I knew a real Italian once. He was “real” in my book because he embodied all of the things I had heard about Italians: his hair was a slick tarmac of black waves, his hand gestures were violent, his name was Gastone, he cheated on his wife and had a baby with his mistress. I felt proud to have known him; it is rare that one gets to know a figure who so perfectly personifies a stereotype.
It wasn’t really Gastone who I knew, though. I am exaggerating for selfish reasons, to seem worldly in my encounter with that perfect machismo, or to make something funny out of something that, in fact, was not. Who I really knew was Flavia Russo, Gastone’s ex-wife. I took care of Flavia’s children and lived with her in her house at 10 Via Paglietta, close to the city gates; the walls were blanketed in ivy and by the time I moved in Gastone had already gone.
I did not know what I was getting into when I moved into Flavia’s house that September. I was to occupy the library, a place of small dimensions, full of books on communism and white elephants, photographs of past happiness, of trips to Vietnam and New York, framed college degrees, a pull-out bed. The ceiling was a fresco of a lonely angel holding a winged child, looking downward onto the bed where I slept. Later I would think: Flavia, is that you?
Flavia was like a light bulb: she was very small but the impact she had on a room was big. She had done things differently than most Italian women in that she had divorced her husband for cheating on her. She was a doer and a mover. She had adopted her two children from Vietnam. When she cooked she had eight arms. She collected art and she cried when she felt like crying. Her hair was a triangular sponge of curls, died blonde, to give her that effect of some over-exposed, frazzled form of light.
Living with Italians. There are things you expect: the shiny hexagonal espresso chambers, the line-drying, the obsessive intricacies of pasta cooking. What I hadn’t expected: the emotions, which flew around Flavia’s house like kites and daggers, and the fact that Italians were, in fact, real people. In other words, this was not a dollhouse, this was life. Flavia flung her emotions wildly; she was in a pillow fight with intangible things.
My emotions were there too, hiding in the fireplace or between the houseplants, taking refuge in the molding that lined the fresco on my ceiling. Unable to compete with those of a post-divorce, mid mid-life crisis single mother, my own emotions waited patiently, like humble turtles, in the wings.
Flavia said: I will make you some chamomile tea. She said: He is a bastard. She said: Life is sad, so you have to let yourself be sad. She said: Why do you wear thong underwear? She said: Why do you take such long showers?
What a mother Flavia was! When we would drink chamomile tea together on her white couch I would tell her all of the things that were on my mind. There are things you do not expect: being understood is one of those things.
Flavia said: I could not have children. She said: In Vietnam there are so many abused children, forgotten children. She said: I would not have adopted them if I had known he would leave me. She said: That bastard. She said: Why haven’t you read Dante yet?
When Gastone would come to pick up the children, the house smelled like a slaughterhouse. Gastone was a big bull; Flavia used collected silence as a cleaver. Gastone was a butcher and Flavia was a weak calf. I was an onlooker, a buyer of meat, meant to regulate and to barter, meant to take whatever was chopped up home with me, wrapped tightly in white paper and plastic. When Gastone would leave there would be blood on the floor, feathers in the air, some empty silence that meant animals had died.
Traveling puts you out of your comfort zone.
I played dress up with the kids. Bruna and Thao. They were both nine and both from the same region in Vietnam. They were not real sisters. Flavia and Gastone had adopted them just weeks after they were born. Thao had been bruised and cut when they had found her; now she had learning disabilities, a hard time saying certain words. Bruna was smart as an owl and seemed to have such instincts. We are all going to die some day, said Bruna, aren’t we? Vietnam was beautiful, according to Flavia. What a poor place, she said. What a sad place.
Before I moved to Bologna I had certain ideas about what I would find there. I thought about the clothes people would be wearing there and the way the arches of the buildings would look through a camera lens. I had read that the city was built of red bricks and imagined what it would look like from above: a crimson lake, deep in the middle and shallow towards the edges where the buildings thinned out. When you think of a place before you go there it is like thinking of a library void of books: you think in terms of structure. People make up places. People change places.
People change.
Gastone had left an entire closet full of clothes at Flavia’s house: designer suits, mostly, and crisp Armani shirts, pressed. They were covered in plastic. They hung like bodies. When Gastone came to pick the suits up it was a cold night. When Gastone left with the suits Flavia ran to the window, peeked through the window shade, and watched as Gastone got into his pregnant lover’s car. Che palle! Flavia screamed. What balls!
When Flavia cooked she had eight arms. Two were doing the pasta and two were doing the meat. The other four did the chopping and the desserts. She never wanted help. When I tried to help her she shooed me away with one of the many arms. A lot of women friends would come for dinner. We would have many grapes and cheeses and hoards of wine. Angela from upstairs would come. Giuliana would come. They would make her feel good for a while, but women can only make you feel so good.
What I remember most about being in Italy was how lonely it was. It wasn’t just me, either. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any friends. Maybe it was the red brick, the way it fooled you, how you thought it would be warm because of its color but upon touching it you were left cold. Or the way you could smell defeat - the declines, lost battles, smoke from dropped bombs – rising from the ground when you went walking, looking for a bottle of wine at midnight. Or perhaps it was just the air there, the way the particles were arranged, that made it feel like you were inhaling sand when you breathed, or like all birds had flown.
In November I got the stomach flu from a baked pumpkin I ate at the market on Via Santo Stefano; the pumpkin was orange and beautiful but made my stomach turn ugly and black. I could not leave my bed in Flavia’s library for days on end, except for the toilet. I called the American doctor who sat on the edge of my bed like a father and wrote me a prescription; his white hair made me miss home. I left the house to pick up the prescription but on the way I vomited in an alleyway and defecated in my pants. I had to throw my pants in the dumpster, pull my sweater down over my knees. Where was my mother?
Bruna and Thao drew pictures of me. In Bruna’s picture I was very big and in Thao’s picture I was very small. They asked me: what does your sister look like? I told them she had dark hair, like theirs, which excited them. They asked me: Do you miss her? Of course, I told them. They asked me: Who’s drawing do you like better? What’s your favorite kind of music? Why do grandparents die? Why do you wear thong underwear? None of these questions were so easy to answer. I was very big and also very small.
Gastone’s face like a bull haunted me. Flavia’s screams sounded like sirens. I was glad the suits in the closet were gone. But what was she left with? It seemed to me that Gastone was every man along with being every Italian.
I have been to many sad places, but none quite like Bologna, where the city’s sadness seems to be as ancient and thick as the bricks it is built of. It was a place where even festivals seemed sad; parades seemed to mourn rather than celebrate, Christmas seemed laced with lament. Happy fruit is dreary under such pressure. Statues are angry history. In the winter we were all inside, in the summer we left for the shore. In between we celebrated the temperate weather but since celebrating wasn’t joyful even the spring seemed sad. Old dust plagued even those of us who were new.
I understand, Flavia said to me when I told her I was moving out of her house. And she did understand. She understood that Americans were always trying to be comfortable.
I had imagined success in the form of stereotypes. I had imagined returning with stories of cigarettes and vineyards, greased-up men hollering, the fashion! I wrote postcards addressed to California addressing the beauty of the laundry hanging from the windows, the richness of the espresso here, the wine! To succeed was to love Italy – what a rich place! – and to fail was to let yourself become burdened by it.
Success leads to comfort as we know it.
Gastone was a prop, was he not? And Flavia a metaphor? This was not real life, but rather a dramatic screenplay strewn with life lessons, a cooking class, a foreign film without subtitles. How easy to break free of such melancholy, for Flavia’s wounded house was not my house at all, nor were her wounds mine to heal.
Comfort means freeing yourself from things that make you uncomfortable.
My success took simple form: the year had passed. And failure happened; my emotions are still somewhere in Flavia’s chimney or biting at the roots of her houseplants. In some sense, I have not left her house at all, nor freed myself from what slaughters plagued us there. I am hoping that Flavia does not find me. She has enough to deal with as it is: she must behave as a light bulb, a kite, a cleaver, a mother with eight arms.
