Contrasts and contradictions

About a year ago, a friend visiting from South Africa pondered our move as he stood looking at the shell of our house in the early stages of renovation. “I’m trying to get my head around your life here,” he said. His words echo frequently as I do my own share of pondering our life here, full as it is with contrasts and contradictions.

We get our honey from one neighbour, eggs from another, milk from a third. Our vegetable patch is doing OK given the lack of attention it’s received, but we had a few delicious meals from our first crop of the season – the fava beans.

In between, I do research on the internet and write for my American and Irish clients. Last Saturday, I watched South Africa play Wales in a rugby international, and on Sunday I watched Rafael Nadal win the French Open. Tonight I’ll watch Italy play France in Euro 2008.

I can go days without speaking Italian. Over the past three weeks, I’ve had to dust off my improvised German for Maria’s visiting friends and family, causing my hard-wired brain untold confusion and my bumbling speech to substitute languages with reckless abandon.

I suppose it is a little more complicated than it used to be in some ways, but it most ways, it isn’t. The simplicity of it is calming, even if the pressure to make money – a greater challenge here for me than ever before – isn’t.

But I’m reminded every now and then how different my life is - not only from my old life - but also from so many people around us, the locals in particular – what constitutes a good day, what a crisis is, how I earn a living … the list goes on.

A week or so ago a particular event brought it home in a jarring, etched-in-the-memory type of way. When we went to collect our milk from the farmer across the valley, I noticed one of the cows lying on its side next to the road. Thinking this an unusual posture for a bovine, I looked closer, and noticed a long gash in its neck. The cow-hand (a woman) came over and told me that it wasn’t well (pointing to its swollen leg) and so they slashed its throat. As we watched, it was eking out its last, moaning and groaning as the life bled out of its neck.

“Mi dispiace” (I’m sorry), the woman kept saying matter-of-factly, which is pretty much how they must have come to the decision not half an hour before our arrival. And then led the cow across the road to its death gutter.

I suppose this sort of thing shouldn’t bother me, but it simply points to how different an upbringing and life I’ve had. People like me imagine life in the rolling hills of Italy to be romantic. It may be so, but it’s also real – perhaps a lot more real than I’ve ever experienced.