Four Seasons in Rome

  At noon in a Roman July, the sun is tiny, a blinding thumbtack pinned into the blue, but it fries us like ants on the cobbles. The city has become a series of superheated corridors. Girls tug off their stockings and soak their calves in fountains; monks and nuns walk about in their heavy outfits like refugees from another century.

  Today is another holiday—I don’t even have the energy to find out what this one is. Tiers of undergarments hang stock-still on clotheslines; the shops are closed. Piazza Garibaldi is lined with men sitting in parked cars reading newspapers. The boys are sweat-drenched in their stroller, chugging milk, hair plastered to their scalps.

  In a few weeks, by mid-August, practically all the Romans will have abandoned their city to the tourists, ferragosto, and the stores will close and the piazzas will bake. We’ll be gone, too.

  When we get back to the apartment, I drag empty duffel bags out from beneath the bed and shake them out the windows. Owen and Henry climb into one and giggle. Clumps of dust drift through the bedroom.

  “Soon we’re going home,” Shauna tells them, and Owen latches on to the word somehow and starts chanting, “Homehomehome,” until it becomes indistinguishable from his word for more.

  “Mo, mo, mo,” sings Owen. “Mo, mo, mo,” sings Henry.

  In the Tom Andrews Studio I pull down the photos of B-17s and bombed-out cities. I fold the pages of my novel into manila folders. I’ll finish it in Idaho, I tell myself, although I might be lying.

  I spend the rest of the morning reading the last volume of Pliny’s Natural History. “In the whole world,” he writes, “wherever the vault of heaven turns, Italy is the most beautiful of all lands, endowed with all that wins Nature’s crown. Italy is the ruler and second mother of the world—with her men and women, her generals and soldiers, her slaves, her outstanding position in arts and crafts, her abundance of brilliant talent, her geographical location and healthy, temperate climate, her easy accessibility for all other peoples, and her shores with their many harbors and kindly winds that blow towards her.”55

  Out in the garden, heat gilds the pathways, the walls. The canopies of the pines stand on their thin trunks, motionless, dizzy. Pliny is wrong, I think. Every place has its own beauty. In Detroit, Michigan, I once got caught in a blizzard on the interstate, ice piling up on the wipers, the taillights in front of me inching along. At one point the wind suddenly died and the snowfall seemed to pause for a second in midair, tens of thousands of individual crystals, a field of diamonds suspended above the windshield. Then it began to blow up—a blizzard in slowmotion reverse. In Nairobi, Kenya, above an impossibly crowded market, the odors of clay and bodies and sewage all around, I watched a woman unfurl a banner above a stall, and the wind tore it from her hands and it opened and flapped in front of the sun, light saturating silk, before blowing out across the rooftops.

  The world is not a pageant: beauty is as unquantifiable as love. Geography is not something that can be ranked.

  The Natural History, the umbrella pines, Borromini’s Sant’Ivo, the question of the starlings, and the question of fatherhood—my interest in them all rotates around one question: If we creatures are on earth only to extend the survival of our species, if nature only concerns itself with reproduction, if we are supposed to raise our kids to breeding age and then wither and slide toward death, then why does the world bother to be so astoundingly, intricately, breathtakingly beautiful? Is it all merely genetic variation? Geology and weather? Chemical twitch, electrical impulse, feathers and mating calls?

  Pliny can’t answer. I return the Natural History to the library downstairs. I clean the Tom Andrews Studio and carry my things out through the courtyard, down the front steps, past the circular entrance fountain in the gravel. A blackbird lands on the fountain’s lip, not ten feet from me, hops forward, and begins to drink. It closes one yellow-rimmed eye. Then it vanishes.

  Marco and his wife, Lula, come over. She has had the twins; they are three months old now, and spending the afternoon with her mother in Trastevere. Both parents look exhausted, gray in their cheeks, swipes of violet beneath their eyes. They hold hands, smile. It as if Shauna and I are looking in a mirror, gazing at former versions of ourselves.

  Marco marvels at our terrace; “Lula, la terrazza,” he calls, and she and Shauna walk out to join us. Henry and Owen run laps around their little pool. We stand in the heat and drink Fanta and stumble through half English, half Italian: nap schedules, diaper brands, breast-feeding—we are soldiers from different armies fighting similar wars.

  “If you can,” Shauna says, “get them on the same nap schedule. Insieme? Together? Otherwise you will have no time for yourself.”

  Lula nods.

  “It’s hard,” Shauna says, and she and Lula share a look. It is strange to think that we are suddenly the experienced ones, we who knew nothing about raising babies a year ago.

  Before Marco and Lula leave, we pile hand-me-downs into their hatchback: sacks of baby clothes, crib sheets, a rug, a bucket of oversize LEGOs. They are grateful but not with the effusiveness that Americans might be; they seem to take it as a matter of course—what else would we do with this stuff?

  A few hours later, we say good-bye to Laura and her family, who are going to spend the next month riding trains from Rome all the way up to Lapland. “A presto,” I tell Laura, though they’ll return from Finland to Massachusetts and I’m not so sure we’ll see them soon.

  Five days before we leave Italy, we take the boys overnight to a little Umbrian hill town called Spello. We pile onto the train: two babies, two strollers, two duffel bags, two baby-carrying backpacks, two liters of milk, each carton so damp from humidity that it feels, pouring them, as if my thumb might punch through the cardboard.

  Before the train has even departed Termini, Henry and Owen have become bored with the seat-belt clasps, the electric window shades, and the flip-up ashtray lids. They squirm in our arms and stomp our groins with their little sandals. Every toy or book we present is promptly tossed to the floor. By Tiburtina, ten minutes out, they are sprinting up and down the aisles, smacking their heads into armrests.

  “You know how you’re sitting on an airplane,” Shauna says, “and some haggard people start down the aisle with a bag in one hand and a screaming baby in the other, and all you can think is ‘Please don’t be in the seat next to me, please don’t be in the seat next to me’?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are those people now.”

  Spello boils with red and pink geraniums. We push the boys up the streets in their stroller and eat ice-cream bars and let them stagger around a dusty playground in the heat. Villagers smile at us; the sun swings low across the vineyards. In the evening we eat pizza and turn down the thermostat in our hotel room to a temperature only American consciences would allow.

  At 3 a.m. the full moon stares like an eye through the window. Owen is crying in his Portacrib. I close the drapes; I rub his back. For the next half hour I rock him in the bathroom. The moon, even through the curtains, is so bright you’d think it must have its own heat.

  In Rome yesterday, as I waited in line at the self-service train-ticket machine, a woman with mud in her hair and three swipes of dirt across her cheek accosted the man in front of me. He refused to give her any money, and she was cursing and shuffling her feet, and I could see some last thread of self-control give way inside her, like a rusty wire, and she closed her eyes and opened them and punched the man in the sternum. He staggered and almost fell. I was extending a tentative arm when she threw her oversize bottle of beer at him. Amazingly, it didn’t break. It bounced off his leg and rang on the floor, and the three of us watched it roll, turning over a couple of times before coming to a rest, a couple swallows of beer still inside.

  Hostility, fervency—these hill towns have walls around them for a reason. Hannibal and his Carthaginians murdered legionnaires in the hills above Tuoro twenty-two hundred years ago, and after that there were the Guelfs, the Lombards, the duchy of Spoleto, t
he pope tyrants, all the rawboned, hopelessly cruel noble families of the early Renaissance, and all the strangers who wandered between towns with nothing to lose. Photos of Tuscany and Umbria and their sunflowers and lonesome cypresses and brown-shuttered villages are plastered in tourist offices all over Italy, and the promise is peace—seasoned pork, sunshine, romance, vines and olives, frescoes and festivals. But the history of violence is in the stones. Foligno, just five kilometers from us, was bombed into nothingness sixty years ago. Mignano, San Pietro, San Vittore—all of them were wiped out during the war. Cassino isn’t that far away, either, where Germans and Americans and New Zealanders and Poles (the grandfathers of tourists sleeping in the rooms around us) died in droves on the rocks below the old monastery.

  What has Italy taught me? Not to count on too much. Any minute a trio of jets will come screaming over the apartment or a diaper will mysteriously disintegrate or a baby will skip his naps. Transportation workers strike at will. A beggar’s tin can lurches from nowhere. Count on sun and it rains.

  Look closely and the picturesque inevitably cracks apart and becomes more interesting. In our little hotel room I sit on the closed lid of the toilet, Owen’s head on my shoulder. Sometimes his scalp smells like wet, uncooked rice. Once, damp leaves. Tonight it smells like a deep, cold lake in summer.

  The town sleeps; his little heart beats against mine.

  Three days before we leave, Rome gives us one cool night. I sleep more deeply than I have since the boys were born. In a dream I am standing in an umbrella pine like the one outside the Tom Andrews Studio except that I somehow am the tree: I feel the wind in the needles as I might feel wind in the hairs on my arms. When I turn, the tree turns. Henry and Owen approach and stand beneath my trunk and open their coats and little white birds flutter out. I reach down: they—the birds and the boys—climb up into me. We look out at an endless white city, silver domes shining between temples, slices of light dropping through the clouds, flotillas of swans like white dots on liquid-metal ponds.

  At noon Shauna and I sit in the garden eating mozzarella, tomato, and vinegar sandwiches. The breeze is mild. The boys stagger beneath the trees nearby and pick up fallen apricots and occasionally bite into one. We have an entire conversation and still the boys are fine—they don’t need anything, don’t need us chasing after them, don’t require milk or consolation. It is perhaps the first time that we’ve been able to talk to each other for fifteen minutes, while the boys are awake, without having to pay a babysitter for the privilege.

  A limitless sense of well-being comes washing over me, big creamy clouds riding through the sky, leaves fluttering softly. A year is an infinity of perceptions: not just the shapes of starlings and the death of the pope and watching our sons learn to walk, but the smell of roasting meat in an alley, the dark brown eyes of a beggar on a church step, a single dandelion seed settling soundlessly onto the habit of a nun who is riding the tram. This year has been composed of a trillion such moments; they flood the memory, spill over the edges of journal entries. What is it physicists tell us? Even in a finite volume, there are an infinite number of points.

  But today, in the cool grass, the experience feels whole and unified and sweet. It feels as if a prism has slowly been turned, and the world has gradually come back into alignment. The edges of the clouds are seemingly sharper against the blue than they’ve ever been in the history of the world.

  At dawn, on the morning after Henry and Owen were born, I left the hospital and rode my bicycle back to our apartment through the slush and climbed onto the porch and got our mail—which included the envelope that would send us to Rome—and carried it inside. I remember that as I passed through the door, I was amazed to find the material objects of our former life still intact—a magazine facedown on the couch and a vase of store-bought daisies on the table and photos of nieces taped to the refrigerator. Everything was exactly as we had left it twentysome hours before. I had assumed, during the night, Owen crying in his mother’s arms, Henry in intensive care, nurses orbiting quietly around him, machines chiming behind curtains, that everything would have changed, that our old lives would have been destroyed and nothing could ever be the same again. But here were my books and computer and e-mail waiting to be answered and the same brown carpet on the stairs and our hamper of laundry and the two new Moses baskets, still in plastic bags, waiting for their occupants to come home.

  There was our old life, in the apartment, in which we had time to finish most of the tasks we started and took long showers and remembered to water our plants. And there was our new life, in the hospital a mile away, in which Shauna needed morphine and two babies needed to eat every three hours around the clock and a tiny boy in a Plexiglas incubator would need to be brought breast milk and given IVs and radiated with ultraviolet light.

  I remember thinking, We’re going to have to figure out how to combine our old life with our new life.

  Over a year later, we still have days of mind-crushing fatigue, midnights when I think I’m pouring milk into a bottle but am actually pouring it all over the counter. Yesterday I spent five minutes trying to remember my parents’ zip code.

  But now there are mornings like this one, when we wake up and realize we’ve slept through the entire night, and we stroll though the gardens as if we are normal again, as if we are finally learning the syllables of this strange, new language.

  In a poem Tom Andrews once asked the Lord to “afflict me with Attention Surplus Disorder so I can see what is in front of my face.”56 I will try to always remember the eyes of the oldest Romans as they settled upon Henry and Owen in the stroller, that slow recognition, that wash of joy. More keenly than anyone, perhaps, they felt the transforming power of youth. They leaned forward on their canes. They wanted to be closer.

  In a sense, this year, our predicament has been the same as Rome’s: to reconcile the new life with the old life, to tunnel an exit back into the future.

  I wish I’d gotten to know more Italians. I wish we’d invited Maria to dinner, the woman at the pasta shop who calls Henry Enrico and lifts him out of the stroller every time we come in and passes him around behind the counter, who loves to rent an RV in the summer and drive it north into Switzerland, who is lovely but a bit crestfallen, too, not from any tragedy I know about but simply from the passage of time, pressing two fingers to her lips as she shows me a photo of her own son, now twelve or thirteen.

  I wish I’d spent three or four days in the folds of the Alban Hills I can see from our terrace, tramping in the snow and drinking colli albani at tiny farmhouses and eating snails and looking back across the valley at the distant haze of the city. I wish I’d started one morning in Umbria with a sack full of sandwiches and a hired canoe and floated the Tiber all the way back to Rome and climbed out of the canoe and walked home. I wish I’d spent a night in Maremma, on the coast west of Florence, where there are supposed to be stands of umbrella pines beside the beach that stretch for miles.

  I wish I’d asked a monk to let us into the catacombs beneath one of the churches on the Appian Way with only the stub of a candle, no flashlights, no bulbs in the ceilings, and let us wander through the ancient quarries down there in the blackness, the cool damp, the soft walls, underground avenues opening here and there, the thousand tombs scrolling past, and their little stone shelves on which sat glass vials of martyrs’ blood, and only the one quivering flame to guide us.

  I wish I’d found a way to get Pope John Paul II to have blessed Henry and Owen, their little faces turned up at him, his old, jeweled fingers quivering slightly, reaching out to brush their foreheads.

  Two days before we leave, a family passing in front of the Academy asks me for directions to the Fontanone. They are speaking Italian but have the look of tourists, slightly lost, sore-footed, rushing nowhere. Northerners perhaps.

  “Follow me,” I say. We descend, turn left: the chainlink fence, the roaring blue pool. At the railing, across from the fountain, they gasp as they lean into the vie
w. The father burrows in a backpack and produces a camera. Far below us is the dark saucer of the Pantheon, the blue tourist balloon at the Villa Borghese, the Vittoriano, the clusters of rooftops: the city.

  Water splashes behind; Rome twists below; clouds stream overhead.

  “Eccolo!” the youngest girl says, and flourishes a hand. “Ecco Roma!”

  Here is Rome.

  Tacy comes to work for the last time. She has not yet found another job. “When I first came to Italy,” she says, “I applied for some hotel jobs. Receptionist, concierge. The ads said they needed fluency in English. But when they called me into the office and looked at me, they didn’t even want to hear me speak. They said, ‘No, we are looking for applicants whose first language is English.’”

  Sweet, beautiful Tacy: lately she has come into the apartment with bright green ivy leaves, big as sheets of paper, and let the boys run their fingers over them.

  When it’s time for her to go home, all three of us cry. Shauna stuffs cash and a thank-you card into Tacy’s purse, as if this somehow absolves us of understanding how much more difficult her situation is than ours, as if a few hundred dollars will ease the work of replacing another under-the-table job, wiring money every week to the Philippines, eight thousand miles between her and her fourteen-year-old son, whose face she has not seen, whose hair she has not smelled, in almost three years.

  We give her the blanket off our bed; we give her our extra dishes. I have to convince Shauna not to give her the remaining balance of our checking account.

  I wait in the heat outside the butcher’s stall for the last time. Three women are in line ahead of me. One, the oldest, turns and leans over the stroller.

  “Sono gemellini?”

  Yes. Little twins.