That evening I am reading Pliny in my studio when two parrots, bottle green, flash across the lawn below the window. They are there so suddenly I am disoriented: Is this Italy? Or the Amazon? Their size confuses scale; they are like fat, green herons; their wingspan looks as if it is as wide across as my desk.
They circle the garden once, one above and slightly in front of the other, screeching to one another. Then they dip over the wall and are swallowed by the trees.
What do I give thanks for this Thanksgiving? The boys, and Shauna, and the veal meatballs the butcher rolls in bread crumbs and packs in waxed paper. I’m thankful for music and the taste of the little chocolate coffee cups from the cioccolateria Shauna found in Trastevere, and the heat from the radiator beside me, and for the pencil box Shauna bought me two days ago made out of handmade paper. I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.
WINTER
THE EARTH TRUNDLES ALONG. AUTUMN SEEPS away from Rome. Good-bye, tomatoes; good-bye, tourists. Good-bye, whitethroats and warblers, and good-bye to the little brown corn bunting who landed on our terrace yesterday and sang a few notes before continuing on. Tonight I press my face into the pillow and imagine the migrants sweeping south through Europe, down the length of Italy, swallows and kingfishers, bean geese and sand martins, a tide across the Alps, darkening the moon, chasing the sun.
The vegetable stand we buy from is located in a little convergence of alleys between the hardware store and the bakery, called Largo Luigi Micelli. The sisters who run it are stubby-fingered and wear gumboots. “Buongiorno,” they say, every time we arrive. “Dimmi.” Tell me.
Most days a son helps them, eager and grave in his apron, periodically bringing a hand to his upper lip to confirm the existence of his downy mustache. The three of them educate me in winter produce: one type of cauliflower white as cotton, another purple as dusk; sheaves of young leeks with mud still packed in their roots; basins of squash; tiny, spherical potatoes like miniature moons. Frost, they say, adds flavor to the leaves of kale; winter radicchio should be brushed with oil and grilled on warm coals. There is fennel in bright, reedy piles. Crinkly, soft cabbages. Mountains of radishes. There are eggplants in rows and eggplants in heaps; indigo, violet-blue, some so purple they are black.
The leeks are bundled like debarked, nascent trees; the red-leaf lettuces are aloof and silent; they burn like torch flames. Especially in wet weather the market is luminous: the air slightly smoky, the stalls seemingly huddled together against the chill, the emerald piles of spinach, the orange pyramids of carrots, a dozen tattered umbrellas gleaming with beads of rain. And then, at noon, shutters are drawn, awnings collapse, the banquet is put away, and in the evening we walk past on the way home from a restaurant and all that remains of the market are locked stalls and trash in the gutters and the reflections of streetlights in the puddles.
This morning the sisters have wood strawberries, fragoline di bosco, little red droplets of flesh. They have supposedly been harvested in the hills we can see from the roof of the Academy.
I buy a carton for two euros, then reach inside the stroller’s rain cover and hand a strawberry like a tiny glowing lamp to each of the boys. They study it before sliding it between their lips.
In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences.21 In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions.
This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal?
The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.
We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife?
“Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world.
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.
In early December we are talking to Laura in the basement laundry room when she tells us this: if it ever begins to snow, we should run to the Pantheon, because to see snowflakes come drifting through the hole at the top of the dome is to change your life forever.
Shauna holds Henry on her hip and—with one hand—folds another basket of laundry. She asks, “Haven’t our lives already been changed forever?”
Still, in the mornings I find myself creeping onto the terrace to inspect the sky. Is today the day? Is tomorrow? Maybe, I think, although there is no logic to it, if I see snow come through the roof of the Pantheon, I’ll finally be able to sleep.
“It hasn’t snowed in Rome in four years,” Lorenzo, the gatekeeper, tells me. He sits in the portineria, the gatekeeper’s lodge, in a parka. A space heater blows onto his shoes. “Grazie a Dio,” he adds. Thank God.
“Does the city even have snowplows?” I ask.
He cocks his head. Behind his glasses his eyeballs are intensely magnified, twice the size they should be. “What do you mean, snowplows?”
Halfway to the studio, I stop in the courtyard. The square of sky above me is a roiling silver, and there is frost in the jasmine, and the water in the fountain looks slow and thick, like cooling wax. As if any moment structures of ice might start lacing their way across the top. As if any moment the sky might send down a few wandering crystals.
December 8 is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. All morning the air is filled with bells, and a parade of nuns marches up via Carini in the rain. Crows drift over the te
rrace, silent and threadbare, like deposed kings. Out in the street Laura’s husband, Jon, the landscape architect, drags a tree stump toward his studio. Celia, a classicist, stands outside the Academy’s front gate, wiping rain from her eyeglasses.
Across town, next to the McDonald’s in Piazza di Spagna, children offer roses to a bronze Madonna on a pillar. The pope is wheeled out of his car to pray at her feet.
The rain picks up. By afternoon, nightcrawlers, thick as fingers, have washed onto the sidewalks. They are huge, the kind of worms you usually see only in bait shops, and it is a little unnerving. Looking at them, I wonder what other hidden things are issuing out of the lawns.
We heave the stroller on and off a bus. Near Oviesse, a department store in Trastevere, a massive dog, a Newfoundland, maybe a hundred pounds, barks as his owner locks a leash into the compartment over the rear bumper of a motorino. Bark, bark, says the dog. The man says something back.
The dog circles the scooter, sniffing. The man lights a cigarette and puts on a helmet and finally seats himself and nods to the dog—hardly a motion with his chin—and the dog scrambles onto the tiny platform in front of the man’s feet. Strings of drool swing from his jaw.
The man starts the motorino. Cigarette still in his teeth, without checking his mirrors, man and dog race into the traffic on viale Trastevere. Beads of water shine on the cobbles, and on the umbrellas of pedestrians, and on the windshield of a tram as it groans to a stop beside us.
The oldest building in Idaho with its original roof still intact is the Mission of the Sacred Heart, just off I-90 near Cataldo, three hundred miles north of Boise, built by Jesuits and Coeur d’Alene tribespeople in 1853. When you see it for the first time, you think: Gosh, that’s pretty old. Forty feet high, no nails, handprints of native children still visible in the adobe. Timber had to be hauled in from a mile away. Foundation stones had to be chopped out of nearby mountains. Mud had to be dragged up from the river. You think: Life was pretty hard for those guys.
The oldest building in Rome with its original roof still intact is the Pantheon, rebuilt atop an older, fire-damaged temple by the emperor Hadrian around AD 125. When you see the Pantheon for the first time, your mind caves in.
Its doors are twenty-one feet high and weigh eight tons each. The sixteen columns on its porch are thirty-nine feet high and weigh about sixty tons each, roughly the weight of two fully loaded eighteen-wheelers, crushed and compacted into a cylinder five feet across. The columns were not hauled here from a mile away. They were quarried in eastern Egypt, dragged on sledges to the Nile, rowed across the Mediterranean, barged up the Tiber, and carted through the streets of Rome. They are ocean gray, flecked with mica, glassy and cold; it is impossible to be close to one and not want to touch it.
The vault of the Pantheon is made of concrete and has a diameter of 143 feet. The hole in the top, the oculus, is twenty-seven feet across. For thirteen centuries, it was the largest dome in the world. For nineteen centuries, it has resisted lightning strikes and earthquakes and barbarians.
But numbers, dimensions, facts—they come later. When you first see it, the Pantheon is about wonder. You walk through the gigantic doorway and your attention is sucked upward to a circle of sky. A filtering haze floats inside; a column of light strikes through the oculus and leans against the floor. The space is both intimate and explosive: your humanity is not diminished in the least, and yet simultaneously the Pantheon forces you to pay attention to the fact that the world includes things far greater than yourself.
The circular turret crowning the dome of St. Peter’s is supposed to represent the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of God, but you can’t help but feel, in the Pantheon, that the real eye is positioned directly over your head. You dwindle, you shrink; you teeter on the threshold of a vast, blue country.
Nineteen hundred years: invading armies, executions, and sacraments, the temple’s foundations sliding in the marshy ground, countless houses rising and falling all around, the Tiber flooding it three or four times a year for centuries—and yet, here it stands.
I am the sheet of film in a pinhole camera; I am the fetus in the womb. Particles of dust swim in the sunlight. Something in my chest unwinds, something blooms.
Three and a half million people visit the Pantheon every year.22 I go there maybe six times in December, hoping to fit my mind around it, hoping for snow.
I pencil Italian vocabulary onto sheets of paper, seal them inside our last Ziploc bag, and tape them inside the shower. Ho perso il biglietto. I’ve lost my ticket. Mi sono perso. I’ve lost my way. To no avail: my Italian remains miserable. I back the big stroller through the door of the little grocery store, Beti, park it beside the shelves of cookies, fight to the front of the throng, and ask the grocer across the counter for tomato sauce.
“Sugo di pompelmo,” I say. “Con basilico.” She squints at me. She knows me, I think; several times she has offered Henry and Owen lollipops.
“Sugo di pompelmo,” I say. I point.
Her fingers float past the jars on the shelves.
“Sugo di carne?”
There are two dozen jars of tomato sauce right in front of her eyes. I speak more loudly. “No, no. Sugo di pompelmo.”
I am determined not to fail. She holds up a can of pears. I shake her off. She holds up jar of tomatoes with mushrooms. “Questo? Pomodori? Confunghi?”
“Ecco!” I say. “Sì.” With mushrooms. Good enough. She hands me the jar. I pay. It’s not until I’m back on via Carini, halfway home, that I realize I was hollering for grapefruit sauce. Grapefruit sauce with basil.
On the Ponte Sisto, a fifteenth-century bridge built by Pope Sixtus IV, a dozen Africans carefully arrange their knockoff Prada purses on blankets, shining them, straightening them. Then they lean back on the balustrade on their elbows and talk. The lantern of St. Peter’s glows orange in the distance.
We pass two disheveled guys with five dogs between them. The men bend over a camp stove upon which a pot steams: slaw, mounds of it, and a meter-long sausage, coiled over itself, boiled pink. An upside-down baseball cap sits in front of them, a few coins inside.
Pretty much all the panhandlers we’ve seen in Rome have dogs: terriers, Great Danes, a black lab nursing a litter of piebald puppies. The strategy appears to be this: Put some sedated dogs on a blanket and use the first-person plural on your sign. Please help us. We need food.
Every time she sees the dogs, Shauna cries. Today a yellow Lab on a sheet of cardboard raises his head, watching us with flat eyes. The wind sticks a scrap of leaf against the side of his face, then wrenches it away. He is looking not so much at us as through us. One of his hind legs is missing.
Already I can sense Shauna tensing up, her lower lip quivering. I put my arm around her, push the stroller a bit faster, point at something at the far end of the bridge.
We construct schedules for Henry and Owen like bungling one-star generals. A nap at nine and another at two. Midmorning snack. Midafternoon snack. Bath before bed. Every day one boy or the other is skipping his nap or falling asleep in the stroller long before he is supposed to. Neither seems very interested in food. Both want to be held all the time. Is this what it means to be a parent—to constantly fail to be in control of anything?
Late afternoons, as it’s getting dark, after I’ve written a journal entry and read Pliny and added not one single worthwhile paragraph to my novel, I’ll return home from the studio and take whichever boy happens to be awake out in the backpack to see the starlings.
Tonight I take Owen. We head downhill from the apartment, kicking up leaves, the frame of the carrier creaking in the cold. He hums a sustained C-sharp into my ear. We pause beside the piers of the Fontanone where the water is splashing blue and cold across the marble and cross via Garibaldi to look out at the city. A few tourists brave the cold. Traffic throbs past. The view still dazzles me, every time. Rome is orange. The sky is deep-ocean blue. Above the Albans, Venus shines a pale white.
Not quite black,
not quite gray, in the hand a starling shimmers with greens and purples, like a puddle touched with oil. Lovely, but common, too, and the rampancy of starlings more than anything casts them as grimy, despised birds. They take over winter feeders, pave neighborhoods with excrement, eat the seeds for winter wheat. But above Rome, in winter, they assemble in flocks ten thousand strong and put on shows that take my breath away.
Tonight there are three flocks. They stretch into quarter-mile bands, winding apart, then slowly snapping back together. In one minute they are three separate helices, a heart, a velvet funnel, two falling scarves. A flock swings closer to us, a shower of black against the blue, plunging in coordination—suddenly a thousand birds turn their wing tips to us and are gone.
Here on the Janiculum the ancients typically posted an augur or two, priests who would interpret auspices—the flights of birds, for the most part—to determine the will of the gods. The birds swing east and it’s time to go to battle. See too many hawks, or not enough, and an inauguration should be postponed. From the little I’ve read, leaning against a table in the Academy library, Livy’s history of Rome is stuffed with good and bad auspices, generals pausing to take them, emperors ignoring them at their peril. Pliny’s writing, too, is infused with omens: he claimed that ravens understood the meanings they conveyed in auspices.23
Eagle-owls signified direful portents,24 and fighting cocks gave the most powerful signs; the manner in which they ate grain determined if state officers could open their homes, and what formations soldiers would take on battlefields. These chickens, Pliny says, held “supreme empire over the empire of the world.”25 Down in Trastevere streetlights come on, one after another. The starlings rematerialize, washed in blue, a five-hundred-foot-tall dancer turning flips. I prop the backpack on its stand and adjust Owen’s hat and give him a bottle, wondering what he sees. Maybe you know the history: In 1890, in New York City, a drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin, who wanted to make sure that every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays was introduced to America, released eighty starlings in Central Park. A hundred and fifteen years later the United States alone has 200 million—and angry wheat farmers and flocks sucked into jet engines and histoplasmosis, a respiratory disease that originates in starling feces.