American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  One afternoon, I made a water run with the uncle to the spring called Fonte Sacramora. We loaded cases of empty glass bottles into the trunk of his car and drove thirty minutes to Viserba, next to the sea. We waited in line. “Acqua buona,” he said.

  And miraculous, I learned.

  Legend has it, when Saint Julian was martyred in 305, he was sewed inside a sack full of scorpions and vipers and tossed in the sea. His body came ashore in Alexandria and was buried in Antioch, where he remained until around the year 950, when his tomb traveled, by water, across the Mediterranean, up the Adriatic, and came ashore in Viserba. On the spot it came ashore there sprang a spring. That’s some water.

  It was free, it tasted good, but it wasn’t tap water.

  These days I’m observing the rule of one—one glass of wine with meals and a lot of water. I take ice water with meals. Between meals I measure consumption in swallows, not in glasses, cupping my hand under the water streaming from the kitchen faucet and slupping down twelve swallows. Twelve swallows how many times a day? On a good day, every time I pee, I then go the kitchen and drink. That’s my system: pee, drink; drink, pee. More swallowing, more frequent peeing. More frequent peeing, more swallowing. I know it’s indelicate, but: what gorgeous pee. A crystal clear, faintly greenish rushing cataract.

  I’m operating on the assumption that a lot of water is good for me. I know it’s possible to kill yourself drinking water, but I’m careful. And the health benefits are legion. Water aids in mental concentration, energizes muscles, is good for your skin, and flushes toxins from your body (witness my pee). The eight-glasses-of-water rule? Probably bunk. A 1945 publication by the National Food Nutrition Board recommended two and a half liters of water daily, which is about eight eight-ounce glasses of water. Since then eight has been the magic number. A more common sense approach: drink when you’re thirsty. My approach—well, enough about that.

  Ice water, on the other hand, raises questions. According to a California State Science Fair project in 2008, drinking ice water with a meal is not good. Says the researcher: “Drinking cold water with your meal is harmful for your health. It delays the process of emulsification of fat because it solidifies it. This causes the fat to cling to the villi for a longer time, which prevents other important nutrients from being absorbed.” I totally forgot about my villi. This warning about ice water is fairly common. Dr. Stephen Sinatra, an integrative cardiologist, also cautions against ice water with food, referring to the resulting imbalance between agni (Sanskrit for digestive fire) and ama (Sanskrit for toxins).

  I’ll have problems with ice water the next time I’m in Italy. For one thing, there’s never enough ice. Ask for ice in a restaurant, they bring you a saucer with a couple of ice cubes the size of dice. The typical American looks for ice on a glacial scale. Then there’s the Italian belief, I’m not sure how widely held, that ice water is bad for you. The uncle who took me to Sacramora always said, “Acqua fredda fa male alla pancia.” “Cold water gives you a stomachache.” In addition to snuffing out your digestive fire and freezing your intestinal villi.

  In a few days my wife and I are going back to San Francisco. To prepare for the trip, I’ve been reading up on restaurants. I’m expecting to see this sign: Water served on request. Meaning tap water. I’m sure there’s all the bottled water you want. Given my rule of one, and the attendant desire to drink gallons of tap water, I’m a little nervous. How bad is the water situation out there? A few weeks ago Tom Selleck was accused of stealing water for his fifty-acre avocado ranch. The charge turned out to be bogus, but the fact that it was made is an indicator of water pressure.

  Unfortunately, I recently watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on television. I can’t think of Muir Woods now without seeing apes in the trees and, across the bay in San Francisco, a militarized dystopia. What kind of civilization would we have if there were a severe, long-term water shortage? You imagine something akin to the one represented in that ape movie: one segment of the population with a sufficient water supply (apes, as it were, who have ready access to water from the reservoir), another segment on the verge of violence and extinction, holding mayhem at bay only as long as the bottled water lasts.

  30

  Feathers

  “Help me with the piumino,” she says.

  My wife is holding an armful of duvet cover, still warm from the dryer. We’re going to stuff the duvet (piumino in Italian) into the cover, an ordeal that makes me long for the simple days of my youth, when bedding consisted of flat sheet, blanket, and bedspread.

  Ordinarily I like things ending in -ino and -ini, a diminutive Italian suffix that confers cuteness on just about anything. Even a turd—stronzino—becomes adorable in the Italian diminutive. I do not love the piumino.

  “Must I?”

  “Yes, you must.”

  The problem is fit. We have an oversize cover. It’s too long and too wide—the duvet floats around inside the cover like a slippery manta ray as we pinch it, feeling around for edges, trying to trap the duvet while it is approximately centered. It is a doomed effort, which means eventually either the lower or upper region of our bed will have lots of duvet, capable of achieving incubation-level temperatures.

  “I hate this thing,” I say.

  “It’s easier.” She’s standing on a chair at the foot of the bed, getting ready to fluff the duvet. “You center it, you poof it, and you’re done,” she says.

  “You’re standing on a chair to make the bed. That’s easy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate this thing.”

  She fluffs the duvet, parachuting it to the mattress. It takes three or four poofs to get the job done. She climbs down from the chair, says it looks nice. She likes it.

  Does she ever. She likes it so much she even leaves it on our bed in the summer. All summer I toss the thing off me all night long. All night she tosses it back on. Some mornings I wake up feeling like poached sole.

  I was not yet out of primary school when my mother taught me how to make a bed. I learned to execute hospital corners on both the top sheet and blanket and then smooth a bedspread over the whole, finishing with a crisp tuck under the pillow. Comfort then was measured in foot-pounds of blanket weight you felt piled on in the winter, the heavier the better. If you had feathers, they were in your pillow.

  The dispute comes down to your feather orientation: feathers on the bottom or feathers on top.

  History suggests humans originally, and through much of recorded time, preferred feathers on the bottom. Feather beds date back to the fourteenth century, though as a rarity, primarily comforting the well-to-do. By the nineteenth century, however, they were more common. The feather “tick” also made its appearance at this time. The tick was essentially a linen or cotton bag full of feathers (fifty pounds of feathers!), which was then laid over a mattress. You would lie on the tick, not pull the tick over you. God was in his heaven, and all the feathers were beneath us.

  Not, evidently, on the continent, where the duvet was becoming a thing, popularizing the feathers-on-top orientation. The term “duvet,” meaning “down,” dates back to eighteenth-century French. Samuel Johnson, in 1759, refers with skepticism to an advertisement for duvets, noting, “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,” and citing, as an example, “‘duvets for bed-coverings, of down, beyond comparison superior to what is called otter-down’, and indeed such, that its ‘many excellencies cannot be here set forth.’” Johnson, something tells me, did not swing that way.

  Mattress historians note that right-thinking Brits and Americans clung to their feathers-on-the-bottom orientation until well into the late twentieth century. In the 1970s, duvets began to appear in department stores in England; in 1987 IKEA opened its first store in London, marketing duvets as “doonas.” That was that. Today, according to the Daily Telegraph, department stores sell seven duvets for every blanket. The Telegraph reports, “Argos, the country’s biggest furniture retailer, does not even sell wo
olen blankets. Fleecy little throws from man-made fibre, yes, but not a proper, woven piece of Britain. It stocks over 100 different duvets.”

  My wife took me to Macy’s the other day, more for company than for my opinion. We went sheet and duvet shopping. This stuff will go on her parents’ bed in Italy, a bed we now sleep on a couple months of the year.

  This bed is an instrument of torture. Until recently its wool-stuffed mattresses rested on a bouncy, noisy wire mesh that over time had become fatigued and taken to sagging in the middle. The lumpy mattresses also sloped toward the center, creating a kind of culvert in the middle of the bed. These mattresses were heirlooms to her, pieces of family history she wanted to preserve. She said they just needed to be fluffed.

  Fluffed? I pictured us hanging bedding out the window and pummeling our wool mattresses, punishing them for hurting us. Instead, we are now rehabilitating the bed. Persuaded by pain and bad sleep, she relented: The wool mattresses are history. The mesh is next.

  But it looks like there will be a duvet.

  While I wait beneath a Martha Stewart poster at Macy’s, my wife tests sheets for crispness. She looks at Westport 1000 thread count, pronounces it slimy; Genova 1200 thread count, slippery. Next there’s Bentley 400, Charter Club Opulence 800, and Ralph Lauren RL 624 Sateen, none of them quite right. She says she wants them scratchy. She skips the sheets and moves to duvets.

  Martha Stewart looks down on me with that confident smile of hers. She’s wearing pajamas. “It’s already decided,” she says. “You’re getting a duvet.”

  “I know that.”

  “You know what else is nice,” Martha says, “for accent?”

  “I like the scratchy sheets. I’ll give her that.”

  “Shams.” She flashes me her Martha smile. “Lots of shams.”

  “No.”

  “King or queen?”

  “Queen. No shams.”

  “In a variety of sizes,” she says, “you can fit up to a dozen pillows on your bed.”

  My wife steps up to the register, motions me over. She’s picked out a duvet cover. “The duvet,” she says, “will be a special order. Is that okay?”

  It’s not. It’s really, really not. But I tell her, “Of course, that will be fine.”

  31

  The Quality of Your Sleep

  I’m lying in bed reading a short novel by Gianrico Carofiglio on my Kindle. Guido Guerrieri, Carofiglio’s funny, sad, world-weary lawyer from Bari, is standing in the doorway of a woman’s apartment. He holds two bottles of wine and smells dinner within. Since his wife left him, he’s been in a deep funk. His sleep is bad. He’s given to spontaneous bouts of crying. In the interest of getting his life back together, he moves to a new complex and discovers one day this woman, Margherita, who lives two floors above him. Or rather, she discovers him, and invites him to dinner.

  During this chat in the doorway, he makes a joke. “Rise,” Guerrieri says. Meaning, in Italian: she laughed. Rise. Sempre con quella specie di gorgoglio.

  My Italian is good enough to understand that Guerrieri hears something funny in her laugh. What I don’t get is “gorgoglio.” She laughed, once again with a kind of . . . what?

  I touch the word “gorgoglio” on screen. Kindle highlights it and goes to its Italian dictionary, which I decide to bypass. Reading the definition of a word you don’t know in a language that you only sort of know can be dicey. Plus, it’s nighttime. I don’t want to work. I touch “More” in the dialogue box and ask to see the translation in English.

  Hubble.

  She laughed, once again with a kind of . . . hubble?

  I’m not sure what laughter with hubble sounds like. I touch “gorgoglio” again and drag-select the whole sentence; then I click “More,” “Translation.”

  She laughed, once again with a kind of gurgle.

  Got it.

  Guerrieri notes this detail and steps inside. Margherita shuts the door.

  While I read, my wife stirs beside me. Her back to me, she is mostly asleep. I hold still, lying on my back, careful not to disturb her.

  I’ve been reading on this Kindle in bed for some months now. It’s backlit, which means I can read in the dark. There’s a childish pleasure in that, a throwback to the flashlight under the covers. Except this is different. Two or three times a week I’m likely to wake from deep sleep at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. In a moment, I’m fully awake. What do you do? Lie there and wait for your thoughts to dissipate and sleep to return? How long do you wait? Pre-Kindle, after twenty or thirty minutes, I would get out of bed and go downstairs, lie on the couch, and read. A couple of pages of The Faerie Queen can be as good as an Ambien. Now I stay in bed. The device weighs seven and a half ounces. If I want to, I can bring the complete works of Spenser and Plato and Shakespeare to bed, without worrying about crushing my chest.

  There’s lots of advice these days on how to sleep—how to go to sleep, how to stay asleep. Exercise. Seek bright light during the day and avoid bright light at night to calibrate your circadian rhythms. Don’t take naps. Avoid spicy food and alcohol in the evening. Smart phone, computer, TV: shut them down an hour before you go to bed. Use your bed, the National Sleep Foundation advises, for sex and sleep only.

  One day I ask my friend who is a sleep doc, should I be getting more sleep?

  “I get, like, four to six hours,” I tell him. “Seven if I’m lucky.”

  He turns his head, listening in his doctorly way, and says nothing, which I take as a request for more information.

  “Maybe four to five hours uninterrupted. Once in a great while six.”

  “How do you feel?” he asks.

  “Good,” I say. My biorhythm bombs every day around four o’clock in the afternoon. I tell him that. “Shouldn’t I get eight hours?”

  “You feel okay,” he says.

  I nod.

  “If you feel okay, I’d say you’re probably okay.”

  Eight-hour sleep may in fact be a modern convention—and an error. Gregg Jacobs, a sleep disorder specialist at University of Massachusetts Medical School, observes, “For most of evolution we slept a certain way. Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.” Historians point to hundreds of references to segmented sleep—first sleep, then second sleep—in medieval literature and medical texts. Back then, it was dark at night, very dark, all night. Nightlife, such as it was, could be dangerous. At sundown, people went to bed, slept soundly, and then woke for an hour or so, for reading, for prayer, for sex, after which they went back to sleep. Then came light and more light. In the 1650s Paris began to light the streets. In the 1690s London did so as well. Nightlife became a thing. Around this time, the word “insomnia” makes it first appearance in the English language.

  Then there is electricity and a lot more light.

  By the twentieth century, our thinking about sleep has made a dramatic shift. There is sleep resistance. To sleep begins to seem like a waste of time. (I remember saying, as a college student, probably right after reading Jack Kerouac, that I didn’t want to sleep, I wanted to live, I wanted to burn bright, I would sleep when I was dead.) And now there is the new normal: sleep eight hours. In our time, segmented sleep is an aberration. Today, when we wake up in the middle of the night, something is wrong. Sleep needs fixing.

  Can it be fixed?

  Should it be?

  I read a few more minutes. Guerrieri’s dinner with Margherita is fraught, confessional. She opens his wine, pours him a glass. They eat. For a digestivo he drinks brown tequila. Then, smoking Guerrieri’s cigarettes, one after another, which explains her gurgling laugh, Margherita tells him a long tale, of her drinking problem, of her troubled courtship and failed marriage, and now of a period of recovery. Poi restammo li’ a parlare, ancora, fino a notte. “We hung in there. We talked and talked, into the night.”

  I close my Kindle, and its light goes out.

  I am awake.

  Sometimes in the dead of night, you lie awake and there is a riot of
thought, a profusion of images, memories. It’s your wild mind coming at you, a mixture of mystery and the mundane. Why am I alive? Will the lawnmower start? Am I a good husband? A good father? Did I forget to thaw the chicken? What is it to die?

  Before their second sleep, people once lay awake thinking thoughts like these. It must be normal human psychology. I can’t imagine them thinking, Drat, I wish I could go to sleep. They must have thought, How curious, and sad, and funny, and dreadful. How wonderful to be so wide awake.

  32

  My Father, Going Deaf

  A few weeks ago my father woke up almost entirely deaf.

  He already had a significant deficit. For years he has worn hearing aids. One for each ear, they are a microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker all in one small plastic device the color of ear wax. He pokes at them with his index finger to dial the volume up and down. He changes their batteries with the same ethic of care that he rotates the tires on his car. More often than not, through most of a conversation, they feedback and squeal like a miniature PA system. A sound anyone in the room can hear. He does not.

  This deafness, I suspect, is in his genes. His mother was similarly deaf. But while my father has always been open about hearing loss, my grandmother was more of a covert deaf person. When you spoke to her and she inevitably did not hear what you said, she would act like she had heard at least some of it.

  “I’m leaving for school now, grandma.”