You may
think that I am going to take some kind of exception to the Olympic Games event
they call Greco-Roman Wrestling. But no,
I am going to write about feet. A chancy
subject to be sure.
In his
gorgeous film Out of Africa, Sidney
Pollack has Denys Fitch Hatton remark, "Did you know that in all of
literature, there is no poem celebrating the foot. There's lips, there's eyes, hands, face,
hair, breasts, legs, arms, even the knee, but not one verse for the poor old
foot."
Karen
Blixen responds with a couplet: "Along he came and he did put, upon my
farm his lovely foot." If the
subject is good enough for Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, it’s plenty good enough for me.
Neither
is this about a fetish. Celebrated as
the foot is the annals of abnormal psychology, I am not going there
either. This is about members of my
family ridiculing, not my whole foot, but my little toes. My pinkie toes are not straight, the way
perfect little toes are supposed to be. They twist a bit, as if they are trying
to kiss the next toe over. My husband
and daughter used to point and laugh at them.
Then one
day, in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, I discovered the truth about my little
toes. They are a badge of my Greco-Roman
heritage. The gallery of ancient sculpture
in that magnificent treasure trove features many statutes on high
pedestals. As I walked through the exhibition,
in awe of the beauty of the ancient works of art, perhaps because the feet
we're at my eye level, I suddenly noticed that the Greek feet before me looked
just like mine. I went up and down the
gallery. ALL the statues—Roman and Greek—had little toes exactly like
mine.
This is
sensible genetically, since my ancestors on my father’s side were from Siracusa in Sicily, formerly the Greek
city state of Syracuse. My mother came
out of the gene pool between Rome and Naples.
Strange how, though I knew about my heritage, finding this little piece
of physical evidence strengthened the bond I already had with my forebears, way
back into history. In a way, I was them.
The blood
of ancients from some part of this world flows in all our veins. We need to remember that. Maybe it will help us not to take the present
too seriously.
Annamaria Alfieri
