Embedded in the Boot
A traveler finds herself hobbled by circumstance.
The sliding glass doors at the Italian First Aid Room welcome and release the local Livornese with respective emergencies, most comparable to mine. The more severe cases are expedited through the waiting room to the back of the hospital, which is cut off by another set of rubber-rimmed doors I am waiting to walk through for an x-ray. Or hobble through, rather. A tenderness in my left foot has throbbed from an annoying hint back home in San Francisco to a sharp, localized spike of pain upon arrival in phonetically delightful Castiglioncello (rhymes with limoncello).
This Tuscan seaside town is also where my mother and I have rented a little apartment thirty yards from the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea so she may immerse herself in language lessons and I may attempt sculpture and watercolor classes (even though any artistic “talent” last surfaced in time for the third grade art fair). But what if a visit to the Provence of our ancestors will entice its return? We are also taking a respite from my mother’s second divorce and my impulsive departure from a pre-pre-revenue Internet company that was—I’ll go with “mismanaged.” What else would an Italian mother-daughter duo do, but cash in their frequent flyer miles and answer an ad for a two-week Tuscan escape from it all?
But now I fear I have a stress fracture from training for a half-marathon, which I registered for in a fit of self-discipline. The suspicious metatarsal is warm to the touch, swelling before my eyes, and I can’t successfully stand on tiptoe. We are at the hospital in the first place thanks to the generosity of my mother’s soon-to-be Italian instructor, Valentina. She sports a pair of leather, fur-lined high-tops, and she tells me where to find them in town. That is, if we ever get out of here and if I can ever again place my foot on the ground without wincing. For now we cram into hard plastic seats, the concave shape of which stopped being comfortable on hour number three; we’re now approaching seven. Si, sette ore, which I can pronounce thanks to Valentina’s impromptu day-long language lesson. I also memorize io sono paziente: I am patient.
While I’m being patient, my mind zooms to what will surely become a trip spent with a foot casted in a plastic boot in the very country famous for its uncanny resemblance to, of all things, a boot. When I am finally wheeled in for the x-ray, my foot is positioned on the cold table and zapped with a quick buzz of radiation in all of ten seconds. Much to my relief, my foot is non fratturato, and my boot-shaped fantasies dissipate. However, this marks the end of the diagnosis. I keep the x-ray for my first Italian souvenir, pay my 20-euro fee, and leave with instructions to ice and elevate.
Two days later, my mother and I greet the day from our balcony and its decadent views of the blue-gray sea that crowns Castiglioncello’s scattered treetops. Despite the beauty surrounding us, I miss running. Daily exertion clears my brain of its anxious loops and an elevated heart rate acts as a full-body cleanser.
“Well, the sea is right there,” my mother says.
Perfect! I will become an open-water swimmer! Right after I revive my inner artist.
My Austrian art teacher, Christian, is a sculptor and painter of some European renown. For my first lesson, I cross the gravel driveway outside the apartment, walk through the small grove of olive trees, and emerge. The sea is vast and audible, capable of astonishing the air right out of my lungs. The promenade weaves into view on the right, and I can eye the path my mother walks to her school. But my lessons are right here at the rim of the country where my great-grandparents were born, and I feel I’ve won a lottery I didn’t know I had entered.
My fellow art students set up their easels. One is already reproducing the central tower of Castello Pasquini, the sixteenth century castle for which the town is named. In fact, Castiglioncello boasts an impressive artistic history, from cinema’s Marcello Mastroianni, who won acting honors the world over to nineteenth century art’s Giovanni Fattori, who made famous the landscapes I look upon now.
Oh, and there’s me. Christian has me do a “quick, little sketch” to assess my “talent,” but after a rather phallic rendition of the castle’s tower, it is obvious that painting may not be my forte while in Italy. So Christian hands me ten pounds of soapstone and a narrow metal chisel.
“What do you want to sculpt? To see emerge from this rock?!” His eyes flare and recede with the efficient swish of a cape.
I stare at the lopsided stone. “A ball?”
Christian pouts. “Is that really all you see?”
He has a point. I take a closer look and slide the chisel against the stone, producing a soft “soapy” powder light enough to lift into the air, onto clothes, perhaps even out to sea. After a careful pause, I notice the slope of a curving backbone. “An elephant!” I shout.
Smiling with pride, Christian helps me position the chisel and hits the top handle with a quick knock of a hammer. Sure enough, a clean shard falls away, and so begins my attempt to free un elefante from flaking chips of stone.
After class, my new exercise regime awaits. My mother and I take the shallow steps down to the promenade. Most of the seaside bodegas have already closed their painted shutters for the season and no longer bustle with vacationing famiglie, their laughter and summer cavorting mere memories that lilt on offshore breezes. We veer left at a pace set by my hobbling until we find a stretch of sand and an open gelateria.
Even though the Tyrrhenian Sea isn’t frigid to the touch like the Northern California Pacific I’m used to, no one else is in the water, save a lone snorkeler and a collection of wet-suited surfers paddling past the low stone jetty to the break between the harbor and a dark scattering of rocks. But I’m intimidated to frolic in my bikini so close to the idle men on the shore: the older set wearing various shades of beige are harmless enough, but the much younger and shirtless uomini have lingering eyes and flirt with occasional hollers.
Instead, I carry out a far better plan. I walk down the other side of the jetty, the one with a convenient concrete walkway meant for accommodating boats. I step gingerly into the lapping water, occasionally glancing back at my mother, as if I’m five (instead of twenty-eight) and learning to swim. I do frolic a little as she snaps a photo and let her have this moment without the embarrassed annoyance I might exhibit Stateside. With one last step, I push off into the cooling water. Then slice. Or was that a crunch? I must have stepped on an innocuous little seashell.
“I stepped on a seashell!” I yell, both of us still smiling and oblivious. I float on my back like an otter and lift the ball of my foot into sight, as if it is now the shell I intend to crack. Instead, half a dozen black sea urchin spines sprout at electrified angles. At least two-dozen more have sunk beneath the skin, thinly exposed like worn stubs of pencil lead. My heart rate elevates, but not in the way I’ve missed. Did I mention it’s the same foot as the running injury? This must be why there are stalls with colorful rubber booties next to the gelateria and outside most of the shops on the main road. Just in case you want to saunter into the sea along a barnacle-infested concrete ramp.
I cry. I’ve been acting five anyway so what’s the harm? On my good leg, I hop to shore and rest on the jetty, not caring that I now attract attention from both sides. My mother’s face twists with worry and we both take a closer look. Out of the water, the urchin incisions are no longer soothed by a salty sea bath and I can’t help the sob (or six) that escape. When I muster the courage to pull on one protruding spine, blood streams then dilutes to pink along my wet skin, just like the watercolors my fellow students mixed earlier that afternoon. The strongest awareness I have is that these are foreign entities, and I want them out of my body.
One of the older men approaches. He is a short, rotund figure with a few stains on the shirt that stretches over his belly to meet his pants. (Yes, they’re beige, at least one word that looks identical in English and Italian.) He smoothes his graying comb-over and gestures in time with inquiries that bubble melodically from his jet-black mustache. All I can make out is his name, Alfonse. My mother offers her present-tense bursts of the language, but my foot tells as straightforward a story as any. With an expression that says he’s seen this all before, he whips out his wallet and pulls back greased and creased leather folds until he plucks a dull sewing needle. He floats it like a symphony conductor’s baton toward my foot, which I pull back like a babe in need of protection.
Alfonse shrugs, returning the needle to its trusty home, and gestures to a small orange Fiat parked on a sloping road leading down to the promenade. We gather he can give us a ride home so we can figure our way to the hospital twenty minutes away (yes, the same ospedale). I can’t say I would advise two women travelers to accept such an offer, even if the man in question does bear a reassuring resemblance to Danny DeVito. Still, we trust. I manage to fold myself into the compact backseat, littered with remnants of a long vehicle ownership, but where I can at least extend my pronged foot out the open window.
For anyone keeping score: Number of days in Italy: three. Trips to the hospital: two.
After Valentina once again gives us a ride, the brunette nurse behind the check-in desk nods her head with bemused recognition. The wait is only four hours this time before I see a doctor who employs a now familiar, though sterile, approach, and uses a needle to fish out the stubborn, embedded spines. He explains that they are brittle and break like glass, making excision difficult. He manages to free three or four, but I will have to be patient for the rest to surface. (I know this one, io sono paziente.) They can give me a tetanus shot, as the sea urchin is the bacterial equivalent of an exposed nail (or thirty), but the doctor explains that the blood-screening regulations are not the same in Italy as they are in the States. I pass on the vaccine and am sent home with tweezers and an ointment closely related to rubber cement but which should draw the spines out overnight.
In the morning, I awake eager to pull back the gauze and find all the critters defeated and dislodged. Instead, the tweezers can’t even get at one solitary spindle. The next plan of attack is to soak the foot in order to loosen the skin around spines. So that means ice for the first injury, heat for the second. Without a bathtub, the bidet proves the most logical receptacle for soaking. I spend an hour sitting on the windowsill, my foot dangling in a disinfectant bidet bath as I flip through magazines. As the bidet drains, I hobble to the living room to twist my foot until the spines are in view, hopeful they are lined up and ready to tweeze. I push two to the surface and the release is as satisfying as any. Then it’s onto the balcony with an ice pack to attend to the initial injury, a procedure I supplement with table wine intake, although more generally acceptable over a long lunch at the corner cafe. (I’ve quickly developed an appetite for frutti di mare and its lurking shell life.)
The next day, I limp alongside my art class to our late morning cappuccino break that arrives all of one hour into the lesson, and regale my German, Swiss, and Canadian classmates with my aquatic adventure.
“I’ve only gotten a couple out so far,” I say of the suspects, which have turned out to be half a centimeter or so in length, little sharp nothings capable of halting physical exertion.
Christian tilts his head to the side, where his short black ponytail collapses like a paintbrush against his shoulder, and says, “One prick per day.”
I take a deep breath and nod with recognition. The wisdom is succinct and as good as any advice for life, for learning a language, for getting over the physical or emotional injuries we bear at home and try to release far away from it all. I should know how to pace myself by now, without burning out at work, at exercise, or any of the agendas I try to overpower back home. Some pricks to the foot are a good reminder; I will force no more, but be content with no less.
“You may not get them all out. The foot is tough,” he says, slapping his palm. “Some may stay down, but they should not bother you by then.”
In the moment, I accept what may be beyond measured control. We walk back along the road, still drying from an early morning rain, through the grove, and to our workstations at the edge of Italy. I pick up my chisel and continue to shape the elefante beginning to emerge, little by little, each day. So what if a few of the tiny foreign bodies stick around? Like any worthwhile trip—and tetanus withstanding—they, too, will just have to become a part of me.
Jennifer Massoni was the Senior Editor of the Gentry family of magazines for many years. Her journalism has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Crawdaddy!, CAFÉ, California Home & Design, and I Love Chile News. In addition to sculpting elephants in Italy, she has written about finding ghosts in New Mexico, surfing waves in California, and making wine in Chile. In 2011, she earned her MFA in Prose from Mills College, where she won the Amanda Davis MFA Thesis in Fiction Award and the Ardella Mills Prize for Literary Composition. Ready to put her wanderlust to the test, she and her husband moved six thousand miles away to Santiago. You can follow her expat adventures and adjustments at notesfromthesouthernhemisphere.blogspot.com.