I’d had no contact with my ex-husband Erwin for years, nor was I curious to find out what he was up to. But when an email from his wife arrived announcing his death, I was sent scrabbling around in my file cabinet in search of a stray newspaper clipping or photo to console her with. Midway through, under a batch of tax receipts from a recent book tour I’d been saving for my accountant, I came across an old red leather travel diary documenting the “Roman Holiday” Erwin and I took after attending an Audrey Hepburn film festival at the Princeton Garden Theatre.
Our dull but friendly marriage started with a shotgun wedding (I was eight months pregnant with our son Victor) and ended sixteen years later with an amicable divorce.
We’d conveniently set up house in Princeton, where we’d both recently finished our graduate work. Erwin was twenty-seven and already a rising star in the Princeton physics department. I was twenty-three and an as-yet undiscovered poet with an MFA in Creative Writing and one slim soft-covered book that had gone out of print six weeks after publication. Now that I look back on it, marrying Erwin was my way of appending a footnote to that ephemeral poetry collection.
I was always a movie freak. I inherited it from my dad, who took me to the movies every Thursday night after work, from the time I was an infant, in a basket, to the first year of high school, when I exchanged his company for a group of equally movie crazy girlfriends who thought my dad was “cute” and wouldn’t have minded having him along, except that I was fourteen by then, and too embarrassed to be seen with him.
Audrey Hepburn was my favorite movie star. While not exactly the ingénue type, I’ve always secretly identified with her insouciant, androgynous, sexuality—a tomboy seductress in spite of herself. It was the “Audrey” film festival that propelled the idea of traveling around Rome—a metaphor in those days for everything romantically sexy and harmlessly dangerous—and promised to spike the routine banalities of marriage and parenthood. Leaving two-year-old Victor with my parents in Philly, we took off for Italy from Newark Airport on a sunny day in May. The following fragments from the diary depict my Romantic “Wanderjahre” mood of the moment—and Erwin’s laudably unsuccessful attempt to shore up our waning relationship.
May 1996
Rome:
Pensione Trinita dei Monte on Via Sistina—operated by the friendly Bruno, and his dark-eyed wife, Lucia, who greets us holding their two chubby bambinos—one under each arm. Immediately making us feel like family.
Our first-floor room’s open windows look out on shops, flower baskets, and gas lamps projecting from the buildings across the street. At the top of the street are the Spanish Steps, which lead on one side to the Borghese Gardens and on the other to the Margutta, or artist’s quarter . . . Tramped around the narrow side streets of the latter and found hidden away a dark club, Taverna d’Artista, owned by an effeminate Belgian who invited us, in courteous French, to come back after 8pm. We left with a promise to return, though we probably won’t. Conjuring literary reminiscences of Mephistopheles and Goethe’s Faust, I noticed that we were being followed by a hideous black dog. Fortunately, this hairy Mephisto soon got bored and disappeared in an alley.
Ate a cheap meal in a Trattoria on the Via Croce, Erwin complaining—from minestrone to tiramisu—about the taxi driver who’d fleeced us before recommending the place. Then, tipsy on Chianti, we made our way on foot back to the Pensione Trinita dei Monte, fell into bed, and slept until midnight. Woke up. Peed. Went back to bed and passed out again until morning.
Great little breakfast, served in our room by the brown-eyed Lucia. Erwin commenting that it was worth far more than the $15.80 we were billed for. Praise be!
Taxis no longer an option. Not with Erwin holding our lira in his tight, stingy fist! So it’s off to the Vatican on the #62 Bus. Thanks to some very helpful Romans who point out that we’re traveling in the opposite direction, we eventually find our way into the massive crowds and are, literally, pushed toward the entrance.
Noted the following en route to, and inside, the Papal Palace:
- Prevalence of tacky souvenir shops
- Saint Peter’s Square ringed by stalls selling dime-a-dozen Michelangelo and Bernini Pieta knock-offs in a variety of media: soapstone, alabaster, bronze, and an assortment of unidentifiable materials
- A Coke machine in the stairwell at the top of Saint Peter’s dome
Despite the overall tackiness of the Square, the Michelangelo originals inside the Vatican are impressive: Christ’s marble flesh, for example, appears to be still pulsating with quickly ebbing life. Mary’s expression—the depths of maternal sorrow.
Intrepid Erwin closes in on every piece of art that catches his eye, his camera busily snapping away. Agoraphobic Charlotte follows less enthusiastically after him as he pushes through the crowds into the Sistine Chapel.
Erwin aims his camera upward. There’s God touching Adam’s finger on the ceiling. Snap. Erwin lowers the camera and pans the busy walls crowded with suspended-in-mid-air saints howling open-mouthed on their tortured way to heaven. Snap. Get that one, Erwin! Adam and Eve expelled from Eden. My favorite. He’s stopped in mid-snap by an unshaven guard shaking his head. No photos. A fine. Or even jail. We hurry past the grizzle-faced guard into a side gallery filled with paintings by the divine Raphael. There’s St. Francis’s Martyrdom, Erwin. Take another forbidden shot on the run. . . . Snap. There you go.
We enter a sunny garden filled with Greek statues: the perfect backdrop for joining Goethe and Schiller on a stroll, heatedly debating the Classical vs. Romantic elements of Goethe’s “Iphigenia.” Take a picture of me in front of the Apollo Belvedere, will you, Erwin. Snap. Good job!
In one of the less tacky souvenir shops, I buy a small statue of the Pope for my mother, making a mental note to call her and ask how Victor’s doing. Erwin buys us a paper cone of cherries from a street vendor, and we eat them on our way back to the Via Sistina. In a little greengrocer’s shop on the corner, we buy a rope bag and fill it with bread and cheese and a jar of green olives and two bottles of sparkling water. Don’t know if we’re allowed to, but we stuff our comestibles into the patrone’s personal icebox in the kitchen on the first floor of the pensione.
Observations about Italian men:
Escorted or not, you’re in their sights, if you’re a halfway attractive woman. Hell, even if you’re not, they’ll send flattering glances your way. The bolder, younger ones accompany their appreciation with little chirping sounds. That’s on the street. The more respectable men you meet in places like the artist’s hangout Regli de Amici are more subtly appreciative. A case in point: Italo, an elderly retired architect who lived through the war (he was ten when the hated SS appeared in Rome.) We listen to him describe his terrible experiences, in fractured English. There’s an awkward silence. Breaking it, Italo offers to take us, in his little Fiat, on an architectural tour of Rome at night. We start at the Trevi Fountain and end at the Janiculum for its spectacular view of Rome. But not before tasting what Italo promises is “the best gelato in Rome”—which turns out not to be that great, but which we pretend is the best we’ve ever tasted, because he’s just driven us around town and insisted on paying for the gelato.
Italo drops us off at our pensione, and I think I am a little in love with him. (Which leads me to question whether this travel diary might be turning from Goethe’s “Wanderjahre” into my own overheated version of Henry James’s “The Italian Hours”.)
Fortified by another great pensione breakfast—nothing fancy, but deliciously fresh: orange juice, Lucia’s just-baked buttered rolls, and jumbo-sized cups of frothy cappuccino—we head, by bus, for the Catacombs of Saint Callisto on the Appia Antica. The bus driver stops and leaves us off to wander along a stretch of farmland through the campus of a boys’ religious school, where four handsome blonde priests are playing volleyball, then take a path bordered by tall poplar trees leading to a little garden covering the Catacombs. Following the guidebook, we descend a staircase into the chilly tombs of the ancient Christians, the walls crammed with bas-relief fish, anchors, and palms. Niched statuettes of Christ in the form of the good shepherd line the flat spaces between the carved bas-reliefs. We stop at a beautiful fresco depicting The Last Supper. We move on through the damp darkness. At the end of the passage stands a Modegno statue of Saint Cecilia. Erwin, reading from our guidebook, informs me that I am standing directly on her tomb. An eerie moment, in which I feel myself becoming one with the horribly martyred girl who pledged her virginity to god and convinced her husband to do likewise before they were both beheaded by the Romans for their faith. I, the unlikely virgin, and even less likely saint, am brought to tears by her story.
Then it’s on to the Via Veneto and La Dolce Vita! Quite a contrast to the Catacombs! And quite a disappointment! No glamorous Fellini characters to be seen anywhere, just a bunch of Italians of no particular caste clumped at tiny tables in overpriced cafés gossiping about passersby who stop for a quick insincere greeting and blow air kisses before moving on to the next café and the next round of faked excitement.
Taverna D’Artista. This place does not disappoint. I dance for three hours with an assortment of bearded Italians, a Spaniard, and an African in a dashiki named Aldo. Erwin, of course, doesn’t dance. He watches. Aims his camera at me. And snaps. Aldo drives us back to our pension in his metallic green Lancia. Then calls the next day, suggesting he and I meet sans Erwin. Further shades of Henry James? Or is it Henry Miller I’m channeling here? Dare I venture into yet another novel of infidelity—on foreign soil this time? I am tempted, but resist, inviting Aldo to join us instead at the Borghese Gardens that afternoon, which he gracefully declines. Never to be heard from again.
Nevertheless encouraged by my newfound sexual attractiveness, I decide to test it out on Erwin. Our first attempt at lovemaking starts out well enough, but the second results in a cry of physical disgust on my part and frustrated withdrawal on Erwin’s. It occurs to me that I’ve unleashed too much passion for him to absorb all at once; that I’ll have to put the brakes on until his faltering libido kicks in. I read once that some men (though not many) are turned off by sexually demanding women. Erwin definitely falls into that category. But that never stopped me from pursuing sex on a more regular basis than he seemed inclined to accommodate. (I am half Italian, after all!)
Martyred later that night by a dreadful attack of the runs (punishment for my voracious sexuality—not to mention my adulterous inclinations?) I lie in bed with my knees to my chest between trips to the toilet musing on the disparity between Saint Cecilia and me regarding virginity, god, or, for that matter, husbands.
My stomach is still wonky the next day, and I’m loaded with anti-diarrhea pills as we leave Rome for Florence by train in—at Erwin’s insistence—a stuffy second-class compartment filled with sausage-chomping soccer fans. Queasy throughout the long, bumpy ride of rising nausea, I stumble off the train to the sound of church bells. Erwin goes to fetch our luggage, bit by bit, as it turns out, for there are mix-ups between our lookalike bags and those of another American couple. I sit on the one retrieved bag swooning with nausea while Erwin arranges for rooms at a place ominously called Hotel California. From which, feeling as sick as I am, I am sure I will never check out. At last seated in a cab—Erwin’s one concession to my doubled-over condition—I lift my head to steal a glimpse of the Duomo’s golden Ghiberti Doors. That does it! “Mala! Stop!” I cry out. And with Erwin reaching across me to open the door, I stumble out of the taxi into the street, spewing the last two days of delicious Italian meals onto the curb in front of Italy’s most magnificent cathedral. Then it’s quickly back into the cab and on to the Hotel California, which is less of a hotel than an ancient pensione run by a hulking, as yet unnamed female who carries our bags up the stairs, two-at-a-time, without so much as breaking a sweat.
I charge through the door into our room, head directly for the bed, and, still clothed and reeking of vomit, throw myself down on the snowy goose feather duvet . . .
The hulking female, Sylvia, is the owner of the Hotel California. She runs it by herself—in toto—as receptionist, cook, bellhop, and, to my great good fortune, compounder of natural remedies, and dispenser of the kind of grandmotherly kindness I never got from either of mine. Thanks to Sylvia’s early morning ministrations, I am well enough the to take a walk. It’s Sunday, and the stalls lining the Ponte Vecchio are closed. A thunderclap, and it starts to rain. We have no umbrella, so we duck into an alleyway and follow the musical strains of a flute and guitar into a medieval cell that turns out to be a trattoria packed with diners. Still shaky, I sit next to Erwin at the zinc bar and watch him put away a small pizza and two glasses of red wine, until the rain stops. We walk a little further from the bridge until we hit an open market with stalls featuring an odd combination of silver, leather goods, sweaters, and bundled straw. Making up for the misery of the past two days, Erwin opens his wallet, hands me his credit card, and says, “Here, buy yourself something nice.” I splurge on two handmade sweaters, one burgundy and one black, and a caramel kidskin-covered notebook. Erwin, who’s walked on a few steps, returns and presents me with a bottle of lemonade. He asks if I’m feeling well enough to watch the movie Sylvia’s showing at the California’s little basement art theatre. Surprisingly, I’m not only feeling well enough to go to the movies, I’m also hungry!
The diary abruptly ends here. I have no recollection of anything that happened afterward on that trip. Except that it was the one and only time Erwin and I traveled abroad together. After that, I took off on my own. To visit my sister at her ashram in India, where I picked up an intestinal parasite and had to take Flagyl for a year. To Jordan and the West Bank, to write a piece on honor killings for a feminist magazine. And on from there to Tunisia, well before the Arab Spring, where a ferocious, pock-marked woman in combat fatigues and a black beret, pointing a Kalashnikov in my face, accused me of being an Israeli spy and demanded I surrender my passport, until her male superior convinced her otherwise and let me through Customs. But not before laying to waste my notes and ruining any chance of seeing my honor killings article published.
Oh, and I’ve long given up identifying with Audrey Hepburn. She was tall and dark and skinny. I’m barely five-foot three and have what used to be called “dirty blond” hair. And when I’m not living a self-created movie version of my life—which, as I age, is too often the case—I incline toward plump. I don’t look in the least like Audrey—never did.
