Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (2 page)

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Even a shy American can be happy in Italy, and Orville Rose was about as happy as a childless man can be. From a low point two years ago when, in a test tube in New Jersey his sperm had failed to impregnate a hamster egg and medical science had declared him sterile, he felt that his life had gotten a whole lot better.

Now, the summer of 1983, he was steadying the oars of a red rowboat as Celestina Polo was pushing away from a dock. With that sweet sense of gliding over ice, they were off. Orville always felt great when setting out, running off, and he sighed happily. He took a first pull against the weight of the water.

As her hand pushed against the rough wood of the dock and she sensed the rowboat ease out onto the lake, Celestina felt a hit of apprehension. Leaving land made her nervous. She settled uneasily onto the plank seat.

“Two bad things will happen today.”

“What?”

“This will be a bad day,
caro.
Two bad things will happen today.”

Orville laughed. In her years of Buddhist study in India, Celestina claimed to have seen things that he, a doctor, saw as outrageous. A man who was 132 years old. A yogi who could transmit and read thought. Another who could levitate, however briefly. A woman who could predict the future. Lately, Celestina herself had been trying to predict the future. She had ventured several predictions, none of which had happened.

“So far, kid,” Orville said, “you've been wrong every time.”

“Of course I am being wrong every time,” she answered. “I am
learning.
I know it is hard for you to believe,
dottore,
but I am not yet totally enlightened.” She smiled. “Two bad things will happen today.”

“Are you talking about money? I mean, if you're talking about money, I agree. We're almost broke. We can't keep staying at these expensive hotels and—”

“Do not talk to me about money! Never to talk to me about money! I don't care about money, and if you—”

“But you don't care about money! You don't seem to understand that if you put it on that little plastic card now, you have to actually pay for it later. With interest. With Mafia-type interest. You're overdrawn, I'm in debt, deep in debt. We're almost broke.”

“In our very brokenness,” she said mischievously, “is our wealth.”

“Oh boy!”

“And in our very wealth is our brokenness.”

“Terrific.”

“The two bad things are not about money, no.” She closed her eyes and pointedly took a meditative breath. “Not about American Express.” Another. “Not even about the Diners Club.” And another.

He chuckled. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. The gap between her two front teeth was suddenly endearing to him. He shook his head.

“You're nuts.”

“
Sì, caro,
nuts enough to love you.”

“Yeah, well, try it from my side. You are
insano.
Discumbobulo!
” Laughing, Orville grasped the worn handles of the wooden oars. He glanced over his shoulder toward the tiny island of San Giulio, set like a child's sand castle, off center, in Lake Orta, the smallest of the northern Italian lakes. He pulled at the oars.

It was past noon. The August sun was hot. The water, still as air, gave off that subtle lake scent that reminds you of wet earth. The day so far had been smooth, suffused with all the glossy luminescence of summer.

Soon they were far out from shore. Back across the water the ancient resort town of Orta San Giulio had diminished to a colorfully painted toy. Above it, amid the grave green cypress, Orville could see the occasional spires of the twenty chapels of the celebrated pilgrimage site on top of the Sacre Monte. He lowered his eyes from the tiny mountain to Celestina's long face, a Modigliani face framed by silky black hair cut smartly short, to her walnut eyes, to her white gauzy dress molding transparently to her breasts, to her browned toes that during their lovemaking that morning had intertwined with such strength with his—she was tall for a woman, he short for a man—and felt a rush of love.

She felt it, too, and smiled. Smiled at his short chestnut hair with the bald spot; at his tanned face with substantial forehead, Sephardic hawk's nose, fine lips, close-cropped beard, eyes the color of the Mediterranean set off by his rose-toned shirt, and at his browned toes. She smiled at all this and at their passion.

“This is getting serious,” he said.

“
Allora,
we are laughing.” She reached over, the hollow of her breasts distracting him so that when she suddenly squeezed his toes hard, he squeaked in pain. “So serious,
tesoro,
we must keep on laughing.”

“
Tesoro?
”

“Treasure.” The word hit him hard. He blushed.

Had he ever been loved like this before? Been loving like this before? Sure, there had been a non-Jewish first love back in high school in Columbia, New York, which had been destroyed by his parents, and in med school a Jewish practical kind of love that had led to marriage. In those loves, like in this one, there had been that same astonishing feeling when your heart seems made of feathers and diamonds and floats up sparkling in your chest when you even think of her or see her hairbrush or her car or her toes.

But this was different. This love was surprising and familiar all at once. The things she said were so outrageous—sometimes seeming totally kooky and sometimes totally wise, as if she really
had understood a few secrets of life. So outrageous that they seemed to expand the usual things that rolled around his head day and night. This love seemed always fresh—maybe because she was
so different, and yet so known
.
Or maybe fresh because she seemed so known, and then took his hand and led him someplace so unknown; led him not only into it, kicking and screaming, but through it to a strangely peaceful place. Nothing like this ever before, no.

This is it, Orville thought. You've really found something here. Something lasting, something of real depth. Please, God, don't let me screw it up!

“You know,” he said, his voice wobbling like a dying top, “that—that
tesoro
—it's the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Celestina blushed, smiled shyly, and said nothing.

“I love you so much!”

They embraced, holding each other close, losing track of time.

Shouts!

Their rowboat had drifted into the path of another rowboat. He picked up the oars. There were tears in her eyes, too.

They docked and walked around the tiny island, hand in hand. She opened a small tin of licorice. They popped the tiny flecks into each other's mouths. The sharp violet taste was a comfort.

It had started a few months ago in Woudschoten, Holland. Orville was working as the
Sportsdoktor
at Camp Zeist, a center where athletes from all over Europe came to train. He had spent years dealing with injured, diseased, and dead bodies, first in suburban New Jersey and then, after his divorce, in the worst trouble spots around the world with
Médecins Sans Frontières.
Being a doctor in the thick of horrific situations had taken its toll. In the past, finding himself up to his elbows in blood and gore and trying to put noses back in the approximate middles of faces and make bones as straight as a five iron, he had come to wonder about the stupidity and viciousness of men toward other men, women, and children. He had discovered that he did not like disease and that he had a particularly hard time with handicaps. He shied away from deformities of all kinds. Hollowed out, he had drifted to Holland to heal. He chanced on a job dealing with healthy bodies. As the
Sportsdoktor,
for almost a year he'd had a practice of the best bodies in Europe. He had many opportunities to engage a woman member of a team during its stay at Zeist, but he resisted. Somehow it seemed pointless. He still hurt too much, from the vicious end of his marriage, and from what he had seen out in the world and could not forget.

Celestina Polo had arrived at Zeist as the yoga teacher and motivator of the Italian women's swim team. His first sight of her had been one morning at dawn as he walked up the graveled pathway between the soaring pines and had seen, in a place in the woods cleared of trees, her leading a class in meditation and yoga. Several young women sat in a circle with her, their eyes closed. She was the only one all in white, and the only one sitting in a full lotus. Shafts of sunlight lit up the limpid mist of the low-country morning. The pine scent was flecked with burning incense. Smoke spiraled up along the trunk of a pine. The sight of this woman sitting there so still, a forest spirit in white amid the deep green of these ancient trees took his breath away. He stopped and stared, taken with the moment, reluctant to keep walking lest his shoes on the loose gravel disturb the silence. It wasn't just the beauty or the quiet; it was something to do with the stillness. The word that came to his mind was a strange one for him: serenity.

As he stood still and watched, the other women fidgeted. She did not. After a while she reached for a small brass cup that she held carefully in the palm of one hand. In the other she picked up a small mallet. She tapped the cup with the mallet, leaving the mallet against it so there was a dull clunky sound. Then she hit it fully. The little cup rang out, a bell to signal the end of the meditation. The clear, bright sound seemed to awaken the air, the pines, and ferns, seemed to awaken him. She held the bell until the ringing stopped. She put it down and placed both hands together, palm to palm, under her lips and bowed slightly to each of the other women, as they did to her.

Then she saw him. Without surprise—as if expecting him to be there—she held his gaze. The moment was riveting.

She bowed to him. He didn't know what to do. And then, smiling, feeling terribly awkward, he hastily put his palms together under his chin and bowed back to her.

With a certain grace she unwrapped herself from her lotus and stood up. She said something in Italian to the others and they, too, stood. As they began their yoga on the mat of pine needles in the glen, he walked away. Something else had happened. That's all he knew, right then, that something else had happened, and that he had to find out what. Their attraction was magnetic.

To him she was white linen and dark secrets, alive in a world different than he had ever experienced—a world he had learned, on the conveyer belt of American medicine, to discount. To her he was Western science and American optimism, hiding under a cynical edge that prompted her to see his potential. In each conversation she said things that at first seemed preposterous but which, as they went deeper, made more and more sense. One day he realized that her worldview seemed to encompass his but not vice-versa. He was enticed and challenged by this idea. He didn't understand what she was saying a lot of the time and understood even less about her meditative practices. But in it all there was a surprising glimmer of possibility for him, which he sensed was a possible end to his hurt, his cynicism, his suffering.

Their lovemaking sealed it. He was exuberant and boyish, she explosive and tantric. Here, too, at first, she was surprising and exotic. But as they got to know each other, the tantric
peeled away, and they were left with the ordinary sensual pleasure and playfulness of two people daring to hope—as if some of Celestina's Indian stuff was a protection against being at the mercy of love.

Like all the rest of us, he said to himself at the time, yes.

After two weeks together in May at the sports center, they were crazed with each other. During their first month apart they called each other at least twice a day and sent flowers and silly gifts.

In June Celestina returned to Amsterdam for a retreat led by an Indian teacher, a woman whom she had studied with in Mount Abu, India. Orville attended a few lectures. He was impressed with the power of the teacher and the depth of Celestina's understanding, but it wasn't for him. Each talk was preceded by a thirty-minute meditation, a sitting in silence “following the breath.” He sat there, knees aching, back sore, going bananas. It seemed like forever. Celestina asked him what it was like.

“Garbage,” he said. “My mind is full of garbage.”

“Good.”

“Good? How is that good?”

“It is true. It is your karma.”

“The karma of garbage?”

“For you, it is a gift.”

Orville groaned. “I don't think so. You do it. I'll watch.”

“Just come to her last lecture tomorrow. For
our
sake, okay?”

The last lecture was on psychological suffering. The root of psychological suffering, so said the Indian guru, lay in comparing yourself to others. The trap is in the process of becoming rather than being. “The flowering of being,” she said, “puts an end to all psychological suffering.”

Afterward, as they walked arm in arm back to the Canal House, their hotel, both were quiet. Neither spoke about the lecture until they were at the hotel. Sitting in their room overlooking the Keizersgracht, Orville said, “You know, I have to admit it made some sense, what she said. I mean, in terms of my life.”