Читать книгу The Road to San Donato - Robert Cocuzzo - Страница 14

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

—Paul Theroux

We weren’t even across the Atlantic yet and Dad already looked like death. In the middle of our overnight flight to Florence, I woke up to find him pale and glistening in a cold sweat. He had his thumbs inside the waistband of his sweatpants, keeping the pressure off his abdomen. “What’s up?” I whispered.

“My stomach,” he groaned. “It’s acting up.”

Dad had suffered from these gastrointestinal attacks for about ten years now. A section of his large intestine becomes kinked, causing extreme nausea and excruciating pain. He was rushed to the emergency room several times over the years, but doctors couldn’t figure out exactly what caused these episodes and offered no long-term cure. Instead, my father was left to develop his own remedy for unkinking his intestine. He discovered that he could make the pain subside by lying in the fetal position and rocking back and forth. This would often take place on the kitchen floor or in the back hall of his hair salon. But many times these attacks seized him while he was on a long ride, forcing him to get off his bike to crawl behind a Dunkin’ Donuts or into an alley to lie down and rock in desperation.

Once he had to lie down in a graveyard. “A group of kids showed up,” he told me later, laughing. “Probably walking back from school or something . . . Scared the crap out of them for sure.” One could only imagine the deep psychological scarring of witnessing a stranger, decked out in full spandex, moaning and rolling in pain on top of somebody’s grave.

Now in the throes of a full-blown attack, Dad desperately needed to assume his rock-and-roll position. Without saying a word, he lifted the armrest between us, lowered his head into my lap, and began to rock. I scanned the plane. This must look absolutely insane, I thought. Here I am with some long-haired head bobbing in my lap in the middle of a transatlantic flight. Your mind didn’t need to be in the gutter to imagine the worst.

Slithering out of my seat, I let Dad’s head fall gently to the armrest, then retreated to the back of the plane. “May I have some water?” I asked the flight attendant, who was reading by an overhead light. She handed me a water-filled plastic cup and returned to her book. Sipping the lukewarm water, I watched my father’s unruly blond hair spill into the aisle as he rocked in what looked like delirious pain. Shit, I thought. Have I underestimated this whole thing? Could I really take care of him? My default setting was to assume things would magically work out, but what were the realities of our situation? I was totally winging it. I had no idea whether I was physically prepared to pedal the distance ahead. I’d never cycled more than fifty miles at a time, and I was embarking on this ride with little more than optimism fueling my tank.

THE PLANE TREMBLED AS it descended into bands of clouds that rose up like icebergs in the cerulean sky. The ground gradually came into view, a jigsaw puzzle of light green grass, dark green trees, and arid brown dirt. The landscape became more detailed during the descent, with the green blocks turning into vineyards dotted with perfectly placed cypress trees, obtuse triangles of red becoming towns of stucco roofs, and handsome villas sprouting prominently from the hilltops. Apart from one main highway, the landscape seemed removed from the twenty-first century, as if we had flown back in time. Ahead on the horizon, I spotted it, with the emerald-green Arno slithering through the stone city like a serpent.

“Yo, Dad, check it out . . . Florence.”

After disembarking, we didn’t have to wait for checked luggage because we simply didn’t have any. Everything for the next two weeks was strategically stuffed into two tiny backpacks little larger than a calzone. Each held a cycling kit, a light down jacket, a light rain jacket, two pairs of socks, and a toothbrush; our helmets hung from the packs’ straps. I also carried a saddlebag, which I planned to attach to the seat post of the rental bike to hold my camera, six spare tubes, patch kit, bike pump, extra battery pack, and two emergency sleeping bags, which, God willing, we’d never have to use.

For our time off the bike, we’d each packed a pair of light pants, a shirt, and minimalist street shoes. Before the flight from Boston, Dad had insisted that he knew the perfect footwear for us. “They’ll fold up into nothing,” he claimed. “Don’t worry. I’ll pick you up a pair.”

When I showed up at my parents’ house later that morning, he presented them to me proudly. “Dad, these are women’s shoes.”

“What do you mean? No, they’re not.”

I snapped a photo of them and texted it to Jenny. “Those are espadrilles,” she confirmed.

“Dad, they’re freaking espadrilles.”

“So?”

“So what did you pack for pants . . . capris?”

Dad was never one to adhere to the norms of fashion. He had a freewheeling sense of style that boasted leather pants, earrings, stacks of necklaces, and flowy dress shirts that he unbuttoned like a pirate. When I was little, I idolized his rockstar ways and begged my mother to let me get my ear pierced just like him. When my father chaperoned one of my grammar school field trips, all of my friends and perhaps some of my teachers thought he was my older, much cooler brother. “Nope, that’s my Dad,” I proudly told them.

As I got older, however, Dad’s clothing choices—or lack of clothing, in some cases—could be truly cringeworthy. Once while I was playing lacrosse in high school, I found my teammates pointing and chuckling at something in the stands. “See that guy?” one of them asked me, gesturing to the grassy hill set behind the stands. I looked up to find my father basking in the sun in nothing but a tiny pair of running shorts that he had hiked up his crotch like a Speedo. “Wow,” I said, taken aback. “Who is that basket case?”

Despite the many times he strutted into parent-teacher conferences like he’d just stepped off the stage at an Aerosmith concert, I admired my father’s unwavering self-confidence, especially as I entered adulthood. Everything about him defied conventionality. He was here to make an unmistakable mark, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. If you called his outfit into question, he only doubled down, popping off another button and adding another necklace. So when Dad stepped off the plane onto Italian soil, he did so wearing a pair of black flats that he insisted were “ninja shoes.”

“WE SHOULD GRAB SOME cash before we get out of here,” Dad said. His stomach pain had mercifully subsided just before landing, and color had returned to his face.

“I have my credit card,” I said. “So we’re good.”

“Yeah, I know, but we should really have some cash on us, you know, just in case.” He pulled out a thick wad of bills. “Here, let’s change this.”

My brother, Mark, and I could always count on my father for cash. He’d slip us a twenty spot whenever we saw him. “Here, grab yourself a six-pack,” he’d kid. He never used a credit card. Not once. Nor had he ever taken money out of an ATM or personally written a check to pay a bill. In fact, beyond paying his taxes every year, there was hardly any paper trail to prove my father’s existence. Which was exactly how he liked it, under the radar. The last time he’d cashed a check at the bank was before he married my mother. Since then, she handled all of the family’s finances—buying and paying off two homes, putting two kids through private high school and college, and setting aside a modest retirement nest egg. Money was never discussed. Dad happily turned over all his paychecks to her and lived off the cash tips he received from his clients after each haircut.

The arrangement suited him perfectly, especially since he never wanted for anything. Not a thing. Apart from his bicycle collection, he was completely disinterested in material possessions. His cars were always two-toned jalopies, the most recent of which he’d purchased at a junkyard from one of Papa’s old friends. “Fifteen hundred bucks,” he announced after sputtering into the driveway. “Can you believe it?”

Yes, we could.

He loved getting a deal and took infinite pride in his ability to stretch a buck. “Ninety-nine cents—can you believe it?” he told my mom after pulling out a bunch of bruised bananas from his backpack. “They were practically giving them away. I mean, hello?”

He had an old Yankee sensibility of making things last, dutifully sewing zippers back on to jackets, patches on to pants, and buttons back on to shirts. He scorned owning anything new. We bought him expensive cycling kits for years, but he never wore them. Instead, he kept them in the plastic like a prized collection of comic books while he sewed the zipper off an old pair of jeans to fix a worn-out cycling jersey. Throwing anything away physically pained him. “I hate waste,” he said whenever he found an abandoned can of soda with a couple sips left in it. “Hate it.” Then he knocked back the rest of the can himself, no matter how flat it was.

Frugality was going to be de rigueur over the next two weeks. For Dad, that was all part of the challenge. Like sneaking microwave popcorn into the movie theater, he relished the thrill of saving a few bucks. As much as I hated to admit it, I was right there with him. Though I regularly poked fun at my father’s stinginess, I couldn’t deny that I was becoming more and more like him. Over the years I had developed my own bizarre penny-pinching habits while traveling. Sleeping in airports or on trains to save on the cost of a hotel room. Taking several layovers instead of flying direct for a cheaper plane ticket. Subsisting entirely on all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets. That type of behavior had become far less feasible with Jenny in my life, but for the next two weeks it was just Dad and me. The arithmetic for our trip would be how much we saved, not how much we spent.

I SLID THE WAD of cash through the currency exchange window. The woman behind the glass counted out a stack of euros and handed it back.

“It’s like Monopoly money,” Dad said. “You hold on to it.”

We walked out into the glaring afternoon sun and motioned for a taxi. I scribbled the address to our hotel on the back of my plane ticket and showed it to the driver. Despite repeated claims that I was going to study up on the native tongue, I hadn’t picked up more than a few words in Italian. “We want to go here,” I said, tapping my chest and then the piece of paper.

“Yeah, no problem,” the cabbie responded in perfect English. “Twenty euros.” He pulled around the airport’s roundabout and zipped us through the outskirts of Florence. The scenes panned across Dad’s wraparound sunglasses. Walls of graffiti. Vespas buzzing by with their drivers carrying oversized loads. Children kicking a soccer ball around a cement court. This was my father’s first glimpse of Italy. Everything was new, and he stared out the window with guarded curiosity.

The cab entered the grips of historic Florence, where stone buildings passed inches from the window as the driver deftly darted around pedestrians. We jostled over cobblestone streets and down tight alleys until we popped out onto a pedestrian-only street. “That big door,” the driver said. “That’s you.”

“Alright, Pops, let’s do it.” We scrambled out of the taxi. I handed the driver twenty-five euros and waved off the change. I was never sure what the tipping policy was in Europe. We shouldered our bags to the hostel, then I pressed the bell, prompting the giant wooden door to click open and reveal a tranquil courtyard with a small palm tree in the center.

“This is dynamite,” Dad said, as the wooden doors closed behind us.

I’d found our lodgings online—a steal at only thirty-five euros, including breakfast. Circling around the palm tree, we found a staircase and climbed up four flights of marble steps that had been worn down over generations. “I read online that this place was built in the sixteenth century,” I told Dad. “The architect was some big-time Renaissance master.” He nodded approvingly.

The innkeeper met us at the top of the staircase. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a graying mustache and goatee that framed his smile. “Ecco, per favore,” he said, directing us to follow him through the big apartment to his check-in desk. “Passaporti, per favore.”

I handed them over.

“Your brother?” he nodded to Dad.

“No, no. I’m the father,” Dad said, chuckling. “He’s my son.”

“Thanks for adding that detail, Pops.”

The innkeeper grinned, finished the paperwork, and stood up, gesturing for us to follow him through the narrow, dimly lit hallway until he turned a corner and opened up a room for us. “Prego.”

There was a good reason why this room cost only thirty-five euros a night—it had a single twin bed. I glanced at my father, who didn’t have any issue about sharing the bed, especially not for thirty-five euros. For that price, he’d happily spoon with me on a bath mat.

“Excellent, thank you,” Dad said to the innkeeper, before slinging his mini backpack on the mattress and pulling open the thick drapes. He could sleep anywhere. He often conked out on the hardwood floor of the kitchen near the heating vents. Growing up, I thought nothing of stumbling upon him sleeping under the dining room table. There was a stretch of time when my father insisted on sleeping in the uninsulated vestibule of our family’s house—during the dead of winter.

“It’s like camping,” he told my mother while rolling out his sleeping bag.

“What if the neighbors see?” she pleaded.

“Forget the neighbors.” Mark and I gawked at him through the window as he slithered into a thin, old sleeping bag. Plumes of his frozen breath fogged the glass.

“Don’t you ever tell anyone about this,” my mother said. “Your father is nuts.”

A FEW HOURS LATER, Dad and I were lying shoulder to shoulder in bed. There wasn’t even enough space for a pillow barrier between us. Thankfully, of all my father’s quirks, sleeping in the buff wasn’t one of them.

Settling in, I pulled out my iPhone. “What’s that?” Dad asked, peeking at the screen.

“Our route.”

“You got the route on that thing?” he asked. “That’s wild.” Dad’s burner flip phone was a couple of years away from having its own exhibit at the Smithsonian. He watched me zoom in and out on the digital map from the corner of his eye, trying to hide his fascination.

We were starting from Florence, which if Italy is seen as a long boot, was high on the shin. The first day would take us to Siena, which was due south. From there, we’d pedal southeast into the heart of Tuscany for three days until we reached Rome, which was only 144 miles as the crow flies from Florence. Of course, we weren’t flying—I planned to link together a complex string of back roads, thoroughfares, and highways that would effectively double that distance. Beyond Rome, I had no idea how we were going to find the village of San Donato, our ultimate destination.

“How’s it looking?” he asked.

“We’ll be biking forty-nine miles on the first day.”

“Oh, that’s a piece of cake,” he said.

“Uphill. Forty-nine miles . . . uphill,” I said. “There’s 6,183 feet of climbing on the first day.”

Rolling onto his side, he groaned sarcastically. A gentle breeze wafted in through the hostel’s heavy curtains. Voices echoed up from the courtyard below. Dad’s breathing got heavy and rhythmic. I stared up into the darkness. What’s Papa doing right now? I wondered. Hell, he’s probably curled up in bed, worrying about us.

“Can’t believe we’re here right now,” Dad said, breaking the silence. “We always talked about it, talked about the village and all, but I never thought I’d actually be going.”

“I know,” I said, “it’s pretty surreal. It’s crazy that Papa never went on his own, back to the village.”

“I know, I never got that,” Dad said. “Maybe it had something to do with his father. Who knows.”

“What was your grandfather like?” I asked.

Dad rolled back around and thought about it for a second. “He was really good to me,” he said. “He always came to all my football games growing up. No matter what, I’d look to the stands, and there he’d be.”

I’d heard that anecdote from him before, but I wanted to know what my great-grandfather was actually like as a man. He was so one dimensional in my mind. What was his personality?

“Well, he didn’t have much of a sense of humor,” my father explained.

This statement demanded follow-up. “What do you mean by that?”

“He was a serious guy. He went to church every single morning, then after mass he’d go up to the barroom in Brighton Center and have a shot and a beer and then he’d go to work.” Dad described his grandfather as a functioning alcoholic, a deeply religious man whose greatest regret was he didn’t enter the priesthood. “Pretty sure that haunted him,” he said. “He’d come home drunk and basically preach about the Catholic Church.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, he went to mass every single morning, then he’d go to work.” Dad’s grandfather worked just over the Charles River in Cambridge at a Ford dealership where he was a mechanic. I wondered why he was so religious. “I don’t know,” Dad said. He thought it might have something to do with him growing up in San Donato. “I mean, there’s like four churches there. But, yeah, he and his brother were really religious.”

When he was a little boy, my father basically lived with his grandparents in the Yard, the makeshift compound they erected when they first immigrated to the United States. “We all lived together there in Brighton, back then,” he said. “Papa’s parents, his uncle and his family, all the nephews.” He described his grandfather as an unhappy man with a temper. “I mean, he never hit my grandmother or anything like that, but there would be these shouting matches where the police would show up.”

“Did this happen often?”

“It didn’t happen all the time,” Dad said. “Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion. But even if it happened just once, it had such an impact on me that it seemed like it happened more—but it may have not.” He sighed. “He and Papa didn’t have a good relationship at all.”

“I know, why was that?” I asked. I had tried to talk about this directly with Papa, but he wouldn’t really go into it with me. Dad explained that his grandfather was a jealous man.

“Jealous of Papa?”

“Yeah, well . . . ” My father paused for what felt like a long time, weighing something in his mind. “There’s . . . a . . . a number of things—I got this from, I actually don’t remember who told me this, but it wasn’t from him . . . Papa believed that his father thought he wasn’t legitimate.”

“What?” I asked, trying to piece together that statement, although the intent could not be more clear: my great-grandfather thought Papa wasn’t his son. After a few moments, I asked my father if that was possible.

“No, it’s baloney!” he said. “They looked so much alike.” Despite that, for whatever reason, my great-grandfather never treated Papa like one of his own kids. Growing up, my dad told me, Papa didn’t have his own bedroom. He had to sleep on the couch in the parlor, while his siblings had rooms. “They loved their father. Idolized him and thought he was like a god, but Papa basically had to fend for himself.”

According to Dad, Papa couldn’t wait to move his family out of the Yard. “When he finally bought a house, apparently my grandfather walked up to him on the front porch and said something like, ‘I guess you think you’re some kind of big shot, now, huh?’” Dad wasn’t sure how much they saw of each other after that. “Papa never really forgave him. But nothing he can do about it now.”

My father turned back onto his side, facing away from me. His breathing got heavy again. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing that if I didn’t fall asleep soon, I’d be up against the full wrath of his snoring. I tried to settle the pigeons of thought pecking at my mind about my grandfather’s toxic relationship with his father. How heavy that must have been to carry all his life. How did he handle that void of love? How did it impact who he became as a father? Why could they never reconcile? And why had my family never talked about it? That troubled me most. Why hadn’t my family addressed this trauma from Papa’s past?

My father started snoring. Ok, sleep. Just sleep, my mind pleaded. There will be plenty of time to ponder all these questions . . . about five hundred miles’ worth.