Marroni Caldi (Roasted Chestnuts)

As I posted my artwork "Interconnected" on Instagram, the thought crossed my mind to contact @verbonnet and ask him to write an accompanying story. Stephen Paré and I have been friends on Instagram for many years now, and our discussions have, I believe, been mutually inspiring.  Mobile art is only one of Stephen's many talents, and I am delighted that he agreed to my request. What follows is the result of our collaboration.   

Marroni Caldi

(Roasted Chestnuts)

I’ve had I guess two mystical experiences in my life. I am not going to try to explain to you what I mean by that - anyway, I’m pretty sure that I can’t. Neither of them lasted more than a couple of minutes, although I’m really not too sure – otherwise, they were completely different. The first one took place in 2009. If I ever figure out how to talk about it, I will. 

The second one happened the day before Christmas, about a month ago. 

We’re not particularly rich but we’ve got a talent (by which I mean my wife has) for being invited into beautiful homes as guests. Christine does trading online and I’m writing a novel so we might as well be anywhere; we took an extended vacation last year, working our way from the Arctic Circle in Norway at Summer Solstice south to Italy and finally Athens, where I’m writing this.

We had Thanksgiving in Lyon (duck instead of turkey, petits pois instead of green beans) and then three weeks of grey weather in Geneva with an affectionate elderly couple who were early to bed; I finished a chapter and then some, gazing out at the lake, feeling excitement and accomplishment despite a head cold that had me sleep a lot. 

And then on to Rome for Christmas, to see the Pope in the basilica, the shepherds at Santa Maria in Aracoeli, and this year’s weird and controversial crêche, which I find ugly but which I’m defending anyway because it’s under attack by the right-wing self-appointed guardians of our culture.  

Christine’s uncle has an apartment in the San Saba district, and he was lending it to us for twelve days while he was ‘in Italy’, by which he means literally anywhere away from Mamma Roma, including New York. For me, too, Rome is the center of something both momentous and familiar; but it is as though I’d discovered I had a different birth mother at age 31 - there’s no regret and no rewinding, not even the wish to rewind - only wonder and whatever heightened moments you can find to spend together while your lives continue on in their settled course. 

The first night I was in bed early and slept immediately, only waking at 9, bedsheets soaked with sweat, the way you do when the illness leaves you. I felt good again. Christine was long gone so I set off walking toward the Pantheon, thinking of cappuccino. 

There’s a piazza in front of Santa Sabina, and as I approached it I could see a street vendor with a chestnut roaster (why are they always men?). After a few steps I could smell the sweet aroma and decided to get some.

That's when it happened.  

"Interconnected" ©Linda Hollier

As I looked toward him I saw another figure, also walking toward him from my direction. It was a bearded man, young, congenitally deformed, with an odd spiraling, laborious, start-and-stop sort of walk, supported by two sticks. The chestnut vendor was turned the other way, talking vividly with someone, a customer, gesticulating as he did with that tool they use to pierce the shells.

I’ve always been interested in the ways that people match their postures and gestures as they talk; there’s a dance that goes on. I was watching the chestnut vendor ‘leading’ as his customer nodded and tilted his head and turned slightly in response to each of the extravagant gestures. Then I noticed something else: the bearded man with the sticks was ‘leading’ the vendor. It was unmistakable. He would pause, and the vendor would pause; he would start up his exaggerated spiraling movement, and then the vendor would gesticulate. But the vendor couldn’t see him! His back was turned.

I was looking, observing, trying to sort all of this out, when I saw something impossible. That crippled fellow, with his stopping and effortful starting, was leading the wind that moved the trees in the little park behind him. The trees were following him, starting and stopping with him. 

An old Fiat came along, and stopped in the street when the man stopped, moving along again when he did, its clutch jerking with his laboring walk.

He stopped, and I sneezed. He moved, and stopped again, and I sneezed again.

I must have come to a halt as I watched all of this, for it was only after the crippled man had disappeared into the park that I realized I was just standing there. The chestnut vendor was looking at me curiously. I sneezed again, roused myself, walked up and got some chestnuts from him. I will never forget the deep compassion I felt for him - well, it was love. That’s the real word, isn’t it. We had taken part in an extraordinary moment together, however unconscious of it he might have been, however ordinary it might have seemed. 

As he handed me the paper cornetto of nuts, time was slowed, the elegant turn of his hand and the crinkle of paper and his mischievous amused eyebrows arching as I grasped the bag - all a slow inevitable unfolding, an orchestral music whose every sound of every instrument I could hear.

I was about to start crying so I hurried off with my nuts and turned down the pedestrian street, tears streaming down my face in the Roman sun and north wind, appetite gone, but every twenty feet stopping, smelling the chestnuts, filling myself with the odor over and over, receiving a blessing, the grace of an ordinary day. I left them on the fountain in front of the Pantheon as a kind of offering.

---oOo---

After writing the story, Stephen let me know that he was writing music for it as well. Listen to Stephen's reading of "Marroni Caldi" set to the music he has composed to accompany it.

lindahollier · Marroni Caldi