pretty dumb things

ovunque, ma qui

The wood is wet. Sadly, this is not a euphemism. The wood is wet despite my purchasing of a large, sturdy and reinforced tarp the exact color of the Green Bay Packers. It’s wet despite my diligent carting of it via wheelbarrow down the steep, stony incline to the villa. It’s wet despite my careful stacking of it in neat piles according to shape and size on the villa’s porch. It’s wet despite my thoughtful piling of it next to—but not too near to—the tiny fireplace that burns said wood, my sole source of heat in this stony Tuscan lonesome. 

That’s not strictly true, actually. There is water that is hot most of the time, or at least as often as there are sunny days, which here in Tuscany is usually. There is also a small, somewhat ineffective portable heater, likely German in origin, that I use sparingly in my large stony bedroom. I turn it on for an hour as I get into bed. It emits an orange glow that gives at least the affect of warmth, if not the experience of it. 

When I returned to Gotham from Italy last June, I found myself in an abject funk of impressive length and weight. It was a Great Blue Whale of a funk, and I swam in its belly like Jonah for a good, painful six weeks. I was surrounded by funk, unable to press my fingers to anything but its solid, mucousy walls. A thick miasma of funk stood between me and my friends, me and my dog, me and my city, me and all that I had once remembered loving.

Clearly the only way to extricate my self from my funk was, I thought, to get back to Italy. I must eject myself out of this funky butt and find myself whence I came. Which is to say, here, in Italy, the land of loss. And thus I am living alone for five weeks in the middle of Nowhere, Tuscany, relying on a fireplace for heat.

This seventeenth-century villa has made yet more vexed my relationship with fire. I was very young, three or four, when my best friend’s house went up in flames. It stood two doors down from my own. I stood outside and watched it burn, as did the whole neighborhood. There are few flame-retardant metaphors for a quick swallowing up of a home by fire. There are beasts and there are juggernauts and there are giant jaws with gnashing flaming teeth. There are balls of fire and walls of fire and tunnels too. So many metaphors used so often, and all crumbled to ashy cliché. 

My friend’s house was eaten by fire, consumed by it, nearly utterly. Her family watched, she in jammies; her parents in that interstitial state of dress that adults affect between work and bed. This generational clothing divide was mirrored by the people in the neighborhood who stood back and let the firemen do their work. The house burned bright, fast and black; it flamed out, like a marshmallow on a stick.

No surprise then my worrisome relationship with fire. About ten years later, my own house would catch fire—some faulty electrical connection in the baseboard heater would send a fast lick of flame up a wall, creating the possibility for an artful renovation. It was a happy accident, eventually, but the night it happened, I lay on the damp grass of my lawn in the black of an April night and wretched. There wasn’t much to do but give into the nausea.

The night I arrived here at the stony lonesome from Rome, I carried the groceries in with my friend, who had to drop and dash to take care of her multiple kids, and nervously lit a fire in the board-game-sized fireplace. The plan originally was to stay with here another friend, here in this beautiful, bohemian, rambling villa that telescopes out magically like the Weasley manse in Harry Potter. But this friend found a job up in Piemonte, and so it’s just me in this three-centuries-old five-bedroom house.

It is a beautiful house. The first thing I wanted to write about it was this phrase: I want to share this with you. This Montalcino sunset seen from the porch, all lambet apricot and lavender greys: I want to share this with you. These stone floors, old as my nation: I want to share these with you. These grapes growing on the arbor, steps from my door: I want to share them with you. This night sky speckled as a robin’s egg, this quiet that’s deep and inexorable as water, this air that’s fresher than homemade bread, this wide bed and its butter-thick down comforter: I want to share it with you. 

It’s a testament to the searing, inescapable and tedious cold that this romantic vision lasted, oh, about five days. Not coincidentally, it ended the same day that I accidentally set a hillside on fire. 

I’d say it wasn’t my fault, except that I grew up with wood stoves and ashes in Vermont. I know well and true not to throw out live embers. I’d say I thought all the ashes were out, but I wasn’t entirely certain, and I thought to myself as I threw the ashes on the compost pile that the soup-stock-spent vegetables I’d put on the pile at the same time would extinguish any embers. I might have seen a flash of orange; I might not have. In the hideous 20/20 that is hindsight, who can say.

I threw the compost and the ashes on the pile. I went out running. I returned, panting and sweaty and breathing rough, so I decided to cart yet more wood from the pile down to the house. As I approached the crest of the hill with the wheelbarrow,  and I heard it. That snap, that pop, that crackle, those flames. And then I smelled smoke. And then I saw great fat billows of smoke wafting like a child’s drawing off the hill.

I ran down the hill, past the pomegranate tree, the persimmon tree, the vegetable garden, and I saw a sheet of fire from the compost pile rising up the hill, a great amber tiger of flame, about the area of a very spacious Manhattan studio. Vicious hot, the flames spread like wildfire because that’s exactly what it was. A wildfire, and I was perched on the brink of becoming the accidental arsonist Foxy Knoxy.

My Italian cellphone wasn’t working. And even if it had been, the Montalcino fire department is whimsical about answering phone calls. And even if someone did answer, there was no counting on their speaking English. And even if they did speak English, I didn’t know my address. I did a quick mental calculation of running back to the house and Skyping my friend to have her call for me. I fast imagined the Montalcino fire department showing up, some motley crew of hip-wader-booted Italians, and as fetching an image as it was, I shoved it out of my head and ran for the hose.

Which didn’t reach. 

I saw a bucket abandoned by the apple tree, half full of water and bobbing with a few citrus fruits. I tossed the contents on the fire and heard a satisfying hiss. For an hour and a half, I ran back and forth toting buckets of water, foot by foot, bucket by bucket, ragged breath by ragged breath, putting out the fire. After about an hour, only the compost heap itself was smoldering. I took it apart, poured water on its archeological layers, and only then did I call my friend. She came over, surveyed the toasty mess, and phoned her friend on the local fire brigade.

“Mia amica ha avuto un piccola conflagrazione,” she said.

A little conflagration, indeed. I put it out, this fire. I started it, but I also extinguished it by myself, a snapping, blazing metaphor for how I’m living my life right now. I made it, I made it go away. 

Today, almost two weeks later, my feet are cold and the ambient beauty of this legendary whatever has dimmed. There are, however, little tufts of green grass growing amidst the toasted black on the hillside. Looking forward with the great, panting eager, I’ve already made my reservation for my hotel in Rome, a city where any fire I come across won’t be made by me, a city with heat and hot water and well-dressed men. In two weeks, I’ll be there.

I’d like to share it with you.

 

atmospheric entry

I wrote about returning to Gotham from Italy. Read it or listen to it or both. Sorry about the soothing white noise in the background.

 

mospheric entry 

 

For the past three weeks, I’ve been feeling like Ben Braddock, Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. Vague, befuddled, ineffably disillusioned, and suffering some inarticulate loss, I have attended people’s parties with no real idea of what I’m doing there.

“How was Italy?” They ask, and then before I can answer, they exclaim, “I’ll bet it was fantastic.  Was it fantastic?” 

Yes, I say, it was. It’s easier to answer that way. I can’t quite live up to their excitement. The truth is too complex, and even when I indulge it, the truth sounds false.

“So what are you going to do now?” they ask. I want to tell them that I’m going to go upstairs and lie down, but I don’t. Mostly I say little. I keep on expecting someone to pull me aside tell me a word, one word, perhaps “plastics.” I too want to sit at the bottom of a pool and hear nothing but the gurgle of filters and the quick-quick twostep of my heartbeat.

Re-entry, as any astrophysicist will tell you, is difficult. It’s a major problem of pyrotechnically flaming thermodynamic proportions. It’s hard not to burn up when  foreign matter hits the atmosphere of a celestial body. I hedge on hyperbole, of course, but when have I not? Hyperbole is my bread and butter and metaphor my jam. I have felt moments from spontaneous combustion. I’ve imagined my sleek Betty Draper blonde hair going up in a poof of Michael Jackson flames. It hasn’t happened, not in real life, not yet.

In truth what it is, or so I hear, is culture shock. The form my culture shock has been taking, beyond pervasive sense of living in The Graduate without Anne Bancroft, is a profound feeling of being paralyzed by not caring very much (if at all) and an endless game of Anywhere But Here. No matter where I go, I don’t want to be there. Everything is wrong. It’s off. The cars are too big and the roads are too wide. The portions are too big and the berries too tasteless. The asses are too big and there are too many people having conversations that I can understand and don’t want to hear. Gotham is dirty and ugly. I hardly remember what I loved about it. Gotham’s far away, though I am in it. I am here but not here. I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I still do the math. It’s 7:45 p.m. here so it is 1:45 a.m. in Italy. It’s 8:13 a.m. here so it is 2:13 p.m. in Italy. I do the math, but I do it less and less. I’ve lost the will to order my food and coffee in Italian, but I still catch myself answering “Si” or “No, per favore” when asked anything by a waitperson. Details have begun to slip away, like pollen they drift and flow on quiet currents, somewhere else.

I suppose I am readjusting. At any rate, I begin to solidify. Gotham grows more real, my friends more important, my dog more lovable. I don’t quite want to chew my own arm off. I’m not anxiously scanning last-minute plane fares. I’m stolidly, thoughtfully planning a trip in September; I placate myself with the thought of six weeks in the fall. I’m growing in, perhaps growing up, here in this city that I used to love with untrammeled abandon and now have to fake it, lying back and thinking of Montalcino.

Which is all very weird because I didn’t come to love Italy until I’d been there for months and months, perhaps months and months and months. I still couldn’t speak the language, though I could understand it well enough (Capisco abbastanza bene ma non parlo bene, mi dispiace.) It wasn’t home, not by a long shot. It was weird and wild and foreign and things, magical things, wonderful things, transformative things, seemed possible there.

Which is to put my finger on the conflagratory problem. Here, surrounded by my stuff, in my city, near my friends, my Romans, my countrymen, I actually have to make those changes I envisioned while I was away. I’m no longer literally distant from my own life; I’m not removed. I’m here, present, accountable, and the real smacks me hard as rushing ground to a falling body. As it turns out, I like escape in multiple forms. I thought it was just narratives and games of solitaire. Travel too must go on the list.

I am going through the motions, walking through the part. Nothing seems to penetrate my heart. Not even, I might add, Buffy. This, if nothing else, alerts me to the gravity of the sitch. There is loss of country, loss of freedom, loss of love and loss of loss. There is loss piled upon loss piled upon loss, and all I want is to be anywhere but here.

Every day gets a little bit better. I suppose it does. It does, I suppose. It gets better, or something like it. It goes, and I’m here stroking my loss that grows transparent, bare and shining under my furtive hands.

 

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.

 

a meditation on dish soap

For those who like to listen, I've also provided a helpful vocal recording: 

 

A meditation on dish soap

 

If you want a sobering exercise, try buying dish detergent in a country where you do not speak the language.  “Come se dice dish soap” will not get you closer to purchasing said dish detergent, nor will “dove è il dish soap.” There is, of course, the international language of package design—the modern equivalent of medieval signage wherein a picture of an artichoke would denote a vegetable store, or a hock of ham would indicate a butcher—but if you spend twenty minutes staring at inscrutable rows of antic colored plastic bottles and can’t find that familiar uxorious shape, you’re kind of fucked. 

Eventually you stumble around, and you realize that Italian supermercati don’t abide by the organizing principles that you have grown up to expect. They will, for example, place the cat food directly above the preserved fish products. It’s a prolonged game of “Witty, Pragmatic, or Oblivious?” and you’re not winning. 

Living in Italy for three weeks now, I realize I’ve carved out for myself a strange interstitial life, one where I’ve not quite committed to an ex-pat existence, but one where I have slowly relinquished many of the customs and pleasures of my Gotham life. I no longer, for instance, really just wish I could call a diner and have them deliver a fucking veggie burger, already. 

I dream in Italian, but I don’t understand it. Everyday conversations swirl around me, and I try to latch onto words and phrases with my grubby, fat toddler’s hands. I am a kindergartener of language and custom stuck in the body of a ferociously intelligent woman. Squat and mute in the stream of gossamer cocktail talk, I feel like an elite athlete in a full-body cast. I could make jokes. I could banter. I could shine bright and brilliant if only I could understand. I can’t. My tongue curls and clefts and tingles and aches. I am lost. 

“Allora” punctuates Italian conversation. Its frequency is to American “whatever,” and its meaning inhabits the linguistic grey space in the Venn diagram of “now,” “then” and “soon.” It’s not our idea of “now,” which is “ora.” It’s also not "then" like English “then” which indicates a time both in the past and in the momentary abstract future, nor is it soon, which means nowish. It’s a grey-space word and it is everywhere. Its ubiquity speaks volumes about the Italian relationship with time. 

So does the phrase “è cosi,” which means “it’s like that.” There’s a pervasive resignation here. Italy has been plundered so many times throughout history. È cosi. You can’t get Wifi. È cosi. You can’t drive your car down that street. È cosi. The cashiers at the supermercato hate you. È cosi. Berlusconi is a criminal, a cheat, a cretin and a douchebarge. È cosi.

È cosi. È cosi. È cosi. Allora. 

I’ve been a great big geek my entire life, and I’ve been reading science fiction since I first stumbled on an Asimov novel in a pile in my parents’ bedroom. I was, I think, eight. But for the first time in my life, I really get it. I am a stranger in a strange land. These people are not my people; their customs are not mine; no culture in its right mind shuts down between 1:00 and 3:00 every day; it’s madness, I tell you, madness.

Which is to say that I’ve been mainlining Dr. Who and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Science fiction has grown less fictional and more real. I try to assume the bemused British façade of the Doctor, to adopt the eager disposition of the Companion, and to remember always to carry my towel. Above all, I try to remember this: Don’t Panic. If the cashiers at the supermercato hate me (and they do; they reject my carefully phrased apology of “Mi dispiace. Sono americana e il mio italiano è terribile”; they roll their eyes and flare their nostrils with such vehemence that I can hear it; it sounds like pigeons landing), I summon those words. If I don’t stamp my train ticket and the conductor acts as if I’ve committed a grievous sin, I summon those words. If I am negotiating a sidewalk the breadth of a kitchen counter as traffic whooshes by so close I could touch the cars, I summon those words.

Don’t panic.

The cemeteries are lovely. The produce is stunning. The men are often good-looking. I can see the sea from my parlor window. My friends still love me. Don't panic.

I want a cheeseburger. I want a lover. I want to understand. I want my dog, my closet, my friends, my voice. I want to get rid of these Euro coins. My wants pile up and cause a scrum of hooligan needs. I want. I want. I want. 

È cosi.

(This is how you say “dish soap” in Italian: piatti gel. Easy peasy. Don’t panic.)