You’ve likely seen that famous, almost clichéd, black-and-white Italian photograph, often found on postcards, depicting a gauntlet of idle Roman men on some strada or other, hamming it up for the camera (hamming, I suspect whether the camera is trained on them or not), admiring, i.e., harassing, an attractive brunette, whose disconcerted expression makes clear she had not expected the transaction of an errand to be quite so fraught with complication—that brunette’s anxiousness as emblematic in Italian culture as the Mona Lisa’s smile. God help her had she been a blonde! Or better still, you surely remember the analogously anxious faux blonde Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, surrounded by the mesmerized, vulturelike Sicilian men as she awaited her lover; the man through whose amorous “agency” she had metamorphosed into her friend, the non-blonde and mysteriously missing Anna. Blonde from brunette, stasis from haste. As my Liza would say, with a shrug, Go figure!
Yes, back to Liza, upon whose heart-shaped face we can reliably place the postcard brunette’s anxious look, trading the olive skin of the latter for the peaches-and-cream complexion of the former; trading as well their not dissimilar figures, such that Liza’s long-limbed, shapely svelteness is now thrust into the foreground of the picture. Let me begin again. Initially to me she was only a slender blonde woman in a stylish and yet modest summer dress walking briskly during rush hour to the fermata at Piazza Sonnino carrying a small satchel over her shoulder and a book clasped in her hand. (Although admittedly a woman in Italy is always a noteworthy commodity; yes; to respond to an attractive woman is compulsory: a national pastime if not a patriotic duty, for a male, and if a blonde attractive woman, up the ante, double the alacrity.)
I watched her walking thus on a number of occasions but only when we found ourselves haphazardly together, stationary, did I initiate a conversation. “What is that you’re reading?” I inquired, not as a ploy, but with genuine interest, and I found it intriguing that in response she merely placed the book, faceup and open, in my lap. The expression spread-eagled came to mind at the time, perhaps because I knew my question could, alas, so easily be construed as a come-on line—but it was a descriptor unworthy of the combination of mysteriousness and directness in her gesture.
Although she was indeed, for all to see, an eagle spread, sublimely, one delicious August afternoon, during an outing to the Hotel Ergiffe’s sumptuous pool, so many sweltering kilometers from Centro or Testaccio or Trastevere. It is an image I will retain for many years: how unself-consciously she stretched her limbs, wearing that simple, elegant black maillot while leaning against the cabana wall, neither proud nor ashamed of her long, Berniniesque legs or her broad majestic shoulders or her strong but seemingly elongated arms, which she raised and spread before her like some beautiful, vertical bird about to take unharried, one might even say balletic, flight.
Quite the inverse of the pesky swarms of importunate starlings that gathered afternoons and at twilight to blacken the skies over Termini, or individually suicide-bomb themselves against the thankfully closed windows of the numerous villas that line the contrastively verdant Gianicolo. (A bloody nuisance are those starlings, though some find them ominous as well, an evil omen. Ancient cities harbor ancient superstitions, I suppose.) Meanwhile Liza was as natural and regal, as at home in her body in that moment as an ambassador’s daughter, and indeed there are a cluster of such families in these parts, residing in posh residences upon the aforementioned Edenic hill on streets such as the Via Garibaldi or Via Angelo Messina and the like. Was not Daphne King Peleus’s daughter after all?
Who knows, perhaps the splendid verdant Doria Pamphilli Park is full of girls turned tree. Not laurels but umbrella pines and cypresses, of course, for even metamorphosis must honor the indigenous. And after dusk, tremonto, when the vast park is officially chiuso, imagine how transcendent it would be if that resplendent arboreal cathedral figuratively—no, literally—let down its/her/their sylvan hair and expelled a sweet collective girlish giggle at the effectiveness of their ruse, while all of the Gianicolo’s citizens heard in the distance the delicate shivery timbre of silver bells. For even nature, even children of the gods, even magical creatures require some privacy: a bit of shelter from our prying eyes. Tell that to an Italian, though.
An Italian man, it is said, has fire in the blood; he is easily ignited, and to honor female beauty is as elemental as to cry out at the sight of conflagration “Fire!” That calls to mind my Liza’s favorite line in one of her most cherished films: The English Patient. When Ralph Fiennes as the laconic Count Almásy, with such singular inflection, utters, “Fire,” it makes his leading lady roll her eyes celestially, just as Liza often does with me. (The thrust of his anecdote was to prove himself comparatively verbose against a man who offered only one word during days of travel.) But Liza does not mimic Katharine’s gesture of forbearance when the handsome count delivers this incendiary punch line. On the contrary, fire on his tongue would appear to make my Liza swoon. Whereas for me, it is Kristin Scott Thomas’s recitation of Herodotus that (here inverted commas) sends me. And when, in order to chastise her leading man for slouching far too sluggishly toward adultery, Kristin, playing Katharine, slaps him, you bet your britches that my pickled pecker perked up straight away, even prior to the kissing and the bodice ripping. Why does the tight-lipped fellow always get the girl, eh?—though one should not discount Phoebus Apollo on fire for Daphne in The Metamorphosis.
Pardon me, I would be derelict of duty were I to withhold attribution, for I neglected to mention not only ancient author Ovid, modern author Ondaatje, and Minghella as director, but also an anonymous Roman sage—the one who offered Liza the aforementioned charming metaphor regarding that which circulates in Mediterranean male veins. Folk wisdom, might one categorize it? The culture that condemns the translator sees its own men fueled by hearts that pump not iron but fire!—transmuting physiology to alchemy.
She met him at the bustling Largo Argentina while they waited for some notoriously tardy autobus; he explained to her calmly and matter-of-factly (rather than lasciviously or condescendingly) why it was inevitable that she be pestered constantly in his country. She was attentive to this native; more so, I would wager, than she ever is to me, given that she reported the exchange verbatim. In one sense he merely stated the obvious, but in another he had uncanny prescience, for her adventure commenced the moment that they parted ways, and he became in retrospect her fortune-teller.
What more quintessential anthropological encounter for a non-Italian woman is there than that with the Italian masher, fixture on any Roman autobus—where one has no opportunity to be, despite the moving vehicle, a moving target, in the manner of our agile, mythic Daphne. Thinking herself resourceful, even pragmatic, Liza, to insure against unwanted admirers while standing pressed against so many other bodies, had rotated her body to face away from an unsavory Italian businessman, as a prophylactic gesture of rejection. (You know that physics divides motion into three broad categories: rotational, vibrational, translational; by story’s end I promise all three will have been miscegenated.) Nonetheless the latter exploited the bus’s sardine-like density to purge himself at her expense.
Only after the fact had it occurred to poor Liza that she had actually made matters worse by turning her back to him, thus denying him access to her frown, her wrinkled brow, that signature locked jaw, thereby allowing him to be even more surreptitious, while unwittingly providing—turned as she was about-face—an even cozier harbor in which he could nest his unsanctioned erection, which was at this point furtively ensconced against the contours of her subtle, fetchingly proportioned derriere. Any warm-blooded male, Italian or not, could infer that beneath the lightweight linen fabric resided ripe flesh such as a finger might sumptuously indent in the manner of Bernini’s miraculously tactile Pluto and Persephone. It is said that a man yearns all his life to return to the womb or to suck again at his mother’s breast, but when all is said and done, is there any texture more gemutlich than the flesh of
a woman’s pliant backside?
You know, I’m glad the impudent Italian lech didn’t make contact by hand, only importuned with his arrogant cock through two layers of cloth; for the press of fingers, once you see Bernini’s masterpiece, becomes more intimate than that considerably thicker—and ultimately far more clumsy—digit.
Signore, she scolded at raised volume (which takes courage for the girl, she’s shy), but the terminal vowel emerged from her lips with the inflection of a feminine ending and thus confounded matters even further, considerably diluting the force of censure, though perhaps it was the most effective insult possible despite its inadvertence—though it was at the same time an obtusely counterfactual interpretation of the craven aggressor’s identity! That’s my Liza—ever bollixed, ever inadvertently theatrical—her florid cheeks betraying her resistance to an attention she did not quite mean to engineer. The Italian custom of cramming into each day no less than four ore di punta presumably gave Signore Masher the chance to return to his casa for pranzo (prepared no doubt by his mother or wife) and change his trousers before resuming work, but Liza was already halfway to the Vatican (its only free-admission day), an excursion she had planned for weeks; thus she elected to retain the soon-enough sun-dried stain in lieu of forfeiting. The trip, I mean, not the dress, which she washed later, twice, I saw it hanging on the wooden rack inside my flat for several days! The coincidence of her parading semen at St. Peter’s, she realized even then, was so patently paradoxical, so potently sociological, as to be absurd. Therein lie the contradictions of Italian culture in a nutshell.
Let us (inverted commas if you will again) rewind a moment, and then (virgule, virgule) zoom in, so as to scrutinize and analyze more deeply. Though she was a victim, she is mortified, and she has raised her arm more awkwardly than elegantly, near frantically, not like a soaring eagle this time but a caged canary, to press the oversized oval button for uscita and angle her way through the press of people to the middle doors so as to exit the bus. Heading toward the Eternal City she now walks. Observe, jury: this peripatetic exhibit A: a semen-stained dress; not blue hence not newsworthy, stained not by presidential but civilian semen, no saliva there commingled, not in Washington but Rome, here in the capital not of First World politics but of Old World Catholics, where nonetheless (paradoxically) such antics would not cause a citizen to bat an eye. Such circumstances are taken in stride, given that prostitutes and senators here can collide at times within a single Italianate identity. You can be sure that those colorful court jesters referred to as Vatican soldiers were not staring at the stain when Liza glided by to purchase several francobolli as colorful as their own preposterous costumes to affix to the postcard she would mail from Italy’s only efficient, reliable postbox, but at her attributes in toto, shall we say. (Its destination will in a future passage be addressed—double entendre, reader!)
Roman buses—any tourist, any native, any worldly person knows—constitute ecosystems all their own. (Un bel casino is the most apposite Italian idiom for this phenomenon.) For if you could peer into the myriad covert activity masked by sheer human volume you would find a clearing house of petty crime: robbery and sexual harassment, pockets being ever so subtly picked, furtive cocks unloading against random hips, incoherent maledictions, heated political arguments, desperate inquiries, boisterous explanations of directions (their specificity and intensity often inversely proportionate to their accuracy), frenetic hugging and kissing (cheek one to cheek two), halfhearted translations, copious bustling and shoving, crowds leaning in like lemmings toward the red stamping machine with the same dogged yet mindless persistence with which they might dip their fingertips into a marble basin of officially designated holy water (that lackluster sequence of morphemes cannot ever match its musical translation: acqua sacra), all the while muttering the requisite scusa and prego. Heavens, once I swear I saw a man bowing toward Mecca even as the bus kept turning corners (a considerable directional challenge to one’s internal compass, I should think)—or so I assume, some form of prostration in any case; uniformed officials boarding when least expected, albeit infrequently, so as to check for any scurrilous infidels riding black.
And long about half July, when the tourist volume has tripled and the heat itself is, from Liza’s stubbornly nonmetric Fahrenheit perspective, triple digits, and both natives and tourists are discernibly sweat drenched and restless, one senses there is in Rome something about to explode. Fire in the city’s circulatory system, would that sagacious bus-stop fortune-teller say? What is it about Americans and their intransigence; they are so inexplicably resistant to conversion—unless the Holy Roller fundamentalist variety. But when it comes to the mundane, the elemental: kilometers or liters or Celsius and centigrade or military time, and for that matter syntax, parts of speech, moods, tenses, etc., the raw material of translation, they are bloody hopeless! Or helpless? They cannot do, as the expression goes, the math. And thus must have it performed for them.
Forgive my outburst. I am opposed to muddleheadedness and superstition. Liza feels the tessera to be some kind of talisman, thinks that the colorful paper rectangle equips her with an instantly Italianate identity, whereas were she to purchase daily tickets she would be perpetually and immutably a tourist. I must debunk this sort of nonsense. I have explained to her time and again that the advantage of the tessera is considerable but strictly practical: one is spared the tedium and annoyance of having to go through the requisite motions; one is allowed to cut certain corners, one avoids having to enter from the bus’s front and fight (adopting as one’s demeanor that specifically Italian mass transit fusion of polite and pugilistic) one’s way to the thoughtlessly if not sadistically placed stamping machine at the back. The pricey monthly tessera is a bargain not only for the infinite number of rides it offers in any direction (that is, if one were certain to use public transport copiously rather than sparingly) but for its power to reduce wasted motion on the bus itself, as those who wield it earn the privilege of entering through the back doors—illogical as that is, given there is for them no stamping necessary.
Isn’t it so often the way, the privileged are granted further privilege, such as the infamous disparity in her country, four percent of the population with a quarter of the wealth, isn’t that the statistic? But please don’t quote me, I’m a word man, not a number man. (Although in comparison to Liza’s grasp of the latter, I’m a mathematical wizard.) In any case, she always purchases her tessera religiously, the day before the new month starts, striding resolutely up to the tabaccheria, looking with those otherworldly eyes past those ubiquitous magazines designed for neither word nor number men but so-called leg men, breast, etc., men, and also past the newspapers and allegedly news-bearing periodicals: La Republica, Il Messegero, La Panorama, and L’Espresso, even past Mirabella and Italian Vogue.
When I first explained to her there was of tessere a limited quantity available, given that once the month’s initial days have expired they become each day another fraction (approximately one-thirtieth) less valuable, I did not offer any specific advice, for in truth I hoped she might experiment with boldness; try on for size the bright red outlaw cape, engage in that nefarious hoax the Germans label schwarz fahren. Admittedly there is a risk (though very low) in this uncitizenly gamble; on rare occasions one is apprehended. I should not have shared with Liza my anecdote about a certain savvy but unlucky couple who were half caught (half haste, half stasis); in other words, the wife evacuated, allowing her husband to take the rap, thus she turned him metaphorically to bark, if not to stone. A transgendered Daphne, as it were. (Declare the verdict, Liza, I demanded after finishing my anecdote; was she an admirably pragmatic spouse, seeing no point in extracting double fines from the conjugal coffers, or a fickle miscreant, who failed to stand by her man, or—let’s mix mythemes once again—a modern-day Euridice, not looking back?) Liza only rolled her eyes, providing incentive for me to play the devil’s advocate, to explain to her that riding black was after all less complicate
d on a Roman bus than on a German metro car, where men in uniforms might be accompanied by German shepherds, or an Italian gondola, from which one could hardly, without peril, jump off!
I made no progress; Liza was insulted that I would dare augment her jeopardy by urging her to forgo another bureaucratic document, even hypothetically. Besides, she said, she’d come to view the tessera with some affection. Displayed upon demand, it was as salient a symbol as an Italian flag. And the place it represented was, in Liza’s view, insistently bureaucratic, exceptionally inefficient, erumpently erotic. Once I gave up fantasizing Liza as the Bonnie to some phantom Clyde, we were in harmony again, agreeing that in Italy convenience was ever rationed, charm ever abundant, and logic ever elusive. Just right for you, the logic part, I teased—call me incorrigible—and then I made a slogan just for her: in logic’s badlands Liza thrives, continuing through the evening to exhibit the affectionate blend of playfulness and censoriousness that tends to drive her mad, yet keeps her—of her own volition, mind you—tethered.
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 46