I turned twenty in Rome. A student in a classics program run through Duke University, I was happily one of a group of about twenty others living in a terra-cotta colored building that shared a wall with a convent full of understanding nuns who blessed our rowdiness. Mother-aged women cooked our meals; they joked about how many eggs we needed to fill our American bellies, to fuel our minds for the marvels that awaited us, from traveling around the country and gaping at the sun rising over archaeological sites to learning Italian from an expat in the building’s attic.
Thanks to ten-euro Ryanair flights, I spent weekends in hostels in Amsterdam and London. I took trains to hike the hills at Cinqueterre, I ate the freshest mozzarella cheese while watching Mediterranean waves crash against rocks, I drank cheap but good wine, slept with the windows open, then went back to Rome where I flirted with the too-old-for-me bassist at our favorite bar and spent the moonlight strolling aimlessly around Rome with an architecture major who named the mélange of styles and creative whims of the past represented in each level of the city. I was twenty, and free, and the future was thornless.
“It was the best time of my life!” I say to Italians I meet in DC, where I now live a less expansive life. “If I had a time machine, I’d go back right now!”
That’s what I say, because that’s how I remember it.
*
Recently, I came across a box of mine, stashed in a basement closet. While my daughter occupied herself with colored pencils, I opened it and unearthed photo albums, irrelevant diplomas, old playbills. Below a stack of middle school yearbooks, I found a battered paperback copy of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. I held the fat, palm-sized book, gazed at its seventies-era cover with its prickly black type and cheesy sunset-hued background, and remembered how I had read and reread the novel in high school, obsessed with the salacious and scandalous plot twists. (In the novel, a priest named Ralph de Bricassart sleeps with a married woman. This is the central, but not only, grossness, in the novel). That afternoon in the basement, I prepared to fall back into McCullough’s juicy prose, if only for a paragraph or two, and opened the front cover and read:
STOLEN from the Vergilian Society’s Villa Vergiliana
Cuma, Italy
during the worst week of my life.
Nov. 2002
I was stunned. No, that’s not right. I wasn’t stunned, I was offended. I didn’t have bad weeks in November of 2002, much less the worst week of my life. This inscription amounted to a sacrilege at the level of Father Ralph’s sexy visit to Meggie on Matlock Island.
After trying, and failing, to remember the terrible event that might have spurred these words, I pulled out my phone and find the Villa Vergiliana on a map. It was listed as a school, located near Roman ruins on the Naples coast, and even in the flat blue and gray of the map, I knew that it was gorgeous, and that I was young and happy when I stayed there, and that this inscription was a lie.
I was still trying to puzzle this out, to understand how an imposter with my handwriting had broken in and defiled my memories, when I considered that handwriting again.
I’ve always prided myself on my handwriting, and when I’m careful and patient, it still looks like this: upright and small, architectural. The me who wrote this message was being careful, patient, and meant something by this inscription. Meant to write the word STOLEN in all-capital letters in order to emphasize the act she was committing.
Could it be that Italy wasn’t all mozzarella and sunrises? I held the book open to the front cover and catch, along with that musty, old-book smell, the briefest puff of a memory:
The whisper-fights I had with a man in my program, someone boisterous and funny whom I thought I loved but who didn’t love me back. Me, holding him in his room to litigate his latest flirtation with a woman in our program while everyone else played games of ping pong in the courtyard.
How much I drank, despite a frustratingly (to me, then) low tolerance and penchant for tipsy wandering, veering around street corners in a city I didn’t know well, without a cell phone or a chance of finding my way back to that pretty – or was it occasionally claustrophobic? – house with twenty other people. How drinking often led to nights I didn’t remember, then mornings spent wincing in pain, acid in my throat, as everyone else marveled at the yellows and oranges of a sunrise over Cuma or Taormina. How many afternoons I skipped Italian class in order to sleep off a hangover and prepare to do it all again that night.
I wish I hadn’t written these angry words. I wish Italy was how I’ve been remembering it and describing it to everyone I meet, but the fact is, that it wasn’t perfect, and neither was I, and it’s fitting that I lamented my pain in a novel that had brought me such joy, even though the story itself is messy and problematic.
Now, The Thorn Birds stands up on my bookshelf in my office, between the thesaurus I use when I’m seeking a better word and the first literary journal that published one of my short stories. This worn copy of The Thorn Birds, and my inscription in its cover, is both reference and assurance of the way my memory uses grit as polish. The way I can smile at the sleeplessness of a woman with a newborn, blotting out the anxious, desperate feeling I had in those early days of my own child’s babyhood, remembering only the sensation of her fist wrapped around my index finger.
The Thorn Birds and its imperfect inscription are out in the open because I have a responsibility to respect the woman who felt that way, in that no-doubt gorgeous villa, just as I hope to respect the woman who feels this way, right now, and will, in twenty years, imagine this time, when my daughter is still small and I still want so many things to happen, as pure rose.