section of pavingstone on a side street in the old part of the city, with a small pick making rhythmic indentations in the sand, then smoothly setting the rounded stones like a farmer nestling eggs in a basket, then a few more chin-chinks to tap them into place. They used fist sized river stones, tumbled smooth by water, and they hauled them in large wheelborrows to the places in the streets that needed mending. One afternoon as I sat by Dan’s bed, I read aloud from a newspaper article I’d been trying to translate as a vocabulary exercise. It described the circus that we had seen during the weeks between the operations. II Cir- co Moira Orfei was a family circus in a single tent, with Moira Orfei, the matriarch, who led forty elephants through a stately dance, her teenaged children who did acrobatics and stood on the' backs of galloping horses, a pair of Czechoslovakian gymnasts, a French contortionist; a Spanish swordswallower. But the performer who electrified the crowd was a Bulgarian aerialist, a stocky, ugly man of about thirty-five. He seemed immune to gravity. Or perhaps he knew the air so well that he could ride its currents like a rafter in a dangerous river. Above the ground he sommersaulted, flipped, and twisted like a joyous fish. It was his joy that made me puzzle. Surely he of all people had lived with the daily possibility of disaster, surely he had lost his footing, had peered over the sharp edge of the world. His movements were too powerful to be naive. He reminded me in some way of the men on the ward, victims of violent accidents, but even in their bandages and pajamas full of life. Like him they must have known how hard and how far one can fall. Was there some relief in that, some spiritual composure gained from seeing the tightrope with complete clarity, as well as the abyss on either side? The newspaper reporter asked the aerialist, “Da dove vienne la sua sicurezza?” “Where does your safety come from?” seemed an odd question, though I didn’t know whether it was because an English speaker wouldn’t phrase it that way, or because an English-speaking journalist simply wouldn’t ask that kind of question. The answer was even more surprising: “Da cuore.” From the heart. At the root of courage is the Latin word for heart. he Blue Script Dr. Losapio was a handsome man of forty-five, tall and imposing as were all the doctors in the very hierarchical hospital. -An aristocrat by birth, education and position, Losapio carried his authority like a Renaissance prince, one in whose court art and music would have flourished, excellent meals have been served, whose estate would have been protected by chained dogs and guards more eager than skillful in their use of spears. He was Dan’s surgeon. The deference with which doctors were treated by the rest of the staff reassured us at first, and the class distinctions worked in our favor. When Losapio discovered that Dan’s father was also a doctor, he gave our case new respect and attention. Losapio understood some English, and could write it fairly well, though he was reluctant to speak, being skilled in the art of avoiding public mistakes. After failing to communicate to us in Italian the details of the surgery, he wrote out a page of explanation. We stared a lon^ time at the delicate blue script an’d read it aloud point by point, but between the medical terms and the idiosyncratic English grammar, we couldn’t understand it. We couldn’t tell what the The newspaper reporter asked him, “Da dove vienne la sua sicurezza?” “Where does your safety come from?” The answer was even more surprising: “Da Cuore.” From the heart. At the root of courage is the Latin word for heart. glass had really done, what had gone on for four hours during the operation, what the chances were of the surgery's success. The anatomy of the hand was the first mystery from which the others followed. Dan and I stared at our hands trying to imagine what had gone on inside his, and we were no more successful than Sra. Agazzi, our landlady, staring at the chimney, trying to see how it fit into her building. When the cast finally was removed, the finger appeared pale, stiff, frozen into a hook. It had no feeling and no movement. For two months Dan had been eager to get the cast off, and here it was, a different hand, partly numb, partly shrunken. I don’t remember if we cried, but we stood a long time-in the cold dining room underneath the cloudy skylight, holding each other, face against face, the way beings who love one another press into the stillness each contains when there is nothing else to be done. We sat down at the table, and Dan unbuttoned his shirt sleeve to show me something else: a series of precise white scars marched up his forearm. He had no idea what they were. Then we remembered an uninHoMjpS WhEfE HEARt iS A mixed media performance and installation. Written and performed by 01 GAg B ,e August 25, 26, and 27 at 8:00pm. WARM Gallery 414 - 1st Ave. No., Mpls. Funded in part by Intermedia Arts of Minnesota through support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. telligible part of Losapio’s explanation. A tendon stretches to do its job like a rubber band. When severed, it snaps and retracts, trapped far from its original location. Losapio had been searching for the tendon. It was so frustrating not to understand! Dan was to return in a month for a check-up, and during that time we talked once or twice about physical therapy. Was this the kind of situation in which people got therapy? Was there still a chance to save the finger? I’d noticed what seemed to be a rehabilitation clinic near the hospital, and I tried to call once to find out if therapy might help. At a pay phone, on a busy street, I couldn’t find the right words. The gap between me and the stranger at the other end was too great, and I had to hang up. When the day for the check-up came, we walked down the ancient stone stairway that zigzagged through fields sloping from the upper town toward the hospital. This was a walkway laid by hand, parts steep, parts eroded. There had been no bulldozer to grade the hill and make a smooth bed, no machine to spew uniform paving bricks. Instead, the medieval builders, and anyone who had repaired the stairway since, had taken the land as it was, uneven, unpredictable, and had worked from one irregularity to the next. Losapio’s job had not been so different. One fork in the path led nowhere. It bent over a sharp incline, but the drop below had been too steep. An eroded gulley cut the rise where the stairs should have been, and a pile of stones lay as they had fallen, broken, caught in a tangle of brambles. We arrived at the hospital hot and sweaty. I had to sit outside the examining room while Dan and Losapio talked. Losapio came out first, smiled uncomfortably at me, his princely manner shrivelled. He ducked into an office where I could hear him making an appointment with a physical therapist. Dan emerged furious. “When I asked if physical therapy would help,” Dan said, “Losapio mumbled, ‘Ah,...yes. Do you want physical therapy?” ’ Then we ran into Angelo, the English-speaking nurse who had become a friend. We told him what had happened, and a strange look came over his face. “A month after surgery and only now he thinks about therapy? He must be crazy! It is imperative to begin to exercise the finger immediately after the cast is removed, to encourage the circulation, to prevent the tendon from cementing itself to the scarred area.” I was horrified. “And you know,” Angelo continued, “Losapio does not do many hands. He specializes in faces.” I was so angry I could barely speak. Did this mean the finger was beyond repair? Were we supposed to let it fall into the oblivion of doomed things, hopeless things, rejected things? The ruined stairway, so exposed, so abandoned, had given me a strange chill. I knew no one would ever try to repair it. I thought about Losapio. For months his judgments, his predictions, even his moods had seem crucial to Dan’s recovery. What happened? Had he failed to plan for physical therapy out of laziness or forgetfulness? Had the operation been a failure, a half-hearted attempt to patch and make do in the tradition of the repairmen who never really fixed anything? Or did the piece of glass invade the internal universe of the hand in ways so minute and complex that no one could have comprehended? After a month of therapy, Dan’s finger remained unchanged. Gianbat- tista, the blind physical therapist, taught me to do the exercises: rest the hand on a pillow, massage the finger for circulation, bend in, bend back, just a little further each day. But the finger did not respond. It stayed stiff and cold no matter what we did. There was no question of philosophies of restoration. It was not fixed. It was not repaired. The hand could do no more than bear witness to its own experience. In Giotto’s painting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate, there are others who watch the man and woman embrace. They are happy at the meeting, at the new life that waits beyond the scene, but there is one figure who looks away. Her head is covered and her face partly hidden by a dark cloak. She too'watches, but her attention is elsewhere. Perhaps she is the girl from the fresco in our house, but older, her garland set aside, the dance slowed. Perhaps she is the necessary presence who gazes clear-eyed into suffering, who contemplates the mystery of losses, who lives with each thing we have tried to mend. Margaret Todd Maitland is a St. Paul writer and editor. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board for poetry in 1980 and creative non-fiction in 1986. Artist Stuart Mead recently had his work shown as part of the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Connie Gilbert has managed her graphic design business since 1982, and has worked with clients such as American Public Radio, Oataserv, and the Community Design Center. Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 35
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