Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

by Anthony Doerr

  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.

  “Che belli,” she says, and unleashes a torrent of Italian. I can follow very little. Something about the apartment adjacent to her own. Something about young children. She seems to be laying down several narrative strands, her fingers feeding yarn into an invisible loom. There are twins who are girls, there is a sports car, there is a phone call on Christmas Eve.

  For a full minute her story builds. Words fly past me. I hear “flowers”; I hear “loaf of bread.” But she is leaning in now; I am at the business end of her index finger, miles past the point where I might ask her to slow down.

  The women in front of us depart with their purchases. The butcher slaps a veal loin onto his board, calls out, “Signora Cimorini?” Without slowing her story, she turns her index finger toward him, waggles it once, then tucks it away. Her story has begun to peak now, and behind the curved lenses of her glasses I see that she has begun to cry.

  Abruptly she pauses. She chews her lip, caught in a whirlpool of memory.

  “So beautiful,” she says. “These girls.”

  I try, “On Christmas?”

  This sets her nodding and crying harder. Tears fall one after another down her cheeks. The butcher calls her again. She looks up and blinks, and it takes her a few seconds to respond before telling him to make the meat thinner.

  The boys watch her, drinking their milk.

  “Santo Cielo,” I finally say, good heavens, because it sometimes makes Italians smile. She pulls a handkerchief from her handbag and wipes her eyes. Should I hug her? I do nothing. I blink. The butcher is telling her that her veal will cost nine euros, and she pours a mess of coins onto the counter and he selects what she owes.

  Before she leaves she kisses each of the boys good-bye.

  One final morning. The sky is so blue it is almost black, the sun raining its hot light onto everything. I go to work in the Tom Andrews Studio one last time, a wave from Lorenzo in his little lodge, ankles crossed, eyes up at the television. The courtyard fountain splashes quietly; the jasmine holds a few last listless blooms.

  The long upstairs hallway, the straight runner of red carpet, the white doors of fellows’ apartments ticking past. The key. The door. The window, the rumpled cot, a broken pencil on the desk.

  I open my journal. I look out at the trunk of the umbrella pine. In my mind, in my memory, I walk through Trastevere, cross the river downstream of Tiber Island, and climb an overgrown pedestrian ramp called the Clivo di Rocca Savella. I have climbed this ramp only once before, but as I sit at my desk, my image of it is clear: the green flowing over its walls, the water-stained brick, the light bouncing off the stones. Buttresses line both sides; the cobbles are furred with mosses.

  At the top, the Aventine Hill is leafy and quiet; the shutters of houses slip past. I take a right; soon the street dead-ends into a piazza. On the northwest side, across from the Egyptian consulate, a locked green door prevents entry into the gardens behind the priory of the Knights of Malta. The paint is weathered, the bronze hardware tarnished at the edges, anchored by four screws. I press my eye to the keyhole.

  Framed in the oval are two parallel lines of hedges, interwoven at the top. Between is one of the most wonderful views in the world. The gaze soars over the Circus Maximus, skirts the Janiculum, and flies through a mile of space. It comes to rest dead center on the dome of St. Peter’s. From here, through this keyhole, the vast church, which struck Henry James “from the first as the hugest thing conceivable,”57 is nothing but a toy, a vaporous dollhouse, its little pillars balanced atop a campanile in the foreground, the lower half of the church obscured behind a stand of pines like tiny flowers.

  If only I could slip in the key and swing open the gate, I could pluck up St. Peter’s and balance the church in the palm of my hand.

  To be framed in hedges is the right thing; they frame the cathedral in the way the countryside frames Rome, Alban Hills on one side, Sabines on the other, fields and apartment blocks and ruins spreading outside the walls, the amber and purple and green of the distances, the blues of dusk, the swale of aqueducts and vineyards and olive groves that hem in Rome, girdling it, burying it.

  Kingdom and time, architecture and weeds. Rome is huge; Rome is tiny.

  A breeze sighs through the studio window, ruffling the pages of my notebook. My eye returns. The one continuous thing through Rome’s history, from the Etruscans to Pliny to Caravaggio to Pope John Paul to Henry and Owen, is the light: the light at dawn, at sunset. The light tiptoes across everything, exposing it anew, whispering, Here is this! Here is this! Ecco Roma! Bursting out of the sun, streaking through space, skirting Venus, just over eight minutes old, but eternal, too, infinite—here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures. It throws the city into relief.

  The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on.

  When we eat a steak, we build its proteins into our bodies and become part cow. Eat an artichoke, become part artichoke. Drink a glass of orange juice, become part orange tree. Everything eventually corrupts: from our first draft of milk, we are corrupted, the world is corruption, time is corruption, and we are forever hungering for more.

  I wonder if the same thing is true for this Roman light: If enough of it enters our eyes, if we look at something long enough, maybe we incorporate it. Maybe it becomes part of us. Maybe it flashes around inside us, endlessly reflecting, saturating everything.

  The oculus of the Pantheon, the dome of St. Peter’s, the tufted pillars of the umbrella pines, and the keyhole in the green door outside the gardens of the priory of the Knights of Malta on the Aventine Hill—they are all eyes of God. We look through them; they look through us. Everything is designed around the light.

  Tomorrow we go home. Boise, for a while, anyway, will probably seem easy after this—all the addresses in English, all the street signs intelligible, all the supermarket vegetables waxy and uniform. Stores will be open when the posted hours say they’ll be open, and weeks might pass without my needing to look at a map. When the boys get sick, we’ll know where to take them and we won’t have to dial two dozen numbers to talk to one of our friends.

  Going home, I think, will be like waking up from a long and complicated dream, when you realize you are in your bedroom and everything around you is as it was but now slightly unfamiliar, and maybe slightly disappointing, too.

  Rome has watched so many artists come and go, fixing its varying imprints on them, that I am hardly worth mentioning, hardly a blade of grass. It is Rome itself, and the idea of it—like the American Academy—that endures, beyond any of the individuals who pass through it. People dedicate themselves to it for a time, then the revolving arms of the seasons whisk them away. Rome is personless, almost immaterial. It is what exists between the buildings, beneath the lawns; it obliges its visitors to recognize what is hidden.

  Look at the writers: Dante, Byron, Wharton, Calvino, D’Annunzio, Moravia, Pasolini. Goethe, who broke his celibacy here. Keats, who left his body here. Hawthorne, who saw his marble faun here. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bernard Malamud. Saint Augustine. Ovid. Virgil. Horace. Cicero. Pliny the Elder. To see a list of even the ones who have worked in this same studio or the studios down the hall is to read off the spines on a serious bookshelf: William Styron, John Ciardi, Harold Brodkey, Anne Sexton. Ralph Ellison, who supposedly tried to cook pig’s feet in the kitchen downstairs. Tom Andrews, whose forearms sweated into the wood of this very desk. Eleanor Clark, wife of Robert Penn Warren, who came to Rome on a fellowship to write a second novel but soon found the city had overwhelmed it. “It lasted there,” she’d later say, “at most two weeks.”58

&n
bsp; So many words spent in one place, on one place—who could have the nerve to slip even one more sentence into the pile?

  I know nothing. I lived in Rome four seasons. I never made it through the gates between myself and the Italians. I cannot claim to have become, in even the smallest manner, Roman. And yet I can’t stop myself: a pen, a notebook, the urge to circumscribe experience.

  Roma, they say, non basta una vita. One life is not enough.

  The Tiber threads beneath the bridges, another pope wakes and pulls on his alb, the summer heat climbs toward the meridian. The seasons make their circuit. Already the earth is tilting away from the sun; the nights are cooling. Soon enough the chimney swifts will leave for Africa and the elms will drop their leaves and snow will whiten the hills.

  In the restaurants chefs prepare their gnocchi and calamari and bruschetta and straccetti. At the market the vegetable ladies stack their apricots and pluck their zucchini flowers. Shoppers tug their grocery carts and old men tap their canes against the runnels and monks with white faces and black cassocks whisper down pillared aisles and beautiful women stride over cobbles in three-inch heels. Tourists gaze up through the oculus of the Pantheon. Out by the train station Tacy pads through her apartment, knowing there is a good chance she won’t see Henry and Owen again for the rest of her life.

  At dusk, between treetops, scraps of the city show themselves like pieces of dreams, and tonight the streets will throw the sun’s heat back into the sky, soft pavements and rooftop mirages, the reaching ivy, the swirling traffic, the spinning fans, the tracking clouds, everything and anything, the city of always.

  I close my notebook. I start down the hallway, making for home.

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  ‘His fingers dug the shell up, he felt the sleek egg of its body, the toothy gap of its aperture. It was the most elegant thing he’d ever held. “That’s a mouse cowry,” the doctor said. “A lovely find. It has brown spots, and darker stripes at its base, like tiger stripes. You can’t see it, can you?” But he could. He’d never seen anything so clearly in his life.’

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  Notes

  1 Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), bk. 2, chap. 38, 1:247.

  2 Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Trees (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), Plate 34.

  3 The Log of Christopher Columbus, Robert H. Fuson, ed., trans. (Camden, ME: International Marine Publishing Company, 1987). Excerpts at http://www.saintjoe.edu/ ~ilicias/columbuslogentries.html.

  4 João Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation (New York: Perseus Books, 2003), 31.

  5 Nicholas Wade, “Ideas & Trends; Prime Numbers: What Science and Crime Have in Common,New York Times, July 27, 2003.

  6 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 8, chap. 42, 3:75.

  7 Pliny, Natural History, trans. John F. Healy (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), bk. 28, p. 256.

  8 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 8, chap. 7, 3:19.

  9 Ibid., bk. 8, 3: 433.

  10 Ibid., 3:503.

  11 Ibid., 3:415.

  12 Ibid., 3:203.

  13 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Healy, bk. 28, p. 259.

  14 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 9, chap. 7, 3:179.

  15 Ibid., 3:173.

  16 Michael Breus, “Chronic Sleep Deprivation May Harm Health,” http://www.webmd.com/ content/article/64/72426.htm.

  17 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 7, chap. 40, 2:595.

  18 Neel Mukherjee, “Dream Lover,” New York Times, November 7, 2004.

  19 Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eicholz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), bk. 36, chap. 1, 10:3–4

  20 Tom Andrews, “Ars Poetica,” in Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2002): 84.

  21 From a letter to the magazine New Scientist 162, no. 2188 (May 29, 1999): 55.

  22 Elin Schoen Brockman, “A Monument’s Minder,” New York Times, June 27, 2004.

  23 Livy, History of Rome, bk. 1, chap. 36. “At all events,” he writes, “auguries and the college of augurs were held in such honour that nothing was undertaken in peace or war without their sanction; the assembly of the curies, the assembly of the centuries, matters of the h
ighest importance, were suspended or broken up if the omen of the birds was unfavourable.” Translation: http://www.romansonline.com/ Src_Frame.asp?DocID=Hor_LV01_36.

  24 Pliny, Natural History, trans. Rackham, bk. 10, chap. 14, 3:313.

  25 Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 24, 3:323.

  26 Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 59, 3:369.

  27 Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 9. “Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood / We bear our newborn infants to the flood; / There bath’d amid the stream, our boys we hold / With winter harden’d, and inur’d to cold.” That’s Dryden’s translation. Here’s another: “To the streams we carry down our sons at birth / with harsh, frosty waves / we harden them.”

  28 This is the same pope who, during the first days after his election, reputedly ordered that all the birds be killed outside his apartment windows because they disturbed his sleep.

  29 Pliny the Younger, The Letters of the Younger Pliny, trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin Classics, 1969), 168.

  30 According to the World Health Organization, more than fifteen thousand people die in Italy every year because of car-exhaust fumes. http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy_regions/lazio_abruzzo/2005/current-affairs/rome-bans-cars-in-bid-to-cut-pollution/.

  31 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998).

  32 Cassius Dio, Roman History, bk. 54, chap. 23. Available at: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/ Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/54*.html.

  33 Plutarch of Chaeronea, Life of Julius Caesar, trans. Robin Seager, chap. 61. Available at http://www.livius.org/caa-can/caesar/caesar_t18.html.

  34 Lots of them got trampled. In 1882, on the twenty-first of February, eleven horses killed fifteen onlookers in front of the church of St. Lorenzo in Lucina. Every year Jews were forced to pay a fee to avoid being forced to race each other on foot after the horses.

  35 Goethe, Italian Journey, 445–76, http://www.romeartlover.it/Goethe.html.