instance, I thought, Maybe this native Roman cabdriver doesn't speak Italian very well, and meant to ask if we were sisters.) But, no. He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh, what can I say? I've been through a lot in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after this divorce. But as that old country-western song out of Texas goes, 'I've been screwed and sued and tattooed, and I'm still standin' here in front of you…'
I've also become friends with a cool couple named Maria and Giulio, introduced to me by my friend Anne-an American painter who lived in Rome a few years back. Maria is from America, Giulio's from the south of Italy. He's a filmmaker, she works for an international agricultural policy organization. He doesn't speak great English, but she speaks fluent Italian (and also fluent French and Chinese, so that's not intimidating). Giulio wants to learn English, and asked if he could practice conversing with me in another Tandem Exchange. In case you're wondering why he couldn't just study English with his American-born wife, it's because they're married and they fight too much whenever one tries to teach anything to the other one. So Giulio and I now meet for lunch twice a week to practice our Italian and English; a good task for two people who don't have any history of irritating each other.
Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in thick black magic marker) because they were having an argument and 'he yells louder than me' and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.
I think Maria is terrifically sexy, and this burst of passionate graffiti is only further evidence of it. Interestingly, though, Giulio sees the scrawled-upon wall as a sure sign of Maria's repression, because she wrote her curses against him in Italian, and Italian is her second language, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose her words. He said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger-which she never does, because she's a good Anglo-Protestant-then she would have written all over that wall in her native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they do blow up.
'A savage people,' he diagnoses.
What I love is that we all had this conversation over a nice relaxed dinner, while looking at the wall itself.
'More wine, honey?' asked Maria.
But my newest best friend in Italy is, of course, Luca Spaghetti. Even in Italy, by the way, it's considered a very funny thing to have a last name like Spaghetti. I'm grateful for Luca because he has finally allowed me to get even with my friend Brian, who was lucky enough to have grown up next door to a Native American kid named Dennis Ha-Ha, and therefore could always boast that he had the friend with the coolest name. Finally, I can offer competition.
Luca also speaks perfect English and is a good eater (in Italian, una buona forchetta-a good fork), so he's terrific company for the hungry likes of me. He often calls in the middle of the day to say, 'Hey, I'm in your neighborhood-want to meet up for a quick cup of coffee? Or a plate of oxtail?' We spend a lot of time in these dirty little dives in the back streets of Rome. We like the restaurants with the fluorescent lighting and no name listed outside. Plastic red-checkered tablecloths. Homemade limoncello liqueur. Homemade red wine. Pasta served in unbelievable quantities by what Luca calls 'little Julius Caesars'-proud, pushy, local guys with hair on the backs of their hands and passionately tended pompadours. I once said to Luca, 'It seems to me these guys consider themselves Romans first, Italians second and Europeans third.' He corrected me. 'No-they are Romans first, Romans second and Romans third. And every one of them is an Emperor.'
Luca is a tax accountant. An Italian tax accountant, which means that he is, in his own description, 'an artist,' because there are several hundred tax laws on the books in Italy and all of them contradict each other. So filing a tax return here requires jazzlike improvisation. I think it's funny that he's a tax accountant, because it seems like such stiff work for such a lighthearted guy. On the other hand, Luca thinks it's funny that there's another side of me-this Yoga side-that he's never seen. He can't imagine why I would want to go to India-and to an Ashram, of all places!-when I could just stay in Italy all year, which is obviously where I belong. Whenever he watches me sopping up the leftover gravy from my plate with a hunk of bread and then licking my fingers, he says, 'What are you going to eat when you go to India?' Sometimes he calls me Gandhi, in a most ironic tone, generally when I'm opening the second bottle of wine.
Luca has traveled a fair amount, though he claims he could never live anywhere but in Rome, near his mother, since he is an Italian man, after all-what can he say? But it's not just his mamma who keeps him around. He's in his early thirties, and has had the same girlfriend since he was a teenager (the lovely Giuliana, whom Luca describes fondly and aptly as acqua e sapone-'soap and water' in her sweet innocence). All his friends are the same friends he's had since childhood, and all from the same neighborhood. They watch the soccer matches together every Sunday-either at the stadium or in a bar (if the Roman teams are playing away)-and then they all return separately to the homes where they grew up, in order to eat the big Sunday afternoon meals cooked by their respective mothers and grandmothers.
I wouldn't move from Rome, either, if I were Luca Spaghetti.
Luca has visited America a few times, though, and likes it. He finds New York City fascinating but thinks that people work too hard there, though he admits they seem to enjoy it. Whereas Romans work hard and resent it massively. What Luca Spaghetti doesn't like is American food, which he says can be described in two words: 'Amtrak Pizza.'
I was with Luca the first time I ever tried eating the intestines of a newborn lamb. This is a Roman specialty. Food-wise, Rome is actually a pretty rough town, known for its coarse traditional fare like guts and tongues-all the parts of the animal the rich people up north throw away. My lamb intestines tasted OK, as long as I didn't think too much about what they were. They were served in a heavy, buttery, savory gravy that itself was terrific, but the intestines had a kind of… well… intestinal consistency. Kind of like liver, but mushier. I did well with them until I started trying to think how I would describe this dish, and I thought, It doesn't look like intestines. It actually looks like tapeworms. Then I pushed it aside and asked for a salad.
'You don't like it?' asked Luca, who loves the stuff.
'I bet Gandhi never ate lamb intestines in his life,' I said.
'He could have.'
'No, he couldn't have, Luca. Gandhi was a vegetarian.'
'But vegetarians can eat this,' Luca insisted. 'Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz. They're just shit.'
21
Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing here, I admit it.
While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother's family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they'd ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots.(My uncle calls the whole lot of them 'oxen.') My father's side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad's family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.
My own parents have a small farm, and my sister and I grew up working. We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse of a mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask. We had a lot of enjoyment in my family, a lot of laughter, but the walls were papered with to-do lists and I never experienced or witnessed idleness, not once in my whole entire life.
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all
