Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [62]
When the pilot informed us we were passing over Newfoundland, which meant one hour from Montreal and eight whole hours from Milan, our final destination, the cabin attendants looked dazedly wild-eyed. They withdrew to the front of the plane and remained there, refusing to answer the persistent demands for attention.
Ruby Green was terrified of flying, so I had asked to be her seat companion. I knew that I was always at my best when I was near someone in a worse condition than I. When the plane took off she grabbed the seat arms, tensed her body and, by will alone, lifted the carrier safely in the air. I spoke to her of California, and thinking of Wilkie, reminded her (and myself) that “there was no place God was not.” After a few hours she relaxed enough to join the conversation. She said that she had no doubts about God but had no previous knowledge of the pilot, and that throughout three years of traveling with Porgy and Bess her serious misgivings about airplane captains had not diminished in the least.
The stewardesses appeared near the front seats. They began hauling out tablecloths and silverware from right to left as fast as possible. Once all our tray tables were down and dressed, they raced back to the minute kitchen stand and grabbed the meals. They handed them rapidly from right to left as quickly and deftly as a Las Vegas gambler deals a deck of cards. When we were all served they returned to their retreat without a single backward glance.
The Milan airport hustle differed only in language from the cacophonous noise of other airports I had known. I busied myself gathering my luggage and staying as close to my friends as possible without appearing to do exactly what I was doing—that is, clinging to their coattails for safety's sake.
The first part of the bus trip from Milan to Venice gave me and my colleagues no time to contemplate the Italian countryside. The driver was determined to show that not only did he know his vehicle and the roads, he was an artist at keeping the two in conjunction even under the most hair-raising circumstances. The bus—extra long and loaded with the entire company and all our baggage, and a guide who thought the language he spoke was English— skidded into curves, screeching like a stuck factory whistle; aimed itself at smaller vehicles as, growling, it leaped and bucked and swung around hills, holding on to the road by two wheels, one wheel, and then simply by sheer memory.
The guide shouted and gesticulated, held his upturned hands away from his body and moved them up and down as if he were weighing two large grapefruit, his head rolling from side to side.
When the bus finally entered a small town, children and dogs became feathers blown out of its path; adults screamed at the driver, who, keeping his foot on the accelerator, turned his head and answered them shout for shout. We stopped at a square in the center of town and relief prevented us from cursing the driver, who stood by the open door, pride in his skill written on his face.
The guide led us to a restaurant and said, “blah, blah, Verona, blah blah.” The word “Verona” hit my ears like a clap of remembered thunder. Here was Verona, the home of Romeo and Juliet. The home of the Montagues and Capulets. I walked away from the crowd and looked at the buildings and up at the stone balconies. I placed Juliet above me, imagined her asking “Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” I put her lover in a shadow across the square and allowed him to praise Juliet's beauty and to wish: “O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!”
I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood.
I was so excited at the incredible turn of events which had brought me from a past of rejection, of slammed doors and blind alleys,