While I was hanging wash, Patrizia came onto her balcony to take the air, drinking a cloudy solution from a large glass.
“You did laundry on Sunday.”
“Yeah, sun is predicted today, and rain tomorrow. I may be a Monday washer, but even I am not so stupid as to skip a good drying day in deference to habit.” Okay, that’s what I wanted to say. In Italian it was more like, “Today there’s sun, tomorrow rain, so I wash today. Smart?”
“Very smart.”
“How are you?”
“I have a bad headache. That’s why I’m drinking this medicine,” she brandished the glass. “Too much sleep.”
“Really? That’s possible, these days?”
“I’m not accustomed to it, so I wake at a normal time, can’t think of why I have to get up, turn over, and an hour or two later I have a headache that won’t go away.”
“So now even sleep is dangerous!”
“What a long list of dangerous things we have.”
Apropos of that, I confess to touching my face during the night. I wonder if I should, but what have I touched since washing and sanitizing my hands fourteen times in the half hour before I retire? If bedclothes are covered with the virus, we’re all doomed anyway.
Back to the balcony. Renzo joined the conversation.
“You gonna take a real walk today?”
“Like on the street?”
“Stay within two hundred meters from home, you have a note from your doctor, it will make you feel so much better than walking down there in circles.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
And just as if he were a theatre director, he repeated the list of reasons for biding his advice, all over again.
I turned my attention to laundry. From their balcony, my neighbors started a conversation with the fellow whose yard is sort of behind my house, talking back and forth over my roof. It didn’t seem possible, but they kept it up for quite awhile. Renzo then introduced us, and my newly revealed neighbor made himself visible up a level or two from my garden, and over the narrow fence that spans the gap between my house and Giancarlo and Annalisa’s next door. Renzo said something about Montalcino, but I didn’t catch whether that was the man’s name or where he was from. I waved with a soggy pant leg, he smiled and asked if everything was okay (“Tutto a posto?”), and I returned the same. He seems nice.
An hour or so later, much in need of a walk, I took Renzo’s direction, donned a mask, put in my aides, pocketed the by now rather limp doctor’s note, and opened the gate to the wider world of Via delle Pertiche Prima. Renzo was at the Corso end of the street watering the flowers he hangs in pots the full length of the lane. Pestilence or not, beauty must be attended.
Via delle Pertiche No. 1 runs for one “block” between Corso Cavour and where Via delle Pertiche No. 2 crosses. If you continue straight, it turns into Vicolo delle Pertiche A, which curves left after about ten meters and goes on to join Via Angelo d’Orvieto. The Vicolo is quite lovely; narrow, passes gardens (one of them with statuettes of the seven dwarves, in living color), very characteristic of the quarter. Close as it is, I’ve not walked there in maybe a year, but today I did. Several times.
My first pass on the Vicolo encountered a masked man carrying a white box. I made room, and as we approached each other I recognized the friendly fellow who owns Enoteca del Duomo. He smiled dazzlingly beneath his mask and waved with his free hand. He was looking for my street. As I looped around I saw him give the white box to a neighbor. I just checked their website hoping for a reminder as to his name, but found instead a delivery menu available seven days a week from ten in the morning to midnight! I just today have become a bit weary of cooking, so that is tempting indeed.
Renzo (and my own good sense) was right. A real walk, in daylight, even if also in circles (they were at least larger) did me a world of good.
The weather cooled. Rain is now forecast by 21:00. I moved the laundry, still damp except for socks, indoors. Weather forecasts, just like pandemic models of probability, are dependent on data, and as the data changes, so does probability. So if it rains early, my laundry is unaffected. If the rain comes late, I’ll get in another real walk. The forecast may not be as neat and certain as we would like, but it is useful in knowing how to time things; like bringing in the clothes off the line. And other much more complex events, too.