American friend Maria and her husband, Giulio. Maria thinks that in a civilized society
one should be able to rely on such things as the post office delivering one's mail in a
prompt manner, but Giulio begs to differ. He submits that the post office belongs not toman, but to the fates, and that delivery of mail is not something anybody can guarantee.
Maria, annoyed, says this is only further evidence of the Protestant-Catholic divide. This
divide is best proven, she says, by the fact that Italians--including her own husband--can
never make plans for the future, not even a week in advance. If you ask a Protestant from
the American Midwest to commit to a dinner date next week, that Protestant, believing
that she is the captain of her own destiny, will say, "Thursday night works fine for me."
But if you ask a Catholic from Calabria to make the same commitment, he will only
shrug, turn his eyes to God, and ask, "How can any of us know whether we will be free
for dinner next Thursday night, given that everything is in God's hands and none of us
can know our fate?"
Still, I go to the post office a few times to try to track down my box, to no avail. The
Roman postal employee is not at all happy to have her phone call to her boyfriend
interrupted by my presence. And my Italian--which has been getting better,
honestly--fails me in such stressful circumstances. As I try to speak logically about my
missing box of books, the woman looks at me like I'm blowing spit bubbles.
"Maybe it will be here next week?" I ask her in Italian.
She shrugs: "Magari."
Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between "hopefully" and
"in your dreams, sucker."
Ah, maybe it's for the best. I can't even remember now what books I'd packed in the box
in the first place. Surely it was some stuff I thought I should study, if I were to truly
understand Italy. I'd packed that box full of all sorts of due-diligence research material
about Rome that just seems unimportant now that I'm here. I think I even loaded the
complete unabridged text of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire into that box. Maybe I'm happier without it, after all. Given that life is so short,
do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward
Gibbon?
27272727
I met a young Australian girl last week who was backpacking through Europe for the first
time in her life. I gave her directions to the train station. She was heading up to Slovenia,
just to check it out. When I heard her plans, I was stricken with such a dumb spasm of
jealousy, thinking, I want to go to Slovenia! How come I never get to travel anywhere?
Now, to the innocent eye it might appear that I already am traveling. And longing to
travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness. It's kind of
like fantasizing about having sex with your favorite movie star while you're having sex
with your other favorite movie star. But the fact that this girl asked directions from me(clearly, in her mind, a civilian) suggests that I am not technically traveling in Rome, but
living here. However temporary it may be, I am a civilian. When I ran into the girl, in fact,
I was just on my way to pay my electricity bill, which is not something travelers worry
about. Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally
different energies, and something about meeting this Australian girl on her way to
Slovenia just gave me such a jones to hit the road.
And that's why I called my friend Sofie and said, "Let's go down to Naples for the day
and eat some pizza!"
Immediately, just a few hours later, we are on the train, and then--like magic--we are
there. I instantly love Naples. Wild, raucous, noisy, dirty, balls-out Naples. An anthill
inside a rabbit warren, with all the exoticism of a Middle Eastern bazaar and a touch of
New Orleans voodoo. A tripped-out, dangerous and cheerful nuthouse. My friend Wade
came to Naples in the 1970s and was mugged . . . in a museum. The city is all decorated
with the laundry that hangs from every window and dangles across every street;
everybody's fresh-washed undershirts and brassieres flapping in the wind like Tibetan
prayer flags. There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and
mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on
a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn't have at least one
crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity
below.
The people here are so insanely psyched to be from Naples, and why shouldn't they be?
This is a city that gave the world pizza and ice cream. The Neapolitan women in
particular are such a gang of tough-voiced, loud-mouthed, generous, nosy dames, all
bossy and annoyed and right up in your face and just trying to friggin' help you for
chrissake, you dope-- why they gotta do everything around here? The accent in Naples is
like a friendly cuff on the ear. It's like walking through a city of short-order cooks,
everybody hollering at the same time. They still have their own dialect here, and an
ever-changing liquid dictionary of local slang, but somehow I find that the Neapolitans
are the easiest people for me to understand in Italy. Why? Because they want you to
understand, damn it. They talk loud and emphatically, and if you can't understand what
they're actually saying out of their mouths, you can usually pick up the inference from the
gesture. Like that punk little grammar-school girl on the back of her older cousin's
motorbike, who flipped me the finger and a charming smile as she drove by, just to make
me understand, "Hey, no hard feelings, lady. But I'm only seven, and I can already tell
you're a complete moron, but that's cool--I think you're halfway OK despite yourself and
I kinda like your dumb-ass face. We both know you would love to be me, but sorry--you
can't. Anyhow, here's my middle finger, enjoy your stay in Naples, and ciao!"
As in every public space in Italy, there are always boys, teenagers and grown men
playing soccer, but here in Naples there's something extra, too. For instance, today I
found kids--I mean, a group of eight-year-old boys--who had gathered up some old
chicken crates to create makeshift chairs and a table, and they were playing poker in the
piazza with such intensity I feared one of them might get shot.
Giovanni and Dario, my Tandem Exchange twins, are originally from Naples. I cannot
picture it. I cannot imagine shy, studious, sympathetic Giovanni as a young boy amongst
this--and I don't use the word lightly--mob. But he is Neapolitan, no question about it,
because before I left Rome he gave me the name of a pizzeria in Naples that I had to try,because, Giovanni informed me, it sold the best pizza in Naples. I found this a wildly
exciting prospect, given that the best pizza in Italy is from Naples, and the best pizza in
the world is from Italy, which means that this pizzeria must offer . . . I'm almost too
superstitious to say it . . . the best pizza in the world? Giovanni passed along the name of
the place with such seriousness and intensity, I almost felt I was being inducted into a
secret society. He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said, in gravest
confidence, "Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double
mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and
tell me that you did."
So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just
ordered--one for each of us--are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in
fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in
return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is
practically in tears over hers, she's having a metaphysical crisis about it, she's begging me,
"Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother
eating food at all in Stockholm?"
Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one nonstop oven. It's
about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in the rain, don't even worry about it,
just go. You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes they run out of
dough, which will break your heart. By 1:00 PM, the streets outside the pizzeria have
become jammed with Neapolitans trying to get into the place, shoving for access like
they're trying to get space on a lifeboat. There's not a menu. They have only two varieties
of pizza here--regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California
olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my
meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It's
soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two
choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy.
How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy?
Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On
top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the
fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal
somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one
shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to
everyone around her. It's technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to
take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like
topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it.
The guys who make this miracle happen are shoveling the pizzas in and out of the
wood-burning oven, looking for all the world like the boilermen in the belly of a great
ship who shovel coal into the raging furnaces. Their sleeves are rolled up over their
sweaty forearms, their faces red with exertion, one eye squinted against the heat of the
fire and a cigarette dangling from the lips. Sofie and I each order another pie--another
whole pizza each--and Sofie tries to pull herself together, but really, the pizza is so good
we can barely cope.
A word about my body. I am gaining weight every day, of course. I am doing rude things
to my body here in Italy, taking in such ghastly amounts of cheese and pasta and bread
and wine and chocolate and pizza dough. (Elsewhere in Naples, I'd been told, you canactually get something called chocolate pizza. What kind of nonsense is that? I mean,
later I did go find some, and it's delicious, but honestly-- chocolate pizza?) I'm not
exercising, I'm not eating enough fiber, I'm not taking any vitamins. In my real life, I
have been known to eat organic goat's milk yoghurt sprinkled with wheat germ for
breakfast. My real-life days are long gone. Back in America, my friend Susan is telling
people I'm on a "No Carb Left Behind" tour. But my body is being such a good sport
about all this. My body is turning a blind eye to my misdoings and my overindulgences,
as if to say, "OK, kid, live it up, I recognize that this is just temporary. Let me know
when your little experiment with pure pleasure is over, and I'll see what I can do about
damage control."
Still, when I look at myself in the mirror of the best pizzeria in Naples, I see a bright-eyed,
clear-skinned, happy and healthy face. I haven't seen a face like that on me for a long
time.
"Thank you," I whisper. Then Sofie and I run out in the rain to look for pastries.
28282828
It is this happiness, I suppose (which is really a few months old by now), that gets me to
thinking upon my return to Rome that I need to do something about David. That maybe
it's time for us to end our story forever. We were already separated, that was official, but
there was still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday (maybe after my travels,
maybe after a year apart) we could give things another try. We loved each other. That
was never the question. It's just that we couldn't figure out how to stop making each other
desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable.
Last spring David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest: "What if
we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway?
What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever
have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could
spend our lives together--in misery, but happy to not be apart."
Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten
months giving that offer serious consideration.
The other alternative in the backs of our minds, of course, was that one of us might
change. He might become more open and affectionate, not withholding himself from
anyone who loves him on the fear that she will eat his soul. Or I might learn how to . . .
stop trying to eat his soul.
So many times I had wished with David that I could behave more like my mother does inher marriage--independent, strong, self-sufficient. A self-feeder. Able to exist without
regular doses of romance or flattery from my solitary farmer of a father. Able to
cheerfully plant gardens of daisies among the inexplicable stone walls of silence that my
dad sometimes builds up around himself. My dad is quite simply my favorite person in
the world, but he is a bit of an odd case. An ex-boyfriend of mine once described him this
way: "Your father only has one foot on this earth. And really, really long legs . . ."
What I grew up watching in my household was a mother who would receive her
husband's love and affection whenever he thought to offer it, but would then step aside
and take care of herself whenever he drifted off into his own peculiar universe of
