Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [107]
Italy, of course, is another story—Italy has always made me happy, has always made me feel like a woman. Whenever I arrive in Italy, I remember the list of proverbs Emmie and I once made for The Amazon Handbook: A Guide for Free Women (which, of course, we never wrote). Proverb number one was: “You’re not too fat; you’re just in the wrong country.” Number two: “Be very romantic, but keep the real estate in your own name.” That was as far as we got. (Actually, those two rules alone could take you far, far.)
Italy. There is nothing about this country that I do not love: The language, in which everything sounds better, from “Please pass the beans” (I fagioli, per piacere) to “I love you” (Ti amo). The people, with their humanity, anarchy, eccentricity, and yet their great belief in all the things that really matter: children, art, food, family, conversation, opera, gardening, shoes. The landscape, warm and maternal in places, with mammary hills, and craggy and masculine in others, with phallic peaks. The whole boot of Italy (and I love boots) is lapped by a lingual, sexual sea. From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with—a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.
It’s not that I fail to love America. America is my home, and so I love and hate it equally, as one loves and hates one’s parents. I know it too well. I know its great energy, its pragmatism, but I also know its crazy evangelists, its corrupt politicians, its mad addiction to money. What I love about America is its boundless optimism; what I hate is the way it fetters that optimism in a straitjacket of puritanism. If you have X, you can’t have Y. If you have Q, you can’t have Z. If you have mind, your body must pay. If you have body, your mind must pay. What I hate about America is its belief in dualism—its belief in retribution—when the truth is that the more you have the more you have, the more you grab the less you have, and the more you give the more you have. For life on its deepest level is a pot-latch, not a stock market: only by giving do we become rich. Only by nurturing mind do we nurture body. Only by loving the body do we really love the mind. They are indivisible, united, one. The heart of America knows this, in its optimism; the body politic of America does not.
Give, give, give! is the cry of the gods. It rhymes with: Live, live, live! Why else are we passing through this sublunary sphere? I cannot believe it is to accumulate T-bills, certificates of deposit, and stock options.
Keep moving, keep traveling. When I travel, I know I am in my proper mode. For what is life but a passage? When I was younger, it was Italy that kept me painting. I dipped my foot in the baptismal font of life.
The phone rings.
“Pronto.”
“Leila—it’s Cordelia. Heard you were in town.” Cordelia’s Southern drawl has not been modified by twenty years in Italy.
“How on earth did you know? I just got in last night.”
Cordelia laughs. “Venice is a very small town, honey. I just know. I’m callin’ to invite you over for drinks at six-thirty or seven. I’m havin’ a few people—flotsam an’ jet set, as we used to say.”
“I’d love to.”
“I’ve moved, honey. I’m now in Palazzo Barbaro. Ask the concierge at the hotel. Everyone knows me. Everyone knows everybody in Venice.”
“Are you going to the Viva Venezia Ball?”
“Not if I can help it, honey. It’s the event of the season, but I hate that sort of thing. Too many cotillions in my ill-spent youth—honey, that’s why I left Charleston in the first place. I try whenever possible to hang out with the lunatics, the lovers, and the poets.”
“Good old Cordelia.”
“See the Biennale if you possibly can—it’s actually good this year.”
“Okay, boss.”
“And come at six, so we can have a minute to talk before the sweatin’ hordes of freeloaders arrive. What do you call them, honey?”
“Call what?”
“Freeloaders—in Yiddish.”
“Schnorrers.” I laugh.
“I miss your madness, Zandberg.”
“Me you too,” I say.
We both