Encounters

Fleeting encounters

I remember, but do they?

One never knows what life will hold in store. Throughout the years we cross paths with people of all kinds, for all kinds of reasons.

Perhaps I was more likely to have a variety of encounters since I had a shop on the cathedral square, since the local hospital was right nearby, since I knew several languages in a town that was still mostly uni-lingual.

The A1 highway passes just below Orvieto as it looks out over the valley from the top of its bluff.

During the day I might hear the wail of an ambulance arriving and would prepare to temporarily close shop if the doctor on duty in ER showed up asking me for help. It was generally simply someone who spoke no Italian, like the burly German truck driver who had been in an accident on the A1 highway.

Another time though the handsome young tenor in the hospital bed had been on his way to Rome where he was to sing the part of Christ in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion when fate had other things in store for him. There had been the usual accident and he ended up in Orvieto. IPhones had not yet been invented and the young tenor was particularly worried about his companion in Germany and had me phone and assure him that he was OK. I never did know the tenor’s name and I wonder if he ever did get to sing the part of Christ.

I remember, but I doubt he does now, so many years later.

There was one episode however that stood out and which all involved long remembered. A middle-aged couple from Berlin on vacation in Italy had parked in a rest area along the A1. Another car drove up and a man stepped out and came over, apparently to ask for information. The husband reached down to get his glasses, at which point the newcomer pulled out a gun and shot him. His wife attempted to get out so she could get their license plate but the newcomer swiftly closed the car door on her leg. Later when describing it all to the police, she said that the man with blond curly hair (for there were two) had a humanitarian streak, for when he noticed that she was in pain, he took pity on her and eased the door up. The two then quickly drove off and she then managed to notify the police. The closest hospital was in Orvieto and I was called in for they spoke no Italian. Her name was Elizabeth and she asked me to contact her daughter Sarah, who arrived on the next flight. Sarah was in theater and I offered to let her stay in my home until her mother recovered sufficiently to return to Berlin. Elizabeth’s companion never fully got over the shock. I don’t think the criminals were ever apprehended. Elizabeth stayed in touch and I would hear from her every year.

Yes, we both remembered.

During the Easter season visitors would frequently stop at my shop, at their wit’s end when they could find no hotel or b & b with a vacancy within a range of fifty kilometers. To me they seemed lost souls asking for help.

It might not just be a room they were trying to find, but something as mundane as a box for a clock purchased from the antique shop on the square which had to be transported back to Germany. As it was Easter, I invited the philosophical German teacher named Joseph, who appeared requesting just that, to the country to share our Easter dinner. He might not have accepted had he foreseen that my father would have insisted he try out the very high swing he had installed for my children. Later, his ordeal and Easter dinner behind him, I did find him the right-sized box and took him to the RR station. We subsequently exchanged a few letters, which are still in a box in my storage chest. I somehow imagined him as a sort of angel. I must have been thinking of Wim Wenders and his angels over Berlin.

Back home in Nordenham where he was teaching, Joseph wrote that the clock from Orvieto was all his joy in a joyless world, his sole solace in the night (?) of the nothingnesses of Nirvana.

My 12 wall clocks, he wrote, are chiming 10 a.m. They have their own revolution. As does the Earth and the Moon and the Sun. In one of his letters he referred to a pigeon, perhaps the one from the Palombella festivities, which he was sure had retired to a convent and was looked after with tender loving care by some horrid old Hexe (witch) pretending to be a nun. That might be a book, too, he suggested: The Memoirs of an Orvieto Pigeon.

It might not always be a matter of an accident and the hospital though. One morning the highway police showed up at the shop, asking for my help.They had picked up a young woman wandering along the A1 highway, practically naked. She refused to let any men, including the police, come near her, and they didn’t know what to do. Piecing her story together, it turned out she had had an argument with her husband and had decided to continue on her own, leaving him at the gas station. She seemed to have hitched a ride with two truck drivers who had apparently abused her and then dumped her along the highway. The Orvieto police got her the necessary clothing and put her up in a hotel, where she was afraid the outlet for the fan was pumping in some kind of drug. Later, in meeting with the psychiatrist, she refused even water, fearing it was drugged. Eventually convinced that a supposedly unopened bottle had not been tampered with, she calmed down and agreed to go to the hospital in Terni. By the following day she was normal enough to return home to Germany. Around a year later I unexpectedly heard from her, for she was coming with a few friends and had brought me a gift.

So she did remember, at least for a while.

There’s a charming film, “Bread and Tulips,” with a similar situation where the wife is left behind at a rest stop on the A1 highway and ends up hitching a ride to Venice, where she enjoys her freedom from her tyrannical husband and uncaring adolescent sons. Hers was however a happy ending for there she met a man who appreciated her and she eventually happily dumped her husband, his mistress, and her sons.

There are many others, extras in the daily play of characters and events that populate life’s stage: the Australian couple confused at night by the street lights as they had to drive on the “wrong” side of the street; the German couple on their honeymoon who fell in love with the Sicilian puppet in my shop and cut their trip short, taking with them the puppet, wrapped in a blanket, ensconced on the back seat of their car; and the little boy on a school outing who was crying since he had lost the coins with which he meant to buy his mother a present. Obviously I saw to it that he did have a present to take his mother.

How many of them remember me? Perhaps not me, but the moment when our paths crossed. Yet the fact that I am writing about that moment obviously means that I remember them.