The next morning I met Andrea. He’d been so insistent the night before that I’d agreed to look at the room, figuring it couldn’t hurt, I’d nod politely at some students and then we’d grab a coffee and that would be it, I’d go on with my morning and the various ways I’d try to fill it. The apartment belonged to a friend of a friend’s mother, or something, I hadn’t paid much attention to the string of relations, sometimes I preferred to let the stream of Andrea’s Italian wash over me without the exertion of trying to figure out every word, I usually got the gist by the end. You’ll like this neighborhood, he said as we walked, Parioli is very nice. I looked sideways at him in annoyance, wondering if it was a test. Parioli was one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Rome, surely he knew that I knew that. We passed several gated buildings I was sure were embassies. The door to the apartment building was held open for us by a man in a navy blue uniform, and the lobby of the building was dark, light from the top filtering down faintly, as if Andrea and I stood at the bottom of a deep pool. A small elevator rose up the center, wrapped by a triangular staircase, all brass lines and luxurious creamy yellows. We entered the elevator, barely large enough for the two of us, and I was glad I’d woken up in time to shower and wash my hair, wished I’d remembered to check my neck for marks from the American boy. I hadn’t been expecting this luxury. Andrea slid the metal gate closed and pressed four, the highest number. We exited into a space filled with light. There were only two apartment doors on the floor, and he led me to the one on the right, rapped his fingers on the dark wood.
The door was opened by an elderly woman who smiled at us warmly, but with something like exhaustion. I guessed she was in her seventies, her hair was almost purely white, elegantly pulled back, and she wore an orange-and-gold scarf tied over a crisp white shirt. She kissed Andrea first, and then me, and Andrea introduced us, her name was signora Ianucci. Loredana, she added, and she smiled, and I thanked her in formal language for letting us visit. She led us down a hallway to a light-filled room, windows lining the long wall. Old photographs were displayed in silver frames on their sills, and the adjourning wall was lined with bookshelves, a fireplace. The furniture wasn’t modern, in fact it was almost ornate, but there was a simplicity somehow to the room, a warmth perhaps brought by the deep red oriental carpets laid over the marble tile, the blue armchairs facing each other convivially, the amount of art and objects showing it had been lived in for a long time. It’s beautiful, I said. I was being sincere, it was the most beautiful room I’d ever been in, but I struggled to find the words, il luce, i libri . . . She thanked me, her smile wistful. There was a small kitchen, a terrace. The bedroom itself was bare, just a twin bed and a desk, a long window with a view of the city and the hills beyond covered partly by pine branches. Do you like it? she asked me, her eyes on my face. Yes, I said, oh, yes.
Out on the street again, I asked Andrea how close his friend was to him, the room should have been much more expensive, I shouldn’t have been able to afford it, he’d told me it would be three hundred euro a month before we arrived, which might have made sense if I were sharing an apartment like Giancarlo’s with five students in San Lorenzo. Andrea had mentioned in the elevator on the way down that it would be inexpensive because of her age, she doesn’t need help, he said, and there’s a woman who comes a few times a week to take her to doctors’ appointments, prepare some meals, things like that, but it would be good for her to have someone in the apartment with her, just in case. Still, for that neighborhood, the amount was nominal, and I had no experience with the elderly, I thought there must have been something else going on, some other factor, which is why I asked Andrea then how close this friend was to him, though I’d already accepted the room, we’d agreed I would move my things the following Monday, which I’d paid through at the hostel, but Andrea had stopped, was pulling on his cigarette, and he looked me up and down. Was Loredana the mother of his friend, was she doing him a favor? No, he said finally, exhaling. You didn’t understand. Her daughter died ten years ago. She’s the mother of the best friend of your mother from childhood.
I’d waited until I was back on my bunk at the hostel to burst into tears I couldn’t entirely account for, the circuitous order of the Italian words repeating in my head on a loop, la madre, l’amica, la madre. How could I have forgotten, I was in Rome, this was my mother’s city.
The next Monday I moved my two bags into the room at Loredana’s, grateful I’d had several days to absorb the impact of our connection. That afternoon I went to meet Giancarlo and Laura, where I watched them translate fourteen straight pages of wedding songs and I struggled to identify my emotion as we left, which I finally decided had been a contented boredom. I felt an ease with Giancarlo and Laura, they were peers who were interested in history, in understanding the world and working for good in it. My months of travel had been selfish, pleasure-seeking in nature, and I saw through them, through the connection with Loredana, that it could be different. Laura, on my way out, had caught me by the hand after Giancarlo was already through the door and invited me to a concert with some of her friends the following week, I’d thanked her and tucked the flyer into my bag. I could still feel the way she’d held my fingers in hers, genially, like a Victorian fiancé. Now that I had a room, here was a chance for a community in this city, I saw how a life could build out of this.
Giancarlo and I rode the bus together collegially back toward the city center, one of his roommates had the scooter. He and the others in the apartment had a communal sense of property, none of them were from Rome, and in these post-financial-crisis years they seemed to get by improvisationally, one of them cut all of the others’ hair, the scooter wasn’t really Giancarlo’s but was used between the roommates as the one asset of value, it really belonged to Luca, who was from Milan and seemed to be silently underwriting the activities of the other four. Once I’d suggested we all go out for dinner to Giancarlo and Andrea, and they’d made flimsy excuses, putting me off, I was slowly coming to realize that none of the Italians my age even went out, it wasn’t only that they didn’t get drunk, that they were capable of drinking one beverage over the course of four hours, it was also they rarely went to bars or restaurants, they didn’t have money, I never saw any of them spend any. Once I’d articulated this to myself, I’d felt embarrassed, but couldn’t tell if it was on their behalf or mine.
Giancarlo and I spoke of Libya that day, either because we’d been talking about my travels and the various countries I’d been in or, more likely, because NATO was just days away from beginning airstrikes in Tripoli and Brega, Gadhafi only weeks away from being beaten, stabbed, thrown off of a truck, brought dead and semi-naked to a hospital, kept in the freezer of a supermarket for four days before being displayed to the local population, then entombed in a desert funeral at a location that has yet to be revealed.
I was in Libya, you know, Giancarlo had said, and I’d asked him to tell me about it. I went with my friend, Giancarlo said, he is an engineer and the oil company sent him. I got a grant from the university for my ticket. So we go, and you know, the people over there under Gadhafi, he pronounced the name so differently than I’d ever heard that it was only a minute later replaying what he’d said that I understood, so it is very strange, they, the people there, they have a green book which is from the dictatorship, and everyone there, they must read and follow this book. I nodded. There were two young women in head scarves across the aisle from us and a row back, and I grew self-conscious, wondering if they were Libyan.
So my friend, Giancarlo continued, he has his job during the day, and so then, I study Arabic and it’s very different there as well, so I am trying to talk to people. I nodded again as the young women got off at the back of the bus. I turned to look at them and noticed only then that one held a baby to her chest. So I am there in a market, Giancarlo said, and I am walking through the stalls, and it is very crowded, so I step aside to something, it’s like an alley, and I stand by myself and drink some water. And then I look down and there is an old man sitting there, he is also in the entrance, he is right by my feet but I hadn’t seen him there before. I don’t know how, maybe he had not moved, maybe I thought he was a pile of clothes, you know his head is covered, so who knows. But he looks up at me and asks if I want to know my future, but I don’t understand at first because like I said the Arabic there is very different, so finally I hear it slow and I understand, and so I say of course, why not? And so the old man asks me some questions and I crouch down on the ground with him because like I said it’s very loud. And it is very hot and I am drinking water but my bottle is very low, so I am wondering where I can buy more, because, you know, it’s better not to drink the water there from the pipes. And he asks me my mother’s name, and when he opens his mouth, I see that he has only a few teeth, in the very back, and I am thinking about his teeth and water and my mother and then he asks how old I want to be when I get married. And it was on this trip, well, Laura and I were fiancés officially, we were going to get married maybe that summer, maybe the next one. And before I can answer the man grabs my pants by the pockets and he asks me for money, only the price he says is, pfff, ridiculous, and I realize there’s something wrong with his brain, he’s not just trying a scam, you know, otherwise he would have told me the fortune first and then said I couldn’t take it back, and I look into his eyes for the first time and I become a bit frightened even though it’s not rational. So I try to stand but he still has my pants by the pockets, and he is strong, and for a moment he lifts off the ground, just this much, and falls back to the ground. And I run away, I don’t know why, but I go back to the hotel and I call Laura and I tell her we cannot get married.
He looked at me with a sheepish, conspiratorial smile, heartbreaking to me in its certainty that I had understood. But I hadn’t understood anything at all.
The next afternoon I was reading in the Villa Borghese when a rainstorm started. I’d only just been in the apartment, Loredana and I had eaten lunch together, and I didn’t feel ready to go back. I felt awkward, it was her house, and I tended to my old schedule of the hostel, locked out during the afternoon hours and wandering the city during that time. As Andrea had told me, there was a girl who came, a Polish girl a few years older than me named Agnieszka, as well as Demba, a Senegalese man who stopped by once a week or so to take care of handyman-like tasks, and I disliked the feeling that I might be interrupting their routines, had a deeply American discomfort with the idea of hired help, which I reacted to by trying to avoid any proof of their existence. So instead of making my way back to the apartment, I bought a cheap umbrella from a vendor on the side of one of the paths and descended the steps from the height of the park. I looked around at the bottom of the stairs, usually crowded with families posing with their gelato cones, standing still as the rain fell around the umbrella and the water traveled down, as the violent drops disrupted the surface of the fountain. To my left was a small wooden sign timidly announcing the presence of the Keats-Shelley museum. I didn’t particularly feel the need to escape the weather, but I wasn’t so unsuggestible as to want to stay in the rain. More than anything what led me inside the large wood-paneled doors to pay my twelve-euro fee was not any scholarly interest but instead a sudden craving to be surrounded by English words, to forget the bureaucratic Italian that had lately occupied my thoughts, the twisty Arabic translations, my stilted, polite conversations with Loredana and Agnieszka, who spoke slightly more Italian than I did and less English than that.
In college, earnestly, I’d decided to take all of my courses for the English major in chronological order, and after Chaucer, Spenser, early picaresque comic novels that meandered through the English countryside that I was unable to find even the least bit funny, after those texts the Romantics had felt like a new window. It wasn’t exactly that I loved their poetry, even in nature-worshiping California I had found their reactions to mountain peaks overwrought, but I did have a respect for their values, I’d felt a kind of kinship with them. As I moved through the stately dark-paneled rooms of the museum, chairs arranged politely with their backs against the walls, I was drawn most to the story of Percy and Mary Shelley. Their movements around Italy were erratic, frequent, four years in the country and nowhere longer than a few months, a story full of elopements, tuberculosis, drownings, all by the time she was twenty-five. But the story in the glass cases turned, and I read horrified about the trail of dead infants they’d left across this country, one baby died in Mary’s arms in the hallway of an inn where Percy was searching for a doctor; a mysterious child was adopted and then left in Naples, herself dead within two years; another child’s death was attributed mysteriously to “moving,” as if the fact of her parents’ restlessness had weakened her own hold on life. Then one afternoon Percy went out in a boat in the bay near Venice, and within a few hours was overswept by a storm, his body taking ten days to reach the shore. All of their years were a risk, and I wondered at their choices, wondered at what point movement for movement’s sake was no longer worth the sacrifice, I thought again of Maria. But I identified with the Shelleys, I looked at their portraits as I left the museum with an unexpected nostalgia, they seemed to know that stopping was its own kind of death.
The rain had cleared and the streets were now crowded with Romans lurching home in their tiny cars, and as I walked, I turned deliberately into the emptier ones, having to double back several times when they dead-ended into alleys, but I needed to be away from the pushing and noises, my chest was full of emotion I wanted to disperse. Suddenly the room at Loredana’s felt like a trap, I felt stifled, panicked. My thoughts spiraled, and I knew that the book of the Palestinian village couldn’t have had anything to do with Vietri. It was a red herring, whoever this Chiara was, whatever I’d said to the barman to make him give the book to me, we’d by now translated enough of it that I couldn’t imagine how it was Vietri’s, it approached him asymptotically, I felt sure that there would be no ultimate connection. My search for Vietri would dead-end like those alleys, and then what was I still doing in Rome, what was this life I thought I was living? I wandered, agitated, this way for an hour or more, erratically south, until the sun was setting and I realized what it was I wanted to do. It was freedom that I still wanted, but then I had always tended to covet exactly the wrong thing.