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.

 

Comments

[Karl Elvis]

I kind of love this man.

[chelsea g. summers]

You are not alone, Kärl Elvis.

[Onthesensor]

A brave piece CG. To look deep within oneself and admit how we love someone is like looking over the edge of a precipice. This brought back memories for me.

But this is about you, the quandary of the situation, returning to your homeland and leaving.

[Auntie Sabauda]

You're pretty tough on yourself...

[chelsea g. summers]

Thanks, OtS. I'm not really sure what anything is about any more, frankly. I think I need my own bed.

And, yeah, Auntie S, I am. It's a whole big thing.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[Auntie Sabauda]

Re: "he is 'of course' right" .... I always say, "there's no of course"

[Pete]

CG,
Your tweets indicated your loneliness, but not to the depth described here. Having lived in another country for a time, I can empathize. The lack of familiar and the underlying homesickness create the detached feeling that one does not have at home. The piece as usual was a good read.
Pete

[Hannah Miet]

I loved this. Not just for how real it was, and the insight I was given. I loved reading this.

I like this Allay.

Knowing someone enough to see when they are not true to themselves. That's a beautiful thing right there.I want that.

Keep writing. Go where you face the most resistance.

[chelsea g. summers]

It has been awhile since I wrote something that engendered such diverse reactions. I must be onto something...though I've no idea what.

[Jonathan]

Here's a different reaction...uh, response. First, there's you and him. That means there's your feelings of who you are, and his feelings about you and who you are, and vice versa.

Then there's loneliness. It can be tough to move that weight of supposed emptiness into solitude, but as I understand it, there's a difference.

Then there's how one deals with one's own feelings, and how one deals with someone else's feelings. Here, Alex was an absolute cad. I think he treated you like merda, but then again the only thing we readers have is what you wrote and our imaginings in between the lines.

So what if you messed up on being honest about loneliness. We're ALL lonely, dammit. To have someone bash you about with his selfish feelings of being exposed--Christ fucking Jesus, he's a character in a story!

Which is the third thing--what you wrote is a beautiful piece. Searching, wonderfully honest about how you felt in the moment, well paced. Very well written, too. And believable.

Love to you, CG!

[chelsea g. summers]

Well, gosh. I'm amazed at how divisive this post has been. Certainly, Jonathan, you're as right as Karl Ëlvis and Hannah are. I've no clue anymore, frankly. I think I just need to get home and sleep in my own sheets.

[arlee]

this is beAUTIFUL. my eyes teared up near the end, Chelsea.

[melon]

I wonder if you're REALLY unresistably beutiful or not..

[chelsea g. summers]

No, Melon, I'm more irresistibly beautiful. But why quibble?

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[Selena Kitt]

Irresistibly beautiful. Without a doubt.

[Mike P.]

Catching up, school crap, chose this one to read first because of all the comments and of course this was a good read.

Enjoy Italy,
Mike

[J-Roc]

I used to sometimes try and write until I became uncomfortable with the results. And then I would try to push through that discomfort and write a little more. There's nothing quite like the fast muscle twitch of writing honestly.

And it's an awkward joy to read such a piece.

Nice work, CG. Hope Italy is handling you.

J-Roc

[pAnda]

I absolutely loved this. You're very honest in your writing, which is refreshing in many ways.
I'm glad you found someone who is bs proof and not accustomed to kissing your "cupcake" bottom.
Paws up.

[Mike P.]

Do you see yourself speaking fluent Italian in 2 years Chelsea?

[Mr. H]

the lovely prose and your fascinating stories will always keep me coming back. you're an amazing person.

[Brone Borglidashio]

Did you ask him what he thought of your writing? No, you asked him about his feelings. He did not answer the question, which tells me all I want to know about him. Babe, there ARE men with balls at least as big as yours. You rush in and feel, figure it out later. This guy wont be able to handle it. He's terrorized already. Too, a man can express his feelings without defensiveness. This guy? His mama still folds his underwear, emotionally speaking. Of course.
Sorry to get all Dan Savage, but you showed it all so clearly, you see.