Context
Days Off
Michael Bérubé
Day 3 In the middle of the city
there is a permanent archaeological site, a pit of dust and ancient
columns rising into the morning’s commuter traffic. The pit is ringed
by fast-food trucks and groups of people carrying maps, cameras,
children, shuffling from tomb to temple to trucks and back. The site
itself is a palimpsest, a repository not only of continuous centuries
of empire but also of continuous centuries of lamentation over the
ruins into which the artifacts of empire have fallen. The latest
“restoration” project was begun by fascists, and is now carried on by a
kind of civic-minded project for the advancement of archaeology and
tourism. A few miles north of the dust site, I too shuffle,
camera at the ready, with my own child, who is eating cheeseburgers in
a small piazza over which looms the Pantheon. He is the only child with
Down syndrome in the piazza, a piccolo bambino con disabili.
When we had rounded the corner from one of the narrow outlet streets
and emerged into the piazza, he saw the Pantheon before he saw the
opposing McDonald’s, and shouted with a small boy’s glee, “It’s a
BANK!” He keeps this up long after (a) he has been persuaded that it is
not a bank, because it continues to amuse him greatly; (b) his parents
have asked each other where exactly he had gotten this idea of what
banks are supposed to look like; (c) his parents have realized that, as
a matter of fact, banks did used to try to look like the
Pantheon whenever they could. It was the Classical period of banks.
Perhaps there will eventually be a fascist restoration of this
Classical period, too. Day 4 Because it is June, the
peninsula is choked with people like me who speak no more than forty
words of the language. Entire cities swarm with visitors filing past
fine works of art and fine stores of jewelry. Prices for postcards and
pasta dishes have been stabilized nationwide; the basic lasagna al
forno has been set at 12.000 lire for all major restaurants, though the
authorities have allowed for some flexibility in the prices of soft
drinks and juices. In smaller cities and coastal towns, the primary
language appears to be German. In some seaside venues German/Italian
menus are common, though the lasagna al forno holds firm at 12.000. The
Germans adopt a sullen, desultory manner, no doubt feeling that this
stretch of land should rightfully be theirs, that they need some decent
lebensraum and a few warm-water ports, und so weiter. And
what is the nature of the tourist complaint? It’s not the tourists who
bother me, today, but the tourists who complain about the tourists.
This includes me, both as tourist and tourist-complainant, but still.
Who do these people think they are, coming all this way to complain
about other tourists, when all they’re doing is getting in the way of my complaining about other tourists? Sometimes the tourists are so thick
in the streets you can’t even see the tourists you want to complain
about because they’re blocked by other tourists, and so you wind up
complaining about the tourists blocking your view of the tourists you
wanted to complain about in the first place. Bloody fucking tourists. News
item: the war in Kosovo has scared thousands of tourists away from
visiting the other, eastern side of the peninsula. Apparently in the
resort towns on the Aegean you can actually see NATO bombers heading
off on their sorties, and there are something like 150 bombs left
unexploded in the Aegean itself. At least that’s the figure NATO will
admit to. There is a moratorium on fishing. Spokespeople estimate that
the country has lost about three trillion lire in tourism so far. As
tourism accounts for 13 percent of the national economy, this skews
everyone’s projections for inflation, currency stability, employment,
building starts, and national elections. But there’s good news in one
sector of the economy, as the market for false passports for Albanians
has exploded along with the demand for ships willing to ferry across
the Aegean thousands of people who claim refugee status and political
asylum. It is hard to distinguish the devastated, impoverished and
malnourished Kosovar Albanians, who are legit, from the devastated,
impoverished and malnourished Albanian Albanians, who are frauds. Day 6 The
cellular phone is ubiquitous, every bit as much a cliche, by now, as
complaints about the ubiquity of the cellular phone. But what’s weird
is the ubiquity of the cellular phone at night in the bars and
trattorias of the piazzas. The tour groups file by on their way to
tour-group bars (on your right you see the traditional draft light beer of Etruscan antiquity),
but they are younger than they were in the dust of the morning, more
twenty-something, with fewer maps and children. The cellular phones
weave amidst the tour groups, clustered in cellular cells of two or
three. Some people are speaking on phones while on dates. The dates
stare off into the middle distance, not seeming to mind. Other callers
are out with friends, two or three people hovering over their phones as
they talk over the ambient human buzz and the mechanical splatterings
of scooters. “I don’t get it,” my drinking companion (and wife) says. “All the phones,” I say. “Not exactly all the phones,” she says. “All the people they’re calling.” “Who are they calling?” “Exactly. Who’s staying home to get all these calls?” “Maybe they’re calling people at other piazzas.” “Mm, to find out who’s having a better time.” “Or
maybe everyone has a Designated Shut-In who has to stay home and take
the call so that their friends can look appropriately busy and engaged.” “Or maybe the Designated Shut-In has to make the call.” “So their friends can look even more busy and engaged.” We
decide that some people are talking to Designated Shut-Ins, and some
are talking to friends at other bars, and some are simply calling
1-900-U-ON-DATE, a pay-per-minute service set up explicitly for people
out in the public hum of the Roman night who have a cell phone but
don’t have anyone to call. Hi, you say. I’m in the Campo di Fiori and I’m having the most wonderful time,
you say. The service more or less picks it up from there, 10.000 lire
for the first minute, 3.500 per minute thereafter. People have never
felt more wanted, more connected, more like a people. People have
always wanted to feel like a people, and now they can do it in public,
for other people to see. Day 8 The buildings on the
edges of the great medieval hill cities have no backyards. In Orvieto,
in Orte, Radda in Chianti, Massa Marittima, the houses on the periphery
have back walls that blend into the cliffs on which the city is built,
they have second-story back windows from which it appears to be a fall
of hundreds of feet. This arrangement must have its advantages for the
people living on the other side of those windows. They cannot build a
swing set or above-ground pool behind their houses, but they have a
fabulous view, and should they ever need to dangle a child or an enemy
out the window by their ankles, they are assured of making a
significant impact on the mind of the danglee. Perhaps this was once a
phenomenon of world-historical importance. Surely when the towns were
young and banks were still centuries away from their classic period,
these houses had great potential to ensure the prompt repayment of
loans, especially for clients who had not yet learned to calculate this
new thing called “interest.” One quarter overdue, we dangle you out the
front window. Two quarters overdue, we dangle you out the back window.
No one was ever three quarters overdue. And thus the infant banks of
the Italian peninsula began the social project we now know as modernity. Day 9 On one of the hills outside Siena is a pen of wild boar. Cinghali.
When I first heard the word I mistook it for the infinitive form of a
verb. But they are nouns, adults and children, gray and hairy, running
and pacing and snorting. Every morning the pen is flustered by pigeons,
a fluster of pigeons, more gray and unsavory creatures flopping about
in the Tuscan landscape. Why do the pigeons visit the boars? Is there a
competition, an exchange we don’t know about, something under the
collective radar of our travel books? The pigeons open with the standard gambit, “And how do the humans eat you?” “Ugh. Ugh. Snort. Usually they grind us up into sausage after a couple of years. And you?” “We
are roasted,” boast the birds breastfully, “whereupon we are no longer
pigeons, but squab. We are very exclusively eaten”—their usage, it is
not so good—”and never put into sandwiches.” “Fuck you,” retort the boars, wittily. The
hills themselves admit of no irony. They are breathtaking, deep,
radically perspectival: the view changes every fifty meters (we’re
talking meters now) as one hill gives way to another. Rows of olive
groves and grape leaves score the landscape, etch lines at various
angles to each other and to the roundness of the hills. So this
is why the British have spent centuries scoffing at things Italianate.
Come, come, it is really much too beautiful, too bountiful for one’s
good. Nothing here to stiffen the spine, my boy. No freezing rains, no
bogs, no blood pudding or mutton. Really altogether indiscriminate.
Makes a man soft, languid, given to . . . cooking, wearing nice shoes,
all that sort of thing. Nice shoes. There are nice shoes
everywhere, and wonderful things to eat, fast cars and snappy business
accessories. Italy has elected fifty-five governments since 1945, one
every 358.6 days, and for many years no one at the G7 meetings has
bothered to learn the Italian representative’s name because they know
they’ll never see him again. But you know what? This was a conscious
decision. Italians could have a strong central government if they
wanted one. Redo the proportional-representation thing, institute
winner-take-all primaries, winnow down the field, as in the United
States, to two candidates, one of whom will campaign on the slogan
“Putting Families First” and the other of whom will counter with the
slogan “Putting People First.” But Italians have recoiled from their
last experiment with strong central government, and so in 1946, as
their bridges and railroads were being rebuilt, they gave up on
centuries of dreams of restoring Rome to the center of the universe,
and let empire westward take its way. From that point on, Italy would
concentrate instead on the conquest of cool. From that point on, the
peninsula would do sports cars and gorgeous suits and leather coats and
prosciutto and linguine al pesto and chianti and bicycle shorts and
rich coffee and wild boar sausage and lots and lots and lots of nice
shoes. The far right has taken notice. All the other political
posters speak of prosperity and peace and the democratic left and a
united Europe, and even the right-wing Allianza Nationale confines
itself to complaining about crime and illegal immigration, but the
neo-nazis speak to the conquest of cool: “Eurocameriere? No grazie!”
(Europe’s waiter? No thanks!) —accompanied by a crude cartoon of an
Italian waiter serving its neighbors to the north. But how can Italy
stop “serving” the rest of Europe when its products are so stylish, so
finely made, and/or so very, very tasty? This is a problem. Current
levels of demand are too strong to resist. The far right thus proposes
a radical de-volution of the consumer goods industries: the party’s
platform calls for a program of bad food, sensible shoes, slow, ugly
cars, warm beer, and drab clothing. You know, like the British. Day 13 For
two weeks we have been driving. I do not drive a standard. This is
because I do not know how. My driving companion (my wife) is an
accomplished and imaginative driver of European cars with standard
transmissions but has a terrible sense of direction, can get lost in
straight corridors, will swing round and round traffic circles unable
to spot landmarks she has passed four, five times today and four, five
times yesterday. I have the maps. I need to enunciate clearly and
translate the road signs. There are children in the back seat. My wife
has a hearing loss in one ear. It is a recipe for vehicular disaster. But
we have emerged from these two weeks with bodies and marital vows
intact, even when it became clear, during the frantic last hour of
driving back to Rome, that the rental agency could not be approached by
car in ordinary three-dimensional space because all four streets at its
intersection were one-way streets that . . . no, here words must fail
me. We
navigate the maze, return the car, walk to the hotel. My walking
companion (and wife) collapses onto the bed and falls into fitful
sleep, clutch foot still clutching. I take the children to the zoo,
after studying bus maps the size of the planning documents for the
invasion of Normandy and learning that two of the sixteen buses that
stop at the nearest piazza will eventually get somewhere close to the
zoo. According to these maps. These maps do not say that the
walk to the zoo from the bus stop will lead us past the U.S. Embassy,
where my children will be glared at by a sentry with an Uzi. They also
do not say that in a city dotted with religious shrines, acres of
painted ceilings, ancient stadia and fora, modern Fendi and Versace,
Spanish Steps and Planet Hollywoods . . . the zoo (the “bioparc”) will
be practically empty. A handful of families, couples on late-afternoon
dates. That’s about it on a sunny Saturday. For the first time in this
city I am in a public space where almost everyone speaks Italian. No
tour groups disturb the orsi, the muflone and oteri are unmolested. Starved for large-primate stimulation, a macaque hurls
itself against the glass wall of its cage, trying to challenge my
younger son for dominance of the monkey house. My child thinks this is
great fun, and so runs back and forth, chortling, in front of the cage,
enraging the macaque, who begins to show us what large pointy teeth he
possesses. But then what really sends the creature into
full-fledged alpha-male fury is my child’s polite departure from the
monkey house, when he turns and waves and says, “ciao, monkeys” before
scooting off to see the lions. It must be terribly frustrating to have
your antagonist simply walk away from a fight, especially when he does
it with such chirpy insouciance. And also when you’re in a cage and
he’s not. Day 14 Pros and cons. There is no peanut
butter or ketchup in the supermarkets. But all the cashiers sit in
swivel chairs, just as if they were, like, management or something. The
traffic is a motion science unto itself, and scooters swarm like
vehicular insects, but there are no traffic “jams,” no road rage, no
fucking minivans or sport utility vehicles. Gas is 18.250 a liter, or
about $4 per gallon. But we’ve paid 3.000 for a good table wine, or
about $1.65. The composite message: drink, don’t drive; feed your kids
penne or something; let the workers sit down for a change. You
cannot buy spaghetti sauce that comes in a jar. It is unheard of. Who
would want such a thing? But if you will agree to make your
tomato-based sauce by yourself, and it’s better for you anyway, the
supermarkets will reciprocate by offering you vials of fresh pesto for
maybe a dollar and a half. There are few paper products, and those that
do exist seem to have been lightly laminated. This gives the tiny
napkins an attractive plastic sheen to them, and makes them wonderfully
water-resistant, too. Your only hope, when eating with a sloppy child,
is to use the napkins to push the pesto or tomato sauce around his face
or torso until it is absorbed into the upper layers of his skin. But by
the same token, there are no paper coffee cups; there is no such thing
as take-out. You must eat where you order, you must face your feeders,
make eye contact and some form of conversation during all acts of
self-nourishment and caffeination. This is a good thing. The public
sphere began with coffee bars. It will end with styrofoam.
