Returning to Rome -- Part 1

Returning to Rome after a long absence is like coming down after a particularly intense acid trip, when everything seems so crystal clear. Never mind that coming here is always such a bad idea in the first place. The down side about a place being trapped in 1603 is that you feel you are…trapped in 1603. Unless you have been born into the ruling class, or at least have an archbishop for an uncle (neither of which apply to me) it is the stupidest thing someone with no money and no job could ever do. With the Euro as it is, anything we buy in Italy has an automatic mark-up of 20% Yet there I was boarding the plane again at Newark; I was already confronted by suntanned, relaxed, stylishly dressed Italians, jabbering away in their native tongue, trying to rush the line to board the aircraft before their row was called. Don’t blame them for this, they really are compulsed to do it.

Seeing this, I felt as if I was already stepping over the threshold to a strange land, watching the bewildered airline personnel shouting that, “we are only boarding rows 25-30 and PLEASE CLEAR THE AREA, SIR” . The Italian passengers just looked perplexed and tried to inch their way up when the airline employee turned his back to roll his eyes at his buddy behind him. It is always the same on the 10:30pm flight from Newark, New Jersey to Rome. Each night, the same airport crew becomes both baffled and angered when they all rush the gate. I smiled and waited my turn (why would I want to spend an extra second on that plane?) sat down, took my tranquilizer cocktail and – seven hours and 35 minutes of hallucinogenic bliss later – woke up over Italy.

This particular trip might be sensibly considered the most ridiculous of all my attempts to join in the Italian ‘dolce vita’. Since I am neither the daughter of a mafioso or the niece of an archbishop, the carefree days of tanning, vogueing in revealing outfits and making out with gorgeous men with slicked-back hair have always eluded me. But ever since visiting Rome for the first time, I have been poisoned with the stupendously unremitting desire to join the ranks of these huge-sunglassed, pointy-shoed, incredibly sexy people. It was really an impulse more than a desire, a voice from deep within me that screamed, “Give up everything and go to the land of vino and ice cream!” It had come upon me with unexpected force, even for someone as used to forceful impulses as me. Once more, I was stepping off the plane for what would be my third attempt at doing as the Romans do; I was beset by a determination the likes of which I had never been able to muster before—MUST GET SOME GELATO BEFORE I SLEEP.

The Green Muse

Rome is heavy with spirits. For thousands of years, men and women have lived and died here in vain, and often suffered the sins of others. Wasted lives, and those killed in conflicts; blood spilled to both satisfy and fuel men’s desires. They lie thick and deep under the Sampietrini, and if you think you can’t feel them, guess what – these spirits are what drew you to Rome in the first place. Sitting in the Campo dei’ Fiori, where a friar named Bruno was burned at the stake; sitting at the feet of the statue that smiles down benignly, the reverie is fueled by the dance of the spirits around his fire.

There is a pub right off the Campo on Via dei Cappellari. Strange place. Strange things happen there. The name is something like Orusdir, but we always called it the Crusader. The interior is all geeky, dungeons and dragons kitch: trolls peeking out from behind faux bridge pillars; a movie poster of Christopher Lambert in ‘The Highlander’. A bit sardonic, but cheerful in a way with young Italian nerds playing chess alongside drunken John Cabot students. At the bar, I remember people speaking Russian. But to tell the truth, though we were there many times, there is not much else I remember because the drinks came fast and cheap. Again, more stories... But tonight I am going to tell you about the time we met the demon.

Absinthe is legal in Rome, or at least readily available. Any alcoholic drink made from something called wormwood that has reputed psychoactive properties and that baked the brains of famous authors into agonized catharsis appealed to me at once. The proper way (that is ‘the Bohemian method’) of drinking absinthe is on fire: shots are served with sugar cubes atop on a special spoon, which once ignited, is dropped into the flaming herbal cauldron before the concoction is tossed down into your swirling stomach. The brain effect comes soon after, but can’t be discerned from ordinary liquor shots until at least three to five shots are downed. Then things start to happen…

The demon, by the way, wasn’t peering down from the Crusader’s frescoed ceiling – that was clearly a painting of banshees up there and not the real thing. Instead we came upon it quite unexpectedly, after crossing the Tiber and threading our way down Via dei Penitenzieri behind Santo Spirito in Sassia, heading towards the Vatican. Here, we would make a right and continue north towards the all-night cornetto shop in viale Angelico and finally stumble home. But once we had turned the corner, we saw her in shadow blocking the narrow Borgo, cloaked in darkness and haloed by the faint glow of Saint Peter’s, with its unforgettable dome in silhouette. I shouldn’t say ‘we’ because I saw her and John saw her, but neither could confirm that the other experienced this mutual apparition until we reached home (forgetting the cornetto) and finally had the courage to un-clasp our steel-gripped hands.

She was the most terrible presence, all dark with glowing eyes that opened you like a tin sardine can. Wearing filthy rags that nevertheless flowed like an angry goddess, she stood guard with strong legs, and battered suitcases piled up around her. As we drew nearer, and realized we would have to pass her in order to reach the open Piazza San Pietro, we instinctively clasped hands, and each hair rose up on the back of my neck like a cat. She was terribly real, and she was standing in front of the largest, most important Christian church in the world. Who was she waiting for?

She let us pass, but not without sending the blood, cold and prickling, up our arched backs and pulling our leaden feet to the stones so that we could not run. She seemed eternal there with her hellish smile; had been to hell and back, and had come in wait for someone's apparent doom – luckily not ours, at least not that night.

It is easy to say, ‘It was the absinthe, guys’. And in fact, other equally bizarre things would happen after indulging the green muse. But it was also Rome, where so much has happened over the millennia, and where the past has never really drawn away from the present, leaving us with strange hints of other worlds in mists where only spirits dare

A Nibble Here...

Dear Bruno,

It’s been a while - how are the kids? Still taking your meds? I’ve been busy writing my memoirs and otherwise rewiring my brain through a steady diet of Tibetan Buddhism and ‘round-the-clock self-flagellation. But let’s face it, I’m still pretty fucked in the head. You know I’ve always been quite the gourmand – food being atop my ‘guilty pleasures’ list (wasn’t it I who uttered the now - famous phrase during one of our early sex acts, “Can we make chicken parm when we’re done?”)

Of course, now that I’m living in Italy my appetites have become slightly more sophisticated (I being from the generation who lost its virginity to the amorous background music of Super Mario Bros), if only to include mortadella atop my list of aphrodisiacs. But I’ve even heard that back in New York, pig fat has become all the rage and meat-butchering sex parties are ultra-hip – what’s this world coming to?

So why am I writing to you about all this? Well, something interesting happened to me last Sunday at lunch, which reminded me of you:

A group of us was invited to lunch at an agriturismo in the country by a young Sicilian grad-student in our yoga class. It was one of those organic farms out near the seacoast where they still butcher their own meat (and don’t find it sexy), make their own ravioli, etc. This place was highly exciting because, as our native friend explained, they have also amassed an excellent collection of artisanal cheeses from all over Italy, with great regional wines to match.

You know I am not much of a drinker, but I drained everything that was put in front of me, becoming progressively more like a participant in a frenzied Bacchanalia with each heady glass. Given my love of cheese, I decided to forgo the usual pastas and meats, to concentrate on the various tastes, textures and terroirs of the formaggi del giorno. Our host, the archetypal Sicilian academic with a serious five-o’clock shadow and even more serious pale-gray eyes was gaily pleased with my decision and gave me a mini-lecture on the historical context of each cheese as it passed my lips.

Somehow, I became lost in all this, but can recall clearly the tangy softness of the taleggio, the grotty, crumbly fossa, the clarity and warmness of the cacciocavallo (made on premises, I was told), the out-of-this-world cocaine-like high of the tartuffata and finally being driven quite mad with passion for another Tuscan cheese whose name I missed but it came drizzled with the best acacia honey. You can imagine that with all the wine, I was being carried along into some other realm by the kaleidoscope of sensations and flavors that was passing before my lips.

Before long, the other companions had vanished from my consciousness, lost as they all were in their collective orgy of buccatini and maialino, and I found myself (perceptually) alone with our Sicilian host, locked into the surreal world of the ratty wine-stained table cloth, the old television in the corner blaring soccer, the ubiquitous black crucifixes on the wall, and the cheese. At some point, the bottom fell out and I realized I had left the world of reason that I’d tried so poignantly to arrange – it was the exact moment I laid eyes on the dreamy burrata Pugliese, wrapped as it was so primitive in its aesthetic-looking water reeds, its soft creaminess literally pouring out and surrounding me.

His eyes locked with mine and they seemed to contain infinite worlds – of madness, of mystery, and above all, of cheese. I understood that his lectures had been cleverly woven to seduce me; the man had read me like a book. There is nothing like a description of a piquant pecorino to get my juices flowing. There was no time for coffee and gorgonzola (pity that). With his heavy hand around my waist, we were away from the table, the room, the restaurant, like a fairy tale, and magically transported to a back room (which he seemed to locate almost telepathically) with a small divan, a hard floor, and some mouse-bitten ends of parmigiano in a corner.

There was no request that I would not have obliged that day with that swarthy, yoga-toned, cheese-loving stranger. But I have to tell you (and certainly you have already guessed this) that the sex was disappointingly boring, forced and showy – lacking any of that masterly smooth spontaneity that he had shown in front of the cheese.

Fortunately, there was one small consolation – the rotund padrona di casa waved me into her kitchen afterward and let me taste some of her fresh ricotta di pecora with a little cinnamon and sugar. It was comfort food, and in retrospect I am sure she was trying to comfort me.
Perhaps she knew all too well…

Bruno, I tell you all this because in all your poetic madness, you always knew what I suspected and have now confirmed: for sheer pleasure, nothing beats a good cheese. Creamy or sharp, not only does cheese provide rich and varied sensory stimulation, but that stimulation is reliable. Cheese takes its time with you – it doesn’t give out its flavor all at once or sadistically hold back – it’s a truly organic experience wrought by months of bacterial alchemy. It is not egotistical; it has no preconceived notion about the experience it provokes. It is just pure flavor – only the bite and softness it was born with. And these are enough.

All the inner depths of the universe explored by my bearded, far-away eyed Sicilian, and all the total beauty he has undoubtedly experienced, did not free him from the need to impose his damn macho, over-romanticized notions on my quivering, expectant body. He will never learn. But at least he gave me this day; allowed me to step outside my rigid world of made-to-order beauty and pre-fab pleasure – into the unexpected. I was, in short, engorged by cheese, in cheese and for cheese. And I only wish you had been there to laugh at me and marvel at the absurdity of our existence.

Venice Lido - Art Noveau Grandeur Away From Italy's Tourist Hordes

Venice Lido - Art Noveau Grandeur Away From Italy's Tourist Hordes

Board Meeting: 3:42 p.m. Friday. early September.

What was she doing in there with all those corpses? Just needed to climb out a window in consciousness and into another time. Wanted to climb into a moment that has passed, yet suspended forever three levels down in the base of her brain. Always spinning, never still. It was a time of immense sadness; but sadness is a heavy kind of joy. All the feelings of a lifetime compounded into this one moment: crossing the highlands in the night sky. Immobilized. Frozen back there. Wide awake while the other passengers dozed, haunted by the sad sweet music of their driver’s choice. The driver – he knew that she was awake but intimated that he was driving alone, self conscious as to appear unaware, he seemed to keep one eye on the narrow road – dash, dash, dash – and the other slightly outside his field of vision, out of perspective, somewhere in the midst of these strange Philistine love songs. All the way back they rode through the silence, she never taking her eyes off the driver’s finite silhouette and he never once letting them wander.

But he knew. Or seemed to know. She thought that somewhere along the road some awareness had passed between. Whatever had brought them out into this lonely night had marked them – kept their minds wandering – in this tiny old rattlebox in a very unusual time and place. None tried to put his finger on it; too engulfed in the intensity of their individual experiences to try and make any sense out of a shared vision. But she saw it trapped in the torpid outlines of the others’ sleeping faces flopped to each side – were they only pretending as to avoid confusion? But some movement of the divine stirred her to sit up ramrod strait and take up her cross, to follow what moved her to its logical end.

Sitting there now in a business meeting, it all seemed to have all been a dream – whatever was indicated in the calculated movements of the eyes, remaining half focused on something greater than the tiny sliver of reality within the lines of the road. Why didn’t he dare? In the end, this feeling drives us all crazy – it’s the incredible loneliness of our ultimate separation from all other forms of life. Che paura! Most of the time we can ignore it by distracting ourselves from the clarity of our existence; in time the pungency fades – call it forgetting. But there come these moments of such supreme knowing and grace when we seem to merge with the beautiful beings around us completely and seamlessly, and there is a common perception of something we can’t put our finger on. The other shoe drops. We were waiting for it, but we didn’t know.

And it is following these moments – in the minutes and days and years that stretch out the life ahead of us, that we acutely feel the absence of this wholeness: the loss, the desolation and finally the despair of our numbing singularity. We live side by side on parallel paths with millions of souls – sometimes even sharing the same bed – and never really meeting but for a few spine–tingling moments of absurd misunderstanding, brushing past each other like two marooned ships on a foggy night. Folly feels divine. It’s chilly. This acknowledgement of our limitedness and the boundaries of our physical being is never shared, though we sit side by side with the same heavy hearts, confined within our skins of deceit. Pretending to be amused.

...And of the son...

After seven years in Italy, I learned something new today, driving around town (Rome) and everywhere I seemed to go, hot guys were making the sign of the cross. It was done in a superstitious way, the way Italians do things sometimes strangely serious all the sudden – like how they used to be famous for grabbing their balls to protect them against the evil eye – just a quick, reflective benediction followed by a cursory but sweet kiss of the slightly curved tips of the fingers of the hand that crossed themselves.

Strange in itself that hot guys make the sign of the cross, but they kept doing it as I crossed up Via Vitellia, over all of Via Leone XIII and right down Via Anastasia II (well, maybe not only hot guys, but frankly those are the only ones I noticed since and I like ‘em short and swarthy Rome is chock full of them). –Ah, there it is again! One guy even crossed himself in front of a McDonalds. Then I turned off and realized I had been driving two cars behind a hearse the whole time. Just another one of those holdovers from days when faith ruled, which has lingered beautifully in this modern age of doubt and cynicism, like a cheeky great uncle who always insists on passing the maitre d’ a twenty when you can just reserve the table.

It was only a few months ago that I learned why all those hot guys (again, probably not only, but the rest aren’t worth mentioning) were giving me those keen-eyed looks. Alas, it’s not because they found me irresistible after all! One day recently, I put it together that each time I got a look like that, we were toasting glasses. Oh damn. Of course, this suddenly shattered many of the assumptions I’d been making over the years here; many of these assumptions, I had made about my self, and they were of course very fragile to begin with. It turns out that when Italians brindisi – ‘cin cin’ with their glasses – they look at each other strait in the eye, deeply, inquisitively, but revealing nothing (why this is so, I’ve no idea). But it’s not like they hand you a how-to book with millennia of traditions, superstitions and assorted cultural baggage when you enter the country; half the time, they don’t even bother to stamp your passport. So I didn’t know.

Now imagine all the hilarity that’s ensued over the past seven years owing to that failure to understand this simple communication. I kneel humbled before you – even a culture as similar to mine as this has been impossible to crack. And it becomes even stranger when you do.

Yesterday, I took my youngest child for a hearing test. The Dr was a Norse god: an affable Dutchman around my parents age, as strong and vital as a young man, but with the wisdom to say, ‘Let’s be patient here. We don’t want to hurt this little baby, so we’ll take our time’. To paraphrase, he then told me (after asking me numerous questions about our decision to live in Italy that I had taken to be ice breakers): ‘Your bad president is gone. For the sake of your children, their education and their livelihoods, it’s time to go back to the United States. There is no reason to stay here, where everything is so difficult’.

And still after all this, we don’t even know why we came. I remember our goodbye party seven years ago in New York – what was I expecting from all this? Maybe it was simply hotties making cute little signs of the cross and looking me strait in the eye as they toasted. Here, Caravaggio and all the masters of old are as alive and vital as you and I, and given to drinking strong coffee all day and copious amounts of wine throughout the evening. Next to them, we too feel strong and vital. Next to them, we are young. And strangest of all, we feel safe hidden among all these ghosts.

Post-Op

Being alive is such a drag - that’s what our newborn baby would say if only she could talk or even have a burst of cognition so complex (at this point, it’s all about digestion). And what a sham we had to perpetrate even to conceive her; this illusion of human dignity and beauty, of physical attraction. Any woman who has had a caesarean birth – or anyone at all who has been cut open under their own watchful eye, understands the reality that we are all just pieces of meat – bloody and full of spilling guts, and not at all beautiful at that except for above the thinnest, superficial layers of skin.

And yet we go on believing in our own sexuality and the allure of others’ thin sheets of skin, eyeballs, eyebrows, lips and the like, which barely conceal all the bloody gore that lies within us; flushing these realizations out of our minds for the very purpose of deceiving ourselves as to the true nature of humanity. Why? When this illusion is enough to grab us by the (proverbial) balls and erode any sense of decency we had, shattering our egos (the ego is also an illusion, but this does not make it sting any less) and leaving us in ruins. This very same illusion also causes us to, after spending our most precious, personal, intimate moments with another human being, suddenly become a stranger to that person and isolate ourselves completely from them, thus suffering the even more painful illusion that all these critical moments of attachment – of joining of souls – never even happened (indeed they didn’t, but this again does nothing to ease the pain).

After all, what are we but two especially tough pieces of meat, projecting our ideas of what a human should be onto each other. There is no way out of this double conundrum – except, except, except. Our children give us a reason to be together: we must team up to raise them, even when we feel that we have absolutely nothing in common and would rather not embrace each other’s rank, bacteria-filled, meaty bodies, we have reason at the end of the day to bunker down and hold onto each other as the universe (with all its flotsam and jetsam) flies by. And finally – most importantly – life is so filled with pain, if you really think about it, that our children’s smiles are the only things that pull us together and keep us sane amidst all the insanity.

This wasn’t supposed to be about you, my love, but it turned out to be. Perhaps because I too got caught up in the grand illusion and didn’t give you your due. You on the other hand have seen my utterly bleak humanity, the ugliness of my desires and my absurd projections, and decided to love me anyway. And sometimes, at the end of a long day, you still crouch in next to me in bed and just hold me – blood, guts and all, though I’ll never be able to figure out why.