I . . . read a magazine? It's a sad image, rather like the idea of humping up a hill all by
yourself on a bicycle-built-for-two. So Linda will provide me with company, and good
company, at that.
I met Linda (and her dreadlocks, and her piercings) in Bali almost two years ago, when I
went for that Yoga retreat. Since then, we've done a trip to Costa Rica together, too. She's
one of my favorite traveling companions, an unflappable and entertaining and
surprisingly organized little pixie in tight red crushed-velvet pants. Linda is the owner of
one of the world's more intact psyches, with an incomprehension for depression and a
self-esteem that has never even considered being anything but high. She said to me once,
while regarding herself in a mirror, "Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in
everything, but still I cannot help loving myself." She's got this ability to shut me up
when I start fretting over metaphysical questions, such as, "What is the nature of the
universe?" (Linda's reply: "My only question is: Why ask?") Linda would like to
someday grow her dreadlocks so long she could weave them into a wire-supported
structure on the top of her head "like a topiary" and maybe store a bird there. The
Balinese loved Linda. So did the Costa Ricans. When she's not taking care of her pet
lizards and ferrets, she is managing a software development team in Seattle and making
more money than any of us.
So we find each other there in Venice, and Linda frowns at our map of the city, turns it
upside down, locates our hotel, orients herself and announces with characteristic humility:
"We are the mayors of this town's ass."
Her cheer, her optimism--they in no way match this stinky, slow, sinking, mysterious,
silent, weird city. Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic
death, or to lose a loved one, or to lose the murder weapon with which the loved one was
lost in the first place. Seeing Venice, I'm grateful that I chose to live in Rome instead. I
don't think I would have gotten off the antidepressants quite so quick here. Venice is
beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really
want to live in it.
The whole town is peeling and fading like those suites of rooms that once-rich families
will barricade away in the backs of their mansions when it gets too expensive to keep the
maintenance up and it's easier to just nail the doors shut and forget about the dying
treasures on the other side--this is Venice. Greasy streams of Adriatic backwash nudge up
against the long-suffering foundations of these buildings, testing the endurance of this
fourteenth-century science fair experiment-- Hey, what if we built a city that sits in water
all the time?Venice is spooky under its grainy November skies. The city creaks and sways like a
fishing pier. Despite Linda's initial confidence that we can govern this town, we get lost
every day, and most especially at night, taking wrong turns toward dark corners that
dead-end dangerously and directly into canal water. One foggy night, we pass an old
building that seems to actually be groaning in pain. "Not to worry," chirps Linda. "That's
just Satan's hungry maw." I teach her my favorite Italian word-- attraversiamo ("let's
cross over")--and we backtrack nervously out of there.
The beautiful young Venetian woman who owns the restaurant near where we are staying
is miserable with her fate. She hates Venice. She swears that everyone who lives in
Venice regards it as a tomb. She'd fallen in love once with a Sardinian artist, who'd
promised her another world of light and sun, but had left her, instead, with three children
and no choice but to return to Venice and run the family restaurant. She is my age but
looks even older than I do, and I can't imagine the kind of man who could do that to a
woman so attractive. ("He was powerful," she says, "and I died of love in his shadow.")
Venice is conservative. The woman has had some affairs here, maybe even with some
married men, but it always ends in sorrow. The neighbors talk about her. People stop
speaking when she walks into the room. Her mother begs her to wear a wedding ring just
for appearances--saying, Darling, this is not Rome, where you can live as scandalously as
you like. Every morning when Linda and I come for breakfast and ask our sorrowful
young/old Venetian proprietress about the weather report for the day, she cocks the
fingers of her right hand like a gun, puts it to her temple, and says, "More rain."
Yet I don't get depressed here. I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking
melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that
this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy
enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I
cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years
there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my
own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind.
Anyhow, it's hard to be depressed with Linda babbling beside me, trying to get me to buy
a giant purple fur hat, and asking of the lousy dinner we ate one night, "Are these called
Mrs. Paul's Veal Sticks?" She is a firefly, this Linda. In Venice in the Middle Ages there
was once a profession for a man called a codega-- a fellow you hired to walk in front of
you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons,
bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets. This is Linda--my
temporary, special-order, travel-sized Venetian codega.
33333333I step off the train a few days later to a Rome full of hot, sunny, eternal disorder,
where--immediately upon walking out into the street--I can hear the soccer-stadium-like
cheers of a nearby manifestazione, another labor demonstration. What they are striking
about this time, my taxi driver cannot tell me, mainly because, it seems, he doesn't care. "
'Sti cazzi," he says about the strikers. (Literal translation: "These balls," or, as we might
say: "I don't give a shit.") It's nice to be back. After the staid sobriety of Venice, it's nice
to be back where I can see a man in a leopard-skin jacket walking past a pair of teenagers
making out right in the middle of the street. The city is so awake and alive, so dolled-up
and sexy in the sunshine.
I remember something that my friend Maria's husband, Giulio, said to me once. We were
sitting in an outdoor cafe, having our conversation practice, and he asked me what I
thought of Rome. I told him I really loved the place, of course, but somehow knew it was
not my city, not where I'd end up living for the rest of my life. There was something
about Rome that didn't belong to me, and I couldn't quite figure out what it was. Just as
we were talking, a helpful visual aid walked by. It was the quintessential Roman
woman--a fantastically maintained, jewelry-sodden forty-something dame wearing
four-inch heels, a tight skirt with a slit as long as your arm, and those sunglasses that look
like race cars (and probably cost as much). She was walking her little fancy dog on a
gem-studded leash, and the fur collar on her tight jacket looked as if it had been made out
of the pelt of her former little fancy dog. She was exuding an unbelievably glamorous air
of: "You will look at me, but I will refuse to look at you." It was hard to imagine she had
ever, even for ten minutes of her life, not worn mascara. This woman was in every way
the opposite of me, who dresses in a style my sister refers to as "Stevie Nicks Goes to
Yoga Class in Her Pajamas."
I pointed that woman out to Giulio, and I said, "See, Giulio-- that is a Roman woman.
Rome cannot be her city and my city, too. Only one of us really belongs here. And I think
we both know which one."
Giulio said, "Maybe you and Rome just have different words."
"What do you mean?"
He said, "Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to
learn--what is the word of the street?"
Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every
city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you
could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place,
you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that
majority thought might be--that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does
not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.
"What's Rome's word?" I asked.
"SEX," he announced.
"But isn't that a stereotype about Rome?"
"No."
"But surely there are some people in Rome thinking about other things than sex?"
Giulio insisted: "No. All of them, all day, all they are thinking about is SEX."
"Even over at the Vatican?""That's different. The Vatican isn't part of Rome. They have a different word over there.
Their word is POWER."
"You'd think it would be FAITH."
"It's POWER," he repeated. "Trust me. But the word in Rome--it's SEX."
Now if you are to believe Giulio, that little word--SEX--cobbles the streets beneath your
feet in Rome, runs through the fountains here, fills the air like traffic noise. Thinking
about it, dressing for it, seeking it, considering it, refusing it, making a sport and game
out of it--that's all anybody is doing. Which would make a bit of sense as to why, for all
its gorgeousness, Rome doesn't quite feel like my hometown. Not at this moment in my
life. Because SEX isn't my word right now. It has been at other times of my life, but it
isn't right now. Therefore, Rome's word, as it spins through the streets, just bumps up
against me and tumbles off, leaving no impact. I'm not participating in the word, so I'm
not fully living here. It's a kooky theory, impossible to prove, but I sort of like it.
Giulio asked, "What's the word in New York City?"
I thought about this for a moment, then decided. "It's a verb, of course. I think it's
ACHIEVE."
(Which is subtly but significantly different from the word in Los Angeles, I believe,
which is also a verb: SUCCEED. Later, I will share this whole theory with my Swedish
friend Sofie, and she will offer her opinion that the word on the streets of Stockholm is
CONFORM, which depresses both of us.)
I asked Giulio, "What's the word in Naples?" He knows the south of Italy well.
"FIGHT," he decides. "What was the word in your family when you were growing up?"
That one was difficult. I was trying to think of a single word that somehow combines
both FRUGAL and IRREVERENT. But Giulio was already on to the next and most
obvious question: "What's your word?"
Now that, I definitely could not answer.
And still, after a few weeks of thinking about it, I can't answer it any better now. I know
some words that it definitely isn't. It's not MARRIAGE, that's evident. It's not FAMILY
(though this was the word of the town I'd lived in for a few years with my husband, and
since I did not fit with that word, this was a big cause of my suffering). It's not
DEPRESSION anymore, thank heavens. I'm not concerned that I share Stockholm's word
of CONFORM. But I don't feel that I'm entirely inhabiting New York City's ACHIEVE
anymore, either, though that had indeed been my word all throughout my twenties. My
word might be SEEK. (Then again, let's be honest--it might just as easily be HIDE.) Over
the last months in Italy, my word has largely been PLEASURE, but that word doesn't
match every single part of me, or I wouldn't be so eager to get myself to India. My word
might be DEVOTION, though this makes me sound like more of a goody-goody than I
am and doesn't take into account how much wine I've been drinking.
I don't know the answer, and I suppose that's what this year of journeying is about.
Finding my word. But one thing I can say with all assurance--it ain't SEX.
Or so I claim, anyhow. You tell me, then, why today my feet led me almost of their own
accord to a discreet boutique off the Via Condotti, where--under the expert tutelage of the
silky young Italian shop girl--I spent a few dreamy hours (and a transcontinental airline
ticket's worth of money) buying enough lingerie to keep a sultan's consort outfitted for
1,001 nights. I bought bras of every shape and formation. I bought filmy, flimsy
camisoles and sassy bits of panty in every color of the Easter basket, and slips that camein creamy satins and hush-now-baby silks, and handmade little bits of string and things
and basically just one velvety, lacy, crazy valentine after another.
I have never owned things like this in my life. So why now? As I was walking out of the
store, hauling my cache of tissue-wrapped naughties under my arm, I suddenly thought of
the anguished demand I'd heard a Roman soccer fan yell the other night at the Lazio
game, when Lazio's star player Albertini at a critical moment had passed the ball right
into the middle of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever, totally blowing the play.
"Per chi ?" the fan had shouted in near-madness. "Per chi ?"
For WHOM ? For whom are you passing this ball, Albertini? Nobody's there!
Out on the street after my delirious hours of lingerie shopping, I remembered this line and
repeated it to myself in a whisper: "Per chi?"
For whom, Liz? For whom all this decadent sexiness? Nobody's there. I had only a few
weeks left in Italy and absolutely no intention of knocking boots with anyone. Or did I?
