe had found me, to retrieve my moist diary books and notes. Yudda ran alongside, perhaps to keep the lingering spirits of old at a distance. Upon my return to the house, there was Francesca, like some goddess, hailing my reappearance with more hot milk and a plate of thick, crusty bread heaped with sweet sausage slices.
"We've a surprise for you," she teased with a glance at Romeo, who was still occupying the hearth of the kitchen's fireplace.
Taking candles and flashlights from a drawer, my hosts directed me out of the kitchen and across a front antechamber. As soon as we had passed the grand piano, we stopped at an ancient-looking wooden door set into one of the music room's walls. Francesca opened its padlock with a large skeleton key and instructed me to follow the three of them into the unlit and windowless room on the other side. I had to stoop very low to get through the door's opening. Even though everyone was nearly invisible in the room's blackness, I sensed its walls were very close and there were no furnishings of any kind. There was a strange mustyness in the air.
"Now, Steven, light your candle and hold it up to the walls," said Francesca.
I did as she instructed. What I saw on all four walls caused me to gasp. Deep inside of me, tiny muscles and nerves tingled. I knew immediately I was staring at true treasures, indeed. On the faded walls were beautiful Roman-era images of maidens harvesting grain, of Neptune guarding his watery home, of an armless Grecian statue, and of benignly smiling cherubs.
"They are as old as the house, over 500 years," whispered Romeo.
Very gingerly I touched one of the frescos. I realized somewhat humbly that this room, no longer used and hidden from the outside world, held antiquities that some persons pay thousands of dollars to travel the world over to see, usually in museums and behind glass cases that say HANDS OFF! And yet, here I was touching and even smelling the frescos as intimately as I might flowers in a mountain meadow. Only once before in my life had I touched a painting with such reverence: That had been on Mount Washington, in western Massachusetts, in the cabin of a very shy minister who'd shown me an original Norman Rockwell painting that had been done of the minister by that famous American master.
Back in the antechamber, Romeo showed me several broken pieces of Roman statue anatomy that he'd scavanged from his farm fields while plowing. From the numbers of pieces Romeo had, it was evident the area's ancient past, particularly so close to a place like Venice, was never far from the present day.
That night, as I lie in my bed in a separate wing of the home, I had a smile on my face as contented as those on the faces of the cherubs downstairs. For a birthday that had started so emptily, it had become one filled with very special surprises. It was the way everyone's 30th birthday should be...magical.
Steven