First Impressions

(I probably could have gone on much longer, but dinner's in 20 and I have to shut up sometime.)

On the first day, I pull the knit sweater from my sticky armpits and wonder why a short-sleeved shirt would be made from material this warm and clinging. The driver of the bus straddles the white line dividing the road, competing with an off-white Fiat for control. The Fiat wisely yields, the steep green sides of the mountain looming in its shiny top-coat as my constricted chest relaxes. I sleep for half an hour to escape Italian driving and the sight of the rock contained by something like chicken wire.

When we disembark in front of Hotel Clitunno, Lana del Ray’s subpar pout squeaks a greeting to me, and I understand that awful music is inescapable, even by oceans. The sun sits on my shoulders like two unfriendly parrots, and the laptop bag I was so pleased to have packed lightly earlier almost anchors me to the cobblestones. The buildings are labyrinthine, and I swear we took four lefts on the way up the city. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, only with fewer mythological fauns and more frescoes.

When I have stowed my bags in room 142, I enter the lift alone to see the lobby. The space seems very small shared by myself and a tan woman in a French maid’s outfit. She rattles a sentence off in Italian, and a long noise, like a car horn dying, escapes me as if to say, “Not only do I not speak Italian, I am also an idiot.” My shoulders seem hooked to my ears. She points to the [1] and says “Una,” then to the [2], says, “Due,” repeats this several times, and gives me question mark eyebrows. “Una,” I wheeze—incorrectly. The ground floor is zero.

Pizza, bira, and some coca-cola sew up my threadbare nerves to some extent. The ambient lighting casts the cobblestones into images of moonlight, brooks, and the lamp with the taupe shade I keep on my desk at home. My back aches, my right leg mutters prophecies of later agony, and my lungs and eyes debate which will leap from my body to roll around in the grass first. At dinner, I use the restroom, and someone knocks. I vocalize, there is a pause, then the handle jiggles. When I open the door a scant thirty seconds after the initial intrusion, a worn-faced woman snaps, “grazie” as if I have inconvenienced her. I stand with hands dripping for a moment, unable to operate the paper towel dispenser or escape her inscrutable scorn. Later, the pizza burns my wet fingers, and I wonder if I will ever be able to smooth my eyebrows down to a normal height. Their arch seems to be the only thing keeping my eyes open.