30.11.09. Winter in Pavia, or, 'No, I'm not cold. Well, maybe a little.'
I just don’t want to have to dig my fingers in. On those long shoe-days when you’re out from morning till night, your socks meld to your feet with the hours’ building sweat. At day’s end you come home and want nothing more than to shed your shoes and slip on your slippers, but you must first pry away the cotton that has bonded with your skin. You do this on one foot, and sometimes you lose your balance and reach for support. If your eyes are too focused on your new cotton-skin compound you grasp at the skinny lamp with the charcoal damask shade, and it and you crash in a heap in the foyer.
You’ll forgive me if I choose sandals. My toes wiggle freely like a butterfly freed of its cocoon, a refreshing wind strokes my foot bottoms between flip and flop, and at the park in grass joy my sandals are off in a trice. Yet when I wear sandals in Pavia when the leaves are turning and falling, it’s like a cry for help. People stare at me, friends and strangers alike, and want dearly to offer me their shoes.
In mid-October we had an exceptionally nice day, about sixty-five degrees in the sun, and I decided to give my summer best one last go before retiring it for the winter. This meant Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. But something got lost in translation. I felt like Bill Murray in an elevator full of Japanese, like a platypus at a mammals-only brunch, like a peanut chunk in Jif Creamy. I was actually turning heads as I walked by.
Perhaps you pretty ladies among my readership (all of you!!) are already familiar with this situation, but it was new to me, and unnerving. I’m used to people staring at me because of my clothes, but not staring as deeply and probingly as Italians stare, and not craning their necks to follow me into the distance. Although I felt comfortable in my breezy polyester island ode, a chill overtook me when I saw everyone around gawking, all swaddled in winter coats and scarves and gloves, all huddled en masse to pool their body heat.
This attention proved too much, so I decided to shelve my aloha gear until June 1—after one more go. A few days after Halloween we put on a costume party in collegio with a theme of ‘Manicomio,’ or ‘Madhouse,’ and I went as a Hawaiian. If it was the third of November and I was wearing flip-flops, board shorts, and a floral print shirt, I had to be crazy. Perhaps even more so than the girl clutching a bundle of rags who in her altered mental state thought it was a baby.
I did hate to be cowed by the calendar, but that is how one dresses here. If the year is in its last or first quarter, there is a four-layer minimum. The Italian prohibition on short-pants and short sleeves is akin to our edict against white after Labor Day. Thus even into last week I found myself wearing t-shirts at outdoor cafés, soaking up anti-depressant vitamin D, while my café companions—dare I say curmudgeons?—hid under meter-thick coats. Perhaps the Italians are cold-blooded.
I am not, however, and cannot bear to be under such thick clothing without freezing temperatures. So while I’ve stowed away my most socially-unacceptable winter clothing, I’ve yet to embrace the overcoat, and still this perturbs. In town and at school people usually stick to staring, along with occasional mumbles about my lack of clothing. But my college mates are not so shy about addressing my dress. The same question comes, its tone rising as my clothing-level falls, it comes whenever I leave my room with any combination of the following: sandals, shorts, short sleeves, long sleeves without jacket, or sweatshirt without jacket. And so far that means pretty much always.
The question is: ‘Ma non hai freddo?’ ‘But aren’t you cold?’ This when I walk the hundred meters to the bathroom in my linen pants and t-shirt, when I cross the thirty outdoor meters from stairwell to cafeteria, when I linger too long outside before or after a meal.
In essence, I’m living with two hundred mothers. Each is concerned I will catch my death if I don’t wrap myself immediately in furs. Their line of questioning does partly relate to confusion—Who is this foreigner who has come to flaunt the Pavian Winter?—but it has its base in anxiety and fear. Their concern for my health is noble and somewhat comforting; I know I’m among good friends who don’t want me to fall ill and die during my sojourn in Italy. But it’s stressful living among the caring. It must be like having doctors for parents and having to fear a diagnosis and vaccination after each cough and sniffle. There are in fact many medical students who live in Ghislieri—maybe that’s the problem. At some point all the ministrations become too much.
So I began to escalate. For a few weeks I answered everyone’s questions in jocular good humor—‘Ha! I know it’s November twelve and I’m wearing a t-shirt, but I’m from Oregon so it’s okay! It’s what we do there, LOL!’—and then I decided that enough was, &co. &co. Fifty degrees and a feebly glowing dot deep in the clouds? Sandals! Forty-seven degrees and swirling Pavian mist? Sunglasses and a sheathed umbrella!
But I have to be on alert when I flout the elements. If I’ve assured everyone I’m not cold, I can’t show any weakness. No one really believes I’m not cold, and they look for clues that show I’m actually suffering beneath my unruffled exterior. If I cross my arms, I’m done. If I stick my hands in my pockets, toast. Nor can I put on my sweatshirt hood without an ‘Aha!’ that erupts from the peanut gallery.
Of course they’re right. I do often feel cold, despite my Northwest pedigree. But is that such a bad thing? Can I not feel cold? Did I lose that right when I came to the Mediterranean? I am not aiming for hypothermia—though a few times I think I came close when I was making statements with my flip-flops—but sometimes I like being cold. I like that brisk air that crawls up your sleeves and slips down your collar to skate across your skin. I like how it makes you tighten up and walk faster to keep it from claiming you. This cold forces active living.
If I dressed like the Italians—like they want me to dress—I’d be a lethargic sweaty mess, my clothes sticking to me like Tennessee Williams’ sad sack Mitch. Such heat is a sedative. Think back to the last time you sat before a crackling campfire or a roaring wood stove. Their radiating heat takes you to contentment but also beyond, so that all you want is to melt into your seat and all you can do is reach out to accept another s’more (something faultless in itself, but which becomes perilous in its role as an enabler).
Moments of cold can enliven, and they can instruct. When you feel cold you realize that nature is still out there running its course, perhaps just going through the motions at this point, but not yet forced into retirement. Nature’s millennia-old decree is that a third of the year shall be cold; we ought to adapt as we need to and as we see fit, but not to the extent that we eliminate Cold. Cold and Heat are relative. Heat and the comfort that comes with it lose their meaning in the absence of Cold. That first eighty-degree day in May is so special because of the sudden and dazzling warmth that coats your body and completes the spring thaw. And when those scorching days string themselves together, where would we be without Cold? Where, without our umbrella drinks?
I say we accept and respect the cold, I say we allow a chill from time to time, so we do not lose the magic of those first warm moments, the magic of those beautiful cold moments.◊