My piece of the palazzo was the garret, a real garret, right in the roof. At least half the floor space was uninhabitable because of the angle of the ceiling. But who cares, it was a garret and it was heaven. The bath was tucked under the slope, so you couldn’t stand up even if you wanted to. The whole place looked out along the higher wall onto the central courtyard and across rooftops towards Verona’s famous Arena, an artfully restored Roman Colosseum-style structure, much loved and used by the locals for everything from opera to Italian pop shows. The contessa had agreed to let me stay for a fee within my budget as a favour to Nina.
‘November 7, 1816. I have been over Verona. The amphitheatre is wonderful—beats even Greece. Of the truth of Juliet’s story they seem tenacious to a degree, insisting on the fact—giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love.’
So Lord Byron wrote to his friend and biographer, Thomas Moore. When he was in Verona, he had yet to visit Rome. I thought that, had he, he might have noted the Veronese Arena, which he referred to as the amphitheatre, to be even better than the Colosseum. Wow. It was so very wow. Made all the more wow by the fact that it was surrounded by a postcard-perfect piazza with rows and rows of outdoor diners basking in its glory. Wow.
Verona did not need Juliet’s legend. It was the most romantic of cities anyway. Wow.
Nina had taken me on a greatest hits walk around the centro storico and I was saying ‘wow’ every thirty seconds. Which wasn’t good. Someone had told me the word was considered a bit déclassé in these northern parts and one thing I had noticed about Verona, apart from its extraordinary architectural and topographical wonders, was its classiness. Central, historical Verona at least, is the utopian Italian city, all handsome, sartorially splendid people, effortlessly enjoying an elegant life amidst the most pleasing buildings against a hilly verdant background. The Adige River snakes through the city, an S running west to east, giving Verona the unfair advantage of riverbanks and their associated charms every which way. Layers of history survived World War II, despite Verona’s proximity to Germany and its forces marching right to the doorstep. Medieval churches and monuments built by the Scaligeri, a dynasty that ruled for hundreds of years before submitting to Milan and Venice, comprise a magnificent architectural legacy. The Venetians added their lions, fortifications and Renaissance palazzi. And that’s not even factoring in the Romans, remnants of whom remain not only in the Arena but also in Teatro Romano, the garden-enmeshed ruins of which date from the first century BC. There are cobbled streets full of elegant shops, little corners of secret local charm and an obvious pride in all of it. If Verona were a woman, she would be well bred, well groomed, well dressed, impossibly comely and rather vain. Much like quite a few of the women who live there.
Nina was an Australian transplanted to Verona, so she ticked all the boxes except the vanity bit. But when she picked me up at the train station, immediately I noticed she had on the most eye-catching set of orange coral jewellery, chunky statement pieces that tied in with her bag, expensive shoes and perfectly stylish garments. I was not five minutes in her company when I could no longer resist commenting on the bling.
‘It’s our uniform,’ she said. ‘You’re undressed in Verona if you aren’t wearing any jewellery.’
In Veronese terms, I was not in pyjamas. I was naked.
The city had me in a festive mood. After Nina left me I decided to keep walking. Up a cobbled street running parallel to a stretch of the river, I spied a corner store with a queue out the door. This was a sight that could only mean one thing at 4.30 on a Thursday afternoon in Italy: excellent gelato. I joined the line. The gelateria was in a pokey cave-like space with the counter arching around one wall and the line of customers following it in one door and out another. The man who was serving was clearly proud of his produce. When I ordered in something resembling Italian, and put my money in the tray on the counter as I was supposed to, he nodded at me like a pleased primary school teacher. I had banana, bursting with fruit, and yoghurt con fragola, with strawberry, that was sweet and tangy and tastebud popping. Best. Gelato. Ever. Mamma. Mia.
From the gelateria I strolled. It was so nice to stroll. I didn’t find I could stroll in Venice or Rome. Or at least, I hadn’t thought to. Venice was a running of the gauntlet between sights and Rome was a serious walk. Verona was smaller and more laid back.
It was strolling along that I found myself at Piazza delle Erbe at apertivo time. Piazza delle Erbe is the main square in Verona, a conglomeration of ages and styles that comes together cohesively, overseen by Torre Lamberti, an 84-metre-high tower of history, begun in the twelfth century, completed in the fifteenth, its clock face added in the nineteenth. The market was closing up and the dogs were out for walks, beneficently allowing their owners to come along for the jaunt. It was such a seductive time of the day. Everyone seemed carefree and content. I sat down at an outdoor café, ordered a glass of wine and people-watched for an hour.
The combination of expensive timepieces, tennis bracelets and tattoos on those belle donne of Verona was a breathtakingly audacious fashion choice, especially en masse. If you needed any evidence that Verona had two football teams, well, it looked like WAG central. I watched tables full of these amazingly groomed and bedecked women drink their spritz, the local tipple of choice, trading an apparently rehearsed warmth with each other as their own mothers nursed adorably dressed bambini who chomped on the fat green olives put on the tables to accompany cocktails. Honestly, I had not seen such a fabulous parade of watches outside the opening pages of the US Vogue September issue.
A husband arrived carrying a salmon-pink newspaper. He had perfect hair, great bone structure, natty glasses and an excellent suit, and he kissed everyone except his wife. She looked slightly awkward with him. I thought his watch was a Rolex. I’d be uncomfortable too, married to a man like that.
At breakfast in a café the next day there was a woman, impeccably dressed in that very conservative, new moneyed way. Crisp white shirt with double cuffs. Navy blue jeans secured with a navy and white belt. Hogan trainers. Neat shoulder-length brown hair. A ton of gold jewellery. After the initial pang of wishing I had packed one of my white shirts, which by the way, I hardly ever wore at home, there was an unfamiliar settling, an acceptance that I could not look like everyone. I could not be all things to all people.
I’d tried. In the mid-1980s clothing, not alcohol, was my compulsion. Shopping for clothes was still entirely irresistible to me. I loved fashion, of a sort. I loved finding things that expressed me. But back then I went through a lengthy phase of buying clothes and changing into them in a public toilet somewhere on the way to work. There were a few shops I favoured, all outlets, open early and on my way to the office. Outlets, so it wasn’t so bad, was it? Except for the volume. A lot of cheap soon became expensive. But I was so uncomfortable with myself I could not stop doing it. I would only be able to start my day if I was wearing something new.
I stopped when I moved jobs and had an earlier start. But for many, many years, I had still compulsively bought and thrown out, bought and thrown out.
There were those times in the late 1980s when I would insist on having something new to wear to the nightclubs every Saturday night. My girlfriends, my sister and I would go shopping on Chapel Street and ask the assistants to put the purchases through in multiple amounts, each under fifty dollars, which was the point at which purchases needed to be phone-authorised. Those days of manual credit card transactions meant my plastic was consistently over the limit. I even had an ATM card confiscated by one bank because I had worked out that on weekends it took their computers a while to catch up to what had been transacted. I would put my account into the red regularly.
It was the same animal as the drinking beast. The same one
as the food. For a long time, I could not say no to myself. That thing needing to be filled up. Lord Byron had filled his up with sex.
I was having a hard time saying no to the Gelateria Ponte Pietra. Every afternoon, I went back. His handmade ice cream was the stuff I knew I would think about every day for the rest of my gelato-loving life. I’d had all kinds of berry flavours, cherry, citrus, my standard banana, but this was no ordinary banana, and then some intriguing choices like zaffrino, or saffron. Sweet, fragrant, with an unexpected richness, I fell for it like a junkie. But it was one of the gelato man’s one-offs. I never got to have it again. Except in my dreams.
Both Lord Byron and I loved to swim. Verona has an outdoor Olympic swimming pool that runs along a section of the old Roman wall. It was a phenomenal location for some exercise. After my laps, I watched a group of newly pubescent boys and girls play spin-the-bottle. There were four skinny, smooth-skinned girls and one curvy, bigger and looser-fleshed girl. This stuff does not change, I thought. She was me in 1976. I watched her, amid the giggles and pecks of kisses of her friends, as mechanical as those meaningless hugs teenagers give each other, her body language running the gamut of discomfort from the knees pulled to the chest, to lying down on her stomach, to pretending to snooze, to looking into the distance with disinterest. She’d clearly told them she wasn’t playing their silly game. And though the boys said the Italian version of ‘Eew, girl germs’ no matter who they kissed, I was sure that in her head, if the bottle had landed on her, they would have recoiled in horror or run screaming or said something dreadfully cruel and life-threatening.
I knew exactly what was going on. Our pool at Ringwood, the Fred Dwerryhouse Swimming Centre, looked the same as the Verona pool—save the Roman wall. Same big lawns, sparkling big blue pool. Same too, was the vulnerability of being almost naked with your schoolmates; as excruciating, or exciting, or both. I spent countless hours at the pool with my skinny, tanned girlfriends, all in the cool group like I’m sure these kids were, feeling so bad about myself.
Poor little thing. I wanted to tell her not to spend the next thirty years of her life feeling that way. The girl at that Verona pool—and me.
After all, later that day I saw a woman in a Pucci mini-dress and with a massive beauty queen blow-dry, toned legs and jewelled gladiator sandals riding by on a bicycle. Crazy stunning. But guess what? We passed by the same group of men, who did not react to her but did to me. Italians like a little curve. Trophy was in the eye of the beholder. In this country, a juicy woman would turn a head every time. That was one of the many reasons I loved Italy.
I bought a ticket to The Killers at Verona’s Roman amphitheatre. A whim but a good one, I thought. It just so happened that I was walking along and saw a poster announcing that they were playing the Arena. I was on my way to the Arena to do the touristy thing, the guided tour, etc. When I saw the poster, I decided against the tour, did some investigating through a series of interviews—charades, capito-non-capito, now combined with a smattering of Italian—with people who I thought might know where I could get a ticket (policemen, parking inspectors, street sweepers), and then I walked in the vague direction of the box office. Amazingly (particularly if you knew the various sets of conflicting directions I was given during my research), I found it. I asked, ‘The Killers, uno, numerato.’ One assigned seat, in other words. I had picked this up while I waited in the queue.
‘No,’ she said. Then, ‘Uno momento.’ She clacked about on the computer and came back with the news—in English now—that a batch of tickets had just been released. ‘Very beautiful tickets,’ she said.
And so I went to see the band at that spectacular first-century AD Roman amphitheatre. In the past I had been annoyed and fascinated by the singer, Brandon Flowers, because he had plenty of interesting things to say, among them that The Killers would be the biggest band in the world, which I found at the time audacious and affronting. But when I saw them I was struck by his genuineness. You always know when you see a band live whether or not their art is coming from that soul level. Who was I to doubt their singer’s convictions about his destiny?
I was beginning to realise that anything was possible in this life. When I stripped Lord Byron down to his core, I thought he was living his truth, living authentically and, though he could be a braggart at times, the enduring appeal of his art was testimony to his authenticity. Regardless of the noise that surrounded him, when he created, he channelled divine inspiration.
Pop music was pop music, but I was reminded of that genuineness at the amphitheatre.
*
After a good afternoon of writing in my garret, I walked down the road to my gelateria. I lined up, waited my turn, told the man, ‘Uno cono, due gusti, banana e mango.’ I was figuring the fruity ones would keep me from getting fat. I took my ice cream to the Ponte Pietra, Verona’s most beloved bridge, which had been blown to smithereens by the Germans. The Veronese had pieced it together again painstakingly from the original materials, scavenged from the river. I stood watching the Adige River draining its melted snow cargo into the Adriatic. Halfway up the bridge two men were playing piano accordion accompanied by a boy of maybe ten on violin. They were good. I chucked them a couple of euro when I finished my ice cream. The Roman ruins in the distance, the black storm clouds rolling across, it was a memorable moment.
As I walked back I practised my bad Italian in a salumeria and a fruit shop, then stopped for a vino at Cantina Buglioni, which was like Cheers. Everybody knew everyone else. I wanted to go home to be cosy and write. But I did have to be out here for a while. How was he going to find me if I was not?
A blue-eyed, dimpled four-year-old called Illya flirted with me. He asked in Italian if I was a mamma. Then he asked if I was married. At least it wasn’t ‘Have you ever been … ?’
A daytime-soap-handsome man came and sat opposite me. They were communal tables but there were plenty of others free. ‘Ciao, bella,’ he said casually, then read the paper and had his drink. He was ridiculously good looking, tanned to the point of showing a vanity that would never allow my kind to be his.
I went back to my notebook and to enjoying my glass of wine as much as I could. The Italians did it so well. It was a ritual here, a delicate note that they hit of enjoying the drink while honouring its potency. Respecting it. I had seen some men attempting to paddle rapids where the Adige ran under the Ponte Pietra. They paddled furiously but kept getting pushed back. It was a pointless battle. The river was always going to win if they attacked it hell-for-leather like that. I think they knew it, because when they went up the side, close to the bank, showing awareness of the river’s force and where it was safe to paddle, they made headway. Wine had become like that for me. I loved its nuances, its mysterious aliveness. And I did not want to be a stranger to that. I thought it could enrich me but I needed to respect it. Like any hazardous hobby, I had to play by the rules.
There was an inner place where I still didn’t trust myself with this. But there was an inner place where I didn’t trust myself with anything.
As I was leaving that wine bar, a man, probably in his seventies, entered the place with the cutest little dog, which I, being a chronic stalker of other people’s pets, immediately fussed over. He spoke no English, I an increasing but still inadequate amount of Italian. One thing I was learning about language: it also helped make clear people’s unstated intentions. I had never considered that aspect of it before this trip.
He told me his name was Norman, I think, or maybe he said he was a Norman. He was German born but proudly Italian, proudly Veronese in particular. He said his dog was a biter, so be careful. Not much later, as I left the bar, I found him waiting for me outside. Speaking a constant stream, he led me across the street and showed me inside the Chiesa San Giovanni in Foro, which truly was worthy of showing off, twelfth century with Roman archaeological remains inside. Then we went around the corner to another church and another bar, where he bought me a drink that I did not drink, but the
bar was a beauty, the Caffè Monte Baldo, an old, atmospheric side-street find. We established he was a retired labourer on the pension who was appalled that Australians generally didn’t have a second language (he was right, it is appalling) and that Pino, his dog, did not bite at all, my mistake, but was keenly into bar snacks.
I got edgy and uncomfortable and attempted to tell him I needed to go home, while still trying to be polite. He asked where I lived and I told him and then we were heading that way. An hour after we had left the bar, this sweet, simple, nice but not-my-kind-of-person man and I reached the front door. I was apprehensive of his expectations but he seemed to have none. Or if he did, he didn’t voice them. Or I didn’t understand them. We said goodbye, he asked if I wanted to go and have more apertivo instead. I said no, thank you, good night again. And closed the door.
And then I caught a glimpse of Norman and Pino wandering off and I felt like crying. This was the moment in which I felt I had disappointed. Rejecting people broke my heart to pieces. It was why I had agreed to too much sex on first dates (not that this was ever on the cards with Norman), too many one-night stands, and let too many people into my life that I really shouldn’t have. I guess it was what some less honourable people saw in me. It devastated me to say no and they sensed it. That whole fear-of-being-disliked thing again, the people pleaser, the play-nice girl.
And so I got mad at God. In fact, I did a bit of yelling in his direction. Out loud. ‘Your sense of humour is not only inappropriate right now, but also not appreciated. I do not understand why the only males I attract are gay guys, small children and old men. I figure it’s because you think it’s funny.’ I stomped to the bedroom, threw off my shoes, and stopped at the mirror. ‘If this is not you being funny, is this the problem? That I have tickets on myself? That I think myself hotter, smarter, funnier, generally better than I am? Because that is a serious problem. Are you adjusting my expectations and showing me the best I can feasibly anticipate? This sucks, God. I really don’t get why this is what you have chosen for me. I DO NOT GET IT. So best you explain it.’
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 14
