The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  Which meant that my limited Italian was now stretched to the “no glove, no love” topic.

  Marco Uno was indignant. So was I. The negotiations reached an unintelligible crescendo.

  It was almost as if we were haggling over merchandise at Porta Portese, and the longer the bargaining continued, the less we agreed upon the price, however desperate each of us might have been to close the deal. Sadly, like much of what’s on offer at Rome’s famous flea market, Marco Uno didn’t look nearly as good now that I had gotten him home. I suppose it was absolute duress and the threat of all momentum grinding to a halt that finally made him relent and tear open the package (which I provided, of course) and put on the condom. To his credit, it had taken so long for us to arrive at the begrudging condom-donning juncture, I found it rather impressive that he could still get an erection at all.

  For my part, it was sheer curiosity that kept me moving forward. I needed the story to have a conclusion. And a short, short story it ended up being. Hands down, it was the most unemotional, mechanical, and speedy act of my life. Afterward, he wrapped his arms around me, as if I was his girlfriend or something, and fell fast asleep.

  The next morning, Marco Uno rolled over, yawned, and invited me to stroll over to the café for breakfast. Basically, he wanted to make a morning-after show of me to his co-workers. I later learned the Italian verb most often applied to winning a woman’s “heart” is none other than conquistare. To conquer.

  Oh, just piss off.

  Marco Due. Marco Due was adorable from the moment we met. He spoke zero English, which was a bonus because trying to comprehend what soon followed our acquaintance finally catapulted me into the realm of fluency. Instead of stuttering and simply pretending that I spoke Italian, suddenly I was able to have actual conversations. Marco Due corrected my mistakes in Italian. (Note: if you are in a bilingual relationship, don’t do this, especially if you are having a fight.) But there was so much else to love about Marco II. Simply put, he was polite, generous, and helpful. He introduced me to his friends and invited me to concerts. Plus, he was romantic—he even brought me to the nearby volcanic hot springs on a moonlit night.

  Indeed, no favor was too great, even the kind of favor most people dread. He took time out of his day to drive me to a doctor’s appointment and sat patiently waiting in a windowless room with no reading material. In Italy, a visit to the doctor’s office is tantamount to sitting Shiva, so this act of kindness was no small thing. He even sifted through all the documents and red tape to transfer my scooter into his name so that he could insure it for me. Italian bureaucracy such as it is, I had found it impossible to do this myself. What I am saying is Marco Numero Due seemed quite keen, because really, truly, what straight guy would do all those things just to be nice?

  As with Marco Uno, my courtship with Marco Due was somewhat protracted. But about twenty minutes after we slept together, the only time we did sleep together, Marco Due announced two things: The first was that he was completely and utterly still in love with his Brazilian ex-girlfriend. The second was that he’d had a heroin problem for well over a decade—but not to worry, because he’d been clean for all of two months.

  Marco Tre. One evening, I was sitting with a couple of friends at a café—another café!—near Piazza Farnese, when along came a dark-eyed, dangerously handsome, Jil Sander-clad electrician named Marco. Perhaps the designer Pumas and the expensive, minimalist jacket should have clued me in. Or maybe, as I discovered later, the erratic hours he kept. Because in spite of the tools littered across the back seat of his car, and the dashing off to see clients to quickly solve a “wiring” problem, Marco III wasn’t really an electrician. He was a coke dealer. Worse, he was a dealer who owed quite a lot of money to the wrong people. I want to say that the term most often used to describe this particular group is the mafia. As a result of his debts, Marco was constantly looking over his shoulder. Literally.

  A few weeks into our meeting, he pounded on my door at about four in the morning, waking me. I unlocked the door, opened it, and he rushed inside. Drenched in sweat, eyes dilated, he frantically asked if he could stay with me. For a few days. So, he wasn’t just dealing, he was also on the lam. It seemed that in Marco Tre’s world I was what amounted to a very cheap date. I wasn’t interested in his cocaine. I didn’t even realize people still did cocaine, aside from the Romans, who, it turns out, are seriously behind the times when it comes to everything.

  One day, Marco Tre simply vanished and never called again. Nobody knew much of anything. Nobody had heard from him. His apartment had been cleared out, alta moda wardrobe and all, and he went missing. That was that. I still have no idea if he is in jail or dead or worse, but I have to admit, I wasn’t too broken up about his disappearing act.

  Marco Quattro. Marco Quattro wore an Alitalia uniform. He looked good in it, too. He often traveled, and I assumed he was a pilot, and although I brought it up several times he never contradicted me. Marco Quattro had a chiseled jaw and blue eyes and was excessively well groomed. Perhaps too well groomed. He waxed his eyebrows into an arch that was distinctly feminine, but the waxed eyebrow fetish was common among Roman men; indeed, I was hard-pressed to find one who had resisted the trend. Brows aside, the problem with Marco Quattro was that he was overtly preoccupied with a certain portion of my anatomy—one that I wasn’t much interested in sharing with him. Which meant that we were ill-fated from the start.

  One evening, during a small gathering that included Marco IV, my friend Sergio stopped by. Sergio also happened to work for Alitalia, and after we all went through the usual greeting routine, lots of ciaos and kissing on both cheeks, he quickly pulled me aside on a pretext. “Elizabeth,” he whispered. “Marco’s not a pilot, he’s a Trolley Dolly, same as me.” This followed by, “Are you sure he’s even straight?”

  Whenever I meet a female foreigner, newish to Rome, and she tells me she has just begun dating an Italian man, I have to ask, “Does he only want to fuck you in the ass?”

  And she will look at me astonished, then shyly respond, “Wait—what? Why? Is that common? I mean, I thought that was only my boyfriend.”

  “No,” I will tell her, “it isn’t only your boyfriend.”

  I am continually compelled to ask this question—in the name of research, of course—even though I know it isn’t any of my business. I could not care less if the woman across from me eschews the act, or if she puts up with it out of some combination of language barrier meets unfathomable sense of obligation, or if she just happens to adore the practice. In fact, if it’s the latter, she has happily landed in the right country. What interests me is that I have yet to meet a foreign female who has not had this experience. Of course, this proclivity exists the world over, but back in Chicago where I’m from, the act is one that any boyfriend (and note the use of the term boyfriend) would broach slowly, cautiously, at the very minimum after a certain level of intimacy has been established. Back in the real world, meaning anywhere but Italy, you would be hard-pressed to find a guy who would simply assume that your bum is on the menu right out of the gate, much less during a casual encounter. Gay men notwithstanding. But with Italian men it is an assumption. And they don’t even politely ask—they just go for it.

  Call this behavior whatever you want, but for me, it falls into the category of Madonna/Whore Complex—those three little words again—about which I have come up with a few theories: What with the specter of the Catholic Church looming large over Rome and virginity at such premium in the Church, I wondered if perhaps the Italian propensity to breach a different port of entry might not, in fact, be considered an actual breach? I wondered if, over time, approaching from the rear might have become a way around that pesky issue of the breaking of the hymen. But the question remains: Is Maria still a virgin if Marco only gives it to her in the ass? Perhaps I need to ask a priest to clarify.

  My second theory: Maybe this anal obsession could be traced to some sort of crude attempt at birth control. For a countr
y that, theoretically at least, doesn’t approve of The Pill, Italy does have a radically low birth rate. And we’ve already established that Italians don’t waste their time with condoms. Or it could be that the assumption is simply this: that all foreign women are easy, therefore all foreign women will let you do anything to them. Or, maybe, just maybe, if an Italian happens to be cheating on his partner, he eases his conscience by convincing himself that sodomy isn’t really sex, therefore he isn’t really cheating. (Kind of like being on the DL isn’t really dabbling in homosexuality.) Of course, that last theory begs the question if cheating is seemingly acceptable behavior in Italy, why bother with the back door to begin with? Aren’t women pretty much designed with the perfect equipment to accommodate a penis? Ah, the conundrum of it all.

  Which brings me to my gay friends in Rome. Of all my expatriate pals, only my gay friends seem capable of sustaining relationships with Italian men. You might guess this has something to do with a clemency in gay culture when it comes to stepping out—the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about whatever you’ve got going on the side. But that’s not really it. From what I’ve witnessed, infidelity is not only accepted in Italy, it’s compulsory, a phenomenon hard-wired into the national DNA. The reason gay men have a better shot at a relationship in Italy comes down to two things. Drama. And the ass. A love of both, I mean.

  Marco Cinque. I never slept with Marco Cinque, but he spent so much time trying to sleep with me that I feel he must be included. Marco Cinque was a filmmaker who tilted back a massive daily dose of espresso and smoked an inordinate amount of hash and cigarettes. He allotted a bit of time each day to making his rounds to different bars, where he’d discuss film and politics and flex his English prowess by hitting on women.

  When we met he told me he was in his thirties, though even in the most forgiving light Marco looked closer to fifty. He had stooped shoulders and a silver tangle of a beard, the worn look of a tooled, leather belt that had been left for decades under the glare of the Mediterranean sun. He owned two apartments in the neighborhood, one of which he rented out, the other of which he lived in and shared with a series of foreign female roommates. His criteria were simply that: foreign and female. Not that Marco was ever my landlord. He was merely my neighbor. We often crossed paths while frequenting one of the many cafés in the neighborhood. No matter which place I chose, there he seemed to be. Like his roommates, his locations rotated, seemingly with the sun.

  Marco believed his English was quite good. He loved to discuss Italian cinema, telling me about this great film or that. But in keeping with the components typical of the dramatic arts, his association with the film business was, in a sense, fictional. Perhaps he had once directed a film, but for all the years I have been acquainted with Marco V, I never knew him to be absent from the cafés in Trastevere long enough to have put in a full day’s work, much less direct a movie. If he’d told me he was an actor then I could vouch, here and now, that he was a man who took the term method acting to new heights. And I could only assume he had been researching the role of a filmmaker, one who, down on his luck, drifted from café to café preying on unsuspecting English-speaking women.

  Although he meant no real harm, Marco V got under my skin. He had an uncanny way of popping up whenever I left the house. He was simply one of the many mysterious characters who exist in Rome, especially in an atmospheric neighborhood like mine. After a while, he was such a common sight that I equated him with the fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere; it’s always there when you stroll through, but looking a bit worse for wear, a bit worn down at the heel.

  Marco was forever inviting me for coffees and dinners and conversations, but there was an inertia about him that frightened me. Something told me that if I did choose to sit beside him in a café, than then I, too, might never work again. And I was already having enough trouble getting things done. But it was Marco Cinque who introduced me to a few of the many Italian superstitions. The first was you should never leave the house with wet hair (not even in the summer) or you will catch a chill. Catching a chill in Italy is serious business, and the “wet hair equals chill” belief is just one of many ways a person might come down with something. From the reaction I got when I dared to wander about with wet hair, it might even be deadly.

  One day, coming out of my building, I ran into Marco V on the street in front of my house.

  He looked at me and wagged his finger.

  “Elisabetta,” he said, “you must to use the fon, and if you do not want to use the fon, then in the afternoons I have a very nice sunlight in my windows.”

  I squinted at him, unsure of the meaning hidden in this sentence.

  “You must not go out così with all your hairs wet. But you will come to my house and you can seat in the window where there is a very nice sun to dry your hairs.”

  O.K., so the first bit of vocabulary I needed here was that a fon (sounds like phone) is actually a hair dryer. Got it. Secondly, what? I am supposed to waltz down the street, freshly showered, and plant myself in a puddle of sunlight on Marco’s windowsill? How does that work exactly? Does he know how often I wash my hairs? Or how long it takes all of them to dry? Was this a new scheme to get me back to his apartment after several other failed attempts? If so, it seemed much easier to buy a fon and avoid the conversation all together.

  Once he realized that I wasn’t going to come over and hang out in a towel, waiting for my hair to dry, much less get into bed with him, Marco Cinque stopped being so nice to me. I’d go so far as to say that he began ducking into shops or studiously avoiding me whenever possible. He moved on to other foreigners, other cafés, but years later, he is still here in Trastevere, holding court—espresso and cigarette in hand and, if I happen to catch his eye, he will nod at me as I pass by.

  Beyond the filmmakers who never made films, there were the actors who never acted, journalists who never filed stories, architects who had never designed buildings, and students still in their thirties or forties who had never had jobs, nearly all living with their parents. Rome was all smoke and mirrors. Everybody had a title, but nobody seemed to do anything. And the more noble the lineage, the more likely they were to be out of work.

  In spite of Rome’s glorious history of producing manly men who had waged wars and captured continents, it appeared that over time another aspect of the empire’s collective psyche had won out. The Bread and Circuses mentality—that love of debauchery—had been sustained through the centuries, while the intellectual forefathers who had engineered the first roads, invented concrete, and constructed the Colosseum had seemingly given birth to sons forever in a state of arrested development. The warriors had been replaced with wimps.

  Taking the concept of dolce far niente—sweet idleness— to new heights, the men I met in Rome spent their nights smoking hordes of hand-rolled cigarettes, swilling beer, and arguing politics—in English—a language their wives and girlfriends couldn’t understand. All the while, those same wives and girlfriends managed to hold down jobs and bring up children.

  Patterns began to emerge. All of my friends’ Italian boyfriends and all of my Italian dates—I can’t really call them boyfriends, though truthfully the concept of dating is as nonexistent in Italy as a steady boyfriend has ever been in my life—tended toward holidays in Cuba and Brazil. First it seemed coincidental, then purely an affinity for the sea, a passion for the beach, maybe even a fondness for countries where the language is similar to Italian. But these vacation destinations were always frequented “with the boys,” never with girlfriends, fiancées, or wives. The motivation behind these trips soon revealed itself to be a side effect of the Madonna/Whore Complex, a phenomenon I refer to as, “I like Cuba. I like Brazil . . . No, wait, I really just like black prostitutes.”

  This tendency exists on home soil, as well. On any given day, a drive toward the beach at Ostia will yield a bevy of prostitutes, statuesque beneath the shade of an umbrella pine, wearing a micro mini or short-shorts, ass
out to the road. They never face the passing cars. I am always disturbed by this sight, so much so that I pretty much avoid going to the beach altogether. Whenever I see a customer, usually in an expensive, imported car, slowing in front of one of these prostitutes, it saddens me greatly. It is just too upsetting, gliding past all those stunning women, catching a glimpse of the shape their days seem to take.

  Then there is the Brazilian transvestite situation. On any given night there are an inordinate number of trannies working the edges of the posh Villa Borghese or trawling the Terme di Caracalla, Rome’s complex of ancient thermal baths. My Italian friends will sometimes look confused, claiming they don’t understand the reason so many transvestites end up in Rome. I tell them it comes down to economics, simple supply and demand. They don’t like that answer. Still, whenever you read those tantalizing stories about Italian politicians or the heirs to an Italian fortune falling from grace, there is always a transvestite somewhere in the mix. It’s uncanny.

  Sometimes I think if Rome were a female, she’d actually be a Brazilian transvestite.

  So what is it about the Eternal City that beckons women of all ages to flock through its ancient gates? Partly, it’s the romantic notion of the Latin lover that has prevailed through the ages. But is that really it? Whenever new acquaintances discover how long I have lived in Rome, the first assumption is always that I must have fallen in love—and that is why I stayed. People seem disappointed when I tell them this is hardly the case.

  It’s easy to assume that women come to Rome in search of the dark-eyed stranger, a whisper of danger about him, who sings out, “Ciao, bella!” and offers a midnight ride on his Vespa, but that cliché feels reductive to me. That same woman, the one who is independent enough to pack her bags and swap countries or even continents, is hardly the kind of woman who would be content to be relegated to the back of a motorino, bouncing along cobblestone streets. She will, at the very least, want to drive. Contrary to what I see in the movies or read in books, I have met very few foreign women who have happily coupled with an Italian male, at least not with one born and raised in the Mother Country.