Living in a Foreign Language (18 page)

I immediately envisioned some penne in a light cream
sauce with some sautéed zucchini, grated
parmigiano
—and dotted with flecks of this dark, salty, delicious ham.

We bought some of each of the two prosciuttos. We quietly watched him slice; you can't be in a hurry at Ugo's. When he was done and we had paid up—not expensive, mind you—he asked me where we lived. When I told him we had bought a house just out of town and explained where the Rustico was, he lit up again.

“C' é un forno!”

Yes, I said. There is an oven.

He told us that our oven is much revered in this area. It has been there for over four hundred years—long before the little house was built—and was the community oven where the women would come every week to bake bread. There was emotion in his eyes.

We walked to the car and Alison carried the packages of ham like the treasures they were.

“So, Pops,” she said.

I looked over at her.

“I think I'm going to marry an Italian butcher.”

Which would be just fine with me.

W
E TOOK
A
LISON TO
R
OME
before she flew back to L.A. She had lived there with us some twenty-eight years before when we were making a movie and we wanted to reconnect her with some memories—and some dear friends—from all those years ago.

One memory etched forever in all our psyches was when we decided to put her in school for the time we were there. There is an American Overseas School in Rome and we enrolled Alison, who was seven years old and itching for some kids her own age. On her first morning of school, the bus picked her up right outside our apartment in Trastevere and we waved her off confidently. That afternoon, Jill and I waited at the same corner to meet the bus. Right on time, we watched it coming up the street; we watched it arrive on our corner, and there was Alison with her bright face in the window, waving; and then we watched it pass us by without slowing down and head off into the bowels of Rome, carrying our now screaming little girl to God knows where. I took off at a dead run, Jill yelling encouragement, Alison
wailing in the window, the bus picking up speed. (I could still run in those days.) Five blocks later, the bus finally stopped at a traffic light and I caught up to it, throwing myself in front of it, sacrificing my body for my little girl. It was all very Italian.

So we revisited Trastevere and the sight of the great school bus chase. We went to the little pizza place right off the Piazza del Popolo, where Alison and I had eaten almost every night after Jill went back to New York. We visited the studio on the Palatine Hill where the movie had been shot. And we visited the Rotunnos.

Peppino and Graziolina Rotunno have been our friends for over three decades. Peppino was the director of photography on the movie and he brought his family down to Calabria for the first two weeks of shooting before we all moved back to Rome to complete the film. His wife, Graziolina, an artist whose exquisite paintings we have been collecting since we first met, and their daughter, Carmen, who is Alison's age, were along for the trip. Carmen and Alison took to each other immediately and, through them, the two families began a friendship that has managed to survive time and distance and all the other things that make people drift apart over the years.

So, the night before Alison flew back to L.A., Graziolina insisted on cooking for us at their apartment. Carmen, who is now married with two babies, would be there with her husband. She and Alison would get to see each other for the first time since they were kids.

Graziolina is almost as wonderful a cook as she is a painter. She was actually my first teacher of Italian cooking, back in the seventies. After Jill, and then Alison, left for the States, I still had three more months of work on the movie,
and the Rotunnos took pity and had me to dinner on a regular basis. I'd hang out in the kitchen with Graziolina and watch as she effortlessly sautéed the chicken and vegetables for a cacciatore. And she took me step by step through my first risotto, which for me is still the most magical cooking process.

Our reunion dinner was a great success. The food, of course, was wonderful. Alison and Carmen—after warily eyeing each other's adult incarnation—connected again and remembered old times on the movie set. But what was all too evident was the difficulty we were having with the language barrier. Graziolina spoke the best English of the Italians, and she helped translate when things got sticky, but it was difficult to maintain a flow to the evening. Carmen's husband, Andrea, a young, successful attorney in Rome, had learned all his English from the lyrics of American rock and roll songs. So, whenever a word or a phrase came up that he understood, he sang the next line. We got a lot of laughs from it, but I can't say we got to know him as well as we would have liked. Carmen and Alison had had a much easier time communicating when they were seven than they now did as adults. There were long pauses as both of them tacitly acknowledged the futility of trying to get into a real conversation.

And most frustrating of all was talking with Peppino. He showed us a book that had just been published—a beautiful book with photographs—of scenes from the films of Fellini that had never been seen by the public, that had ended up on the cutting room floor. And Peppino, who had shot many of these films, was prominent in the book. There were pictures of him as a young man, working on the set with the Maestro, and he was recalling stories for us of Fellini, Mastroianni
and many others. And we ached to be able to understand him better. He's retired now, but busier than ever. He teaches cinematography at Cinecitta and heads up the movement to preserve all the great Italian films of the past. His career reaches back through the golden days of Italian film to its early days, when he apprenticed as a camera assistant. He has stories to tell about all of it and we couldn't really understand them—not the subtleties; not the character nuances.

The one great language breakthrough we had that night was when we wanted something—which is usually the case. We asked Carmen if she knew about great places to shop for furniture for our house. She's a gold mine of information because she shops all over Rome for props and furniture for the theater pieces she designs. Graziolina got a pen and paper and Carmen dictated a list. And if we didn't understand her, we made her slow down and repeat it. The list would take us all over Rome, so Peppino fetched a map that would help us see where we were going.

After dinner, we hugged and kissed good-bye, making a promise to improve our Italian before our next dinner together. We decided to walk through the streets of Rome for a while so that Alison could get her last taste of Italy, and when we were about to cross the Tiber, not far from the Piazza del Popolo, Jill stopped and told us to listen.

“It's James, isn't it?”

And sure enough, we could hear the unmistakable sound of James Taylor, singing, “How sweet it is to be loved by you. . . .”

We followed the music, which led us into the piazza, which was filled with ten thousand or so Italians, swaying to the music of the free, live concert. We joined them, quietly
sang along and thought back to our beach house days, when we pitched in with a bunch of other couples—young and out of work like us—to rent a dilapidated fraternity house on Fairfield Beach in Connecticut. Alison was a kid. We were kids. And James was our music.

This had been a good visit with Alison. Italy would be a place for us to come together—as adults—with both our children.

The next day—after Alison flew off—Jill and I charged around Rome in a shopping frenzy. Following Carmen's instructions, we went first to a shop in Prati that specialized in furniture from different parts of Asia. Since we couldn't afford to fill the house with antiques, we thought we'd mix things up a bit—some new, some old, some Italian, some not. We'd always furnished our houses this way. We eyed a set of lamps that we thought might go well in our new bedroom. But we had promised ourselves we wouldn't buy anything until the house was closer to being finished, so we just fantasized.

The next store on Carmen's list was an ultramodern emporium with fantastic Italian designs that we tried to imagine in our little Rustico. Fun to look at, but not for us. Then we wandered over to a little street off the Piazza Navona called Via Governo Vecchio that was filled with shops of every conceivable style. There were oriental carpet shops, expensive antiques, junk stores with hidden treasures, lamp shops and furniture makers, as well as clothing boutiques and shoe stores—and Baffetto, the best pizza in Rome. Governo Vecchio is a shopper's paradise, and we spent the rest of the morning wandering from one fabulous
shop to another until we found the one on Carmen's list. It's a store that specializes in imports from Bali, Singapore and other parts of Asia, as well as the creations of some very individual designers from Italy and other parts of Europe. It's an eclectic collection that appealed to our taste immediately. And our budget. There was a dining table that caught my eye as I came through the door. It was carved from a single, immense slab of wood—teak, I think—and was more like a sculpture than a piece of furniture. As I drooled over it, Jill reminded me of the size of the dining area in our tiny house and I reluctantly came to my senses.

We then went downstairs and saw a wicker chair and ottoman that got us both so excited we forgot our pledge not to buy anything that day. We had to have it—even though it would be another year before we'd have a space for it. Francoise, who runs the store, asked us if we could wait until after lunch—it was almost one o'clock and she had to rush home to her apartment to make lunch for her husband. We agreed; it was Rome and nothing is more important than lunch. She told us about a little trattoria right down the street that was hard to find because it had no name, no sign—you just had to know about it. She told us there might be a line but that it was worth the wait. We made a plan to meet her after lunch, we would bring our car over from the hotel and see if we could fit the chair into it.

Lunch was perfect. We were the only non-Romans in the place. There was no menu—just a few pastas and a few
secondi
—very simple, good and cheap. Afterward, we checked out of the hotel in Prati, aimed our car toward the Piazza Navona and plunged into the Roman after-lunch traffic frenzy. The mantra for driving in Rome is “Never look back, never look to the side and above all, never
hesitate—just step on the accelerator and pray.” There were no parking spaces anywhere near the Piazza Navona; there were no spaces on that entire side of the river. So we crossed back to the other side and found a spot—totally illegal—right in front of the police station next to the Castel St. Angelo. From there we walked across the pedestrian bridge and right up to the Via Governo Vecchio. Francoise was waiting with our chair and ottoman and a young fellow from the barbershop down the street who was all set to carry the chair to our car. We paid her, exchanged phone numbers and promised to be back for more once we had the rest of the house built. Then the three of us wended our way back across the bridge, carrying the chair and ottoman as best we could. We put the backseats down and managed to squeeze the furniture in, completely blocking my rear view—which I wouldn't need anyway because, as I said, if you look anywhere but straight ahead in Rome, you'll never have the courage to move an inch.

We decided to chance leaving the car—filled with our new furniture—for a few minutes longer so that we could race back to the Piazza Navona for a gelato at Tre Scalini. We reasoned that being parked in front of the police station—albeit in a no-parking zone—would discourage thieves.

Jill got the
nocciola
—hazelnut; I got my trusty
stracciatella;
and we strolled around the Bellini fountains and then into the side streets. The great thing about Rome is that there's no one “Old Section” where tourists go to see antiquity—it's everywhere, all mixed in with the new. So the city is like a river, in that its past, present and future are all rolling by you at the same time. We felt different about Rome that day—less like tourists and more like we belonged there.

We took off around four-thirty, heading vaguely north. We got lost seven or eight times, and then found our way out of Rome and onto the A1. In an hour and a half we were home. Rome was ours—to play, shop or eat gelato in—as long as we never looked back.

T
HE NEXT WEEK WE KEPT PRETTY MUCH TO
ourselves—playing house, lying low. Guests require attention. And if the guest happens to be one of our kids, they require even more. We wanted Alison to be excited by Umbria, to realize that it was a resource for her. We wanted her to meet our friends and get a feeling for the lifestyle, which had meant dinner parties almost every night—either cooking at someone's house or trying one of the restaurants we love. We showed her Trevi, Spoleto, Assisi and Perugia; and then we traipsed all over Rome, walking the cobblestones until our feet were bloody stumps. We were all ready for a break.

Jill and I do an odd thing sometimes—we play down our love for the sake of the children. It's not a conscious choice, but we think, somehow, that if they see how strong we are for each other, they'll feel less love flowing in their direction. So we tame it down a bit. It's not all that obvious; the kids may not even notice it. But eventually it takes a toll on us. When we're less in touch, less demonstrative, and when I don't have Jill in my radar quite as much as I like to, we feel
the difference. It's a little embarrassing that we dote on each other so much. It started with the cancer and picked up steam during our time in Marin—all those courses somehow gave us permission to be more intimate—and it's become a habit.

After Alison flew back to L.A., we had a week to find each other again. I cooked every night—just for us. We took long hikes; Jill did some watercolors; I wrote a bit. We casually poked around the area, checking out some towns we hadn't seen yet. Bevagna is a beauty; Montefalco, Spello, Foligno—each one is worth its own six-week visit. So we put a bookmark in them with a promise to get back and give them more time. But this week, the time and attention was for each other.