Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [101]
Asolo’s beauty was astonishing. But it was the quiet serenity of the place that appealed to me most. Sometimes at night I would get up and walk through the terraced gardens just outside the door to my room, listening to the silence. Rising in the morning, I would open the heavy wooden shutters and hear only the sound of bird-song or the soft thud of raindrops dripping from the roof above to the grass below. Beyond the gardens was the view I looked out on each morning: pale blue hills, and beyond them, the snowy Dolomites, their peaks ringed like Saturn with bands of swirling mist.
In Asolo I purposely fell into a routine; I wanted to make one day indistinguishable from the next. Breakfast was taken on the terrace outside my room or in the main villa: espresso, fresh fruit, and a slice or two of panforte, a bread made with raisins and nuts. Then I walked into town, stopping to peer in every window and study each building along the way. One day a British tourist staying at the villa accompanied me on my walk, pointing out the house where Eleonora Duse, a great actress born in Italy in 1858, had lived. She, too, was buried in Asolo.
Occasionally, I would stop to pick up a paper before heading for Caffè Centrale in the main piazza. There, in front of the imposing fifteenth-century water fountain, under the fierce gaze of the stone lion of San Marco, I would try to decipher the news by matching the Italian words with the accompanying pictures. More often, I simply sat drinking espresso while observing the townspeople as they went about their daily routines.
In Asolo there were no cell phones ringing or motorbikes whizzing by; no harried commuters on their way to jobs that occupied most of the space in their lives; no weary-looking tourists with timetables to meet and must-see churches to visit. The tourists in Asolo at this time of the year, mostly English travelers and well-to-do Italians from Milan, seemed to have no agenda—except to relax and enjoy themselves.
In Asolo, life went on in a quiet fashion. Children played around the fountain, splashing one another with water that still flows through a Roman aqueduct. Mothers pushed babies in strollers. Men sat reading the papers, halos of pipe smoke rising above their heads. Women walked home from the market, carrying bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. Once I saw a wedding party walking to the church, the bride’s white veil blowing up from her head like gauzy wings.
The piazza was home base for me. Often I ate lunch there; soup, usually. The pasta e fagioli, a thick pasta-and-bean soup, was my favorite. Then in the afternoon I’d explore the small, fascinating shops in the arcaded walkways, stopping in at the embroidery school and pottery shop to watch the artisans at work.
At night, after dinner, I would stroll up to the square and have a glass of Ferrari, a sparkling white wine from the Alto Adige. Often on such evenings I thought of my sons.
Sometimes I found my mind roaming over the past, briefly returning to me the two boys who used to live in my house. I saw them sitting at the table, one building airplane models, the other arranging his baseball cards in stacks. I saw them playing with the cats—Pussums, Graysie, Pussums, Jr., Mittens, Pumpkin, Tasha—who still, in their minds and mine, formed a feline map of our past together. I saw the boys waving good-bye from the bus that took them to summer camp and saying hello when they came home from college for Christmas. It never occurred to me then to mark such seemingly ordinary moments before they slid into obscurity. After all, how was I to know that somewhere a clock was quietly ticking away, moving the three of us into the future?
More often, though, I tried to imagine