Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra visa

This time two weeks from now we'll be spending our first night in Torino. Exactly where, I don't know. There's no one left in Italy to ask, because everyone is on vacation. Bob imagines a cartoon scenario in which we call a number beginning in +39, and a voice answers, "You have reached Italy. We're not here to take your call right now, but if you'll leave a message, we'll get back to you in September when we return from vacation."

And besides, we don't have our visas yet. I could explain the whole drawn out and nonsensical process of trying to get them, which has grown especially intense during the last two weeks, but I promise you don't want to hear the details. I'm not even sure I understand them, because they're in Italian, and besides that, they are Italian. But the upshot is that by some miracle we have an appointment on Thursday for the immigration equivalent of the Last Judgment. We'll sit on one side of a desk on Park Avenue handing over a series of notarized and apostillized documents, and a woman with a box full of rubber stamps (which clearly represent power) will either accept our application, or not. I'm thinking of taking some cookies.

That leaves us a week to get ready for the movers!

Last spring, I'd had thoughts of saying a proper goodbye to the city, perhaps visiting places we've loved for fourteen years for the last time, having long visits with friends, and even going to some of those museums and interesting stores we never got around to seeing. Now I see that this isn't going to happen. Instead, I'm living in a kind of blur, running papers down to Fed Ex, grouping things for packing, carting belongings to the thrift store, spending all my American change, eating down the pantry, calling insurance companies. I've made my last Amazon order. But I also find myself staring at people on the subway, with a sideways, New York glance. Such variety, such eccentricity! Every now and then I realize that I'm leaving, and I catch my breath. But there's too much to do to think about it very long.

And yet, this too is a part of life. It's not what I would have chosen, but it can be lived well, and it certainly calls for character; more than I have, in fact.

Detail from a Florentine fresco of Dante. The book is open to "Nel mezzo del cammin..." The people on the left are waiting in line for visas.

Last Monday I was having a bad bureaucracy day, which made me feel especially satirical. So I began imagining the famous first terza of Inferno as applied to immigration:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra visa,

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che' la diritta via era smaritta.

In the middle of the pathway of our visa

I found myself in a dark wood

the straight way lost.

Yes, this is the perfect allegory to describe our situation! We really don't know what we're doing. Without our Italian Virgil, Michele, we'd never have gotten even this far. Even the phrase written jokingly above many a bureaucrat's desk, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," comes from Inferno.

But the words of the first terza are really "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," not "visa," which isn't really even an Italian word, and that's where the truth comes in. I'm in the middle of the pathway of my life, and this rather tedious and stressful process, however annoying, is a part of that life. Today, and not tomorrow, is when I live.

And perhaps, in about two weeks (or maybe a little later, after our obligatory visit to the police station), I will emerge in another hemisphere, on what seems like Easter Sunday, to find the sky studded with stars. Or I'll start exploring my new home, at least.