| You cannot expect me to remember a single thing. Not a thing. Do you know what I did tonight? I saw the Exorcist! And somehow it's inspired me to write about Ferrara. Ferrara! This was my first clue, my first understanding that 1. I was not going to get laid on this trip, and that 2. I was going to indulge, indulge, indulge in every other way, I was going to drink and eat and drink more and smoke and eat... which is just what I told people I wanted to do, I wanted to go to Italy and eat and drink. Which, it turns out, is much of what goes on over there, and thank God for that.
The whole trip we were with Agostino Tilotto from Cicily, Agostino, Agostino is a "bad motherfucker," and in every town we visited he knew who would feed us best. In Centre, not far from Ferrara, we stayed with Lorenzo in an abandoned convent which his father had turned into a peach farm and which Lorenzo was now turning into paradise. We slept in straw beds and ate and drank wine that made my lungs and liver quiver all night, all night Andy shouted at me but all night I couldn't sit still, I was quivering, quivering! And also in the night Andy and I went walking and got completely lost in the dark streets of Centre, we even saw the frightening and moving old church, where legend has it an elderly couple used to visit each day, they'd arrive in the morning each day, and in the evening the daughter would come and drive them home. This went on until one of them died - I don't recall, the husband or the wife - and then just the one came, and then none. It's not frightening, it's moving, and it was such an odd little intersection of two roads between the peach trees and the rough ground ready for the fall rains, the thought of these two sitting each day.... Andy sat on the chair in the darkness and I took his photograph. That was before we knew the story about the chairs. The show was not so bad, a fair start, a Monday night. We were shown around town by Giovanna, she showed us the shoes and the castle with the moat. We nearly disrupted something in the cathedral, what was it? They walked down the aisle with the censer, all those poor kids. But we left without screaming, had a drink, and played the show. To me it felt like a practice show - which it was, really, we hadn't played since New York and Matt [Kadane, keyboards] was here, too (he got to Ferrara about the same time we did, coming straight from New York, we met him at the train station), so we were completely out of, and in need of, practice. It was a show! We played it! I won't go on. Stayed the night with Ernesto, a cork-carving Argentinian living outside of what small town I do not know, a genuinely gentle guy. At some point Giovanna threw me a carved piece of artwork worth some $30,000, and I grabbed it by one hand drunkenly and sort of twirled it upside-down so that the other bit hit a chair and the thing broke into twenty pieces, and Ernesto asked us not to worry about it - and he meant it, he really did! I smoked hash, too. I liked the hash. That was after Tim and Vickie and Matt and Andy were in bed, it was just me and the Italians. I couldn't understand anything they said but it's the language of love and hash, everyone understands that. |
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