Il Dolce Far Niente

thirty-six years old—rome, italy

I spent thirty-eight hours working my way to Sean—ten months and thirty-eight hours—but when the train pulled into Roma Termini, I still had no idea how I felt about seeing him. I walked up and down the platform looking for him. Twice I paced up the binario and back again, but no Sean.

Then there he was. He later told me he’d been standing there all along, but at first he hadn’t recognized me. We walked toward each other, quickly but not running. I felt excited but nervous. I also felt the irrational anxiety that even as I walked toward him we were already running out of time.

As I reached my arms around him, I registered that he’d gained a little weight. Then I registered that something was flooding through me. Love? Confusion? Adrenaline? I squeezed him tighter, then we both moved in for a clumsy kiss and half-missed each other’s mouths, noses clashing, lips mashing, hitting more cheek than mouth. I want to explain how I felt at that moment, because surely that information must be important. But even once I saw him and held him, I didn’t know how I felt.

I still don’t know.

The farther I travel, the less certain I feel about anything. There are moments when I begin to know who I am, but those moments have yet to reveal my relationship to the people, places, and events surrounding me. Who is Sean to me? I have no idea. Maybe God just plants people in my life and I must simply accept that they’re there and move toward them or away from them as the truth of who I am pushes or pulls me.

Sean spent his first night in Rome in a hotel room that cost 125,000 lire (seventy bucks), a bit rich for my shoestring budget, although we’ve agreed to split costs. So today we moved around the corner into an airy room in a wistful saffron paint-peeler with creaking wood floors. It cost half what Sean paid last night for a tiny bourgeois cupboard with showy sheets and shiny faucets.

“Wow, this is so much bigger,” Sean said.

“And it has more character.”

“So, this character, is he the one making the creaking noise?”

“Watch it, or you can forget finding out if the bed squeaks.”

No, the bed doesn’t squeak, but the headboard does bang against the wall. After ten months of separation, waiting, and doubt, in the end it was as easy to abandon myself with Sean as it has always been. Maybe that’s because there are no secrets between us; or maybe it’s because the last time either of us had sex—with a partner—was with each other, ten months ago.

“So, was it worth flying thousands of miles just to get laid?” I asked.

“Absolutely.”

We lay in bed for hours, watching the afternoon sun glide across the room until day was gone, as stories of my journey tumbled onto the crumpled sheets in a silken skein of murmurs.

By the time we dressed for dinner it was 9:30 and Sean suggested we eat nearby. But I insisted we catch a bus to the lively nightlife of Trastevere. Three buses and four helpful Italians later—the people in this city really are friendly—we still had no idea where Trastevere was.

At eleven we gave up and got off our third bus, near a restaurant where the kitchen had stopped serving everything but pizza. I ordered one with flaked salmon and praised the delicate crust. Sean smiled, but said nothing. When we finished it was past midnight. Most buses had stopped running and no taxi would pick us up from an undesignated stop so late. We had to walk about two miles back to the hotel.

On the way, we passed the Roman Coliseum, glowing in its nightly bath of lights, the last remaining luminance of the Roman Empire, a colossus of forgotten pain and remembered beauty. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I asked.

“Beautiful,” Sean parroted in a weary voice.

“They probably thought it would last forever.”

“I feel like this walk is gonna last forever.”

We arrived at the hotel at 1:30. As we crawled into bed, Sean said, “You know, all the time we were walking tonight? I just wanted to sit down on a curb and cry.”

I wanted to tell him it was better than all the endless, exhausting walks I’ve taken alone. But I knew it would only make him feel worse. All I said was, “I’m sorry. You were right, we should’ve eaten near the hotel.”

“That’s okay,” he said, laughing. “That’s just you, Cara. You never want to take a chance of missing something.”

“Maybe that’s how I miss everything.”

“No. Even when you miss something, you don’t miss anything.”

“I missed you.”

“With a whole world of new sights and sounds to keep you occupied?”

“Especially then.”

Sean fell asleep before I did, as he always has. And the night slipped away, as everything between us always has, leaving only forgotten pain and remembered beauty.

The Last Frontier

thirty-four years old

“So, what now?” I used to ask Sean with impish impatience. I was always excited about what we were going to do next, where we were going to go, what we were going to see. He always laughed, tickled by my desire to experience everything. He wanted to discover Alaska’s treasures as much as I did. More than that, he wanted to share with me the treasures he’d already dug up and watch my reaction.

One summer day in Anchorage, we rode our bikes to a place he knew: Ship Creek. Not the busy banks near the inlet, where hundreds of people lined up for combat fishing, but further upstream at a serene little pause where salmon jumped up an old fish ladder. As fish leapt up the humble manmade falls, their scales flashed silver in the sunshine. Downstream from the watery stairway, we spotted a salmon swimming against the current without making any headway, just maintaining his position like someone running on a treadmill.

“Maybe he knows the destiny that awaits him and he’s in no hurry to get there,” I said. “Imagine only getting one chance to have sex and then you die.”

“Do you think if they really knew what was going to happen to them afterward they’d turn around and go the other way?”

“Nah. Think about it. Even humans aren’t smart enough to do that,” I said. Then, as usual, I turned to him with a grin and asked, “So, what now?”

We hopped back on our bikes and continued on to the Coastal Trail, where we stopped to walk along a silty, rocky beach near downtown. The beach was decorated with a collection of rock cairns like a display of featureless totem poles. The cairns weren’t intended to delineate a trail, but purely to give bored beachcombers something to do. Sean picked up the tiniest rock he could find and balanced it on the most precarious tower, where large boulders teetered atop small rocks, triangular stones atop oval. It looked as if each person who added to this particular pile had dreamt of a life as a circus performer.

When I pointed out my observation, Sean said, “You know, I used to want to be a magician. I bought magic kits and books, and studied and everything. I juggled, too. I actually performed in a few high school shows. I wasn’t bad.”

“Will you show me?”

“Sure. I’ll show you when we get back to my place.”

I picked up a rock to place on the cairn, but hesitated, a sly grin tugging at my lips.

Sean looked at me quizzically. “What?”

“When I see a tower like this, I have a wicked desire to kick it over.”

“That’s because you’re an artist.”

“I want to destroy something other people created, and that makes me an artist?”

“Of course,” he said. “You want to make your own statement. The only way to create something new is to destroy something.”

“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form.”

“That’s what I mean. To create a painting, you change a blank piece of paper, so it’s no longer what it was. To create a sculpture, you cut stone or carve wood or dig up clay. You’re destroying ‘what was’ to create ‘what will be.’”

“Okay, so to create a relationship, what do you destroy?”

“Wow. I don’t know,” he said. “Your mind never stops does it?”

“No. Neither does yours.” I turned to face him, arms akimbo, and said, “So, what now?”

We rode on to Kincaid Park. At the park chalet, we climbed a metal stairway to the rooftop, for a view of Cook Inlet and Mount Susitna, otherwise known as Sleeping Lady.

“That mountain does not look like a woman,” I said.

“Sure it does.” He traced an outline in the air with his hand. “See: she’s lying on her side with her hair flowing around, and there’s her breasts . . . ”

“That does not look like breasts. Men just see breasts everywhere.”

“Only if we’re lucky.”

The wind picked up and we heard an unearthly sound, like dozens of ghosts sighing into great silver flutes, evoking an elegiac music. We traded puzzled glances, wordlessly questioning what could be haunting us. As we descended the stairway, the sound increased. Together we stopped and looked down at the stairs, a metal lacework of diamond shapes, and realized that the music was created by wind passing through the grating. Listening, we exchanged smiles of wonder and kissed, as the mystical sound wafted around us.

I whispered, “What do you think it is that keeps people together?”

“Great sex?”

“I think what binds people together are the secrets they share.”

Back at Sean’s apartment, he made me dinner. After he slid two pieces of nut-encrusted halibut into the oven, he poured two glasses of wine.

I raised my glass in a toast. “To us and the music of the wind in the stairs.” I took a sip, then remembered, “Hey, you were going to show me your juggling.”

“I’ll warn you, it’s not that impressive,” he said. But he disappeared into his bedroom and reappeared with a set of colorful cloth balls. He started with three, then added a fourth.

I clapped my hands with delight. “Wow! Can you do five?”

He shook his head and chuckled. “I used to. It’s funny you ask. I used to practice and practice until I could juggle three. Then someone asked, ‘Can you do four?’ So I learned four. Then someone asked, ‘Can you do five?’ So I got up to five. Then someone asked, ‘Can you do six?’ And I realized: this’ll never end. So I stopped at five.”

For the moment, he stopped altogether; a strange sight outside the window had caught our eyes. As the summer night gradually insinuated itself across the sky, an orgy of clouds rapidly multiplied on the glowing horizon. We opened the window and stared out. “That looks so bizarre,” Sean said. We heard a single clap of thunder and exchanged a look almost as puzzled as when we’d heard the wind in the stairs. Thunder was uncommon in Anchorage; in my eight years there, I only heard that sound about half a dozen times. A few raindrops began to fall, but the air was so dry each drop disappeared before it hit the ground.

I left the window to pour myself another glass of wine and was surprised to find the bottle empty. My brow furrowed as I calculated how quickly Sean had finished three glasses. I told myself not to jump to conclusions. But as I put the bottle down and walked back to his side to watch the reticently falling rain, I couldn’t help wondering, “So, what now?”

***

I worked the evening shift, from 1:30 to 10:30, producing and anchoring the late news, or reporting and doing live shots. After work each night, I went to Sean’s, where he waited up for me . . . at first.

One night he wasn’t waiting. I opened the apartment door with a quiet click, and heard an abrupt stumble-thump as he leapt from his bed and lurched down the hall, his hair standing up in odd spikes. He had the pop-eyed look of someone trying to pretend “No, you didn’t disturb me at all!”

“I fell assseep,” he slurred. “I’m sssorry. I tried to zzztay awake. I wanted to give you a s-prise.” He glanced behind me at the kitchen counter where several small, gooey brown blobs sat on a plate. Closer inspection revealed them to be chocolate-dipped strawberries. “You told me it waszh your favorite.” He chewed his thumb like a nervous child bringing home a bad report card.

I hugged him and said, “That’s so sweet. Thank you. Nobody ever did this for me before.” I picked one up and popped it in my mouth.

He tried to stop me. “I don’t know if you should eat ’em. I ssscrewd-emup. The shocolate was hot when I dipped it and it kind of cooked the ssstrawberries to muszh.”

That was an understatement. But I felt touched that he’d remembered my favorite treat. The slurred speech I put down to the fact that he’d just woken from a dead sleep.

As time went by, he waited up less often. I frequently arrived to the sound of thunderous snores blowing down the hall from his bedroom. Alone, I sat up late, watched TV, and raided the fridge. When I threw away trash, I usually noticed one or two bottles of wine in the trashcan. I thought nothing of it. Rather, I kept thinking about it and telling myself there was nothing to it.

One night when I got off work early, Sean cooked dinner and rented a movie. When I arrived, he’d already worked his way through a bottle of wine. His kiss tasted like vinegar. At dinner, we opened another bottle. He drank most of it. Fifteen minutes into the movie, he fell asleep and started snoring. Frustrated, I elbowed him in the side, hard. He grunted, rolled over, and recommenced snoring.

But he was never mean. He never yelled. If he fell into dark, philosophical moods, that was just his personality. If he was often depressed, that was just seasonal affective disorder.

Then, one chilly evening when I was alone at his place, I decided to borrow a sweatshirt. As I pulled the sweatshirt down from his closet shelf, two tiny, airline-size liquor bottles tumbled onto the carpet. I stared at them, stunned, rooted to the spot as blood hammered my eardrums.

The next night I confronted him. I sat next to him on his couch, took his hands in mine, and said, “I have something I need to tell you.” I looked straight into his eyes and forced the words out in a rush, “I’m worried because it seems to me that you drink a lot.”

“And you’re wondering if I’m an alcoholic?”

“Yes,” I exhaled. It was such a relief to hear him say it that I was sure the answer must be no. He was always so kind. His apartment was scattered with dog-eared books on philosophy and Eastern religion. His father had gone through A.A. Sean couldn’t be an alcoholic.

But he said, “I’m not going to answer that question. That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. But you know what I think? I think you need to be with someone who doesn’t drink.”

“But can’t we talk about this? I mean, I’m not saying you are. I know a lot of people drink wine, and that doesn’t make them all alcoholics.”

“Okay, then tell me what you think. Like, what’s too much to you?”

“Well . . . every time I come over here I see bottles of wine in the trash.”

“You’ve been digging through my trash?!”

“No, Sean.” I was growing impatient. “I throw things in the trash and the bottles are just there.”

“And . . . ? It’s not like I hide them or anything.”

“Nooo . . . But it seems to me . . . it seems to me that two bottles of wine a night is a lot.”

“What else?”

“I grabbed a sweatshirt from your closet last night and . . . ”

“And you found some little bottles of alcohol?”

“Yes.”

“I think you should leave.”

“What?”

“Look, I don’t have a problem with how much I drink, I’m not going to go to A.A., and I’m not going to quit. So if it’s an issue for you, you should leave.”

“Do you want me to go?” I began to cry.

“No, wait. You know what? You stay here and decide what you want and I’ll go!” In a sudden fury, he grabbed his coat off the rack and headed for the door.

For the first time, it occurred to me to ask, “Have you been drinking?”

“Of course. Don’t you know I’m a drunk?”

I looked at his eyes and saw the telltale lack of focus. Why hadn’t I noticed before? With fierce determination, I said, “If you drive off right now, I’ll call the cops and give them your plate number and tell them you’re driving drunk.”

He clenched his jaw. “What right do you have?”

“What right do you have to get in a car and endanger my community? I think it’s only right for me to try to protect the people you might kill. I’m certainly not going to try to protect you from the consequences of your actions.”

“You mean you won’t be an en-ab-ler,” he said. “Don’t feed me that twelve-step crap. I’ve been through it all with my dad. I know all the big words. I don’t need you to explain it to me.”

“Why are you doing this? Do you really want to destroy what we have?”

“It’s already destroyed. I told you not to get attached to me. I told you that you just didn’t know yet what an asshole I could be.”

“Yeah, you were a real hero, the way you tried to save me.”

Without another word, I walked out the door. As I made my way through the arctic entry, the hatred I’d long denied began to choke me. I don’t know whom I hated, or what, but the feeling was palpable, as if it were a parasite that had been lying within me for years, growing undetected as it fed on my humanity without my knowledge or consent.

I’d run from Denver to Alaska, from Joe to anyone else, from Chance to Sean, all to avoid this feeling. But no matter how far I ran, I kept walking out the same door.

Il Dolce Far Niente

thirty-six years old—rome, italy

Rome and romance might sound as if they were made for each other, but that doesn’t mean Rome is a good place for estranged lovers to start over. In this city of impetuous romantics and wine, Catholic rules and wine, summer heat and wine, everyone seems relaxed, and everyone seems ready to blow their tops. Sean wasn’t the first to unscrew the lid on his latent anger, and neither was I.

I blame the tour guide.

Even before we met the angry American ex-pat, my trust in tour guides was not high. I suspect many of them fall into this line of work because they never got that history degree they always wanted. While there are some good guides who know their stuff, there is no archaeological site, old building, or cultural phenomenon that can be described with one unarguable explanation. I’ve taken tours from different guides in the same country and heard conflicting interpretations of the past. And that’s with the licensed guides. With the unlicensed guides I wonder: are they making this stuff up just to mess with us, and how would we know the difference?

Some fellow travelers I met on the train to Rome arranged today’s walking tour at a bargain basement price, with an unlicensed guide. When Sean and I arrived, our new friends were nowhere in sight. Our guide was the only person there.

Susan the Angry American Ex-pat was a fast-talking, fidgety young woman, her lank hair impatiently knotted in a plastic clip, her brow creased in permanent irritation. Susan hated us before she met us. We were cutting into her exciting life as an ex-pat. Sure, our under-the-table tour would help pay for that life, but we weren’t paying enough to earn her gratitude.

“Hello. You’re a little late,” she accused.

Sean frowned and looked at his watch. “You said to be here at nine. It’s nine-o-two.”

When four more people arrived between 9:05 and 9:10, she sighed heavily and scolded them for their tardiness. Our friends still hadn’t arrived; we later found out they’d been at a pub until three a.m. and were sleeping off a drunk.

“Should we wait?” Susan asked.

I gave her a measuring look. “Why don’t we give ’em five minutes?” She heaved another explosive sigh, threw herself onto a bench, tapped her foot, shook her head, leapt up, and barked, “Let’s just go! Now that we’re running late we’re already going to have to eliminate the first sight from our itinerary.” It was all of 9:15. Sean and I exchanged a look and jogged to catch up with Susan, whose punishing stride quickly put her well ahead of us.

The pace never changed. On this walking tour we didn’t walk, we ran, or faced the wrath of the shouting Susan: “Pick it up guys, we’re running behind!”

I muttered to Sean, “She probably moved to Italy after she lost her job as a prison guard.”

Oddly, even though we only spent five minutes at most sights, the fact that we were behind schedule never changed. Maybe she shouldn’t have crammed fifteen sights into four hours.

At the Trevi fountain we barely had time to toss coins over our shoulders to ensure our return to Rome, before Susan barked at us to “get moving!” At the Bocca della Veritá, or “Mouth of Truth,” we each swiftly stuck our hands into the mouth of the beast to prove our honesty, while Susan looked at her watch with exaggerated patience. I whispered in Sean’s ear, “Do you think that mouth only bites the hands off liars, or assholes, too?”

At Circus Maximus, she asked us to gather around. As she began to talk, she cut herself off and abruptly insisted, “Would you all please stand on one side of me instead of scattered around, so I don’t have to keep turning my head!” Half the group scurried to obey. She then told us about Ancient Roman events at Circus Maximus, such as chariot races and feeding Christians to lions. She said the Romans used to put the heads of Christians on poles and set them on fire to use as torches for evening events. Sean whispered in my ear, “That’d be another way to keep her from having to turn her head.”

As the group started moving again, I hung back and told Sean, “I just want to stick with her long enough to see the Mammertine Prison, because I don’t know how to find it on my own. Then let’s ditch ’er.”

“Deal.”

This brief exchange put us some twenty feet behind the group, so we sprinted to catch up.

Susan shot us a baleful glare. “You guys, you really have to keep up!”

“Lighten up!” Sean growled.

Mammertine Prison was where Saints Peter and Paul each spent their final days, surrounded by thirty to fifty prisoners, chained in a tiny dungeon that felt crowded with just ten tourists. Susan explained that, in addition to other tortures, the guards used to dump urine and excrement on the prisoners through an opening in the low ceiling. She showed us a place on that ceiling that’s been rubbed smooth by the touch of thousands of human hands, the place where, according to legend, Peter once bumped his head.

“How did Saint Peter die?” one woman asked.

“He was crucified,” Susan replied.

“Many people believe he was crucified upside down,” I added, with a sardonic glance at Susan. “According to tradition, he said he didn’t deserve to be crucified in the same manner as Jesus.”

“What about Paul?” someone asked. “How did he die?”

Susan raised her voice so that it filled the cramped space, “Does anyone here know how Paul died?”

An American tourist frowned at her and quietly informed our group, “He was beheaded.”

At the Roman Forum, Sean and I made up some excuse about being tired, and dumped Susan.

I’ll give her credit for one thing: our freedom felt so much sweeter after she’d taken it away. In the afternoon, we paid for a tour of the Coliseum with a licensed guide. After that, free of Susan’s clutches, we climbed up to the cheap seats to relax and neck a little. I sighed blissfully and said, “There’s nothing to stir romance quite like a place where men and beasts used to kill each other in front of huge audiences for entertainment.”

But Susan had infected our mood. Or maybe, once Sean and I were alone together, it was only a matter of time before our past caught up with us.

On the way back to our hotel, we started to cross a busy street near Piazza Venezia when I saw an oncoming car speeding toward us just fifty meters away. I grabbed Sean’s arm and pulled him back toward the curb as I gasped, “Look out!”

He stumbled, then wheeled to face me, red with fury. “What the hell are you doing?!”

I stepped back in surprise. “I’m sorry. I was afraid that car was going to hit you.”

“I saw it, Cara! I would’ve made it!”

“Okay, maybe. But I wouldn’t have. I wasn’t just afraid you’d get hit, I was also afraid of getting separated and losing you in the crowd. You have no idea how afraid I am of getting left behind.”

“Don’t ever do that again! If anything, you put me in more danger.”

“It was a reflex. I said I was sorry. Why are you so angry?”

“Look, I don’t want to have a fight here on the street.” He shot an embarrassed glance at the crowd of pedestrians sharing our curb, but they seemed too busy looking for an opening in traffic to notice us.

I lowered my voice anyway. “I’m not trying to fight. I’m just trying to explain—”

“Okay, okay, I get it! Can we drop it now?”

We walked in silence until we reached a quiet, unfamiliar intersection, where we realized we were lost. There were no people in sight. We stopped to stare at my map, then stare at our surroundings, then the map again, unable to find any clues to our whereabouts.

“I think I see some familiar buildings that way,” I said, pointing down one street.

“I think it’s this way,” Sean said, pointing down another.

“Okay.” I followed him. But when we reached the next intersection, I said, “This feels even less familiar. I think it’s back that way.”

“All right!” He threw up his arms. “So I’m wrong again, as usual.”

“I never said that.” I was near tears. “I said ‘I think it’s back that way.’ Why can’t we just discuss our options, together, like partners?”

“What’s to discuss? Nothing looks familiar to me. So let’s go your way.” He turned down the street I’d suggested, with angry-tour-guide strides.

I followed after him, silent, sad. I felt like a child. I didn’t understand how to make this spiral of anger stop. Although we were walking down the street I’d suggested, I felt that I was being dragged down a street neither of us had chosen.

A moment later, Sean’s pace slowed as he looked around with an expression of dawning recognition. “You know, I have to apologize, because you’re right. I recognize this street now.”

Tears overflowed from my eyes and dripped onto the street as I shook my head. “Don’t you see? It’s not about being right. What hurts me is that you misunderstand my motives. You always think I’m trying to tell you you’re wrong, or tell you what to do, or trying to hurt you. It makes me feel like you don’t know me.”

At that moment I felt lonelier and more invisible than I had in all my months alone. I thought, If Sean doesn’t know me, who can? We fell silent again until our hotel was in sight.

Sean stopped and turned to me, startling me out of my thoughts. “I am sorry,” he said. “Not just because you were right, but because I know the fear of being wrong is something in me. I know it’s not you that makes me feel that way.”

He held me and pressed his forehead to mine. I imagined the romantic picture we must appear to passersby. They couldn’t know how my heart ached. We’d only had a typical argument any couple might have, lost in a foreign city. Yet I feared that his wild-eyed anger, and my equally wild panic, presaged our doom.

In the past couple of days we’ve bonded over our hunger for sex after a lengthy celibacy, our awe at the aged splendor of Rome, and our dislike of Susan the Angry American Ex-pat. But standing on that forgettable street, with nothing to occupy us except the connection between us, I began to wonder if that connection was made up of nothing but memories. Perhaps, together, we are going in the wrong direction. Maybe that’s why Sean pulled away when I pulled him back toward the curb.

At dinner, he ordered a Coke and I ordered a carafe of wine—cheaper than a Coke. I thought about how he had seemed drunk with rage today on the streets of Rome and wondered if it had anything to do with drinking Coca Cola instead of wine. His volatility is that of a man on edge. We joked about our megalomaniacal guide and excitedly made plans for tomorrow. But I could feel the jack-in-the-box crouching inside each of us, waiting for the windup.

lucca, italy

Il Dolce Far Niente (The Sweetness of Doing Nothing): the byword of Italy, the antithesis of my life.

We missed the fast train from Florence to Lucca by mere seconds, running to the platform just in time to see the caboose diminish to a disappointing silver dot. Twenty minutes later, we caught the next train, a clattering old bucket of bolts dragging a string of colorful boxcars. We were on the milk run, which stopped at every tiny Tuscan village along the way.

I sulked. “I want to explore Lucca with you, not spend all day on a train.”

Sean smiled. “I don’t care, Cara. Don’t you understand? I just want to make love to you in Italy, in every town we go to. In the meantime, isn’t this what il dolce far niente is all about? Taking it slow?”

He was right. Caught up in the anxiety of fishing in the wastebasket to retrieve the relationship I’d thrown away, I’d forgotten that I was on a journey, and that the journey itself was the destination. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and looked around. Our car was nearly empty, except for a man who sat in the far corner with his back to us. Outside our open window the countryside breathed soft and warm, its chest rising and falling with fecund desire, down into tame green rows of vineyards and olive groves, up into wild green hills and stone cottages.

As the heat rose, we moved to the open passage between the cars and stood in the warm breeze. Standing behind me, Sean reached around me and laid a bold but gentle hand on the curve of my breast. A slow smile rose from my belly, although I darted a pointed glance over my shoulder at the man in the corner. “No one can see us, Cara,” Sean breathed, tickling my ear. He kissed me deeply, until we melted back into our seats, talking and laughing and kissing in slow motion, as time stretched into a new shape.

When we arrived in Lucca, we walked through its arched gates into a time that surely never existed. In reality, medieval times could never have been this idyllic or the people wouldn’t have felt the need to build the high walls of earth and stone that encircle this city. Then again, in Lucca the walls have never been breached. Today, only locals are allowed to drive cars through the city gates, and only on a few select roads near the city walls. It’s a town of pedestrians and bicycles, heels and wheels stuttering across uneven stones. Whatever the time in the actual world, ever since we’ve arrived within this bewitched circle, the clock that ticks away the moments of our lives has stopped.

Awakening here this morning I felt clarified, returned to an atavistic sense of self: my feet down to earth, my soul connected to the people around me, my thoughts open to the heavens. We woke when we felt like it and slid into a nearby piazza to drink cappuccinos, sitting at a little metal table under a great spreading tree dripping with white blossoms. We ate crème-filled croissants, and Sean laughed as mine oozed all over my hands.

I read aloud from my journal about the Annapurna Circuit while he listened with rapt attention. After spending much of the past few months in solitude, in the company of others I’m more of a twittering clown than ever. The compulsion to explain my life feels as difficult to ignore as a persistent itch, and the results are as painful as scratching that itch until I bleed. While I was reading, I became aware of the inexhaustible sound of my own voice and felt the blood rise to my cheeks in patches of shame. Sean saved me from myself by touching my arm and pointing behind me.

I stopped in mid-sentence and followed the direction of his finger to a Siberian husky drinking from a public water spigot. The insatiable dog lapped at the everlasting stream of water as if quaffing a canine elixir, while his patient master waited, and waited. Smiling, we both fell silent, watching people pass through the piazza and listening to the rise and fall of friendly, angry, happy, melancholy, flirtatious Italian voices. Could life really be this simple?

Not for everyone. Our eyes were drawn to a shop across the piazza, where human limbs hung in the display window: prosthetic legs, arms, and hands of various sizes. “An Italian deli for cannibals?” Sean suggested. The disconcerting deli motivated us to move our own limbs while we still could.

As we got ready to leave, Sean teased me with my old phrase, “So, what now?”

“I have no idea,” I said, jumping up from the table. “Let’s go find out.”

In each piazza, stout marble churches posed proudly for pictures, and I stopped to photograph each one. In Italy, this kind of behavior is beyond obsessive, like taking a photo of every Starbucks in Seattle.

At the Chiesa di San Michele, the white and green wedding cake tiers and Gothic columns drew noisy praise from the gathered tourists—except Sean, who stood transfixed by death. No, not by the bronze-winged Archangel Michael spearing the small harmless-looking dragon atop the church, but by another sight below that.

“My God, those spider webs are huge,” Sean muttered. “I think that’s a bird wrapped up in there . . . and over there, too.”

“You’re kidding! Where?” I asked.

“In those recesses behind the columns.”

I squinted for a moment, until I saw a silk-wrapped bulge in the shadows. “Ewww! That’s disgusting. Actually, I think they’re rats.”

“Either way we’re talking some big spiders.”

The church stood in solid splendor, not crumbling ruins. Yet after Sean’s morbid observation, the building called to mind Miss Havisham’s wedding cake in Great Expectations, rotting and cobwebbed and overrun with spiders.

A real wedding party gathered on the steps, waiting for a bride and groom to emerge from the aged cake. The couple’s family and friends threw their arms around each other and exchanged kisses, “Ciao . . . Ciao . . . Ciao bella!” Then the bride and groom appeared, young faces glowing with a belief Sean and I have never known, their open smiles free of cynicism or doubt. Wedding guests threw rice at the pair as they floated down the steps, and the pigeons prevalent in every piazza scuttled forward to peck at the tiny white good wishes.

After the couple rode off in their flower-decked car, we walked into the empty church. The pews were adorned with red roses. At the last wedding Sean and I had attended in Alaska, I’d caught the bouquet. Sean had teased me about not getting “any ideas.” I’d felt degraded and we’d fought. Today neither of us hinted about our connubial surroundings. We simply agreed that the ordinary interior of the church was anticlimactic after the luscious layers of frosting on the outside.

At the Cattedrale di San Martino, scaffolding covered the façade, which is undergoing a facelift. But we weren’t as interested in the church’s outside as we were in what was inside: the Volto Santo, or Holy Face. The Volto Santo is a thirteen-foot crucifix of dark cedar which Catholics believe was carved by Nicodemus. According to biblical tradition, Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin who knew Jesus during his lifetime, came to his defense, witnessed his crucifixion, and bought precious oils for his burial. The carving is simple, but believers consider the plain, passive, bearded face of this particular crucifix to be the “true likeness” of Jesus.

Its very simplicity appealed to me more than the vestments we later saw on display: clothes used to dress up the Volto Santo for an annual procession. The garments included a jeweled gold belt, gold crown, gold shoes, and other glittering accessories.

“I understand that Jesus sits on a throne at the right hand of God and the royal clothes are symbolic,” I whispered. “But I can’t help thinking it’s like playing Volto Santo Barbie.”

“Me, I just look at it as a jeweler,” Sean said. “This is amazing work.”

I preferred to see Jesus dressed down, like a “man of the people,” like someone I could talk to—which I did. Standing in the church before the unadorned Volto Santo, I closed my eyes and asked Jesus to show me the purpose of my life and help me fulfill it.

Surely there wasn’t any connection between my prayer and our next stop in the small room next door? The Tomb of Ilaria del Carreto. Ilaria, the wife of a thirteenth century nobleman, died in her early twenties. She would have had no visitors some seven hundred years after her death, if not for her glorious casket. While Ilaria’s bones moldered below, her fair and youthful likeness lay on the lid of her casket in lovely white marble sleep, immortalized by Lucca’s famous sculptor Jacopo della Quercia. It took one to three years to finish the piece. Her widower, Paul Guinigi, remarried before the sculpture was finished. So much for the eternal beauty of a dead woman.

Looking at the marble woman lying atop the casket in her high-necked gown, I saw my stepmother lying in the ICU in her hospital gown. Dad recently emailed to announce he’s getting married again, to the woman he met before I left. I’m not surprised. I’m happy for him. It’s not death that’s disconcerting so much as the relentlessness of the world revolving past it.

In this village, time has only stopped for the buildings. For people, the time between youth and death has sped up to a blur. Here, dozens of generations have left the path of time, leaving behind nothing but stone to mark their passing. Ilaria’s immortal beauty is an illusion. No artist, however great, can hold back the rot that will soon sweep us all off the path.

Feeling churched-out, we left the dark sanctuaries of the past for the light of the present. We strolled atop the city wall, a wide pedestrian avenue lined with trees. Day and night, locals and tourists walk or jog around the wall’s four-kilometer circumference and picnic in its grassy parks. We found an empty park and spread out a deli lunch on my sarong—panini, marinated mushrooms, and strawberries—which we cheerfully defended from a surprise assault by party-crashing ants. Then we took part in another traditional pastime on the wall: making out.

Sean’s hand had just snuck under my skirt and started plundering the territory beneath, when a guy on a bike pulled over at a nearby tree to do some sort of repair. Sean, an avid cyclist, puzzled over the guy’s aimless movements—which didn’t appear to be fixing anything—until he theorized there might be a local Petting Patrol, undercover bicycle cops who make sure no one has sex atop Lucca’s wall. Either way, our picnic was over. We resumed our walk until the sky threatened us with grey clouds and rain.

“You wanna go back to the room and finish our picnic?” I asked.

“Yes I do.”

We reached our upstairs room, with its dark wood floors and dark antique furniture, just as a violent thunderstorm burst outside. Trapped in the storm’s dark center, we reflected its fervor with our own answer to each burning white flash and deafening explosion. Never before had we been so uninhibited with each other.

After the rain stopped and nighttime fell, we left our room to walk atop the nearly empty wall in the dark, listening to each other breathe into the quiet night as time continued to hold its breath. When we came down from the wall, we followed a narrow canal, where we came upon a group of boys playing soccer in the street. A young man on a motorcycle drove through the middle of the game, and the ball hit his front tire and bounced away. Sean and I exchanged a look. We’d shared the same illusion: that the motorbike had playfully kicked the ball.

In this place, with this man, I’m beginning to feel a tranquility that has eluded me most of my life, minus the restlessness and ennui that I feared would accompany it. My soul is pulsing in rhythm with Italia, in synchronicity with Sean. Yet we cannot stay behind these timeless walls forever. Even here, the church bells toll the hours, though we ignore them.

corniglia, cinque terre, italy

A beautiful beginning, full of anticipation; a painful ending, marked by the probing of deep wounds: that’s the Via dell’Amore, the Way of Love. Today Sean and I walked the path of the same name.

The Via dell’Amore follows the cliffs of the rugged Ligurian coast. It starts as a paved path, but turns into a rugged trail of steep ups and downs, linking the five villages known collectively as Le Cinque Terre, “The Five Lands”: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, Monterosso. In the five villages, merrily painted boxes cling to each other atop steep cliffs and along rocky shores: homes and pensiones laced with intimate mazes of walkways, stairs, and passages. Up the steep hills above the towns climb groves of twisted olive trees and vineyards dotted with clusters of tiny, green early grapes. Far below the towns, the aquamarine of the Ligurian Sea explodes against the rough coastline in an ecstatic frenzy of white froth.

Suspended between those highs and lows, the Via dell’Amore comes alive each day with an antlike procession of hikers, mostly foreigners, mostly Americans. According to Sean’s guidebook, the entire walk usually takes four to six hours, but . . . something about best-laid plans, good intentions, mice, and the road to hell . . . or whatever.

At ten this morning, at the paved trailhead in Riomaggiore, a wiry old man leaned one arm against the railing and spoke to a handful of Italian tourists. His bent frame lifted and his shriveled voice swelled with pride, as one thickly veined hand pointed at the meeting place of land and sea. Though we couldn’t understand what he said, his voice and arms and bushy eyebrows rose and fell in a passionate upwelling of love for his home.

Along the rocky shoreline of the first four villages, locals and tourists have created four makeshift beaches, each one little more than a tongue of concrete boat launch and a lick of ocean. In Manarola, the natural rocks have arranged themselves into two pools. We paused our hike to join the two-dozen people sunning and swimming in the miniature cove.

It was a challenge timing the bobbing swells so that I could launch myself into the water without getting thrown back into the rocks. When Sean shoved off the rocks, a mean bully of a swell shoved him back, threw him into a boulder, then ground him back and forth across the stones. He hauled himself out of the water in frustration, his knees dripping blood. I rushed ashore and grabbed my first-aid kit. As I bandaged his knees, I told him I was excited at this rare opportunity to use my kit. He ruefully responded that he was happy to make me feel useful.

In the middle village, Corniglia, we climbed a trail into the vineyards to eat our lunch of focaccia while overlooking the cliff-top houses and the surf far below. We were quite alone on our high perch.

After lunch, I looked at Sean’s watch—it was just past noon—and said, “We have time to neck for five minutes, then go.”

“Five minutes?” He made a show of disappointment.

“Okay, make it ten.”

By the time we started the rugged hour-and-a-half hike to Vernazza, most of the other hikers were either well ahead of us or done, so we almost had the trail to ourselves. The air was hot and syrupy. Sean was deep red. “Let me know if you need to slow down,” I warned playfully. “Remember, you’re in your heart attack years.” After that, whenever he fell behind, he mimicked me, “Remember, I’m in my heart attack years.”

At about 3:30, we arrived at Vernazza’s castle tower, where men once kept a lookout for enemies and pirates. I wasn’t content until we climbed to the top of the tower and then explored every nook of the village: up and down stairs, under archways, past green wine jugs glistening in the sun. Most locals were indoors hiding from the heat, while on the stoop in front of the farmacia a group of panting young hikers leaned back on their elbows and licked lackadaisical cones of melting gelato. In a girlish, wheedling voice, I suggested we stop to buy one.

Much to Sean’s amusement, I’ve yet to miss a day of gelato consumption: tiramisu, niccola, fragoli, pine nut, chocolate mixed with candy . . . licking a scoop, swinging my feet, and humming a made-up tune, as blissful as a child answering the calliope call of the ice cream man.

It took another hour and a half to reach Monterosso, via a trail so precipitous and narrow it felt more like “Lover’s Leap” than “The Way of Love.” Then, gravity dragged us down a steep stairway to the last of the five lands. We arrived at about 6:30, faces burning, skin dripping, feet dragging. The piazza was nearly empty, the day-trippers gone. The beach—the only one in Cinque Terre with a resort-like stretch of sand and a line of colorful umbrellas—was also empty.

Eager to cool off, I challenged Sean to a swimming race, to the breakwater and back. He turned his bloodshot eyes and mottled purple-and-white face toward the breakwater, about fifty meters away, and said, “I don’t think so. I’ve already been beaten up by the sea once today. Besides, don’t forget, I’m in my heart attack years.” But I teased him until he relented.

I arrived at the breakwater just one stroke ahead of Sean, and reached out a hand to grab hold of a rock. As I drew my feet up to rest them on the rocks below, I looked down to check for sea urchins. A needle had stabbed my foot in Greece and I wasn’t interested in repeating the experience. I spotted several of the black, spiny maces lurking among the rocks and turned to warn Sean, “Be careful where you put your f—” Before I could finish my sentence, he yelped and grabbed his foot.

We swam back to the beach to inspect his injuries, which were worse than I expected. Both heels were shot through with deeply imbedded spines. Out came the first-aid kit again. For fifteen minutes, I tried to prod out the spines and splinters with tweezers. But I made no headway.

“We should probably head back so we can take care of this properly,” I said, allowing childish disappointment to creep into my voice.

“No,” Sean said, kissing my forehead. “I know you want to see the town, and we’re never going to get all these spines out. Let’s just walk.”

A girlfriend once told me there’s always one jerk in every relationship. If that’s true, then this time it must be me. Why else would I have taken Sean up on his offer when he was in obvious pain? Why else would I have taken Sean up on so many of the offers he’s made since I’ve known him, when it was obvious I was causing him pain?

I walked and Sean limped—wincing with each step—as the promenade filled with lovers out for the evening passeggiata, shadows moving through the chiaroscuro of a summer sunset. Although Monterosso is the most commercial-looking town of the five, the waning sun turned it into a mellow dreamscape, from the house overrun by purple bougainvillea to the male giant carved into the rock of a beachside cliff. The stone giant’s face strained as his back bent under the weight of a building. The sculpture was an anomaly; there were no others like him in sight.

At a small restaurant overlooking the beach, we ate dinner, a spicy seafood linguini dish for two. Sean plucked out the choicest morsels and placed them on my plate. Although the Cinque Terre vineyards are famous for their wines, I didn’t order any. After our first couple of nights in Rome, I decided to abstain for the rest of Sean’s visit. It seems rude to drink wine in front of a man who I once walked out on because of his drinking.

So it wasn’t wine that made me bold. Maybe it was the chivalry Sean had shown throughout the day that gave me the courage to tell him my fantasy: “Wouldn’t this be a perfect spot to get married? I wonder, if we wanted to elope tomorrow, how hard it would be?”

Sean chuckled, but said nothing.

Now I felt foolish. “I don’t mean to be . . . I won’t talk about it anymore.”

His eyes filled with concern. “No, don’t stop talking about it. I just laugh because I get embarrassed. But I like it when you talk about it.”

If anything, this response only made me more nervous. I smiled, but dropped the subject.

We took the train back to Corniglia, where we’re staying. From the train station we had to walk—or in Sean’s case, hobble—up three hundred seventy steps to reach the cliff-top town. In the piazza, local men had gathered, as they do every evening, to harangue each other about terribly important issues or outrageously funny nonsense, or both. We exchanged a polite “Bona sera” with them, then returned to our pensione so I could perform surgery.

For the next hour, in our tiny room overlooking the sea, Sean lay splayed out on the bed while I crouched at his feet digging out urchin spines, first with tweezers, then a needle. He repeatedly twitched his leg like a wounded dog and gasped in pain. I asked if he wanted me to stop, but he insisted I continue. Frustrated by the deepest splinters, I started flaying away bits of skin, creating small bleeding holes all over his heel. I started to cry.

He asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I just hate hurting you.”

I pried out about ten pieces. A couple of spines had worked their way in too deep for me to dig out without the risk of seriously hurting him. After I bandaged his heel, which looked as if it had been shredded with a cheese grater, he kissed me tenderly. “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

“It is? Then you need to hang out with a better class of people.”

“Cara, I’d rather be with you, suffering and in pain, than anywhere else.”

It was such a corny thing to say that I gave him a doubtful look. But his eyes told me he spoke the truth. That’s when I knew: I love him more deeply than I’ve ever realized, this man who would walk on swords for me. The realization is as comforting as coming home and as unnerving as waking up in a strange land. Until tonight, I always felt guilty because I believed Sean loved me more than I loved him. If that’s not true, I need no longer worry about Sean. But what about me?

We cuddled up to sleep, my body in a fetal position, his wrapped around mine in placental protectiveness. I knew he was still in pain. But instead of falling asleep, he grew increasingly amorous, until I said, “Well, if I’d known flaying the skin off of you would turn you on so much, I would have tried it a long time ago.”

Maybe I had.

florence, italy

For our final two days together, Sean and I have come to Florence to finish painting the renaissance of our relationship in the summer-drenched colors I most want to remember. I don’t know if this revisionist work of art will survive our next separation. But in my memory it will remain imperishable, ever fixed in the frame of Firenze, the flower of Italy.

We were equal parts entranced and appalled as we gaped at the Duomo, a pixilated neo-gothic bombardment of Florentine pink, white, and green marble. The overdressed façade of La Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore is enough to make a religious person say, “There really is a God,” or inspire an atheist to say, “Oh my God!” Or, as Sean put it, “Holy shit! I feel motion sick just looking at it.”

Tonight, a festival atmosphere took over the pedestrian-only streets of Florence’s historic city center: tourists and locals alike circling endlessly on a hot summer night, coalescing around street performers from all over the world, revolving through the gelato shops where soft, cold delectation was piled in great humps of glistening colors more distracting than the Duomo.

After dark, we stopped to admire the work of the street artists, some of whom were still hunched over their tasks, drawing amazing chalk artwork on the walkways. Next to each drawing sat tip jars filled with money. Some drawings were clever copies of Renaissance paintings, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Others were original works of imagination, like the nude gazing at her reflection in a pool. All of it was temporary. “Now there’s an exercise in non-attachment,” Sean said. “By tomorrow these drawings will be all stepped on and smeared and faded.”

Now, lying in our hot, stuffy attic room, we’re exercising our own non-attachment. It’s too hot to make love, so we’ve been trying to sleep, arching and stretching our sticky bodies away from each other in the narrow twin bed. Arriving in Florence late on a Saturday afternoon at the height of the tourist season, the only room we could find was this tiny attic cubbyhole. I call it our “Room Without a View.” It has no air conditioning, no fan, no windows, and no oxygen. It must be more than 30º in here (around 90º F). After I shifted so far away from Sean that I fell off the bed, I gave up on sleep and pulled out my journal. Sean is still tossing and turning.

I suppose I should at least try closing my eyes. Tomorrow is our last day together, and already I feel stepped on and smeared and faded.

***

My last day with Sean was as perfect as Michelangelo’s David. That’s what made it so awful.

At the Galleria dell’Accademia I circled the David for at least half an hour, staring at the fiercely concentrating eyes and the overlarge hands holding the tools of his destiny. Although the David is perfect, perhaps because the David is perfect, I felt more affinity for Michelangelo’s four unfinished Prisoners. Here was something familiar: the soul trapped inside the body. They’re muscular men, but unable to break free of the marble blocks in which they’re trapped, imprisoned by the very stuff of which they’re made. Art historians disagree whether the artist truly didn’t finish the sculptures or intentionally left them that way. Either way, the message was complete. The Prisoners asked me just one question: how can any of us break free of our own natures?

After the Galleria, we returned to the Duomo to see the inside. There was a long line to get in, which gave us time to watch the unending slapstick routine of the Piazza del Duomo. Every day, dozens of illegal street vendors from Africa and Asia set up shop on blankets and cardboard stands in front of the cathedral. Every half hour or so the police cruise through, prompting the vendors to fold up their blankets and stands, with their wares stashed inside, and meander away, pretending they’re up to nothing. Meanwhile, the police pretend to patrol the area, somehow failing to notice the obvious vendors. The moment the cops leave, the souvenir stands reappear.

“It’s like a game,” Sean said.

“Who’s winning?”

“I don’t know. The rules aren’t very clear.”

In between rounds, we spotted two Gypsy children passing through the line to the Duomo and dipping their hands into the pockets of an oblivious American couple. Before we could shout a warning, before the tiny fingers reached anything, a young African vendor abandoned his stand to chase the children off, shouting in Italian and waving his fist. The couple looked up in alarm as the tall, dark man bolted past, and they grumbled at his suspicious behavior, never noticing the criminal cherubs who had darted away.

After we toured the Duomo, we wanted to climb to Brunelleschi’s Dome for a commanding view of Firenze, but the Dome was closed. We climbed the bell tower instead.

Following the cavernous expanse of the Duomo, the skinny tower was a shock to the senses. Its spiral staircase was nearly as narrow as a coffin: the tower’s wall hemming us in on one side, the axis of the stairway swirling like a chambered nautilus up the other, people one step ahead and one step behind. Sean and I giggled and made nervous jokes about claustrophobia, but the young man walking just ahead of us with his girlfriend came completely unglued.

The man kept babbling: “This is crazy! The walls are too close. Stay off our heels, will you? Back off!” When the entire line was forced to stop and allow people coming down the stairs to squeeze past, his panic increased. “Jesus, I feel like I can’t breathe!” When we continued upward he stopped so suddenly I almost fell into him. He crossed his wrists and made a violent slicing motion of denial, barking, “I’ve gotta get out of here! Move out of the way!” He shook his head at Sean, his white-circled corneas jittering madly as he forced his way past us. His receding voice floated up to us, “I’m outta here!” along with the grunts of people he stepped on and pushed in his frantic scramble down the stairs.

It reminded me of the time my birth mother took me to Disneyland when I was eleven. She was fine on the first few rides. Then we boarded Pirates of the Caribbean, a water ride that, at one point, took us floating through a pitch-black tunnel. In the tunnel, my mother started a litany similar to that of the man on the stairs, her voice rising in pitch, “Cara, I can’t do this! You don’t understand. I really can’t deal with this! I have to get out!” I felt her body shaking next to mine and I feared she would either jump out of the boat or faint. I thought I should do something but had no idea what. Her helplessness frightened me. More than that, it made me angry. I was the child; she was the adult. I didn’t want to take care of her; she was supposed to take care of me.

Luckily, our boat floated into an open cavern before she grew any worse. I turned and saw the beads of sweat on my mother’s forehead, and the whites of her eyes.

When I used to visit her in Arizona, on the last day of every visit I always stood before her sobbing and begging, “Mommy, why can’t I live with you?” But that day in the dark, as Animatronic pirates fired fake cannons over our heads, I felt grateful that this terrifyingly terrified woman had the wisdom not to try raising me on her own.

I never knew what dark tunnel in her life had left her that way. I only knew that her father had been so traumatized by World War Two he used to leap into the air screaming whenever his four daughters accidentally ran into him in the halls of their home, that he stuck knives in the walls to threaten them when he was angry, that once he shoved the head of his youngest daughter through a wall. “Monica used to be such a sweet, smart little thing,” my mother said. “She was never the same after that.” My dad once told me that my mother was often hungry as a girl, but never dared fetch food from the refrigerator without asking, because her father had threatened to cut off her hands if she did. My mother never told me that story.

Did she panic in that small, dark tunnel because her father once locked her in some small, dark place? Or did the stifling darkness simply remind her of what she saw whenever she closed her eyes and tried to look within herself?

I’ve never had claustrophobia in the true sense. Still, I felt relieved when Sean and I reached the top of the bell tower. We broke free into a dazzling view of Firenze: sun-blasted whitewash and terra cotta, heat-shimmering marble and cobblestone, the coruscating River Arno and its bridges, all laid out like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It was the sort of puzzle that families might put together at a kitchen table as they try to dream their way out of the dark.

In the early evening, we walked to the Ponte Vecchio. The fourteenth century stone bridge was the only bridge in Florence to survive the German bombs of World War Two. There—amid the tiny twentieth century shops of gold jewelers and silversmiths, the crowd of lovers out for an evening passeggiata, the street musicians playing guitars and singing with humble talent but great gusto—we watched the sunset turn the River Arno to liquid gold.

I opened my guidebook, looked up the Ponte Vecchio, and played tour guide for Sean: “It says here the bridge used to be lined with butcher shops, and the butchers used to throw animal parts and rotting meat into the river. It also says some Florentines used to piss into the river, knowing it would flow downriver to the towns of their enemies.”

“I wonder how many of them fell in,” he said.

I sat atop one of the walls, while Sean stood next to me on the bridge, gingerly holding my waist. I gave him a knowing grin. “Are you trying to protect me from falling in?”

“Something like that.”

“Is that why you’re not sitting up here?”

“Yes,” he confessed with a laugh. “You know I’m afraid of heights.”

Leaning back on the wall to tease him, I felt grateful to have no phobias. Or do I? How deep does a fear have to go before we name it a phobia? I keep moving forward through life, facing new people, new places, and new situations with an attitude some call courage. But maybe that’s an illusion. Maybe what scares me is to stand still, in one place, holding onto one person. “Let’s live in Florence,” I said. “I’ll become a photographer and you can be a jeweler on the Ponte Vecchio.”

“When I can’t even stand on the bridge without feeling sick to my stomach?”

“Okay. Let’s live in Cinque Terre.”

“Same problem.”

“Lucca?”

“Okay.”

I closed my eyes in contentment, to watch the warm red coals of day’s end play against my eyelids and memorize the feeling of Sean’s fingertips lightly trailing over my hip.

After dark, we walked back through the pedestrian center of old Florence and slowed to survey the wreckage of last night’s fleeting art. As Sean had predicted, the intricate chalk drawings of the night before were already smeared with the passage of indifferent feet.

***

Last night, we made careful, sweaty, uncomfortable love in our Room Without a View. This morning, as the first hint of dawn troubled the dark, we walked to the train station. It had rained in the night, and the streets shimmered wet and yearning in the glow of the streetlights. Sean was catching the six a.m. train to Rome.

As we walked down the platform, he said, “I’ve spent the past two days trying to think of what to say to you at the train station. I know I might not see you again for a long time, so I wanted to say something special. But it was too much pressure. I never thought of anything.”

“Sincerity is more important than originality,” I said.

“I had fun. I’ll miss you. I love you, Cara.”

“I love you, too. It’ll be lonely traveling without you.”

“But you’ll still have fun.”

“Well, ye-ah!” I said. “Of course I’ll still have fun.”

“Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He laughed, but tears were in his eyes.

“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . . I mean, I will miss you . . . I just don’t want you to think I’m all needy and . . . you know what I mean.”

“I know.”

We lingered, kissing and embracing as awkwardly as we had when I’d arrived in Rome—as if, instead of our time together coming to a close, it was unraveling. When we couldn’t put it off any longer, he turned to board the train. As he looked for a seat, we saw each other through the window and I waved, flapping my hand energetically like a child, trying to overcome sentimentality with silliness. He grinned and waved back. I wonder when we’ll see each other again.

It’s probably best we didn’t elope in Italy. I could hardly have married him only to send him home alone while I continued traveling for another two months or so. No, I would have had to leave with him, and I’m not yet ready to end this journey. And although we’ve rekindled our romance, so far it has all been in the context of Italy, country of romance. I’m not ready to trust him in the emotional minefield of life’s ordinary routines. Come to that, I’m not ready to trust myself, either. Making a commitment to this relationship was easier for me when there seemed little likelihood it might be reciprocated.

He’s only been gone a few hours and already his time with me feels like the distant past. In a few minutes I’ll catch a train south. To stay in Florence would only depress me now.

Alone, I took one more walk through the Piazza del Duomo, and stopped to watch the African street vendors and the cops play their “game” one last time. This time I found out who was winning, or rather, who was losing. After the vendors concluded one of their disappearing acts, one lone cop returned to their midst unnoticed. He walked up to a surprised African man who was overseeing a blanket lined with handmade wooden trains, planes, and cars. The policeman shouted at the man and kicked his display, scattering the toys.

The frightened African protested plaintively, “Far Niente! Far Niente!” (Doing Nothing! Doing Nothing!) as his shaking hands pulled some paperwork from his pocket. Another cop walked up, and when the two officers bent their heads together to talk, the African made a run for it. The cops ran after him. A third cop cut him off at the edge of the piazza. “Far Niente! Far Niente!” the man cried as they dragged him away, his feet bouncing along like a rag doll, heels skittering across one of the chalk drawings that were, by now, almost entirely faded.

“Doing nothing! Doing nothing!” he continued to cry in Italian as he was dragged one way and I walked the other. I turned to look over my shoulder at him, my eyes filled with tears of pity: pity for the African, likely to be deported back to a hungry land and cruel life that he’d probably fled for good reason; tears for myself, alone again and still running for no clear reason.

Far niente no longer sounded so dolce.

aeoli islands, sicily

Stromboli is me: a restless volcanic island, out-of-place in a sea of “doing nothing.” The most active volcano in Europe, Stromboli raises hell in the vacation paradise of Sicily’s Aeoli Islands. The mountain rises from the sea to vent its fury in constant explosions of viscous lava, volcanic bombs, steam clouds, and ash. It erupts several times an hour, creating flashes in the sky like a beacon in the night, earning Stromboli the nickname “Lighthouse of the Mediterranean.”

The volcano has been erupting like that for at least 2000 years. In 1919, during one of its more violent tantrums, the giant threw multi-ton blocks at the villages of Stromboli and Ginostra, killing four people and destroying a dozen homes.

By contrast, the island of Lipari is sweet, hot, breezy lassitude. That’s where I’m staying, behind the walls of a rambling, grey stone castle. I’ve been delayed here four days, waiting for stormy, threatening weather to clear so I can hike up Stromboli. The volcano’s eruptions tend to be small, and seeing them is unlikely without climbing the mountain itself for a closer look. That is my purpose in coming to these islands.

I’ve spent most of my long wait sitting at this café overlooking the tiny harbor, reading a paperback copy of Moby Dick and drinking granita di caffè. The frozen blend of coffee and sugar sets my leg and mind tapping, so I have to reread sentences. Who cares how to properly coil a rope on the deck of an eighteenth century whaler? Moby Dick in the summer heat; I must be mad.

By this morning, I grew stir-crazy and went to an Internet café to check my email. There were three from Sean. In the first, he’d written: “It’s been one week since I’ve been back and all my dreams are of looking for you in small towns, on winding stone-lined streets. I feel like a mouse looking for the prize at the end of the maze. I miss you.”

In the second e-mail, he’d inserted a freehand drawing of a heart with the words “I love you” in the center.

In the third, he’d written only three words, “Marry me, soon.”

When I read that one, my hands flew to my suddenly warm cheeks, even though there was no one else in the café except the young woman who ran the place. But my reaction soon changed from excitement, to puzzlement, to disappointment. Was it a proposal, or a mere test of the waters? I’ve never given much thought to how I’d want a man to propose, but I’m sure “via email” would never have occurred to me.

I’ve sent no reply . . . yet. I want him to ask me face-to-face. I want to be sure it wasn’t the ease of pushing the “send” button that prompted him to write those words. I want to be sure our two-week reunion was long enough to tell me all I need to know. Will I ever learn all I need to know?

So it is that everything inside me is threatening to erupt, as I prepare to hike up Stromboli tonight.

***

A small pleasure boat took us to Stromboli Island. The little island is only the 900-meter-high tip of the volcano, which rises more than 2000 meters from the floor of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Our tour group was three Italian couples of various ages, and me. I sat alone and silent in the bow, sprayed mercilessly with water and the colorful confetti of Italian conversation. I assumed none of them spoke English, until a blond woman who looked as if she’d stepped out of a sailing brochure turned amused blue eyes my way and said, “You are really wet!” The boat had churned up enough spray to turn me into a sparkling pillar of saltwater. I laughed politely, an awkward seal-like cough. I could think of nothing to say. I felt so conspicuously single.

As we approached the island, we were escorted by a cheerful contingent of leaping dolphins, but my attention was on the swirling white clouds circling the bald upper reaches of the green-flanked volcano. There was something odd about those clouds; the rest of the illimitable sky was a spotless azure. It took me a moment to realize the clouds were not the aftermath of yesterday’s storm, but the result of heat rising from the craters hidden in their midst.

I blurted, “Che bella vulcano! Il . . . il . . . nubes suben la caldera!” in a muddy blend of Italian and Spanish that probably meant nothing, but got everyone’s attention.

“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Blond Sailing Brochure. She tapped her blond brochure husband on the arm, pointed, and said, “I think she’s saying those are clouds from the volcano!”

The captain nodded and said something in Italian that prompted everyone to point at the mountain and chatter. Unable to understand them, I smiled blankly. A young black-haired goddess with skin tanned the deep bronze of endless summer put a sympathetic hand on my arm and explained, “The captain said the same thing you said, more or less.”

At the island, the captain turned us over to a hiking guide: a short, barefooted man covered in wild curls from the top of his head to his muscular calves. He spoke no English, so I’d be learning little about the volcano. Before we started up Stromboli, we walked to the guide’s house in the village, where he put on hiking boots and kissed his wife and children goodbye.

I was surprised there was a village on the narrow grass skirt of the volcano. Hadn’t these people learned anything from Pompeii, where the villas and bathhouses and temples of a once-thriving civilization still wait for masters who will never return, where hundreds of suffocated victims left their imprints in pumice, where plaster casts of the dead still huddle in agony around the bones within?

So, if I was so smart, what was I doing here?

We started the hike just before sunset so we’d arrive at the top after dark, when it’s easier to see the fireworks. For the first hour, we walked single-file through the grasses of the lower slope. The sun began to bleed, then drowned in an indigo sea. During the second hour, the group fell quiet as the terrain changed to a steep rise strewn with sharp rocks. Soon, deep volcanic ash sucked at our shoes. During the third hour, the sky turned black and the group pulled out flashlights. I donned my headlamp.

We were resting among a clump of rocks when I saw it: a shower of flaming red pyrotechnics sprayed from one of the mountain’s three craters and flew high into the dark sky. The volcano’s thunder was distant and faint. I had no clue how to say “look!” in Italian, but grunted loudly, “Ag-g-g-b-b-b . . . !” and flapped my hand in the direction of the explosion. The exclamations and sighs of the group were equally inarticulate, as they turned just in time to see the glowing rocks fall earthward and float ever so slowly down a collapsed segment of the cone, called the Sciara del Fuoco, the “Stream of Fire.” I wished Sean were here to see it.

“Okay, I’m satisfied. I have seen it and I can turn back now,” the Bronze Goddess of Endless Summer muttered. She leaned against a rock and rubbed her calves. “Not that I’m afraid. Just exhausted. Walking through this ash is like walking across the sands of the Sahara!”

When we continued upward, I chuckled. Mr. Blond Brochure turned and asked, “What’s up?” This American euphemism sounded new and charming in his Italian accent. I answered, “I was just thinking, we’re going the wrong direction. I’m sure if you told most people, ‘You see that mountain there? It’s ex-plo-ding,’ they’d run the other way.” The Blond Brochures and the Bronze Goddess laughed and passed a translation down the line to the non-bilingual Italians. Delayed laughter floated back to me in a slow wave.

The guide took us to the ridge and then up into the sulfur-stinking cloud of steam that rose from the craters. Then we came down out of the cloud to sit in the ash and eat. As I ate my panini, I stared unblinking at the craters below, waiting for the next thunderous expletive.

Twice more the volcano bellowed and sent up salacious spouts of lava, fragmented into fiery red blobs. We were closer this time and the loud booms gave several people a start, followed by nervous laughter. The third time, the fireworks disappeared momentarily into the cloud overhead before returning to sear the mountaintop. The radiant red cinders crept down the black void, and we could hear them crepitating like dozens of distant campfires as they flared and dimmed into a sizzling after-glow of gold embers. We stared in awe, pre-hominid children from the primordial sea witnessing the violent dawn of creation.

Creation: an act of violence. I remember Sean standing on the sand of Cook Inlet, among the rock cairns, telling me that the only way to create something is to destroy something else. Maybe that’s why I’m not ready to answer his near-proposal: I’m not yet sure that we’ve destroyed what was to create what will be.

While our group waited for another blast, Mr. Blond Brochure told us he’d just had a discussion with the guide about how safe we were. The guide had told him only two hikers had ever been burned while standing in this spot. “He said they got hit with the sciora, the hot rocks, and one of them got hit in the head. But they didn’t die,” Mr. Blond Brochure reported. “A man was killed once, but only because he walked too close to the crater.”

Mrs. Blond Brochure elbowed him. “You could not wait to tell us until later?”

The Bronze Goddess lifted an eyebrow at me and said, “So, we did come the wrong direction.”

train from milan, italy to port bou, france

The volcano didn’t burn me. It took people to do that. I’ll never know who they were. I never saw their faces. I’ll never know exactly what happened. The most disturbing thing of all is the absence of memory, the dreamless three hours or so between “before” and “after” that are forever lost to me.

On my way out of Italy, I stopped in Milano to see Leonardo de Vinci’s Last Supper. I could think of no other inducements to stay in such a homogenous, city-like city. So after the Last Supper, I caught an all-night train to Port Bou, France. From there, it would be a quick hop to Barcelona. That meant breaking a vow I’d made to myself for my own protection: “Never take an overnight train.”

Rather, I wasn’t breaking my vow, only amending it, to: “Never take an overnight train alone.” I walked through the passenger cars until I found a compartment with three female travelers who spoke English. I asked if I could join them, and explained that I was nervous about traveling alone. They were very obliging. I never thought to ask, and they never thought to tell me, whether they were taking the train all the way to Port Bou.

The first two women got off the train somewhere on the coast of France. The other woman left a couple of stops later. With that, I was alone.

The hour was late. I looked up at my heavy pack on the overhead shelf; I would have to don it again if I wanted to search for new companions. And, I knew by the murmurs and snores sneaking through the walls from neighboring compartments that many people had already gone to sleep. I decided to stay put.

If one must take an all-night train alone, the travelers’ grapevine offers the following advice: don’t fall asleep; don’t put your bag near the door where someone can quickly reach in and grab it; don’t lie with your head near the door, because some robbers chloroform travelers to knock them out before fleecing them of their belongings.

It wasn’t possible to lock the couchette. So I slid my pack away from the door, then I lay on the bench with my feet propped against the door so I’d feel it move if someone tried to open it. I was determined not to fall asleep. I read Moby Dick. Not the best reading material to keep me alert after 2:00 a.m., but it was all I had. At about 3:15, I glanced at the tiny travel-clock I carry in my pocket. Then I lay on my side to continue reading. A few minutes later someone opened the door. That’s the last thing I remember.

The next thing I knew, I woke up from a strange blankness and again checked my little clock. It was 6:30, more than three hours later. Odd, never on a train had I slept for more than an hour. But then, I didn’t feel as if I’d been asleep. I felt as if it had been 3:15 a moment ago and now it was 6:30 and the time between had vanished. I felt disoriented, my thoughts gummy and knotted. There was a funny taste at the back of my throat and a strange chemical smell in my nose, which I felt a strong urge to blow.

I walked down the hall to the toilet, where I grabbed copious streamers of toilet paper and repeatedly blew my nose. But the odd smell didn’t go away. It dawned on me that the train had stopped. Concerned that maybe we’d reached my stop, I wandered into the next car.

When a young woman stepped out of her couchette, I asked, “Y’know where we arrrrr?”

Her eyes studied mine for a moment before she asked, “Have you been robbed?”

“No. Juz’ worried thiz may be my . . . ztop.” To my own ears I sounded quite normal.

She gave me an odd look. “Do you know where your stop is?”

“Yeah, wrote on a ‘lil peez of paperrrrr . . . ” I was about to take out the slip of paper, which was in my pocketbook, when I realized I didn’t have my pocketbook. “Thaz ztrange, I muz’ve lef’ it in the couzhette.”

She put a hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and over-enunciated her next words, as if she were talking to someone deaf and wanted to make sure I could read her lips: “Are you sure you weren’t robbed?”

“I don’ thing-zo,” I said. Why did she keep asking me that?

“Why don’t you show me that little piece of paper?”

She followed me to my couchette. I was puzzled to see that I’d left my pack behind, too. Anyone could’ve taken it. What was I thinking? My pocketbook with the neck strap was lying on the bench. Picking it up, I said, “I pud the peez of paperrr righd here. Thaz funny . . . ” All the pocketbook’s compartments were unzipped, the money I’d carried in it gone. “Oh my God . . . ” I said, instantly alert. “I was robbed.” I reached down to feel the many zippered pockets of my travel pants. “Jesus! He must’ve had his hands all over me. All my pockets are unzipped.” How could I have slept through that? I looked at the girl, puzzled. “How’d you know?”

“You weren’t the only one.” Her accent was American. “Another woman came to our compartment a few minutes ago looking confused, like you. But she knew what had happened to her. She said she was scared because she’d just been gassed and robbed, and she asked if she could stay with us.”

“Gassed?!”

“Yeah. She said someone sprayed something in her face and when she woke up later her money was gone. My friends and I heard about this kind of thing. We promised to keep each other awake all night because we were scared it might happen to us. So did they get a lot?”

“No, it was just thirty-five bucks. I carry the rest of my money somewhere else . . . Oh my God!” I reached into the waist of my pants for my money belt, yanked it out, and tore it open.

“Is everything still there?”

“Yeah, it’s all here.”

“That makes sense. I hear these thieves move fast, hop on at one stop, get off at the next. You know, I think we saw the guys who did it, too. A few hours ago the door to our compartment opened and these two guys were standing there. They looked surprised to see the three of us sitting up, wide awake, just staring at them. They muttered some excuse and took off. And that girl who came to our car? She met another girl in the hall who it happened to. They must’ve hit a bunch of people.”

I kept looking through my pocketbook in the compulsive way a hungry person will keep staring into an empty refrigerator. I thought back to when I’d first woken from my drugged sleep. The sarong I’d pulled over myself had still been draped over me. Rather, it had been neatly put back over me after someone had removed it, taken my pocketbook from around my neck, and rummaged through my pants. I pictured some man looming over me while I lay there helpless. With a train full of loot to plunder, the thieves wouldn’t have taken time to molest me, but the thought that they could have without me being any the wiser . . . A chill shook my body.

The girl put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “You can come sit with us if you want.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you. But I think I’m going to go sit in the coach.”

Still a little out of it, but no longer the clueless zombie I’d been when I’d first woken up, I put on my pack and walked through the train in search of the conductor. I told him simply that I’d been robbed, that I knew he probably couldn’t do anything, but that I thought he should know. He shrugged with such elaborate unconcern it bordered on malice. He acted as if he was enjoying my misfortune, and I wondered why. After that, I walked to a nearly empty coach and sat down with my pack by my side, draping my arm across the seat behind it like a lover.

Now I’m on a different train, to Barcelona. But as this train fills with morning light and sleepless travelers, I keep trying to piece together what happened to me on that other train in the dark. I can still see the door opening . . . then nothing. It’s what I do when things go wrong: I go back and back and back, trying to figure out how I could have changed what cannot be changed.

Looking back, it occurs to me I’ve been dazed and confused for a long time, long before I was drugged and robbed last night. I’ve spent too much of my life unconscious while men have taken what they wanted from me, leaving me with little but my next destination. Luckily, this time they didn’t get much. Anyway, that’s all behind me now. It’s a new morning in a new country and another chance to start again.

Shit! I just realized. I left Moby Dick on the train to Port Bou.