“She makes birds dip and cluster in a flame/ tree, heavy
with bushels of orange blossoms,/ makes the green spikes of yucca, its white/
bell torches, the fallen petals of pink,/ fuchsia and white bougainvillea,
dried to paper.”
—Tina Barr, “On the Loom”
Daniela, our tour guide, meets us at the top of Montelucco,
chasing her tiny daughter, Mathilde, who is not chasing anything, not the pigeons
like many children do here, on the paved slate tiles of the upper city, or even
the feral cats who bend, mostly, under any hand. We have just ascended the
gravel, found the fountain, had a cigarette. She leads us to the hovel of a
monastery, St. Francis’s. With pink on the apples of her cheeks, she pins the
air, rends it, and asks us to press an eye, too see through time to the ugly
little man with the burlap bruising his skin, who needed to be alone so much
that he climbed this mountain with no water and punctured the earth and God’s
mouth was on the other side, flowing clear and sweet. Mathilde wiggles in her
arms, palms her mother’s gray. We enter and everything is brown and flat, the
tiny rooms like five cells in a beehive where a summer with no rain has desiccated
the honey. The entrances to each room are so low, only Mathilde can fit, and
she tries, before Daniela swings her up again, not high, not to Heaven, the
roof is so low, only to her arms again, strong and tan. Daniela explains us the
mystery, that Francis and his monks would have to bow in submission to God
every time they passed through their rooms.
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