La Casalinga

May 19th, 2008

After living in Bologna for almost a year now, I have many new friends. Some of these I am certain to stay in touch with forever; some I know will naturally drift away with the seasons as our lives take different directions when I return home. Yet they will all remain present in the annals of my memory. As will those whom I’ve seen on a daily basis but know little about, or have never even actually met. These familiar strangers include the chubby butcher who joyfully greets every pretty lady passing his counter with “Buon Giorno, Signorina,” or the young woman at the tobacco shop who unenthusiastically sells me my scratch-off lotto tickets, and with a similarly lifeless comportment pays me when I win. In this category of mysterious familiars the one I will remember most is the old lady who lives across the courtyard from me.

It’s eight a.m.. It could be Sunday, it could be Tuesday. No matter. For her everyday begins the same way. First, the exterior metal blinds called taparelle are drawn up. Then the windows are opened with a full thrust regardless of the time of year. I see her. She is peaking out with her pale doughy face to see who is in the courtyard, who is out on one of a hundred balconies attached to one of five condos that line our common courtyard. She looks to see who might be looking at her. Sometimes she spots me drinking coffee from my balcony. Sometimes I peer out from the shadows of my kitchen where I am still invisible to her. I admit it: I am fascinated by this woman and her tireless routine.

If it’s not raining she immediately wipes off the window ledge. Then come the bedsheets. She drapes them out the window where air blows through electric-white fabric. So come the pillows, also white, placed side by side atop the ledge. Beating and shaking, she punishes the inner feathers into fluffiness. Looking out into the courtyard again she scans the scene to see if anything has changed, if anyone new is coming or going in a car, on a bike. But mostly she stops to puff. By this I mean that every movement requires extreme effort. This little hunched-over woman with her colorless pageboy cut and her pallid skin that has never seen a ray of sun, who couldn’t be taller than four feet ten inches, has the willpower of a giant. All the while huffing and puffing till her cheeks blow up like a guppy she shifts linens from off her bed to the window ledge where they dangle and sway until they are tamed by the breeze into freshness. All this she does without expression. Even her bent over body moves with slow wooden turns from side to side. The puffing cheeks and lips never betray what she might be thinking for every movement is one of endless years of household duty.

She is gone for a moment only to reappear from inside the bathroom window. Her skin, hair, and colorless housedress blend in with the neutral tile walls. All I see clearly now are dark black eyes looking out, eyes that remind me of a doe’s eyes nervously scanning the forest to detect enemies. Then come the bottles of detergent, one by one. A small stiff hand moves in and out of view placing cleaning product after cleaning product on the ledge of the bathroom window. There are somewhere between four and five brightly colored plastic containers perfectly lined up before she starts to bend and scrub. She lifts a bathmat out the window and brushes it clean, then brushes the brush clean with another smaller brush. And so it goes, an endless cycle of polishing and sanitizing everything that has been touched and used throughout the previous day. This same activity is repeated each morning with the puffing and the stooping and the black eyes looking out to see what others above and below are doing, all while her equally pale husband sits on a chair and smokes absently sometimes observing her, sometimes not.

Meanwhile, as it is across the courtyard, so it is above. Paola, another older woman with a cleaning fixation, lives alone. Though she is probably somewhere past eighty years old like the panting lady, Paola is full of chutzpa. Each step she takes across her marble floor just above my head is bursting with vigor. Her house slippers start clomping with the weight of wooden clogs at around five-thirty a.m.. The ripping screech of her taparelle being opened comes soon after accompanied by the morning radio news, the scraping of broom bristles, and the hum of a washing machine's revolutions.

Last October when my mom came to Bologna for a month, she laid in bed in the darkness one morning and said to me – I had been awakened by Paola too – “Doesn’t that poor woman have anything else to do besides start cleaning everyday at six a.m.?” We both knew the unfortunate answer to that.

I’m guessing it’s a generational thing. From the baby-boomer women who are sixty -- my mom’s age -- and beyond to those who are my grandma's age, the female sex is tied to the identity of the casalinga, housewife. But here in Italy it's not the tidy June Cleaver version of the profession where the role of housewife becomes almost a fashionable function, it's more a kind of stranglehold that takes this occupation by the throat and gives it a name -- control. These women's houses are always immaculate and they make you wear strange sock-like slippers over your shoes so that you're literally skating atop the tiles when you come over to visit them. Glasses are taken away before you can finish drinking and tables are wiped off while you’re still sitting and sipping coffee. Dinner and lunch are served at the exact same time and if you show up late there’s no reheating. I guess there’s something to be said for these habitual standards -- they keep the family together at mealtime and old folks who keep moving generally live longer, but it’s an extreme approach I could never take. Is this pre-occupation and obsession with absolute perfection and order a throw back from the days of Mussolini? Maybe even Il Duce wouldn't take the blame.