I said, ‘Vai via!’ (Go away) and he pushed the newspaper up, and with this new force, my chin went up. I used my hands – both of them – to stop him, to pull the newspaper away.
He withdrew and said, ‘I finish.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘When I let go of my bag, you snatch the bag from me.’
He laughed. ‘You not understand the story how it ends.’
I reached into my satchel. My wallet and phone were gone.
‘That was quick,’ I said. ‘Fucking hell.’
‘You are not a woman who says “fucking hell”. You say “mio dio”, d’accordo?’
Stefano would never get the sex he wanted, and he knew it, I think, and his frustration came out when I was in any way vulgar, not lady-like. This strange combination of sex-addiction and moral propriety, and an insistence on women being gentle and soft and respectful of the Virgin Mother, is common in almost all Italian men.
‘Yeah, boss. I get it.’
. . . . . . . . . . .
In September 2006, I was at Termini Station, waiting for a train to Fiumicino airport. I was due to appear on stage at the Edinburgh Festival the next day and I stood straddling my suitcase, my satchel’s strap tight across my chest, and watched the electronic departures board. There were dozens of tourists on the platform. A young man, about thirty-five, very handsome and tall, wearing a pin-striped suit, probably Armani, stood close to me, but not too close.
‘Do you know if this is the platform for the airport?’ he asked.
He spoke impeccable English and he smelt like soap, and his teeth, which he made sure I saw, were straight and white and had been near some good dentists.
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
He said nothing else, stayed just where he was, standing, like me, watching the departures board. There was a station announcement in rapid Italian, and I recognised the words cancellation, airport, change and platform. Like most non-Italians, I checked the board again. There’d been no change, and though I felt nervous sweat beading on my back, I didn’t move.
The man in the pin-stripe stood closer now and looked up at the board, which was directly above my head. I didn’t move away. People who smell like soap are good people.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I think the train is cancelled and we must move to platform number seven.’
‘Really?’
I looked round: none of the other tourists was moving, and if what he said was true, none had understood.
‘I think we must change,’ he said.
I looked round at nothing in particular, the kind of redundant stalling which marks the early stages of panic.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I will find for us the answer,’ he said.
I didn’t wonder why he had no luggage, not even a briefcase. He was handsome and kind. He was an executive and not a dumb, male-model kind of handsome; he had one of those strong, uniquely beautiful faces we assume belong to smart, moral people.
He began to move away in search of a station official and while I was busy feeling looked-after, another man ran down the platform, a messy, short, greasy, criminal-type with craggy skin, and this filthy man crashed into me, hard. I stumbled and my Armani friend held my elbow.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I find for us the correct train for the airport now,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
I waited.
The train was due in a few minutes. I opened my bag to check my ticket and, for no reason I can remember, I also reached for my wallet. It was gone, and so was my phone.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Stefano and I were going to a crowded marketplace the day I told him I’d been robbed, that I’d lost €300 and my phone, but that I was happy, because I was on the Man Booker shortlist. He ranted against the Romani. He said they were gypsy scum, ‘The way they breed and live like animals in all the tents in the motorways. Everywhere they are. Like stupid animals.’
‘There are plenty of Italian thieves, too,’ I said.
‘Be careful for the thieves.’
I agreed I’d be careful, but he wanted to tell me more about the cons used by Roma pickpockets.
‘I tell you now what they can do.’
He was showing off, of course, but I was having fun.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me what I need to know.’
He told me to be on guard for: (a) The pickpocket who falls or trips and grabs your shoulder, then fleeces you (a classic trick, sometimes known as Misdirected Pressure). (b) The pickpocket who hangs posters near crowded tourist cafes with warnings such as, ‘Thieves are at work in this area’. In this con the victim, who sees the warning poster, pats his wallet and this gesture tells the pickpocket where to aim. (c) The pickpocket who drops a briefcase and documents fall out: The ‘victim’ and another pickpocket stop to help and the victim is ‘dipped’ (in casinos, buckets of coins are used to cause the distraction).
Around the time of our day at the market, then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had proposed a law requiring the fingerprinting of all Romani children and another regulation requiring Romani prostitutes to ‘wear jeans’ when they touted for business, especially the ones who are ‘11 or 12 years of age’. This was one of several of Berlusconi’s deranged attempts to control child prostitution and the ‘vast uncontrollable illegal migrant population’. He would rid the country of Romanians, he said, even if this meant starving them.
When my Australia Council residency ran out, I wasn’t ready to go back to England. I moved to an apartment in Monti and lived on Via del Boschetto for six months; my home was a one-bedroom flat on a cobbled, narrow street, not wide enough to let a Range-Rover through. I was happy. I understood, of course, that Italy is hell for its thinking natives; for the gentle, patrician and wise, Italy under Berlusconi’s demented rule was a country of ever-worsening chaos, its major cities anarchic and its politics corrupt, racist, sexist, puerile, a bureaucracy jammed with nepotistic favours.
Rome is a stunning city, but it’s also a dirty and disorganised shambles. Still, I’d never felt so alive, or so at home. The way Italians live for pleasure, so quick to love and hate, and are not so much interested in work; the way the air caught my skin, the way people throw their hands about, the way ancient ruins are unearthed whenever city engineers try to finish building the subway – all of these things made me want to go out at four a.m. and prowl like a wolf. For the whole year I lived in Rome, I did little else but write, and eat, and walk, and ride on a scooter in the beautiful streets, and drink espresso, and eat and talk. In that kind of way, I was living a life without interference from Italy’s messes and I was, I suppose, and still am, stupid enough to think Rome is perfect.
I had just a week left before my money ran out, a week before heading back to darkest Manchester, and I was sitting outside a café, half a block from my apartment, two blocks from the Colosseum, smoking a Marlboro and drinking espresso. A Romani boy, about eight years old, came to my table. He said nothing and put a piece of cardboard on the table on which was written, Por Favore. I am poor and hungry. I gave him some change and he left. As he left, he picked up the cardboard, which he’d put on top of my phone, and as he lifted the piece of cardboard … I didn’t realise it was happening until it’d happened.
‘Shit!’
When he was about a body-length away, I lurched at him, grabbed him by the wrist, and threw him down. He hit the cobbles, hard, and I got my phone. As he bounced up from the cobblestones, he called me a pig, bastard, bitch, and walked away, slow, watchful, hunting for another idiot.
I was back in Rome about three months later. I’d been living in Manchester and lecturing in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, and I was invited to a writers’ festival in Bologna. After Bologna, I stopped for a few days in Rome.
I was at Fiumicino airport, in the airport’s two-platform train st
ation. It was early morning, the quietest time. I bought my ticket, then went into the kiosk, a tabacchi, to buy a bottle of water and six packs of Marlboro Lights (fags are half the price in Rome).
There was a wad of cash on the shop’s floor, resting there, still and crisp, right in front of the cashier’s counter. The notes were folded neatly in half, perhaps €500, at least that much, probably more, straight out of an ATM. I bent down, pretended to adjust the zip on my boots, picked up the bundle, paid for the fags, and went out to the platform. I decided that I would find the owner myself. I didn’t trust the polizia who patrolled the station, and I didn’t trust the old man in the tabacchi.
I walked along the platform. I’d taken just a few steps when I saw him, a boy running down the platform toward the tabacchi. He was about eighteen, tall and blond, and he wore a short-sleeved rugby jersey. I moved back, closer to the tabacchi, and listened. The boy asked the old man if he’d found any money.
‘No, no, no.’
‘Are you sure?’
The boy was American, a clean-skinned optimist, well-educated, from somewhere like Wilmington, Delaware, that kind of place.
When he’d given up on the tabacchi, he spoke to the policeman guarding the one-man polizia booth. ‘No, no, no.’ The policeman had nothing.
I waited for the boy to walk down the platform and when he was near me, said, ‘Excuse me. Have you lost some money?’
‘Eight hundred euro. I just got it out of the bank!’
The boy looked down the platform. He had friends waiting for him, three of them, just like him: healthy, tall, fair-skinned. Now they were coming down the platform, wheeling their suitcases, 100 percent leather, unscuffed. These were boys on a gap year: next year, Harvard, Yale, athletics scholarships.
One of his friends called out, ‘Did you find it?’
The boy shook his head.
‘I have it,’ I said. I pointed to the tabacchi. ‘You dropped it on the floor of the shop. I just wanted to be sure it was yours.’
‘Jesus,’ he said.
Then he shouted out to his pals. ‘I’ve got it! This woman’s got the money.’ His friends heard what he said and walked back toward the other end of the platform.
This woman.
The boy looked at my bag and said nothing. Not ‘Thanks’, not ‘What a relief’, or ‘You’ve saved me’. Nothing. He looked at my satchel, waited for me to reach for the money and hand it over. He didn’t look at my face. I was his money.
I fetched the bundle of notes and I separated some, loosened a couple, freed a few, two or three (I wouldn’t know how many notes until I was on the train), and handed him the rest.
‘There you go,’ I said.
He snatched the money and said ‘Jesus!’ again and waved the money in the air for his friends to see – though they weren’t looking – and as he walked away, he put what I’d given him into the front-right pocket of his shorts, and up the platform he went.
‘You’re welcome,’ I said.
Arriving in Luxembourg
BY CHRIS PAVONE
Chris Pavone is the author of The Expats, which hit the New York Times bestseller list immediately upon publication in March 2012. Chris grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell, and was an editor at a variety of book-publishing houses that included Doubleday, Crown and Artisan, most notably as executive editor at Clarkson Potter. He spent a year and a half as an expat in Luxembourg, but once again lives with his wife and children in New York City.
I.
I’d seen them before in my life, many times. Departing from Mexico City and Beijing and Paris, with their giant suitcases and their terrified children and their passports of a different color than my deep American blue. And then on the other ends of their long-haul flights, arriving in New York or Miami or Houston, spent, exhausted, yet not even close to finished with their epic journeys.
Now I’m one of them: an immigrant, immigrating. With my mountains of cheap mismatched giant suitcases, and a dog crate with a nervous dog inside, and backpacks and computer bags, teddy bears and two small children and a calm, composed wife. I am leaving home, the place I’ve lived my entire life, for a new life, somewhere else. I don’t know when – don’t know if – we’ll ever again live in New York City.
II.
My oven in Tribeca offered a wide choice of numbers, in Fahrenheit. This one here has no numbers.
I am fully aware that things will be different in Luxembourg; I want things to be different. I am prepared – I am eager! – to embrace the new. For example, to do my cooking in Celsius. I’ve long admired the neat roundness of water boiling at 100 degrees.
But this dial offers no numbers, Celsius or otherwise. What this dial offers are Beleuchtung, Ober-Unterhitze, Unterhitze, Grill, Grill klein, Auftauen, Intesivbacken, Umluftgrill, Heißluft plus (inexplicably, there’s no plain-old Heißluft, without the plus), and Schnellaufheizen.
I speak no German, and I keep forgetting to buy a German dictionary. Sometimes I bring the laptop into the kitchen to use online dictionaries, attempting to translate my appliances. But I often mistype, especially the likes of ß, and anything with an umlaut. And I suffer from attention fatigue after four syllables. So I end up with the very unsatisfying ‘your search term yielded no results.’ This sounds like the recap to a disappointing night of unsuccessful carousing.
I stare at the dial. I’m attracted to the sound of Intensivbacken, which, like so many German words, seems to have at least one built-in exclamation point. But this probable idea – Intensive! Baking! – sounds too powerful for the task at hand, reheating the little chicken I bought from the farmers’-market truck that sells three things: little rotisserie chickens, big rotisserie chickens, and sliced potatoes that cook in the fat that drips from the rotisserie chickens.
Grill seems like a better choice, if only for the dimwitted reason that it’s the most familiar of the words. As I turn the dial, I am actually thinking to myself: you are being an idiot.
A few minutes later I catch a whiff of something, and glance at the oven, from which smoke has begun to slink. I open the door to billowing puffs, and my head darts around in a panic, searching for a detector to disable. If there’s one thing I don’t want, it’s to infuriate neighbors we haven’t even met yet. But there’s no smoke detector here, in this sleek hyper-modern kitchen. And if not here, there’s probably no smoke detector anywhere. I’m relieved for the instant, disappointed for the long term.
The chicken is now extra-crispy, but salvageable. I tentatively lean my head into the oven, and see that the coils on top are glowing bright red. Grill, I now know, is the broiler. I will learn, one mistake at a time.
III.
My wife has started going to the office every day, but school has not yet begun. I am alone with my four-year-old twins, all day every day, in this foreign place. We go to playgrounds and markets, cafés and gelaterias. When we purchase things in small shops, the women at the caisses give candy to the boys.
But it is frequently raining, and not as warm as I’m accustomed to for early September. We need an indoor activity. So we gather bathing suits and goggles and towels, and walk over to the public pool. Where we find out from the sign on the door that today is the hebdomadaire closing. This undams a torrent of tears from my bored and disappointed and semi-scared children.
We return the next day. We pay our fee, and use our paper tickets to pass through an unmanned and irrelevant turnstile, and start to wander through what I realize – just a second too late – is the women’s locker room. We scurry to the gender-appropriate area. We figure out, eventually, that we must use our tickets to release a door to secure a locker. Later, we’ll have to use the same tickets to exit through those turnstiles. The children start referring to these multifunctional pieces of paper as credit cards, which are later described in a fashion that makes it clear they’re the highlight of the expedition, which is otherwise what you’d expect from a public swimming pool.
But while paddling a
round, I notice that off to one side of the big pool is exercise equipment, and more of it up on a balcony. I need regular exercise, and I’m not sure how to go about finding a gym. Perhaps this swimming-pool setup will serve.
IV.
I return to the pool, buoyed with confidence that I know about the bi-weekly closing, and about the tickets, and about the soft demarcation between the locker-room zones for semi-naked women and those for semi-naked men.
An unmistakable sign – pictogram as well as words – expressly forbids shoes in the pool area. So I carry my sneakers to the machines, where I assume I’ll be able to wear footwear. But the three people exercising are barefoot. Damn.
I step barefoot into the elliptical machine, and start the Sisyphean climb. My soles are immediately, painfully imprinted with the bubbled Braille of the footpads.
The other barefoot exercisers trickle away. Two new women show up, and I watch them closely. They’re carrying their shoes across the tiled surround of the pool, then . . . they do it! They pull on their sneakers and climb onto the machines! Hurrah! I too will wear mine, as soon as I work up the courage to dismount and lace up.
But oh no, what’s this? A lifeguard shows up, literally wagging his finger. He engages the women in a spirited conversation that begins in German, then turns to French, and fluctuates between simmering resentment and withering hostility. At one point, he gestures at me, and says something about what Monsieur is doing, and they all look at me, the women with suspicion and resentment, as if I’d betrayed them.
I give a weak smile, trying to communicate to the women that I’m on their side, but without signaling to the lifeguard that I’m against him, at least not personally, it’s just that I too would rather be wearing my sneakers. That’s a lot to pack into a single smirk; I probably look like I’m experiencing intestinal discomfort.
Upstairs, then. The strengthening machines are a bewildering hydraulic system. The disappointed shoeless women join me. Then two guys. All of us are trying to figure out these machines, and not succeeding to anyone’s satisfaction. After I use the stomach-torturing contraption, one of the men asks me a question in rapid-fire French, the gist of which appears to be whether it’s supérieur or antérieur. I feel my own stomach to try to pinpoint where it hurts. ‘Supérieur,’ I answer.
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