We'll Always Have Paris (12 page)

How
do
you
say
watch
me, look at me?
I wondered, flipping through my phrase book.

“
Guardami
,” I said pointing to myself, going into charades mode. I placed my hands over my head in a point and spread my legs so my body would resemble a volcano ready to erupt.

Think
about
acting
class. Be the volcano.

“
Io
sono
Vesuvius.
” I then began to grumble like the volcano getting ready to erupt. They weren’t getting it. Either that, or they wanted to see how far I would go. The cost of directions was going to be a full dramatic recreation of the fateful day in Pompeii. I tilted my head back so my mouth pointed skyward and made a bubbling, spewing noise like percolating coffee. I brought my fists to my face and then lifted fluttering fingers up toward the imaginary volcano rim. Each man suppressed laughter. With my hands and arms, I imitated lava flowing down the sides of the volcano, all while grumbling and bubbling “
Sono
Vesuvius
, grrr.” Then I held up a finger to let them know I was doing a new scene. I pointed to myself, now a woman in the ancient city washing her laundry in a basin. “
Mama
mia, Vesuvius!
” I shrieked, placing my hands on my cheeks. I began running in place, looking over my shoulder checking to see if I was outrunning the flowing lava. “Oh no!” I gasped, then froze in the position of the statue featured on the ruins of Pompeii promotional material.

“Brava!”
they shouted and clapped. “
Si
vuole
scavi
.”

Vuole
? That either means “you want” or “you go,” right? And scavi must mean excavation site
, I thought.

“
Si
scavi!
” Katie said.

The men rattled in Italian and pointed. Noticing I didn’t understanding his directions, one of the men tore a piece of paper from his pad and drew a map.

Scavi
was not across the street as Claudia had promised. Nor was there an Italian government official waiting to check our bags anywhere in sight.

Katie and I proceeded to walk the mile or so to the ruins of Pompeii, pulling our suitcases through sun-baked cobblestone streets. I gained a new appreciation for the delicacy of my elbows as they absorbed the shock from the suitcase wheels jumping in and out of the grooves in our path. For a moment, I considered walking in the gutter so we could enjoy a paved road. Then I remembered that something perilous occupied these streets: Italian drivers.

“Look ahead!” Katie shouted.

“It’s a mirage,” I said, exhausted. “Don’t fall for it. There is no water.”

She laughed. “It says ‘Tourist Information’—in
English
!”

Printed boldly on a blue canvas tent were the welcoming, wonderful words. In fact, there was a row of about fifty tents offering maps, tours, and souvenirs.

I eagerly greeted the couple working at the blue tent and asked where the baggage check was. They looked at each other and shrugged. “Here,” the man replied. “Three euro and you leave bags in back.”

This
was the baggage check? Where was the Italian government official? As I rolled my bags to the back of the tent, I wondered where the other luggage was. “Um, you’re sure this is a baggage check?” I asked dumbly. What did I expect? If they were crooks, they weren’t going to tell me.

“Yes, it’s no problem,” the woman assured me. “Three euro.”

The further we got from the blue tent, the more my discomfort grew. My anxiety erupted when we reached the entrance of the site. A barrel of a woman in an Italian government uniform stood with her arms folded under a sign that read “
Deposito
Bagagli
,” the exact words Claudia had written for me.

“
This
is the
Deposito
Bagagli
?” I asked the woman, switching back and forth between my natural voice and my English accent.

“How many tickets?” she replied with the energy of someone who was days from retirement.

“One child, one adult,” I said.

She knit her eyebrows. “Where are you from?”

“
From?
” I asked, sheepish.

“Let me see your passports,” she demanded. Obediently, I showed her the U.S. passports.

“We live in California currently,” I said lamely.

She blurted the price for full-fare non-European Union members. I handed her my credit card and asked again, “If this is the baggage check, who did I give our bags to?” She did not respond. “The people in those tents? Who are they?”

“The gypsies?” she snorted.

“Gypsies?!” Didn’t gypsies wear head scarves and off-the-shoulder blouses? Those two looked like an ad for Old Navy.

“They probably won’t steal your things,” the baggage clerk said cruelly. “You weren’t stupid enough to leave money in there, right?”

“No, um, not
that
stupid.”

“Next!” she shouted.

I began breathing heavily with panic, no easy task in the stagnant Italian summer air. If the gypsies stole our luggage, we would have absolutely no clothing except what was on our backs. I had our passports and train and plane tickets, but I’d grown rather attached to some of my sundresses. And all of the Vatican souvenirs I had bought for my Catholic family and friends would be lost. I had no desire to spend our first day in Florence shopping for new underwear, shirts, and shorts. Glancing at my watch, I realized that we only had forty-five minutes to explore the ruins if we were to make it back to the station in time to catch our train to Naples then connect to Florence. “Katie, we need to move quickly,” I told her.

We spent the next three-quarters of an hour jogging through the ancient city, barely stopping to read any of the exhibition descriptions. I knew that this visit to Pompeii would likely be our only one together, so I rushed through, trying to cram a daylong tour into less than an hour.

The site was 160 acres, the lifeless and parched remains of the ancient walled city. There were large open lots with broken columns and statues, and small lots displaying antiquities like kitchen items, tools, and utensils. Some structures like the amphitheater remained mostly intact, while others like the Temple of Apollo were reduced to small fragments of their former selves. Some cells were once people’s homes, now no more than a faint property line.

As Katie looked at the exhibits, my mind raced with worry. If the gypsies stole our suitcases, we would need to replace those too. Good God, how could I be so stupid?!

“Can you believe this was once an entire city?” Katie asked, looking at another display. “Did you see that poor dog?”

“The statue of the dog?” I asked Katie.

“Mommy, that was no statue. He was covered in lava from the eruption at Mount Vesuvius.”

I wasted my time in Pompeii simultaneously trying to cover the most ground possible and fretting about gypsies selling my moisturizer on the black market. As a result, I saw very little and understood even less.

Katie and I exited the site and looked around at the completely unfamiliar area. Despite my best efforts to remember which exit was nearest to where we entered, I had lost my bearings in the sprawling site. Making a mental note to turn left at the crumbling column did absolutely no good. “If we follow the outside of the wall, we’ll make it to the tents eventually,” Katie suggested as she quickened her pace. I looked at my watch nervously.

“Wasn’t there a church nearby?” I asked.

“Please, this is Italy,” Katie said with an eye roll. “There’s always a church nearby.”

“No seriously, look for the cross on the steeple, that’s where our bags are.”
Or
were.

After twenty minutes, we saw the blue tent and sprinted toward it. “I want our bags!” I demanded breathlessly, accusing.

The man gave a Euro-shrug and led me to the back where the suitcases appeared to be untouched. I unzipped the bags, and everything was exactly as I had left it. “Oh,” I said, feeling like a heel. “
Grazie.
”

He shrugged again and we were on our way. If Katie and I rolled our bags at the same pace we’d set as we walked the periphery of the ancient city, we could make it to the train station with zero minutes to spare. We bought chilled water not only to drink, but also to douse on our bodies as we raced to make the train. We arrived sweaty, breathless, and probably in need of elbow surgery, but on time.

The train, however, was not. It pulled in to the station an hour later.

When Katie and I arrived in Naples, we had an hour to spare before our train left for Florence. I spotted a pay phone. “Let’s call Daddy!” I suggested. “He should be just getting to work around now.”

Telling William about our day in Pompeii, I reported, “The jig is up on my European discount.”

“Your what?”

“Oh, I’ve been using an English accent to get EU discounts on admission at tourist attractions,” I said blithely.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

I explained again.

“That’s what I thought you said,” William said, irked. “Jennifer, that’s stealing.”

“Stealing?”
I said, appalled by the accusation. “There’s no reason they should charge European residents less than the rest of us.”

“Actually, there is,” William said. “They pay taxes into the system that maintains sites like the ruins of Pompeii and all of the museums you’ve been visiting. You don’t.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated. “I hadn’t realized.”

“Here’s what you need to do,” William told me. “When you’re in Florence, find a museum or cultural attraction and slip some extra money in the donation box.”

“Really? Can’t I just stop?” I asked.

“Nope.” Marrying a man who embraced the rule of law was a good deal for the most part, but there were moments like this when it was going to cost me. William and I exchanged a few more words before I handed the phone to Katie. “Be good,” he said, bidding me farewell.

After Katie and I boarded the train to Florence, I finally felt the effects of the long day. I melted into my cushioned brown seat and felt a lump in my throat as the train pulled away from Pompeii station.

“I know this wasn’t exactly what you had hoped for from Pompeii,” I told Katie, who was looking out the window. “But you’re young; you’ll get to Pompeii again and you’ll make that visit perfect.”

She turned to face me, her long braids disheveled, freckles smattered across her nose. “A trip doesn’t have to be perfect to be great, Mommy. We got to see the ruins of Pompeii. Do you know how lucky we are?”

Katie instinctively knew what I had struggled my entire life to grasp. And I still hadn’t really gotten it. Eluding me was the ability to focus on what I had, rather than what I had lost or could lose.

I smiled and placed my hand over hers. “You’re right.”

Looking out the window, she snorted a little laugh. “People have had worse days in Pompeii, you know?”

Visiting Florence was like attending a surprise party every day.

Katie and I arrived by train a little after nine that evening and found the city absolutely, positively barren. It was apocalyptically desolate; not a soul on the streets. We got the attention of a taxi driver by tapping on the window of his yellow cab and breaking his trance.

My childhood friend Andrew had recommended the Cimatori Bed and Breakfast because he knew we shared the same travel requirements: location and price. The Cimatori was in the center of town, the third floor of a walk-up apartment building that looked like something from the Lower East Side of Manhattan before it was hip. The lobby was lined with old white subway tile. Two bikes sat chained to a rack. A row of metal mailboxes was bolted to the wall, each bearing the name of a different bed and breakfast. As Katie and I pulled our suitcases up three flights of stairs, we read small ceramic signs for each. One bed and breakfast marked its door with a dainty oval sign that bore its name in lavender script and a trim of painted wildflowers. It seemed to be trying to convince visitors that it was the entrance to a charming country cottage.

The hostess at the Cimatori quickly showed us our room, rattled explanations of where everything was, and rushed off. She wasn’t rude but clearly in the midst of doing something more important like assisting at a childbirth or fighting a wildfire. “We talk in the morning, ay?” she said, her long black hair flowing behind her.

I turned to Katie. “Let’s take a little walk and get our bearings.”

“Sure,” she said, grabbing one of the maps on the desk.

The front door of our bed and breakfast opened onto a narrow street lined with apartment buildings. I looked left, then right, but neither direction offered any sort of visual invitation. “Let’s just walk to the end of the block,” I offered.

Before we made it to the end of the cobblestone street, however, we saw another small alley that led to a statue of an equestrian. “Katie, let’s walk down to the horse.” I hoped I wasn’t leading us into the dodgy part of Florence, but ganglands weren’t usually marked with Renaissance sculptures, so I figured it was probably safe. I could not imagine an Italian hoodlum challenging his rival to knife-fight behind a Botticelli.

As Katie and I got closer to the statue, we realized that the alley actually opened to a giant piazza, the largest we had seen so far after eleven days in Italy. The long corner of intricately adorned buildings was positioned like outstretched arms, the periwinkle sky maternal and soothing. The piazza was dotted with about a half-dozen sculptures, including a copy of Michelangelo’s
David
. “We are at Piazza della Signoria,” Katie announced, looking at her map. Pointing, she added, “That building is the Uffizi Gallery, and if we walk one more block we’ll be at the Arno River.”

“Should we go further?” I asked.

“Why not?” Katie returned with a Euro-shrug. Walking along the Arno, Katie and I still did not see a soul. I knew Florence wouldn’t be like Rome with its constant hustle, but even Salerno had more nightlife than this. We took in the stone bridges that stretched across the narrow river and wondered why no one was out. It was worth a stroll just to watch the light from the street lamps dancing on the black water. But where was everyone?

An eruption of cheering came from every corner of Florence. People blew horns and cried out the way they might when ringing in the New Year. “
Mama
Mia!
” we heard from several different directions.

“What’s happening?” Katie asked, delighted.

“Goal!” someone shouted, as if to answer her question.

***

The next morning, all the talk at breakfast was about Spain’s big win of the Euro Cup. A few women soccer players from Hong Kong sat next to an ebullient Italian couple and two deflated German men. I wondered why the victory was so personal for Italy, then the host explained that if your country isn’t playing, you root for your neighbor. She glanced sidelong at the Germans and said that Spain’s opponent played extremely well and the victory was very hard-won.

The late-morning streets of Florence were like fresh-baked flatbread. In fact, the whole city had a warm, doughy feel that reminded me of my long-deceased grandmother Aggie. Perhaps it was the fact that the low height of the yeasty colored buildings allowed sunshine to constantly bake the streets. Perhaps it was the ever-present aroma of bread. I wasn’t sure, but something about the city made me crave focaccia.

Post-soccer frenzy, Florence was amply populated with people making their way about town with unfolded maps and gelato cups. Katie’s and my only plan was finding the Accademia so we would not miss our scheduled time to see the
David
sculpture the following day.

About a block before we reached the museum, we heard booming opera singing coming from a nondescript building. We looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. Without saying a word, we headed toward the giant dark wooden door. A man in red jeans pushed open the door while simultaneously rolling up the sleeves of his aqua button-down shirt.

I managed to clumsily ask in Italian what translated to: “What is music?”

“Ah,
belle
, you are Americans.” We nodded. “Music school has…ah, how you say,
esame
?”

“Exam?” Katie popped like a game show contestant.

“
Si! Esame
for the opera student. You have come to watch?”

At first I worried that he had mistaken us for expected guests. Before I could explain that we
wanted
to watch, Katie chimed in. “
Si, grazie
.”

Sporting her little red backpack, Katie stepped into the school and accepted a catalog from the man. “You use a for fan,” he explained, handing me a small booklet as well.

Katie and I sat in the back row of a muggy auditorium as a twentysomething skater boy belted out
Figaro
. An elderly Italian woman with red cotton-candy hair interrupted and directed. He sang it again and again until the woman was satisfied that he had fully embodied the character. Katie and I looked at each other in amazement at how the bony young man’s voice could fill the auditorium until the walls nearly shook. Wide-eyed, she asked, “Where does he get all that air?”

***

Katie and I now shared the experience of hearing the
Figaro
aria outside of the traditional venue of an opera house. When my mother and I lived in Greenwich Village, one of the two guys who lived upstairs sang for the Metropolitan Opera and used
Figaro
as his standard warm-up. He sang it in the shower; he sang it in the kitchen. He sang it in the morning; he sang it in the afternoon.
Figaro, Figaro, Fiiiii-garo!

When the couple fought, the opera singer wouldn’t storm out the front door. Instead he opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape. One evening, my mother and I heard delicate, apologetic tapping on our living room window. It was Opera Guy. My mother opened the window, but before she could ask why he had climbed down onto our fire escape, he blurted, “Goddamn Frank locked me out. I needed a little fresh air and he locked the windows.” With Opera Guy now inside our apartment, my mother asked if he had a key to the front door. “No,” he said, primly placing his hands on his lap. “I am so steamed. Can I use your broom?”

My mother handed it to him without question. Like the diva he was, Opera Guy lifted the broom handle and began banging on our ceiling. “You’re an asshole, Frank,” he shouted.

Our neighbor banged a few more times and shouted, “You can smoke yourself to death up there, but I will not have you destroy my instrument!”

They were in their own world, separated only by the thin layer that divided our apartments.

“Who’s Frank?” I asked my mother as our upstairs neighbor escalated the fight by stomping on his floor.

My mother was baffled by my confusion. After living in Greenwich Village for nearly a year, the idea of a gay couple shouldn’t have fazed me. Two lesbians helped us move our furniture into the apartment. Most of my mother’s friends were gay men.

“Yes, they live together. They’re lovers,” my mother explained of our neighbors.

“I thought his name was Figaro.”

***

After the Italian student passed his opera exam, a young woman took the stage wearing a white rag on her head. She held a mop and began a soprano aria that could make people weep, even those who had no idea what the words meant. Katie reached into her backpack and took out a book. “We can leave if you’re bored,” I whispered.

“Bored? This is great,” she said, offering me a swig from her water bottle. “I didn’t know I like opera.” She rested her head on my shoulder, the heat depleting us. The student hit a point in her song where she was begging the master of the house for mercy after he had just shoved her onto the floor. My eyes filled with tears, though I wasn’t sure if it was because of what was happening on stage or within me. Two instructors in the front row dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs. Either the student’s performance was excellent, or these teachers were also highly neurotic mothers overwhelmed by the joy of realizing that life’s most perfect moments could not be planned, scheduled, or even expected.

“What do you think she’s singing about?” I asked Katie, who lifted her head to reply.

“I think she’s very unhappy at her job.”

The next day, Katie and I took a walk down the Arno River before our appointment to see Michelangelo’s
David
. As we crossed the Piazza della Signoria, we saw a full-size theatrical stage with ballet dancers stretching together on the
barre
. “Isn’t that nice, they’re giving outdoor ballet lessons. Maybe it’s the ballet school’s final exam,” I suggested.

That night we realized that what we’d witnessed earlier was a professional ballet company practicing for a full-scale performance in the piazza. Under the stars, dancers performed on a stage the size of the Lincoln Center’s. The piazza held thousands of people who gathered to watch, picnic baskets and wine bottles in hand. “What is this?” I asked someone.

“A ballet,” a woman answered in a thick Eastern European accent. Her flat expression clearly indicated she thought I was an idiot. What else would it be? Women in delicate gauzy skirts and toe shoes flitted across stage into the arms of muscular men in tights.

“Where do we buy tickets?”

“You are, no doubt, Americans,” she said. “You do not buy tickets. Sit and vatch ballet. Tomorrow evening vill be symphony.”

***

When my mother left New Jersey to move to Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, one of her great loves was studying at the Joffrey Ballet School. She was nineteen years old and bursting to escape her traditional Italian Catholic life in Newark. Her parents saw no need for a girl to attend college, so my mother applied to NYU on her own and financed her education through a work-study program for several years. She moved in with two women who took her under their wings and taught her about gender politics and the burgeoning women’s movement. Her posse attended free lectures, theater, and poetry readings in warehouse basements. They dropped small bronze tokens into subway turnstiles that led to tubes marked with angry graffiti. With neither cruelty nor apology, my mother calls those days the best of her life.

Every few years, my mother and I take a walking tour of her youth in the Village where she points out her old apartment (where the buzzer now reads “Fisher”), the neighborhood Laundromat (which is now a hip bistro), and the Italian meat market (which has remained unchanged). She sighs with nostalgic delight at all of her old haunts, but the one that evokes the most emotion is when she sees the oversized windows of the Joffrey Ballet School on Sixth Avenue. “I ran from my classes at NYU straight to ballet, then went out with my friends for the evening,” she says. “We never got tired.”

When she married my Brooklynite father, my mother reluctantly left Manhattan. She returned soon after their divorce six years later. “I should have never left Sheridan Square,” she still says more than forty years after her return to Manhattan. “Our place was rent controlled. I’d pay $600 today.”

My mother is one of the old-school New Yorkers who firmly resents the transplants who moved to Manhattan only after the construction of glossy Trump residences. When women with jet-black winged hair and bedazzled running suits pass us on the street now, my mother shakes her head. “They were afraid to come to the city unless it was to see a Broadway show,” she scoffs. “They’d jump into their Cadillacs, lock the doors, and complain about the noise.” She furrows her brows at the sight of frat boys-turned-businessmen barking into their cell phones. “They’ve taken over and now young artists have to commute from Pennsylvania.” Some actually do live in Pennsylvania, but when my mother refers to the state, she could mean any of the other four boroughs. She might also mean Long Island, Westchester County, or New Jersey.

Thanks to rent stabilization, she has been able to remain in Manhattan but has lost several friends to the city’s gentrification. At the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, my mother’s college boyfriend bought a place in Woodstock. We imagine him today with a long gray ponytail making candles and teaching yoga. In the mid-eighties, another dear friend fled to San Francisco. And the year
Wall
Street
’s Gordon Gekko declared “Greed is good,” my mother’s roommates from NYU packed their burlap sacks and bought a Christmas tree farm in Massachusetts. The nineties brought Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and soon Times Square’s triple X peep shows became Starbucks and the Olive Garden. Local pimps were replaced with latte baristas and waiters sporting apron flair.