Slice of Life, Sweltering

An armadio named Behemoth, Dante-esque heat, and a room of one's own

Photo by Luis Graterol on Unsplash

Cari amici,

It’s been a week of soaring temperatures and 95 percent humidity, definitely not the time for hefting and schlepping furniture. But that’s how the week played out, and in the end, a room I used to hate has become a delightful refuge. I have nothing profound to offer you here, only this little slice of my life here in Italy and the realization that sometimes good intentions can detract from the quality of our lives.

First, though, a digression, to follow up on last week’s letter by pointing you to the news that Bali, like those Venetians and their cry of “this isn’t Disneyland,” has had it. Had it with tourists stripping down in sacred places, had it with displays of disrespect and party-animal-itis. The country is imposing a modest tourist tax and a ban on hiking sacred mountains, and handing out information on expected behavior (which will no doubt go unread by its target audience). Anyway, if you’d like to read more about it, you can go here and here (or just google Bali tourism).

As you’re probably aware, parts of Europe and the US are infernos right now, simmering in temperatures that scream “Climate change!” to anyone who’s not in denial. Here in Italy, records are being broken in Rome and beyond, and my hilltop town, usually cooled slightly by breezes, has had two straight weeks of the kind of heat that comes with health warnings. Lately any breezes have been nothing but hot air, and the nights (when we all throw open our windows, desperate for fresh air that’s below 30 degrees) haven’t cooled down much at all. In this kind of heat it’s best to hunker down in the darkness of your shuttered house next to your portable AC unit or dehumidifier, which is what I was doing until I inadvertently started a chain reaction of events that ended in sweat, lots and lots of sweat. But also lots of reward.

It all started with an armadio (wardrobe)—an enormous, brutto (ugly) one from the 1960s or ’70s that filled half my bedroom for the last three years. My house’s previous owners left it for me at my request (boy, were they relieved), a choice based on the fact that we were still mid-pandemic and shopping at antiques markets seemed like part of a very distant past. The monstrous thing, recently dubbed the Behemoth, was very well made and provided oodles of storage space, so it made sense to keep it. The drab color, a pale diarrhea tinged with puke, could be painted over, the missing pieces of trim replaced. Right?

No. Nothing stuck. The finish was as smooth as Formica, and any applied paint could simply be wiped off, leaving no traces. Fine, I said, I’ll sand the sucker down to its white base coat and leave it at that. My plan: do one set of the six double doors and see how long it takes. The reality: hours and hours and hours.

The Behemoth, three meters by almost three meters. The photo is flattering compared to reality.

By now you’re probably thinking “helloooo, Cheryl, ever consider hiring someone to take the doors off and sand and paint them?” Well, yes, I did, but I hate to pay for things I can do myself, even if they’ll take the rest of my foreseeable life.

Then all thoughts of restoring the Behemoth died. Enter the muffa.

What’s muffa, you say? It’s mold or mildew. The very thought makes some people scream “Toxic black mold, oh my god!” but that’s not necessarily the case. There’s lots of debate about whether muffa in Italy is toxic, and I’ve found no sites official or convincing enough to make me think my death from respiratory compromise was imminent—but regardless, I wanted that muffa gone.

I’d wondered, ever since I moved in, whether muffa might be growing behind the Behemoth, which sat, immoveable, against a wall that had been an exterior wall of the church. (I live in a 15th-century ex-convent.) I figured the wall might be damp, but I couldn’t see behind the Behemoth and there was no muffa in the corner next to it—until there was. And then the Behemoth’s fate was sealed.

Me being reluctant to throw things out, especially well-made, useful things, I tried to find a home for the Behemoth, asking around the borgo (neighborhood), sending photos to local mercatini dell’usato (thrift shops) in hopes they’d take it. No one wanted it. My options, unless I was willing to wait months to re-home it (and very likely fail), were to take it to the Gesenu recycling center or have Gesenu pick it up. Our man-about-the-borgo, Roberto, thought he could connect me with a truck, but that fell through. “I’ll just ask if Gesenu will pick it up,” I told him. I had my doubts, since I figured the Behemoth would break apart into six pieces measuring a meter by a meter and a half each. Surely they’d say no.

I WhatsApp’d them with a description and the dimensions, asking if pickup would be possible. In response to my theoretical question, I was given a very concrete pickup date, which could be changed only with two days’ notice. The date? The next day. Ackkk! Panic. What if Roberto wasn’t available? Fortunately he was.

Out the window went my plans for the day. Never mind the 37-degree heat (98.6 F), the task at hand was to empty the Behemoth, schlep its contents down a (thankfully short) flight of stairs and down the hall to the guest bedroom. I was soon to discover exactly how much the Behemoth could hold, and the precise amount is a shit-ton. I made trip after sweaty trip, nauseated by the wool, winter scarves, and heavy sweaters touching my skin. Then came the Swiffering of the barely reachable top so that Roberto wouldn’t drown in dust, the removal of handles (reusable!) and drawer pulls (reusable!) and shelves (reusable!).

Initially I’d thought we’d break the Behemoth into those six large sections I’d envisioned and cart them down to the piazzetta for pickup, but Gesenu had said to dismantle the thing as much as possible. Roberto went for it with hammer and crowbar and glee, which, if he wasn’t such a nice guy, I’d think was actually submerged rage directed at me. Anyway, the upshot was that instead of carting six very heavy pieces (far too heavy for me, I now realize) down two flights of stairs and up the street, we made, oh, I don’t know, maybe forty trips. As Roberto slammed the Behemoth into smithereens, I hauled the pieces down one flight to my apartment door; from there we assembly-lined everything down the second flight. Roberto, saint that he is, did the final leg, outside in the suffocating heat. Hey, I gave him water.

But we weren’t done. Two days later, Roberto came back to cart off the Behemoth’s matching dresser, which Gesenu wouldn’t take the first time because I’d forgotten to mention it. Then there was the run to Ponte San Giovanni with Roberto and my pal Francesco and his furgone (van), to pick up a gorgeous Liberty-style cassettone con specchio (dresser with mirror) I’d found. And then, miraculously still in good cheer, Roberto came back yet again to help me haul upstairs a Liberty armadio I’d bought a few years ago.

I adore Liberty style.

The amazing thing about this story, aside from the willingness of good men to do hard work in an inferno, is that the end result—the transformation of a room—ended up changing more than a physical space. I know how important my surroundings are to me; I’ve arranged, rearranged, and rethought the rest of the house many times. Given that, how could I not recognize how oppressive my bedroom felt with the Behemoth towering over me, dominating the space?

The answer is that I can be too practical, too conscientious, to the point of letting my desire to reuse and repurpose get in the way of my own quality of life. I’m sad that I had to trash something that someone else might have used, even needed (though Marketplace is full of similar pieces, the postings months old). But now my bedroom is on its way to being what it should be—a haven, a retreat, a place where I feel al mio agio (at ease). Now I’m contemplating paint colors and art options. A pretty magazine holder that was in my living room is up there now, holding my bedtime reading, and a vase I painted for my mother years ago is on the dresser, filled with fresh flowers.

With the Behemoth gone, the space can breathe and so can I.

And I read a manuscript for a friend, a fellow author, and it’s good, very good. And good for me to see the possibilities in someone else’s creation, the art in their craft, to experience the shared hope and joy of telling stories that someday, hopefully, will have wide audiences.

And the heatwave has broken, just a little, just enough.

It’s been a good week. Tell me about yours.

Alla prossima,

Cheryl

© 2023 Cheryl A. Ossola

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Quote of the week:

Instead of a book or a poem this time, I’ll leave you with an excerpt, Virginia Woolf’s opening words in A Room of One’s Own—only tangentially relevant here, but since it’s about rooms and writing, I’m going with it.

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.

P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites. Another fab option is to ask your local library to stock it.

If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’ll make me over-the-moon happy. Baci!