Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [87]
Later, sitting in my room, my clothes hung on a chair to dry, I consoled myself with thoughts of what a good story it would make when I got home. Although it wasn’t exactly like Katharine Hepburn falling into a canal—I did jump, after all, not fall—there were some similarities. It involved Venice, for one thing, and water, for another.
In the next few weeks, as the group worked its way south, the days and the towns passed by quickly. We were like a touring company of actors: always on the move, packing and unpacking, checking in and checking out of hotels, catching trains and buses on a schedule that allowed us to wake up in Perugia, have lunch in Rome, and go to bed in Sorrento.
And like any group thrown together in a strange situation, we developed the sort of we’re-in-this-together, for-better-or-for-worse camaraderie that I found appealingly familial. It was something I missed, the sense of sharing those small, daily experiences that, as far as I can tell, are really what life boils down to.
I particularly enjoyed being around Marta and Bernie. Often we shared meals together, using the time to agree on or argue about books, politics, personalities, and what we liked or didn’t like about the trip. If I had to pinpoint what drew me to Marta and Bernie, beside their humor and interest in the world, it was this: the three of us just liked one another. And we all knew it.
It was in the hill towns of Tuscany and Umbria, however, that the depth of Marta’s character began to reveal itself to me.
Because Marta’s weight limited the amount of walking she could do on the steep streets of towns like Amalfi and San Gimignano, she sometimes spent the afternoon sitting in a café or on a hotel veranda with a view. There, with the town’s activity going on around her and the olive groves stretching out beneath, Marta sat, taking in the essence of that particular place. Sometimes, when I grew weary of long lectures inside museums and churches, I would abandon the lecturer—as Whitman had abandoned his “learned astronomer”—to join Marta outside in her quiet vigil of the Italian countryside.
On one such occasion in Assisi—a town with streets so steep it was like walking up the face of a cliff—Marta said, “I know some of the others think I shouldn’t have come on a trip that involved so much walking and climbing. But I don’t feel I’ve missed a thing. Just look out there.”
It was late afternoon and we were sitting in the warm sun of the Hotel Subasio overlooking the Umbrian countryside. Beneath us, stretched out as far as we could see, was a patchwork quilt of hills, olive groves, and terraced vineyards.
“You’re right, Marta,” I said. “I can’t imagine anyplace I’d rather be.”
The hotel just outside the city walls of Siena looked fabulous. An historic sixteenth-century villa surrounded by olive groves and gardens, it was the epitome of Tuscan charm. It was a little after six in the evening and we were lined up at the receptionist’s desk, waiting to check in. We were all tired and hungry and not looking forward to the predictable delay that accompanied the processing of a late-arriving group.
“I hear the rooms here are lovely,” Vivian said, as we stood in the lobby waiting to be shown to them. I could tell she was anxious. It was becoming clear to her that single travelers, despite paying a surcharge, did not get the best rooms in the house. Although I thought the practice of penalizing someone for traveling alone was unfair, I’d grown used to it. Vivian, on the other hand, had not. It distressed her to be assigned to what usually amounted to a small room with little or no view.
When our turn came to follow the bellhop to our rooms, he ushered us, along with the third single