My Body, The Buddhist

9 my body likes rest

9 my body likes rest I can be embraced by the very core of who I am, quite still. —Eva Karczag, dancer I received help. October 1, 1996, a driver of a black sedan, courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation, met me at Malpensa Airport. I had left Melbourne, Australia, twenty-four-and-a-half hours earlier. After fifteen months on the road, my luggage was too much to cart anymore . I was carrying performance and dance practice clothes, street and dress wear for all climates, my powerbook, printer, and needed business papers. My arrival in Italy was preceded by six weeks of teaching and performances in New Zealand and Australia. In Melbourne, I had premiered 1–2–1, a dance for twenty-four people. We worked from nine in the morning until six at night for ten days, and then gave three public performances. Every morning before nine, I was in the studio practicing my solo, Voilà, which followed 1–2–1 on the same program. Our last performance had been September 28. On October 3rd, I would start a month-long collaborative artists’ residency with Austin artist Tré Arenz at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center. I was tired. I had planned two days to wind down and empty out before starting this new project. The driver suggested we take secondary roads instead of the highway. I thought I would see farmhouses and vineyards, villages and gardens; life among the real people. But business was booming in northern Italy. Young women prostitutes stood by the side of the two-lane thoroughfare, trucks and cars whizzing by, waiting for a chump. Roadside advertising blurred my vision. Lumber, wire, steel machinery, concrete blocks, and stones lay piled or stacked ready to be formed into industrial warehouses or showrooms. My breathing, in general, Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page 49 49 Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page 50 50 : my body, the buddhist was slowed and disturbed by the foul air from car and truck exhaust and the degradation of the earth’s surface in sight everywhere. The competition for space was unyielding. I gradually froze with fatigue. Months earlier a reservation had been secured at Hotel Belvedere, a moderately priced accommodation in the town of Bellagio. Upon arrival , I learned that the man who occupied the room reserved for me had become sick the night before and I would have to stay in a flat a few doors down the street and a few flights above the local movie house. I could move back to the hotel after the man’s son came to fetch him. I traipsed up three flights of stairs to check out the appropriated flat. It was light brown. The only light came from a small, inaccessibly situated skylight. The woman at the reception desk back at the hotel tried to pressure me into this disappointing alternative. She did not share my fantasy of the restorative right setting—one that would satisfy a single woman alone on the shores of Lake Como for the first time in her life. I had imagined a small sunlit room with a little balcony. Flowers. A lake. Cappuccino. I left my bags and went into town to check the other hotels. All were booked, except for the five-star Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, situated at the tip of a peninsula on the Lago di Como. (The summer camp I went to for ten years was on Lake Como, in Pennsylvania.) They offered off-season rates. I was shown room number 265. Opposite the foot of the bed was a floor-to-ceiling window that faced north, away from town and onto the lake. Downstairs, the sitting rooms that divided the main floor were stupendously luxurious. The grounds were diverse and peaceful. The town lay at its doorstep. I stood at the desk for a half hour, one side of me pleading with the other to book the room. “You are out of your mind.” “What do you mean?” “You cannot afford this hotel.” “When will I have an opportunity like this again?” “Who do you think you are? You could live for almost a month on what you would pay for this room.” Ad nauseum. From my window, across the Lago di Como, the mountains, shrouded in fog, appeared and receded in a gray haze. On the bed was a white terrycloth bathrobe wrapped in clear plastic with the insignia of the Grand Hotel Serbelloni over...