the lightning and I am the thunder."
And I thought, Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I am the steel! Bring to me your
leather, take from me my lace!
But still, he has not kissed me.
I don't very often see Dario, the other twin, though he does spend a lot of his time with
Sofie. Sofie is my best friend from my language class, and she's definitely somebody
you'd want to spend your time with, too, if you were Dario. Sofie is Swedish and in her
late twenties and so damn cute you could put her on a hook and use her as bait to catch
men of all different nationalities and ages. Sofie has just taken a four-month leave of
absence from her good job in a Swedish bank, much to the horror of her family and
bewilderment of her colleagues, only because she wanted to come to Rome and learn
how to speak beautiful Italian. Every day after class, Sofie and I go sit by the Tiber,
eating our gelato and studying with each other. You can't even rightly call it "studying,"
the thing that we do. It's more like a shared relishing of the Italian language, an almost
worshipful ritual, and we're always offering each other new wonderful idioms. Like, for
instance, we just learned the other day that un'amica stretta means "a close friend." But
stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is
one you that can wear tightly, snug against your skin, and that is what my little Swedish
friend Sofie is becoming to me.
At the beginning, I liked to think that Sofie and I looked like sisters. Then we were taking
a taxi through Rome the other day and the guy driving the cab asked if Sofie was my
daughter. Now, folks--the girl is only about seven years younger than I am. My mind
went into such a spin-control mode, trying to explain away what he'd said. (For instance,
I thought, Maybe this native Roman cabdriver doesn't speak Italian very well, and meant
to ask if we were sisters.) But, no. He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh, what can
I say? I've been through a lot in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after
this divorce. But as that old country-western song out of Texas goes, "I've been screwed
and sued and tattooed, and I'm still standin' here in front of you . . ."
I've also become friends with a cool couple named Maria and Giulio, introduced to me by
my friend Anne--an American painter who lived in Rome a few years back. Maria is from
America, Giulio's from the south of Italy. He's a filmmaker, she works for an
international agricultural policy organization. He doesn't speak great English, but she
speaks fluent Italian (and also fluent French and Chinese, so that's not intimidating).
Giulio wants to learn English, and asked if he could practice conversing with me in
another Tandem Exchange. In case you're wondering why he couldn't just study English
with his American-born wife, it's because they're married and they fight too much
whenever one tries to teach anything to the other one. So Giulio and I now meet for lunch
twice a week to practice our Italian and English; a good task for two people who don't
have any history of irritating each other.
Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to
my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in
thick black magic marker) because they were having an argument and "he yells louder
than me" and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.
I think Maria is terrifically sexy, and this burst of passionate graffiti is only further
evidence of it. Interestingly, though, Giulio sees the scrawled-upon wall as a sure sign ofMaria's repression, because she wrote her curses against him in Italian, and Italian is her
second language, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose
her words. He said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger--which
she never does, because she's a good Anglo-Protestant--then she would have written all
over that wall in her native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which
makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they do blow up.
"A savage people," he diagnoses.
What I love is that we all had this conversation over a nice relaxed dinner, while looking
at the wall itself.
"More wine, honey?" asked Maria.
But my newest best friend in Italy is, of course, Luca Spaghetti. Even in Italy, by the way,
it's considered a very funny thing to have a last name like Spaghetti. I'm grateful for Luca
because he has finally allowed me to get even with my friend Brian, who was lucky
enough to have grown up next door to a Native American kid named Dennis Ha-Ha, and
therefore could always boast that he had the friend with the coolest name. Finally, I can
offer competition.
Luca also speaks perfect English and is a good eater (in Italian, una buona forchetta-- a
good fork), so he's terrific company for the hungry likes of me. He often calls in the
middle of the day to say, "Hey, I'm in your neighborhood--want to meet up for a quick
cup of coffee? Or a plate of oxtail?" We spend a lot of time in these dirty little dives in
the back streets of Rome. We like the restaurants with the fluorescent lighting and no
name listed outside. Plastic red-checkered tablecloths. Homemade limoncello liqueur.
Homemade red wine. Pasta served in unbelievable quantities by what Luca calls "little
Julius Caesars"--proud, pushy, local guys with hair on the backs of their hands and
passionately tended pompadours. I once said to Luca, "It seems to me these guys consider
themselves Romans first, Italians second and Europeans third." He corrected me.
"No--they are Romans first, Romans second and Romans third. And every one of them is
an Emperor."
Luca is a tax accountant. An Italian tax accountant, which means that he is, in his own
description, "an artist," because there are several hundred tax laws on the books in Italy
and all of them contradict each other. So filing a tax return here requires jazzlike
improvisation. I think it's funny that he's a tax accountant, because it seems like such stiff
work for such a lighthearted guy. On the other hand, Luca thinks it's funny that there's
another side of me--this Yoga side--that he's never seen. He can't imagine why I would
want to go to India--and to an Ashram, of all places!--when I could just stay in Italy all
year, which is obviously where I belong. Whenever he watches me sopping up the
leftover gravy from my plate with a hunk of bread and then licking my fingers, he says,
"What are you going to eat when you go to India?" Sometimes he calls me Gandhi, in a
most ironic tone, generally when I'm opening the second bottle of wine.
Luca has traveled a fair amount, though he claims he could never live anywhere but in
Rome, near his mother, since he is an Italian man, after all--what can he say? But it's not
just his mamma who keeps him around. He's in his early thirties, and has had the same
girlfriend since he was a teenager (the lovely Giuliana, whom Luca describes fondly and
aptly as acqua e sapone-- "soap and water" in her sweet innocence). All his friends are the
same friends he's had since childhood, and all from the same neighborhood. They watch
the soccer matches together every Sunday--either at the stadium or in a bar (if the Romanteams are playing away)--and then they all return separately to the homes where they
grew up, in order to eat the big Sunday afternoon meals cooked by their respective
mothers and grandmothers.
I wouldn't move from Rome, either, if I were Luca Spaghetti.
Luca has visited America a few times, though, and likes it. He finds New York City
fascinating but thinks that people work too hard there, though he admits they seem to
enjoy it. Whereas Romans work hard and resent it massively. What Luca Spaghetti
doesn't like is American food, which he says can be described in two words: "Amtrak
Pizza."
I was with Luca the first time I ever tried eating the intestines of a newborn lamb. This is
a Roman specialty. Food-wise, Rome is actually a pretty rough town, known for its
coarse traditional fare like guts and tongues--all the parts of the animal the rich people up
north throw away. My lamb intestines tasted OK, as long as I didn't think too much about
what they were. They were served in a heavy, buttery, savory gravy that itself was terrific,
but the intestines had a kind of . . . well . . . intestinal consistency. Kind of like liver, but
mushier. I did well with them until I started trying to think how I would describe this dish,
and I thought, It doesn't look like intestines. It actually looks like tapeworms. Then I
pushed it aside and asked for a salad.
"You don't like it?" asked Luca, who loves the stuff.
"I bet Gandhi never ate lamb intestines in his life," I said.
"He could have."
"No, he couldn't have, Luca. Gandhi was a vegetarian."
"But vegetarians can eat this," Luca insisted. "Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz.
They're just shit."
21212121
Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing here, I admit it.
While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I
was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not
my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother's
family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they'd
ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their
hobnailed boots.(My uncle calls the whole lot of them "oxen.") My father's side of the
family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad's
family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan
relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.
My own parents have a small farm, and my sister and I grew up working. We were taughtto be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and
efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse
of a mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask. We had a lot of
enjoyment in my family, a lot of laughter, but the walls were papered with to-do lists and
I never experienced or witnessed idleness, not once in my whole entire life.
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.
Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.
Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme
parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work
harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca
Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up,
showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do
in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out
and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box
and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not
exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This
is the cause of that great sad American stereotype--the overstressed executive who goes
on vacation, but who cannot relax.
I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed
so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain.
"Oh, no!" he said. "We are the masters of bel far niente."
This is a sweet expression. Bel far niente means "the beauty of doing nothing." Now
listen--Italians have traditionally always been hard workers, especially those
long-suffering laborers known as braccianti (so called because they had nothing but the
brute strength of their arms-- braccie-- to help them survive in this world). But even
against that backdrop of hard work, bel far niente has always been a cherished Italian
ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment
for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you
can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich
in order to experience this, either. There's another wonderful Italian expression: l'arte
d'arrangiarsi-- the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few
simple ingredients into a feast, or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a
talent for happiness can do this, not only the rich.
For me, though, a major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure was my ingrained sense of
Puritan guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is very American, too--the insecurity
about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits
completely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have
actually warranted a special treat. This Bud's for You! You Deserve a Break Today!
Because You're Worth It! You've Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer
thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I am gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs!
And then comes the reactionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising
campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already
know that they are entitled to enjoyment in this life. The reply in Italy to "You Deserve a
Break Today" would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That's why I'm planning on taking a
break at noon, to go over to your house and sleep with your wife.
Which is probably why, when I told my Italian friends that I'd come to their country inI walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I
