Salon Wanderlust | An Italian romance: Chapter Two

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
Where is your perfect retreat? Is it a deserted island or cultural metropolis? Discuss how you prefer to get away from it all in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Running with the Hadza
By Eric Seyfarth
Tanzania's Stone Age tribe represents a living link to our earliest ancestors
(09/27/98)
"Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse"
By Lesley Hazleton
Searching for the site where James Dean died
(09/25/98)
Letter from Pusan: The party's over
By Rolf Potts
The heady rise and fall of expat decadence in South Korea
(09/24/98)
Swimsuits -- and more!
By Beverly Gage
Past and present collide at Atlantic City's annual Miss America extravaganza
(09/23/98)
The cheapest air ticket around
By Dawn MacKeen
Couriers fly halfway around the world at half (or less) the normal price
(09/22/98)

Browse the
Wanderlust Feature archives

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Travel Book Partner

AN ITALIAN ROMANCE: CHAPTER TWO | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
You roll your suitcase along the cobblestones and scan the faces of the young people sitting on the steps of the enormous cathedral. You don't see him. You panic: You're late, and you have no back-up plan. There is no way to reach him. You sit on the steps and wait, bleary from the sleepless flight, anxiously glancing in all directions. You have no idea what you'll do. Here you are in Milano, the ugliest city in Italy, under thick threatening skies, and you are worried that even if he shows up, it will rain and you're tired and there's nothing romantic about Milano and no nice place to stay. You consider leaving.
You get up and wander toward the doors of the cathedral, then turn around and spot his denim jacket and the curls at the nape of his neck. There is an empty space beside him on the steps. You quietly sit down next to him and he doesn't see you. You press your skin ever so slightly against him and there is a little frisson before he turns. "Ciao," you say, and he smiles in an excited way the French rarely allow themselves to smile, and then he takes you in his arms.
"I never dreamed I'd see you again so soon," he says. He tells you, appreciatively, that you look the same, and you tell him he does, too, but in truth he looks much more skinny and haggard than you remember. He asks if he looks thinner, and you say maybe a little, and he says he hasn't been eating, it has been a long story these past few months. But he likes himself this way. I don't know, you tease him. You used to have a rule that you never sleep with anyone who weighs less than you. He looks at you doubtfully and then draws himself up to seem bigger and taller. "Va bene?" he asks. You say well, probably, and he says the only rule you should have is never to sleep with a man who likes his body better than yours. He takes your hand. "Andiamo."
You walk across the wide piazza, glancing at each other with shy surprise and frank expectation. He says he has found a charming little hotel nearby. In Milano, filled with big, anonymous modern business hotels, this is a miracle. You climb the stone stairs in an ancient building to land at a cheerful, airy hotel, with hand-painted furniture, fresh flowers and views of the historic center. Inside the room, everything suddenly seems so small, so intimate. He puts down your suitcase and you don't know what to do.
"A shower?" he asks, and you nod, good idea, and disappear into the bathroom. You return, refreshed, with some courage, and flop down on the bed next to him, tossing away your towel. Ah, he says, and he runs his finger down your spine. He caresses you and your weariness from a long flight turns into dreaminess as you make love. After, he strokes your hair and whispers that he's going out for a couple of hours, that you should nap after that long flight, but not too much.
In what seems like a moment he is back again, and he draws the curtains so you can watch the fading light outside. He climbs back under the fluffy comforter and you think, we have only two days and nights together, maybe we will never get out of bed.
But eventually you dress and wander outside to the nearby castle grounds. He asks you about your divorce and you say you feel better, it's been a year, and now you just want to cut the ties completely, get on with your life. Also, you say San Francisco is a desert for dates. Don't worry, he says. It's early. Maybe, you say, but the shock of being suddenly single after many years is the feeling that women over 35 are no longer considered attractive, not even by men over 35.
It's a pity, he says. The problem with American men is that they are so superficial. They want youth and beauty right up front in their faces. That isn't interesting. European men like to discover what's beautiful about a woman. Your beauty, he tells you, sneaks up on you. He didn't see it right at first, meeting you over breakfast in a pensione on an island, reading your guidebook, asking practical questions, so serious. He had to figure out how to make you smile that soft smile. That's the pleasure.
He squeezes your hand and you ask about his long winter. It was terrible, he says. His wife fell in love with another man and almost left him. He couldn't imagine his life away from her, from their house, from their children, their routine. They'd both had little stories with other lovers before, but this threatened everything. He was scared and lonely, but exceptional circumstances, he says, make you become more exceptional. That, of course, made it a more difficult choice for her, he says, with empathy and no bitterness. His wife stayed, but it's different now. It does give him more freedom to travel, though.
Your wife, you tell him, would have to be completely crazy to leave you, and you mean it. He's grateful for that remark, and you realize that the tables are oddly turned from Ischia. He is heartbroken and you are stronger, comforting someone who seemed so invulnerable. He feels sad, he says, but something positive came from it. For the first time he had to really talk to his friends about his personal life. Before, he says, there was no one I could even tell about meeting you on Ischia. Nobody.
You walk quietly for a while, crossing a busy street back to the center of town. Did you tell anyone about meeting me on Ischia? he asks. Well, yes, you say, a few people. Actually, quite a few people -- you wrote a tiny little story about it and published it online. He seems amused.
When can I read it? he asks. You spread your hands in an Italian gesture of helplessness. Sorry, you say, it's in English. "I learn fast, sweetheart," he says. In English.
In the evening, outdoors over pizza, you talk about his new book idea, your work, his students' art, your families, and you realize that the conversation is much deeper than it was on Ischia, that something else is happening.
You have a grappa in the Piazza del Duomo when it starts to pour. You abandon your drinks, splash through the streets and take refuge in the covered open-air market square, which is empty. You watch him leaning against a stone pillar and you tell him he looks good from a distance. He tells you that you have to drink grappa more often, and he walks toward you and wipes your face dry with his foulard. Alone in the market square, with lettuce leaves scattered at your feet, you make out like teenagers, rain splattering all around.
The next morning you wonder what you'll do in gray Milano. You have pots of café au lait in bed and then he says that since we're island specialists, we'll have to go to an island. You have no idea where the train you board will take you, but an hour later you arrive in Stresa, a lovely little town on the edge of Lago Maggiore. You descend to the boardwalk and follow a path lined with Liberty-style villas and flowers everywhere -- azaleas, rhododendrons, roses. You go to the edge of the enormous lake, surrounded by high granite mountains and green valleys, and take a water taxi to Isola Bella -- "beautiful island."
The island at first appears covered with bad restaurants and tourist kiosks selling the same Boticelli ashtrays they sell everywhere in Italy. But then you enter the Palazzo Borromeo, Conte Vitaliano Borromeo's 1670 hideaway, and you're in another world. The huge palace rests on the edge of the island cliffs, and you walk through room after room of overdone gilded splendor. Here is a grand ballroom, here is the canopied bed where Napoleon slept (twice, behind Josephine's back: once with an Italian princess, another with an opera star), here is a little stage with fierce marionettes that must have terrorized the children. M. explains that the way you can tell this is a baroque, not Renaissance, room is that you have the feeling that you can't escape; you don't see the other rooms or have a sense of the building. It's handy, you think, to have an affair with an art professor.
You pass by rooms filled with armor and go downstairs into the grottoes. "Incredible," says M., and you have never seen anything like it, either. The cool cellars are lined, floor to ceiling, in mosaics made of pebbles, in sea themes, with swirling shells, starfish and mermaids, room after room of fantastic designs. There is a smooth white marble sculpture of a woman sleeping on her stomach, with a pretty curve in her back. "That," says M., "is obscenely beautiful."
The grottoes open out into classic Italian gardens, with infinite varieties of exotic trees, plants and flowers. Huge terra cotta pots of lemon trees and geraniums perch atop the cliffs against the blue water. White peacocks traipse around the lawns, displaying their spectacular tails whenever a drab little peahen shows the slightest interest. Delicate, pastel-colored water lilies float on a reflecting pool. Statues of gods and mythical beasts face the lake, standing on ever-higher terraces of roses. You explore together, taking paths, and are comfortable not saying anything at all.
The sun breaks out and M. sits down in an ornate iron chair on a lawn. "Imagine it in the evening, at a party, lit everywhere with candles, with a banquet there and a string orchestra over there," he says, gesturing. "You and I were born three centuries too late." You picture him telling tales in "The Decameron," sneaking off between times into the grottoes or a secluded corner of the gardens -- with you.
Reluctantly, you leave the palace grounds and stand in line for a boat to another island and you hear someone call your name. You turn and see a woman who seems familiar but whom you don't recognize. She introduces herself and you realize it's a foreign student who lived with you six years ago; you've bumped into the only person you know in Switzerland here near the border. You are so surprised you introduce her to M. but completely forget his name. You chat for a while but then it comes back to you that you didn't like her so well and even if it is a phenomenal coincidence to see her, you hope she sits somewhere else on the boat, which she does. M. watches all of this and you tell him it was remarkable to run into her, but in fact you weren't really friends. "I noticed that right away," he says. "Now I know something new about you: You can be cold." You say you hope you weren't rude, and he says no, it's just nice to know you're so warm to him when you can be so chilly to others.
You stroll around another island -- Isola Madre -- taking trails that snake through lush woods to wide flowery meadows that are thick with exotic birds. "We've seen so many beautiful things today," he says, content, smoking a cigar on a bench overlooking the lake. Amazing, you say. This was every bit as enchanting as Ischia.
Snuggling on the train ride home, he touches your arm tenderly, easily. You think about the habit of American men who jump right into sexual intimacy, but then are afraid that if they touch you affectionately outside of sex you'll want to marry them or something. They confuse a woman's desire for ambient affection with demands on their freedom.
It's late and you're hungry when you return to the hotel, but you're hungrier for each other. You play and play and he keeps offering you more until you tell him, loosely translating a French phrase he's used, that he has killed you so many times you're dead. Famished, you walk out and wander in the old Jewish section of town until you find a trattoria tucked in a side street. You both order risotto milanese, with its rich aroma and saffron-gold flavor, and you suspect that the reason it tastes so good has to do with veal broth, and even though you're a vegetarian, you don't care. You order porcini mushrooms and place one in your mouth and while it melts you realize you have never tasted anything so good in your life. You will never have another porcini mushroom like that porcini mushroom. And looking across the table you wonder whether you'll ever have a chance to have another meal with him again.
It makes you a little sad, you have to leave so soon. This visit will become another snapshot of paradise that you tuck away in your desk. He seems to sense what you're thinking and he asks you: What are you doing in September? You forgot about September and a nervous thrill shoots through you, but you calmly say you have no real plans.
I've never been to California, he says. I think I would like San Francisco.
You try to digest this while you walk back to the hotel, and you're excited and scared. He says he is making plane reservations for mid-September, and he will leave everything about this romantic trip up to you. He says nothing more about it.
In the morning, you have early trains. This time when he kisses you goodbye in the station, it isn't so hard. You'll see him again. But you wonder if the next time you say goodbye to each other, it will be much more bittersweet.
SALON | Sept. 29, 1998
Laura Fraser is a writer in Northern California. This article is a sequel to her first story for Wanderlust: "The Italian affair."


	T A B L E_T A L K Where is your perfect retreat? Is it a deserted island or cultural metropolis? Discuss how you prefer to get away from it all in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Running with the Hadza By Eric Seyfarth Tanzania's Stone Age tribe represents a living link to our earliest ancestors (09/27/98) "Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse" By Lesley Hazleton Searching for the site where James Dean died (09/25/98) Letter from Pusan: The party's over By Rolf Potts The heady rise and fall of expat decadence in South Korea (09/24/98) Swimsuits -- and more! By Beverly Gage Past and present collide at Atlantic City's annual Miss America extravaganza (09/23/98) The cheapest air ticket around By Dawn MacKeen Couriers fly halfway around the world at half (or less) the normal price (09/22/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		AN ITALIAN ROMANCE: CHAPTER TWO \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - You roll your suitcase along the cobblestones and scan the faces of the young people sitting on the steps of the enormous cathedral. You don't see him. You panic: You're late, and you have no back-up plan. There is no way to reach him. You sit on the steps and wait, bleary from the sleepless flight, anxiously glancing in all directions. You have no idea what you'll do. Here you are in Milano, the ugliest city in Italy, under thick threatening skies, and you are worried that even if he shows up, it will rain and you're tired and there's nothing romantic about Milano and no nice place to stay. You consider leaving. You get up and wander toward the doors of the cathedral, then turn around and spot his denim jacket and the curls at the nape of his neck. There is an empty space beside him on the steps. You quietly sit down next to him and he doesn't see you. You press your skin ever so slightly against him and there is a little frisson before he turns. "Ciao," you say, and he smiles in an excited way the French rarely allow themselves to smile, and then he takes you in his arms. "I never dreamed I'd see you again so soon," he says. He tells you, appreciatively, that you look the same, and you tell him he does, too, but in truth he looks much more skinny and haggard than you remember. He asks if he looks thinner, and you say maybe a little, and he says he hasn't been eating, it has been a long story these past few months. But he likes himself this way. I don't know, you tease him. You used to have a rule that you never sleep with anyone who weighs less than you. He looks at you doubtfully and then draws himself up to seem bigger and taller. "Va bene?" he asks. You say well, probably, and he says the only rule you should have is never to sleep with a man who likes his body better than yours. He takes your hand. "Andiamo." You walk across the wide piazza, glancing at each other with shy surprise and frank expectation. He says he has found a charming little hotel nearby. In Milano, filled with big, anonymous modern business hotels, this is a miracle. You climb the stone stairs in an ancient building to land at a cheerful, airy hotel, with hand-painted furniture, fresh flowers and views of the historic center. Inside the room, everything suddenly seems so small, so intimate. He puts down your suitcase and you don't know what to do. "A shower?" he asks, and you nod, good idea, and disappear into the bathroom. You return, refreshed, with some courage, and flop down on the bed next to him, tossing away your towel. Ah, he says, and he runs his finger down your spine. He caresses you and your weariness from a long flight turns into dreaminess as you make love. After, he strokes your hair and whispers that he's going out for a couple of hours, that you should nap after that long flight, but not too much. In what seems like a moment he is back again, and he draws the curtains so you can watch the fading light outside. He climbs back under the fluffy comforter and you think, we have only two days and nights together, maybe we will never get out of bed. But eventually you dress and wander outside to the nearby castle grounds. He asks you about your divorce and you say you feel better, it's been a year, and now you just want to cut the ties completely, get on with your life. Also, you say San Francisco is a desert for dates. Don't worry, he says. It's early. Maybe, you say, but the shock of being suddenly single after many years is the feeling that women over 35 are no longer considered attractive, not even by men over 35. It's a pity, he says. The problem with American men is that they are so superficial. They want youth and beauty right up front in their faces. That isn't interesting. European men like to discover what's beautiful about a woman. Your beauty, he tells you, sneaks up on you. He didn't see it right at first, meeting you over breakfast in a pensione on an island, reading your guidebook, asking practical questions, so serious. He had to figure out how to make you smile that soft smile. That's the pleasure. He squeezes your hand and you ask about his long winter. It was terrible, he says. His wife fell in love with another man and almost left him. He couldn't imagine his life away from her, from their house, from their children, their routine. They'd both had little stories with other lovers before, but this threatened everything. He was scared and lonely, but exceptional circumstances, he says, make you become more exceptional. That, of course, made it a more difficult choice for her, he says, with empathy and no bitterness. His wife stayed, but it's different now. It does give him more freedom to travel, though. Your wife, you tell him, would have to be completely crazy to leave you, and you mean it. He's grateful for that remark, and you realize that the tables are oddly turned from Ischia. He is heartbroken and you are stronger, comforting someone who seemed so invulnerable. He feels sad, he says, but something positive came from it. For the first time he had to really talk to his friends about his personal life. Before, he says, there was no one I could even tell about meeting you on Ischia. Nobody. You walk quietly for a while, crossing a busy street back to the center of town. Did you tell anyone about meeting me on Ischia? he asks. Well, yes, you say, a few people. Actually, quite a few people -- you wrote a tiny little story about it and published it online. He seems amused. When can I read it? he asks. You spread your hands in an Italian gesture of helplessness. Sorry, you say, it's in English. "I learn fast, sweetheart," he says. In English. In the evening, outdoors over pizza, you talk about his new book idea, your work, his students' art, your families, and you realize that the conversation is much deeper than it was on Ischia, that something else is happening. You have a grappa in the Piazza del Duomo when it starts to pour. You abandon your drinks, splash through the streets and take refuge in the covered open-air market square, which is empty. You watch him leaning against a stone pillar and you tell him he looks good from a distance. He tells you that you have to drink grappa more often, and he walks toward you and wipes your face dry with his foulard. Alone in the market square, with lettuce leaves scattered at your feet, you make out like teenagers, rain splattering all around. The next morning you wonder what you'll do in gray Milano. You have pots of café au lait in bed and then he says that since we're island specialists, we'll have to go to an island. You have no idea where the train you board will take you, but an hour later you arrive in Stresa, a lovely little town on the edge of Lago Maggiore. You descend to the boardwalk and follow a path lined with Liberty-style villas and flowers everywhere -- azaleas, rhododendrons, roses. You go to the edge of the enormous lake, surrounded by high granite mountains and green valleys, and take a water taxi to Isola Bella -- "beautiful island." The island at first appears covered with bad restaurants and tourist kiosks selling the same Boticelli ashtrays they sell everywhere in Italy. But then you enter the Palazzo Borromeo, Conte Vitaliano Borromeo's 1670 hideaway, and you're in another world. The huge palace rests on the edge of the island cliffs, and you walk through room after room of overdone gilded splendor. Here is a grand ballroom, here is the canopied bed where Napoleon slept (twice, behind Josephine's back: once with an Italian princess, another with an opera star), here is a little stage with fierce marionettes that must have terrorized the children. M. explains that the way you can tell this is a baroque, not Renaissance, room is that you have the feeling that you can't escape; you don't see the other rooms or have a sense of the building. It's handy, you think, to have an affair with an art professor. You pass by rooms filled with armor and go downstairs into the grottoes. "Incredible," says M., and you have never seen anything like it, either. The cool cellars are lined, floor to ceiling, in mosaics made of pebbles, in sea themes, with swirling shells, starfish and mermaids, room after room of fantastic designs. There is a smooth white marble sculpture of a woman sleeping on her stomach, with a pretty curve in her back. "That," says M., "is obscenely beautiful." The grottoes open out into classic Italian gardens, with infinite varieties of exotic trees, plants and flowers. Huge terra cotta pots of lemon trees and geraniums perch atop the cliffs against the blue water. White peacocks traipse around the lawns, displaying their spectacular tails whenever a drab little peahen shows the slightest interest. Delicate, pastel-colored water lilies float on a reflecting pool. Statues of gods and mythical beasts face the lake, standing on ever-higher terraces of roses. You explore together, taking paths, and are comfortable not saying anything at all. The sun breaks out and M. sits down in an ornate iron chair on a lawn. "Imagine it in the evening, at a party, lit everywhere with candles, with a banquet there and a string orchestra over there," he says, gesturing. "You and I were born three centuries too late." You picture him telling tales in "The Decameron," sneaking off between times into the grottoes or a secluded corner of the gardens -- with you. Reluctantly, you leave the palace grounds and stand in line for a boat to another island and you hear someone call your name. You turn and see a woman who seems familiar but whom you don't recognize. She introduces herself and you realize it's a foreign student who lived with you six years ago; you've bumped into the only person you know in Switzerland here near the border. You are so surprised you introduce her to M. but completely forget his name. You chat for a while but then it comes back to you that you didn't like her so well and even if it is a phenomenal coincidence to see her, you hope she sits somewhere else on the boat, which she does. M. watches all of this and you tell him it was remarkable to run into her, but in fact you weren't really friends. "I noticed that right away," he says. "Now I know something new about you: You can be cold." You say you hope you weren't rude, and he says no, it's just nice to know you're so warm to him when you can be so chilly to others. You stroll around another island -- Isola Madre -- taking trails that snake through lush woods to wide flowery meadows that are thick with exotic birds. "We've seen so many beautiful things today," he says, content, smoking a cigar on a bench overlooking the lake. Amazing, you say. This was every bit as enchanting as Ischia. Snuggling on the train ride home, he touches your arm tenderly, easily. You think about the habit of American men who jump right into sexual intimacy, but then are afraid that if they touch you affectionately outside of sex you'll want to marry them or something. They confuse a woman's desire for ambient affection with demands on their freedom. It's late and you're hungry when you return to the hotel, but you're hungrier for each other. You play and play and he keeps offering you more until you tell him, loosely translating a French phrase he's used, that he has killed you so many times you're dead. Famished, you walk out and wander in the old Jewish section of town until you find a trattoria tucked in a side street. You both order risotto milanese, with its rich aroma and saffron-gold flavor, and you suspect that the reason it tastes so good has to do with veal broth, and even though you're a vegetarian, you don't care. You order porcini mushrooms and place one in your mouth and while it melts you realize you have never tasted anything so good in your life. You will never have another porcini mushroom like that porcini mushroom. And looking across the table you wonder whether you'll ever have a chance to have another meal with him again. It makes you a little sad, you have to leave so soon. This visit will become another snapshot of paradise that you tuck away in your desk. He seems to sense what you're thinking and he asks you: What are you doing in September? You forgot about September and a nervous thrill shoots through you, but you calmly say you have no real plans. I've never been to California, he says. I think I would like San Francisco. You try to digest this while you walk back to the hotel, and you're excited and scared. He says he is making plane reservations for mid-September, and he will leave everything about this romantic trip up to you. He says nothing more about it. In the morning, you have early trains. This time when he kisses you goodbye in the station, it isn't so hard. You'll see him again. But you wonder if the next time you say goodbye to each other, it will be much more bittersweet. SALON \| Sept. 29, 1998 Laura Fraser is a writer in Northern California. This article is a sequel to her first story for Wanderlust: "The Italian affair."