Four Seasons in Rome Read online

  All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That’s the miracle of writing, the place you try to find—when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act. Gone are the trucks rumbling outside, the sharp edge of the desk beneath my wrists, the unpaid electricity bill back in Idaho. It might seem lonesome but it’s not: soon enough characters drift out of the walls, quiet and watchful, some more distinct than others, waiting to see what will happen to them. And writers come, too. Sometimes every fiction writer I’ve ever admired is there, from Flaubert to Melville to Wharton, all the books I’ve loved, all the novels I’ve wished I were talented enough to write. Lately Pliny leans on the edge of the desk like some old pharmacist, breathing through his nose, smelling of camphor, shaking his head every once in a while.

  Sometimes, at the back of my mind, I sense the other artists in this big, drafty Academy, too, the architects and sculptors and composers asleep or just waking up, turning over their own work in their minds. I imagine them as little flames burning in their beds, flaring as the morning progresses, flames down in the library, flames in the windows of the studios, flames passing through the courtyard and out into the garden.

  I x-ray sentences; I claw away a paragraph and reshape it as carefully as I can, and test it again, and peer into the pages to see if things in there are any clearer, any more resolved. Often they are not. But to write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss.

  Eventually the spell breaks. Someone turns on his shower on the other side of the wall, or I realize my hands are freezing, or my stomach is cramping, and the studio floods back in. Gravity, the smell of someone’s microwaved broccoli in the kitchen down the hall, air brakes squealing somewhere beyond the garden walls, the material demands and limitations of life.

  The big trunk of the umbrella pine looms outside the window, living its two lives—the upper world of needles and stems, the lower world of roots and soil. I leave the studio, shake off the dream, and go back to Shauna, the twins, Rome, that louder, more insistent dream.

  Carnival, carnevale: it comes from the Latin carn (flesh) and levare (to put away). On the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, we stroll through the Campo dei Fiori, past a bakery on via dei Baullari (the street of the trunk makers) with rows of pastries and pizzas steaming in the windows and a mortadella—a massive bologna, flecked with cubes of fat, thick as a church pillar—balanced on sawhorses beside the doorway. We cross the corso Vittorio Emanuele II and stop to watch a street vendor weave herons from palm fronds. All over Piazza Navona, children tramp and stomp, their breath showing in the cold, the masks of their costumes thrown back on their heads: Mary Poppins, Tweety Bird, homemade princesses and devils. Our shoes kick up tiny scraps of colored paper; it coats the stroller wheels. Occasionally a child flings a handful onto Henry and Owen, little stars and circles and squares. The boys are not pleased.

  Only children wear costumes, and pretty much only around Piazza Navona. The parties used to be better. Here’s Livy on the Bacchanalia: “When the license offered by darkness had been added, no sort of crime, no kind of immorality, was left unattempted. There were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim.”

  Here’s Plutarch on Lupercalia, which had pre-Roman origins and fell on the fifteenth of February: “At this time many of the magistrates and many young men of noble families run through the city naked, and, in their jesting and merrymaking, strike those whom they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of high rank purposely stand in their way and hold out their hands to be struck, like children at school.”33

  The shaggy thongs were bloody strips of goat skin, which supposedly conferred fertility. The whip was called the februa; it gives February its name. Much later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during Carnival, all the Romans wore costumes, from cardinals to coachmen. Banners flapped from balconies; streamers, confetti, and flour poured from windows. After dark the carriages and crowds along the via del Corso would be pushed to the sides, and riderless horses, strung with ribbons, spurred on by spiked balls tied into their manes, would charge out of Piazza del Popolo and race the mile to the Piazza Venezia at the far end, trampling anyone in their way.34

  Goethe waded into the throngs in 1788. “At a given signal,” he wrote, “everyone has leave to be as mad and foolish as he likes, and almost everything, except fisticuffs and stabbing, is permissible.”35

  Dickens waded in fifty-seven years later: “The jingling of the [horses’] trappings, and the rattling of their hoofs upon the hard stones; the dash and fury of their speed along the echoing street; nay, the very cannon that are fired—these noises are nothing to the roaring of the multitude: their shouts: the clapping of their hands.”36

  Carnival: a building madness, meat roasting on every fire. Then comes Ash Wednesday, the cold rinse of the Ave Maria, and for forty days the flesh gets put away.

  Owen slaps his hands on the tiles as he crawls. Henry eases in behind him, both of them slipping single file under the kitchen table. Seeing them, I think of migrating animals, one wildebeest following another. Henry can clap his hands now, and Owen sings in the mornings, but wakes screaming every night at exactly 10:35 p.m. and has to be hugged and reassured.

  “It’s the teeth,” Shauna says. Everything is the teeth.

  Still, their energy is breathtaking. Trying to dress them after a bath is like trying to put pajamas on a mackerel. Every time they manage to break into our bedroom, they seize the power cord to the computer and pull as hard as they can; four times I have caught the computer before it hit the floor. All day they drive the kitchen chairs across the tile and produce the worst screeching noise imaginable. Shauna constructs a shield of cardboard and shipping tape around the power cord from our radio, but two hours later Owen has figured out how to unravel it and is sitting in the center of the kitchen with the entire plug stuffed in his mouth.

  In the Villa Sciarra, the children’s park with the fauns and peacocks, we set the boys on blankets and they go motoring off into the shrubs. Four or five Italian kids circle them, pat their backs, offer them lollipops. I try to relax. All I can think is, Germs.

  At midnight, at one, at two, I can’t sleep. I go out on the terrace in a coat and wool hat and hack apart the dirt caked into the fifteen or so pots left out there by some previous tenant. I pull out the dead weeds and break up the soil with my fingers and cram in new tulip bulbs, hardly any space between them, twenty bulbs per pot.

  At two in the morning the Alban Hills are blue, threaded with lights. A couple passes below me in the street, the woman lagging behind the man. She pauses, adjusts a strap on her shoe. The orange tip of her cigarette arcs out into the night.

  “Esta, mi dispiace,” the man calls back. Esta, I’m sorry. She straightens, looks around. Then she laughs.

  I am awake more hours than I’ve ever been in my life, and yet the days and nights in Rome seem to skim past like pages in a flip-book.

  On the seventeenth of February, the pope returns to the hospital, suffering from headaches. Stills from a videotape of an Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, kidnapped two weeks earlier in Baghdad, are printed on the front page of every Italian paper. “I beg you,” she reportedly says on the tape, “put an end to the occupation. I beg…the Italian people to put pressure on the government to pull out.” She is kneeling with her back to a blank wall and her palms are pressed together. “Please do something for me.”

  Soccer stars show up for practice wearing Liberate Giuliana T-shirts. A giant picture of her is hung fr
om City Hall. I open the atlas in the library and realize, for the first time, that Rome is closer to Baghdad than Boise is to Washington, D.C.

  What does Pope John Paul, tucked into a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers, whisper tonight into the ear of God? Does he pray for kidnapped newspaperwomen? Or for the swollen gums of little children? He probably dreams bigger: the planet gliding through space, the slow grinding of tectonic plates.

  I convince myself: it will not snow in Rome this winter. Some nights, carrying another sack of dirty diapers to the Dumpster, washing another sinkful of baby bottles, we begin to feel glutted, oversaturated. Church interiors meld from one to the next, two-thousand-year-old columns float past unnoticed. Was that another Michelangelo? Another Pinturicchio? Fifty years ago, in Rome and a Villa, the novelist Eleanor Clark called it the “too-muchness” of Rome, and I feel she’s right as I stand at the Dump-sters and watch the vapor of my breath float away: the Fontanone is straight ahead, the fabled city below that, but all I see is sludge and broken glass. Too much beauty, too much input; if you’re not careful, you can overdose.

  Cook spaghetti, peel an apple. Cut spaghetti and apple into small pieces. Place on high-chair trays. Watch Henry and Owen throw food onto the floor. Pick it up off the floor. Wash high-chair trays. In the city we pass Romans reading novels, talking in the sun, happily devouring their contorni at a café in the Jewish quarter. They wear ironed shirts, their hair is neatly coiffed, their shoes gleam. I stare at them through the bars of parenthood. Why don’t they have milk stains on their shoulders? Why do they get to sleep through the night?

  If I didn’t have you, Owen; if I didn’t have you, Henry. If I didn’t have you, I would be able to eat lunch with two hands.

  Then, just when I need it, there is something like this: I am carrying Owen down the stairwell when we pass a man I’ve never seen before on his way up.

  “Ciao,” I say.

  “Ciao,” the man says.

  “Ciao,” Owen says. It is the first time he’s ever said it. I almost fall over. The man grins.

  “Ciao!” the man replies. He flourishes his cane and bows.

  A line from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes back to me. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

  One polished, windy morning, two weeks into Lent, some Academy fellows take me to the top of Mt. Testaccio. Mt. Testaccio looks like any of the other Roman hills, but it’s not one of the famed seven: it is man-made. It consists almost entirely of pieces of big clay jars called amphorae. Millions of them. Probably as many as 25 million.

  Anyone used to be able to come up here; now you need a permesso. Or the inclination to step over a few chains. From the top we can see the thousand apartment blocks of southern Rome, their rooftops bristling with TV antennas, and dozens of vacant lots, shining with puddles, a Gypsy encampment in one of them, campers and tents, blue tarps snapping against ropes.

  Amphorae, when they’re found whole, have thin necks, pointed bottoms, two handles. Empty, an unbroken transport amphora weighs sixty-six pounds. In the days of the Empire they’d be filled with wax or honey or linseed or grain, or—more often than not—olive oil. Then they’d be stacked in ships, floated to Rome from Spain or North Africa, dragged up the Tiber, and unloaded right below Mt. Testaccio, before the rapids around Tiber Island. The oil would be decanted into smaller jugs, and the amphorae would be cracked and stuffed with their own pieces and sprinkled with lime and stacked. All regulated, all planned, all recorded in Latin.

  Olive oil was the muscle, hair tonic, soap, and lamp fuel of the Empire, the flavor of its meals, the illumination of its dramas. Pliny devotes eight scrupulous chapters of the Natural History to olives and the olive tree, from seeding to picking to pressing to storing. Olive oil was rubbed on icons, bridles, kings, pregnant women, and foot sores. Want to preserve a piece of wood? Moisturize your face? Soothe a toothache, alleviate stretch marks, grease a chariot axle, cool your scalp, anoint a dead Christian?

  Today Mt. Testaccio is 165 feet high, 236,000 square feet, a monument to appetite as large as any monument in Rome. It’s daubed with weeds and a few scrubby trees. The discarded wrappers of candy bars blow past. We roam the summit looking for shards of amphorae, the sun heating the back of our jackets, the wind stripping heat from our hands. The ground chinks beneath our sneakers.

  Off to the west, wearing a haze of dark green, is the Janiculum: rooftops and pine trees, a flourish of marble crowned by a tiny iron cross that marks the very top of the Fontanone. To its left is the orange turret that stands on the roof of our apartment building. I think of little Owen and Henry, Owen probably awake from his first nap by now, crawling across the kitchen tiles, tormenting his mother. They haven’t been alive a year, and already their diapers are scattered across six states, two continents.

  To live is to make leavings. Hair, dust, trash, children, love letters, old shoes, bones. We are all possessed by terrible hungers. When they were less than an hour old, already Henry and Owen knew how to attach themselves to their mother. Rome itself sits on calcareous rocks, the calcite made from the skeletons of trillions of tiny sea animals, their own bodies broken and stacked, literally sprinkled with lime, a primordial cemetery, a pelagic ooze. We are born, we consume, we die. Our landscapes are graveyards, and what is a graveyard if not a landfill?

  The weight of the olive oil that arrived in Rome during the six centuries that they stacked amphorae on Mt. Testaccio was something close to 400 million pounds.

  Lent: We drink latte macchiati; we eat ravioli stuffed with spinach. We soak hunks of a baguette in olive oil we brought back from Umbria, bottled without a label, green and cloudy and sharp.

  In restaurants the backs of our chairs scrape the backs of the chairs behind us. On buses we battle for territory with hips and elbows, wedging the stroller through doorways, crushing our calves against wheel wells. A woman weeps in the seat next to me. Shauna overhears someone say, in English, “Well, so what if he’s impotent?” A violinist, reeking of wine, drives his instrument case into my back.

  Proximity, propinquity—we are not only Americans in Italy, but country people in a big city. I buy a newspaper and turn around and three little girls are stroking the hair of my children. A pair of monks, small as gnomes, push past, talking animatedly, onions on their breath. The piazzas are living rooms and concert halls and festival grounds, the alleys youth lounges, the park benches open-air nurseries. Again and again you are reminded of the architectural necessity for the garden, the cloister, the hidden courtyard.

  We run into the man on crutches whose wife is expecting twins. Marco. He is with his daughter. Their doctor, he says, has placed his wife on bed rest. For the past three weeks she has not been allowed to get out of bed except to go to the bathroom.

  “And we bought a stroller,” he says. “A different one than yours.”

  His daughter is dark-eyed and curly-haired: beautiful. “Let us know if you need anything,” Shauna says, in English.

  It’s hard to tell if he understands. “Oh, we are doing okay,” Marco says. “Aren’t we?” and he pats his daughter’s shoulder. But his eyes are far away.

  On the last day of February, I spend ten entire minutes trying to open a plastic package of Weeble-wobbles Shauna’s mother has sent, the boys screaming for me to get them out, my fingers raw, the three little Weebles obstinate in their PVC clamshells. I can’t help but wonder, as I saw with a bread knife at the seam of the package, about technology and the sprint that is a modern life. Is progress really a curve that sweeps perpetually higher? Wasn’t packaging (or toymaking or cobbling or winemaking or milk or cheese or cement, for that matter) often better three hundred or seven hundred or nineteen hundred years ago?

  A few weeks ago, in the Forum, we saw a tour guide stop before an excavation and point with the tip of a folded umbrella. “Notice how the masonry gets better the earlier we go,”37 she said.

  Imagine life before industrial milk a
nd government radio and the proliferation of images! Imagine if you only saw the president (or pope or prince or queen) once in your life, no television footage, no photographs, just a statue or two, a bust, his profile on a coin. What was life like in Pliny’s day? Just think how powerful stories were: Your cousin who saw the emperor galloping toward the Capitoline in his chariot, a pair of fingers held aloft, his face in shadow, guards thundering in his wake, all that bronze flashing in the sunlight. Power, divine right, the radiance of myth—one glimpse in a lifetime, and why wouldn’t you believe?

  You were born at home. If you were lucky, you died at home. Night beyond the walls was lightless, the sky paralyzed with stars; winter killed family members, and the orb of the planet, a deity in itself, spinning at the center of the universe, glided silently within rings of pestilence and war.

  The sound track of life was not the sustained grumble of engines, but the murmur of wind and the howling of dogs, the scolding of mothers; chisels, footfalls, and laughter; the clatter of hooves, the screams of prisoners, and the secrets of neighbors.

  Maps were full of shadows. The occasional traveler or soldier might walk away from the neighborhood and return years later with stories either believed or disbelieved or never told, but hardly anyone else ever left. The chimney swift perched on your laundry line would have seen more of your country than you could hope to. Your father’s trade would determine practically everything about your life: where you lived, what you did, whom you married, what you ate. Men fought for salt, and the lands to the north, as far as anyone knew, were filled with ice and barbarians. A long walk could take you to the remains of a wall no one would ever cross, because, as Procopius wrote in the sixth century, on the other side “countless snakes and serpents and every other kind of wild creature occupy this area as their own.”