Part 1
Keeping the feast.
One couple's story of love, food, and healing in Italy.
by Paula b.u.t.turini.
Prologue.
Two ghosts. That was how a friend later described us when we returned to Rome in 1992. John and I had been away five years, and though neither of us knew it at the time, we returned, I think, because Rome seemed the most likely place to recuperate and cast out the demons we had picked up in our absence.
We moved into a small apartment near the Tiber on one of those golden October days so perfect that you could never imagine willingly leaving the city again. Every morning I would walk down our narrow street toward the hubbub of Campo dei Fiori, where the flower sellers, the fruit vendors, the vegetable sellers, the fishmongers, the mushroom lady, the bread shop, the lamb and chicken lady, the pork butcher, the notions man, the meat vans, the olive and herb vendors, the newspaper kiosk, the housewares stand, and the roving garlic salesmen from Bangladesh were always open for business no matter how early I awakened.
Morning after morning for an entire year, I walked to the Campo before most people were up. Noisy, honking, shouting Rome is almost quiet at that hour, and what began as a simple routine soon took on the trappings of ritual. I woke up early, dressed, walked out the door and over to the Campo. I would buy a shiny, plump purple-black eggplant. Or a handful of slender green beans, so fresh and young you could eat them raw. I bought three golden pears, or a heavy bunch of fat, green grapes. I bought a few slices of Milanese salami, a bit of veal. I bought a thin slab of creamy Gorgonzola, to spread on crusty, still-warm bread. I bought milk, yogurt, b.u.t.ter, and eggs, and finally the newspapers. Then I would head home, stopping in the tiny church of Santa Brigida, which lay halfway between the Campo and our apartment. The first few months, I would rest my bundles on the cold marble floor, kneel for a moment at the back of the church under the gaze of a painted Madonna, and try not to cry. Months later, I would still kneel for a moment in the same spot, but when I felt the tears coming, I'd make a fist and pound once or twice on the pew in front of me. It made a fitting, hollow sound in the almost empty church. Then I would collect my bundles and continue my short walk home.
I needed both parts of the ritual, the buying of the food and the stopping in the church. We all must eat, and there is nothing more normal than buying the food that keeps us alive. When I performed the ritual of buying our daily bread, the world seemed more normal. Pounding a pew a few minutes later brought home how far from normal I still felt.
Though the name means "Field of Flowers," Campo dei Fiori has not been a meadow since Pope Eugene IV ordered the field scythed and cobblestoned in the 1430s. These days the only flowers are the cut variety on sale at one end of the square and a few pots of scraggly geraniums and shrubs outlining the sidewalk cafes and trattorie and pizza joints that ring the piazza. Since the fifteenth century the Campo has been a horse market, a way station for pilgrims who thronged its Renaissance hostelries, and a place of torture and execution for those branded heretics by the Holy Roman Inquisition. Only since 1869, after the popes' temporal powers had finally been checked, has it been transformed into a public marketplace.
Today money changes hands under a patchwork canvas ceiling of gigantic umbrellas and tarps that protect the produce from Rome's fierce sun. The flower sellers jam their lilies, mums, dahlias, daisies, freesia, eucalyptus, sweet williams, and roses into plastic buckets and vases, enough to form a wall of flowers toward the western end of the square. All the other vendors display their wares w.i.l.l.y-nilly, piled high in bursts of brilliant colors atop weather-beaten wooden carts or sawhorse tables. When business is slow, and often when it's not, the vendors converse in deep-toned shouts with their compet.i.tors or the crowd.
From shortly after dawn till shortly after lunchtime, unruly knots of shoppers (I doubt the Campo has ever seen an orderly line, even for a hanging or a burning at the stake) jostle for position around the stands to choose the makings for their next meal. By one-thirty p.m. business is finished for the day and the vendors begin packing up their stands, tossing their rotten tomatoes, molding lemons, festering zucchini, and wilted greens onto the gray cobblestoned pavement. They leave hills of battered produce and mountains of the wooden crates used to haul their daily stocks from the city's wholesale market.
At that point, when the Campo looks like a garbage dump, cleanup crews-some plying medieval-looking willow brooms or plastic-fronded imitations, others maneuvering ultramodern street-washing trucks-vacuum up and hose down the chaos. Walk through the Campo about three p.m. and, except for a lingering smell of seafood on the eastern edge of the square, a visitor would have no idea that this was anything other than a large, lovely Roman piazza, about the size and shape of a football field, with a ceremonial fountain splashing at one end and a looming, hooded statue standing in its center.
At first glance Rome often seems all turmoil and frenzy. But time reveals a gentle side, too, a city of measured pace and rounded edges, a place not just of sun and heat, but of color and grace, whose comforts can outweigh its chaos. When we returned to Rome, ghostlike, in 1992, we were longing for those comforts, that blend of light, warmth, food, beauty, and friends-the very elixir that had nourished and protected us before our jobs as foreign correspondents called us off to cover the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. We had taken a battering during our five years away. Italy seemed the place to try to get over it.
Both of us had lived essentially fortunate lives before we met in Rome in 1985, when I was thirty-four and John was forty-three. We lived four essentially joyous years afterward, deeply grateful to have found each other. Only then, just after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, were we sucked into what I came to think of as our own private tornado. Though I don't believe the maxim that trouble comes in threes, I suspect that consecutive blows make it harder to rebound, easier to be dragged into a downward spiral. Our troubles began with a police truncheon in Czechoslovakia, two weeks before our wedding, and a bullet in Romania three weeks after. Infection, illness, and a family tragedy followed, and finally-the result of all that had come before-a long, slow slide into textbook depression.
I know that bad luck falls to everyone sooner or later. Ours simply hit especially hard, and lasted unusually long. This book recounts our troubles and how we found our way around them. It describes the simple strength we discovered in the one wild card we possessed: our love for Rome and the rituals we clung to there, all involving nourishment of one sort or another. These rituals of feeding and eating-rooted in our warmest memories from childhood and reinforced by our years in Italy-helped heal and strengthen us, allowed us to regroup. We cling to them still to ensure our future.
Like memory itself, this book wanders back and forth between old recollections and new. Food is the thread that connects them, for food has always been my lens and prism, my eye on the world. I may write about the smell of asparagus, the color of polenta, or the taste of figs still warm from the sun, but all of it is a personal shorthand for weighing hunger and love, health and nourishment, secrets and revelations, illness and survival, comfort and celebration, and perhaps above all, the joy and gift of being alive.
Can you love a city for its pink mornings and golden twilights? For the screech of its seagulls, the flitting of its swifts? Can you love a city because it is a riot of ochres and earth tones, all of them drenched by a fierce, rich light? Can you feel sheltered by the earth-hugging chaos of a city's skyline, exhilarated by its church domes floating like balloons across a deep blue sky? Can you feel nourished for a lifetime because an ancient city has never forgotten that its citizens need honest, fresh, and simple food, not only to survive but to flourish?
I know I loved Rome because of the water that streamed out my kitchen faucet, not only because it was clear and icy even in summer but because it sprang from the same mountain sources tapped by the engineers-or were they magicians?-of ancient Rome. I know I never got over the first joyful shock of seeing live green acanthus growing near the Colosseum, in the shadows of columns that are topped by stone acanthus carved thousands of years ago. I know I felt I belonged the day my butcher, standing behind his pocked marble counter, asked if I was planning a festa festa when I ordered four, not two, scaloppine of pale, pink veal. when I ordered four, not two, scaloppine of pale, pink veal.
Rome took me in the first time I saw it, a stifling August night when I was thirty-two. I stumbled into a seat along the cool marble benches that ring the Trevi Fountain, a few steps from my hotel. Two elderly matrons in freshly ironed house-dresses were taking their ease, fanning their bare arms and legs as they sat and chatted in the cool, damp air the fountain produced. Acknowledging my presence with a discreet nod of the head, they soon began peppering me with questions. When had I arrived? Two hours earlier. Allora Allora, what did I think of the Colosseum, the Forum, the Palatine, San Pietro? The larger of the two eyed me incredulously when I said that the Trevi Fountain was the only thing I had seen. They stopped their fanning. They collected themselves, took each other by the arm, and walked me slowly the few blocks to Piazza Navona, describing the city's most elegant parlor with a pride of possession so strong that they themselves might have owned it. They left me there marveling in the pink-gold splendor of the square, whose three splashing fountains somehow swallow up the din of the city, leaving s.p.a.ce only for its charms.
1.
Hungers.
Some mornings, beginning in March, I wake up hungering for green asparagus. It is a grown-up hunger, for I don't remember asparagus cravings before I was twelve or thirteen, when my father learned to braise them in b.u.t.ter under three or four leaves of dripping wet lettuce. The lettuce, lightly salted, would wilt, then give up a mild, sweet juice in which the asparagus would steam. When they were done and my father lifted the lid, a cloud of vegetable essence would fill the entire kitchen. My mother would sigh in delight at the smell of it, and even my brother, five or six at the time and still finicky in his appet.i.tes, would devour them. On those days, our hunger for asparagus was boundless.
Decades later, sudden unshakable hungers still seize me throughout the year. In winter, it might be a craving for baby artichokes, braised in olive oil and mint, eaten barely warm. In spring I often crave strawberries-the smaller, the better-sliced over a mound of fresh ricotta. In summer I long for figs, or tomatoes, their juices still warm from the sun. In fall, I want and need a fat persimmon, quartered, opened up like a flower, sprinkled with lemon juice and eaten slowly, with ceremony and a spoon.
My maternal grandmother's Neapolitan soul knew and respected these sudden cravings. She called them voglie voglie, an Italian word that can mean anything from wishes, wants, and desires to longings, fancies, or whims. But when Jennie Comparato used the word in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1950s she meant only one thing-those deep, impulsive hungers for some special seasonal feast. The word is properly p.r.o.nounced VOHL-yay VOHL-yay, with the accent on the first syllable. But all of us in the family, none of whom had ever been to Italy, heard it rather differently. "Wool-EEE" is what we used to say, Americanizing it beyond recognition. We changed the v v to a to a w, w, we changed the sound of the we changed the sound of the o o, we accented the last syllable instead of the first.
" I've got the wool-eee wool-eee for a cream cheese sandwich on date-nut bread," my mother might sigh on a particularly bleak Sat.u.r.day morning in late January when she was convinced spring would never come again. If her for a cream cheese sandwich on date-nut bread," my mother might sigh on a particularly bleak Sat.u.r.day morning in late January when she was convinced spring would never come again. If her wool-eee wool-eee was serious, she would slap on lipstick and a hat and order me out of my flannel-lined dungarees and into a hated hand-me-down skirt. She would pop me into the backseat of the Olds and drive us downtown. There, in a wood-paneled bakery and sandwich shop called Harkabus, she would satiate her desire, sighing in quiet joy at her first bite, as if that mixture of brown bread and white cheese could coax the bare magnolia in the front yard into early bloom. I never shared her enthusiasm for that particular sandwich, and she never thought to press it. was serious, she would slap on lipstick and a hat and order me out of my flannel-lined dungarees and into a hated hand-me-down skirt. She would pop me into the backseat of the Olds and drive us downtown. There, in a wood-paneled bakery and sandwich shop called Harkabus, she would satiate her desire, sighing in quiet joy at her first bite, as if that mixture of brown bread and white cheese could coax the bare magnolia in the front yard into early bloom. I never shared her enthusiasm for that particular sandwich, and she never thought to press it. Wool-eees Wool-eees were personal, and though best when shared, could not be coerced. She satisfied her soul her way and I took care of mine, with bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toast, the mayonnaise carefully sc.r.a.ped off. were personal, and though best when shared, could not be coerced. She satisfied her soul her way and I took care of mine, with bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toast, the mayonnaise carefully sc.r.a.ped off.
Jennie and the entire Comparato clan-she had seven brothers and sisters, four half brothers and half sisters-took wool-eees wool-eees seriously, never mocking or ignoring these often inexplicable desires. When a seriously, never mocking or ignoring these often inexplicable desires. When a wool-eee wool-eee erupted, they knew the stomach was speaking. And the stomach, in our family, was to be listened to attentively, not just blindly fed. In our family the stomach was only slightly less important than the brain, and according to my mother, clearly more trustworthy and often more intelligent. I was not quite sure what she meant by those words nor by the fierceness of the tone she used when uttering similar p.r.o.nouncements, all of which ended with a look into my eyes and the same tag line: "That's life-better get used to it." erupted, they knew the stomach was speaking. And the stomach, in our family, was to be listened to attentively, not just blindly fed. In our family the stomach was only slightly less important than the brain, and according to my mother, clearly more trustworthy and often more intelligent. I was not quite sure what she meant by those words nor by the fierceness of the tone she used when uttering similar p.r.o.nouncements, all of which ended with a look into my eyes and the same tag line: "That's life-better get used to it."
I thought at the time, and for many, many years, that she was talking to me when she made those p.r.o.nouncements that sounded so wise and so certain. Later I understood that she was talking mainly to herself. At any rate, by age six or seven, I knew wool-eees wool-eees bespoke nourishment and need, both of body and of soul. I knew they transcended mundane treats. Neither body nor soul could ever pretend to require a Hostess s...o...b..ll, a lemon Popsicle, or an Almond Joy. bespoke nourishment and need, both of body and of soul. I knew they transcended mundane treats. Neither body nor soul could ever pretend to require a Hostess s...o...b..ll, a lemon Popsicle, or an Almond Joy.
When I first moved to Rome, in my early thirties, it was the abundance of Roman voglie voglie that made me feel welcome, almost as if I'd moved home. Romans have that made me feel welcome, almost as if I'd moved home. Romans have voglie voglie for all manner of edible things. They are sometimes tied to the days of the week, like the need for potato gnocchi on Thursdays, or for thick pasta and chickpea soup, with rosemary and dried red pepper, on Fridays. They are sometimes tied to hours of the day, such as a craving for for all manner of edible things. They are sometimes tied to the days of the week, like the need for potato gnocchi on Thursdays, or for thick pasta and chickpea soup, with rosemary and dried red pepper, on Fridays. They are sometimes tied to hours of the day, such as a craving for spaghetti aglio, olio, e peperoncino spaghetti aglio, olio, e peperoncino late at night or for a piece of warm late at night or for a piece of warm pizza bianca pizza bianca on the way home from school. They are often tied to seasons of the year, when the body instinctively knows what it needs to eat, such as a mountain of midwinter spinach, barely warm and drizzled with olive oil and lemon; for ricotta in spring, when the cows and ewes produce their sweetest milk; for deep platters of mussels in white wine and garlic, all you can stand on a broiling summer night; for a brown paper cone of roasted chestnuts in November, just off one of the battered braziers that appear on street corners when cooler weather finally sets in. on the way home from school. They are often tied to seasons of the year, when the body instinctively knows what it needs to eat, such as a mountain of midwinter spinach, barely warm and drizzled with olive oil and lemon; for ricotta in spring, when the cows and ewes produce their sweetest milk; for deep platters of mussels in white wine and garlic, all you can stand on a broiling summer night; for a brown paper cone of roasted chestnuts in November, just off one of the battered braziers that appear on street corners when cooler weather finally sets in.
Each year my own wool-eees wool-eees grow stronger, as if by being satisfied they are heightened instead of diminished. It makes a certain sense, for if we are charmed once, and charmed again by repeating the performance, our memories hold the weight of both. So it is that toward the end of each succeeding winter, I need asparagus even more than I needed it the year before. grow stronger, as if by being satisfied they are heightened instead of diminished. It makes a certain sense, for if we are charmed once, and charmed again by repeating the performance, our memories hold the weight of both. So it is that toward the end of each succeeding winter, I need asparagus even more than I needed it the year before.
These days I find myself willing local asparagus into the market even before it is ready for harvest. By the time they actually arrive, I can almost taste them. But it is not just the taste I crave. I hunger as much, perhaps even more, for what their seasonal appearance signals: that the dark and cold and death of winter is about to yield to the sun and heat and promise of spring. I hunger then for their springy green color, for the sharp crack they make when I snap off the bottom of a muddy, fibrous, white-tipped stalk. I hunger, too, for the sight of them in an orderly, b.u.t.tered mound, their sweet, blunt tips all pointing in the same direction, lying on a thick white pottery platter and covered with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. I even hunger for the proof I have eaten them, for asparagus is the only vegetable I know that produces a vegetal, acrid smell in pee. I hunger, too, for that cloud of asparagus-lettuce perfume that used to fill our kitchen when I was twelve or thirteen, and the four of us ate them, happily.
In Rome, when I needed and wanted and simply had to have asparagus, I walked to Campo dei Fiori early to choose the pick of the lot. They would be standing upright on Signora Maria's crowded vegetable stall, wrapped in green-and-white paper, as if they were flowers, secured with a thick green rubber band so that only the fat tips showed. Back home, I would snap off the woody bottoms where they themselves knew to break. I would wash off the grit, then wish I didn't have to wait till dinner. Sometimes, if that wish was very strong, I didn't. I boiled a few right then and cooked them gently with a beaten egg to produce a filched asparagus frittata, which tastes better than anything, probably because its main ingredient has been stolen, for hunger's sake.
The first few times each season, I want them whole, with a bit of b.u.t.ter melting over them and lots of freshly grated Parmigiano. If John is traveling, I may balance my plate on my knees while sitting on my favorite stool, and this private kitchen picnic will be as satisfying as any proper meal at a well-set table. If John is in town, we'll sit at table, the platter between us, and stalk by stalk contentedly share my winter-to-spring wool-eee wool-eee. Later in the season, for variety, I may dribble a bit of good green-gold olive oil over them while they are still warm. Just as I am about to eat, I squeeze a wedge of lemon over them, and the lemon oil gets into the skin of my fingers and into the air, and the lemon juice rides in droplets atop the olive oil, and the sweetness of the asparagus mingles with the oil and juice. It is a private, heady potion, my own call to Persephone to summon spring.
When I no longer need to eat them whole, I chop them into bits and pieces to turn them into spring's best risotto, using the asparagus water in which the stalks are first cooked as a mild, sweet broth that both colors and flavors the rice. It is a vegetable tonic, helping the body and mind make that longed-for but always difficult change of seasonal gears from darkness to light. In our house, risotto is always served from a large, deep oval platter, just as it appeared on the mahogany dining table in Jersey City when John was a boy. Risotto served from a bowl or from a flat, round plate doesn't taste right to him. When I appear with a platter of asparagus risotto, the color of the soft green cloud that hovers over a tree just before it bursts into leaf, neither of us is craving just the simple ingredients that went into the pot. For me, every forkful is like each bite my mother took from her cream cheese sandwich: a rea.s.surance that winter will, in fact, finally end. For John, I think, each taste satisfies his longing for all the Tagliabues who ate supper together in the two-family house on Columbia Avenue, for Mother and Daddy; for the older boys, Charles, Robert, and Paul; for Aunt Julia, who never married; for Upstairs Grandma, who used to sing softly and absently for hours as she sat in her kitchen just above theirs.
When we returned to Rome after our years away, we arrived with another sort of craving, a hunger for normalcy, a wool-eee wool-eee for some sort of old-fashioned cure. The treatment we sought, unconsciously at first, centered on food. Not fancy food or chichi restaurants, not the latest food fads or expensive ingredients. Just the magic of honest food-fresh and wholesome-simply prepared and eaten together three times a day, from ingredients that Italians have largely been eating for millennia. Italy still celebrates one of the most primordial rituals of the human community, the daily sharing of food and fellowship around a family table. What better place to take ourselves to heal? for some sort of old-fashioned cure. The treatment we sought, unconsciously at first, centered on food. Not fancy food or chichi restaurants, not the latest food fads or expensive ingredients. Just the magic of honest food-fresh and wholesome-simply prepared and eaten together three times a day, from ingredients that Italians have largely been eating for millennia. Italy still celebrates one of the most primordial rituals of the human community, the daily sharing of food and fellowship around a family table. What better place to take ourselves to heal?
Even before the troubles began raining down, we had begun to paint Italy as a haven, a refuge, the place to recover from too much work. John was the Warsaw bureau chief for The New York Times The New York Times, I was the Eastern European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune. Each summer, nearly played out, we would collect John's children, Peter and Anna, from Germany and return to the same magical house on the steep, scrub-covered hills in Trevignano Romano, a quiet village that overlooks Lake Bracciano, an hour's drive north of Rome.
We used to arrive, pale and wan, craving the sun, the heat, the food, the wine, the daily Monopoly games, the hours of reading, the afternoon swims, the naps on the beach, the nightly stroll on the lakeside promenade with ice cream dripping off our cones. We craved the trumpet vines that surrounded our bedroom windows and the cosseting of our older friends, Ann and Joseph, who had built two simple houses on the land, to use as a weekend retreat from the daily chaos of life in Rome. After three blissful weeks in Trevignano, we would leave tanned and rested, nearly restored. The best years, we arrived at the height of fig season, when a neighbor would leave enormous wicker baskets of green-gold figs on our back steps. Anna, seven or eight then, and I would stand around the basket and devour them, three and four at a go-our luggage, even the lake, forgotten. Nothing seemed to banish our hungers more than those meltingly soft figs oozing the thick, honeyed juice of an Italian summer.
After the troubles started, then multiplied and multiplied again, we stubbornly tried to keep to our ritual summer cure. We flew to Rome, met the children, and drove back up to the lake. There were no fat figs on the steps that summer, though. The neighbor who had always welcomed us with the fruits of her tree had died suddenly, shortly before we arrived.
Even if I try to list the troubles simply, objectively, without elaboration, without a frame, I still sound to myself like one of those thin, nervous women-their lips working, their eyes not meeting the camera-who used to appear on Queen for a Day Queen for a Day and tell their tales of woe. The woman with the most pitiful story and the most copious tears won the crown and the fur-trimmed robes. She won the long-stemmed roses, and maybe a refrigerator or some big cash prize. Under the crown and the robe, the winners would sob and laugh, cry and dissolve before the whirring camera. I watched that show with horror as a child, seeing grown-up terrors of loss and suffering paraded across the little octagonal screen of our first television set. It was a peculiar show for its time, oddly un-American, designed to reward trouble, to let a loser win. But I kept my horror of it well hidden, knowing the show would be forbidden if I let on how terrified it left me. I hated to watch it but hated to miss it, afraid this key to the grown-up world of troubles and fears might get away from me. If I watched, took in, and learned its secrets, maybe I could be ready for the adult terrors that obviously were waiting to be grown into, just like the bulky winter coat bought cheap at the end of the season for the following year's wear. and tell their tales of woe. The woman with the most pitiful story and the most copious tears won the crown and the fur-trimmed robes. She won the long-stemmed roses, and maybe a refrigerator or some big cash prize. Under the crown and the robe, the winners would sob and laugh, cry and dissolve before the whirring camera. I watched that show with horror as a child, seeing grown-up terrors of loss and suffering paraded across the little octagonal screen of our first television set. It was a peculiar show for its time, oddly un-American, designed to reward trouble, to let a loser win. But I kept my horror of it well hidden, knowing the show would be forbidden if I let on how terrified it left me. I hated to watch it but hated to miss it, afraid this key to the grown-up world of troubles and fears might get away from me. If I watched, took in, and learned its secrets, maybe I could be ready for the adult terrors that obviously were waiting to be grown into, just like the bulky winter coat bought cheap at the end of the season for the following year's wear.
The troubles that, in fact, were waiting started in Prague on November 17, 1989, the first night of what later came to be called the Velvet Revolution against the country's Communist leaders. Czechoslovak ant.i.terrorist police waded into a peaceful crowd of student demonstrators and beat everyone in reach. I was there to report on it and they beat me unconscious in the street, then dragged me off with a colleague who had tried to intervene, hauling us into a building entryway, where they could continue to beat us, with impunity and without witnesses.
Five weeks later it was John's turn. Two nights before Christmas, a sniper hiding in the darkness of a city street in Timioara, Romania, fired at the two-door Peugeot in which John was riding, shattering the car windows, tearing through doors, dashboard, seats, trunk, engine, and roof. The car was demolished, but neither the Frenchman at the wheel nor the two other Americans in the backseat were hit. John was struck by only one bullet, which he remembers "scurrying like a mouse" across his entire middle before he pa.s.sed out.
I know that a riot stick connecting with a human target makes a sharp thwack thwacking sound when it hits a skull, and a slightly m.u.f.fled, duller thwock thwock when it hits flesh. I know that hundreds of shiny white plastic riot sticks catch and reflect streetlamps as they whoosh and flail like crazed metronomes in cold night air. I know what a gunshot sounds like. But I wasn't there when John was shot, so I can only wonder about the specifics of the scene. Was there a flash of white light when the sniper squeezed the trigger? Or maybe just a dirty yellow spark? I'd like to know if the bullet was spit out with a spike of blue smoke, or whether a puff of gray fume wafted lazily up into the December night. Had I been standing hard by, would I have heard the bullet cut the air? Would it have whined or screamed or whispered or made no sound at all? when it hits flesh. I know that hundreds of shiny white plastic riot sticks catch and reflect streetlamps as they whoosh and flail like crazed metronomes in cold night air. I know what a gunshot sounds like. But I wasn't there when John was shot, so I can only wonder about the specifics of the scene. Was there a flash of white light when the sniper squeezed the trigger? Or maybe just a dirty yellow spark? I'd like to know if the bullet was spit out with a spike of blue smoke, or whether a puff of gray fume wafted lazily up into the December night. Had I been standing hard by, would I have heard the bullet cut the air? Would it have whined or screamed or whispered or made no sound at all?
I needed fifteen simple st.i.tches to close the two long gashes in my head and a couple of weeks for my hugely swollen face to look again like mine. Had my beating been the sum of it, I probably would have nursed a longtime fear of uniformed men wielding riot sticks, but would have few other lingering concerns. But a bullet that pierces a car door, a parka, a sports coat, a sweater, a shirt, trousers, and underwear-a bullet that splits a belt in two, then chews its way across a body I knew and loved-causes an entirely different level of injury. The body is only the first victim; the soul, the psyche, the spirit are each ripped apart as well. People who had learned this lesson in their own particular ways-a wise hospital orderly in Munich, friends who had lost a child, an acquaintance who had once been knifed in the chest-tried to warn us early on that our lives would never be quite the same. They tried to let us know that any biography-changing trauma such as a car wreck or a heart attack was likely to split a life in two, into the time before and the time after.
But we weren't ready to take in their wisdom. It was only over the years that we began to understand that the troubles that befall us alter, permanently, not only our view of the world but our position in it. We still had so very much to learn. Who would have thought that patience could be a vice? And anger a virtue? Who would have thought that there are times when it is not only natural to feel angry and impatient but of enormous importance to demand that a sick person show signs of getting better? Who would have thought that the most fundamental of human rituals-buying, preparing, eating, and sharing our daily bread-would have become our tether to normal life as we struggled to make the crossing from our old life before to our new life after?
The Romanian surgeon who first saved John's life said the bullet slammed into his right side, shattering his pelvis and sending shards of bone deep into the surrounding muscles. The German surgeons who saved his life later said the bullet then tumbled and danced its way across the rest of him, skimming close enough under his spine to shatter the tip of one vertebra and slightly fracture two more. Ultimately, though, it skimmed under his spinal column and chewed across the rest of him, exiting his left side just above what was left of his belt. Doctors-first in Timioara, and later in Munich-had to cut open John's back to expose and clean the tunnel the bullet had made. They had to clean out the bits of bone, metal, paint, dirt, grease, and shredded cloth that the bullet carried with it. They had to kill the inevitable infection that followed, and weeks later, when there was enough new flesh to st.i.tch, they had to sew up the long, deep trench-about as wide and deep as my forearm-that they and the bullet had made.
No one ever found the bullet that found John, so the experts were forced to theorize about what exactly hit him. The Romanian doctors thought it was a dumdum, a soft-nosed bullet that expands upon hitting a target so as to produce maximum damage as it travels through the body. One of the Munich surgeons, an avid hunter, said the bullet may have been absolutely ordinary, but that the impact of bullet against car door, bullet against pelvic bone, so destabilized its course that it mimicked the malignant bob and weave of a dumdum.
Whatever it was, we still have a fabric footprint of how and where the bullet slipped in. Romanian hospital workers somehow managed to save most of John's clothes despite the b.l.o.o.d.y bedlam of an ill-equipped hospital emergency room inundated with casualties when the revolution erupted in Timioara a few days earlier. The staff wrapped John in his parka before our emergency flight to Munich, and he actually wore it a couple of times the following winter, but only till we managed to replace it. The holes were too noticeable, too disquieting, and we finally threw that parka out. We stashed his sports jacket and khakis out of sight in an old wooden cupboard. Later, I cut them up, saving a few square inches around the holes where the bullet slipped in. Then I stuffed them into a drawer along with everything else I had saved from the shooting, enough to fill a four-inch-thick binder.
If I pull the swatches out of the file, I can see two raggedy holes in the herringbone tweed where the bullet entered the bunched-up sports jacket. Far clearer is the single hole in the khakis, perfectly centered on the seam where waistband meets trousers, directly above the right rear pocket. I used to look at these bits of cloth occasionally, as if they could tell me what had happened and why. But no matter how many times I looked, the holes refused to speak.
Years later, I still have difficulty even connecting them to a shooting. Shootings, I still like to think, happen to drug dealers or innocent pa.s.sersby in New York, to foreign tourists visiting Miami. They happen to people who clean guns or keep them under their beds. They happen to soldiers, to policemen, to mafiosi, to people who have enemies. They don't happen to my husband, my family, to me. I suspect my response of utter disbelief is standard for anyone who hasn't been blindsided by some sort of shock: the sudden diagnosis of a rampaging cancer, the overnight loss of a family's life savings. Shocks like these hammer home the notion that a history of good luck is no amulet for the future.
2.
Eating Out.
In some ways, I think a move to Italy was destined to be as much in my future as a move from Italy had been in my family's past. As a child, I moved only once, from the Fairfield side of Ash Creek to the Bridgeport side. We went from a two-bedroom flat we rented to a three-bedroom house we owned; from a lumbering two-family house overlooking a reedy marsh full of red-winged blackbirds to a two-story, single-family colonial, whose western windows looked out over the broad expanse of a salt.w.a.ter tidal basin full of gulls. I was nine, my brother, Danny, two, and my mother always said that we spent that entire first day clattering up and down the straight wooden staircase that led to our new, separate bedrooms.
My parents never dreamed of moving again, and my brother still lives an hour away from the old house, but it seems the delight that took hold of me that first moving day left me hungry to move on. Family history played a role, too. My family had started out in Italy; at some elemental level I needed to go back, to see what they had left and why, to see what my life might have been like had my grandparents or their families not packed their trunks and gone to l'America. l'America.
My first move on my own, to college just west of Boston, was the bliss of freedom. The move to a cramped apartment in Hart-ford, Connecticut, nearly four years later, to marry, was all joy. The move to a quirky flat in the top story of a historic house in Plainville, Connecticut, was magic, especially when I landed my first reporting job at a nearby newspaper. The move to a Dallas suburb three years later-during an endless New England cold spell that left me shivering in our thin-walled, insulation-free apartment-was a revelation: one could actually avoid winter, forever, with something as simple as a move.
My next move, alone, to an old neighborhood of down-at-the-heel wooden houses in Dallas itself, was painful but right. My six-year-old marriage had long been dying, and a judge was about to grant the divorce my first husband had sought. The house that I spent the next three years restoring was my psychologist. I hammered, sanded, patched, painted, laid floors and sub-floors, ordered wallpaper, planted iris, staked tomatoes, picked green beans, and tended herbs in a heat so intense that my basil plants grew waist high. I could rock to and fro in one of my old front-veranda swings and smell the basil baking in the sunshine or the figs drying on the branches of the old tree that kept the sun at bay.
It didn't bother me that I no longer had a bed, and was sleeping on foam camping mats on the restored parquet flooring of my new bedroom. With a window seat as my headboard, I lay happily under twelve-foot ceilings and a glittering crystal chandelier that had been so obscured by sixty-five years of grime and dust that I initially thought it was made of black plastic. My mother came to visit shortly after I moved in, to make sure I was surviving the divorce proceedings, the first in our family. It was a singular moment, with a certain fragility hanging in the air, not only because neither of us dared bicker with the other for the few days we were together. I was twenty-eight, she sixty-one, and over a long pot of tea and slices of apple cake at an old-style cafe not far from downtown, she told me a story I had never heard, a story that, in a heartbeat, seemed to explain the central puzzle of my childhood. Her story, though I didn't know it at the time, would also prepare me in some ways for what was to come later in my life with John.
Squeezing lemon into her tea, she spoke in a confessional tone I had never before heard her use. She told me she had developed the baby blues after my birth. Not the normal come-and-go baby blues but the kind that come and stay. This being the 1950s, and my mother never given to revelations, she kept her illness secret, except for the family. Her older sister, Marie, would call her daily to try to get her to stop sobbing. Auntie would talk and talk, telling her to put on her coat and hat, dress me warmly, pop me into my carriage, and get out into the fresh air. My mother usually managed to follow her sister's advice, day after day pushing the carriage across the Ash Creek bridge into Black Rock, tears rolling down her cheeks, her favorite epithet, "sonofab.i.t.c.h," escaping softly, in whispers, into the air.
The only professional advice she remembered receiving came from the doctor who delivered me. "He clapped me on the shoulder," she said, her voice still shaking with rage and emotion nearly three decades later. "He clapped me on my shoulder and told me to buck up," she said. " 'You've got a nice baby there to take care of. Get on with it.' " She tried, heroically, it seems to me now. And with my father pitching in when he got home from work, and my mother's parents pitching in while he was at the office, and my aunt playing psychologist by phone and in person, time went by. Still terribly ill by the time I turned two, she underwent electroshock therapy, done as an outpatient procedure in those days, and soon she came around.
She told me that a miscarriage a couple of years later sent her back for more shock treatments, after six months of depression. A second miscarriage provoked the same response, the same treatment. My brother's birth, seven years after mine, provoked a yearlong collapse, she said, but a last round of shock treatments brought her out of it again.
I sat across from her, our cake plates empty, our teacups drained. I had no memories of anything she had related. Nonetheless, the puzzle pieces of my childhood suddenly seemed to find their place. Much as she loved me, she found me a source of both joy and pain. My birth had made her a mother; my birth had made her insane. Her story explained her shakiness, her anger, her mood swings, our complicated mother-daughter life, my uneasiness in her presence, the reason I disliked hugging her. Had I known all this earlier, I would not have had to fight so hard to keep her at bay.
" Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I asked, without a trace of my usual pique.
"Because I was afraid you wouldn't want to have children," she said. She paused a moment, looking at the crumbs left on the solid, white cafe china. Then she looked up. "Having children is the best," she said, taking a breath. "And the worst."
Two years earlier, in 1977, my first husband and I had moved to Texas so that I could take a job with United Press International. My salary more than doubled-providential, since my husband was out of work-but it was UPI's nature as an international news agency that interested me most, for it meant the chance of a transatlantic posting sometime in the future. Dallas back then was a tight, closed world so provincial that a local, university-educated colleague was deeply shocked the day he learned I was a Catholic, despite my blue eyes and dirty-blond hair. "Darlin'," he muttered, "you sure don't look Mezkin." After five years in Dallas-and three weeks after I finished restoring my beloved old house-I finally got the first of the transatlantic transfers I had been hoping for. Within months I was living alone in London, editing UPI copy from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and helping cover, at a distance, Britain's improbable war over the Falkland Islands. I was thirty-two. Later UPI transferred me to Madrid and then back to London before bouncing me, a year later, to Rome, a city I so loved I was not sure I could ever leave.
I would probably be living there now if I had not met John late in the summer of 1985. Long based in Bonn, the former West German capital, John was on a yearlong a.s.signment in Rome. We met in pa.s.sing on a broiling August day at an outdoor pool where foreign reporters could swim practically for free. A couple of weeks later we met again, when a small group of mutual friends got together at a restaurant whose terrace, crammed with vines and plants, enjoyed the slight breeze that often descends upon Rome late of an August evening. My brother, visiting from Connecticut, was with me that night, as was Lou, a writer and English professor who was one of my closest friends. Both of them took to John that evening as easily as I did.
My brother had to fly back to the States the next day, but Lou was with me a week later when John made good on his offer to cook everybody one of his mother's best risottos. The recipe started out like a risotto alla milanese, risotto alla milanese, made with b.u.t.ter, onion, rice, chicken broth, saffron, and Parmigiano, but ended up enriched with dried porcini mushrooms and skinny made with b.u.t.ter, onion, rice, chicken broth, saffron, and Parmigiano, but ended up enriched with dried porcini mushrooms and skinny luganega luganega sausage cut into what John described as " Tootsie Roll-sized pieces." sausage cut into what John described as " Tootsie Roll-sized pieces."
Wedged into the narrow galley kitchen of a colleague, John seemed utterly at home as he whipped up the meal, sidling from countertop to stove and doling out joke instructions: insisting that the onions be cut just so, wheedling for a bit of red wine for the cook, and suddenly breaking into a mad whistling as he began to grate the Parmigiano. "You absolutely have have to whistle while grating the cheese," he announced, raking the cheese across an old-fashioned hand grater and explaining that in a household with four large, hungry boys and a very large, hungry father, Parmigiano always had a way of mysteriously disappearing during the grating process in their Jersey City kitchen. His mother, he said, could only keep to her budget if she required her helpers to whistle as they grated, for as long as they were whistling, they could not be eating it when her back was turned. to whistle while grating the cheese," he announced, raking the cheese across an old-fashioned hand grater and explaining that in a household with four large, hungry boys and a very large, hungry father, Parmigiano always had a way of mysteriously disappearing during the grating process in their Jersey City kitchen. His mother, he said, could only keep to her budget if she required her helpers to whistle as they grated, for as long as they were whistling, they could not be eating it when her back was turned.
John, who had tucked a dish towel into his trouser waistband to serve as an ap.r.o.n, cooked a huge batch of risotto that night, and Lou and I and the other friends who were there finished it off in short order, marveling that none of us had ever eaten a risotto like it before. When somebody murmured that she was full, John responded without missing a beat, "Barrels are full. You You have had sufficient." He looked at us and laughed: "Chapter three, verse two, May Tagliabue's own Bible of personal rules of behavior." have had sufficient." He looked at us and laughed: "Chapter three, verse two, May Tagliabue's own Bible of personal rules of behavior."
Since my own kitchen was minuscule, with no oven and just two tiny gas burners, Lou offered to host a similar meal a week or two later so that I could make good on my offer to make the group one of my family's favorite dishes, gnocchi verdi gnocchi verdi-tiny, light dumplings made with ricotta and spinach-served with a mild, b.u.t.tery tomato sauce enriched with a bit of cream. Late one night we all crowded into Lou's small kitchen while I made the gnocchi dough. John pitched in to help with the messy job of forming cherry-sized gnocchi in the floured palms of our hands. Laughing and chatting easily, we rolled and rolled the sticky dough in tiny b.a.l.l.s as flour flew in all directions. Even Lou, fastidious to a fault, agreed the floury mess on his countertop and floor was easily worth the taste.
Maybe it was John's Jersey accent or his help in the kitchen that so reminded me of home. Maybe it was his innate gentleness or the kindness and light I saw in his eyes. Maybe it was that he looked like a cross between Alan Alda and my mother's cousin Tom, or that his face was as boyish as his too-short chinos. Whatever it was, all I knew was that within a few weeks, for the first time since my divorce six years earlier, I felt drawn to a man instead of wanting to flee; felt promise, not fear.
John and I first came to know each other over what seems now like an endless series of dinner tables, most of them set on the cobblestones outside simple Roman trattorie, because when one works until ten or eleven or midnight, night after night, movies or concerts or museums are not real options. So after John had finished filing his nightly story and after I had closed the UPI bureau, we fell into the habit of meeting up with other reporter friends for late, light, cheap suppers of honest food and nonstop conversation.
It was here-over tables covered in white butcher paper, tables that wobbled on the uneven cobblestones, over small pitchers of Rome's trademark sour white wines-that John and I watched and listened to each other kibitzing with friends, where we first dared to open up to each other. We would talk and eat, eat and talk, for hours, all under makeshift roofs of giant white canvas...o...b..elloni ombrelloni, oversized parasols that spout like mushrooms outside so many Roman restaurants.
We might talk about the day's news, Italian politics, Vatican p.r.o.nouncements, boneheaded editors, whatever new archaeological or architectural details we might have discovered that day, for bella Roma bella Roma is an endless trove of nooks and crannies filled with visual treasures just waiting to be noticed during a morning stroll to the market or the office: a tiny fountain in the shape of a foot-long barrel tucked into the facade of an otherwise nondescript palazzo; the ornately carved capital of an ancient Roman column peeking out of a pockmarked, dirty wall. is an endless trove of nooks and crannies filled with visual treasures just waiting to be noticed during a morning stroll to the market or the office: a tiny fountain in the shape of a foot-long barrel tucked into the facade of an otherwise nondescript palazzo; the ornately carved capital of an ancient Roman column peeking out of a pockmarked, dirty wall.
Working our way through small bowls of spaghetti with fresh baby clams, or a small grilled sea ba.s.s, a mound of barely cooked spinach, or bowls of tiny blueberries, raspberries, and currants, we would talk, listen, debate, argue, regale. John, who had studied and taught Latin at Bonn University and worked at an inst.i.tute of medieval Latin for years before becoming a reporter, had a way of mixing the erudite with the goofy, going on at length in pig Latin, then bringing in a few lines from Horace or Virgil to hammer his point home. Once the cooling night air signaled it would soon be time to end the evening, his jokes would start coming. John would somehow manage to get us laughing at his father's oldest, corniest jokes-What was the head singing as it floated down the Hudson River? "I ain't got no-body," he would warble-before we settled our bills and adjourned.
When I recall those evenings, I always think of that magical moment, hours after sunset, when Rome's night breezes began blowing out the hot, stale air of the day, when that curious mix of city streetlamps, car headlights, and restaurant lanterns started casting a magical pink-gold light across a seventeenth-century palazzo's crumbling ochre walls or over a Baroque facade half hidden by a wall of ivy or Virginia creeper. The sensation I had of having eaten well, of having talked away the burdens of the day, of having laughed and joked and relaxed, of having felt embraced and supported by food and drink and talk and companionship, unconsciously brought to mind those comforting meals I used to eat-day after day, year after year-around my family's kitchen table.
One night after a long, lazy supper out with friends, John and I decided to take a walk on the Pincio, a steep, high ridge on the edge of the Borghese Gardens that looks west across the center of Rome toward the Tiber and beyond to the enormous dome of St. Peter's. It has been a magical view, I would guess, since the days of the emperors, when the ancients strolled through the same sort of pleasure gardens, then known as the Horti Pinciani. We stood on the broad lookout of the Pincian parapet, where even without moonlight we could make out dozens of church cupolas, St. Peter's great dome the most visible of all. We stood, content, gazing across Rome's night skyline and picked out the domes we could most easily identify, the ziggurat top of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, the broad, flattish dome of the ancient Pantheon, the grand dome of Santa Maria del Popolo, which rose literally at our feet.
I remember that night we sat, content, on a green park bench as words tumbled out of us w.i.l.l.y-nilly in a way neither of us had experienced before. John told me about the wooden astrolabe, quadrant, and s.e.xtant he had built when he was nine or ten after founding a club, the Junior Men of the Sea, and how he and his friends would climb his garage roof in Jersey City to try to sight the North Star. In turn, I told him about the fishing lines my sixth-grade friend Jeannie and I would cast into Long Island Sound when the snapper blues were running, and how we would scream with joy when those tiny voracious bluefish would seize the raw bacon we had used as bait.
John told me about his father, who could be the life of the party one moment, sad and teary the next. I told him about my mother, another life of the party, who loved to push away her fears on a ballroom dance floor.
John told me how filled with joy he had been during his first three years as a young monk in a Trappist monastery just after high school. He told me how he had fallen into a depression during his last year at the monastery, how electroshock treatments had helped bring him round, how bereft he felt later when he returned to the world outside the abbey walls. His talk of beating depression, given my mother's history, only made him feel more familiar.
I told him how full of joy and promise I too had been when I first married, and how deeply I had longed for a pa.s.sel of children, preferably boys, to avoid another complicated mother-daughter life. I told him how bereft I too had felt later, when I first realized that my marriage had irretrievably failed. I told him about lying on my back in bed, awake and alone one awful night in Dallas years earlier, when I suddenly realized that the thought of having children with my first husband brought only cold horror, not joy, to my mind. I told him how my left arm had been half hanging off the edge of that unhappy bed and how I felt as if my blood and soul had drained out of my dangling fingertips, and with them, the marriage and the children I had once hoped to have.
We were still sitting on that green park bench when I finished speaking, and as I looked at John I felt a sorrow deep inside me dislodge. The horror of that Dallas night began to melt, the sadness that had settled in with the horror fading away, too.
Suddenly the tall, thin, brown-haired man with the kind brown eyes who was sitting beside me on that green park bench seemed utterly familiar, as if I had known him for decades. Suddenly, seamlessly, we seemed to be talking about the future, our future, together.
John remembers experiencing that same sense of familiarity just after we met, a feeling that after years of trying, he had finally come home. " I knew very quickly that wherever you were would be home," he wrote to me recently. "That's been true even after twenty years and more."
I know I came to love John because he wrote chatty letters home to his mother every week, because even in his forties he called her "Mother"; because he still referred to his father, long dead, as "Daddy." I came to love him because he never stopped talking about his parents, three brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, and above all, about his children, Peter and Anna. I came to love him because his family was enormous, as mine once had been.
As time pa.s.sed I loved him because he spoke broadly and listened deeply, because I knew he would never bore me, no matter how long we lived. I loved him because he could speak English, Italian, German, Spanish, French, and Latin, because he could read ancient Greek and a smattering of Hebrew. I loved him because he could not read music, but could read and sing Gregorian chant. I loved him because he was not afraid of tears, his own or mine. I loved him because he grew up eating not just pasta but also, like my family, polenta, that cheap, yellow cornmeal mush that kept generations of northern Italian peasants from starving. I loved him because he loved the two children he had, and because he told me he wished he could give me a child, too.
I loved John also because, like me, he liked to cook as much as he liked to eat, because both of us grew up in homes where honest food was the central magnet that brought us all to the same table two or three times a day. I loved him because both of us were blessed with a metabolism that let us eat with pleasure, not guilt. I loved him also because both our families came to the table not just to eat, but to talk, laugh, share our problems, share our lives. I loved him because I could envision a lifetime of ordinary meals together, alone or with good friends who might share our sense of what nourishment really means. I loved him because he knew that good talk, good books, good music were one staff of life, and that simple, good food, shared with others, was the second. I loved him because he was smart enough to know that food was a lot more than fuel.
That both of us were working as foreign correspondents made our courtship easier, for only another reporter (or perhaps an obstetrician) could understand completely that when the job called, all other life went on hold. Even though John was in Rome for much of the next year, neither of us ever spent much time in the same place. Much of our courtship was, in fact, spent apart, because of the nature of the daily news business. Long and short absences were, from the beginning, part of our life together. Even before John returned to Bonn, we were used to depending on telegrams, letters, cards, telephones, and telexes-a clunky, international communications service dating back to the 1930s that sent and received hand-punched messages by teleprinter-to stay in touch. I have a file full of yellowing messages sent from wherever John happened to be working that remind me how happy we both were to have found each other, how the knowledge of each other's existence was enough to keep happy two people who had for years been feeling essentially alone. That we were usually in different cities or countries did not seem an insurmountable problem, as long as we knew the other could be reached by written or spoken word.
About eighteen months after we met, John's editors in New York named him Warsaw bureau chief. Even better, the Times Times gave him five months off from reporting duties to learn Polish. Overjoyed at the opportunity of actually being paid to learn a new language, John threw himself into intensive, one-on-one language studies with a Polish university student eight hours a day, six days a week. gave him five months off from reporting duties to learn Polish. Overjoyed at the opportunity of actually being paid to learn a new language, John threw himself into intensive, one-on-one language studies with a Polish university student eight hours a day, six days a week.
His cla.s.ses were scheduled to end in August 1987, two years after we had met, and when he asked me to marry him and move to Poland with him, I did not hesitate to accept. It meant giving up the UPI job that had brought me to Europe, but I would happily freelance in order to be with John-and then, serendipitously, I was hired by the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune as Eastern European correspondent. The wedding we initially envisioned in Warsaw would turn out to be bureaucratically impossible, but I see that now as providential. Our wedding ended up being celebrated-four years after we had met-in Rome, where we would eventually return, much sooner than we'd ever dreamed, to find sustenance and strength at a time of seemingly endless woe. It seemed right that the place that initially brought us together, as friends, lovers, and then as man and wife, would also be the place that held us together through our later trials. as Eastern European correspondent. The wedding we initially envisioned in Warsaw would turn out to be bureaucratically impossible, but I see that now as providential. Our wedding ended up being celebrated-four years after we had met-in Rome, where we would eventually return, much sooner than we'd ever dreamed, to find sustenance and strength at a time of seemingly endless woe. It seemed right that the place that initially brought us together, as friends, lovers, and then as man and wife, would also be the place that held us together through our later trials.
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