La Bocca Della Verità (The Mouth Of Truth)

In the bowels of the Santa Maria Novella stazione is a veritable carnival of shops, vendors, food stalls and beggars. Blankets line the tunnels and on them are little jumping and dancing plastic toys from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many of them wind-up toys that play the same music, but at different times, resulting in a crazed-sounding din. The sellers are situated only inches from one another—each one beckoning and calling to passing travelers to stop at his blanket and buy his wares.

Joe and I have four hours to kill. We have already—early this morning—taken the #14 bus to the stazione and then the SITA bus to the Peretola airport on the outskirts of Florence (the same airport from which jets take off and pass over Cornelia’s 500 year old house.) We arrived at the airport intending to meet our oldest daughter, Becky, flying from California to stay with us for a week—only to learn that she had missed her connection in Brussels and would be delayed for four hours. We decided we could have lunch at the airport—but the cafeteria was “chiusa,” and the bar was smoky and crowded. There was nothing for us to do but take the bus back to the city, have a meal and spend time till it was necessary to go back and meet Becky’s flight.

Thus we find ourselves in the underground corridor of the train station, examining the wares. There’s a certain kind of jacket for sale all over Florence this time of year, costing in the range of 15,000 lire, made of a washable nylon pile, hip-length, with elastic wristbands and a zipper up the front. They seem inviting to me, warm and soft, and I decide this is a good time to buy one. The patterns on the cloth are often of geometric, American Indian designs, and the colors are shades of blue, or brown, or mixed pastels—all very pretty and soothing to the eye.

As soon as I tentatively touch a plastic wrapped jacket displayed on a table to look for the size label, the salesman has it out of the bag and is holding it open for me to try on. In no time he is praising my beauty in it, my absolute breath-taking gorgeousness. I hear a string of “bellas” enough to turn my head. Joe can’t help smiling. It’s settled then. I buy the jacket, then I buy another one for my sister. I consider buying others, for my friends, aunt, daughters, but Joe reminds me of our suitcases, how they were already straining at their zippers when we arrived in Italy.

He gets me free somehow, and we wander along the tunnel. Little gypsy girls run at us with their hands cupped for money. The gelato stand calls to us with its great tottering column of stacked sugar cones dipped in chocolate. Everyone wants us, courts us, makes us feel important, desirable. Up ahead we see a kind of waterfall, an underground, train station waterfall. Nothing is surprising in Italy. You see everything here, you expect not to be surprised.

In a little alcove we see a photo booth. Beside it, mounted on the wall, there is a large carved stone displaying a moon-faced creature. The sign proclaims “Bocca della Verità” (The Mouth of Truth.) The visage, with its wild beard and hair, has intense staring eyes and a fiercely open mouth. It seems to have been transported directly from an ancient ruin to this wall. If you put your fingers in its mouth, it promises to read your hand and tell your fortune…for only a thousand lire.

“Oh, I must…” I tell Joe, and he finds coins in his pocket for me to use. I drop the money in a slot, lay my fingers between the creature’s teeth, and rest them on the flat chilly stone inside. I hear a motorized whir and fear for a moment the teeth will bite down. But my fortune emerges on a thin sheet of paper, computer generated. Joe translates for me from the Italian:

THE MOUTH OF TRUTH TELLS YOU THAT

You enjoy a robust constitution and work hard

You will be disappointed and upset by taking gambles

You are not suspicious or excessively cautious

In order to realize your ambitions do not look anyone in the face

You will have financial difficulties that you will eventually succeed in controlling

“But only,” Joe adds, “if you don’t buy any more jackets or put money in any more machines.”

“Wait, there’s more.” On the bottom of my fortune is a scale that shows my level of Vita, Amore, Fortuna, Salute, and Sesso. I seem to be well above average in Life, Love, Fortune, and Health—but “Sesso” goes off the chart. What could that be?

“Sex,” Joe says.

“Well, lucky you,” I tell him.

For our next entertainment (we still have three hours left before we can meet our daughter), we decide to have a long, luxurious lunch at Trattoria Alfredo near the Palazzo Vecchio. We have seen their sign for a “Menu Turistico” posted outside, promising a flat 25,000 lire price for “Primi piatti (which is soup or pasta or risotto), secondi (which is meat or fish), contorni (which is salad or vegetable), and dolce (dessert)”—the entire works.

Like all the trattorias we have visited, this one is cozy (crowded would be the word in the USA), furnished with simple wooden tables and chairs, and owned and run by family members. Here there are two brothers, both wearing red aprons, who welcome and seat us. An additional menu is offered for “bistecca alla fiorentina”—a specialty steak of Florence, famous for being seared and salted on the outside, and dripping with blood inside. This delicacy generally costs 45,000 per kilogram for the meat alone, more than our budget will comfortably allow. We settle for the “Menu Turistico” and make our choices with difficulty, considering the many possibilities. We decide we will share everything.

My “primo” is lasagna, Joe’s is “pappa al pomodoro”—a tomato and bread soup, flavored with garlic and basil. The soup has the consistency of oatmeal, but tastes delicious and could be a full meal. Next we have “osso buco” and “fegato alla veneziana”—with side dishes of peas and ham, and “insalata mista”—with the ever present dressing of fresh pressed olive oil (greenish in color) poured from a glass pitcher with a spout, and the accompanying vinegar. A platter of bread is set before us, thickly sliced, rough-textured, with the flat taste of unsalted bread that Italians favor.

Still, our feast is sumptuous. We eat leisurely, having time to observe and comment upon the other customers. None of the guests at this hour seem to be tourists—we hear rapid Italian being spoken at every table, and conjecture about the relationships of the parties in each group. Are those two beautiful women mother and daughter? Then who is the man? Is he the daughter’s lover or the mother’s? Or their brother? Father? Husband? And what of that sullen young couple in the corner, she pouting and he drinking glass after glass of wine? There’s a father and his young son, the boy perhaps twelve or thirteen; they seem to love one another seriously, they talk in a gentle way, as if cooperating, confiding important messages. If only we knew what these people’s lives were like. We can wonder, but can only guess. We will never know how they rate in the areas of Vita, Amore, Fortuna, Salute, and Sesso.

Dessert is tiramisú for me, macedonia for Joe; again we share. The tiramisú is a scrumptious confection of cream, espresso coffee, sponge cake, shaved bitter chocolate, and liqueur; the macedonia is made of fresh, hand-cut squares of fruit: plums, oranges, apples, pears. And then coffee is served in small white cups, dark, rich, foamy with its own bubbly sheen. The bill never comes till Joe asks for the “conto”—it’s considered rude in Italy to rush patrons on their way till they make it clear they’re ready to leave. We notice we have whiled away the better part of two hours and now it’s time to take the bus back to the airport in the hope that our child has arrived.

In front of the Peretola airport is a huge, chunky, ungraceful statue of a big brown bird.

“What is that doing here…” I ask Joe, “in this country of great art?”

“I think it must be Michelangelo’s first sculpture,” Joe says.

The arrival area (which we are prevented from entering) is glassed in; however the top three-quarters of the glass is painted black. In order for me to see if our daughter is coming in from the landing field, I am required to lay myself down on the floor and look at the shoes of the incoming passengers through the clear lower glass partition.

Furthermore, having the intention of taking her picture (“Becky’s First Moment in Italy”—to go in the albums with “First Smile, First Steps, First Day of School, First Prom”), I have to aim my camera blindly toward wherever it is that I think the passengers’ feet will first appear.

This prohibition—the blackened glass—seems typically Italian to me. Italians are masterful in thwarting the wishes of the public. In the same manner as their closing the cafeteria exactly at the moment when we reasonably expected to wait there and have a meal, they now do all they can to prevent me from seeing my beloved daughter arrive in Florence.

But I won’t be thwarted. I have no shame. I station myself on the floor, lying on my side, having a fairly good view of the shoes coming in. Joe pretends not to know me. He’s waiting to the side with a luggage cart, wishing (I’m sure) that I was able to exercise more self-control. But there are times I have little regard for propriety.

I want to get this photo and I consider the barrier an interesting challenge. I can’t be certain I will recognize my daughter’s shoes since I probably haven’t accompanied her to buy shoes for twenty years or more (probably not since she was fourteen), so watching for her shoes is more a matter of intuition than knowledge.

As passengers begin to arrive, I know which shoes are not hers at once: the cowboy boots coming in the doorway from the tarmac are not hers, the shiny Italian leather loafers are not hers, the backless clogs are not hers, the high heeled pumps are not hers, the basketball sneakers are not hers. But wait, there’s a pair of tennis shoes coming in the doorway now, worn down at the outside edges in just a certain way, the walk familiar enough to make my heart flutter.

“She’s here!” I cry to Joe, and begin snapping photos blindly, holding my camera at floor level. “Yes, yes, I’m sure it’s her.”

Joe says, “Maybe there’s a reason the windows are blacked out. Maybe they don’t want you taking pictures of everyone’s feet. Maybe it’s a security measure, so that no one gets assassinated when they arrive. Maybe you’d better get up off the floor.”

The tennis shoes, connected to our daughter, come around the corner and out into the waiting area, where we are overjoyed to see her. The first hug is the best, full of reunion, delight, the sense of solid flesh in my arms. My daughter says, “I knew you were here, Mom, I saw your camera there on the floor, aimed at everyone’s shoes. Who else could it be taking pictures like that?”

We ask about the flight, about her delay in Brussels. She tells us that because of the unexpected layover, she was given a coupon good for “a free snack”—which she greatly appreciated since she had no local money with her. We discuss the merits of the various airlines and I decide that flying from Los Angeles to Brussels and then directly into the Florence airport is a far better arrangement than the flight we took from Los Angeles to New York to Rome (after which we still had a long tiring journey to take to Florence.)

We ask Becky about matters at home; she assures us her husband will manage perfectly well for the week. She has been to visit my mother, who is holding her own, been to greet my cat, who has taken up a firm friendship with the boy who is feeding him. My sister is well, my plants are thriving. No crooks have ransacked the house, no earthquake has brought it to ruin.

We make our way outside and see a city bus waiting at the bus stop. (This, we learn from the posted sign, goes from the airport directly to the Santa Maria Novella station, for the usual city fare of 1200 lire. We elect to take this bus rather than the fancier SITA bus, which—in this case—costs five times that price and follows exactly the same route.)

Just as Joe punches our tickets in the box on the bus, an older German tourist couple arrives at the bus. They drag their heavy suitcases aboard. The husband removes his wallet and takes out some bills, offering them to the driver. The driver shakes his head. Via pantomime and the pointing of his finger, he explains more or less that he doesn’t sell tickets. He directs the couple back toward the airport terminal where they will have to buy tickets from a machine, bring them back to the bus and have them punched. Of course, by then, the bus will have left for the city, and they will have another hour’s wait.

I want to leap up and explain to them that this once they can ride without a ticket. That dozens of Italians play this game every day—they ride the buses and hope no ticket controllers (I think of them as the bus police!) will leap on and confront them, asking to see a punched ticket. I want to beg them to take the chance, that soon they will be spending many dollars honestly on buses (and everything else). That foreigners are not likely to be fined if they plead ignorance (which they obviously have in good measure). That this unfair welcome is just an accidental oversight of the local authorities. They don’t mean to be this inhospitable. (Do they?)

The tired German couple is already confused and sweating; I somehow want their first moments in Italy not to be ones of exhaustion and frustration (as mine were). I wish the driver would invite them to ride this little trip into the city without forcing them to drag their luggage back to the airport terminal, without requiring them to find the ticket machine and read the directions on it (impossible to understand); without having them realize they don’t have the proper change for the ticket dispensing machine (which I’m sure they will not, since the man seems to have only some bills with him that he now is offering the bus driver, beseechingly, as if to say, “Please, take all my bills, just let us stay on this bus.”)

But no, to be in Italy is to have this pure Italian experience. Defeated already, the man drags his luggage off the bus, helps his wife down, begins to trudge back to the terminal. The bus driver checks his watch, starts up his motor, and, with only my husband, myself and our daughter aboard, departs without apology for the city center of Florence.