All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [22]
“It’s a good story, no?” Cecilia asks.
Sì. The prospect of a real story, in Italy, no less—which I am able to sell to an international women’s magazine—makes me forget entirely about the urgent problem of needing a new life. It also stops my obsessive wondering about whether Gustavo will ever call or whether I’ll see him again. We exchanged a few e-mails, his addressed to Sexy, mine using up all the Brazilian endearments I knew, and then the correspondence fizzled out. For all my fantasies, maybe it had just been a fling—a wildly fun fling, and not everything has to last forever, but still. A friend remarked that maybe the problem was that I was the one who needed to be the hot Brazilian in a relationship, so to speak. “You’re the exotic and creative one; your guy needs to be a little more stable,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s just one zany adventure after the next.” In any case, once again, I decide to fly away.
I arrive in Rome and visit Carmen, the social worker, who is in her fifties and divorced. Every evening, Carmen takes me along to a different dinner party, because her circle of friends can’t stand the thought of her trying to microwave something to eat at home alone (she’s the only Italian I know, male or female, whose cooking is truly atrocious). Italian women are never really alone, because Italians, bless them, tend to crowd around their unattached friends until they safely find someone. Carmen has a houseful of people—an African daughter she adopted, a boarder, and now a guest from the United States—but that doesn’t prevent her friends from considering her in mandatory need of company. There is no direct translation of “loneliness” in Italian—or, for that matter, “privacy.” The concepts don’t quite exist in Italy.
Not that Italian women don’t have their own problems with men and relationships. Even more than Americans, they’re caught between expectations of being good, traditional Italian girls and wives, looking after men who have never washed a dish or made a bed, and being sophisticated professionals; the dilemma leaves a lot of them unmarried, without children, and the Italian birthrate is the lowest in the world. Somehow, though, they don’t seem to have the hardness that a lot of American women have, and even 1970s feminists like Carmen have no Puritan-inspired problems reconciling their ideology with dressing glamorously and provocatively. Italian women in their fifties and sixties just seem to be all that much sexier for how well they know themselves and how assured they are about their charms.
During the day, when Carmen is working, these friends invite me to lunch, one by one, as if they’d worked out a schedule. I’m never alone for a meal. Somehow, in Italy, you always feel held—if not by a man, then by a family of friends.
WHEN I ARRIVE at the Naples train station, I remember that this is where I said good-bye to the Professor after we first met on the island of Ischia and spent four sun-drenched days there, a sweet reward for getting up out of my postdivorce depression and traveling by myself. At the time, I was sure I would never see him again but felt delighted to have been able to run into him, to have spent those wonderful days in his company—eating fresh pasta, making love, swimming in the sea, and starting all over again. Now it’s been four years, and I know this time that if I do see him again, it won’t be as a lover. But that’s fine, too. I’m moving ahead and haven’t lost those years I spent with him. All those beautiful moments—sipping wine and staring at the volcanoes in the distance, making love with open eyes, wandering around Moroccan alleys holding hands—don’t go away. The love in your life adds up.
I step out of the train station into soft light that shows off Naples’ faded Renaissance beauty at her best. Naples is sometimes called the northernmost city in Africa for its sultry air, chaotic humanity, and medinalike mazes of ancient streets. To be in Naples again is an unexpected pleasure, because the city is irresistible