Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
The North for the historian Tacitus was nothingness, “a huge and shapeless tract of country.”38 The emperor Caligula’s soldiers preferred mutiny to sailing across the English Channel because, they believed, it was so abundantly populated with mermaids.39 Narwhal tusks were sold as unicorn horns—and why not? It’s a lot easier to believe in a horned horse than in a bulbous white whale hunting seals beneath pack ice.
Mastodon bones that turned up in floods were the bones of giants. The phoenix, wrote Pliny, “is as large as an eagle, and has a gleam of gold round its neck and all the rest of it is purple.”40 Lions understood the meaning of prayers, and certain snakes, he claimed, “could catch and gulp down birds passing over them even though they were flying high and fast.”41
People ate donkey foals, stuffed dormice, stewed larks. There were words you could not say. Witchcraft was real. Asses’ milk relieved facial wrinkles; bear fat, mixed with lamp soot, prevented baldness. Scraping your gums with a tooth taken from a man who died a violent death was believed to relieve soreness.42 Pregnant women who wanted their children to be good-looking were urged to look at good-looking things.
The poet Statius tells this story about the Colosseum: Sometime around AD 81, when the arena was still brand-new, Emperor Domitian threw an all-day drunken bash for the end-of-year festival called Saturnalia. Hazelnuts, dates, plums, and figs rained onto the spectators; servants, white napkins on their arms, distributed free bread and wine. Female gladiators fought, then dwarves; then prostitutes circulated among the stands, and belly dancers, and jugglers. And as the sun was setting, and the general enthusiasm was flagging, the emperor ordered that tens of thousands of exotic birds be released into the stands: flamingos, pheasants, partridges, guinea fowl. The crowd went berserk trying to catch them; there were more birds than spectators, Statius says; it was the ultimate game-day giveaway. Think of it: torchlight flowing under canopies, smoke creeping through archways, feathers flying, birds shrieking, the shouts and scrambling of fifty thousand citizens. And this same Roman sky, framed by the same oval of stone, turning its evening violet, seething with pink flamingos.
I wouldn’t trade the twenty-first century for any other. We have toilet paper and pasteurization and Novocain and Mexican avocados all winter long. And plenty of mysteries remain: what causes premature labor, or what exactly the universe is made of. The biology of deep oceans, the nature of gravity, the reason we sleep, the mechanisms of migration; thousands of questions still await answers.
But when I finally get the Weeble-wobbles out of their package, Henry and Owen suck on them for about half a minute, then crawl off, leaving a garishly dressed rhino and alligator wet and rocking on the tile. And I can’t help but think of Pliny and modern civilization’s persistent assessment of itself as advanced. For if Pliny believed that the moon caused shellfish to wax and wane in size, and women’s menses dulled sword blades, and wormwood, worn under a cummerbund, prevented swelling of the groin, so what? Did he not also describe the Earth as a sphere and understand that it rotated every twenty-four hours? Did he not also say, “The only certainty is that nothing is certain?” I’m not reading Pliny to see how far humanity has come as much as I’m reading him to see how much we’ve lost. Knowledge is relative. Mystery can be cultivated.
Henry and Owen see more images in a day than Pliny saw in a lifetime, and I worry their generation will have to work a bit harder than every previous one to stay alert to the miracles of the world.
Shauna says it’s a good thing I didn’t get to see snow sifting through the oculus of the Pantheon. Sometimes, she says, the things we don’t see are more beautiful than anything else.
It rains, the sun comes out. Five minutes later, hail is bouncing off the street. This morning the Alban Hills were slate blue and velvety. At noon they were shining and white. Now they are heavy and black, terrible, apocalyptic.
Lorenzo crouches in his gatekeeper’s lodge, heater blowing, a pile of mail in his lap. “This weather is called monkey weather,” he tells us. Shauna and I cross the gravel of the courtyard, on our way to the corner bar to order spremute, tall glasses of blood-orange juice. We clasp hands. There is thunder. The west, beyond the Vatican, burns inwardly, a thousand shades of gold.
The oranges are from Sicily. The juice tastes like sunlight: low, red, foamy.
We hold our glasses with two hands. We try not to take anything for granted.
SPRING
OWEN AND HENRY SPEND NEARLY ALL THEIR waking minutes preparing to walk. They haul themselves up by drawer handles, inch their palms across cupboard doors. Squat, pivot, tumble: they are gymnasts in training.
On Sundays the big Academy building is quiet and mostly empty, and we lug the boys down the long marble staircase into the basement, which contains offices and a floor of the library and three vaulted brick hallways, each straight as a needle and fifty yards long. I drag an old shopping cart out from beneath one of the stairwells, load Henry in the basket, and position Owen so he can push. Then I let go. Owen walks with his fingers laced through the metal grid, his little moccasins gripping the tile, the cart gliding along. He’ll push it down all three hallways, his grin splitting wider and wider, and then Shauna will switch them out and turn the cart around and it will be Henry’s turn.
Occasionally, we take breaks for milk.
Before we leave, before we have to strap one child into the backpack and the other into the chest carrier, I’ll put them both in the cart and push them as fast as I can, screeching around the corners, hurtling down the straightaways. Our laughter echoes through the vaults, past the stacks of mattresses and broken desks, past the lecture room with its empty chairs, past the antique display cases with Etruscan potsherds scattered inside.
On March 4 the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena is released by her kidnappers. The FM stations we usually listen to foam over their normal frequencies, the whole spectrum buzzing, a dozen deejays rattling off faster-than-usual Italian. Finalmente, I hear, and pace, which means “peace,” and the name of the newspaper she writes for, over and over, Il Manifesto, Il Manifesto.
Then the news changes. Approaching a checkpoint near the Baghdad airport, Sgrena’s Toyota Corolla is fired upon by American soldiers. Sgrena herself is wounded. An Italian security officer, Nicola Calipari, father of two, is killed. “I heard his last breath,” Sgrena will write, a few days later, “as he was dying on me.”43
Who knows what to think? From the terrace everything looks the same, the pines tossing in the wind, the motorini shooting past. But in the past hour Americans will have become that much less welcome here. Shauna walks Henry out to join me, dangling him by his arms, her hair hanging over his, just the tips of his moccasins touching the ground. “Let’s stay in the apartment today,” she says.
The next morning our neighbor Jon Piasecki is at the butcher’s buying chicken when someone behind him says, “Sabato con i fascisti.” Saturday with the fascists.
On Tuesday, Calipari’s coffin is set on the steps of the Vittoriano. The Italians waiting to see his body fill Piazza Venezia. CNN.com says thousands have come to pay respects. A Roman paper puts the number at hundreds of thousands. Regardless, from what I can tell, climbing Michelangelo’s stairs to the Campidoglio, it’s a lot of people. A few rainbow-striped peace flags wave above the crowd; everybody, as all Italians everywhere seem to, wears a navy blue or black coat.
I think of American tourists stuck on buses in the traffic this must be causing and wonder about the strange intersections of nations. One of the Iraqi kidnappers, Sgrena says, was a fan of Rome’s soccer club. The airport road the Italians were driving is referred to in the papers as Route Irish. One of the American soldiers at the checkpoint, the one operating the gun in what was called the “blocking vehicle,” is a father of two named Mario Lozano. Mario comes from Marius, a Roman name, centuries old.
Spring here comes fast, a barbarian invasion, a Japanese harbor wave. I blink and the grass has turned green. We’re walking home from a resta
My overcrowded tulip bulbs awaken in their pots, one after another, showing pale green shoots. Ivy laces old walls; the trees in the gardens are locked in an invisible frenzy: light rains on the branches, moisture hurls upward through trunks, roots suck at stones. Color flies into the eye: sepia walls, red roof-tiles, emerald lawns—it is as if, all along, an illumination box has been mounted above the city and finally somebody has plunked a coin into the slot.
Two weeks before Easter I fly to London to appear on a television show. I have a note in my pocket that says Good luck, Daddy in Shauna’s handwriting and has scribbling all over it. When I return, forty hours later, pale brown mushrooms have appeared overnight in the hydrangea bed beside our building’s entrance. My tulips are suddenly four inches tall. I look up from feeding Owen breakfast to find a pair of ladybugs mating on my sleeve.
Days of rain. I wake at 2 a.m. and type the ending to the story I’ve been working on, writing through the night, backtracking around dead-ends, linking together fragmented sections.
In the morning, down in Trastevere, the river slips its banks, rushing brown and foaming over the jogging paths beneath the embankments. Cormorants dive one by one into the rapids around Tiber Island and emerge with little brown eels squirming in their beaks.
Indeed, the whole city seems to be filling up, breath after breath of springtime blowing off the hills, piles of artichokes appearing at the vegetable stand, then fava beans, then strawberries, as if a sequence of northbound waves is breaking over the city. The austerity of Lent gives way: Romans pour out of their houses and swirl through the streets, throng the markets in Testaccio, sit hip to hip along the benches outside the Palazzo Farnese, devouring gelati. And the tourists return, too, trampling through the Pantheon, circling the Forum. One afternoon the parking garage at the Vatican bus stop is virtually empty; the next it is stuffed with buses.
In the second week of March I walk to the bakery practicing vocabulary. Glassa is icing; compleanno is birthday. I insert one edge of myself into the queue and slip, like a needle, to the front. One torta, please. Cioccolata. With icing. For thirty people.
Shauna hauls a handcart full of beer and wine the half mile home from the grocery store. I spend two nights drawing invitations. We buy Mylar balloons. We buy a Chicco Play ’N Ride Car Deluxe with rocker and safety bar and carry it up from Trastevere from the toy store, and Shauna wraps it in shining Italian wrapping paper.
Owen stands in the playpen and bounces while we chant “Jump, jump, jump!” Henry cries in his crib, in his high chair. He runs the tip of his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other and back again; he grinds his finger against the swollen rims of his gums.
Then it’s March 18 and the boys are one year old. The cake, when I pick it up, is the size of a small desk. I carry it up via Carini, through the whizzing traffic, and into the park across the street from our apartment. We set up high chairs and tables; we tie balloons to the gate. The trees send hazy shadows across the lawn.
Friends come, mostly Americans. Lorenzo the gatekeeper wanders out of the portineria, wearing beautiful tan shoes and jeans and his big, eye-warping glasses. Tacy rides the bus an hour each way to bring the boys a yellow plastic shoe that plays music. It will become their favorite toy.
We sing “Happy Birthday” in English, then Italian. Owen grins at me from across the park, cake all down his front, his hair flattened across his ears. Henry spends a half hour crying, overwhelmed, in one of the swings. Soon enough everyone is gone and we are folding paper cups into trash bags. On the terrace I spray the high chairs with a hose. Twelve months ago tonight, Shauna held Owen in a hospital bed, snow flying past the window. I sat beside Henry in the NICU down the hall, a hospital gown over my T-shirt, a dozen monitors beeping around us, my fingers on the Plexiglas. The circumference of his wrist was smaller than the circumference of my pinkie finger. Now he pushes the horn on his new plastic car and his brother sings his vowels as he crawls, squealing, toward the bathtub.
After they’re in their cribs, after all the dishes are done, we open a bottle of Prosecco and pour it into two water glasses. It is the color of straw. Tiny bubbles fly upward. I spend a couple minutes with a calculator. In the past year Shauna breast-fed for approximately 1,040 hours. She put the boys down for 1,460 naps. She did something close to four tons of laundry. I folded maybe four pounds of that.
It’s Henry and Owen’s birthday, but the toast is for their mother.
Two days after Henry and Owen turn one, the war in Iraq turns two. We are walking from the Pantheon toward Piazza Colonna when we catch the tail end of a peace march. Maybe three hundred carabinieri in riot gear mill between trucks; one passes what look like machine guns up through an open door. A helicopter floats above. Protesters, at the far end of the street, hold painted bedsheets and sing. I imagine I can feel their eyes on us, on the stroller. We are Americans, I want to say, but America is a big place.
The next day is Palm Sunday. The newspapers doubt the pope will be well enough to make an appearance, but he manages to sit for a minute in his apartment window, a few stories above St. Peter’s Square. His face is the same color as his white alb; he seems to be pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead. Boys wave flags and chant, “Viva la Papa!” Long live the pope. Some even surf atop the outstretched arms of their friends.
He does not speak. Still, the crowd roars. After he recedes, something like exaltation radiates from the faces around me. Celebrity, the cult of recognition. Denzel Washington getting miked up on Thirty-seventh Street, women screaming his name.
Whenever the stroller passes a cat, Owen grins his two-and-a-half-toothed grin and shouts, “Deedeedee!” (his version of “kitty”). Whenever we open the terrace door, Henry screams in delight. They sit in their high chairs, wind pouring through the windows, and pinch pieces of tortellini between their thumbs and forefingers and fumble them into their fists and drop them on the floor.
We eat broccolo Romano, a pale, diminutive broccoli. We try puntarelle, thin, sweet chicory shoots soaked in oil and vinegar. Everything surges. The lawns are a supernatural green. It is as if I can hear roots crackling and rustling in the flower beds.
In high spring, my tree guidebook says, inside a mature oak tree, rising sap can reach velocities of two hundred feet per hour. That’s three feet a minute. I lean over the windowsill of the studio and stare at the big trunk of the Italian pine and wonder about its thirst, its cloud of half a billion root tips prowling through the soil.
At dusk a pair of hawk moths like little winged lobsters hover in the Academy courtyard, sucking nectar from the jasmine. At night Trastevere distends with young people, a drummer pounding bongos with demonic stamina, children sprinting through the mobs. Every bakery and fruttivendolo, every supermarket and husband-and-wife salumeria, hangs enormous foil-wrapped chocolate eggs from the ceiling. Vermilion eggs, silver eggs, Donald Duck eggs with the diameter of a dinner plate. Gran Sorpresa! they say, Big Surprise! Trapped inside are toys: rocketmen and soccer players, little incarcerated acrylic pandas.
The birds, singing on the gutters in the morning, are loud enough to wake us. In his crib, Henry pulls himself up by the slats and lets his right hand dangle at his side, bouncing on his mattress, testing, practicing.
On Easter Sunday we melt the shell of an infant-sized chocolate egg and dip strawberries in it and set them on foil to dry. Only in Italy would the chocolate from an egg containing two red plastic robots taste good enough to make you want to cry. Shauna dips a finger in the warm chocolate and slips it into Henry’s mouth, and his face seems to crack open with wonder. He looks at his mother as if to say, You’ve been putting green beans on my tray and the world includes this?
All across the country, birds are making nests, rising up corridors of nectar, chasing the northward tide of blooms. Love, something sweet to eat, and the quickening of the heart. What else is springtime about?
In the afternoon a man clambers over the tourist railing on the cupola at the very top of St. Peter’s Basilica, several hundred feet above the roof of the church below, and crouches on the impossibly steep face of the dome. Firefighters close the church; a bishop tries to talk him down.
Helicopters buzz past the terrace. The air glitters with pollen.
Before nightfall we stroll the boys through Villa Sciarra, the fountains splashing, the hedges wearing a haze of light, the cypresses casting stately shadows. Families promenade all around us, wearing Easter finery, laughing, gesturing, eating ice-cream bars. On the way home we pass two teenagers making out in a Volkswagen. Two cars down, another couple is lying on top of one another, four legs in jeans and sneakers sticking out a window.
“Italians,” our friend George Stoll says, “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.
The following recipe for a Nutella Dog, submitted by twelve-year-old Martina Bartolozzi, appeared in the newspaper the other day. Nutella is a hazelnut-flavored chocolate spread that Italians spread on everything: toast, crepes, breadsticks, cookies, even pizza bianca.44
Spread the cut sides of a hot dog bun with Nutella.