I sit down at my desk to write a letter to Rome, the city of love and the death of love and love that dies trying to be born. I think of Piazza Vittorio, on the Esquiline Hill. The four plaza walls are made of apartments built during the Risorgimento, the period after Garibaldi unified Italy in the 1880s. In Roman terms, this is a new neighborhood. In my hometown in America, we have not one building as old.
In this Roman neighborhood, they buried the Emperor Caligula in the garden of a villa, no one knows quite where. He ruled only two years before he went so crazy that he made his horse a senator. The Praetorians, his own personal guards, assassinated him. The one thing you’re not allowed to do in Rome is lose your mind. I pick up my pen.
Caro Sandro:
When I left I considered myself lucky to escape. Six months later I am beginning to wonder.
Every time I visit the American supermarket with its barely-edible chicken in plastic trays, I think about going to your booth. You say, “Ciao, bellisima,” and I respond by asking for filets of chicken breast. And you smile and wield that big knife you are always holding, the one with a blade a foot long, and slice the beautiful golden chickens. Their meat is succulent and ambrosial.
As you cut them, I criticize, saying last time you left a particle of bone attached. And you point at me with the knife and reply to my son, “La tua mama ha una testa dura.” Your mother is hard-headed. Just then the children look away at a garbage truck trying to negotiate the tiny corner of the piazza, and in that moment you say, with a completely straight face, “I want to hold you. Just one time. Please. It would mean so much to me.”
You are married, I am married. But in Italy that is apparently irrelevant. It is as if people in Rome were to say, you can’t expect our lives to end just because we are married! I knew this was so when I arrived; still your propositions surprised me. You are the first and only man I have ever known to so blatantly beg me to take you home with me, having received, I believed at the time, no encouragement whatsoever.
Your entreaties sounded rude, then bizarre. I realize now you really were serious, in your way, and not just trying to assuage the boredom of standing from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. behind a glass counter in the market of Piazza Vittorio, surrounded by old Italian woman and men, Zingari (the gypsies) and the occasional foreigner, me.
I admit I liked you. But I was also going crazy; I couldn’t afford to have an affair with anyone. You could not understand, or so I believed, my struggle as I trailed along; day by day fighting back the onset of a nervous breakdown.
I went down after childbirth, into a scary country in my mind. I was worried about the baby – though I admitted she seemed well – who was five months old when we arrived in the city. The effort of getting the older children to school and cooking dinner seemed enough to push me over the edge. Every day I walked to the market, that line of stalls and vendors, the fruit seller, the hardware caravan, the flower booth. I pushed the baby in her stroller over the rough asphalt, past a thousand strangers and you.
You came so close to guessing right about me. You could see the fidgetiness in my demeanor that suggested “She might.” I didn’t tell you I was drowning, that there were times when the only good thing that happened to me all day was you saying “I love you. When are you going to change your mind?” Everything else looked black in my eyes, the statues and churches and the monumental tombs.
What would you have said if I told you that walking through the crowded grey streets threw me into a panic? Some days it seemed only God and you really knew whether I lived or died.
Looking out from my strange dark world I saw nattily dressed Romans in trench coats and sleek leather shoes walking the streets with their tiny dogs, and twenty-year-old men with black, short-cut hair riding red motorinos, a cigarette dangling from sensual lips, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses. These things were postcards, they were not real. But you, you were Rome.
I spied on you, you know. One day I saw you talking to another woman, a young beautiful one. Later, I said to you “Look, all this talk about your love for me, you say that to all the girls. You said the same thing to her.”
But you scoffed. “No, no, you are silly. She is like a daughter to me, not like you at all; you are the only one I tell these things to.”
I didn’t believe you.
I tried to avoid your stand: Impossible! If I didn’t buy chicken for a week, you would say, “Why don’t you stop? I’ve been waiting for you with my heart breaking, you just walk by!” Or, “Susan, Susan, I promise I will be only your friend. I will not talk any more of love. Only amici, I promise, please, you are killing me. Please. Please, stop and talk to me.”
So I would stop. You would smile. I would admit to myself, you were not too old or too young for me. In fact, if I am scrupulously honest you have the very look that I like – lean and quick-eyed, not too tall. But we cannot really be friends. I am a foreigner. Was I wrong about you?
And then, as I think these things, before I turn around, you say, with sudden vehemence, “I want to hold you, I want to hold you, just one time, I promise, just once.” Believe me, in all my life in the United States, I have never ever heard a pitch like this. Either you were not serious – which was what I believed – or your tireless begging was the work of a madman.
“You can’t speak to me this way!” I told you. “It’s rude, and it’s wrong!” I wondered if American women have a reputation that I am unaware of, one that encouraged your consistent prodding and pushing. American men, faced with unrequited love, tend to suffer in silence. In Italy, apparently, there is no shame in openly acting the disappointed lover.
When you said you would take me to the gelateria, I told you it was impossible for me to be seen having an ice cream with the butcher. You said, “But it’s only ice cream! With the kids! Have you no sense of adventure, no desire to enjoy your life?”
My mother visited me in Italy, and she said, “You have to find another butcher stand. You think about him too much.” That was why I started making the long detour around the flower stall, to avoid you.
But you outflanked me as I waited at the deli stall for some ricotta cheese. You crept up behind us and lured my four and six year old sons back to your poultry stand, using severed chicken feet and a soccer ball. You offered to let them keep the feet. When I called, you said to them, “No, don’t go yet, your mother will come and get you if you wait,” and pulled a ball to show them soccer juggling.
As you know I had no choice but to come back. And then you said, “Why do you never come see me? Every day, every day I hope you will come, but I saw you going in back of the flower stall to avoid me. I promise we will only be friends if you forgive me.” And I assented. Five minutes later, you said, “Has your husband come back from the assignment overseas?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Come on, I’ll close up the stall and we’ll go back to your house right now.”
“Sandro, you promised. Besides, I have the children.”
“How many rooms in your apartment? It is a big apartment, no?”
“Seven rooms, but you cannot come with me.” I wondered what would happen if you found out where I live.
“You need help carrying your things. I will only walk you to the door.”
I imagined what would happen if I let you walk with me, you, who won’t take no for an answer. I knew I must keep this romance in the market where there are other people around. “No, no,” I said. You seemed resigned, but I knew it was only for that day. Tomorrow, you would be back with more attempts. And I appreciated this so much.
I will tell you now, in case you are still curious, that our family’s apartment, our condominio, was on the fifth floor of 15 Via Principe Eugenio. Ceilings 12 feet high made the flat seem bigger than it was; shuttered double glass windows kept out street noise. Bonded, grey marble floors stretched through all the rooms; including the tiny kitchen with its sturdy gas stove. Our apartment had a portiere who swept and cleaned the courtyard and watered the plants, and an elevator, just big enough to admit the baby’s stroller.
If you had been in that apartment, you could have opened the window and seen the watermelon stand in the piazza, open all night, and the drunks, singing, weaving down the street, barely getting out of the way of the orange streetcar which whistled down the tracks and halted at the stop one block down.
In September, I told you we were leaving, going back to America. “So happy for you, but so sad for me,” you replied.
“Surely you can find another pretty girl in the market.”
You shook your head no. “I care for you so much,” you said. “For me, this is a very sad day.” And truthfully, you did look as sad as any man I’ve ever known. Perhaps you believed that with a few more months, I would break down, like the Travertine marble curbs of Piazza Vittorio, worn away by the water from the fishmongers.
A week later two minivans arrived in front of our condominio to carry the luggage, the children and the souvenirs. And we drove to the airport, the soaring wall of Piazza Vittorio, and the children’s school, and you disappeared as we drove away. Had I escaped, or left too soon? I will never know.
In America, I shop the grocery stores, I and the children, without talking to anyone, and after a few months of dangerously swinging by a thread, strange nightmares, and days when my fear was so great that I thought I might spontaneously combust, my reeling mind begins to careen back down to earth; and no longer do I feel like a puppet with tangled strings.
Paranoia is easier to deal with in the land where you were born. But in the peanut-butter-and-jelliness of my recovery, here in my home town, I sometimes think about how I have lost contact forever with Rome, which I now realize I was beginning to understand. It’s as if I was sailing on an ocean liner and panicked and jumped off and swam and swam and swam until I pulled myself ashore on an island, and then looked back and realized that I had left civilization behind.
In the city of Rome, dead love affairs are stacked on top on one another like so much marble. People try to memorialize them with books and plaques but in the end most of Rome’s love stories, like the location of the body of Caligula, are lost.
But are they really gone? As the mental fog leaves my head and I begin to think clearly again for the first time in what seems like forever, I begin to have a new idea: that our dreams are real, even as things that happen are real. When we are gone, will there be a difference between our acts and our feelings? The Bible says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
In that case we were more together than I realized.
When we are gone, buried under that ever advancing human future, perhaps what will matter is not only what we achieved or lost, but by what we dreamt and desired. If I have left Rome forever, this story is the fragment I have shored against my ruins. I come to realize that I misread you when I said you were insincere; in fact, you were possibly the most devoted lover I have ever known.
Ciao, Amore.
Susan
