Four Seasons in Rome

by Anthony Doerr

  In two thousand more years, maybe everything Pope Benedict can see from his apartment window will be a hundred feet underground.

  Water gurgles through the gutters. Henry and Owen kick at their rain shield. The billion nightcrawlers of Rome swim beneath us, leaving their castings, navigating the oceans of the past.

  May brings more wind: the sky blown clean, the cornices of the palaces electric with light. House martins divebomb gaps in the shutters of the Academy building and clamber into hidden nests and keep scholars in their little apartments awake half the night.

  All Henry and Owen want to do is walk, and all they do when they walk is wipe out. Bruises flare and fade on their bodies like storm clouds: one at the bridge of Henry’s nose yellowing as one on Owen’s right temple darkens and swells. At the far end of the terrace, Owen plucks a petal off a tulip and staggers in a slow circle and finally holds it out—a bright yellow panel of silk—to his brother.

  In the Villa Sciarra the peacocks strut in their cage and the cypresses seethe and three women stroll past, each with a macaw on her right shoulder. One of the women is rubbing her bird’s wing and saying, “Qui siamo, qui siamo,” here we are, here we are, over and over.

  No brain tumors, no blood clots. Shauna’s test results are fine. Her doctor flushes wax out of her ears and tells her to keep hydrated. We celebrate by deciding to leave the boys with Tacy for an entire day—morning to evening—while we take the train to Spoleto, a hill town in Umbria.

  We say good-bye, step through the front gate. The sky is a jeweled blue. We swing the trash into the Dumpster. A taxi hauls us past the Vittoriano, down via Nazionale, BMWs and Fiats racing beside us, faces fluttering past like sheets of paper, motorini clicking across the cobbles, the riders often so close, even at thirty miles an hour, that I could reach out the window and tap their thighs.

  The train station, Termini, swarms with travelers—it is part homeless shelter/part mall—but it feels serene to us; we can hardly believe how unencumbered we are: two sweaters, two small backpacks. A pair of sunglasses, a bottle of water. No baby wipes, no milk cartons, no teething toys. To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy—a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence.

  We buy tickets, find our seats. The weeds between adjacent tracks are a vivid, almost tropical green. The train starts forward and the thousand switches of Termini glide past above the windows. In a minute we’re in the suburbs, rooftops studded with TV antennas, the back of a supermarket, a depot for wounded buses, an overpass, a slice of aqueduct, two moldering temples wearing a haze of new growth.

  Then we’re out: ilex and oak, the stripe of a highway, and the distant swell of a mountain draped with clouds. Telephone wires race alongside, dashing in shallow parabolas from pole to pole. I think of Henry and Owen, so curious about the world—yesterday they staggered down the gravel paths in the Villa Sciarra, the trees above them bursting with flowers. “Daadadaada,” sang Owen. Henry tried for half a minute to grasp a piece of gravel between his thumb and his forefinger.

  In Spoleto we climb into the old town from the train station and eat candy bars on a fourteenth-century bridge built on 250-foot-high stone arches. A cloud blows through the gorge and engulfs us in a light drizzle and moves on, floating down the valley, shot through with light. Spires of smoke rise from fields. The wind smells of honeysuckle, then wild rose, then turned earth. A rainbow—no kidding—threads halfway across the gorge and touches the quilts of olive groves below town.

  Shauna smiles and breaks into a run; her cheeks glow pink. We wander through the duomo; we lie on our backs on a bench and trade pages of a newspaper. In the afternoon we choose an entryway at random and clamber into a velvety, cramped restaurant, waiters in tuxedos, lamps turned low.

  What we eat is a poem.

  Campanella soffiata alla caciottina locale con fonduta di parmigiano e tartufo nero; strengozzi alla Spoletina con pomodori, peperoncino, pecorino e prezzemolo; lombello di maialino in rete di lardo della Valnerina, salsa delicata al pecorino e pere al rosso di Montefalco; e sformatino caldo al cioccolato con crema all’arancia.

  Blown campenalla (ruffled-edge pasta) with local sheep’s milk cheese, topped with Parmesan and black truffle fondue; Spoleto-style strengozzi (to call these dumplings is akin to calling a Rolls-Royce a golf cart) with tomatoes, peperoncino, pecorino cheese, and parsley; the loin of a Valnerina piglet in a pecorino, pear, and Montefalco red-wine sauce; and a hot, wet chocolate flan smothered with orange cream.

  We close our eyes; we slide the forks out of our mouths. “It’s ridiculous,” Shauna says.

  At dusk the plains below town turn blue, the sky indigo. We fall into train seats sunburned and happy. Every minute a tunnel flashes past, sucking the air out of our ears.

  I open a book. Shauna closes her eyes. The city rushes toward us. Someday, I tell her, we’ll come back to Spoleto and sleep a night in the Hotel Gattapone, built into a cliffside, and cross that fourteenth-century bridge at dusk and walk the muddy trail that winds across the far side of the gorge to a picnic table above a ruined hermitage and drink a bottle of wine and eat pecorino cheese and walk back across the bridge in the full dark beneath the four naked bulbs, spaced a hundred feet apart, and our sons will run out in front of us.

  The dreams of parents. Our reflection shines in the train windows. Occasionally the darkness is broken by a distant town, its yellow lights riding the crest of a hill in the distance.

  SUMMER

  DAYS LIKE THIS: THE MOST FLAWLESS BLUE YOU could imagine, every leaf edged with gold. Tiny strawberries fatten in the garden and awnings flap and there are the big oceangoing sighs of the umbrella pines. The Academy and its fellows become like adolescent summer campers, cooped, artists trampling on scholars, scholars trampling on artists; they post tirades on the bulletin boards about misuse of Academy vans; the upstairs kitchen smells of spilled milk, garlic, and intrigue.

  If you pause in the street, you can feel the sunlight pounding your shoulders. It is as if every day the sun gains slightly more mass. Shauna collects the boys from their naps and their shirts are soaked. By afternoon Owen’s little bathroom has become a broiling suffocation chamber.

  Only early mornings remain cool. Wall lizards creep across the terrace, with neon backs and delicate toes and long tails like slips of shadow. Tiny red mites swarm beneath the potted tulips. I lift a pot and a city of mites erupts into activity.

  As I walk to my studio, there is a dawning sense of the temporariness of this life. In two months we will be cast out of the Academy, and George the sculptor will have to pack up his meticulous plaster bowls, and the bristling and sharpened and painted forest in Jon Piasecki’s studio will disappear. By late August, the door of practically every studio I pass on the way to work will have a different name fixed to it. Mine included.

  We decide to visit Umbria every Wednesday for the rest of the weeks we’re in Italy. In May we crisscross the vale of Spoleto, spend a Wednesday in Todi, a Wednesday in Orvieto, a Wednesday in Assisi. We step off the train into daydreams—no schedules, no grappling with writing, our children back in the city, dozing away, and here are the cramped, contorted alleys and distant gorges and sudden archways and painted shutters and always the burnishing, majestic light and the azure distances. Geraniums spill from window boxes, eyes peep at us from shadowed doorways. We climb onto the ramparts of town walls and wind pours through our shirts and sends leaves, or great flexing clouds of pollen, or—once—a rectangle of paper with a drawing of a face on it spinning past us, flying out over the rooftops. In restaurants I convince myself I can taste that wind in the wine, and the herbs, and especially in the oil.

  Assisi is alive with chimney swifts—the air above the piazzas are snowstorms of birds, swirling over the rooftops at dusk like reef fish. To avoid tourists there, all one has to do is climb: two blocks above the cathedral, the streets are dead quiet and the houses cling to slopes and the vale far below fade
s imperceptibly into twilight.

  The alleys in Orvieto on a rainy afternoon smell like old basements: cisterns, old paper, and must. Orvieto, we learn, has a mirror city running beneath its streets, miles of subterranean galleries and crypts and cellars, pickax basements, forgotten quarries, so many tunnels nobody knows how extensive they are.

  In Todi, we enter a chapel through a side door and are suddenly in the middle of twenty nuns, all praying silently; the only sounds the sliding of zippers on prayer books.

  We visit Giotto’s famous frescoes in Assisi, most remarkable for their breathtaking blues: a pigment he made by grinding lapis lazuli into a powder, horrifyingly expensive; he reserved blue for only the loveliest skies, the holiest robes.

  On the façade of the duomo in Orvieto, the thirteenth-century sculptor Lorenzo Maitani has carved seemingly half the books of the Bible into vertical slabs of marble. Eve appears to physically step from Adam’s rib. Cain prepares to give Abel a solid pounding with a sledgehammer. Maitani has made trees lacy as coral; serpents coiling out of walls; devils rending faces. During the Last Judgment, whole tangles of tormented bodies spill from the stone.

  The volcanic tuff in every town possesses a slightly different hue: burnt yellow, faded pink, dirty blue. Little black scorpions wander into shoes and beetles crawl in bathtubs and boars rumble across driveways. Cyclamen send runners of color through the forests. Between train tracks, poppies on skinny stems—bright red splashes of paint—buck in the wake of the trains. To return to Rome is to return exhilarated and windburned and unclenched, but always a bit sad, too, to see the motorini and billboards, to slip back inside the walls, to leave behind so much distance and color and sky.

  Toward the end of May I walk into the little grocery store, Beti, after living in Rome for nine months and say good afternoon to the same exact woman from whom I once demanded grapefruit sauce and ask her in Italian for a loaf of bread, two hamburger rolls, an apple muffin, three-tenths of a kilogram of pizza bianca, and a can of tuna fish, and I don’t screw up a single syllable.

  What happens? I get my groceries. No streamers drop from the ceiling, no strobe lights start flashing. The grocer doesn’t reach across the counter and take my face in her hands and kiss me on the forehead.

  You communicated. So what. Go pay at the register.

  No, instead she asks me something in quick-fire Italian about Henry and Owen, something about their hair, but she speaks so quickly that I miss 80 percent of it and sheepishly, stepping down from my throne of fluency, have to ask, “I’m sorry, more slowly, please?”

  On the second of June, the Feast of the Republic, fifty-nine years since Italians voted to replace monarchy with democracy, Romans celebrate by lining the via dei Fori Imperiali between the Vittoriano and the Colosseum to watch tanks and a police Lamborghini and a World War II torpedo on a flatbed come rolling past. Next come carabinieri with drums and swords, infantry in berets, even a regiment of cheerleaders swishing white pom-poms. For a finale, nine antitank jets scream in formation over the Vittoriano, spewing white and green and red smoke.

  That night we wake to fireworks launching off the roof of the villa across the street. Sparks and smoke below the trees, a whistle, an explosion, then sparks and smoke above the trees. Shauna and I stand at the terrace door blinking away sleep. Any moment the boys will wake up and start screaming. The street flares blue, white, red. Funny how to celebrate peace we seem to want to simulate war.

  Fifty-nine is a recurring number. There have been fifty-nine different Italian governments since World War II. Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi’s current government will be the first postwar administration to stay in power for a full term.51 And yet the Italians walk about in the summer heat as if drugged, as if patience is the one quality they possess in spades.

  Here’s another line from the poet Belli: “I’m not myself when I exert myself.”52

  At our favorite restaurant we eat hopelessly good antipasti: tiny roasted tomatoes; fried slips of zucchini thin as tissue paper; crisp and wet green beans; grilled bell peppers. Then we share a chicken pounded with salt and peppercorns and roasted on hot stones. We finish our meal in maybe two hours and wait another hour and a half for the bill. I try pleases, I point to my watch and say, “la babysitter…”

  “Va bene,” the waiter says. Okay. No problem. Still, we wait thirty more minutes. It comes when it comes. As if the waiters are trying to teach us something.

  One afternoon, walking down via Carini to buy milk, we pass the Banca di Roma and its goateed, pistol-wearing guard, when I notice, for the first time, the window decal that displays the banking hours.

  Mornings: 8.30–11.30.

  Afternoons: 14.15–15.40.

  Closed Saturdays.

  The bank is open less than four and a half hours a day. Inside, customers sit hip to hip, clutching slips of paper, attention on a big LED number, another eye of God.

  This coming Sunday will be the first “ecological Sunday” of the summer, meaning gas-powered vehicles are prevented from circulating in Trastevere or the historic center from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Of course, two miles away, the 50th Annual Rome Motor Show will be held at the Foro Italico, ten thousand cars, and models in Altieri dresses, and all those engines running all weekend long.

  I finish my short story about the flooded village. It is nine thousand words; it has taken me almost six months to write. It is the first piece of fiction I have completed since the boys were born. I put it in the mail for New York and drink a half a bottle of Chianti and fall asleep reading Pliny’s account of giant blue worms in the Ganges River. “They are so strong,” he writes, “that they carry off elephants coming to drink by gripping the trunk in their teeth.”53

  I wake at 3 a.m., sweating. Owen is crying in his crib. His room is sweltering. I lie with him on the couch and drift in and out of nightmares, his little weight on my chest, the morning sweeping relentlessly toward us, dawn flowing across the Black Sea, touching Bulgaria. Soon people in apartments in Yugoslavia will be starting their days; then the Croatians, then the Umbrians. Then it’ll be our turn.

  By now, mid-June, even dawn is hot. Thick ceilings of clouds clamp in the heat. At night I try keeping the windows open, but then the motorini keep me up, and the mosquitoes come for Shauna. I try shutting the windows but then the air gathers so much weight it feels as if I’ve sealed us inside a plastic bag.

  The following night Owen wakes crying at 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 a.m. I bring him milk, I rock him. I feel myself reentering the familiar country of insomnia—the ghostly hours, the slow thoughts, the inability to put together clear sentences.

  “He’s getting molars,” Shauna says. “Poor guy.” He sucks a stale corner of pizza bianca on the terrace. I try to imagine sprouting big, round pieces of skeleton through my gums.

  In the afternoons we walk stultified through the city, sky throbbing, stroller tires rubbery on the cobbles, the axles flexing, as if the metal is softening and the whole contraption might collapse. I carry along a notebook but hardly manage to open it; the heat is like having my brain removed and a bunch of hot, wet cotton stuffed behind my eyes. My skin slumps; my limbs go heavy. I daydream but nothing is happening in my head—I’m merely staring into the world, seeing blankness.

  “We can’t escape it,” I hear Shauna say into the phone one evening. “Cannot get away from it.” Diaper rashes creep up the boys’ chests and backs. Still, their enthusiasm for the world astounds. Everything—a roll of tape, a telephone jack, each other’s hair—warrants investigation. Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we’re too busy filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new continents all day long. Sometimes, looking at them, I feel as if Henry and Owen live permanently in that resplendent, taut state of awareness that we adults only reach when our cars are sliding on ice through a red light, or our airplane is thudding through turbulence.

  My own attention is
sucked ceaselessly toward water. The Tiber, sure, but the Tiber is too slow and too brown, sliding past without a ripple; in this weather it hardly seems like water at all. It’s the fountains: drinking fountains, district fountains, monumental fountains. A travel website says there are 280 fountains in Rome, but it seems as if there are more: the tower of miters and keys that is the Fontanella delle Tiare in the Borgo; the giant twin bathtubs in Piazza Farnese; the lions spewing water in Piazza San Bernardo. There is a spigot spilling day and night into a stone tank at the bottom of via di Porta San Pancrazio; another beside our bus stop; another near Garibaldi’s huge statue atop the Janiculum.

  Passing the turtle fountain in the Jewish quarter, in murderous sunlight, I watch a man sitting on its railing undress an apple with a penknife, turning the apple like a table leg in a router, the skin curling off in a single, green spiral. When he is done, he sets the coil of skin on the stair beside him, reaches back, and washes his blade in the water.

  My favorites are not the dramatic fountains, the arcing shooters, the twin jets in front of St. Peter’s, or the pomp and roar of the Fontanone. The best fountains are the pensive dribblers, the bubblers, the brimming basins, the damp backs of nymphs and centaurs, the petrified grotes-querie of Villa Sciarra. The little burbling pinecone in Piazza Venezia. Remove them and there is no present tense, no circulatory system, no dreams to balance the waking hours. No Rome.

  I sit with a notebook and watch the tides of people come and go, a time-lapse of an afternoon, blurs of darkness roiling through the light, crossing paths, intersecting energies, the fountains in the piazzas pouring on and on. Before these medieval houses were plumbed, every time you wanted to wash your shirts or vegetables or children, you had to march to the basin in front of your home. Think how often you’d see friends, enemies, the neighbor girl you’d fallen in love with. Think of the perpetual trickle of gossip, the hanging mists of rumor. These were the original office watercoolers.