pretty dumb things

she was a young american

Sorry to those of you who enjoy the sound of my voice. There's no audio for this piece because I don't do accents.

So, I ask him, how does it feel to be written about?

He narrows his eyes at me and does that thing with his shoulders and his mouth, that particularly Italian gesture where his lower lip and his shoulders make this twin parabolic arc, two parentheses echoing one another. He sets his fork down on his plate next to the brown bits and blubs of rabbit.

“You want to know?” He asks. He’s got these blue eyes. He chooses clothes in colors that match, blue and white as the sea and the wakes of boats trailing away in the distance. (He says his favorite color is green. I’ve yet to see it.) 

Yeah, I tell him. Lay it on me. 

His left shoulder does a quick jut forward; the left corner of his mouth pulls down.  It’s like his speech is Michael Jackson and his body is the remaining four of the Jackson Five. There’s always that somatic Greek chorus providing back-up, counter harmonies, vital subtext.

“It wasn’t about me.” He says. 

Yes. It was. I say. 

He blinks and looks at me. “It wasn’t,” he says. “It was flat. It was…” He searches his polyglot Rolodex for the word. “Predictable.” 

Predictable, I say. 

“You are an American. You come to Italy. You fall in love with the land, with the food, with the strawberries. You fall in love with Italy. Of course, you fall in love with an Italian. It’s not about me. It’s a story that everyone has heard, everyone has read. It’s flat. It’s…” 

Cliché, I suggest. 

“Yes. Cliché.” He picks up the rabbit with his fingers and takes a bite, chews, and swallows. “You don’t name me. I’m not a real person. I’m just an Italian. Like the strawberries.” 

I don’t name people on my blog, I say. My stomach presses like a subway fondler against my solar plexus. 

“It’s not about love. It wasn’t about love,” he says. “You want to read about love, read Pablo Neruda.” This conversation is going nowhere good. My ego looks at the door and wants to bolt my body. My superego considers the pragmatism of walking down the long, black and tortuous road back to Recco. I hear the siren song of my interior Verdi opera calling. I hear the rise of the emo aria, and I want to sing it, loudly and ferociously, all the way from my beleaguered solar plexus. I play a quick game of anywhere but here.

“It wasn’t about love,” he continues. “It was about sufferance.” 

Sufferance, I say. 

“Yes,” he says. “Me dica. It’s your loneliness. You don’t have anyone to tell all these things to. You think about telling the panificio lady but you can’t. It’s not about love or falling in love or Italy. It’s about you, alone.” He spears a potato and eats it. He’s so thin. His cheeks hold hollows that compel me to fill them. In bed, and sometimes out of it, I press my cheekbones, my nose, my mouth in those hollows. I want to fill him.

“You could have left off the last part. You don’t want to talk about love. You want to talk about loneliness but you make it this story that everyone knows, this American girl who comes to Italy and falls in love. It’s flat.” 

He looks at me. “If you didn’t want to know, you shouldn’t have asked.” His voice is rough with decades of cigarettes, and his accent is flecked with French, with British English. He sprinkles his conversation with Brit slang. There’s a lot of knackered and fuck-alls. When he denies something, he says “not-a-tall,” all Queen’s inflection and clotted cream. He’s the first man who has ever first used my preferred term of endearment to me.

“My love,” he says, “I don’t mean to upset you. I am honest. I could tell you something you want to hear—when you first showed the writing to me, I said ‘It’s good. I like it’ because I didn’t want to say to you things you don’t want to know. But you asked and I will be honest.”

He is, of course, right, and that’s the thing that pains me the most. The piece was pat. It was cliché. It was flat. It was—most horribly—not honest. The one emotion that has defined my time here in Italy has been loneliness. I thought I knew loneliness before; I have spent my life alone and know loneliness like my own shadow. Its expansion and its contraction, its dark, diaphanous shape and its sinuous movement, always there and always shifting with my life’s light’s slant. I have never known the loneliness I've come to know in Italy. Here, I've felt this disassociating whirl of absolute alienation, a removal so surgical that I can't even parse the body language--and yet, the vertiginous pull of the familiar. American pop songs, American t-shirts, the cultural markers of a familiar landscape slapped like posters on a world I don't know and doesn't want me. My loneliness here has curled on my body like the weight of a constant cat.

I listen to him and come to recognize that frottage of stomach and solar plexus comes because I wrote and I relied on cliché. Its blankness pains me for everything that I thought I knew about myself.

I’m accustomed to men kissing my cupcake ass and quailing in the power of my tiger eyes. I’m used to being on top. Rare is the man who can stand up to my titanium-clad bitchiness that strides as a colossus. Of all the things I expected to find in Italy—and I admit that a lover was one of them—I didn’t expect to meet a man who has the ability to see me for who I am and to tell me when I’m not being real. I didn’t expect this man.

His name is Alessandro. He likes to be called Alex. When Italians say his nickname, they leave off the “x” and say “Allay.” I don’t often call him anything. Words fail me. And who am I, when I cannot trust my power, my words.

 

mi dica

If you're the kind of person who enjoys thrilling to my dulcet tones and poorly accented Italian, you can also listen to this here:

Mi dica

“Mi dica,” the woman in the panaficio says to me. She juts her chin for emphasis. “Tell me.”

Mi dica. Tell me. It’s what the salespeople who spend their workaday lives behind counters say here, or what they say to you once they recognize you. When you’re a stranger, they just say hello. 

“Salve,” they say. They say, “Buon giorno”; they say, “Buena sera.” Sometimes they cut it to the quick and say merely, ”Sera.” But once they know you, they jut their chins at you and say, “Mi dica.”

Tell me.

Tell you what, exactly? Tell you that I’ve lost my keening need for a cheeseburger but I’ve still not lost my hot desire for brunch? Tell you that I retain my fear of acciuga, those hairy little fish we call anchovy, despite having eaten and enjoyed them? That the Sicilian strawberries seduce me anew every day? That I’ve had to recalibrate everything I thought I knew about zucchini? That I forget what it’s like to get delivery?

That I’ve seen the olive trees and the pinetta, the only green when I first arrived, lose themselves in the hills’ aggressively verdant growth? That the smell of the jasmine here will cut a bitch? That nowhere should poppies and lilies be wildflowers. That every time I see those poppies, fat and wide as a longshoreman’s fist, blooming beside the railroad tracks or dotting the center of some landscape of urban sublime, that it breaks my heart open just a little bit?

Tell you that the ceilings are high here, that the walls are thick, that the doors are medieval? That even while here, I’m grieving this loss of space, of air, of time? That though I’m here for another three weeks, I’ve already begun a slow adieu to the view of blue sea and green mountains and creamsicle buildings? And yet when I’m stressed—and it happens even in this paradise, I get stressed, I feel stress, anxiety will clutch my heart in its knobby grip and it will squeeze—I long for the city, the anonymous bustle of busy people with places to go and people to see and none of them me? Tell you that Gotham hangs like a chimera, some hideously beautiful thing I love and loathe, want and reject, miss and forget, in equal, if impassioned, portions?

Tell you that I dream in Italian and I don’t understand it? 

The ladies behind the counter don’t want to hear any of this. And even if they did, I couldn’t tell them. Capisco abbastanza bene, ma non parlo bene—I understand well enough, but I don’t speak well. Which is, of course, a lie. I don’t understand.  It’s true that I latch onto more language than I used to. I can grab verbs and nouns out of sibilant streams of syntax. I can pluck out these words, like pomegranate seeds, but they they’re not enough to nourish me. I’m usually left wanting.

I have much to tell and yet I’ve held it close, as if in the telling it’ll lose its glamour. Or if in the telling, I’ll come to understand it. I’m not sure I want the pellucid truth. I’m finding the charm in the fuzzily experienced, and I’m finding less value in the entirely anatomized known. In choosing not to write, in opting not to tell, I’m choosing to prolong this experience of living in a world whose language I don’t understand. Being a person whose identity is so very tied up in being very clever, in being terribly witty, in negotiating every moment in a relentless torrent of words, this existence where I can neither understand nor express myself is freeing. (Sometimes writing is a terrible burden; sometimes writing is just another word for alienation.) 

I could, I suppose, tell that I’ve moved from terror to freedom. There is that. Though I suppose that metaphorical movement would get lost in translation, as so much does.

I have, in the past three months, fallen in love. I can say this: I fell in love with Italy. I think it happened, as it so often does, somewhere in Tuscany. I was on a train going to visit the only female friends I’ve made here—two expats with names so closely matched that only one consonant separates them—and somewhere on that train between Camogli and Grossetto, fields of flowers and sheep and mountains and cypress spinning past me like a hackneyed rom-com montage—I exhaled and fell in love. Spring in Italy is hard to resist. After a while, it wears a cynic down. You stand in the center of a thousand-year-old olive tree split by lightening, its trunk lacy with age. You walk through Rome and you feel the improbable anachronistic weight of centuries piled upon themselves. You find yourself eating langoustines and sucking their little crustacean heads with gusto. You realize you’re in love. It happens.

As also so often happens, I have fallen in love with an Italian. And of this, the less said the better. He is, I will tell you, extraordinary, unexpected and dusted gently with magic. He speaks English, and though my language throws him regularly, we can talk. I tell him; he tells me. Sometimes it happens beyond language, which is interesting and too valuable to tell. 

Mi dica. Una focaccia, per favore. Anche una brioche. Va bene. Grazie mille.

What else is there to tell? Everything, and nothing. Waves crash. A dog barks. My Italian lover asks how I am feeling. The smallest questions can have the biggest answers.