Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

by Anthony Doerr

  In the States, practically every time someone would stop us on the street or in the grocery store, they’d gesture at the stroller and say, “Twins? Bet you have your hands full.” They’d mean well, of course, but to be reminded of something you can’t forget is debilitating. I prefer the Italian mothers who lean over the stroller and whisper, “So beautiful,” the smiles of passing children, the old Roman who stopped us today and grinned at Henry and Owen before shaking my hand and saying, with a bow, “Complimenti.” My compliments.

  In the middle of January, Shauna’s mother flies to Rome. The second morning she is here, she agrees to come over from her hotel at 7 a.m. and watch the babies. Shauna and I bolt down grapefruit juice, ride the #115 bus to St. Peter’s, and walk through the big, empty piazza, everything wet with rain, the fountains splashing, the façade of the basilica gray and damp.

  We thread along the Vatican walls and enter a section of the city we haven’t seen before. Shops hawk pope-shaped lollipops and plastic Virgins; a bakery sells pastries shaped like papal miters.

  We are in line for the Vatican Museums before 8. Twenty minutes later the umbrellas in front of us are shuffling forward, and we pick a lucky metal detector and a lucky ticket booth, passing a few tour groups as they gather in bleary-eyed clusters, and we slip through an archway and break into a run down a mile-long hallway with a somber courtyard unscrolling endlessly beyond the left-hand windows, tapestries sailing past, the 130-yard-long Hall of Maps sailing past, the Hall of Masks, the Hall of Muses, the various guards watching us bemusedly, and soon there is no one in front of us at all, only gallery after gallery, and the taciturn exteriors of Vatican buildings advancing beyond the windows. After three or so more minutes of jogging, we come breathless past the Raphael Rooms to a final staircase and a cluster of six or seven guards, most of them on cell phones, and step down into the Sistine Chapel alone.

  It’s darker than I thought it would be, and rawer, and older. It smells like musty newspapers.

  Four years of work, eight-hour days, lying on his back. In the quiet we imagine him, big-eared, broken-nosed, left-handed Michelangelo, young when he did the ceiling, old when he did the back wall, walking here on a drizzly morning like this one, limping down the halls in his dogskin boots, the day’s plaster wet and waiting, the vault silent. You take a breath, you go back to work.

  For five minutes Shauna and I are the only people in the Sistine Chapel. Eventually another couple arrives, out of breath. A tour group enters through a door I hadn’t even noticed. Still, there are less than twenty of us. Shauna and I lie on a bench beneath the Drunkenness of Noah and whisper.

  The ceiling sets our heads fully on the stem of our necks, our eyes in their sockets. I will remember, more than anything else, the feet of Jonah, fifty feet up, muscular and arched, dangling above the Last Judgment, his torso contorted in his throne, his expression seemingly in awe both of the miracle of his own existence and of the ceiling laid out above him.

  You find your way through a place by getting lost in it. Winter in Rome is a breath of daylight, then limestone and shadow: light glowing behind closed shutters as though stacks of gold are hoarded inside. In a window in Campo Marzio, not far from Augustus’s sundial, two thousand silk neckties, each in its own cubbyhole, shine like tropical birds. In San Lorenzo, east of the train station, we drink hot chocolate thick as oil. At the Holy Staircase, a half mile from the Colosseum, where Christian pilgrims are supposed to ascend twenty-eight marble steps on their knees, we see a man furtively tuck a folded newspaper beneath his shins as he climbs.

  Rivers of cars circulate through the city, dashing along here, stalling in eddies there. Shauna pulls another tissue from her purse. To spend a day walking the streets in Rome, we’re told, is to inhale the equivalent of eighteen cigarettes.30

  I push the twins to the vegetable market in the morning and a woman passes, smoking. Two more pass, smoking. A man in a business suit revs his dirt bike—complete with shocks and knobby tires—at a stoplight.

  No wonder the pope has been shuttling in and out of the hospital. I think of Henry and Owen’s ten-month-old bronchi, bright and pink; I think of John Paul’s trachea, eighty-four years of Polish and Italian pollution worn into its rings.

  In St. Peter’s Square, reporters smoke and aim cameras at pilgrims: Are you praying for His Holiness?

  Am I? When the breeze is down and the light is right, you can stand on the lip of the Janiculum and see the smog: ribbons of blue and gold draped above the churches.

  Here, from the newspaper, is the latest antipollution measure:

  The city of Rome will limit driving within the fascia verde on Thursdays to cars with either odd or even license plates. Starting Jan. 13, if your car has an even license plate number, you will not be able to drive between the hours of 9 a.m. and noon and again from 3 to 7 p.m. The following Thursday it will be the turn of the odd numbers. And so on, alternating between odd and even through March 31.

  The regulations are so convoluted and maddening they become almost beautiful. Which is what it’s like here. We’ve lived in Rome four months now and I still do not understand when I am supposed to pay for coffee at a bar.

  Or try this. Ten years ago a plaster Madonna in a garden in Civitavecchia, a village north of the city, cried tears of blood. Last week, a report released by “a team of legal, medical, religious, and scientific experts” was printed in the paper, concluding that the event “was supernatural as there is no scientific explanation for the tears.”

  Rome is a broken mirror, the falling strap of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballast hidden beneath the surface.

  A man passes in a suit, fur-covered boots, and mirrored sunglasses. A little boy passes wearing a watchcap printed Versace. A woman brushes my shoulder, her gloved hands clutching sheet music, Mozart’s name across the top. This is the city where Renaissance bankers served soup made from parrot tongues. This is the city where the ancient Etruscans may or may not have had thousand-member orgies, and vestal virgins found “guilty” of intercourse were entombed alive with enough food that they wouldn’t die right away, and spectators at beheadings would wager on the number of spurts of blood that would gush from a headless body.31

  Crucifixions, stake-burnings, entrails cranked out by mobs. In Roman History, the second-century senator and historian Cassius Dio describes a wealthy Roman named Vedius Pollio, who kept big saltwater reservoirs stocked with moray eels “that had been trained to eat men, and he was accustomed to throw to them such of his slaves as he desired to put to death.”32 In Trastevere, Saint Cecilia was scalded by steam for three days in AD 230 before finally having her head hacked off. Saint George was torn up by giant gearworks a century later and forced to wear red-hot shoes, and still he wouldn’t die. Thirteen hundred years after that, a governor of Cesare Borgia’s held his page over a fire with a poker. One pope started forcing Jews to race down the Corso in front of horses, and another nailed the ears of heretics to doors. And what was heresy, really? A poorly timed question? Aiming a lens at a star?

  We arrange, over the Internet, to rent a farmhouse for a week near an Umbrian town called Todi, two hours north. We arrange to rent a minivan called a Picasso. The minivan costs almost as much as the house. To secure it, I have to sign seven different forms. I drive it to the apartment slowly, horns following me all the way.

  The stroller. Diapers, wipes, high chairs, two car seats. Two grocery bags loaded with baby food in jars. Winter jumpers, overalls, a stack of little fleece pajamas. Our last bag, containing Shauna’s and my clothes, is an afterthought. As we pull past the Academy, on our way out of town, Lorenzo hurries out of the gatekeeper’s shed.

  “You are driving?” He peers into the backseat at the babies. He adjusts his glasses. “You have done this before?”

  “Since I was sixteen.”

  His expression is serious, earnest. He is, I decide, one of the most considerate men I have ever
met. “Romans don’t use turn signals,” he says.

  We creep through Monteverde. Cars and vans blast past on both sides. Soon we are in the new Rome, billboards and construction barrels, a Hilton, a tractor dealership, tenements in reclaimed fields, glass-and-steel towers ringed by reefs of gleaming cars. Shauna ends up discarding the map and announces exit numbers on instinct. I find the driving is easiest if I pretend I am playing a video game.

  A statistic: you are fifty times more likely to die on the roads in Rome than you are in Los Angeles or London. Romans are famous for their adoration of children, and yet, if you stand on a sidewalk for, say, three minutes, chances are two helmetless fourteen-year-olds will tear past you on a Vespa.

  The Picasso fares admirably: one U-turn, no accidents. The sprawl dissipates. Vineyards climb the shaggy hills. Little stands of oak here and there cling to their leaves. Olive groves groove the hillsides; a commuter train pours through a tunnel. A BMW hurtles past us, going maybe 130 miles an hour. The boys scatter Cheerios across the backseat, singing, “Ma, ma, ma, ma.”

  Our rental is a stone farmhouse on three acres. It’s near dark when we arrive. We fill an upstairs tub with brown water and bathe Owen and Henry and set them to sleep in cribs from which Shauna has painstakingly removed mouse droppings.

  Out the windows the Milky Way is dazzling and white. The house feels enormous to us, creaky as a freighter, full of big rooms and old furniture. I have forgotten what it is like to live in a space like this, with a real oven and loaded bookshelves, stacks of pillows and blankets, two dining tables, a kitchen island, windowsills, three fireplaces. I have forgotten what it is like to be surrounded by quiet.

  We climb into a soft bed. Pale curtains drift around us. It is so silent I can hear the branches of the trees outside the window clicking softly against each other.

  “I want a house,” Shauna says.

  Umbria in January is smoky and blue. The rosebushes are bare. Dead leaves rattle in the dwarf oaks, and olive cuttings litter the groves.

  An hour after dawn it begins to snow. It tinkles on the branches and the woodpile like shavings of glass. The valley below the house is a brilliant white; three soft lights glow far below us. The sun comes up and sets the hills on fire. After breakfast we barricade the boys into the living room with pillows and blankets; we hide lamp cords and fireplace tools. They are not walking yet, but by now both can crawl at what seems like twenty miles an hour. They pull themselves up on chairs; they crash through our puny fortifications like runaway trucks. Every few minutes there is a sickening thud as something heavy is pulled over, followed by a long inhalation, the pause as you run toward them when you think, Maybe this time he won’t cry. Then there’s the screaming.

  We eat roast chicken, roast potatoes, pork loin, apple pie. It is the first time we have used an oven since we arrived in Italy.

  Out here in Umbria, perhaps even more so than in Rome, you begin to get a sense of how long Italy has been home to humans. Everywhere we walk there are centuries-old groves and sleep-soaked farmhouses and ruins of walls: I feel as though we might start memories up from the fields as we might startle bevies of quail back home. But I feel, too, that this Italy is not quite known yet, either, not completely subdued. Time is larger here. Hawks come over the house and frost whitens the mulberries and the earth coughs up luminous, round pebbles of quartz. Mud sucks at our boots. The Tiber flows along at the bottom of the road, brown and fast, its shallows glazed with ice.

  An unexpected thing happens: I start writing fiction again. The image of Rome as I first saw it comes back to me, the view from the rim of the Janiculum: the Fontanone thundering behind us, the rooftops and domes and gardens of the city wavering beneath a field of blue. The panorama floats in front of my eyes, and by lunchtime I am five pages into a new short story about a village that will be drowned by the construction of a dam.

  Maybe it’s that Italy has become familiar enough that I can stop paying attention to it for a few hours a day. Or maybe it’s just being back in the country, a place so much more similar to home, where men go for long walks in the hills and people wave to you when you drive past and the background noise is not engines but silence. Regardless, the notebook pages begin to fill with an imaginary world. I work in the attic on a desk covered with the dead husks of wasps, legs turned up, writing out new pages, one after the other. Shauna reads in an armchair beside the fire. The boys nap hard, curled into the corners of their cribs. The sky is silver all week.

  Toward the end of January my recently published novel comes out in the Netherlands and I climb onto an airplane. One after another reporters come into an Amsterdam hotel room clutching a copy of my book in Dutch. A grandfather clock chimes the hours. Behind its face little wooden ships rock to and fro, marking the seconds.

  I answer the same questions a dozen times. By the end of the day I’ve had so much coffee my hands are vibrating. Amsterdam seems a city of ghosts, motionless all evening, rain falling quietly on the canals, no horns or car alarms, just pale, lovely people gliding through intersections on bicycles. The streets disappear into curtains of mist. In the red-light district bored women in lingerie stand framed behind windows the size of phone booths, shifting their weight from hip to hip.

  Five years ago this was a future I wouldn’t have believed in: that good-looking European strangers would have read my books, that in a single day I’d see my face reflected in the lenses of fifteen different cameras. Canals and fresh fish with my Dutch editor and a box of exquisite chocolates in my room with a note from the manager and a gorgeous Belgian newspaperwoman riding three and a half hours on a train to come talk to me about something I made up—it’s like a dream.

  I walk London with Jessica the publicist; I walk Amsterdam with Esther the publicist. The flower market, the big, black capsule of another radio microphone, a photo shoot outside the Rijksmuseum, and tomorrow a flight back to an apartment from the terrace of which I can see the Pantheon—one would think it’d feel glamorous. But it doesn’t, not quite. Instead I lie in hotel beds and miss my family. The hours when people ask me about books I’ve already written feel mostly as if another person undergoes them. It’s part of a previous life; my heart is elsewhere. This, I suppose, is what it means to look after two babies: any attempt to make you feel as if you were at the center of something is hopelessly hilarious.

  Even now, when I have a chance to sleep all night, I cannot. I write some new pages for my short story; I switch on the news. During the first break, a Volvo in a commercial slips across a cypress-lined road and suddenly, impossibly, snakes past the Fontanone. The thick, bullet-shaped marble piers in front of the fountain, carved with dragons, are unmistakable.

  Wet pavement, arc lights, a sleek sedan. My sons dream their own dreams just a couple hundred yards from that very spot.

  I finally fall asleep around three. In a dream a single snowflake comes spiraling through the oculus of the Pantheon and lands on the floor and shines a moment before melting.

  I come through the door carrying two sacks of tulip bulbs. Shauna tells me the boys have started skipping naps again. “And they scream for no reason,” she says. “They’re sitting there, drooling away, and suddenly they start screaming.”

  Constipated? Hungry? We pry open their mouths and peer in—the tissues of their gums are swollen and red. They have runny noses. They want to be held nonstop.

  All week we take turns aiming brown, bad-smelling drops onto their gums, wrestling them into diapers, handing them frozen washcloths to suck on. In the mornings I mold paragraphs for my short story, examine them, try to figure out what I want to say. As soon I’m back in the apartment, I hurry Shauna out. Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor—it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

  On a dazzling and cold first day of February, Tacy watches the boys while Shauna and I walk the two and a half miles to the Piazza del Popolo. Near dusk we find ourselves on the north side of the square, in the church o
f Santa Maria del Popolo, standing in front of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter. It’s a massive painting, dark and grainy, loaded with maroons and blacks. In it, three faceless workmen struggle to raise a solid-timber crucifix to which an aged and muscular Saint Peter has been nailed upside down.

  The church smells of old wood, stone, and the ashes of incense. A restorer’s drill whines on scaffolding behind us. I squint into the gloom. The painting is hung in a shadowy chapel, it’s four hundred years old, and Caravaggio used so much black that it’s hard to make out much of anything. I am about to move on when a man shuffles up, rifles in his pocket, and plunks a coin into a box mounted on the rail beside me. There is a click from somewhere above us and a spotlight mounted on the ceiling switches on and bathes the painting in light.

  The white on Saint Peter’s chest and knees springs forward; I can discern wrinkles on his forehead, grime on his ribs. A strange and alienated concern appears in his face, as if he cannot figure out where to set his gaze. In the calves and forearms of the crucifiers, there is the obvious strain of heaving up a heavy old peasant. For the first time I understand what art critics mean when they say Caravaggio was a master at using white: Peter’s loincloth, centered on the canvas, bright and creased, vaults into the eye. The artist has used maybe twenty strokes of white in a vast landscape of black, but with it he has made an entire universe spring to life.

  The spotlight burns for a minute, then clicks off. The painting falls back into shadow. We blink. I leave the church wondering, How many other places around here have these illumination boxes?