The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [42]
As we made our way through a long line of travelers at the foreign airport, my grandmother complained that her ankles had swollen like watermelons. An airport worker offered her a wheelchair, and I pushed her to the immigration booth, where she spoke to the uniformed official in a language I didn’t understand. Red stamps in our new passports.
An endless bus ride, we sweat like elephants. Everything smelled of garlic as we passed cornfields and vineyards, vast golden landscapes dotted with cypresses, olive trees, and giant round hay bales.
At a rest stop, a German tourist bought me a hollow chocolate egg with a toy turtle in it.
At the red plastic table outside, stray chickens pecked at our shoes.
“Bella Umbria,” my grandmother sighed.
We piled back onto the bus, barreled farther through the foreignness until, at last, a castle of a city rose up from the countryside, the color of old bone.
My classmates at All Saints K–8 had written compositions about summer vacations they’d taken with their families, so I’d imagined a grand hotel or cozy log cabin. Instead, we hiked uphill to a dusty pilgrim’s hostel run by nuns who wore scratchy brown habits, and we shared a room with a half dozen old people who muttered in Italian even as they slept.
When Nana went to bed and I lingered in the arched doorway, the sisters invited me to play cards with them in a damp brick room. Five-card stud and I won 3,000 lire! The nuns chuckled, slapped their knees. I quit while I was ahead, climbed into the cot next to my grandmother’s, and slept the sleep of a rich girl, dreaming of turquoise swimming pools and shrimp cocktails from Fisherman’s Wharf. Imagine my disappointment in the morning when all that 3,000 lire bought was a tin bracelet in a souvenir shop. Still, I kept that bracelet and my little plastic turtle for years.
Morning in Assisi, and we made our way through the touristed streets to a courtyard in front of the rose-windowed basilica. “Before Francis, this was the Hill of Hell,” a near tour guide explained. “He chose to be buried at the very place where public executions were once held.”
Inside, I craned my neck to the high ceilings, frescoed like the night sky—gold stars on indigo. A holy place. I studied the images on the walls depicting my namesake’s life from madness to ecstasy. The supernatural radiance of God’s love. “Pray,” my grandmother instructed me. “Ask forgiveness.”
I followed her down a wide staircase and through a gothic portal. A second church lived in half-light. “Look,” my grandmother pointed. A fresco of the Madonna with angels, and Saint Francis showing off his stigmata.
We descended lower still. Pale and dim. Just a few brass lamps burned like stars in the chilled basement. “Come,” my grandmother whispered. She knelt silently at the crypt. This is what we’d come so far to behold—the porous bricks over Saint Francis’s body, deep underground.
“Come and touch, my child.”
The tomb.
Imagined earthquakes rattled in my mind. What if we got trapped down here? The saint’s decomposing body. Touch it?
A young monk sang softly from the corner. In his thick brown cape, he reminded me of an Ewok from Star Wars.
I didn’t want to touch it.
Nana’s hand trembled on the stone wall of the tomb. “Come and be forever blessed, child.”
She took my hand, pulled me toward the dark shrine.
I lowered my body as if kneeling, but I didn’t let my knees touch the stone steps.
“There, my child,” Nana whispered.
I reached forward as she had, pretending to touch the outer wall of the tomb, but I let my dirty fingers hover there in nothingness above the dark stones.
My grandmother whispered, “Yes. You are cleansed.”
I pulled back, stood up too quickly, stepped to the right so another pilgrim could be forever blessed.
As we ascended the stairs, Nana held my hand tightly, her fingernails digging into my scarred and unblessed palm.
That night, after she’d fallen asleep and I played one-eyed jacks with the sisters and won nothing, I lay awake on