Sweet
Heaven
5 August 1998
I was walking up
the street in Lecce near Santa Croce church when someone across at the
edge of my peripheral vision started calling out to me in English "Hey!
Hello! Excuse me, hello!" As usual as with the hotel touts at
train stations, the man at the postcard stand today, and the guy playing
his guitar (badly) yesterday in a doorway when strangers on the
street in Italy start talking to me in "American," I ignore them completely.
Not to be rude, but because 9.99 times out of ten they want to sell
me something I don't want or need, and they're out to fleece me to boot.
So I kept walking ahead. Then the voice said "Eh, uhm... Frommer's!
Frommer's, hello!"
Wait
a minute. This guy knows who I am.
I turned
and it was a face I sort of kind of vaguely recognized. He shook my hand
and said (In Italian from here on in) "It's me Andrea, sorry your name
slipped my mind for a minute there, but it's Reid, right?" He introduced
me to his friend, we smiled, and he commented/asked "So, still touring
around for work, yes?" yes, I am. "Did you ever get the chance to go to
the beach?" I shake my head. "You work all the time, yes?" Unfortunately,
yes.
I still
haven't the foggiest who this guy is. Someone I've met in the past several
days not here in Lecce, but somewhere in Apulia but I can't
place him at all. He asks where I'm headed and I said to lunch, that-a-way.
His car's that-a-way, let's walk together. So we chat. He asked if I know
of the Suore (sisters). What Suore? He grins. "Follow me."
We diverge
up a side street and cut through two nameless piazze where clearly once
stood buildings but where now people just park. One side of the second
piazza is a long, windowless wall interrupted only by a solid double metal
door painted green with a "No Parking" sign yellowing on it. He walks
up to the door and presses a buzzer. He grins at me. After a few moments,
a feathery old woman's voice crackles over the intercom, "Si?"
My friend
(whoever he is) asks in extremely polite terms for something from the
feathery old woman's voice, and it replies "Si, certo. Un attimo soltanto."
(Yes, of course. Just a minute.)
We started
chatting again, waiting up against this green double door. After about
five minutes, the door cracks open and a delicate, liver-spotted hand
reaches out, proffering a flat package wrapped in white paper and secured
with a thin green ribbon like a present. The mysterious Andrea hands the
wrinkled hand about 12,000L and I peek around to see a kindly old nun
in her habit and wimple smiling at us from the dark. She's the lucky nun,
in my opinion, the only one within this cloistered order who's allowed
to communicate with the outside world.
We thanked
her profusely and walked back through the two nameless piazze to get out
of the sun and untied to green ribbon to open one end of the package.
Out slid a cardboard tray piled with florettes of marzipan, sugary almond
paste shaped into candies, with a dollop of pear marmalade hiding in the
center. Without trying to make a joke on the calling of the good Sisters
of San Giovanni, their marzipans are quite heavenly.
Now
that is the sort of thing I want to put into guidebooks.
Copyright
© 1998 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved. |