by André Aciman
Summer before last, though, with my wife and sons, I took the Metro and got off at the Furio Camillo stop, two blocks north of Via Clelia, exactly as I’d always envisaged the visit. Two blocks would give me plenty of time to settle into the experience, gather my impressions, and unlock memory’s sluice gates, one by one—without effort, caution, or ceremony. Two blocks, however, would also allow me to put up whatever barriers needed to come up between me and this lower-middle-class street whose grimy, ill-tempered welcome, when we landed in Italy as refugees more than four decades ago, I’ve never managed to forget.
I had meant to enter Via Clelia precisely where it crosses Via Appia Nuova and take my time recognizing the streets, whose names are drawn from Virgil mostly—Via Enea, Via Camilla, Via Eurialo, Via Turno—and confer far-fetched echoes of imperial grandeur on this rinky-dink quarter. I had meant to touch minor signposts along the way: the printer’s shop (still there), the makeshift grocer-pizzaiolo, the one or two corner bars, the plumber (gone), the barbershop across the street (gone too), the tobacconist, the tiny brothel where you didn’t dare look in when the two old frumps left their door ajar, the spot where a frail street singer would stand every afternoon and bellow out bronchial arias you strained to recognize, only to hear, when his dirge was done, a scatter of coins rain upon the sidewalk.
Home was right above his spot.
As I began walking down Via Clelia with my wife and sons, pointing out aspects of a street I’d known so well during the three years I’d lived there with my parents while we waited for visas to America, I caught myself hoping that no one I knew back then would be alive today, or, if they were, that none might recognize me. I wanted to give no explanations, answer no questions, embrace no one, touch or get close to nobody. I had always been ashamed of Via Clelia, ashamed of its good people, ashamed of having lived among them, ashamed of myself now for feeling this way, ashamed, as I told my sons, of how I’d always misled my private-school classmates into thinking I lived “around” the affluent Appia Antica and not in the heart of the blue-collar Appia Nuova. That shame had never gone away; shame never does, it was there on every corner of the street. Shame, which is the reluctance to be who we’re not even sure we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us, deeper even than who we are, as though beyond identity were buried reefs and sunken cities teeming with creatures we couldn’t begin to name because they came long before us. All I really wanted, as we began walking to the other end of Via Clelia, was to put the experience behind me now—We’ve done Via Clelia, I’d say—knowing all along that I wouldn’t mind a sudden flare-up of memory to make good the visit.
Torn between wanting the whole thing over and done with and wanting perhaps to feel something, I began to make light of our visit with my sons. Fancy spending three years in this dump. And the stench on hot summer days. On this corner I saw a dead dog once; he’d been run over and was bleeding from both ears. And here, every afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk by the tramway stop, a young Gypsy used to beg, her bare, dark knee flaunted boldly over her printed skirt—savage, dauntless, shameless. On Sunday afternoons Via Clelia was a morgue. In the summer the heat was unbearable. In the fall, coming back after school on the number 85 bus, I’d run errands for Mother, always rushing back out of the apartment before the shops closed, and by early twilight, watch the salesgirls head home, and always think of Joyce’s “Araby.” The girl at the tiny supermarket down the street, the salesgirls of the tiny local department store, the girl at the butcher’s who always extended credit when money was tight toward the end of every month.
There was a girl who came every day for vitamin B12 shots. My mother, once a volunteer nurse during World War II, was only too glad to administer the injections; it gave her something to do. Afterward, the girl and I would sit and talk in the kitchen till it was time for dinner. Then she disappeared down the staircase. Gina. The landlady’s daughter. I never felt the slightest desire for Gina, but it was kinder to conceal what I couldn’t feel behind a veil of feigned timidity and inexperience. Neither timidity nor inexperience were feigned in the slightest, of course, but I exaggerated the performance to suggest a dissembled feint somewhere and that behind it lurked a waggish side capable of great mischief if given the go-ahead. I feigned an earnest, bashful gaze the better to hide the writhing diffidence underneath.
With the girl in the supermarket, it was the other way around. I couldn’t hold her gaze and was compelled each time to affect the arrogance of someone who might have stared one day but had forgotten to the next.
I hated my shyness. I wanted to hide it, but there was nothing to hide it with. Even trying to cover it up brought out more blushes and made me more flustered yet. I learned to hate my eyes, my height, my accent. To speak to a stranger, or to the girl at the supermarket, or to anyone for that matter, I needed to shut down everything about me, weigh my words, plan my words, affect a makeshift romanaccio to cover up my foreign accent, and, to avoid making any grammar mistakes in Italian, start undoing every sentence before I’d even finished speaking it and, because of this, end up making worse mistakes, the way some writers change the course of a sentence while still writing it but forget to remove all traces of where it was originally headed, thereby speaking with more than one voice. I dissembled with everyone—with those I wanted nothing from, with those I wanted anything they could give if only they could help me ask. I dissembled what I thought, what I feared, who I was, who I wasn’t even sure I was.
Wednesday evenings, I remember, were earmarked for running errands and redeeming bottles at the tiny supermarket at the end of Via Clelia. The girl in charge of stacking the shelves would come to the back counter and help me with the bottles. I was scared each time I watched her empty the bag of bottles fast, feeling that time was flitting by sooner than I’d hoped. My gaze seemed to upset her, because she always lost her smile when she stared at me. Hers was the dark, ill-tempered stare of someone who was trying not to be rude. With other men, she was all smiles and bawdy jokes. With me, just the glare.
* * *
We arrived at the Furio Camillo Metro station at ten in the morning. At 10:00 a.m. in late July I’d be in my room upstairs, probably reading. On occasion, we’d go to the beach before it grew too hot. But past the third week of the month, the money ran out and we’d stay indoors, listening to the radio, saving the money for an occasional movie on weekday evenings, when tickets at the seedy and deserted third-run movie theater around the corner were cheaper than on Sundays. There were two movie theaters. One had disappeared; the other, all gussied up now, stands on Via Muzio Scevola, named after the early-Roman hero who burned his right hand on realizing he’d murdered the wrong man. One night, in that theater, a man put his hand on my wrist. I asked him what was the matter with him, and soon enough he moved to another seat. In those days, I told my sons, you also learned to avoid the bathrooms in movie theaters.
One more block and scarcely five minutes after arriving, our visit was over. This always happens when I go back to places. Either buildings shrink over time, or the time it takes to revisit them shrinks to less than five minutes. We had walked from one end of the street to the other. There was nothing more to do now but walk back the way we came. I sensed, from the way my wife and sons were waiting for me to tell them what to do next, that they were glad the visit was over. On our way back up the street, I did spend a few more seconds standing before the building, not just to take the moment in and never say I’d rushed or bungled the experience, but because I still hoped that an undisclosed something might rush out and tug me, exclaiming, as some people do when they suddenly show up at your door after many years, “Remember me?” But nothing happened. I was, as I always am during such moments, numb to the experience.
Writing about it—after the fact, as I did later that day—might eventually un-numb me. Writing, I was sure, would dust off things that were not there at the time of my visit, or that were there but that I wasn’t quite seeing and needed time and
paper to sort out, so that, once written about, they’d confer on my visit the retrospective resonance that part of me had hoped to find here on Via Clelia. Writing might even bring me closer to this street than I’d been while living there. Writing wouldn’t alter or exaggerate anything; it would simply excavate, rearrange, lace a narrative, recollect in tranquility, where ordinary life is perfectly happy to nod and move on. Writing sees figures where life sees things; things we leave behind, figures we keep. Even the experience of numbness, when traced on paper, acquires a resigned and disenchanted grace, a melancholy cadence that seems at once intimate and aroused compared with the original blah. Write about numbness, and numbness turns into something. Upset flat surfaces, dig out their shadows, and you’ve got dreammaking.
Does writing, as I did later that day, seek out words the better to stir and un-numb us to life—or does writing provide surrogate pleasures the better to numb us to experience?
Three years in Rome and I had never touched this street. It would be just like me scarcely to touch anything, or to have grazed this city all but unintentionally, the way, in the three years I saw the Gypsy girl seated on her corrugated piece of cardboard next to the tramway stop, I never made a dent into her sealed, impenetrable, surly gaze. I called her the dirty girl to hide arousal and disturbance whenever I spoke of her to my friends at school.
Was I disappointed? It seemed a crime not to stumble on at least one quivering leftover from the past. Did numbness mean that even the memory of hating this street had gone away? Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?
Or was I relieved? The romance of time had fallen flat. There was no past to dig up here—never had been any. I might as well never have lived here at all.
I felt like someone trying to step on his own shadow, or like a reader who failed to underline a book as a teenager and now, decades later, is totally unable to recover the young reader he’d once been.
But then, coming back from the West, perhaps it was I who was the shadow, not this street, not the books I had read here, not who I once was.
For a second, as I stood and looked at our tiny rounded balcony, I felt an urge to call myself to the window, the way Italians always shout your name from downstairs on the sidewalk and ask you to come to the window. But I wasn’t calling myself. I was just trying to picture what I’d be doing behind that window so many years ago. It’s past mid-July, there’s no beach, no friends, I’m more or less locked up in my room, reading, and as always shielding myself from the outside world behind drawn shutters, desperately using books to put an imaginary screen between me and Via Clelia.
Anything but Via Clelia.
* * *
In that room on Via Clelia, I managed to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside it. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over its buildings, a film that washed down Via Clelia like a sheet of rainwater, casting a shimmering spell on this hard, humdrum, here-and-now area of lower-middle-class Rome. On rainy days when the emptied street gleamed in the early evening, I might have been very much alone in my room upstairs, but I was alone in D. H. Lawrence’s “faintly humming, glowing town”—by far the better. Dying winter light took me straightaway to the solitary embankments of Dostoyevsky’s white nights in Saint Petersburg. And on sunny mornings when shouts from the marketplace a block down couldn’t have sounded more truculent, I was in Baudelaire’s splenetic, rain-washed Paris, and because there were echoes of Baudelaire’s Paris around me, suddenly the loutish romanaccio, which I learned to love only after leaving Rome, began to acquire an earthy, Gallic coarseness that made it almost tolerable, vibrant, authentic. Earlier in the morning, when I opened the windows, I was suddenly in Wordsworth’s England where “domes, theatres, and temples lie … glittering in the smokeless air” beneath the Beatles’ “blue suburban skies.” And when I finally put down Lampedusa’s The Leopard and began to see aging, patrician Sicilians everywhere, each more lost than the other in a scowling new world that none of them could begin to fathom, much less belong to, I knew I was not alone. All that these Sicilians had left was their roughshod arrogance, their ancient, beaten-down palace with its many, many rooms and rickety balconies that looked over the shoulders of history back to the Norman invasion of Sicily. One could step out onto Via Clelia and enter a tiny park where scrawny trees and scorched growth told me I’d stepped into the abandoned hunting grounds of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.
Anything but Via Clelia.
So, why shouldn’t Via Clelia feel dead now? It had never been alive. I had hated it from my very first day and had almost managed to hate Rome because of it.
And yet, as though to punish me now for calquing my own images over these sidewalks long ago, Via Clelia was giving them all back—but not a thing more. Here, Baudelaire’s vendors, take them; here’s Raskolnikov’s hat, you wear it; over there, Akaky’s overcoat, yours; and if you looked over across the Appia Nuova through Oblomov’s smoky windows, you’d find Lampedusa’s declining mansion, and farther out, D. H. Lawrence’s town—all, all yours now. I had lined the world with books; now the city was giving them back to me, one by one, as one returns a tool, unused, or a necktie, unworn, or money that should never have been borrowed, or a book one had no intention of reading. The snow of Joyce’s “The Dead,” which had mantled Via Clelia after midnight one evening and given it a luster that would never have existed outside of books, was being returned to me with a curt inscription: “It never snows on Via Clelia, didn’t you know?” De Quincey’s London, Browning’s Florence, Camus’s Oran, Whitman’s New York had been waiting in escrow year after mildewed year. “Truth wasn’t good enough for you, was it?” asked the street, irony flecking each of its features.
The illusory film, the shadow of my three years here, was all I had. And as I walked back from one end of Via Clelia to the other with my wife and sons, I realized that all I’d be able to cull here were the fictions, the lies I’d laid down upon this street to make it habitable. Dreammaking and dissemblance, then as now.
It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories, are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions.
Via Clelia was my street of lies. Some lies, like impacted chewing gum, were so thoroughly stepped over each day that there was no undoing or erasing them. Look at this corner, that store, this printer’s shop, and all you’ll see is Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert. Underneath, nothing. Just the memory of three years waiting for our visas to the States to come through.
* * *
We had no television in those days, no money, no shopping to take our minds off anything, no friends, hardly any relatives, no point in even discussing a weekly allowance. All my mother gave me was enough money to buy one paperback a week. This I did for three years. Buying a book was simply my way of running away from Via Clelia, taking the number 85 bus on Saturdays, and spending the rest of the day burrowed in Rome’s many foreign-language bookstores. The walk from one bookstore to the other without paying attention to the city itself became my way of being in Rome, of knowing Rome—a Rome that, for all my reclusive bookishness, was no less real to me than was the Rome of everyday Romans or the Rome tourists came looking for. My centers were bookshops and, between them, a network of cobbled, narrow lanes lined by ocher walls and refuse. The piazzas with their centered obelisks, the museums, the churches, the glorious remnants were for other people.
On Saturday mornings, I would get off at San Silvestro and wander downtown, hoping to get lost, because I loved nothing better than stumbling on one of my bookstores. I grew to like the old city: Campo Marzio, Campo de’ Fiori, Piazza Rotonda. I liked the muted affluence of rundown buildings I knew were palatial inside. I liked them on Saturday mornings, at noon, and on weekday evenings. Via Del Babuino was my Faubourg Saint-Germain, Via Frattina my Nevsky Prospekt, streets where people crow
ded dimly lit sidewalks that could, within seconds, seem studded by turn-of-the-century gas lamps flickering in the evening’s spellbound afterglow.
I even liked the people who suddenly popped out of seventeenth-century buildings, leading flashy, extravagant, dream-made lives where love, movies, and fast cars took you to places the number 85 bus knew not a thing about. I liked hanging around awhile after the bookstores had closed and the streets had begun to empty and amble about in this magical part of the city whose narrow cobbled lanes and spotty lights seemed to know, long before I did, where my footsteps were aching to turn. I began to think that over and above Via Clelia and the books I’d come looking for, something else was keeping me from heading back home now, and that if books had given me a destination that was a good enough alibi for my parents and for myself, my staying in old Rome now had a different purpose. I’d grown to love old Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome, so that I was never sure if my love was genuine or simply a product of my own yearnings thrown at the first old lane that crossed my path.
It would take decades to realize that this strange, shadow Rome of my own invention was everyone else’s as well. Who would have guessed … I’d been hiding my shamefaced, lonely-adolescence Rome from everyone, yet all I had to do was share one picture, and everyone, young or old, knew exactly … Emerson: “To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.”