I needed to make some friends. So I got busy with it, and now it is October and I have a nice assortment1 of them. I know two Elizabeths in Rome now, besides myself. Both are American, both are writers. The first Elizabeth is a novelist and the second Elizabeth is a food writer. With an apartment in Rome, a house in Umbria, an Italian husband and a job that requires her to travel around Italy eating food and writing about it for Gourmet2, it appears that the second Elizabeth must have saved a lot of orphans3 from drowning during a previous lifetime. Unsurprisingly, she knows all the best places to eat in Rome, including a gelateria that serves a frozen rice pudding (and if they don't serve this kind of thing in heaven, then I really don't want to go there). She took me out to lunch the other day, and what we ate included not only lamb and truffles and carpaccio rolled around hazelnut mousse but an exotic little serving of pickled lampascione, which is--as everyone knows--the bulb of the wild hyacinth.
Of course, by now I've also made friends with Giovanni and Dario, my Tandem4 Language Exchange fantasy twins. Giovanni's sweetness, in my opinion, makes him a national treasure of Italy. He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated5 with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, "Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new." Sometimes I feel like he's older than me, what with his solemn brow and his philosophy degree and his serious political opinions. I like to try to make him laugh, but Giovanni doesn't always get my jokes. Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, "When you are ironic6, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder."
And I thought, Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I am the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!
But still, he has not kissed me.
I don't very often see Dario, the other twin, though he does spend a lot of his time with Sofie. Sofie is my best friend from my language class, and she's definitely somebody you'd want to spend your time with, too, if you were Dario. Sofie is Swedish and in her late twenties and so damn cute you could put her on a hook and use her as bait to catch men of all different nationalities and ages. Sofie has just taken a four-month leave of absence from her good job in a Swedish bank, much to the horror of her family and bewilderment of her colleagues, only because she wanted to come to Rome and learn how to speak beautiful Italian. Every day after class, Sofie and I go sit by the Tiber, eating our gelato and studying with each other. You can't even rightly call it "studying," the thing that we do. It's more like a shared relishing7 of the Italian language, an almost worshipful ritual, and we're always offering each other new wonderful idioms. Like, for instance, we just learned the other day that un'amica stretta means "a close friend." But stretta literally8 means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is one you that can wear tightly, snug9 against your skin, and that is what my little Swedish friend Sofie is becoming to me.
At the beginning, I liked to think that Sofie and I looked like sisters. Then we were taking a taxi through Rome the other day and the guy driving the cab asked if Sofie was my daughter. Now, folks--the girl is only about seven years younger than I am. My mind went into such a spin-control mode, trying to explain away what he'd said. (For instance, I thought, Maybe this native Roman cabdriver doesn't speak Italian very well, and meant to ask if we were sisters.) But, no. He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh, what can I say? I've been through a lot in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after this divorce. But as that old country-western song out of Texas goes, "I've been screwed and sued and tattooed10, and I'm still standin' here in front of you . . ."
I've also become friends with a cool couple named Maria and Giulio, introduced to me by my friend Anne--an American painter who lived in Rome a few years back. Maria is from America, Giulio's from the south of Italy. He's a filmmaker, she works for an international agricultural policy organization. He doesn't speak great English, but she speaks fluent Italian (and also fluent French and Chinese, so that's not intimidating). Giulio wants to learn English, and asked if he could practice conversing11 with me in another Tandem Exchange. In case you're wondering why he couldn't just study English with his American-born wife, it's because they're married and they fight too much whenever one tries to teach anything to the other one. So Giulio and I now meet for lunch twice a week to practice our Italian and English; a good task for two people who don't have any history of irritating each other.
Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in thick black magic marker) because they were having an argument and "he yells louder than me" and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.
I think Maria is terrifically sexy, and this burst of passionate12 graffiti is only further evidence of it. Interestingly, though, Giulio sees the scrawled-upon wall as a sure sign of Maria's repression13, because she wrote her curses against him in Italian, and Italian is her second language, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose her words. He said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger--which she never does, because she's a good Anglo-Protestant--then she would have written all over that wall in her native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they do blow up.
What I love is that we all had this conversation over a nice relaxed dinner, while looking at the wall itself.
"More wine, honey?" asked Maria.
But my newest best friend in Italy is, of course, Luca Spaghetti. Even in Italy, by the way, it's considered a very funny thing to have a last name like Spaghetti. I'm grateful for Luca because he has finally allowed me to get even with my friend Brian, who was lucky enough to have grown up next door to a Native American kid named Dennis Ha-Ha, and therefore could always boast that he had the friend with the coolest name. Finally, I can offer competition.
Luca also speaks perfect English and is a good eater (in Italian, una buona forchetta--a good fork), so he's terrific company for the hungry likes of me. He often calls in the middle of the day to say, "Hey, I'm in your neighborhood--want to meet up for a quick cup of coffee? Or a plate of oxtail?" We spend a lot of time in these dirty little dives in the back streets of Rome. We like the restaurants with the fluorescent15 lighting16 and no name listed outside. Plastic red-checkered tablecloths17. Homemade limoncello liqueur. Homemade red wine. Pasta served in unbelievable quantities by what Luca calls "little Julius Caesars"--proud, pushy18, local guys with hair on the backs of their hands and passionately19 tended pompadours. I once said to Luca, "It seems to me these guys consider themselves Romans first, Italians second and Europeans third." He corrected me. "No--they are Romans first, Romans second and Romans third. And every one of them is an Emperor."
Luca is a tax accountant. An Italian tax accountant, which means that he is, in his own description, "an artist," because there are several hundred tax laws on the books in Italy and all of them contradict each other. So filing a tax return here requires jazzlike improvisation20. I think it's funny that he's a tax accountant, because it seems like such stiff work for such a lighthearted guy. On the other hand, Luca thinks it's funny that there's another side of me--this Yoga side--that he's never seen. He can't imagine why I would want to go to India--and to an Ashram, of all places!--when I could just stay in Italy all year, which is obviously where I belong. Whenever he watches me sopping21 up the leftover22 gravy23 from my plate with a hunk of bread and then licking my fingers, he says, "What are you going to eat when you go to India?" Sometimes he calls me Gandhi, in a most ironic tone, generally when I'm opening the second bottle of wine.
Luca has traveled a fair amount, though he claims he could never live anywhere but in Rome, near his mother, since he is an Italian man, after all--what can he say? But it's not just his mamma who keeps him around. He's in his early thirties, and has had the same girlfriend since he was a teenager (the lovely Giuliana, whom Luca describes fondly and aptly as acqua e sapone--"soap and water" in her sweet innocence). All his friends are the same friends he's had since childhood, and all from the same neighborhood. They watch the soccer matches together every Sunday--either at the stadium or in a bar (if the Roman teams are playing away)--and then they all return separately to the homes where they grew up, in order to eat the big Sunday afternoon meals cooked by their respective mothers and grandmothers.
I wouldn't move from Rome, either, if I were Luca Spaghetti.
Luca has visited America a few times, though, and likes it. He finds New York City fascinating but thinks that people work too hard there, though he admits they seem to enjoy it. Whereas Romans work hard and resent it massively. What Luca Spaghetti doesn't like is American food, which he says can be described in two words: "Amtrak Pizza."
I was with Luca the first time I ever tried eating the intestines24 of a newborn lamb. This is a Roman specialty25. Food-wise, Rome is actually a pretty rough town, known for its coarse traditional fare like guts26 and tongues--all the parts of the animal the rich people up north throw away. My lamb intestines tasted OK, as long as I didn't think too much about what they were. They were served in a heavy, buttery, savory27 gravy that itself was terrific, but the intestines had a kind of . . . well . . . intestinal28 consistency29. Kind of like liver, but mushier. I did well with them until I started trying to think how I would describe this dish, and I thought, It doesn't look like intestines. It actually looks like tapeworms. Then I pushed it aside and asked for a salad.
"You don't like it?" asked Luca, who loves the stuff.
"I bet Gandhi never ate lamb intestines in his life," I said.
"He could have."
"No, he couldn't have, Luca. Gandhi was a vegetarian30."
"But vegetarians31 can eat this," Luca insisted. "Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz. They're just shit."
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1
assortment
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| n.分类，各色俱备之物，聚集 | |
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gourmet
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| n.食物品尝家；adj.出于美食家之手的 | |
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orphans
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| 孤儿( orphan的名词复数 ) | |
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tandem
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| n.同时发生；配合；adv.一个跟着一个地；纵排地；adj.（两匹马）前后纵列的 | |
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frustrated
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| adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧 | |
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ironic
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| adj.讽刺的，有讽刺意味的，出乎意料的 | |
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relishing
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| v.欣赏( relish的现在分词 )；从…获得乐趣；渴望 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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snug
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| adj.温暖舒适的，合身的，安全的；v.使整洁干净，舒适地依靠，紧贴；n.（英）酒吧里的私房 | |
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tattooed
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| v.刺青，文身( tattoo的过去式和过去分词 )；连续有节奏地敲击；作连续有节奏的敲击 | |
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conversing
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| v.交谈，谈话( converse的现在分词 ) | |
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12
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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repression
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| n.镇压，抑制，抑压 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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fluorescent
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| adj.荧光的，发出荧光的 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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tablecloths
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| n.桌布，台布( tablecloth的名词复数 ) | |
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pushy
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| adj.固执己见的，一意孤行的 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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improvisation
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| n.即席演奏(或演唱)；即兴创作 | |
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sopping
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| adj. 浑身湿透的 动词sop的现在分词形式 | |
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leftover
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| n.剩货，残留物，剩饭；adj.残余的 | |
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gravy
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| n.肉汁；轻易得来的钱，外快 | |
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intestines
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| n.肠( intestine的名词复数 ) | |
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specialty
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| n.(speciality)特性，特质；专业，专长 | |
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guts
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| v.狼吞虎咽，贪婪地吃，飞碟游戏（比赛双方每组5人，相距15码，互相掷接飞碟）；毁坏（建筑物等）的内部( gut的第三人称单数 )；取出…的内脏n.勇气( gut的名词复数 )；内脏；消化道的下段；肠 | |
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savory
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| adj.风味极佳的，可口的，味香的 | |
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intestinal
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| adj.肠的；肠壁；肠道细菌 | |
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consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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vegetarian
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| n.素食者；adj.素食的 | |
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vegetarians
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| n.吃素的人( vegetarian的名词复数 )；素食者；素食主义者；食草动物 | |
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