(Note from the author: I started writing this last night immediately after the events themselves happened, but I had to wait to until this morning to finish partly because, as you will see, I really needed to lie on the Campo and have a glass of wine.)
I was going to write an informative-but-snarky-and-charmingly-witty post about the Campo today, but I just had a very exciting twenty minutes, so my tone is going to be a bit thunderstruck instead.
After a very long day in Assisi, Tom and I decided on Chinese food as the best pick-me-up. (I mean, obviously. What else would you eat in Italy?) The food itself was bizarre. Their version of sesame chicken was essentially deep friend candy with a little bit of chicken occasionally maybe sometimes. The menu was fantastic (read: hilarious), seeing as how all the Chinese dishes had Italian names with English descriptions. But this is all irrelevant. After we ordered, we sat down to wait and chatted for a bit before the woman who would become the sole conversant for the next fifteen minutes wandered in.
We had been talking for maybe forty-two seconds before she interrupted. “Excuse me, are you English?”
Tom and I looked at each other. “Oh, yeah. Well, American.” (The possible colonial jokes did not occur to me until this moment.)
“I’m-I’m sorry, iht’s juhhst thaht I was never going to speak to anyone ahver again.” Up until this point, I had thought her interesting pronunciation of the English language was due to her being foreign, but it was this that made me realize, with dread, that she was another loud, drunk, lost American. I then noticed the collection of empty ¼ liter bottles of wine littered around her seat.
Despite her decision to not speak to another soul ever again, she was surprisingly chatty. After inquiring and then forgetting where we were from, she rattled off a list of cities she had lived in, the most recent one being Boston.
Tom asked, “So, what are you doing in Italy?”
Our companion turned to her empty plastic cup, stares at it frowningly, and said, more to herself than us, “What aahm I doing here?” Tom and I exchanged quick what-the-HELL-have-we-gotten-ourselves-into-here looks and directed our attention back to her, who had started in on Florence.
“Iht’s one of the most DAYngerous cities in the WUHRLD. EspESHTHially for a woman.” Our charming friend then proceeded to tell us about how her birthday is December 25th, did we know December 25th?, how she and her friend went to get sushi on December 25th, and how (this was whispered) an Eastern European man came up to her, hit her in the arm and broke it. And the Florence hospital had it cast at a certain angle but she went on MayoClinic.com, which is the best website for everything and all the doctors in the United States use it for their information, and it said to have it cast ANOTHER way so she did and now she can move her elbow.
Tom, whose father is a doctor, barely had time to explain the importance of getting one’s broken arm cast a specific way before she started discussing this book Obama’s Wars, had we read it? She wasn’t asking us any favors or telling us to do anything, but we must read that book because it’s by that same guy who wrote about Nixon’s Watergate and doesn’t ONCE mention Hillary Clinton and did we know who set Obama up?
Tom and I looked at each other. “How do you mean, ‘set up’?” Tom asked, clearly getting less amused and more irritated.
“Set up to be PRESIDENT.”
“The American voters?”
“Hillary Clinton,” she said solemnly. Apparently she “read between the lines” of this book and determined that because good ol’ Hill wasn’t mentioned, she was clearly responsible for everything.
I timidly attempted to steer the conversation back to Italy, while Tom got up to wander around the tiny restaurant and avoid talking about American politics. “So, do you live in Siena?”
She made a face (or maybe she wanted to vom. It was hard to tell.). “No, I live in (here she mumbled something unintelligible) Chianti. It’s WUHRSE.” The hills of Tuscany. I’m sure it must be perfectly dreadful.
Our food was ready. Tom and I booked it out of there after wishing her goodnight and (silently) good luck.
I stepped out of the restaurant, not paying attention, almost got hit by a Vespa going 256 miles an hour, and was yanked to safety by Iron Man Tom.
Like I said, it was a very exciting twenty minutes.
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