by André Aciman
She wants the new and the unfamiliar; I want nothing that isn’t old. The last thing she wants is to be reminded of home; I can’t wait to pick up remnants of mine. She likes to get lost; I still haven’t found my way.
My curiosity, when I am indeed curious, is steered by a totally different agenda. Hers is based on seeing things that dazzle the imagination, mine on those that stir memory. We’re traveling together separately.
I want to be reminded of the Ithaca I lost; she’s after a new world. Every visit to a city on the Mediterranean needs to bring me closer to what I know, or to what I believe—but am no longer sure—I remember and think I want to revisit. Without this, I might as well not travel. I like to walk down the streets of foreign cities and spot imaginary signposts—unreal signposts that are real to me because they point to a parallel place and to a shadow time zone elsewhere in time.
My wife watches all this and tries to encourage me to unload the “baggage” I trail along. I know she is right. With her, sometimes, I walk down unfamiliar streets and try to meet her—as the saying goes—halfway. I look up at unimpressive residential buildings in nondescript neighborhoods and ask myself, not “Was this city worth visiting at all?” but “Could I live here?” I’m scoping out a home; she’s happy with hotels.
Over the years we have reached a compromise of sorts: I will try not to travel in search of lost time; instead I will travel to seek out an imaginary future. I “connect,” not by saying, “Isn’t this little picturesque hill town beautiful?” but “Do I see myself living here?”
“Do I see myself as a child running down flights of stairs to head out to the movies with friends?”
“Do I see myself telling the corner baker to send up fresh bread tomorrow morning?”
“Do I hear the clatter of plates being set for long lunches with my entire family?”
Do I see myself living here? however, also asks an undisclosed and far too unsettling question: “Could I have lived here?”
I like to play with these two questions, for it is only by asking such questions that I “connect” with the world around me.
It is through this detour, this hope of restoring a remembered past in an imagined future that I come closest to what goes by the name of a comfort zone, call it a makeshift home, a counterfeit home. Grammarians might call this combination of past and future the imperfect conditional—otherwise known as a contrafactual mood. I am, come to think of it, a contrafactual tourist. I do not travel to see things; I come to prospect unreal time in unreal cities. It is only by finding a would-be, would-have-been, wannabe home that I begin to experience the joy that others feel when they go away. It is a transposed and counterintuitive joy, joy by proxy, the vicarious, artificial joy of finding in one place things lost in another.
And yet, should you dig a tiny bit deeper, it is no imaginary joy at all. It is a joy so real and so poignant that it summons feelings I never expected: the fear of being tempted by this new place I couldn’t have cared less about or—more poignant yet—the fear of missing a place I flew to with no enthusiasm, no desire, and no curiosity and, at the last moment, ended up wanting to take back with me. It doesn’t take long for me to see that what lies behind these fears goes by the name of one thing only—love—and that it is always love that catches us unawares, exiles, tourists, and nomads alike. We walk about a dreary town on a scalding hot day and as we’re plotting the indifferent itinerary of a possible return trip in years to come, it suddenly hits us, as always obliquely, that this is love, isn’t it? That it is really love we bring when we thought we were bringing nothing at all, that some of us find what is real for us through long and complicated detours when others find it staring right at them.
Roman Hours
Today, again, I stared at the small knife on my desk. I had purchased it months ago on the Campo de’ Fiori, just before buying bread rolls and heading down the Via della Corda to find a quiet spot on the Piazza Farnese, where I sat on a stone ledge and made prosciutto and Bel Paese sandwiches. On the way to the Palazzo Farnese, I found a street fountain and rinsed a bunch of muscatel grapes I had bought from a fruttivendolo. I was leaning forward to cleanse the new knife as well, and to douse my face while I was at it, when it occurred to me that this, of all my days in Rome, was perhaps the one I would like most to remember, and that on this cheap knife—which I had originally planned to discard as soon as I was finished using it but had now decided to take back with me—was inscribed something of the warm, intimate feeling that settles around noon on typically clear Roman summer days. It came rushing to me in the form of a word—one word only, but the best possible word because it captured the weather, the city, and the mood on this most temperate day in June and, hence, of the year: serenity. Italians use the word sereno to describe the weather, the sky, the sea, a person. It means tranquil, clear, fair, calm.
And this is how I like to feel in Rome, and how the city feels when its languid ocher walls beam in the midday sun. When overbrimming old fountains dare you to dunk your hands in and splash your face and rest awhile before resuming your walk through yet narrower twisting lanes along the Campo Marzio in the centro storico (historic center) of Rome.
This warren of old alleys goes back many centuries, and here sinister brawls, vendettas, and killings were as common in the Renaissance as the artists, con artists, and other swaggerers who populated these streets. Today, these lanes with tilting buildings that have learned to lean on each other like Siamese twins exude a smell of slate, clay, and old dank limestone; the odor of wood glue and resin drift from artisans’ shops, attesting to the timeless presence of workshops in the area. Otherwise, the streets are dead past midday. Except for bells, an occasional hammer, the sound of a lathe, or an electric saw that is no sooner heard than it’s instantly silenced, the only sound you’ll hear on the Vicolo del Polverone or the Piazza della Quercia is the occasional clatter of plates ringing from many homes, suggesting that lunch is about to be served in all Italy.
A few more steps into the Largo della Moretta, and suddenly you begin to make out the cool scent of roasted coffee emanating from hidden sanctuaries along the way. These havens—like tiny pilgrimage stations, or like the numerous churches to which men on the run, from Cellini to Tosca’s Angelotti, rushed to seek asylum—each have their old legend. Caffè Rosati, Caffè Canova, Caffè Greco, Caffè Sant’Eustachio, Antico Caffè della Pace—small oases where blinding light and dark interiors go well together, the way hot coffee and lemon ice go well together, the way only Mediterraneans seek the shade and wait out the sun they love so much.
There is a magic to these summer hours that is as timeless as the tiny rituals we invent around them each day. Here are mine. Strolling in the dry heat and suddenly rediscovering the little-known Vicolo Montevecchio, where a huge, off-white ombrellone suddenly sprouts, spelling food and wine. Wasting yet another bottle of sparkling water by washing a hand unavoidably made sticky with food purchased on the fly. Baring both feet by the Fontana delle Tartarughe in the Piazza Mattei, the empty square basking in the ocher glory of its adjoining buildings, and when no one’s looking, letting them soak awhile in a pool of water so peaceful and translucent that not even the quietest beach on the quietest day could rival it.
Getting lost—the welcome sense that you are still unable to find your way in this maze of side streets—is something one never wishes to unlearn, because it means one’s visit here is still very young. The rule is quite simple: scorn maps. They never show all Renaissance Rome anyway; they merely stand between you and the city. Stray instead. Enforced errancy and mild disconcertment are the best guide. Rome must swim before your eyes. You’ll drift and wander and suddenly land, without knowing how, at the Piazza Navona, or the Campo de’ Fiori, Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Pantheon, the Piazza di Spagna, or the Piazza del Popolo, with its stunning tricorno fanning out in three directions: the Via del Babuino, the Via del Corso, and the Via di Ripetta. “Could this be the Trevi Fountain?” you wonder, half fasci
nated by your internal compass, which knew all along where you were headed and which, in retrospect, gives you a sort of proprietary claim on the piazza, the way a prince may think he alone is entitled to marry a particular debutante simply because he was the first to spot her at court. How we discover beauty is not incidental to it; it prefigures it. The accident that brings us to the things we worship says as much about them as it does about us. What I want is not just to see the Turtle Fountain but to stumble upon the Turtle Fountain inadvertently.
This protean city is all about drifting and straying, and the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line but a figure eight. Just as Rome is not about one path, or about one past, but an accumulation of pasts: you encounter Gogol, Ovid, Piranesi, Ingres, Caesar, and Goethe on one walk; on another, Caravaggio and Casanova, Freud and Fellini, Montaigne and Mussolini, James and Joyce; and on yet another, Wagner, Michelangelo, Rossini, Keats, and Tasso. And you’ll realize one more thing that nobody tells you: despite all these names, masonries, and landmarks, despite untold layers of stucco and plaster and paint slapped over the centuries on everything you see here, despite the fact that so many figures from one past keep surfacing in another, or that so many buildings are grafted onto generations of older buildings, what ultimately matters here are the incidentals, the small elusive pleasures of the senses—water, coffee, citrus, food, sunlight, voices, the touch of warm marble, glances stolen on the sly, and faces, the most beautiful in the world.
And this, without question, is the most beautiful city on earth, just as it is the most serene. Not only is the weather and everything around us serene, but we ourselves become serene. Serenity is the feeling of being one with the world, of having nothing to wish for, of lacking for nothing. Of being, as almost never happens elsewhere, entirely in the present. This, after all, is the most pagan city in the world; it is consumed by the present. The greatest sites and monuments, Rome tells us, mean nothing unless they stimulate and accommodate the body; unless, that is, we can eat, drink, and lounge among them. Beauty always gives pleasure, but in Rome, beauty is born of pleasure.
Twice a day, we come back to the Antico Caffè della Pace, off the Piazza Navona. The caffè is a few steps away from the Hotel Raphaël (a luxurious place whose roof garden offers an unimpeded view of the Campo Marzio). At the caffè, dashing would-be artists, models, drifters, and high-end wannabes sip coffee, read the paper, or congregate, which they do in greater numbers as the day wears on. I like to come here very early in the morning, when the scent of parched earth lingers upon the city, announcing warm weather and blinding glare toward noon. I like to be the first to sit down here, before the Romans have left their homes, because if I hate feeling that those who live here or were born after I’d left Rome, years ago, have come to know my city better than I ever will, then being here before they’re ready to face their own streets gives me some consolation. While I retain the privileged status of a tourist who doesn’t have to go to work, I can easily pretend—an illusion sanctioned by jet lag—that I’ve never left Rome at all but just happened to wake up very early in the morning.
By evening, the jittery caffè crowd spills over into the street. Nearly everyone holds a telefonino in their hand, because they expect it to ring at any moment but also because it’s part of the dress code, a descendant of the privileged dagger that conferred instant status at the unavoidable street brawl. One of these twenty- to thirty-year-olds sits at a table, staring attentively into his telefonino as though inspecting his features in a pocket mirror. Watching the flower of Rome, I see how easy it is to reconcile its cult of the figura with the beauty that abounds on a Baroque square such as the Piazza Navona. There will always remain something disturbingly enticing about this shady clientele. This, after all, is the universe of Cellini and Caravaggio. They lived, ate, brawled, loved, plotted, and dueled scarcely a few blocks away. Yet from some unknown cranny in their debauched and squalid lives, they gave the world the best it is ever likely to see. Here, as well, lived the ruthless Borgia pope Alexander VI, whose children Lucrezia Borgia and Cesare Borgia are notorious to history. A few steps away, and a hundred years later, Giordano Bruno was brought to the Campo de’ Fiori, stripped naked, and burned at the stake. Scarcely a few months earlier, an event had taken place that shook Rome as probably nothing had since the martyring of the early Christians: the brutal decapitation of the beautiful young Beatrice Cenci by order of the pope himself.
* * *
We may never become Roman, and yet it takes no more than a few hours for the spell to kick in. We become different. Our gaze starts to linger; we’re less fussy over space; voices become more interesting; smiles are over-the-counter affairs. We begin to see beauty everywhere. We find it at Le Bateleur, a charming, run-down antiques and curios shop on the Via di San Simone, off the Via dei Coronari, where we find stunning French watercolors. Or at Ai Monasteri, which sells products made in Italian monasteries and where I found a delicious spiced grappa, the best Amaro, and the sweetest honey I’ve ever known. Or at the Ferramenta alla Chiesa Nuova, seemingly a hardware store but actually a knob, door handle, and ancient keys gallery where people walk in bearing precious antique door hinges they despair of ever finding a match for, only to have the owner produce a look-alike on the spot.
The city is beautiful in such unpredictable ways. The dirty ocher walls (fast disappearing under new coats that restore their original yellow, peach, pink, lilac) are beautiful. And why not? Ocher is the closest stone will ever come to flesh; it is the color of clay, and from clay God made flesh. The figs we’re about to eat under the sun are beautiful. The worn-out pavement along the Via dei Cappellari is, however humble and streaked with dirt, beautiful. The clarinetist who wends his way toward the sunless Vicolo delle Grotte, wailing a Bellini aria, plays beautifully. The Chiesa di Santa Barbara, overlooking Largo dei Librari, couldn’t offer a more accurate slice of a Roman tableau vivant, complete with ice-cream vendor, sleeping dog, Harley-Davidson, canvas ombrelloni, and men chatting in gallant fashion outside a small haberdashery where someone is playing a mandolin rendition of “Core ’ngrato,” a Neapolitan song, while a lady wearing a series of Felliniesque white voiles cuts across my field of vision. This sixty-year-old aristocratic eccentric is, it takes me a second to realize, speeding on a mountain bike, barefoot, with an air of unflappable sprezzatura.
What wouldn’t I give never to lose Rome. I worry, on leaving, that like a cowered Cinderella returning to her stepmother’s service, I’ll slip back into my day-to-day life far sooner than I thought possible. It’s not just the beauty that I’ll miss. I’ll miss, too, the way this city gets under my skin and, for a while, makes me its own, or the way I take pleasure for granted. It’s a feeling I wear with greater confidence every day. I know it is a borrowed feeling—it’s Rome’s, not mine. I know it will go dead as soon as I leave the Roman light behind.
This worry doesn’t intrude on anything; it simply hovers, like a needless safety warning to someone who’s been granted immortality for a week. It was there when I purchased the ham, the rolls, the knife. Or when I saw the Caravaggios in San Luigi dei Francesi; or went to see Raphael’s sibyls in Santa Maria della Pace but found the door closed, and was just as pleased to admire its rounded colonnade instead. Could any of these timeless things really disappear from my life? And where do they go when I’m not there to stare at them? What happens to life when we’re not there to live it?
* * *
I first arrived in Rome as a refugee in 1965. Mourning my life in Alexandria, and determined never to like Rome, I eventually surrendered to the city, and for three magical years the Campo Marzio was the place I came closest to ever loving. I grew to love Italian and Dante, and here, as nowhere else on earth, I even chose the exact building where I’d make my home someday.
Years ago, just where the Campo is split by the ostentatious nineteenth-century thoroughfare, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, I would start on one of two favorite walks. As soon as the school b
us had crossed the river from Vatican City, I’d ask the driver to drop me at Largo Tassoni—rather than bring me all the way to Stazione Termini, from where I’d have to take public transportation for another forty minutes before reaching our shabby apartment in a working-class neighborhood past Alberone. From Largo Tassoni, either I would head south to the Via Giulia and then the Campo de’ Fiori, ambling for about two hours before finally going home, or I’d head north.
I liked nothing better than to lose my way in a labyrinth of tiny, shady, furtive, ocher-hued vicoli, which I hoped would one day, by dint of being strayed in, finally debouch into an enchanted little square where I’d encounter some still higher order of beauty. What I wished above all things was to amble freely about the streets of the Campo Marzio and to find whatever I wished to find there freely, whether it was the true image of this city, or something in me, or a likeness of myself in the things and people I saw, or a new home to replace the one I’d lost as a refugee.
Roaming about these streets past dark had more to do with me and my secret wishes than it did with the city. It allowed me to recast my fantasies each time, because this is also how we try to find ourselves—by hits and misses and mistaken turns. Dowsing around the Campo Marzio like a prospector was simply my way of belonging to this area and of claiming it by virtue of passing over it many, many times, the way dogs do when they mark their corners. In the aimlessness of my afternoon walks, I was charting a Rome of my own devising, a Rome I wanted to make sure did exist, because the one awaiting me at home was not the Rome I wanted. On the twilit lanes of a Renaissance Rome that stood between me and ancient Rome just as it stood between me and the modern world, I could pretend that any minute now, and without knowing how, I would rise out of one circle of time and, walking down a little lane lined by the mansions of the Campo Marzio, look through windows I had gotten to know quite well, ring a buzzer downstairs, and through the intercom hear someone’s voice tell me that I was, once again, late for supper.