Americans of my class (i.e., the one where an undergraduate degree was expected and partially funded) and age (we’re nostalgic for things we don’t remember, like the release of Return of the Jedi) spend their days going online to explain to slightly older Americans that the older Americans just don’t really understand what it’s like in another culture, you know? (The older Americans say, “Fuck you! Enjoy President Trump!”) So when I find a harmless stereotype fulfilled, it warms my heart. Italians are exactly like you want them to be: they sing and dance as a way of making conversation; they dress both immaculately and with abandon, somehow; and they make ice cream so outrageously fucking good that the taste of it confuses me, because the emotions it draws I’ve felt only about specific women, when I was inside them. I feel like it makes emotional sense to enter gelato. I abstain because there are children around, but I do not judge.
(Don’t even come at me with that hot bullshit where “Oh, we have that in America!” because [1] fuck you, and [2] not only is the real thing better, but the environment of Rome is part of the consumption, and the air and the stone and the climate and horizontal striped dresses descending alleyways are fragments of the taste; [3] fuck you again.)
Last Word, herself craving some more of this god-food, tells Andrew one afternoon that today – just today – he can have two cones. When she tells him this, she is walking ahead of myself and Rob Roy, so I learn about the exception when Andrew calmly explains “IT IS A… A SPECIALDAY! A SPECIAL! DAY!”
It is a special day: knowing that my sister may actually read this, I am obliged to note that hers is a nutritious regime: the boys eat fruit and greens plucked mere miles away from their home. But of course, not all parents are pragmatic biologists. And kids love the shit out of ice cream. So whenever I hear about The American Obesity Epidemic, I choose to find it heartwarming: There are just a lot of parents out there who really, really love their children. To death, sure; but any number of 80s English bands can tell you that’s basically how love works.
—
On our last afternoon, Rob Roy decides that we need an Italian lunch: a bottle of wine, a streetside café, and courses after courses. I assent because of the wine part, and we search alleys in our visiting neighborhood. We almost stop at a pretty, sunlit spot of awnings and cobblestone, but there’s a young couple staring deeply at each other, and I’m the only one who thinks it would be fun to sic a feral Jack-Jack on their afternoon. (Like Andrew, I live by the rule that you shouldn’t have any toys I don’t have.)
Rob Roy has a better reason: he says that when the family was in Paris and the boys were fed and napped, he and my sister would eat on brick sidewalks near couples. Often, seeing the boys in unrepresentative docility, the couples would turn and smile. They would chuckle as Jack and Andrew played, and their hands would creep towards each other. Their feet, too. They would leave, arm around each other, and Rob Roy would barely contain the urge to scream: “Don’t do it! You don’t know what you’re thinking!”
Parents are allowed to make these sorts of jokes.
We wander instead to yet another sunlit spot of awnings and cobblestones, because Italy doesn’t know any other way. The waiter smiles at Andrew’s cannonball routine, and a lady the table over says “Bambino!” a lot. We eat bread that makes me want to cry, and I have a cut of fish that caves my mouth in. I know that the next time I eat, I will feel it’s some kind of adultery.
In a fit of pique, I wonder why it can’t be this always: Why can’t I sit and eat and talk and think, just because it’s a day of the week; just because it is beautiful and good?
America has more money than anywhere else, but it doesn’t like beautiful things. It sells them at market, but it doesn’t natively enjoy them. And it doesn’t really have nice, easy places: if you want a modest home near some water, in temperate weather, then welcome to Venice Beach and that will be $7 million; thank you – enjoy walking nowhere ever again.
I am not the first American to say, “Wow, Europe is nice to, like, be in!” There are probably a hundred attractive American dullards in Rome right now who make a living taking pictures of European streets (and themselves) for vague media purposes I’m too old and human to understand. The wise, the simple, and the addled all agree: Europe is pretty, and its people seem to feel good about life as they live it.
But Americans are too Puritanical to create a place like this. I don’t mean that Americans are prudish: Americans of a certain ilk abuse substance and sensation in ways that would literally kill any human born before Prohibition. (When I am sad, I imagine Calvin Coolidge at a Steve Aoki concert, and it is wonderful.) We’re Puritanical in the essential way: we make severe moral judgments and preach them to each other; then we demand our judgments be mapped onto civil existence. If you have money, Americans say, you deserve to have money! You can’t just live well because you want to! You have to work decades first; or failing that, just be sort of morally ordained for wealth! If you are happy without money, you don’t deserve blue jeans or health insurance!
Not so fast! say other Americans, as they slam down the shot glass. You can get rich fast from like finance and shit, and then just get a fuckton of stuff! Why, my friends and I were in Costa Rica and it was, like, super fuckin’ chill, and we got fuckin’ lit and like totally trashed this beach. It was like, cool seeing their culture and all? There were ‘shrooms.
No; all of you are evil! say still others. Being supremely wealthy is a sin! The billionaires have taken my life from me, and we need to take our stuff back from them! We will finance a revolution in their monied blood! In this way, we shall achieve unity!
I hate unity! say more. I reject streetside cafés because sidewalks are against my religious convictions! I don’t want to have people I don’t know breathing where my air is! I want a house, and a few other houses nearby but not too nearby, and I will only leave this castle to forage at the Kroger!
No, smile the kids, all white teeth and militantly toned ass: You just like, do it, you know? Take out the GDP of Sweden in student loans, and like pay tens of thousands for a broom closet in Bed-Stuy. You have to, ‘cause it’s the Greatest City in the World. Bernie’s going to wipe away The Debt, and then we’ll all celebrate in this crazy lounge that used to be a women’s prison but is currently just a regular prison; and you can get some toilet cocktails for cigs, which is just so fucking authentic!
I think about this as I chat idly with family about life, play with my nephews, and wander public lanes in no direction.
Italy is wealthy, and weak. The Italians haven’t suffered quite like the Greeks and the Portuguese in the ongoing Euro crisis, but they’ve danced without paying for the floor. It’s easy for me to romanticize a simpler life when I am spending a notable percentage of my net worth on ice cream and pasta and gorgeous wines – it’s easy to confuse indulgence with contentment, and it’s easy to forget how far Americans have wandered from their austere, pragmatic origins – and so it’s easier to mock that austerity.
But it’s not just me, on vacation: the Italians are obviously and apparently happy. Not everyone. Not everywhere. But their chief city is fueled by a love of beautiful things. By an animal impulse to make themselves and each other happy. Just happy. People chat at restaurants with strangers. They play with children. They sit, without phones or papers, and just watch the day go by; on the grounds it is a pretty day. They’re not counting hours here.
Since undergrad, I have learned to count every one. If I’m not working on a piece of music, I’m working on my (probably impotent) nascent business, or I’m just working at whatever for monthly liquidity. If I’m not doing any of those things, I am actively abandoning them, and I know it; and I count those hours, too. If I do something dull for money, I feel the hours slipping away from music; if I write a song, I feel the shame of working for no money. I have internalized American morals myself. My parents don’t understand this place: I do, but it doesn’t mean I can have it.
I met a guy once, back in Colorado, who was very excited about some recent financial maneuvers. He claimed to have shorted Facebook’s IPO, and “fucking banked.” (“Eww,” I did not say.) He said he’d recently been on a work trip to Paris, but didn’t love the place: “You can just see why we’re ahead of them! They show up to work at like 9 a.m.! Then they leave early!”
He had decided that his disposable participation in the anhedonic financial machine that nearly destroyed civilization (and still might!) was morally superior to life enjoyed.
Of course, not all cities are the same, and any European would be happy to educate you in the ways their place is better than the other thing. Rob Roy himself didn’t love Paris: he found the manner affected, and the military state incurred by the 2015 terrorist attacks repressive and racist. He thinks the Parisians are right about themselves and their city: they are the best; their things are the best; their existence is truly refined. But, in his observation, it’s a stressful way to live: they fight against the barbarians, who in their reckoning are basically all other humans. Or to put it in a way the Brits might understand: the French can be cunts, which takes the piss out of their treasures.
Italians, Rob Roy says, love fine things and nuance just the same; but they seem more excited about their place in the world. The French sniff; the Italians throw an arm over your shoulder, down an espresso as an appetizer to a full-bodied red, and shake you; saying, “Fuck yeah! I’m Italian! Isn’t this fucking cool?”
It is. It really is.
—
It has to end. Everything does.
We wake and head to the train station. I don’t expect much from this morning. I have a flight in mid-afternoon, and my sister and her family leave before this. We’ll say goodbyes; I’ll walk off the red-white hangover, and life will go on in dimmer colors.
But I’m in Italy. So this morning, I find three beautiful things.
The first is a moment outside a café. This sounds like bad young adult fiction (i.e., young adult fiction). But I’m in Rome, and there is by law a café every fourteen feet or less, and anyway that’s where I am: bite me.
Rob and Word leap into this café for breakfast. (When you are a parent, it seems you leap more than you probably used to.) “What do you want?” asks Last Word as she is already inside, and then, “Please watch Andrew!”
“What kind of TRUCK IS THAT?” says Andrew. It is difficult to tell for the uninitiated, but he is subdued: he is not leaping into the street. (Children learn from their parents, but parents also seem to play the rhythms of their children.)
So as the others get breakfast – Jack-Jack is safely ensconced in his child-pack – Andrew and I shoot the shit about cars on the cobblestone. He’s a little softer in his movements here; he knows this is the end of the trip, and it seems to affect him a little. He asks a few questions: “What kind of…” – he pauses to process a minor electrical surge in himself – “truck is THAT?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “What can you see about it?”
“It has three wheels,” he says in awe.
“Yeah, yeah it does.”
This conversation isn’t particularly about anything. I’m tired and already sad about leaving my sister, and my head is pulsing audibly. But what I realize here, doing nothing particular, is that I love Andrew. I have always loved him as a sort of official diplomatic position, of course. You always love family, is the idea, and I wish this were true. But it isn’t. And loves are different: sometimes, love of family is a tether to pain; a cord you can’t cut and a chord only they know how to play. You will always hurt when they hurt themselves, no matter how far away you get. Familial love is a prison. In small part, I went to China to escape it, which is like going to prison to get out of some other prison. Or maybe not a prison: something alive. Something that moves and hunts. I fear the love of family, because when it bites it leaves teeth in the wound.
But I love Andrew out of joy. I want so many good things for him that I don’t think I have names for them. And I want them just because he is himself, and for no more complete reason. I love him in ways he can’t love me back: ways he doesn’t know yet. And I have never loved like that. I have never loved anyone that much younger than me; that much physically smaller than me. It will be another fifth of his life gone when I see him next. He won’t remember me clearly, here on this street. He’s not terribly focused now: there are cars on the road, and he’s fascinated by every one. But his tiny, syrup-sticky hand fidgets in mine; and every few moments, when I ask him to stay close to me, it squeezes.
My time with Andrew is interrupted by Last Word, who rushes out of the café with a burbling Jack-Jack strapped to her. “Well, you’ve really started something,” she says. “It’s your turn.”
“My what?”
My sister performs here a remarkably accurate impression of her one-year-old: “Uncle [Redacted]! Uncle [Listen, I write about people I work for]!” and she does the full body wave Jack makes at things he wants. He can’t talk, and he is asking for me.
I am already feeling more feelings than I usually allow myself in a year. I manage to hold my face together.
So Andrew heads to his mother and Jack stares at me with a goofy smile. It is an intense stare, for someone so small. He doesn’t blink much.
We know each other. It’s a little sad: he’s leaving, and when I return to his life he won’t know me anymore. Andrew loses detail; Jack loses me. But it’s also wonderful, because at this point in his existence, when he can’t communicate with anyone, he and I speak. These few days I have understood, I think, what he was looking at; I understood why he liked that color or that shape or that texture of stone. He usually chirps and gurgles when he’s fed: he doesn’t say anything now. He’s just happy to see me. We’re friends now.
We’ll meet again, and then again and again and I’ll be in his life as much as I can. But this moment – this first time we understand each other; this first time we find warmth in the company – this one’s just for me. It’s a sweet little gift. When Rob Roy delivers our espressos and croissants, I muss Jack-Jack’s threads of hair. He makes a sound that’s a half-giggle, and we turn and walk for the bus.
As we ride, Andrew sits next to me, which is to say that he stands and yells out the colors of buildings. It’s magic. I hug them all and we say goodbyes.
But I don’t say goodbye to Rome; not yet. I walk across the street from Roma Termini and find a rock church. Not stone: not crafted. Rock. Cut from the guts of something else. I don’t know this when I enter, but that something else was the baths of Diocletian. A thousand years after their construction, one of the Piuses decided to make a church in the ruin. Michelangelo designed it. The exterior is rock; the interior pink, pale marble. There’s an old device something like a sundial running across the floor.
I wander outside. There are the usual carts set up for tourists: water; mugs. It’s cloudy, and a little wind tickles the palm trees. Around the back of the church, a path advertises a museum. I’m not sure I have the time for that, but I wander around anyway.
The museum’s entrance is all glass; a wall of panes. It’s probably not too recent a construction, but in the surroundings it is alien. The new is a fascination on the canvas of the old.
Outside this glass there are simple gardens; relics of the baths. I wander and I sit. I see what look like tombstones lining the walks, nestled up to walls and hedges. I peek, and they are tombstones: tombstones of Nero’s soldiers. Some plaques point out notable citizens in their midst: Nero’s wife is marked here.
It’s a magnificent, glorious city. It’s one of the first capitols in the broad, infighting continent that ruled and still somehow rules the globe – and surely the most important one. In one sense, its time is past. In another, it’s still fading; slowly. It’s calming: learning, culture, and arts survived Nero; perhaps we can survive Trump. Culture also survived Rome itself: slavery and murder and flickering stakes in the Coliseum.
I like graveyards and tombstones. I know we all die; that’s neither surprising nor specifically frightening. I want to know what to do before that happens; and if I might, somehow, stand after. These soldiers tell me their names, almost two millennia later. That has to be beautiful, whatever their lives and deeds.
But Rome – including not just its treasures but itself; today – tells me more. It tells me that there’s maybe a such thing as love. It reminds me that for all its beauty, there’s little in it without the people. I already miss my nephews and sister and brother-in-law. But I also miss sitting on the back porch of my sister’s home in South Florida with Rob Roy, smoking cigars and asking all these same questions – and I didn’t like that house or South Florida.
There hasn’t been any love in my life for a while. That’s a strange, uncomfortable thing to type. It means, usually, that the typist wants romantic love. I do – I think I’d be a fool not to – but that absence doesn’t really pain me. What pains me is that I don’t even have a framework for that kind of love: I don’t have the people near me to sustain me through more ephemeral passions. What’s the point of that wonderful partner or spouse if there’s no spine in it: no family? I’m just human; I want a family. And I also want to move, and experience, and see, and know. Life, as R.R. likes to tell me, is just a pile of trades.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Rome thinking about America. And I keep thinking this: don’t we want to be happy? Don’t we want to care about each other? Even if we think it’s impossible, don’t we at least wish we could be at peace with each other? I’m part of a cohort – not merely of age, but of social training – that moves and moves and goes. And you get a lot of things that way, but you don’t get family. You don’t get the central, primal brick in the human arena.
I don’t want children. I don’t think whatever it is in me that likes tombstones and links butterflies to reveries about death should be passed on. It hurts more than it doesn’t: this is and has been my experience of life in thirty years. It hurts more than it doesn’t, and I’m well-fed and wealthy, if only in global terms. But being with family – family that doesn’t want from you, but only gives; only enjoys for the sake of enjoyment – is enough to tremble my conviction. I see a lot, and I’m not sure what any of it is. I am free to do as I wish, and I count hours and stare at this overlit computer screen. What am I doing, exactly? In Rome, you see things made that outlive their makers. What do we make that is better than family?
It’s just the smallest tremble. I have a flight to Lisbon, and I plan to fight through the hangover.