lot of Mediterranean cultures have this kind of tradition, but in Trastevere, they really go all out with it.
The scene always begins the same way. The young man comes to his beloved’s house with a group of male friends and any number of guitars. They gather under the young woman’s window and belt out-in loud, rough, local dialect-a song with the decidedly unromantic title “Roma, nun fa’la stupida stasera!” (”Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!”) Because the young man is not, in fact, singing directly to his beloved; he doesn’t dare to. What he wants from her (her hand, her life, her body, her soul, her devotion) is so monumental that it’s too terrifying to speak the request directly. Instead, he directs his song to the entire city of Rome, shouting at Rome with an emotional urgency that is raw, crass, and insistent. With all his heart, he begs the city itself to please help him tonight in beguiling this woman into marriage.
“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” the young man sings beneath the girl’s window. “Give me some help! Take the clouds away from the face of the moon, just for us! Shine forth your most brilliant stars! Blow, you son-?of-?a-? bitch Western wind! Blow your perfumed air! Make it feel like spring!”
When the first strains of this familiar song start wafting through the neighborhood, everyone comes to their windows, and thus commences the amazing audience-?participation portion of the evening’s entertainment. All the men within earshot lean out of their apartments and shake their fists at the sky, scolding the city of Rome for not assisting the boy more actively with his marriage plea. All the men belt out in unison, “Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight! Give him some help!”
Then the young woman herself-the object of desire-comes to her window. She has a verse of the song to sing, too, but her words are critically different. When her chorus comes around, she also begs Rome not to be an idiot tonight. She also begs the city to help her. But what she is begging for is something else altogether. She is begging for the strength to refuse the offer of marriage.
“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” she implores in song. “Please put those clouds back across the moon! Hide your most brilliant stars! Stop blowing, you son-?of-?a-?bitch Western wind! Hide the perfumed air of spring! Help me to resist!”
All the women in the neighborhood lean out their apartment windows and sing along loudly with the girl, “Please, Rome-give her some help!”
It becomes a desperate duel between the men’s voices and the women’s voices. The scene becomes so pitched that it honestly starts to feel as though all the women of Trastevere are begging for their lives. Strangely, though, it feels like all the men of Trastevere are begging for their lives, too.
In the fervor of the exchange, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the end, this is just a game. From the first moment of the serenade, after all, everyone knows how the story will conclude. If the young woman has come to her window at all, if she has even glanced down at her suitor in the street, it means she has already accepted his wedding proposal. By merely engaging in her half of the spectacle, the girl has demonstrated her love. But out of some sense of pride (or perhaps out of some very justifiable sense of fear), the young woman must stall-if only to give voice to her doubts and hesitations. She must make it perfectly clear that it will take all the mighty powers of this young man’s love, combined with all the epic beauty of Rome, and all the brilliance of the starlight, and all the seduction of the full moon, and all the perfume of that son-?of-?a-?bitch Western wind before she concedes her yes.
Given what she is agreeing to, one might argue that all this spectacle and all this resistance is necessary.
In any case, that is what I’ve needed, too-a clamorous song of self-?persuasion about marriage, belted out in my own street, underneath my own window, until I could finally relax into my own acceptance. That has been the purpose of this effort all along. Forgive me, then, if, at the end of my story, I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach comforting conclusions about matrimony. I need those straws; I need that comfort. Certainly I have needed Ferdinand Mount’s reassuring theory that, if you look at marriage in a certain light, you can make a case for the institution being intrinsically subversive. I received that theory as a great and soothing balm. Now, maybe that theory doesn’t work for you personally. Maybe you don’t need it the way I needed it. Maybe Mount’s thesis isn’t even entirely historically accurate. Nonetheless, I will take it. Like a good almost-?Brazilian, I will take this one verse of the persuasion song and make it my own-not only because it heartens me, but because it actually also excites me.
In so doing, I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony’s long and curious history. So that is where I will park myself-right there in this place of quiet subversion, in full remembrance of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice love.
Alone in that corner with my sweetheart at last, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NOTHING NEW HERE EXCEPT MY MARRUING, WHICH TO ME IS A MATTER OF PROFOUND WONDER.-Abraham Lincoln, in an 1842 letter to Samuel Marshall
Things moved very quickly after that.
By December 2006, Felipe still hadn’t secured his immigration papers, but we sensed that victory was coming. Actually, we decided that victory was coming and so we went ahead and did the one specific thing the Department of Homeland Security expressly tells you not to do if you are waiting for a partner’s immigration visa to be cleared: We made plans.
The first priority? We needed a place to settle permanently once we were married. Enough renting, enough wandering. We needed a house of our own. So while I was still there in Bali with Felipe, I started seriously and openly searching for homes on the Internet, looking for something rural and quiet located within a comfortable driving distance of my sister in Philadelphia. It’s a crazy thing to look at houses when you can’t, in fact, look at any of the houses, but I had a clear vision of what we needed-a home inspired by a poem my friend Kate Light once wrote about her version of perfect domesticity: “A house in the country to find out what’s true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you.”
I knew I would recognize the place when I found it. And then I did find it, hidden in a small mill town in New Jersey. Or rather, it wasn’t really a house, but a church-a tiny, square Presbyterian chapel, built in 1802, that somebody had cleverly converted into a living space. Two bedrooms, a compact kitchen, and one big open sanctuary where the congregation used to gather. Fifteen-?foot-?tall wavy glass windows. A big maple tree in the front yard. This was it. From the other side of the planet, I put down a bid without ever having seen the property in person. A few days later, over there in distant New Jersey, the owners accepted my offer.
“We have a house!” I announced triumphantly to Felipe.
“That’s marvelous, darling,” he said. “Now all we need is a country.”
So I set forth to secure us a country, damn it. I went back to the States alone, right before Christmas, and took care of all our business. I signed the closing papers on our new house, got our belongings out of storage, leased a car, bought a mattress. I found warehouse space in a nearby village where we could relocate Felipe’s gemstones and goods. I registered his business as a New Jersey corporation. All this before we even knew for sure if he would be allowed back into the country. I settled us in, in other words, before we were even officially an “us.”
Meanwhile, back in Bali, Felipe plunged into the last frantic preparations for his upcoming interview at the American Consulate in Sydney. As the date for his interview approached (it was alleged to be sometime in January), our long-?distance conversations became almost entirely administrative. We lost all sense of romance- there was no time for it-as I studied the bureaucratic checklists a dozen times over, making sure he had assembled every single piece of paper that he would eventually need to turn over to the American authorities.
