and couldn't read yet, but was dying to learn. I remember sitting in the waiting room of a
doctor's office with my mother, holding a Good Housekeeping magazine in front of my
face, turning the pages slowly, staring at the text, and hoping the grown-ups in the
waiting room would think I was actually reading. I haven't felt so starved for
comprehension since then. I found some works by American poets in that bookstore, withthe original English version printed on one side of the page and the Italian translation on
the other. I bought a volume by Robert Lowell, another by Louise Gluck.
There are spontaneous conversation classes everywhere. Today, I was sitting on a park
bench when a tiny old woman in a black dress came over, roosted down beside me and
started bossing me around about something. I shook my head, muted and confused. I
apologized, saying in very nice Italian, "I'm sorry, but I don't speak Italian," and she
looked like she would've smacked me with a wooden spoon, if she'd had one. She insisted:
"You do understand!" (Interestingly, she was correct. That sentence, I did understand.)
Now she wanted to know where I was from. I told her I was from New York, and asked
where she was from. Duh--she was from Rome. Hearing this, I clapped my hands like a
baby. Ah, Rome! Beautiful Rome! I love Rome! Pretty Rome! She listened to my primitive
rhapsodies with skepticism. Then she got down to it and asked me if I was married. I told
her I was divorced. This was the first time I'd said it to anyone, and here I was, saying it
in Italian. Of course she demanded, "Perche?" Well . . . "why" is a hard question to
answer in any language. I stammered, then finally came up with "L'abbiamo rotto" (We
broke it).
She nodded, stood up, walked up the street to her bus stop, got on her bus and did not
even turn around to look at me again. Was she mad at me? Strangely, I waited for her on
that park bench for twenty minutes, thinking against reason that she might come back and
continue our conversation, but she never returned. Her name was Celeste, pronounced
with a sharp ch, as in cello.
Later in the day, I found a library. Dear me, how I love a library. Because we are in
Rome, this library is a beautiful old thing, and within it there is a courtyard garden which
you'd never have guessed existed if you'd only looked at the place from the street. The
garden is a perfect square, dotted with orange trees and, in the center, a fountain. This
fountain was going to be a contender for my favorite in Rome, I could tell immediately,
though it was unlike any I'd seen so far. It was not carved of imperial marble, for starters.
This was a small green, mossy, organic fountain. It was like a shaggy, leaking bush of
ferns. (It looked, actually, exactly like the wild foliage growing out of the head of that
praying figure which the old medicine man in Indonesia had drawn for me.) The water
shot up out of the center of this flowering shrub, then rained back down on the leaves,
making a melancholy, lovely sound throughout the whole courtyard.
I found a seat under an orange tree and opened one of the poetry books I'd purchased
yesterday. Louise Gluck. I read the first poem in Italian, then in English, and stopped
short at this line:
Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana . . .
"From the center of my life, there came a great fountain . . ."
I set the book down in my lap, shaking with relief.
13131313Truthfully, I'm not the best traveler in the world.
I know this because I've traveled a lot and I've met people who are great at it. Real
naturals. I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of
water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages
where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand
down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office.
People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal
wherever they go--in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly
Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can
sometimes pass for Arab . . .
I don't have these qualities. First off, I don't blend. Tall and blond and pink-complexioned,
I am less a chameleon than a flamingo. Everywhere I go but Dusseldorf, I stand out
garishly. When I was in China, women used to come up to me on the street and point me
out to their children as though I were some escaped zoo animal. And their children--who
had never seen anything quite like this pink-faced yellow-headed phantom person--would
often burst into tears at the sight of me. I really hated that about China.
I'm bad (or, rather, lazy) at researching a place before I travel, tending just to show up
and see what happens. When you travel this way, what typically "happens" is that you
end up spending a lot of time standing in the middle of the train station feeling confused,
or dropping way too much money on hotels because you don't know better. My shaky
sense of direction and geography means I have explored six continents in my life with
only the vaguest idea of where I am at any given time. Aside from my cockeyed internal
compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I
have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent
invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know--that
super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there,
anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of a riot in Jakarta. Oh, no. When I don't know
what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I
look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a
transparent transmitter of my every thought. As David once put it, "You have the
opposite of poker face. You have, like . . . miniature golf face."
And, oh, the woes that traveling has inflicted on my digestive tract! I don't really want to
open that (forgive the expression) can of worms, but suffice it to say I've experienced
every extreme of digestive emergency. In Lebanon I became so explosively ill one night
that I could only imagine I'd somehow contracted a Middle Eastern version of the Ebola
virus. In Hungary, I suffered from an entirely different kind of bowel affliction, which
changed forever the way I feel about the term "Soviet Bloc." But I have other bodily
weaknesses, too. My back gave out on my first day traveling in Africa, I was the only
member of my party to emerge from the jungles of Venezuela with infected spider bites,
and I ask you--I beg of you!--who gets sunburned in Stockholm?
Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, eversince I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting
money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for
travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel
the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn
baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine.
Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to--I just don't care.
Anyway, for a flamingo, I'm not completely helpless out there in the world. I have my
own set of survival techniques. I am patient. I know how to pack light. I'm a fearless eater.
But my one mighty travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make
friends with the dead. I once made friends with a war criminal in Serbia, and he invited
me to go on a mountain holiday with his family. Not that I'm proud to list Serbian mass
murderers amongst my nearest and dearest (I had to befriend him for a story, and also so
he wouldn't punch me), but I'm just saying--I can do it. If there isn't anyone else around
to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock. This is
why I'm not afraid to travel to the most remote places in the world, not if there are human
beings there to meet. People asked me before I left for Italy, "Do you have friends in
Rome?" and I would just shake my head no, thinking to myself, But I will.
Mostly, you meet your friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on
a train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell. But these are chance encounters, and you
should never rely entirely on chance. For a more systematic approach, there is still the
grand old system of the "letter of introduction" (today more likely to be an e-mail),
presenting you formally to the acquaintance of an acquaintance. This is a terrific way to
meet people, if you're shameless enough to make the cold call and invite yourself over for
dinner. So before I left for Italy, I asked everyone I knew in America if they had any
friends in Rome, and I'm happy to report that I have been sent abroad with a substantial
list of Italian contacts.
Among all the nominees on my Potential New Italian Friends List, I am most intrigued to
meet a fellow named . . . brace yourself . . . Luca Spaghetti. Luca Spaghetti is a good
friend of my buddy Patrick McDevitt, whom I know from my college days. And that is
honestly his name, I swear to God, I'm not making it up. It's too crazy. I mean--just think
of it. Imagine going through life with a name like Patrick McDevitt?
Anyhow, I plan to get in touch with Luca Spaghetti just as soon as possible.
14141414
First, though, I must get settled into school. My classes begin today at the Leonardo da
Vinci Academy of Language Studies, where I will be studying Italian five days a week,
four hours a day. I'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid myclothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent
leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me.
We all have to take a test on the first day at Leonardo da Vinci, in order to be placed in
the proper level of Italian class for our abilities. When I hear this, I immediately start
hoping I don't place into a Level One class, because that would be humiliating, given that
I already took a whole entire semester of Italian at my Night School for Divorced Ladies
in New York, and that I spent the summer memorizing flash cards, and that I've already
been in Rome a week, and have been practicing the language in person, even conversing
with old grandmothers about divorce. The thing is, I don't even know how many levels
this school has, but as soon as I heard the word level, I decided that I must test into Level
Two--at least.
So it's hammering down rain today, and I show up to school early (like I always
have-- geek!) and I take the test. It's such a hard test! I can't get through even a tenth of it!
I know so much Italian, I know dozens of words in Italian, but they don't ask me anything
that I know. Then there's an oral exam, which is even worse. There's this skinny Italian
teacher interviewing me and speaking way too fast, in my opinion, and I should be doing
so much better than this but I'm nervous and making mistakes with stuff I already know
(like, why did I say Vado a scuola instead of Sono andata a scuola? I know that!).
In the end, it's OK, though. The skinny Italian teacher looks over my exam and selects
my class level: Level TWO!
Classes begin in the afternoon. So I go eat lunch (roasted endive) then saunter back to the
school and smugly walk past all those Level One students (who must be molto stupido,
really) and enter my first class. With my peers. Except that it becomes swiftly evident
that these are not my peers and that I have no business being here because Level Two is
really impossibly hard. I feel like I'm swimming, but barely. Like I'm taking in water
with every breath. The teacher, a skinny guy (why are the teachers so skinny here? I don't
trust skinny Italians), is going way too fast, skipping over whole chapters of the textbook,
saying, "You already know this, you already know that . . ." and keeping up a rapid-fire
conversation with my apparently fluent classmates. My stomach is gripped in horror and
I'm gasping for air and praying he won't call on me. Just as soon as the break comes, I run
out of that classroom on wobbling legs and I scurry all the way over to the administrative
office almost in tears, where I beg in very clear English if they could please move me
down to a Level One class. And so they do. And now I am here.
This teacher is plump and speaks slowly. This is much better.
15151515
The interesting thing about my Italian class is that nobody really needs to be there. Thereare twelve of us studying together, of all ages, from all over the world, and everybody has
come to Rome for the same reason--to study Italian just because they feel like it. Not one
of us can identify a single practical reason for being here. Nobody's boss has said to
anyone, "It is vital that you learn to speak Italian in order for us to conduct our business
overseas." Everybody, even the uptight German engineer, shares what I thought was my
own personal motive: we all want to speak Italian because we love the way it makes us
feel. A sad-faced Russian woman tells us she's treating herself to Italian lessons because
"I think I deserve something beautiful." The German engineer says, "I want Italian
because I love the dolce vita"-- the sweet life. (Only, in his stiff Germanic accent, it ends
up sounding like he said he loved "the deutsche vita"-- the German life--which I'm afraid
he's already had plenty of.)
As I will find out over the next few months, there are actually some good reasons that
Italian is the most seductively beautiful language in the world, and why I'm not the only
person who thinks so. To understand why, you have to first understand that Europe was
