The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (10 page)

26

I had shipped ahead a box of books to myself, right before I left New York to move to Italy. The box was guaranteed to arrive at my Roman apartment within four to six days, but I think the Italian post office must have misread that instruction as “forty-six days,” for two months have passed now, and I have seen no sign of my box. My Italian friends tell me to put the box out of my mind completely. They say that the box may arrive or it may not arrive, but such things are out of our hands.

“Did someone maybe steal it?” I ask Luca Spaghetti. “Did the post office lose it?”

He covers his eyes. “Don’t ask these questions,” he says. “You’ll only make yourself upset.”

The mystery of my missing box prompts a long discussion one night between me, my American friend Maria and her husband, Giulio. Maria thinks that in a civilized society one should be able to rely on such things as the post office delivering one’s mail in a prompt manner, but Giulio begs to differ. He submits that the post office belongs not to man, but to the fates, and that delivery of mail is not something anybody can guarantee. Maria, annoyed, says this is only further evidence of the Protestant-Catholic divide. This divide is best proven, she says, by the fact that Italians—including her own husband—can never make plans for the future, not even a week in advance. If you ask a Protestant from the American Midwest to commit to a dinner date next week, that Protestant, believing that she is the captain of her own destiny, will say, “Thursday night works fine for me.” But if you ask a Catholic from Calabria to make the same commitment, he will only shrug, turn his eyes to God, and ask, “How can any of us know whether we will be free for dinner next Thursday night, given that everything is in God’s hands and none of us can know our fate?”

Still, I go to the post office a few times to try to track down my box, to no avail. The Roman postal employee is not at all happy to have her phone call to her boyfriend interrupted by my presence. And my Italian—which
has
been getting better, honestly—fails me in such stressful circumstances. As I try to speak logically about my missing box of books, the woman looks at me like I’m blowing spit bubbles.

“Maybe it will be here next week?” I ask her in Italian.

She shrugs:
“Magari.”

Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between “hopefully” and “in your dreams, sucker.”

Ah, maybe it’s for the best. I can’t even remember now what books I’d packed in the box in the first place. Surely it was some stuff I thought I should study, if I were to truly understand Italy. I’d packed that box full of all sorts of due-diligence research material about Rome that just seems unimportant now that I’m here. I think I even loaded the complete unabridged text of Gibbon’s
History of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
into that box. Maybe I’m happier without it, after all. Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

27

I met a young Australian girl last week who was backpacking through Europe for the first time in her life. I gave her directions to the train station. She was heading up to Slovenia, just to check it out. When I heard her plans, I was stricken with such a dumb spasm of jealousy, thinking,
I want to go to Slovenia! How come I never get to
travel anywhere
?

Now, to the innocent eye it might appear that I already
am
traveling. And longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness. It’s kind of like fantasizing about having sex with your favorite movie star while you’re having sex with your
other
favorite movie star. But the fact that this girl asked directions from me (clearly, in her mind, a civilian) suggests that I am not technically traveling in Rome, but living here. However temporary it may be, I am a civilian. When I ran into the girl, in fact, I was just on my way to pay my electricity bill, which is not something travelers worry about. Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies, and something about meeting this Australian girl on her way to Slovenia just gave me such a jones to hit the road.

And that’s why I called my friend Sofie and said, “Let’s go down to Naples for the day and eat some pizza!”

Immediately, just a few hours later, we are on the train, and then—like magic—we are there. I instantly love Naples. Wild, raucous, noisy, dirty, balls-out Naples. An anthill inside a rabbit warren, with all the exoticism of a Middle Eastern bazaar and a touch of New Orleans voodoo. A tripped-out, dangerous and cheerful nuthouse. My friend Wade came to Naples in the 1970s and was mugged . . . in a
museum.
The city is all decorated with the laundry that hangs from every window and dangles across every street; everybody’s fresh-washed undershirts and brassieres flapping in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags. There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn’t have at least one crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity below.

The people here are so insanely psyched to be from Naples, and why shouldn’t they be? This is a city that gave the world pizza
and
ice cream. The Neapolitan women in particular are such a gang of tough-voiced, loud-mouthed, generous, nosy dames, all bossy and annoyed and right up in your face and just trying to friggin’
help
you for chrissake, you dope—
why they gotta do everything around here?
The accent in Naples is like a friendly cuff on the ear. It’s like walking through a city of short-order cooks, everybody hollering at the same time. They still have their own dialect here, and an ever-changing liquid dictionary of local slang, but somehow I find that the Neapolitans are the easiest people for me to understand in Italy. Why? Because they
want
you to understand, damn it. They talk loud and emphatically, and if you can’t understand what they’re actually saying out of their mouths, you can usually pick up the inference from the gesture. Like that punk little grammar-school girl on the back of her older cousin’s motorbike, who flipped me the finger
and
a charming smile as she drove by, just to make me understand, “Hey, no hard feelings, lady. But I’m only seven, and I can already tell you’re a complete moron, but that’s cool—I think you’re halfway OK despite yourself and I kinda like your dumb-ass face. We both know you would love to be me, but sorry—you can’t. Anyhow, here’s my middle finger, enjoy your stay in Naples, and
ciao!
”

As in every public space in Italy, there are always boys, teenagers and grown men playing soccer, but here in Naples there’s something extra, too. For instance, today I found kids—I mean, a group of eight-year-old boys—who had gathered up some old chicken crates to create makeshift chairs and a table, and they were playing
poker
in the piazza with such intensity I feared one of them might get shot.

Giovanni and Dario, my Tandem Exchange twins, are originally from Naples. I cannot picture it. I cannot imagine shy, studious, sympathetic Giovanni as a young boy amongst this—and I don’t use the word lightly—mob. But he is Neapolitan, no question about it, because before I left Rome he gave me the name of a pizzeria in Naples that I had to try, because, Giovanni informed me, it sold the best pizza in Naples. I found this a wildly exciting prospect, given that the best pizza in Italy is from Naples, and the best pizza in the world is from Italy, which means that this pizzeria must offer . . . I’m almost too superstitious to say it . . .
the best pizza in the world?
Giovanni passed along the name of the place with such seriousness and intensity, I almost felt I was being inducted into a secret society. He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said, in gravest confidence, “Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and tell me that you did.”

So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered—one for each of us—are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, “Why do they even
bother
trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at
all
in Stockholm?”

Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one non-stop oven. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in the rain, don’t even worry about it, just go. You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes they run out of dough, which will break your heart. By 1:00 PM, the streets outside the pizzeria have become jammed with Neapolitans trying to get into the place, shoving for access like they’re trying to get space on a lifeboat. There’s not a menu. They have only two varieties of pizza here—regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian
nan
than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It’s soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin
and
doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It’s technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it.

The guys who make this miracle happen are shoveling the pizzas in and out of the wood-burning oven, looking for all the world like the boilermen in the belly of a great ship who shovel coal into the raging furnaces. Their sleeves are rolled up over their sweaty forearms, their faces red with exertion, one eye squinted against the heat of the fire and a cigarette dangling from the lips. Sofie and I each order another pie—another whole pizza each—and Sofie tries to pull herself together, but really, the pizza is so good we can barely cope.

A word about my body. I am gaining weight every day, of course. I am doing rude things to my body here in Italy, taking in such ghastly amounts of cheese and pasta and bread and wine and chocolate and pizza dough. (Elsewhere in Naples, I’d been told, you can actually get something called chocolate pizza. What kind of nonsense is that? I mean, later I did go find some, and it’s delicious, but honestly—
chocolate pizza
?) I’m not exercising, I’m not eating enough fiber, I’m not taking any vitamins. In my real life, I have been known to eat organic goat’s milk yoghurt sprinkled with wheat germ for breakfast. My real-life days are long gone. Back in America, my friend Susan is telling people I’m on a “No Carb Left Behind” tour. But my body is being such a good sport about all this. My body is turning a blind eye to my misdoings and my overindulgences, as if to say, “OK, kid, live it up, I recognize that this is just temporary. Let me know when your little experiment with pure pleasure is over, and I’ll see what I can do about damage control.”

Still, when I look at myself in the mirror of the best pizzeria in Naples, I see a bright-eyed, clear-skinned, happy and healthy face. I haven’t seen a face like that on me for a long time.

“Thank you,” I whisper. Then Sofie and I run out in the rain to look for pastries.

28

It is this happiness, I suppose (which is really a few months old by now), that gets me to thinking upon my return to Rome that I need to do something about David. That maybe it’s time for us to end our story forever. We were already separated, that was official, but there was still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday (maybe after my travels, maybe after a year apart) we could give things another try. We loved each other. That was never the question. It’s just that we couldn’t figure out how to stop making each other desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable.

Last spring David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest: “What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can’t live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together—in misery, but happy to not be apart.”

Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten months giving that offer serious consideration.

The other alternative in the backs of our minds, of course, was that one of us might change. He might become more open and affectionate, not withholding himself from anyone who loves him on the fear that she will eat his soul. Or I might learn how to . . . stop trying to eat his soul.

So many times I had wished with David that I could behave more like my mother does in her marriage—independent, strong, self-sufficient. A self-feeder. Able to exist without regular doses of romance or flattery from my solitary farmer of a father. Able to cheerfully plant gardens of daisies among the inexplicable stone walls of silence that my dad sometimes builds up around himself. My dad is quite simply my favorite person in the world, but he is a bit of an odd case. An ex-boyfriend of mine once described him this way: “Your father only has one foot on this earth. And really, really long legs . . .”

What I grew up watching in my household was a mother who would receive her husband’s love and affection whenever he thought to offer it, but would then step aside and take care of herself whenever he drifted off into his own peculiar universe of low-grade oblivious neglect. This is how it looked to me, anyway, taking into account that nobody (and especially not the children) ever knows the secrets of a marriage. What I believed I grew up seeing was a mother who asked nothing of anybody. This was my mom, after all—a woman who had taught herself how to swim as an adolescent, alone in a cold Minnesota lake, with a book she’d borrowed from the local library entitled
How to Swim.
To my eye, there was nothing this woman could not do on her own.

But then I’d had a revelatory conversation with my mother, not long before I’d left for Rome. She’d come into New York to have one last lunch with me, and she’d asked me frankly—breaking all the rules of communication in our family’s history—what had happened between me and David. Further disregarding the Gilbert Family Standard Communications Rulebook, I actually told her. I told her everything. I told her how much I loved David, but how lonely and heartsick it made me to be with this person who was always disappearing from the room, from the bed, from the planet.

“He sounds kind of like your father,” she said. A brave and generous admission.

“The problem is,” I said, “I’m not like my mother. I’m not as tough as you, Mom. There’s a constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love. I wish I could be more like you, then I could have this love story with David. But it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it.”

Then my mother shocked me. She said, “All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too.”

In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist and finally showed me the handful of bullets she’d had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she
is
happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father. I had never seen this side of her before, not ever. I had never imagined what she might have wanted, what she might have been missing, what she might have decided not to fight for in the larger scheme of things. Seeing all this, I could feel my worldview start to make a radical shift.

If even she wants what I want, then . . . ?

Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, “You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember—I come from a different time and place than you do.”

I closed my eyes and saw my mother, ten years old on the family farm in Minnesota, working like a hired hand, raising her younger brothers, wearing the clothes of her older sister, saving dimes to get herself out of there . . .

“And you have to understand how much I love your father,” she concluded.

My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive—a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too—but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?

And the question now for me is, What are
my
choices to be? What do I believe that I deserve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not? It has been so hard for me to imagine living a life without David in it. Even just to imagine that there will never be another road trip with my favorite traveling companion, that I will never again pull up at his curb with the windows down and Springsteen playing on the radio, a lifetime supply of banter and snacks between us, and an ocean destination looming down the highway. But how can I accept that bliss when it comes with this dark underside—bone-crushing isolation, corrosive insecurity, insidious resentment and, of course, the complete dismantling of self that inevitably occurs when David ceases to giveth, and commences to taketh away. I can’t do it anymore. Something about my recent joy in Naples has made me certain that I not only
can
find happiness without David, but
must
. No matter how much I love him (and I do love him, in stupid excess), I have to say good-bye to this person now. And I have to make it stick.

So I write him an e-mail.

It’s November. We haven’t had any communication since July. I’d asked him not to get in touch with me while I was traveling, knowing that my attachment to him was so strong it would be impossible for me to focus on my journey if I were also tracking his. But now I’m entering his life again with this e-mail.

I tell him that I hope he’s well, and I report that I am well. I make a few jokes. We always were good with the jokes. Then I explain that I think we need to put an end to this relationship for good. That maybe it’s time to admit that it will never happen, that it
should
never happen. The note isn’t overly dramatic. Lord knows we’ve had enough drama together already. I keep it short and simple. But there’s one more thing I need to add. Holding my breath, I type, “If you want to look for another partner in your life, of course you have nothing but my blessings.” My hands are shaking. I sign off with love, trying to keep as cheerful a tone as possible.

I feel like I just got hit in the chest with a stick.

I don’t sleep much that night, imagining him reading my words. I run back to the Internet café a few times throughout the next day, looking for a response. I’m trying to ignore the part of me that is dying to find that he has replied: “COME BACK! DON’T GO! I’LL CHANGE!” I’m trying to disregard the girl in me who would happily drop this whole grand idea of traveling around the world in simple exchange for the keys to David’s apartment. But around ten o’clock that night, I finally get my answer. A wonderfully written e-mail, of course. David always wrote wonderfully. He agrees that, yes, it’s time we really said good-bye forever. He’s been thinking along the same lines himself, he says. He couldn’t be more gracious in his response, and he shares his own feelings of loss and regret with that high tenderness he was sometimes so achingly capable of reaching. He hopes that I know how much he adores me, beyond even his ability to find words to express it. “But we are not what the other one needs,” he says. Still, he is certain that I will find great love in my life someday. He’s sure of it. After all, he says, “beauty attracts beauty.”

Which is a lovely thing to say, truly. Which is just about the loveliest thing that the love of your life could ever possibly say, when he’s not saying, “COME BACK! DON’T GO! I’LL CHANGE!”

I sit there staring at the computer screen in silence for a long, sad time. It’s all for the best, I know it is. I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises. I know all this. But still . . .

It’s
David.
Lost to me now.

I drop my face in my hands for a longer and even sadder time. Finally I look up, only to see that one of the Albanian women who work at the Internet café has paused from her night-shift mopping of the floor to lean against the wall and watch me. We hold our tired gazes on each other for a moment. Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, “This blows ass.” She nods sympathetically. She doesn’t understand, but of course, in her way, she understands completely.

My cell phone rings.

It’s Giovanni. He sounds confused. He says he’s been waiting for me for over an hour in the Piazza Fiume, which is where we always meet on Thursday nights for language exchange. He’s bewildered, because normally
he’s
the one who’s late or who forgets to show up for our appointments, but he got there right on time tonight for once and he was pretty sure—didn’t we have a date?

I’d forgotten. I tell him where I am. He says he’ll come pick me up in his car. I’m not in the mood for seeing anybody, but it’s too hard to explain this over the
telefonino
, given our limited language skills. I go wait outside in the cold for him. A few minutes later, his little red car pulls up and I climb in. He asks me in slangy Italian what’s up. I open my mouth to answer and collapse into tears. I mean—wailing. I mean—that terrible, ragged breed of bawling my friend Sally calls “double-pumpin’ it,” when you have to inhale two desperate gasps of oxygen with every sob. I never even saw this grief-quake coming, got totally blindsided by it.

Poor Giovanni! He asks in halting English if he did something wrong. Am I mad at him, maybe? Did he hurt my feelings? I can’t answer, but only shake my head and keep howling. I’m so mortified with myself and so sorry for dear Giovanni, trapped here in this car with this sobbing, incoherent old woman who is totally
a pezzi
—in pieces.

I finally manage to rasp out an assurance that my distress has nothing to do with him. I choke forth an apology for being such a mess. Giovanni takes charge of the situation in a manner far beyond his years. He says, “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.” He gives me some tissues from a box in the back of the car. He says, “Let’s drive.”

He’s right—the front of this Internet café is far too public and brightly lit a place to fall apart. He drives for a bit, then pulls the car over in the center of the Piazza della Repubblica, one of Rome’s more noble open spaces. He parks in front of that gorgeous fountain with the bodacious naked nymphs cavorting so pornographically with their phallic flock of stiff-necked giant swans. This fountain was built fairly recently, by Roman standards. According to my guidebook, the women who modeled for the nymphs were a pair of sisters, two popular burlesque dancers of their day. They gained a fair bit of notoriety when the fountain was completed; the church tried for months to prevent the thing from being unveiled because it was too sexy. The sisters lived well into old age, and even as late as the 1920s these two dignified old ladies could be seen walking together every day into the piazza to have a look at “their” fountain. And every year, once a year, for as long as he lived, the French sculptor who had captured them in marble during their prime would come to Rome and take the sisters out to lunch, where they would reminisce together about the days when they were all so young and beautiful and wild.

So Giovanni parks there, and waits for me to get a hold of myself. All I can do is press the heels of my palms against my eyes, trying to push the tears back in. We have never once had a personal conversation, me and Giovanni. All these months, all these dinners together, all we have ever talked about is philosophy and art and culture and politics and food. We know nothing of each other’s private lives. He does not even know that I am divorced or that I have left love behind in America. I do not know a thing about him except that he wants to be a writer and that he was born in Naples. My crying, though, is about to force a whole new level of conversation between these two people. I wish it wouldn’t. Not under these dreadful circumstances.

He says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Did you lose something today?”

But I’m still having trouble figuring out how to talk. Giovanni smiles and says encouragingly,
“Parla come mangi.”
He knows this is one of my favorite expressions in Roman dialect. It means, “Speak the way you eat,” or, in my personal translation: “Say it like you eat it.” It’s a reminder—when you’re making a big deal out of explaining something, when you’re searching for the right words—to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman food. Don’t make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

I take a deep breath and offer a heavily abridged (yet somehow totally complete) Italian-language version of my situation:

“It’s about a love story, Giovanni. I had to say good-bye to someone today.”

Then my hands are slapped over my eyes again, tears spraying through my clamped fingers. Bless his heart, Giovanni doesn’t try to put a reassuring arm around me, nor does he express the slightest discomfort about my explosion of sadness. Instead, he just sits through my tears in silence, until I’ve calmed down. At which point he speaks with perfect empathy, choosing each word with care (as his English teacher, I was so
proud
of him that night!), saying slowly and clearly and kindly: “I understand, Liz. I have been there.”