Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [63]
They had saved a chair for me inside the café.
“Martha, did you know this is Verona?”
She looked up from the menu she was studying. “Yes, and it's only twenty miles to Venice.”
Lillian said, “My God, if we don't get a different driver, we may never get there.”
“Or if we keep this one we'll be there in five minutes.” Martha laughed.
I said, “But I mean, this is Verona. Where the— This is the setting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.”
“We all heard it on the bus, Maya.” Lillian smiled at me as if I were an excited child. “The guide told us. Weren't you listening?”
Martha pursed her lips. “The Everyman Opera Company goes to the tremendous expense of hiring a guide who speaks an unheard-of language and moves his arms like a semaphore in a strong wind, and our prima ballerina doesn't even listen to him. Alas.” She went back to the menu.
Lillian looked at me and shook her head. “Maya, in the next year you'll probably be in the place where Hamlet died, where Othello killed Desdemona or where Cleopatra did herself in with an asp. You're not going to get this excited each time, are you?”
Martha said, “Dear, do let her have her day. After all, this is her first time in Europe.” They had both traveled with Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, and they acted as if they had chalets in Switzerland and villas in Spain where they took weekend visits. Martha continued, “Let me help you with the menu.”
I decided that day never again to let them know how I really felt. If they wanted to play it cool, then I'd show them how to play it cool. I asked for the menu and with my heart beating loud enough for them to hear it, gazed at the list of foods, written in Italian and in a script I'd never seen before. I recognized uova as eggs on the basis of my high school Latin and ordered. I knew that I must buy a dictionary the next day and start to teach myself Italian. I would speak the language of every country we visited; I would study nights and mornings until I spoke foreign languages, if not perfectly at least coherently.
Neither books nor films had prepared me for Venice. I had seen Blood and Sand, the Tyrone Power movie, and felt I could walk easily among bullfighters and the beautiful señoritas of Spain. The Bicycle Thief and Open City gave clear if painful images of Italy after World War II. The Ali Baba and Aladdin's lamp stories, although portrayed by actors with heavy Central European accents, gave me some sense of the Moslem world. But Venice was a fantasia I had not experienced even secondhand. Our bus drove through narrow streets walled by tall buildings. Erratically we burst away from enclosures and saw open water where gondoliers plied their boats with as much élan as our driver conducted his vehicle. Balconies thrust above our heads; vegetable stalls and small shops jutted out beyond the pavement.
Across the square we stopped in a small plaza where there was a hotel. Tables sat out in front of a restaurant. As the company piled out of the bus and began the routine of sorting themselves and their baggage into individual lots, I stood looking at the black-coated waiters who were covering the tables with red checkered cloths.
A few had seen and heard the singers identifying their belongings in loud voices and they had rushed to the restaurant door to call to their fellow workers and Venetian customers. Men and women flowed out of the restaurant and onto the square, their eyes on the crowd of colorful Negroes who hadn't the time or the inclination to give them the slightest thought.
The ogling crowd who waved their hands in a kind of balletic concert were the first large group of native Italians I observed carefully. In Verona I had been too busy coping with my memories and the ancient romance and my own image to really look at the waiters or the other customers. But now, as I stood apart and had the opportunity to take in the whole scene, the Italian