Wanderings

 

I AM living in—and writing this from—a liminal place, an in-between region.
      Lunigiana is formally Tuscan but ignores the label; it’s not Ligurian or Emilian, either. It’s been inhabited and cultivated for millennia. Located between the Mediterranean coast to the west, Tuscany to the south, and the Emilian plains to the north, Lunigiana is scored northwest-southeast by the Appennine and Alpi Apuane mountains. An ancient pilgrims’ route known as the via Francigena meanders through the region; all year long, backpackers hike this trail, their plastic water bottles bobbing at their sides. Some are day-trekking couples or groups; others, solo seekers-after-truth. (Whether their thoughts tend toward death is anyone’s guess, though I expect it’d be difficult to tromp for days in silence without thinking of the moment when all tromping will cease.)
      This in-between region, crisscrossed for centuries by people who don’t actually stay or live here but traverse it in all directions, seems to reflect my own inner landscape, now that I’m not in Brooklyn, not at my university, not around English-speaking people, not under the influence of the presidential campaign season, not on vacation but sabbatical, and not about to return Stateside unless something urgent calls me home…
       The house my husband Antonio and I inhabit is, in its own way, also a liminal space. It sits midway along a narrow alley running parallel to Castiglione’s sole street— though that phrase scarcely applies to the cobbled, extremely steep lane that ascends all the way to the castle gate, and is barely wide enough for the passage of the smallest possible Fiat or Honda. The few cars that undertake the brief, vertiginous journey suffer for it; their sides and bumpers invariably get scratched by the houses flanking the lane. Going downhill terrifies me; I picture our old, battered VW’s brakes failing, the car gaining speed, aimed headlong at stone… Mostly we avoid the drive, instead hauling stuff up and down the lane in our arms or by handcart, and leaving our car in the little piazza at the foot of the lane, where the provincial road dead-ends.

WE are not the only ones setting up a home here in our house. There’s also a spider I’ve dubbed Joseph, whose engineering prowess is such that we have ceded him half the terrace.
      We came downstairs several mornings ago, opened the terrace doors, and saw, backlit, a perfectly made spider-web suspended—without guy-wires, or so it seemed— halfway between one of our four plastic chairs and a beam supporting the terrace’s roof. The web seemed to be afloat, a little craft bobbing gently on the breeze. It took us several moments of peering to locate the fine iridescent threads leading from web to chair and web to beam—a span of nearly four feet.
       How did he construct this marvel? He must’ve jumped from the beam, playing out filaments as he dropped, then skittered over to the chair and attached some filaments there, then somehow connected them… Did he have to pause to think, uh, what’s the angle here? Did he make mistakes, curse, have to re-do his work at some point—like tearing out rows of knitting? Do spiders tolerate such trial-and-error? Do they go mad with despair when they suddenly realize the consequences of being a half-millimeter off course? Confronted with such conundrums of their own making, are they guilty Catholics, knotty Jews, calm Buddhists? Is there any spider-Allah they might pray to?

HOW lucky for Joseph, at any rate, that neither Antonio nor I barged into his web, having failed to see it! Without the sun’s help he’d have been the victim of a spiderly version of a natural disaster. Having no desire to play this role in his life—and so as to remind ourselves of Joseph’s presence when the sun shifts, and he and his web become invisible to us—we’ve moved the table and the other three chairs to one side of the terrace, well apart from him. That way, we figure, we can’t possibly take him down, though a wasp or bat certainly could.
        In fact, something might already have done a slight bit of damage: two small holes mar the otherwise perfect concentricity of the web. Joseph’s windows, I think of them as. Who knows, perhaps he made those holes himself—out of a need to disturb the symmetry, rough up the place a little, or remind himself of the need for constant vigilance.


JOSEPH is small and, in direct sunlight, vividly orange; otherwise, he’s the usual brown of most spiders.
        He doesn’t seem to be catching a whole lot of prey. For the past two days, we’ve seen nothing in his web but one or two tiny specks, which could as easily be dust-motes as miniscule insects. Our spider doesn’t appear to do much, at least during the day. He’s inert.
       Antonio says Joseph’s probably just exhausted by his labors; I’ve sometimes fear he’s died of them. And yet today, after breakfast, I saw his little body jerk slightly, as if he were dreaming of something that distressed him. Then he settled back into sloth. Why that brief shudder? Was he berating himself for having put so much energy into a task that was aesthetically satisfying but wasn’t netting him enough to eat? Was he thinking that although he might have a bit of talent for spinning threads, he lacked any reliable sense of where to position himself, whether to move or stay still, how to trick and lure his prey? I can relate, Joseph, I told him. You’re like lots of writers.


AN ELDERLY villager who’s offered to bring us fresh eggs has told us about life in the village years ago, when her husband was still alive and more people lived in Castiglione year-round: how most homes lacked bathrooms, how she used to have a garden but couldn’t deal with it any longer, too much work… I imagine the eggs: slightly warm, having so recently emerged from some hen’s body. She (the hen, that is) must feel enormous relief, ridding herself of such cargo. Joseph, on the other hand, surely wants to engorge himself, despite his seeming lassitude. We all have our desires, some urgent, some optional; we’re lucky if we can find or make a place from which to launch ourselves into their fulfillment. (I think of Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider”: …to explore the vast, vacant surrounding / It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself...)
        The old woman wishes merely to walk down the path and share with us her modest bounty and a few tales; and I, dwelling for a limited time in a stranger’s stone house, want to receive them—and to give the old woman something in return, though what it might be I cannot yet know.