Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [74]
When that changed I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that for the last couple of decades I had organized my life too much around the illusionary principle of success and failure. Naturally, it was the verdict of success I wanted the world to hand down to me. Maybe my reluctance to join the others in a night of ballroom dancing was simply my fear of not being very good at it. Of failing.
But somehow when dancing with Barry I never once thought about failing. Or, for that matter, succeeding. It was enough to be alive and having fun, surrounded by music and laughter and people who, though I barely knew them, seemed on this night as familiar to me as lifelong friends.
I suppose it will always puzzle me, the riddle of why an important lesson is sometimes taught by the unlikeliest of professors. By Barry, for instance. Perhaps I was just ready to learn. Maybe it’s that simple. Although answers, once we’ve found them, always seem simple.
I wondered: was this then to be my Oxford learning experience? The lesson I would remember long after I’d forgotten rural England’s economic history and patterns of settlement? Was Barry to be the Oxford instructor I would remember above all others?
As if to answer, the church bells in Radcliffe Square began sounding their midnight chimes, telling me: Yes, yes, yes.
12
MOTHER OF THE BRIDE
Dear Alice,
Milan seems like home to me. It’s one of the big surprises of my trip. Today, sitting in the sun in the Piazza della Scala, an elderly man asked if he could sit next to me. I nodded. The man, who looked down on his luck, opened a magazine of crossword puzzles, which he completed by copying the answers from the back of the book. Later when he saw me consulting a map, he asked in near-perfect English: “May I be of help to you?” It’s a friendly—and surprising—town.
Love, Alice
When the plane landed at Malpensa airport outside Milan, the pilot’s voice announced brightly that the ground temperature was a “mild” 78 degrees. No mention was made, however, of the rain that pelted the windows, or the wind that caught the rivulets of water in midstream, blowing them sideways across the glass. This omission did not surprise me. It is a truth universally acknowledged by those in the travel business that less is more when it comes to imparting bad-weather news to tourists. If this was not true, most travelers would ignore the guidebooks and, regardless of destination, simply pack three things: rainwear, a down parka, and clothing made of tropical see-through mesh fabric.
This was my first trip to Milan. It was also my first encounter with Malpensa airport. I whispered the name to myself: Malpensa. It was a forbidding name, I thought, one that summoned up Edgar Allan Poe. Or Bram Stoker, the man who created the strange, dark world of Count Dracula. My intuition was right. Malpensa turned out to be the Transylvania of airports: a place of such twists and turns that conceivably an innocent tourist might arrive only to disappear and never be heard from again.
All airports, of course, present the weary traveler with any number of obstacles; but the frustration mounts when a language barrier is added to the mix. Foolishly, I had counted on the Italian classes taken twenty-five years earlier to get me through the basics. Too late I remembered that the sole purpose of all those classes was to foster a deeper appreciation for Italian opera. So unless I was prepared to stop a porter and say: Such sweet warmth runs through my veins, or, I cannot tell if your cheerful mood is real or not—words I seemed to recall as being from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore—I was totally out of the conversational loop.
It was hot, humid, and crowded in the airport. It was also incredibly busy, with long lines waiting at every ticket counter and information desk. I needed