peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus
(which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on
the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the
formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert--a lovely
peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm
from the Roman sunlight. For the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it
was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of
nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a
patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers,
while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every
molecule.
Until--as often happened during those first months of travel, whenever I would feel such
happiness--my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully
in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire
life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper?
I replied aloud to him. "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business
anymore. And secondly, to answer your question . . . yes."
22222222
One obvious topic still needs to be addressed concerning my whole pursuit of pleasure
thing in Italy: What about sex?
To answer that question simply: I don't want to have any while I'm here.
To answer it more thoroughly and honestly--of course, sometimes I do desperately want
to have some, but I've decided to sit this particular game out for a while. I don't want to
get involved with anybody. Of course I do miss being kissed because I love kissing. (I
complain about this so much to Sofie that the other day she finally said in exasperation,
"For God's sake, Liz--if it gets bad enough, I'll kiss you.") But I'm not going to do
anything about it for now. When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn
your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome
to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a
scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
It's a kind of emergency life-saving policy, more than anything else. I got started early in
life with the pursuit of sexual and romantic pleasure. I barely had an adolescence before I
had my first boyfriend, and I have consistently had a boy or a man (or sometimes both) in
my life ever since I was fifteen years old. That was--oh, let's see--about nineteen years
ago, now. That's almost two solid decades I have been entwined in some kind of dramawith some kind of guy. Each overlapping the next, with never so much as a week's
breather in between. And I can't help but think that's been something of a liability on my
path to maturity.
Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that's not fair to say. To have
issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear
into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have
everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog,
my dog's money, my dog's time-- everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your
pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect
you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you
have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your
entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give
you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so
exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming
infatuated with someone else.
I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how it's always been.
Some time after I'd left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me,
"You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you're with this new
boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even
dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think
maybe you always look like your men."
Dear God, I could use a little break from this cycle, to give myself some space to
discover what I look like and talk like when I'm not trying to merge with someone. And
also, let's be honest--it might be a generous public service for me to leave intimacy alone
for a while. When I scan back on my romantic record, it doesn't look so good. It's been
one catastrophe after another. How many more different types of men can I keep trying to
love, and continue to fail? Think of it this way--if you'd had ten serious traffic accidents
in a row, wouldn't they eventually take your driver's license away? Wouldn't you kind of
want them to?
There's a final reason I'm hesitant to get involved with someone else. I still happen to be
in love with David, and I don't think that's fair to the next guy. I don't even know if David
and I are totally broken up yet. We were still hanging around each other a lot before I left
for Italy, though we hadn't slept together in a long time. But we were still admitting that
we both harbored hopes that maybe someday . . .
I don't know.
This much I do know--I'm exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of
hasty choices and chaotic passions. By the time I left for Italy, my body and my spirit
were depleted. I felt like the soil on some desperate sharecropper's farm, sorely
overworked and needing a fallow season. So that's why I've quit.
Believe me, I am conscious of the irony of going to Italy in pursuit of pleasure during a
period of self-imposed celibacy. But I do think abstinence is the right thing for me at the
moment. I was especially sure of it the night I could hear my upstairs neighbor (a very
pretty Italian girl with an amazing collection of high-heeled boots) having the longest,
loudest, flesh-smackingest, bed-thumpingest, back-breakingest session of lovemaking I'd
ever heard, in the company of the latest lucky visitor to her apartment. This slam-dance
went on for well over an hour, complete with hyperventilating sound effects and wildanimal calls. I lay there only one floor below them, alone and tired in my bed, and all I
could think was, That sounds like an awful lot of work . . .
Of course sometimes I really do become overcome with lust. I walk past an average of
about a dozen Italian men a day whom I could easily imagine in my bed. Or in theirs. Or
wherever. To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful.
More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the
same way as French women, which is to say--no detail spared in the quest for perfection.
They're like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud. The men
here, in their beauty, force me to call upon romance novel rhapsodies in order to describe
them. They are "devilishly attractive," or "cruelly handsome," or "surprisingly muscular."
However, if I may admit something not entirely flattering to myself, these Romans on the
street aren't really giving me any second looks. Or even many first looks, for that matter.
I found this kind of alarming at first. I'd been to Italy once before, back when I was
nineteen, and what I remember is being constantly harassed by men on the street. And in
the pizzerias. And at the movies. And in the Vatican. It was endless and awful. It used to
be a real liability about traveling in Italy, something that could almost even spoil your
appetite. Now, at the age of thirty-four, I am apparently invisible. Sure, sometimes a man
will speak to me in a friendly way, "You look beautiful today, signorina," but it's not all
that common and it never gets aggressive. And while it's certainly nice, of course, to not
get pawed by a disgusting stranger on the bus, one does have one's feminine pride, and
one must wonder, What has changed here? Is it me? Or is it them?
So I ask around, and everybody agrees that, yes, there's been a true shift in Italy in the
last ten to fifteen years. Maybe it's a victory of feminism, or an evolution of culture, or
the inevitable modernizing effects of having joined the European Union. Or maybe it's
just simple embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their
fathers and grandfathers. Whatever the cause, though, it seems that Italy has decided as a
society that this sort of stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer
acceptable. Not even my lovely young friend Sofie gets harassed on the streets, and those
milkmaid-looking Swedish girls used to really get the worst of it.
In conclusion--it seems Italian men have earned themselves the Most Improved Award.
Which is a relief, because for a while there I was afraid it was me. I mean, I was afraid
maybe I wasn't getting any attention because I was no longer nineteen years old and
pretty. I was afraid that maybe my friend Scott was correct last summer when he said,
"Ah, don't worry, Liz--those Italian guys won't bother you anymore. It ain't like France,
where they dig the old babes."
23232323Yesterday afternoon I went to the soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. We
were there to watch Lazio play. There are two soccer teams in Rome--Lazio and Roma.
The rivalry between the teams and their fans is immense, and can divide otherwise happy
families and peaceful neighborhoods into civil war zones. It's important that you choose
early in life whether you are a Lazio fan or a Roma fan, because this will determine, to a
large part, whom you hang out with every Sunday afternoon for the rest of time.
Luca has a group of about ten close friends who all love each other like brothers. Except
that half of them are Lazio fans and half of them are Roma fans. They can't really help it;
they were all born into families where the loyalty was already established. Luca's
grandfather (who I hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio
jersey when the boy was just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.
"We can change our wives," he said. "We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even
our religions, but we can never change our team."
By the way, the word for "fan" in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In
other words--one who is mightily fevered.
My first soccer game with Luca Spaghetti was, for me, a delirious banquet of Italian
language. I learned all sorts of new and interesting words in that stadium which they don't
teach you in school. There was an old man sitting behind me, stringing together such a
gorgeous flower-chain of curses as he screamed down at the players on the field. I don't
know all that much about soccer, but I sure didn't waste any time asking Luca inane
questions about what was going on in the game. All I kept demanding was, "Luca, what
did the guy behind me just say? What does cafone mean?" And Luca--never taking his
eyes from the field--would reply, "Asshole. It means asshole."
I would write it down. Then shut my eyes and listen to some more of the old man's rant,
which went something like:
Dai, dai, dai, Albertini, dai . . . va bene, va bene, ragazzo mio, perfetto, bravo, bravo . . .
Dai! Dai! Via! Via! Nella porta! Eccola, eccola, eccola, mio bravo ragazzo, caro mio,
eccola, eccola, ecco--AAAHHHHHHHHH!!! VAFFANCULO!!! FIGLIO DI
MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRA-DITORE! Madonna . . . Ah, Dio mio, perche,
perche, perche, questo e stupido, e una vergogna, la vergogna . . . Che casino, che
bordello . . . NON HAI UN CUORE, ALBERTINI! FAI FINTA! Guarda, non e successo
niente . . . Dai, dai, ah. . . . Molto migliore, Albertini, molto migliore, si si si, eccola,
bello, bravo, anima mia, ah, ottimo, eccola adesso . . . nella porta, nella porta,
nell--VAFFANCULO!!!!!!!
Which I can attempt to translate as:
Come on, come on, come on, Albertini, come on . . . OK, OK, my boy, perfect, brilliant,
brilliant . . . Come on! Come on! Go! Go! In the goal! There it is, there it is, there it is,
my brilliant boy, my dear, there it is, there it is, there--AHHHH! GO FUCK YOURSELF!
YOU SON OF A BITCH! SHITHEAD! ASSHOLE! TRAITOR! . . . Mother of God . . . Oh
my God, why, why, why, this is stupid, this is shameful, the shame of it . . . What amess . . . [ Author's note: Unfortunately there's no good way to translate into English the
fabulous Italian expressions che casino and che bordello, which literally mean "what a
casino," and "what a whorehouse," but essentially mean "what a friggin' mess."] . . .
YOU DON'T HAVE A HEART, ALBERTINI!!!! YOU'RE A FAKER! Look, nothing
happened . . . Come on, come on, hey, yes . . . Much better, Albertini, much better, yes yes
yes, there it is, beautiful, brilliant, oh, excellent, there it is now . . . in the goal, in the goal,
in the--FUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUU!!!
Oh, it was such an exquisite and lucky moment in my life to be sitting right in front of
this man. I loved every word out of his mouth. I wanted to lean my head back into his old
lap and let him pour his eloquent curses into my ears forever. And it wasn't just him! The
whole stadium was full of such soliloquies. At such high fervor! Whenever there was
some grave miscarriage of justice on the field, the entire stadium would rise to its feet,
every man waving his arms in outrage and cursing, as if all 20,000 of them had just been
in a traffic altercation. The Lazio players were no less dramatic than their fans, rolling on
the ground in pain like death scenes from Julius Caesar, totally playing to the back row,
