Packed the court papers detailing my conviction for fare avoidance on the TTC into the thickest book I brought abroad (Paglia) and have not touched the computer keyboard in weeks; it feels stiff and my mind empty, like the shallow stone basin we originally thought was meant for kindling fires but discovered to actually be an archaic pool in the yard of the house we are staying in now, after being at the artist’s residence for a week, trying to settle into some semblance of a routine to begin the cataloguing of his work; making him dinner, going out for walks in which he gets lost and leads us down treacherous overgrown paths.
We hold hands, ready to catch him in an inevitable unbalanced toppling. It is clear why he has not been allowed to drive and why the cataloguing of his work is so pressing since most of it lies un-dated, and his memory is going.
There was the dream I had the other night, where a deranged man was trying to kill everyone on the estate with a demonic drill. A lot of scrambling to hide, slipping by unnoticed, bated breaths, as the killer fumbled around the rooms, holding the spinning, bladed machinery. Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Melancholia.
Outside, I finally managed to wrangle it from him and stick it into the spin of a nearby water mill, crushing the drill bit into a flurry of colours and sparks that brought me to consciousness in the dark of the house we are staying in now, by a rushing brook.
There is the horse pen in the field just outside of the town we are in, a few minutes from the autostrada, where two horses, one black and the other white, roam. The black stallion shines in the sun, seeking the shade of the only tree just beyond the perimeter of the pen.
Flies buzz around, and despite the sizeable enclosed area the horses have to roam in, they stay near the tree and the bales of hay under it. The white horse has brown spots that are really more of a faded black, and his eyes are red and swollen. He kicks at the ground clumsily, breathing louder than the black one. A sign at the front of the pen reads, Il cavallo possano mordere.
I’ve been scribbling Italian words I don’t know the meanings to in the hardcover Moleskin I stuck in my pocket at one of Heathrow’s WHSmith’s. As we wandered around the enclosure, watching the horses, I wrote down ‘possano’ in purple ink from the Bic pen I got at the PlanetFitness I frequented in Montreal.
There is a red and green Italian-English dictionary I flip through to find the meaning back at the artist's house. Still, there is none for possano: posa means laying, resting–perhaps etymologically linked to posing. I understood the sign to mean ‘the horse bites’, singular, not the plural cavalli, with possano possibly being a descriptor–not il cavallo bianco, nero, but il cavallo possano.
The other night, the white horse was grazing close to the gate, huffing, bright in the night despite no moonlight. The villagers told me the moon does not come up this time of year. It rises and falls on the other side of the hill. Behind the white horse was the black one, neither laid nor resting. Are horses like fish that cannot stop swimming lest they stop breathing?
The white horse’s breathing does seem off. It kicks at the ground randomly and snorts, and those flies buzz around the swollen red eyes. Maybe possano means retarded, and one of these days, walking out of the town, the black horse will be roaming alone, for the white one will have been shot since I imagine that’s what they must do to retarded horses.
I’ve been instructed in handling a standard drive, what’s called manual in North America. Working the clutch is the real reason I’ve been brought here. It is my summer project; I am the designated driver. To practice, we take a drive with the artist’s SUV to a nearby medieval village. A Subaru SUV circa 2006 can only go 90 on the autostrada, but nobody honks in Italy; they steer around.
On the way up a steep hill, I stall the engine and apply the handbrake to avoid rolling down. The other day, I almost went off a cliff coming around a sharp bend and was told that if I did, indeed, go off, I’d probably be caught by a tree in what was described as rudimentary; men would come in a tractor or crane and hoist the car back onto the road.
A church overlooks the valley at the top of the medieval village, with red-tiled roofs, and mountains in the distance. A gold plate sign on the edge of the stone balcony informs us of a double sunset phenomenon. Twice a year, as the sun sets behind Monte Forte, it lines up with a natural arch in the summit and shines through, making it look like there are two suns on the horizon. It is an optical effect, but seeing the distant arch on the horizon, I understand how these people can believe in God.
Relying on limited horsepower to return home, after sharing half a litre of wine and having a shot of sambuca in my espresso, I return to that eternal longing for happiness. No matter how treacherous, the twists and turns of the road are designed to facilitate the mechanical efficiency of cars in the rough terrain of the Tuscan hills. My only approximation to comfort is rolling down these hills on neutral.
Driving is not a higher mental activity, like art or science–my domain of expertise has been granted, and our safe arrival is not merited with accomplishment; it is a means to an end.
I’ve not had internet since arriving, only the occasional personal hotspot from my boyfriend’s phone, sucking his 100G data plan until today when I finally managed to plug my PayPal balance into the network sourcing the modem in the house we are at now to get unlimited WiFi going so I can fact check this before publishing.
Google translating possano I discover it means ‘can’. The horse can bite, and perhaps its retardation is solely my projection.
I wanted you to ride the horse under moonlight so badly