THE CELEBRATIONS TO MARK the new millennium were over and it was time to leave Rome.
My husband, Glenn, and I sat on the sofa while the movers carefully packed our last purchases and remaining clothes in layer upon layer of white paper. It was the final act at the end of our second tour in Italy, one that lasted six short years. The rest of our material goods were already in a shipping container waiting to be transported “home,” a concept that after so many years in Italy had taken on a somewhat uncertain meaning. Geographically it was to be a small town near Seattle, but in my heart I knew home would always remain Rome. We now favored pasta over potatoes, stylish clothes and strappy sandals (for me, anyway) instead of gray fleece and tennis shoes, and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano rather than beer. Our conversation was peppered with Italian words when we couldn’t recall the English equivalent, and visits to our once and future Pacific Northwest home were remembered for the dreary weather and excruciatingly slow drivers.
My contract as a human resource manager for the United Nations World Food Programme was completed and family beckoned. Glenn was content to give up the charms and challenges of Italy for a more settled life, but I was anxious. Losing my friends, work, and country, however temporary it had all been, was a large dose of change to manage at one time. Already starting the transition, we moved out of our home for the last six years when the rental contract expired a month earlier. We were now perched in an apartment on the Aventine Hill, house-sitting while the regular renters were on leave in Quebec.
When the movers departed they presented us with a bottle of prosecco in thanks for the business. While we sipped we tried to look into a cloudy crystal ball (in reality our smudged wine glasses) in a vain attempt to see the future. We soon gave up, turning back instead to thoughts of the events that had shaped our lives. Immediately coming to mind were those of the first months in the Eternal City on our initial Italian sojourn. It began on the same Aventine Hill.
“Do you remember?” Glenn asked.
“How could I forget?” I answered.
* * *
“Hey! What are you doing? STOP that!!”
I sprang up from the floor where I was lounging on a deflated air mattress and rushed into what was supposed to be our dining room in the echoing, still-empty apartment. Why was Glenn shouting? I found the answer when I saw my normally mild-mannered husband hanging out the window yelling at a group of nuns in their crisp black-and-white habits as they dumped wheelbarrows filled with garbage into the open space behind our building. They looked up briefly. Then, paying no further attention to the outraged foreigner, they finished their work and swished off toward an unseen convent.
It was Saturday morning, a month after I’d started with the UN on a four-year contract. We stayed in a hotel on the Aventine Hill for the first two weeks after our arrival in Rome and then in a new colleague’s apartment for another two weeks while he was back in California. Now, at the unsettled beginning of our second month, we were tired and cranky. We’d been sleeping on the living room floor on a bed of flattened cardboard cartons that originally held an air mattress, a few dishes, pots and pans, two folding chairs, an old card table, and some clothes. These items comprised our air shipment, meant to tide us over until the shipping container arrived by sea a couple of months later. The air mattress we hoped to use over the cardboard had slowly and irreparably deflated, paralleling our naïve enthusiasm for the whole adventure of a move to romantic Italy.
We had been anxious to find a home. The hotel was expensive and my settlement allowance was running out. The American Embassy located apartments for its staff, but my new office offered no assistance. The rental agents we contacted from newspaper ads had nothing satisfactory to offer, nor did the few ads on an office bulletin board. Word of mouth eventually led us to another agent, a disagreeable American who made her living finding apartments for greenhorns like us with minimum effort on her part. She insisted that we take the bus to the apartments she suggested, leaving us scrambling to find buildings in unfamiliar locations and waiting until she drove up at her leisure and parked her car on the sidewalk. Worse, after she signed us up we began to hear stories circulating in the gossipy expatriate community that was welcoming us. One story in particular made us especially cautious about the woman: several years before our arrival, Marge invited a client for lunch at her own apartment, which was filled with cats and their untended litter boxes. After a microwaved meal of fettuccine Alfredo, she announced that she had an appointment and left, locking the man inside. He was trapped with the cats. After waiting an hour, he managed to signal a neighbor on an adjoining balcony who reluctantly let him climb over the railings to escape an unknown fate.
We weren’t subjected to such dramatic events, but then again, Marge hadn’t shown us anything livable either with her numerous dark and dilapidated suggestions. At the point when we were getting agitated she finally produced an attractive solution that we later heard was yet another apartment where she had resided. Our proposed new home had large windows on both sides of one end of a small family-owned building. It also came with a telephone—a bonus, as it often took a year to have one installed (this was just before cell phones became widely available). Best of all, there were two balconies on one side and a sunny terrace opening off the master bedroom and living room on the other. The outdoor spaces were the real attraction for migrants from a cloudy home near Portland, Oregon.
We nodded to Marge in agreement. The next day she and the owner came to my office after work to present two contracts, both in Italian. The only part Glenn and I could read was the rental rate. The first document showed the low, legally allowable amount. The second was for the remaining exorbitant amount that we paid. Needless to say, the first document would be used for tax purposes. I signed as the breadwinner, and handed over a pile of cash to our new landlord and another to our agent. After we shook hands, we were given a bunch of huge keys, the type one would expect to be used in an old monastery or castle dungeon. The place was ours. Before Marge walked off fondling her commission, she offered some advice: “Always buy De Cecco pasta.”
Early fall, and it was still hot. I tried to focus on a remark by the ancient Roman orator Seneca: “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” Well, I always wanted to have a change of place, and now my wish had come true. But sometimes mental exhaustion was a more common sensation than new vigor as my brain tried to get organized to meet the dramatic changes in my life.
Our nights were spent lying awake on the floor contemplating my job, the antics of the nuns, and the difficulties of getting settled. Packs of incessantly barking dogs left behind when their owners went on vacation provided a background to our thoughts. Adding to the noise, eerie sirens like those in World War II movies split the night air. We squirmed on the flat, sweaty air mattress while considering our decision-making skills—deciding to leave secure jobs for a flight into fantasy. Mamma mia! What had we done to ourselves?