Well, Chris Guillebeau is way more fabulous than I will ever be, and ten years younger. This kid kicks my ass to Saturn, and probably yours too. Clicking around his hipster-riffic Web site I’m less That could be me! than Why even bother? or maybe Why not just kill myself now? There are other people out there living my dream better than I ever could. Who am I to think I have anything new or necessary to say or contribute?

**

It’s getting harder and harder to drag myself into work each day. My cubicled purgatory is still full of wonderful souls who smile and embrace me, and I love them, but without my beautiful boys the color and the pizazz as well as all motivation is gone. I’m living within an almost still life — as monochrome and sexless as the world of the angels in Wim Wenders’ imagination, longing like Damiel to cross over and take a big bite of the apple.

Thus the summer flies by. I thought I’d be elsewhere by now.

“You should come to California with me!” says my friend Drew, the amateur astrologer I previously called stocky and adorable, who comes around for his daily hug. He’s considering a move to the Los Angeles area to attend graduate school. Unfortunately he’s not driving there. If he were, I’d actually consider it, just to get on the road again (and the hell out of Dodge). I am fond of Drew, and he’s cute in his freckled redheaded way, even if his beliefs are a little out there for me. I’d consider biding my time with him the way I bided (bid?) my time with Seamus — although Drew has said himself that the Leo-Capricorn combination isn’t ideal. (His ex-wife was a Capricorn.) It’s not like I have a throng of irresistible fans lining up to take me out. Anymore.

**

A new reader points me to an online Zen expert. He’s a fine guidance counselor, Krishnamurti-like in his advice — “you have to decide for yourself what is best” — and gently compassionate in his outlook. He reminds me of the Buddhist therapist I saw for a number of years. I’ve always preferred Zen to most other philosophies and belief systems, even though it could be interpreted as directly contradicting what my own life coach and other live-your-dream types currently advocate. The “intention” and “manifestation” people, after all, tell you to desire, and to desire hard — the more the better! Which, I have consistently found in my own experience, only leads to more suffering when I invariably don’t obtain or achieve whatever it is I wanted.

Hence the appeal of Zen. Especially now. Of course, mine is probably the immature, sour-grapes version…kind of like when the Violent Femmes sing You know that I want your lovin/but Mr. Logic, Mr. Logic says it ain’t never gonna happen/so then my defenses say I, I didn’t want it anyway…yeah, I want to transcend desire and attachment and become one with Pure Being. But you know sometimes I’m a liar.

**

Samira emails me from India. I ask her how Ken is, and she replies “Great. Still HOT. Still sweet. My honey.” She, for one, isn’t helping to prove that so-called romantic love with another human is unfulfilling. But I don’t really want her to.

**

In my last installment of the Italy diaries, I wind up celebrating fleeting joys and fruitless desires, unapologetic about what I wanted and how I conducted myself. It’s kind of a pleasure to revisit, to tell you the truth. So here it is, the last of the series.

Part 6.3: MILANO (MILAN)

The next morning I boarded the 11:14 train to Milano at Santa Maria Novella station. It arrived at Stazione Centrale around two, and I wandered back and forth along Via Vitruvio until I located Hotel Bernino on Via Napo Torriani.

My room was smaller and darker than the one in Florence, but it was also half the price. After I dropped off my things, I set off down Via Pisani (a street of unattractive modern buildings that could have been in any city) toward central Milan in search of food. I was specifically looking for Asmara, an Eritrean restaurant recommended by Let’s Go that was supposed to be open for lunch until four.

After walking about twelve blocks I found the place, in what seemed to be a largely African immigrant neighborhood, but it was closed. Groaning and hungry, I walked over to the shopping thoroughfare Corso de Buenos Aires. Most restaurants were closed, observant of afternoon siesta time, and the snack bar on the corner was completely cleaned out. Across the street was a McDonalds, but I was not going to go in there. I continued down the Corso feeling almost lightheaded, fretting that I might soon pass out from low blood sugar (this is not an exaggeration, it’s happened before), when suddenly I had the calming thought (or heard the voice, depending on how you interpret it) — Have faith, you’re almost there.

Who knows what that was about? What I do know is that right around the corner, on Via Spallonzani, I found a piazza with a little snack bar full of Italians. I bought a piece of foccacia pizza, which they had in abundance, and a bottle of aqua naturale. The foccacia was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, but the story doesn’t end there. After I had finished I noticed that both the chalkboard outside and the painted words on the door said CANNOLI SICILIANI.

That’s the part that amazes me. I was complaining not long ago that you can’t get decent cannoli in my town the way you can in the Italian North End of Boston, and I had intended to find some authentic cannoli in Italy. But I had been in Italy almost five weeks, it was my last day, and I had located no cannoli. Antonio had insisted that Sicily made the best. Allora, this was kismet. I ordered one with a cappuccino, and when it came it was like a dream on a plate. The crispiest, flakiest shell, dusted with powdered sugar, was stuffed with the freshest, sweetest, gooiest filling (mascarpone, not ricotta!) and garnished with candied orange. Mamma mia. Mamma mia. It kicked the North End’s ass. I made all sorts of noises while savoring every bite, and licked my fingers afterward.

The local sitting in front of me talking to his buddy in Italian was wearing a shirt that said HEMINGWAY’S BAR across the back of it. When he got up I noticed that the front said “Mexico,” so it wasn’t just some Milano locale. What is it with these meaningful coincidences? Skeptics say it’s a matter of what we filter; others believe in synchronicity. I’m not about to say, although I do have a mystic’s tendency to err on the side of the mysterious. And this day in Milano was already turning out to be marvelously mysterious.

I followed Corso Buenos Aires until it turned into Corso Venezia, intending to visit Milano’s Duomo. This Duomo is the third largest church in the world, begun by Visconti in the 14th century and finished in the 1800s under Napoleon. I passed by the Giardini Pubblici, a park housing the natural history museum, as the Corso grew prettier and prettier.

Alessandro didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He discouraged me from going to Milano on my days off at Centro, saying that it was too industrial, and that there was nothing to recommend it if you weren’t a fashionista. He made it sound like a mixture of Los Angeles and Detroit. I should never have listened to a young man who can’t even see into a mirror properly.

Milano is a beautiful city full of gorgeous architecture like that of Roma, laid out in ways that remind me, again, of my hometown Boston. You could say Milano is to Firenze as Washington, DC is to Annapolis, Maryland. One is an imposing urban metropolis showcasing innumerable periods of design; the other is a pretty historic town full of cobblestones and charm. Of course, Annapolis is much smaller than Firenze, but It’s the feel of the place I’m talking about.

In an area overrun by expensive clothiers and tourist-trap restaurants, I found the Duomo. It was overwhelming. There’s something frightening about a structure that large with more apparent spines than a porcupine. From the ground, what you see are rows and circles of stalagmites growing from countless spires to reach sharply toward heaven. If anyone were to be cast out like Lucifer, he’d be in danger of getting gruesomely impaled on these things. The style is ostensibly somewhere between Gothic and Baroque, having gone through five centuries of architectural tinkering. Mercifully, this Duomo has a lift that takes curious tourists to the roof, where they can clamber up and down built-in stairs and take in birds’-eye views of Milano.

Before doing that, I walked around the cathedral, and saw the Piazza del Duomo out front, which looks like the Italy you see in movies, gray flagstone and pigeons underfoot, with the arched doorways of Renaissance-era buildings on either side and a monument of the ubiquitous King Vittorio Emmanuele II in the center.

I took the lift up with a petite and sunny middle-aged woman named Margret who was visiting from Germany with a tour group. We walked together on the roof for a short time, and she pointed out the rooftop garden restaurant where they had stopped for lunch.

From here I could see that the “stalagmites,” which had looked like sharp points from the ground, were in reality tipped with detailed statues of saints and other religious symbols. Truly an amazing, painstaking accomplishment. No wonder it had taken so long. Beyond them, the stately roofs of Milano stretched for kilometers in every direction; here and there rose the round green duomo of a lesser church.

Why hadn’t I come here sooner? Why hadn’t I taken advantage of the opportunity to wander this extraordinary rooftop before, when I could have come here on a day off with my wonderful new English friend?

But it might have been too much for me. A sublime and centuries-old work of art like this cathedral would have brought home to me the small, transitory identities of (AlienBaby) and James — whatever one believes about the soul — and made me want him even more, with that bittersweet carpe-diem sort of longing. I leaned against one of the turrets and felt the familiar ache in my chest. This is why some people, after falling once, won’t let it happen again: loss is a bastard.

Yet we have to say goodbye to everyone, at some point. How is it a solution not to love anyone?

I walked back to the side of the roof across from Margret’s restaurant. Somewhere in that building, music was blaring. What the world needs now/is love/sweet love/it’s the only thing/that there’s just too little of…

I bent to rest my forearms on the stone railing and listened, smiling to myself. I could not have made this up. Even better was the next thing on the playlist, “I’m Not In Love,” that ironically penned protest against the obvious. I’d like to see you/but then again/it doesn’t mean you mean that much to me…

Big boys don’t cry.

…

I now had a massive blister on my left pinky-toe and was limping slightly as I walked toward Viale Premuda and the Osteria il Giardino del Segreti, a highly recommended restaurant. I stopped in at one of the many Farmacias, marked with a green neon cross, to buy plastic adhesive bandages, and sat down at a trolley stop to apply one.

Viale Premuda is another Boston-esque street, reminiscent of Commonwealth Avenue where it snakes its way through Brookline, with quaint little trolleys running up and down the center of it and slightly run-down shops and restaurants on either side. It’s unfortunate to see graffiti on some of the beautiful 17th- and 18th-century buildings, but local taggers are probably blasé about their city’s history.

The Osteria wasn’t open yet — the man inside told me quarter-past seven — so I looked around unsuccessfully for an Internet point for twenty minutes. When I came back, they told me ten more minutes, so I decided to start back uptown. I was far from the hotel, and I wanted to be a lot closer when it got dark. (I found an Internet point within fifteen minutes once I headed toward the Corso, and checked my email.)  I decided to swing by Asmara one more time, just for the heck of it, and found it open.

Seated by the smiling Eritrean hostess at a white-tableclothed table beneath photographs of beautiful African women, I ordered a piccolo beer and the vegetariano special.

Madonna. It was better than even the best very similar Ethiopian food I’d had in the States. Scooping up scrumptious greens, potatoes, and lentils using the spongy bread, I was reminded of a certain non-date I had had at an Ethiopian restaurant with a certain non-boyfriend of mine back in the early spring. It was nice to think about a man other than you-know-who for a change. The memory is a wonderful one, a Novara all its own.

And I considered how this person, who defies any sort of categorization in my life, has been a blessing, and possibly one of the best things that has ever happened to me. How could I fail to remember that? He won’t even mind my saying so, that’s how radically different and how terminally cool he is. I actually believe that we will always be friends. I feel I can tell him anything without fear of judgment (hence his presence on this list). And when you don’t need to seek after or worry about someone’s acceptance or esteem — when you know that it’s already there for you — the need for reassurances, promises, or contracts seems to largely dissipate. At least for me, at least in this case. And that’s no small thing. In reality, it’s a pretty big, rare thing.

He has given me exactly what I needed from him.

Bless him for that.

EPILOGUE

As my plane prepared for takeoff the next morning, I thought about all the places I hadn’t been. Venice. Pisa. Naples. Sicily. The Amalfi coast. Cinque Terre. Part of my original idea had been to see the Mediterranean, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere near it. But there was no more time, and even if there were, I had no more energy or stamina. My health was starting to wane.

Then I remembered how, not long ago, I was talking with my good friend Ruth, and was able to sum up my most personal dream for her in a few words: to be somewhere beautiful, with someone beautiful.

I had lived my dream. I had lived it for only two weeks, but some people never even see theirs for a day. High on a mountain overlooking Lago d’Orta, amid the jasmine and the honeysuckle and the peacocks, I flushed with happy excitement to see a witty blue-eyed Englishman coming up the gravel path. What could have been lovelier or more magical? It was worth a hundred steam burns in the dishroom and peeling endless piles of carrots, just to see him smile, to gain the prize of making him laugh. Call him a first class asshole, call me a fool for falling for a first class asshole, but I’d do it all again in a millisecond. James may not have believed he was very attractive or very lovable (and isn’t that the root of all evil?) but to me he was bellissimo, bellissimo, beautiful in every way.

And who knows, really…there are many beautiful places in the world. There are beautiful places right here. There are beautiful, lovable, ineffably dear people everywhere, and the more intimate you become with loss — the more you befriend it –the less afraid you are to love them.

Of course, there’s loss, and then there’s loss. In Philadelphia where I changed planes there were televisions tuned to CNN, and I mistakenly thought that their BBC clip commemorating the anniversary of last year’s London bombings was current. Did that ever make my heart hammer. Such catastrophic dispatches from that part of the world will never be the same. It’s one thing to feel empathy and sorrow for strangers attacked in a distant city, and quite another to care passionately for even one person there who may come into harm’s way. “It’s enough for me that you are somewhere here,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha at one point in Dostoevsky’s novel, and that’s how I feel, even though I don’t expect to ever see him again. To steal a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay, “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.” I can live without James, but I do want him to live.

Günter was fond of saying, you never know. And you don’t. You never know what tomorrow will bring, or if there will be one. Lightning strikes, cars collide, the body fails. A close friend of mine from college took her own life. I regret so much about that relationship, and about my silence within it…that was part of what shaped me into the apparent madwoman I am today, who won’t shut up about how great you are, and how much she loves you. Most “normal” people don’t behave this way in the English-speaking world. Raffe was like that, but James didn’t take her effusions seriously, and besides, she was Italian. Still, I won’t apologize for refusing to be cautious, for saying the things I said, or for trusting my own heart. Because you never know.

My flight companion on the way back from Philly turned out to be a delightful sixtysomething Englishman from Surrey. How perfect is that? He lives in Paris now, and we discussed some of the better French films and actors, much the way another Englishman and I discussed the better English-language films and actors, during one of the many good times at Centro.

It was a fitting bookend to my Italian aventura, my sojourn in Oz, my dream.

I won’t lie to you: I’ve become depressed again. And if killing myself could land me in Goran Dukic’s quirky limbo for lost souls, I’d be climbing into the tub with the hair dryer. Because even in that grey place that’s almost like planet Earth, “just a little bit worse,” friendships and road trips and great music and small miracles — even romantic love — are possible. (Besides which, you don’t have the usual paralyzing worries about getting yourself killed or starving in the street, because you’re already dead.) I wanted to get in the totally beat-to-shit station wagon with gypsy rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, looking like Peter Krause’s mutton-chopped little brother) and take off for Tom Waits’ magical refugee camp in the desert where even the “crooked trees” among us are celebrated.

Of course, Waits’ character Kneller sums up my whole problem in one line. “Here’s the deal,” he tells the protagonist Zia (Patrick Fugit). “As long as you want it so bad, it’s not going to happen. The only way it’s going to work is if it doesn’t matter.”

I might be the best witness to that, having been brooding lately over a lifetime catalog of things I wanted so badly my ribs hurt, and to which I never even got close — attributing this outcome to ill fortune or my own baffling incompetence. But consider this: when all I wanted in the world was Sonny, I got the cash infusion that allowed me to go to Italy. When all I wanted in the world was to go back to Europe, Rick crept up like a wild creature to eat out of my hand. When all I wanted in the world was Rick, then Eli seemed to notice me. Whatever I was not intensely focused upon came easily, and what I desired most did not.

Of course now even scintillating Eli is gone (whose attentions I would have welcomed in lieu of my vanishing stoner’s), my pool of pretty young admirers has inexplicably dried up, and I have even less of a clue or a hope about how I’ll get to the other side of the lake. I’m in my own grey purgatory of solitary routines and ugly cubicles, consigned to a repetitive task that invites the hostility of strangers, living in a transient’s furniture-challenged crash pad, and sleepwalking through rapidly passing, oppressive summer days in which nothing new or interesting happens.

I seem to have jumped, as so often has been the case, from one of those delightful beginnings (where everything is new, and you can wind up playing pool in a hippie bar with an intriguing acquaintance at the drop of a hat) to a truncated end (where suddenly everything’s played out and exhausted), with no discernible middle. You’ve just gotten to first base on your first turn at bat, and now the game’s over. Rained out. So you sit in the window at home, gazing out at the drizzle, disappointed and bored.

Somebody please send Eugene over with the car! I want to hit the road and go see the Wizard. Although I think I know what he’s going to say. Still, I’d like to make the journey, because the journey itself is half the point. Besides which, Eugene — for all his skeezy antics — is damn cute. And he’s always horny. Seriously, I’d eat that little pirogi for breakfast.

But speaking of journeys…onward with the diaries…we’re almost done. This week I have a tale of Florence to tell.

Part 6.2: FIRENZE (FLORENCE)

The next morning I took a city train (as opposed to the faster Eurostar) and got to Florence at shortly after three in the afternoon. Without too much trouble I located the Ostello Archi Rossi on Via Faenza, off of the main drag Via Nationale. Faenza is like hostel central in Florence, with a number of small hotels along it as well.

The Ostello is clearly a youth hostel.  But I’m no longer a youth, and the staff was hostile.

They had gotten my e-mail, at least, and handed me the Visa slip to sign. Perhaps that had given them a prejudice against me already, I have no idea.

At first, I liked the funky feel of the place – noisy and vibrant in that collegiate way, with graffiti-covered walls that would have made my little anarcho-radical pals feel right at home (although the actual clientele looks much more American State University). When I got to my 6-bunk room I was glad to find it clean, and that I had a locker. They had assigned me an upper bunk, and I wondered briefly how I was going to climb up or down without stepping on the head of the person in the twin bed at the foot of the bunk. There were clean sheets, but no towel. Did they rent them out? I hoped so. I went down the hall to the “toilette” and noticed that there was a single shower off to one side of the toilet. Poking around a bit, I didn’t find a shower room, although I found one other similar “toilette” on that floor. I started to feel a little anxious, wondering how two such bathrooms were supposed to accommodate a throng of people who would be needing to both bathe and relieve themselves. I’d ask the staff when I went down to see about renting a towel. I decided, since the room was empty, that I could at least recharge my laptop.

Except that none of the outlets in the room worked.

I sat down on the lower bunk, feeling defeated, and gulped water from a litre bottle I had bought downstairs from the ostello refrigerator. I felt considerably dehydrated.

That’s when the migraine hit.

I had not had a migraine since March. Not since I had quit the job I had come to hate. At the time, I had attributed my debilitating condition to stress, sinus congestion, and general unhappiness with my station in life. So in a way, this was a perfect time for a migraine. My sinuses had been screwed up since my Pettenasco cold, I was beaten down by heat, fatigue, and loss, and completely stressed out by my surroundings.

I wanted to talk to the staff, to relieve some of my anxiety, but I was in too much pain. I took two Naproxen tablets and climbed up into the bunk, where I grew groggy as the medication hit. My head throbbed softly and I lay there in a near-trance, hearing very clearly the voices on the patio outside. Somewhere down there, I heard a man speak in a broad, working-class English accent; his voice had a familiar, midrange tenor timbre. My heart started to race. I knew the reaction was irrational and physiological — he was gone, gone for good — but knowing this just increased the pain, adding a heavy ache in my chest to accompany the sharp ache in my head. I listened to the man’s voice, and tried to relax into the pain, “becoming the pain,” as the Buddhists would say, eventually losing consciousness for the better part of an hour.

Later, when I managed to wander down to the desk in my medicated haze, I asked about towels, showers, and the outlets. Yes, towels were rentals. They seemed affronted by my fairly neutral shower question, and addressed me with a tone of condescension. “This is how it is in hostels in Italy!” I begged to differ, telling them about the Rome YWCA. They had never heard of it. You want your own shower, the impatient gray-haired woman said, thoroughly misunderstanding me, with a you-spoiled-high-maintenance-American-princess tone of voice, you get a single. They were none too happy about my asking to recharge my laptop behind the desk, either, although they hadn’t known about the outlets in that room, so I actually did them a favor.

Exploring the hostel for myself, I found that there were six bathrooms total (one shower and one toilet in each), two per floor, for 140 people. (Does that sound reasonable to you?) I determined to get up at six the next morning to beat the rush.

It was six-thirty PM and I was feeling weak, having eaten only a foccacia on the train. I found ZaZa’s after a short walk, and Osteria Pepo next door, but the latter opened at seven, and I just couldn’t wait. I sat outside on ZaZa’s pretty terrace facing the piazza, but the experience was lost on my achy, druggy self. I remember eating seafood pasta (it seemed a good time to indulge, for once) and yet another subpar salad.

While I was waiting for my food, a black man driving a silver sedan got himself stuck between parked cars (they really were too close together) in the piazza intersection. Everyone behind him started honking angrily, and the onlookers on the piazza started laughing at him. Feeling surrounded by hostility myself, I squirmed for the man, who doubtless already had to suffer innumerable difficulties due to having dark skin in this white country, and now was the glaring focus of so much public ire and ridicule. I thought, things could definitely be much worse for me. (He finally managed to back up, and maneuver between the parked cars.)

The waitress brought my pasta. It was full of shrimp. The waiter at the wine bar next door called to the hostess: “Gina!”

Bleary-eyed, fighting back tears, I thought to myself: Florence blows, man.

What was it, exactly? It was that feeling of being vulnerable and unmoored, in an (at best) indifferent and (at worst) hostile world. Alienation: that sense of being alone, misunderstood, and cared for by no one. In other words, how many Western men, like a certain Anglo I know, experience life on a daily basis. What was it I told him that night in the kitchen? “I can’t explain it,” I said. “I just have so much love for people.” My sense of connection, so it would seem, originated within me. Where had it gone?

Well, first things first. I was feeling like a sick, abandoned child. Some grownup part of me was going to have to advocate for the helpless part. WWED? What Would (my grandmother) Ella Do? I asked myself. I was in Italy thanks to her, and she certainly wouldn’t want me to be feeling so ill and miserable. What would she tell me?

You go and spend some more of that money, dearie, came the answer. It’s ALL RIGHT. Pay whatever you have to. This ain’t worth the savings.

I returned to the Ostello and asked the unsmiling clerk about paying extra for a private room. I even tried to explain that I wasn’t feeling well. He looked at me as if I were telling him some bullshit tale of woe, and said that there weren’t any. Eager to be rid of me, he said I could tell him tomorrow morning if I found somewhere else to stay my second night.

I went up to the (still empty) dorm to burst briefly into hot tears of weariness, pain, and humiliation, and then, with renewed resolve (Archi Rossi can kiss my spoiled American princess ass!!!), went outside and wandered up and down the street, inquiring with hotels and hostels. I found a tiny third-floor hostel for women called Hotel Paula that looked lovely, painted in coral tones, but unfortunately it was full. Around the corner from the Ostello, the small air-conditioned Hotel Vasari had a double available for 100 Euro. The quiet front desk clerk was deferential and kind-eyed; his manner made me want to hug him. I reserved the room with my credit card and immediately felt a hundred kilos lighter.

There now, said Ella. Isn’t that better.

When I got back to Archi Rossi, I met Werner and Sita, young Toronto-ites, in the room, which (yet another surprise) was unisex. I told them my whole Ostello story, and they were not only sympathetic, but also grateful to get the information about the towels, the outlets, and the sucky bathroom situation. At least my troubles benefited someone. They were more than happy to let me have the ladder hanging from Werner’s upper bunk, as he could climb up without it. How good it was to see and to talk to these friendly young Canadians after dealing with the unfriendly staff! They went out, and I went to bed early in a still-empty room.

In the morning I felt much better, like a human being again. I showered (with lightning speed) at seven, packed and locked up my luggage, and took advantage of the hostel’s included breakfast and Internet (booking my Milan hotel) before heading out to the Duomo.

Brunelleschi’s famous dome, that is, topping the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Del Fiore. The Cathedral is huge, and an amazing sight to see, looking, with its green marble stripes, like it was made out of very dusty peppermint candy. It’s almost too flashy, outside, to be a Catholic church; it should by all rights be a mosque. The top of the dome is the highest point in the city of Florence, and you can reach it by climbing at least as many stairs as are inside the Statue of Liberty. I paid the six Euro for this particular torture, seeing as it was early in the morning and there was no line.

Speaking of torture, there are frescoes inside the dome that depict the torments of hell, in true Christian doomsday fashion. These paintings are almost kinky…they belong to that genre of religious art that seems downright salacious in its voyeuristic violence. Christian porn, more or less. Grinning devil-men with horns and tails skewer naked humans with pitchforks; one unfortunate man seems to be getting a flaming torch in the ass. Such visceral physicality the artist envisioned for an essentially spiritual punishment! The grotesque, graphic images of the destruction of the flesh made me wince. Is it any wonder so many people hate religion?

From the top of the dome — if you make it — you can see all of Florence, and the mountains beyond.  It was quite a panorama to behold, but unfortunately I had to descend soon after my triumphant arrival in order to make check-out time at Archi Rossi.

I got back before eleven to retrieve my belongings, and spent an hour and a half in the cafe across the street from the hostel, sipping a cappuccino and writing. I wheeled my suitcase around the corner to the hotel at half-past noon, but my room still wasn’t ready. The paternal white-haired man at the front desk showed me where to stow my luggage in the meantime. Bless the Hotel Vasari. God bless them, every one.

Now it was time for lunch. I headed for Trattoria Mario, on the same piazza as ZaZa, a lunch joint Let’s Go cited as having a rabid following among Florentines.

It was crowded and raucous, an Italian greasy spoon, and I was told to sit at a table with three strangers. Allora (so)! I did. They were all Italiani, two men and one woman. The studious-looking, bespectacled man and the pretty brunette woman were together; the good-looking green-eyed man with the shiny, wavy black hair who smiled broadly at me was obviously a regular. He knew the waitstaff, and kept talking to the men at the next table. I told the cute shorn-headed waiter (he looked like Andre Agassi) “Non mangio la carne,” and he brought me a bread and vegetable soup.

It was only room temperature — appropriate, I suppose, on such a blistering day — but it was the best thing I’d had in days. Hearty and deliciously seasoned, it possessed the perfect balance of flavors — not too salty, sweetened by the bread. I ordered an insalata verde, too, and I got a plate of crispy dark greens with radiccio in a simple but tasty olive oil dressing. Bravo, Trattoria Mario!  Write that one down, folks.

The green-eyed hunk kept glancing at me while he and the others talked, and I finally said to him, “Non capisco niente. Non parlo l’Italiano molto bene.” (I understand nothing. I don’t speak Italian very well.) He laughed uproariously (had I actually fooled him with my ordering?), and asked where I was from. I told him, and he explained things to the others. Everyone introduced themselves, but I can’t for the life of me remember their names. Still, I loved the whole noisy, elbow-rubbing, familial feel of it all. What I told James is true. It’s the gente, man. Il popolo. You can be connected regardless of lingua.

From the trattoria I went straight to Accademia, the museum housing Michelangelo’s David. The slowly creeping line stretched around the block, and for once I joined an endless queue of sweaty tourists. If I was going to get into only one museum in Florence, it was going to be Accademia. What other sight in Italy was more up my alley than the great master’s timeless monument to male beauty??!

Behind me, I heard Spanish being spoken. Thrilled to hear a language other than English that I understood, I turned around. “De donde van Ustedes?” (Where are you from?) The three twentysomethings were from Mexico: Ana, Michaela, y Jose. Ana was a raven-haired beauty with a pierced nose; Michaela was cute, lively, and petite, with glasses like mine; and Jose was a stocky jokester with an interesting birthmark on his right temple. He gave me sips of their McDonalds Coke, and the four of us braved the unforgiving, humid heat together for an hour and a half.  Jose knew English, and Ana asked me a lot of questions in simple Spanish. I also chatted intermittently with the affable middle-aged Australian man in front of me. Time flies, or speeds up, anyway, when you’re in good company.

Finally we were in. Upon entering the museo, I was greeted by the spiral of the three figures in The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna: an older, defeated protector on the bottom, overcome by a younger, stronger man in the middle who is carrying away the gaping woman at the top. It’s necessary to walk all the way around for full effect. In the next room are Michaelangelo’s slave sculptures, appropriately still imprisoned in their stone, and his similarly imprisoned Saint Matthew.

The plaque by this last sculpture called attention to the strain of the figure in opposite directions, denoting the opposition between the temporal and the eternal, between the flesh and the spirit, the ongoing dualistic war within a man. Well, I thought. There you grand old Western patriarchs go again! Who decided we needed a war? What’s so compelling or unavoidable about splitting yourself in two?

Then there was the domed, high-ceilinged room at the end, where David towered in all his naked glory. It was necessary to walk all the way around him also, just to behold his three-dimensional perfection. Such attentive care was given to depicting the musculature of his chest and belly, his thighs, his back, the veins in his hands, the curve of his buttocks. Has anyone ever accused Michaelangelo of being queer? It seems to me (but you know how I am!) that one would have to love the male body to create such an appreciative tribute.

Beneath a discreet, sleeping member, his balls are plump, perfect globes. It’s amazing to me that after all these centuries David has managed to hang onto the entirety of his manhood. So many other statues, including the men grappling beneath the Sabine woman, have been emasculated by the ravages of time. A stone hurled during a riot in 1873 broke David’s wrist in two places, but otherwise he’s managed to survive, magnificently intact, with all delicate extremities precisely as they were created.

After staring at David for a while, I looked around the rest of the museum — it was mostly church triptychs and commissioned paintings dating back to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. There were many madonnas with child, as well as assorted crucifixes, apostles and saints. Daddis and Gaddis and Peruginos. That these things have survived is impressive, but I’m not a huge fan of Christian art.

From there I went south, to the Bargello, a less touristy museum that houses sculptures by Donatello, but it was closed for the day. So I headed for the river and the Uffizi, home of Botticelli’s Venus, as well as works by Fra Angelico, Da Vinci, and Caravaggio. Alas, there was a daunting line, so I wandered the little plaza between the two branches of the building, which was a combination of buskerfest and art bazaar. Living “statues” posed for photographs with tourists, and artists lined the thoroughfare selling their original art. I bought a small original for the wonderful woman who covered nearly all of my work shifts from an inobtrusive artist who resembled Stephen Rea. (He struck me as having a better eye than some of his fellows, whose attempts at realism or impressionism tended to be between generic and cheesy.) I was sorry when the police chased off a group of youngsters who looked like our anarchist kids at home — they had illegally put down a blanket to hawk their stone and bead necklaces, and I had wanted to scope out their wares.

I had a quick look around the courtyard of the medieval Palazzo Vecchio next door, with its 15th century frescoes, and checked out the cluster of statues outside, including a smaller copy of the David and an attempt at Neptune by the student Ammannato which Michelangelo had historically slammed. (The Florentines apparently call it “Il Biancone” in derision, or “The Big White One.”) Across from the Palazzo, facing onto the Piazza Della Signoria (a wide-open and truly lovely piazza), is the stone stage Loggia dei Lanzi where some actual treasures are on open display, such as Cellini’s Perseus holding the head of Medusa. No tickets, no waiting.

From there I walked back through the plaza to the Arno river, to check out the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in Florence, which was built in 1345. These days it’s a tourist mecca of boutiques and jewelry shops, but it still maintains much of its ancient charm, and the view from the east side of the bridge is a postcard.

But now it was gelato time. I headed back toward the Bargello to find Vivoli, which Let’s Go says is a long-standing contender for the best gelato in Italy. With a little bit of wandering I found it — it’s so easy to get turned around in those skinny cobblestone streets — and discovered a creme caramel flavor that beat out even the chocolate mousse.

On the way back to the hotel I stopped in at Florence’s smaller Santa Maria Maggiore church. Like so many buildings in the city, it had undergone many incarnations.There were still faded paintings on the original pillars that dated back to the 14th or 15th century, and then there were the Renaissance and post-Renaissance religious paintings on the walls, and then there were the modern touches at the altars. At the altar along the left wall, candles were burning for the dead, and I gave my 30 cents to light a candle for Ella. I thought of how she had made all of this possible for me, the good, the bad, the ugly — and the beautiful. Thank you, Ella, I thought, for my Italian aventura. I was quickly choked up with emotion and with gratitude and with missing her, the plucky little farm woman from Pennsylvania.

Arriving back at the Hotel Vasari, I discovered my double room to be minimalist, but bright and clean, with a gleaming toilet, bidet, and shower all my own. There was even a hair dryer. I nearly fell on my knees and wept with gratitude, but instead I stripped off every stitch of my sweat-soaked clothing and proceeded to unpack every single item from my suitcase and backpack. I plugged in my laptop, and threw out all the random bits of paper and receipts I had accumulated, along with used-up toiletries and my grungy box of soap. I re-folded all of my clean clothes. Then I took a long sandblast of a shower, after which I dried my hair and applied makeup, two things I hadn’t done in a very long time. When I walked out into the evening I felt regenerated, and more attractive than I’d felt since leaving the States. Three young Italian men passing by on Faenza seemed to concur.

I went straight to Osteria Pepo. Stepping inside, I found a warmly lamp-lit, classy interior with wine bottles lining the back bar, and was greeted — much like at Arancia Blu — with a gratis glass of sparkling wine. They had me at hello.

The crostini I ordered were superb — one topped with Tuscan white beans, another with a zucchini pate, another with a classic fresh tomato sauce. The liver one I didn’t eat, for obvious reasons. And it was here, at last, that I got the good gnocci, swimming in tomatoes and fresh melted mozzarella. (I finished with a cappuccino and tiramisu, which was good, but not oh-sweet-Lord-in-heaven good, which tiramisu really should be.)

I went back to my room to write for a while, and heard the shouts and cheers begin when Italy defeated Germany in the latest football match. Long after I’d gone to bed, the honking and the yelling and the screeching tires continued.

Which left me susceptible to a blast from the not-so-distant past. I check into my social network infrequently these days, to deal with invitations and requests and to share my published articles…but this week I saw him in the news feed. A brand new picture: Sonny lounging barefoot in a patch of clover, propped on his elbows, heels kicking up like a kid. My heart was wrapped up in clover/the night that I looked at you. He’s growing his hair out, the way I always liked it best, and I think now that I lied when I called Rick the most gorgeous man on the planet. I wonder who’s kissing him now…

And I remember keenly some of the urgency I felt about leaving this town. Two weeks ago, one of my worst-case scenarios occurred without incident — I ran into my old studio boss, she of the batshit-insane emails — but she carefully avoided me, and I felt freer for that careful avoidance. Sonny, however, in his mere two-dimensional glory, has me running for Trebbe Johnson’s book again, seeking conceptual aspirin for these sudden chest pangs.

**

My lovely, groovy, gypsy-skirted friend Diana wrote this week on her blog about “god-love,” about hanging out with her free-lovin’ Dances of Univeral Peace/Course In Miracles hippie peers who make out on couches at parties like unchaperoned adolescents, and for only the four hundredth time I feel left out of the divine acid trip — without, in all honesty, feeling that bad about it. I’m definitely not a raging atheist like Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens — I believe the best things in life are a mystery — but I also appear to be made out of spiritual Teflon. Considering how thoroughly my childhood insecurities were exploited in order to force-feed me the so-called Bread of Life, it’s a wonder I’m open at all to what those two gentlemen consider utter balderdash. I’m not going to argue with Trebbe or anyone else about my desires and cravings being misdirected longings toward The Divine…but based on my own experience (or lack thereof) they may as well be telling me that they’re misdirected longings toward The Heavenly Unicorn. I cannot tell a lie: God has never slipped me the tongue. Not with my knowledge, anyway.

Although Sonny is something of a “little-g” god. (I doubt there are two 21-year-olds alive who could in tandem outshine this luminous 42-year-old.) But this is why I have always adored Dostoevsky: his characters are passionate, lusty, complex people possessing tremendous depth of thought and feeling who struggle with a burning doubt in anything “divine.” He fully grasps the intoxicating allure of beauty (see Dmitri Karamazov’s unforgettable monologue) and the transcendental elements of desire. He shows extraordinary (one might even say Christlike) compassion for human vulnerability and our misguided, shame-driven actions. When he presents God as Love, you can almost believe. But you also get the feeling the author never fully settled the question for himself.

**

This week I’ve gone back to listening to Nick Cave, who (I would point out to my music-loving German friend, were he here) makes my darling Damien look about as sunny as The Partridge Family. Well versed in Biblical lore, Mr. Cave is a die-hard old-school goth romantic forever lamenting the loss of some dark-haired temptress with long fingernails. He knows fruitless yearning and restless seeking like the back of one of his bony hands. Little wonder Wim Wenders chose Cave’s dark, dissonant “Carny” and “From Her to Eternity” to bring together angel and trapeze artist in his marvelously subversive landmark film “Wings of Desire.” Bruno Ganz’s soulful angel gives up direct spiritual communion with God for fleshly communion with a human being! Talk about your wacky reversals! The two piano-driven songs to which I keep returning are “Nobody’s Baby Now” –

There are some things love won’t allow
Yeah I held her hand but I don’t hold it now
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now

and “Do You Love Me” –

I found God and all his devils inside her…
So completely filled with light she was…
All things move toward their end
I knew before I met her that I would lose her

What a line. I knew before I met her that I would lose her. That’s pretty much where I’m coming from these days. It sure wasn’t wrong about my good buddy Rick. Then again, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not wrong about anybody, is it? Maybe that’s the lesson to be gained from my various beautiful and disappearing teachers. The Buddha had it right, after all: impermanence is the only permanence. As Damien wrote, Life taught me to die.

But I’ve rambled on quite enough already. Here, without further ado, is my post-Centro diary from Rome.

Part 6.1 ROMA (ROME)

I begin this final chapter in the Piazza Della Madonna De Monti, on Via Dei Serpenti, just off of Via Cavour. There is a little fountain here, and up the street is some of the most killer gelato in Rome (Gelatone). Rome isn’t as big as you’d expect…you can get everywhere you’d want to go on foot, if you don’t mind a good walk. The blocks are shorter, usually, than in most American cities, so distances on a map look greater than they really are.

The journey was fairly uneventful, although I was glad to have given myself an extra hour in Milan because I had to navigate the subway system in order to get to Stazione Centrale. Here’s proof of how freaking hot it is in Italy: I didn’t have to go to the W.C. once during the four-and-a-half hour train ride. (In general, my usual problem is not a problem, even though I’m drinking litres and litres of aqua naturale, because here you sweat copiously and all the time.)

After a little bit of searching in the neighborhood of the Teatro Dell’ Opera — it took me some time to figure out that the street names are chiseled on the buildings — I found the YWCA tucked away almost invisibly on a side street. This particular area, near the Termini station, reminds me a lot of Boston, but I guess that’s not incomprehensible given than Boston was built by former Europeans. The crazy thing I noticed about Rome right away is that in these busy metropolitan areas, you may see some big chunk of ancient brick sitting in the middle of everything, an unnamed, unknown arch or wall. In the piazza Largo di Torre Argentina, there was a sort of interrupted dig in the middle of it, with a row of crumbling columns. I read somewhere that the third line of their subway system has been stymied by the ongoing accidental excavation of yet more undiscovered ruins. What a place to live — it’s a perennial treasure hunt.

The YWCA is an undiscovered treasure all its own. Girlfriends, take note! It’s a clean, quiet, pleasant environment specifically for women, although a man can stay if he’s with a woman. It feels safe, there’s no tourist stampede or rowdy college students, and the staff is friendly. My first night there, I had the 4-bed room to myself. Which is exactly what I needed — someplace safe, quiet, and cloister-like, to decompress and lick my wounds. Of course, quiet is a relative term when the streets are full of wilding Italian football fans. World Cup fever is in full swing here, and when Italy beat the Ukraine on Friday night, Rome turned into Boston after a Patriots Super Bowl win, with honking and hooting and hollering continuing long into the wee hours.

I followed my Let’s Go book’s advice and found the Hostaria da Bruno, near Termini, for a late (though not for Rome) dinner. The place was lousy with Americans, and for this reason I rather defiantly spoke only Italian with the waiter. I ordered a half litre of red wine, an insalata, and a plate of gnocci.

I never did manage to find a decent salad in Rome. I had a gorgeous salad in Pettenasco, with crispy dark greens like arugula, and a wad of the freshest mozarella you can imagine. And the pasta in Orta was everything you’d expect from Italy. But this salad was iceberg, and the gnocci was nondescript and a little too salty. I was disappointed.

Then the waiter suggested the special dessert, made (from what I understood — he was speaking only Italian to me) fresh that day. I agreed to give it a try.

It was the redemption of the entire meal. Santa Maria, was it good. A sweet, creamy vanilla custard, topped with a compote of small savory-tart berries I didn’t even recognize. They made me pucker. With a cappuccino, it was perfect. Somehow, a little wobbly with all that wine, I made it back to the YWCA and to bed.

The next morning I set out for the most distant sights, intending to get all my most tiring walking done on the first day. After a meager Italian breakfast of a croissant and a cappuccino at a nearby snack bar (Rome is full of these), I headed for the Villa Borghese, which, from what I could tell from my book, was a place I definitely wanted to see. The Galleria Borghese sounded wonderful, less of a tourist madhouse than some of the other museums, and it contained masterpieces by Caravaggio, Titian, and Raphael. From there I planned to head across the Tiber river to Vatican City.

I started at the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, close by the YWCA. An impressive twin-domed structure, the interior of which dates back to the 5th century, it crowns the Piazza Dell’Esquilino where I had my cappuccino. It was built as a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the site where an apparition supposedly appeared, and the presiding Cardinal is none other than the scandal-plagued former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law. (I went inside it the following day during a mass, but the part that was open to the public wasn’t all that amazing, unfortunately.) Directly across the main street Via Cavour began Via de Pretis, and I started up this street, soon cutting due north to walk through virtually deserted cobblestone streets in the government district (which reminded me of Beacon Hill and Cambridge back home). It was relaxing to be off the beaten path. Before I knew it I had reached the huge, green public park that is the Villa Borghese, and was at the manor-like Galleria.

A traveling Raphael exhibit had packed the place, and I found out that tickets were sold out through July 5th. Resigned, I decided to explore the park, which was a shady oasis in the oppressive Roman heat. Scipione Borghese had commissioned this immense garden upon becoming Cardinal in the early 17th century, and the Galleria was built as his villa suburbana.

I love the Villa Borghese. I would spend a good deal of my free time here if I lived in Rome. There are garden sanctuaries within it that were retooled in the 19th century, such as the Corinthian-columned Temple of Aesculapius, which sits amid flowering bushes on a still, idyllic little pond. Old Italian men sit on the park benches, and there is a zoo at the far end near the modern art museum (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna). I walked beyond the Villa for a few blocks, past the museum and off my map, to the end of one of the Metro lines and a statue of Winston Churchill. Here I sat down to rest my weary feet, swig from my bottle of mineral water, and munch on the apple Elke had given me for the road.

From there I made my way across the park to the Piazza del Popolo, the people’s square, with its mirror-image domed churches Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto. I hunted on side streets for a good lunch place before deciding on an elegant but affordable pizzeria with sidewalk tables. The pizza was tasty, but not nearly as tasty as the pizza I had had in Novara, with its wafer-thin crust.

Piazza del Popolo was only a short distance from a bridge over the river, and after crossing I cut south to Piazza Cavour, a place I was determined to see as a self-respecting Morrissey fan. His latest album had been written here, in Rome, featuring his signature sound samples (every time I heard a Roman emergency siren, I expected to hear him launch into “The Youngest Was the Most Loved”) and he mentions this piazza in “You Have Killed Me.”

A brief tangent (indulge me): I feel an even greater kinship with my former comrade-in-despondency these days, because his Roman experience ostensibly involved the breaking of his legendary, lifelong (romantic) losing streak. The new songs recount, in more detail than his coyness usually allows, a reluctant joining of the ranks of the content and fulfilled. Horrors! Someone has killed our morose old Mozzer! “At last I am born,” he croons at the album’s conclusion. I didn’t break my own perennial losing streak in Italy — I revisited it — but I did have something like this happen before I left, which defied all of my negative (and usually accurate) expectations. As for my own Italian journey, Moz’s first track “I Will See You in Far-off Places” has become something of a theme song, apparently written to some long-lost, beloved wiseass:

It’s so easy for us to sit together
But it’s so hard for our hearts to combine…
And I will see you in far-off places…
I believe I will see you somewhere safe
looking to the camera
messing around
and pulling faces…

I found the piazza, bordered by the pretty white Chiesa Valdese (church) and the massive Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice). There were very few people around. “Piazza Cavour,” I serenaded the Palazzo, “what’s my life for?”

Then I was ready to move on to Vatican City.

I followed Via Crescenzio to the Piazza dei Resorgimento,  where you first see the thick brick walls of the City. On the island in the center by the Metro tracks were clumps of overheated tourists and several African men selling duffel bags and luggage. They must have been doing so illegally, because when a police car drove into their midst they scattered and ran. I stopped to rest and to write in the shade outside of a gelateria before starting around the high brown wall in search of an entrance. I should have just looked in my book, because I wound up going in the wrong direction and hiking around the entire perimeter. My feet were hurting by the time I found the ingress by the Piazza San Pietro. I couldn’t help but think: what the hell is the Pope so afraid of that he has to live within this bloody fortress?

The Piazza was full of pigeons and tourists. St. Peter’s basilica was very large and imposing in the background, but I was too tired to do anything but take a few pictures and sit down. After that, without consulting my map, I headed down Via Della Conciliazione, again in the wrong direction, until I reached the Piazza Pia in front of the truly ancient Castel Sant’ Angelo, built by Hadrian in the first or second century. I was by the river again. Stopping, I wondered if I should just head back downtown. It was nearly six o’clock.

Accidentally, I made eye contact with a short, balding fortysomething man crossing the street, and he asked me for the time. Suddenly he was asking me a barrage of questions. (Here’s a tip for the womenfolk: never make casual eye contact with a strange Italian man unless you mean it.) I answered most of the queries good-naturedly (where was I from? what did I do?) until this man, named Giuseppe, asked me “Do you have a boyfriend who loves you?”

Not only did that make me wince (ouch), it made his intentions crystal clear. With a somewhat forced laugh I said “I think this conversation is over now,” and turned toward the Vittorio Emmanuele bridge. “Wait! Wait! Signora!” I could hear him calling behind me. Bye bye, Giuseppe. Thanks for letting me know it was time to leave.

It was a long walk back to the YWCA, down Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, past the aforementioned ruins in the Largo di Torre Argentina, through the Piazza Venezia with its huge white marble monument to king Vittorio Emmanuele II. Here I helped a lost Australian tourist locate his whereabouts on a map. From Venezia, I took less touristed side streets over to Via Cavour, and from there it was a straight shot back to Santa Maria Maggiore and the YWCA.

After cooling down and looking through the food listings in Let’s Go, I decided (rather insanely, after all that walking) to venture southeast of Termini into the San Lorenzo neighborhood for dinner. There was a vegetarian restaurant there called Arancia Blu, Orange Blue, which opened at eight-thirty (Romans eat late). It was probably at least two kilometers away, but I started off anyway, walking the length of the Termini station to Via Bibiana. It was definitely the skids along that route, complete with abandoned buildings and drunks, and I wondered about the walk back after dark. Once I turned onto Via Tiburtina, I found myself in a vital, if run-down, area that reminded me of parts of Somerville, Brookline, or Cambridge (Massachusetts). This was San Lorenzo, south of the city university, and it had that youthful, vibrant, multicultural vibe found in urban student neighborhoods. There were a lot of kebab shops and ethnic restaurants, and I loved it immediately.

I passed by Arancia Blu at least once without seeing it, a concrete building covered with graffiti. It was only eight-fifteen, but the pretty green-eyed waitress told me I could sit down anyway. I opted for the attractive raised wooden patio. A squarely built gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair (who, unbeknownst to me, was the chef) came to ask me if I wanted red or white wine. Apparently they give you a free glass at the outset — how cool is that? — so I asked for white. The man returned with the wine and a small plate on which were the two most delectable samples of focaccia I’ve ever tasted.

I liked this place.

I ordered a pasta dish with saffron and asparagus from another waitress, who reminded me of a slimmer, more unassuming version of Ingrid Bergman with a longer nose. (The pasta came very al dente, and was bright yellow.) While I was waiting for my food, a young woman, looking vaguely retro-punk with black-rimmed eyes and a black Blondie T-shirt, sat down at the next table and spoke American English with the waitress. She looked like my kind of people, so I struck up a conversation. Her name was Julie, and she was a student at the state university in Atlanta. This was her last day in Italy. She had come back to San Lorenzo because it was one of her favorite parts of Rome. We chatted all through dinner, through my decadent dessert of chocolate cake (so dense it was like fudge) with bitter orange sauce, and she told me where to go in Florence for good food. Specifically, Osteria Pepo, next to the very popular ZaZa’s. I wrote this down.

We walked back to the hostel neighborhood together afterward, and I felt completely safe.

The next morning after breakfast I sent out my travel diary from the YWCA computer. I had to retype the whole damn thing, because there was no way to hook up my laptop to the Internet (this was true at Internet points around town as well). Then I made an online reservation at the Ostello Archi Rossi in Florence for the nights of the third and fourth. The Web site confirmed availability for both nights in a 6-bed dorm.

It was eleven-thirty when I finally set out for the Ancient City. It was much closer by, fortunately; I was really feeling the effects of yesterday’s trek. Walking through the Domus Aurea park, where Nero’s house had been, I arrived at the Colosseum.

I had gotten quickly accustomed to Rome’s Renaissance grandeur, but this was something else entirely. There’s old, and then there’s old. The remnants of this colossal structure truly belonged to another, dead age. I didn’t pay to go inside; having only two days for all of Rome, I had determined that I wouldn’t spend much time standing in line. From outside you can get glimpses, through some of the arches, at the stadium inside, and that was enough for me.

I had a forgettable lasagna and another iceberg salad at Luzzi on Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, the street across the Piazza del Colosseo from the Colosseum, before entering the ruins. I took Via Sacra, the oldest street in Rome (a stone-paved pedestrian walkway), past what was left of the famous Roman baths (walls) and the Temple of Venus (ten columns), to the well-preserved Arch of Titus, A.D. 81, which depicts the sack of Jerusalem. Here there was a splitting-off of streets: Sacra, Nova, and Clivus Palatinus, with stairs on the Sacra side leading down into the sunken area of the Forum. Clivus Palatinus led to the Palatine Hill, but I didn’t feel like shelling out for the view when the rest of the Ancient City was mine to see scot-free. I descended into the valley and wandered amid modified temples like the columned Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, which had been (like so many buildings in Italy) remodeled by later architects and turned into a church. Other temples like that of Vesta, up on the hill, were nothing but a crumbling wall, and the adjacent House of the Vestal Virgins could have been any number of things. I read in my book that the Vestal Virgins were among the most respected people in Rome, with the power to pardon prisoners – but that if one of them was found to have partaken of the pleasures of the flesh, she was buried alive with a loaf of bread and a candle.

May I take a moment here to vent? Jesus H. Christ, I am so over this ancient, culturally pervasive madonna/whore business. We’re still feeling the effects of centuries of this perverse dualism, this sexual sickness. You can be esteemed, like a Vestal Virgin, or dispensed with, like a worthless piece of shit. (Sound familiar??!!!) I want to be a Sacred Prostitute, goddammit. These ladies, Heterae, tended the goddess temples in Greece, and healing powers were attributed to their sexuality. A war-scarred man limping home after the trauma of battle might go to the temple to be “healed” by one of these respected priestesses. (Yeah baby, I’ll heal you up real nice!) Deena Metzger wrote a famous feminist play inspired by this practice, “The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them.” At the root of it, it’s about engagement, about giving something back to a man that has been sorely lacking: not merely pleasure, but the Feminine itself. Literally, it’s about “plugging a man back in” — to connection, to community, to the ethic of care.

I kicked around in the ruins for a little bit longer, and then exited up to Via dei Fori Imperiali, crossing the street to have a look at the bits and pieces of the Forum of Augustus. I recognized where I was immediately; down the way was the gleaming Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, and here was the beginning of Via Cavour. I took Via Cavour to Via dei Serpenti, where I found the heavenly gelato at Gelatone, and sat in the piazza to begin this massive missive.

I checked my email at an Internet point on the way back, and discovered that Ostello Archi Rossi had confirmed me for only the 4th, so once at the YWCA I used their pay phone to call Florence. The young man on the other end of the line told me that if the email confirmed only the 4th, then they only had availability on the 4th. “That would have been nice to know before I made the reservation,” I said. He repeated himself about availability. “All right,” I said, realizing I was getting nowhere, “whatever. Can I cancel my reservation?”

That made him change his tune. He actually checked availability, and said that they had a space, but that he couldn’t take my reservation over the phone. I was to email them and authorize them to charge my credit card for the night of the 3rd. I paid the YWCA the 2 Euro to use their Internet (their minimum charge, for an hour) and followed his instructions. Then I went back to my room to freshen up before heading down to San Lorenzo. I wanted to have my last dinner in Rome there.

I took a different route and thought I had gotten lost, in a very down-and-out looking area by an ancient ruined bridge, but I do usually have a bloodhound’s sense of direction (despite yesterday’s Vatican fiasco) and eventually found myself on Arancia Blu’s street, Via dei Latini. I explored the neighborhood for a while, looking for an open restaurant, but in this part of town it seems everyone opens late. After eight o’clock I gave up, already ravenous, and went to see my friends at Arancia Blu.

The green-eyed waitress, Silvana, was there, and let me sit outside again and eat bread. We talked for a few minutes, and I mentioned that I had been working up at Lake Orta. She was from the lakes region herself, but had never heard of Centro. The Bergmanesque waitress, Daniela, who had waved at me when I passed on the street, brought me a glass of sparkling wine to go with my bread. When the kitchen opened I ordered the potato and mint ravioli, which was certainly an interesting combination, if not ecstasy-inducing. For dessert they recommended the parfait of eggnog, which had a marsala-caramel glaze that gave a wonderful bitter tang to the creamy sweetness underneath. Daniela brought me a (gratis!) glass of marsala to go with it, and I sat back, content, chatting with the cute college-aged couple from California at the next table. Life was good.

When I left, reluctant to part for good from this new home away from home, Daniela motioned to me, and made her way around the tables to kiss me, Italian-style, on both cheeks. This pleased me to no end. What a terrific place this was, and what marvelous people, like a slightly upscale, Roman version of my local organic community cafe at home — only with free wine.

Walking out into the night, I heard drumming. I followed the infectious tribal beat to the piazza near the clock tower where I had snapped a picture earlier. (I have no name for the place; it’s off my map, and nowhere on the Internet.) A crowd stood there watching a group of student activists in blue and orange costumes dance in front of a banner decrying the Mexican government for human rights violations. It was election week in Mexico, but I wasn’t sure what these kids were advocating in terms of Italian participation. All the fliers had already been handed out, not that I could have read them anyway. Still, it was fun to watch their choreographed dance and catch the contagion of their youthful energy, that spirit of resistance.

They moved on down the street, and I turned back toward Termini. The marsala and the good people of San Lorenzo had calmed my nerves enough that the walk back, along those dark and deserted streets, gave me no pause.

I did express trepidation to my friends, over and over again, that the longer I stayed here, not following my intention to live abroad, the more momentum I would lose, and the more likely it would be that I would become embroiled in some new drama on the local level that would suck up all of my energy and motivation. I wasn’t wrong. Candy-loving AlienBaby got a job working alongside some tasty boys, and wound up, once again, in a metaphorical Shanghai.

**

But there’s more to it than that. I realized something earlier this week when my cannabis-clouded friend was unusually clear-headed: there is something entirely palpable between us. I know that he has strong feelings toward me. I can see it; I can feel it. For my part, I simply soaked up that life-giving energy while it was present, adoring him right back (which wasn’t hard, as he really is fricking adorable). I’m glad I made the most of our time then, however, because he disappeared into a bleary-eyed fog the next day, before literally disappearing.

Within this certainty, I’m much more comfortable extrapolating that, as he never planned on having these feelings toward me, he’s not okay with them…or at least a significant part of him isn’t. At the risk of seeming like I’ve gone from one extreme (of severe self-deprecation) to the other (of insufferable conceit), I think the problem isn’t that Rick doesn’t want or care about me. The problem is that he wants and cares about me a lot more than he wants to want or care about me. And that is a problem. Just ask Psyche. It’s the age-old story…déjà vu all over again.

I was a little afraid, myself, at the outset; I felt vulnerable, overwhelmed by his radical differences in habits and lifestyle, and ambivalent about his appearance. But one of the most poignant things about this young man is that he has — throughout so many of the experiences that make men hard (and not in a good way) — retained a certain childlike wonder about the world, and an open, curious, friendly attitude toward other people. I feel as if I’ve had the rare privilege to have touched a heart that’s known far less love than it deserves, and is far less armored than one might expect. How could I not love this person, regardless of the package he came in? Sure, I may think he’s the most gorgeous thing alive now — but my faithful readers know he was not what I had in mind. And there were so many reasons for it not to work on any level. In spite of all that, when the moment came for me, I surrendered.

For a man, however, that kind of surrender may mean intolerable weakness, or public humiliation in the ignoble tradition of the hand-wringing Mark Sanfords of the world. The seductress Delilah cut Samson’s hair and robbed him of his strength; every worldly warrior since has been wary of her. She tied you to a kitchen chair/and she broke your throne/and she cut your hair/and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah, wrote legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen, a man who could easily be described by detractors as “whipped” and who actively savors that kind of surrender.

I mean Rick no harm — I mean him anything but harm (and I love those long black waves of his) — but the argument could be made that he’s better off not getting mixed up with me, a substantially older woman intending to move overseas. (I do have the occasional thought that he could always come along, as he wants to see the world.) Maybe it was better for James not to get mixed up with me, either. I don’t know. It’s just too bad if what was better for them didn’t involve me getting a little sumpin-sumpin.

Anyhow, without further ado, here are my reflections on that not completely dissimilar episode.

______________

PART FIVE: LEAVING OZ

I have stolen something from Centro d’Ompio.

A virtually useless item, cheesy-looking, and broken to boot, it has no value to anyone but me. It’s a Christmas mug with a broken handle. Most people drink their tea and coffee from glasses up at Centro; only Bisetti has mugs. But there was a certain working guest who absolutely had to take his tea in a mug, and this particular mug somehow found its way up the mountain, where it dwelt in a secret hiding place near the dishroom. And now I have taken it. HA.

Maybe it’s extremely third grade of me, but nevertheless. It’s all I have. No shirts no shoes no jackets no blues, to borrow from the old Mel Etheridge song “No Souvenirs.” I never even got a picture of the bloke.

*

Here’s one for the May You Live In Interesting Times file: I got an email from my mother, who has no idea what’s really been going on. As you may recall, she and my father are ultraconservative born-again Christians. She told me that they have been praying I’ll have “a very memorable experience” here. You can imagine the laugh that one gave me. Be careful what you wish for, Ma.

There were some definite bright spots my last week. Last Saturday night we had a barbecue at Bisetti. Marjorie and I were drinking a potent dark rum with coke; she got “leathered” and fell out of the hammock, to everyone’s amusement. Eddie, the newest working guest, a student in international relations from Long Island who resembles the young Daniel Johnston (not that that may mean much to most of you), is now Finn’s roommate. He’s a funny kid, and he and Finn get along extraordinarily well. That night Cosmo (in typical Cosmo fashion) had called Eddie “Herman” by mistake, and Finn was especially tickled because “Her Mann” in German means “mister man.” Finn and Eddie started bantering back and forth drunkenly…Finn harassed his roommate about his tendency to snore, and Eddie countered by accusing Finn of yodeling in his sleep. Somehow or other, the two of them eventually decided that they should be in a band together called “Herman and the Yordeling Snodelers.” Maybe you had to be there, but the two of them made me laugh harder than I have since…well, you know. I was definitely inebriated, myself, but it was the first time I’d had such knee-slapping fun since before my escape to Orta.

Eddie’s got the New Yorker sarcasm that never fails to crack me up, but I’ve been most grateful for the arrival of Finn. The man is a blessing, like sunlight — his mere presence can make the difference in the tone of your day. He fixes you with these serene green eyes as clear and pure as glacier water, and grins widely before erupting into uninhibited laughter that jumps two octaves. Such unabashed, high-pitched giggling from a man betrays a striking cultural difference; Centro’s Swiss groundskeeper Gerhard has a similar unselfconscious titter. American (and English) men wouldn’t dare sound so “girly,” but truth be told, it’s completely infectious, and a joy to be around.

Finn’s girlfriend will be arriving at Centro on the day I leave Italy, and I regret not being able to meet her. She is undoubtedly an amazing person. Sitting beside Finn at lunch and watching him talk, I considered what an incredibly lucky woman she is. Socrates would have pronounced Finn kalos, a word meaning both beautiful and good (of the highest kind).

One day at the bar I told him, “We should clone you, and repopulate the world.”

His response was to giggle happily and to respond in his incomparable Viennese accent, “But who then would there be, to love Finn?”

*

We were talking about attachment at one point. He’s definitely on the side of the yogis and Buddhists, and believes that we cause ourselves unwanted suffering by clinging to our experiences. He never takes photographs for this reason. This is one way in which we differ, although I couldn’t precisely articulate my disagreement at the time. But while sweeping bamboo leaves from the gravel path outside Centro, I thought of the famous Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who founded the school of logotherapy. In Frankl’s view of the world, there is no doing away with suffering — what is important is the meaning we derive from it.

I realized then that I don’t believe it’s necessary, or even desirable, to try to banish suffering from our lives – it seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to escape our inescapable humanness, much like what those Western White Males were trying to do in subjugating or denigrating the Feminine. What I find that I need to do instead, more than anything, is to make some sort of sense of what happens.

I suppose that’s why I started writing in the first place, and telling these stories. Every culture on Earth has its stories and its storytellers.

This is one thing that appears to be universally human.

*

Hanna and Alessandro, perhaps intuiting that I would want to hear them (there have been no open discussions of what happened), shared some James stories with me. Alessandro told me about their trip to Florence together early on, where they enjoyed bloody, juicy steaks (very welcome after Centro’s strict vegetarian fare) and spent the evening talking with a couple from one of the Dakotas. The man was a fan of British television, and he and James apparently had a fantastic time together. Alessandro said he’d never seen James laugh so much. “He seemed really happy that night.”

Hanna told me about going to the nearby Ameno blues festival with James and Robert. Robert told the ticket booth that James was a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine, and that he was the photographer. Hanna, of course, was a groupie. Unbelievably, the gullible staffperson bought this shameless bullshit story and let them all in, free of charge.

*

Cosmo left on Monday, and I forgot to say goodbye.

Cosmo was frequently unintentionally, side-splittingly funny with his misunderstandings and mangled versions of English expressions.  He was an offbeat character to begin with, having gone through younger incarnations as a hippie and a Rastafarian; earlier this month he even visited an Aquarian community. James thought he was a total flake, naturally — when Cosmo and Mila were having problems in the kitchen, he said “Mila doesn’t seem like one who suffers fools gladly” — but I got a big kick out of him. And he coined my favorite catchphrase of all. One night when I broke a beer glass in the dishroom (much to Robert’s dismay), Cosmo came in, surveyed the mess, and pronounced sagely, “Shits happen.”

He didn’t understand my ensuing hilarity, but at appropriate moments thereafter, I would turn to Eddie (who had been my dishwashing partner) and repeat Cosmo’s wise words.

Christian and Marjorie left Monday as well. On their last night, I found out from Marjorie her actual age, which is thirty-seven. I couldn’t believe it. She’s almost twice Christian’s age. She could be his mom, for crying out loud. But that didn’t stop them from embarking on their little foreign affair.

Now I’m truly envious. Some people I know have trouble with a decade.

Alessandro stayed another day, and left at five in the morning by taxi. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him, either (though I imagine we’ll be in future contact). The night before, Gina was in Bisetti again, and I just had to get out of there and away from her. The last time I saw Alessandro, he was sitting beside her on the stairs. Her shiny black curtain of hair fell over one shoulder as she smiled up at him, almost leaning in to him. I wondered if she meant to give him a similar sendoff, the incorrigible little puttana. In Alessandro’s case, I actually hope she did. He could seriously use the boost.

As long as it didn’t come with a rash.

Me-ow.

*

On my last night at Centro, the group on retreat known as “The Libido Group,” who had been doing primal dances in the pavillion all week, had their going-away party. It became my going-away party, too. Robert played his best dance music, and I got decidedly drunk on a bottle of wine. Elke, Bettina, Finn, Eddie and I all danced to Marvin Gaye and Tom Jones. I even let a soused Hanna cuddle me and tell me I was “so cute.” She confessed drunkenly that she and Robert have been carrying on all this time (which everyone knew anyway), but my fifty bucks says she’ll be living with another woman before she’s thirty.

After most of the staff and working guests had gone, things got kind of wild. Juanita, one of the retreat-goers, a sprite-like African-American woman from Santa Barbara, got up on the bar with a slim blond German man, a German woman named Marta (who can’t be a day under forty-seven, but has a firmer body than I ever will) and a cute Indian guy named Ajit, and started dancing. Marta was the first one to take off her pants, and the others followed suit (or un-suit, as the case may be). Soon they were all topless, and by the end of Tom Jones’s cover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” they were all as naked as the day they were born. Robert had offered me a toke of some quality weed earlier, which I had, for once, smoked, so the entire thing felt completely surreal. And yet it wasn’t that sensational once you got used to it. Yeah, naked people. Dancing. Hey, this is Europe — big deal.

*

Finn was up early the next morning, and made me a cup of Earl Grey tea. I sat on the smokers’ porch with him eating cornflakes as some of the others roused themselves and started moving about. Eddie, Hanna, Mila, and Elke all came to hug me goodbye. Finn carried my luggage to the car and gave me a long, tight squeeze and his card. It was like he was kinda attached to me, or something.

Bettina drove me down to Pettenasco station. The train was twenty minutes late, and the waiting and waiting was a déjà vu. I felt nostalgic, there on another bright Italian morning, at that abandoned stazione. I knew I would never step in that river again. It was bittersweet as I hugged Bettina goodbye.

I had to change trains at Novara, on the way to Milan. There was so little time between trains, I wasn’t able to buy as much as a postcard. I wish I had gotten at least one, to commemorate the place where I was so beside myself with joy, if only for a day. Novara. Mia Novara. I don’t have any photos, and I disagree with Finn about them. I want to remember the place – how it was, and what it looked like, that one summer when I was thirty-eight and met that beautiful young Englishman in Pettenasco, the one who accidentally stole my heart. “It all goes by so fast,” I tried to explain to him, that long night in Bisetti’s kitchen. Ten years are nothing. When I come back here — if I ever do — I may have blue hair and dentures, and romance of any kind may be a distant memory.

Bettina and Finn both expressed the opinion that Mezza Coda chose her “time” because she was incredibly happy. Several of us were picking her up and cuddling her on a regular basis, Finn had taken to feeding her and keeping the other cats away until she’d finished, and Padma had gently cleaned her dirty fur on the day that she disappeared. According to them, the little kitty more or less said to herself, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” and gave up the ghost. It seems like a feasible theory. I wonder: is it possible for us two-legged mammals?

I mean, think about it. I don’t know about you, but if I could choose, I’d prefer to throw in the towel after a day like Novara.

The problem is, how do we know when we’re done?

*

Before I left the U.S., life seemed better than ever. I was (finally) focused, hopeful, living with intention, cultivating new and thoroughly healthy habits, feeling like I was getting somewhere. I started to experience a sense of trepidation (and some outright anxiety) about my Italy trip at some point, as if it were a tangent, or worse, something that might derail my fine progress, change everything that was good.

In a way, I turned out to be absolutely right. I mean, here I am, slacking off on my yoga and meditation practices, drinking more than I have in the last six months together, depressed, a bit lost, a tad hateful even.

Would I take it all back?  That’s the million dollar question.

Probably not.

Sometimes you live with intention, and sometimes life just grabs you by the collar and shoves you in the boat and takes you to Shanghai.

I actively resisted going. I did. I remember trying hard to keep my pulse down, that one day early on, when the cute English guy flipped up his shirt to show me what was apparently a newly flat and muscular stomach (he was so proud of the recent loss of his “loov handles”). That trash-talking rascal could look so inexplicably hot in a dishwashing apron, showing me how to turn the glasses over to let them evaporate, and giving me hysterics all the while. Jesus, there was just no way I could have ever helped myself. I was doomed, totally doomed, from day one. And secretly so thrilled, later, when he took to calling me “loov,” an endearment English women usually take as insufferably patronizing, like being called “honey” by your male boss. No matter. It made me unbelievably happy, James calling me this, with a tone of affection behind it. Almost as if he meant it.

Riding from Novara to Milano on the train, I had time to contemplate how often I’ve found that the old stereotypes are a lot of bollocks, and that it’s straight men who are frequently constrained by some kind of internal chastity belt. Put simply, you can’t get into both their hearts and their pants. At least not in that order.

My roommate Elke, as it turned out, understood a lot more that one might have thought about what happened, despite the language barrier. She had seen everything. She knew without my having to tell her, and I have to say I was gratified that she had only distaste – grimacing and shaking her head – for Gina. “Sometimes the men, they just want the sex,” she offered tentatively.

I had to laugh at this. That’s exactly where I got myself into trouble. It was me who wanted the sex, Elke dear.

It was my fault, in a way. I went and got greedy. Coming back from Novara, I experienced a kind of bliss, simply being there with James while he dozed. We were in the process of developing a quite wonderful bond, but I was the one who started to want more. I relished that growing ache of lust, that hunger that makes you weak with anticipation and need. It’s a bit addictive, no?  I thought I could have his warm body as well as his warm regard. But with men like James, you just can’t have both. I’ll never forget his nervous laugh when I told him outright that I wanted him — how young he looked all of a sudden, and how uncertain. It was as if I had betrayed him by changing the rules in the middle of the game. How dare I, indeed. First I make him start to give a fook about me, and then I want to touch his willy. Dirty play, that.

But by the end I didn’t even need it. I just wanted him to know how much I cared for him, which was the most unforgivable sin of all.

It amazes me, in retrospect, how little time it took to fall so hard and to have it end so abruptly. At the risk of exposing my abject geekiness — I feel like Jean-Luc Picard in that episode of “Star Trek” where he lives out an entire accelerated lifetime in another dimension, while unconscious for only fifteen minutes on his ship. Centro d’Ompio has been like that other dimension, and returning home will be like waking up. This has all been an episode in a parallel universe.  Or maybe a technicolor dream I had, after getting smacked on the head during a tornado.

*

But now I’m in Rome, and I’ve been walking all over town looking at all manner of buildings and eating all manner of food. I’ll try hard to make number six about my final aventuras in the citti d’Italia, since I know you’re probably getting weary of hearing me go on and on about my beautiful lost limey bastard. You know how I am, though. Such ruminations are part of the package. And besides, I never planned on any of it.

You know how it goes. Shits happen.

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress

does not hide him,

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

– Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”

Finding my amorous longings toward men most often reflected in the rhapsodizings of the great queer male writers, I have often wondered whether I’m a gay man who has been rather haplessly reincarnated into a woman’s body: still pronouncedly desirous in a visual and most unladylike fashion, still operating with a male-to-male directness that just doesn’t fly in the straight world.

I am in a sweet agony over the beauty of men.

I told my friend Russ that I feel as if I’m wading through a field of fresh daisies, longing to ‘pluck’ them all…yet I know that in my greed and artless haste I’m very likely to wind up with nothing but grass-stained empty hands. Already I seem to have alienated Rick. He’s pulled a literal and figurative disappearing act ever since I made my sexual feelings plain.

**

I still don’t quite understand how it is that I could be so fascinating and worthwhile to men when I’m benignly indifferent (as I was at two parties last weekend, where I was followed from room to room by doggedly unaware acquaintances) or mildly intrigued (as I was upon meeting this colorful character Rick), but then instantly become repellent the moment I exhibit overt, full-blooded desire. You’d think I was some alluring wood nymph that suddenly morphed into the gorgon Medusa, hair-snakes a-hiss, turning previously warm, living men to stone. That’s really not the kind of hardness I was hoping for.

I’m kicking myself for not taking advantage of Rick that first night, even though I was tired, and not as horny as I had been earlier, and up against a writing deadline. I didn’t know how much worse it would get, or that I wouldn’t have another opportunity. I didn’t know how a dark wisp of hair curling against his neck would pierce me through like a sword (my kingdom for the chance to kiss that sweet spot!), or how his briefly bared, muscular shoulder would make my ovaries ache, or how watching his battered, inelegant hands perform any task whatsoever would make the blood rush blaring from my head like fire engines to the site of a four-alarm blaze. I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to entertain even a passing thought about his more indisputably masculine attributes if I had any intention of maintaining brain function (or dry panties) at work. I want him, that hairy, disreputable, irresistible bastard, who overrode my current taste settings and time-warped me back to 1994.

Desire! — it consumes everything: your time, your concentration, your thoughts, your plans, your best intentions. Like a mirage, it keeps you stumbling across the desert, believing that if you just keep following it, your thirst will eventually be quenched. I find Ms. Johnson’s book is only helpful up to a point now: her thesis is mainly about the love aspect of eros, not the nitty-gritty sexual one. I may be able to court my inner Beloved and find the Divine or the Other or the Outlaw Pothead somewhere within myself, but I’m not about to sprout hair on my chest or face — nor do I want to. I can’t sprout certain other things, either, with which to then perform indecent acts upon myself. The literal, physical hunger for the sexual Other isn’t something you can DIY.

**

The fact that I’ve been spending my recent days as swollen and juicy as a ripe Georgia peach may, perhaps, be why so many other young men at work have been sniffing around me lately, their dog-sense telling them that there’s something to come and get. I can’t tell you how much I love the fact that the beautiful, intense, whip-smart doctoral candidate in history (the first person to actually catch my notice when I walked in the door) has taken to sitting next to me during the evening shift, chatting and joking with a barely detectable but winsome edge of nerdy awkwardness. (And where, as Eliot said, do I begin?) The newest trainee, a classic-heartthrob-looking pup who belongs in 1950s films alongside James Dean and Montgomery Clift, did a mutual triple take before we introduced ourselves, and he has also gravitated to the chair next to mine to play getting-to-know-you. Besides these two obvious beauties in my obvious type-category, there are a few lovely-boned African-American gentlemen who heap their satin-smooth attentions upon me on a daily basis, a stocky, adorable amateur astrologer who caresses me and calls me “sexy lady,” and two affable young supervisors who find excuses to hover around my cube like honeybees.

I love it all, and I love them all, and I am one hundred percent certain that if I tried to act upon any of this in my typical, straightforward, clumsy fashion, it would all go away. Because I have no idea what to do, and never have, as a woman who desires men the way men desire women. (As I said to my coach friend, “Why did God make men beautiful if he didn’t want me to have sex with them? And who do you have to sleep with to get laid around here?!!!!”)

Maybe there are no shortcuts. Maybe I’m looking for an easy way to home plate that doesn’t exist for me as a respectable female, or maybe I just say too g-damn much. Standing dumb in this field of daisies, I clench my hands impotently. How do I reach for Eli (the gorgeous grad student) in a way that doesn’t make him vanish like a vapor? Maybe I shouldn’t even try. Maybe I should just enjoy our sparkling rapport for what it is, and leave him to the nice marriageable girls his own age whose mothers would have paroxysms over him. Maybe out-of-the-box-fresh Mr. Dean doesn’t need to be put on the spot by a shameless cougar wannabe having a midlife crisis. Such lovely, earnest creatures they are. Maybe I should just wait and see if Rick comes around, because he is, after all, the sexy and not-so-nice outsider who triggered this human estrus. I just don’t have a clue. A clue is something I’ve never gotten.

The one thing I am confident of, given how intoxicated I became last Monday when Rick stood a little too close (I had to take a step back just to keep my wits about me), is that I can count on my own arousal, at least with him, and if I can count on my own arousal, the rest would take care of itself. There’s nothing worse than play that feels like work, especially that kind of play. But wanting a man — God! — with that delicious appetite…peeling him bare like an exotic fruit…feeling his rough and smooth textures…smelling him, tasting him…swallowing him deep in your belly…all with the lip-smacking relish you might reserve for a savory meal in a Roman trattoria…it requires no more effort than simple, hearty eating when you’re famished. And he wouldn’t have to work very hard, either. (He would have to let me enjoy him…one of my few complaints about the only truly wanted men I’ve ever had is that they rushed or truncated my slow and deliberate worship of their bodies, not realizing how central it was to my own pleasure.)

But I fear I’ve rambled on too long before the fourth installment (which I decided to post after being urged to continue by a Russian-born fan who likes me better than Elizabeth Gilbert!) — this post will be positively unmanageable. (Poor bluemorpho3, he’ll never catch up!) Here’s the first dispatch I sent from Centro d’Ompio post-James, still reeling from the loss. Of course in the meantime I have a couple of unwanted pursuers of both sexes…naturally!

__________________________

PART FOUR: TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

“…creeps its petty pace from day to day.”

This week’s diary is a day-by-day log, reflecting the way time trudges on when joy takes a holiday.

*

TUESDAY

This laptop is the best investment I have ever made. Last week I was sitting in a cafe in Orta writing this diary for hours — today I’m sitting on the top of Centro’s mountain, having hiked up to the wooden cross at its pinnacle, looking at the whole of Lake Orta. Diagonally across the lake I can see the red roofs of the town of Pella, and high above them, on a steep cliff, the chalk-white church to which James hiked one day, incredibly. It was a grueling journey, certainly more than I would ever have attempted on foot.

Today (my day off) I slept until eleven o’clock, fading in and out of consciousness, my twin futon like a little raft where I floated on a murky river of loss. There was nothing to propel me out of bed, neither duty nor anticipation. Life for the full-time staff at Centro may be a continuous exercise in nonattachment, but for me, experiencing this place for the first (and probably the last) time, there is now and will forever be a James-shaped hole that no one else can fill. We had only seventeen days together, but in that brief time he became like my best friend. And then he was like the best friend who teased me by coming into the kitchen in nothing but a towel. And then he was like the best friend I wanted to pull the towel off and touch in all manner of delightfully impertinent ways. And then…but you know what then.

Not that the soap opera does not continue. Oh, no. Now I find myself fending off a weathered Georgian war veteran and a nascent lesbian. Vaja, the pool man, who fought in Afghanistan and struts around Bisetti chest-out like its resident rooster, is frequently either trying to catch my eye or touching me in some uninvited way. James practically lionized the man — when I mentioned that Vaja had stroked my hair, he joked “I’ve been wanting him to do that since I got here!” — but his kind of aggressive machismo makes me uneasy. I don’t think he’s actually dangerous, but he really can’t take a hint, and now that my obvious love interest has flown the coop it’s as if it’s open season on yours truly. When all I want is to be left alone.

Then there’s Hanna.

We used to argue good-naturedly about her, the limey and I. Over time I became certain that she felt more than friendly toward me, and that that was the main reason why she regarded him through slitted eyes and spoke to him curtly (if at all). He said that she simply hated him, and that I was horribly conceited. But now that he’s gone, she follows me around and stares at me intensely as if I were a cross between Jesus Christ and a Belgian chocolate truffle. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had anyone, not even a lesbian, look at me with such adoration and ferocious longing, and, as I told James, the chicks dig me! Also, she’s not “out.” For all I know, the young woman is at a delicate turning point in her life, and I certainly don’t want to give her a bad experience. So I’m not handling it well. Most of the time I’m simply in flight from her and Vaja. Any advice you queer friends of mine (or for that matter the straight ones) can give me is welcome. Aiuto! as they say in Italy. HELP.

Marjorie and Christian have become close. I never had a chance to tell you about Marjorie — there was just too much else going on. She’s a pretty, fairly uncomplicated but very sweet blonde account manager from Bolton, England (near Manchester), who is built, as they say, like a brick house. When she first arrived, my heart sank, but James had no interest in her whatsoever, preferring to spend even more time with me (which was more gratifying than I can tell you). In the meantime Alessandro and Christian attached themselves to her like barnacles. Ultimately, 19-year-old Christian seems to have won out (I think she has about ten years on him), and they are planning to leave early to go restore medieval houses together in San Remo. Their last day at Centro is Sunday. I’m just realizing how much I’ll miss them, and how much I envy them, those crazy kids.

Gina is still here, the voluptuous little Italian harlot (no, I’m sure she doesn’t deserve that) staying in Raffe’s room. When the hell is she leaving, for God’s sake?!! I see her coming and going, and we regard each other briefly, unsmilingly. I can’t help but wonder what, if anything, he said to her in parting. There’s that extremely petty, jealous and injured part of me that secretly hopes it was shattering, so that she knew at once and beyond a doubt that their little romance was all a lie. Gina happens to look a lot like my fourth grade best friend, Adriana Giametti. Adriana and I had an intense love/hate relationship — we were always competing for grades, attention, boys, you name it. I could never stand for Adriana to get the better of me, and I couldn’t stand for her lookalike to think she’d gotten the better of me now. Even if I know she meant nothing to him…I want her to know she meant nothing to him, too. Stupid cow.

Yeah, I know. So sue me. I’m not the Buddha.

At least I have a new friend I can actually talk to, without Raffe’s language barrier or conflict of interest. At the end of last week Finn arrived from Vienna. He’s a slender, easygoing young web designer with sensitive green eyes and a deep baritone voice who practices yoga and plays the guitar. His English is impeccable, honed by years of enjoying English-language films and books. He’s been to Centro before, and has known Robert and Mila for years, having lived with them in Australia. He has a serious girlfriend back in Vienna, so that’s not on the table, in case you were wondering. He’s a lovely person, inside and out, but I really couldn’t go there right now anyway. Almost immediately, just being in his company with others and hearing the way he expresses himself, I knew that I could trust him. He would feel at home at the yoga center (he practices Ashtanga for two hours in the morning) and comfortable at a party with my closest friends. He’s not put off by “girly” things. I wonder what James would have said about him. Would he have thought he was too much of a “pussy?” I’d certainly much rather hang out with Finn than with Vaja.

This morning, after finally dragging myself out of bed, I found Finn reading a book about globalization on the sort of mini-veranda on the second level of the house where the smokers go to smoke. He asked me how I was. “I’m kind of depressed,” I admitted. I would probably not have admitted this, at least so readily, to any of the others. Gina was in evidence just then, getting ready to depart for the day, and I waited for her to leave before I confessed, “I was in love with the Englishman.” It felt good to say it out loud, right there on the premises, and I gave Finn the bare bones of the story, including the reason why I can hardly look at the woman. A little later, after I had showered and dressed, he came to get me for lunch, and showed me the secret back way to hike up to Centro.

The others have seen us hanging out, and I know what they’ll conclude, but what I really need right now, more than anything, is a friend. I feel as if I’ve tumbled almost traumatically from my state of grace. Walking down from Centro after dinner, I felt the loneliness I hadn’t felt since my first night here, and the sudden emptiness of grief. I know that this too shall pass, but I wasn’t ready. Are we ever ready? You find a shimmering pearl, you hold it in your hand, and then you lose it again. Cosi e la vita. Such is life.

*

WEDNESDAY

Padma is a gift.

Her Sanskrit name was given to her by her spiritual master in Costa Rica, where she worked on a commune for several years. She’s probably around fifty, with long, thick, graying hair and an ample bosom, but she seems younger in spirit. Her room is next to mine and Elke’s; at night, I can often hear her picking her guitar and singing some soft Portuguese lullaby. Her room is cozy and inviting, and she has set out to beautify every single common area at Bisetti. She’ll be a full-time kitchen worker at Centro for four months, and explains her Bisetti project by saying “this is my home.” Last night I came into her room and sang along to a Sanskrit chant I recognized from a Krishna Das CD that gets frequent play at my yoga center.

Padma believes that people are healed through music. So I may be coming to her room quite a bit in the near future. Just now she came up to me from behind, and enfolded me in a mighty embrace that reminded me of being a small child in my grandmother’s lap. God bless Padma. I’m never one to push away a life preserver.

*

THURSDAY

My very first friend in Pettenasco is gone.

Mezza Coda, “half tail,” the blind, deaf and slightly lame cat who had resided at Bisetti for nineteen years, or the entriety of Christian’s lifespan, appears to have gone away to die. She’s been missing since yesterday. Finn found her hobbling down the road Monday, and brought her back to Bisetti, but she had probably been trying to go to her final resting place. She never strayed far from the kitchen steps, and countless times since that first night I picked up her small grubby body and held her cradled against my shoulder until she purred loudly and stuck her head under my chin. She loved to be held; she just couldn’t get enough affection. Even James picked her up and petted her, sometimes, although her copious drooling would cause him to utter a stream of hilarious curses worthy of the saltiest English sailor. (I told him that she couldn’t help herself — he had this effect on females.)

Earlier in the day it had hit me, hard, that Alessandro, Christian, and Marjorie are all leaving Monday morning, as is Cosmo (due to some sudden family problem or emergency). The losses are piling up like wrecks on a freeway. Alessandro and I have been spending less and less time together since he moved in with Christian, so I’ve lost him piecemeal. (I really must get a picture of him, so that you can see him.) He’s managed to become something of a sidekick to the comparatively more worldly Norwegian. I never fell under Christian’s spell the way Alessandro and Marjorie did, but he did walk with me all the way to Orta that day, and I decided that he was all right. At any rate, I’m losing most of my original cast, my companions in Oz, my witnesses.

Coming back to Bisetti, I saw the candle Padma had lit for Mezza Coda beside the cat dish, which was now filled with flowers. For the second time I sat down on the kitchen steps, put my head in my hands, and started to cry silently, my shoulders shaking. I had meant to take a picture of her. I had wanted to help clean her up. I never got to say goodbye. And now my little friend was gone, as surely and as suddenly as my other beloved friend was gone.

Marjorie came up behind me from the kitchen, reached down, and stroked my hair, which just made the tears come that much faster. Raffe came along, too, and took my hand (which was welcome), and Vaja crouched down and petted me a little (which I could have done without, but I suppose he means well). “This is life,” he said, a statement which is true, but absolutely never helps at all.

It was only partly about the cat, but her final gift to me, I suppose, was this opportunity to let go in front of the others.

Mercifully, Gina had packed up her things and was retrieving her luggage that night. What I found out from Raffe was that they had had a major falling-out, partially precipitated by the James episode, but not limited to it. Somehow this made me feel better about Raffe. “She has lots of problem,” Raffe explained. “I don’t know she will be back.”

All I have to say is — Ciao, Gina, won’t miss ya, don’t let the door hit your enormous Italian ass on the way out.

Mezza Coda may not have had any claws left, but I guess I still have a few. Me-ow. You may rightly say that I’m directing my anger at the wrong person…but in the end I realize there were no real winners here. Not Gina, and not James, except in that toxic macho bullshit sense of having scored, of having fucked one more anonymous chick. No, I’m just being hateful because of course I wanted to be the one up there, giggling in his room, releasing all that delectable sexual tension we created over time. It ain’t fair, is it? You cook up this tasty international treat, and then some random Maria comes along and dispenses with it in one gulp.

*

FRIDAY

Today I determined that, if it was the last thing I did, I was going to get to the waterfalls.

At the risk of boring you to death…it was one of those places to which a certain Englishman I knew loved to go, packing a lunch of bread and cheese with tomato. And I had not yet been there. He had spoken of bringing me along sometime, but we never made it.

So after lunch, I hiked up over Centro’s mountain and through a good deal of woods to the village of Agrano, and then followed the instructions Finn gave me, walking up a mountain road to a small co-op farm and restaurant called Alpe Selviana. The waterfalls were just a short distance beyond. It took me an hour and a half under a blazing sun.

I was incredibly sweaty and winded on the road up to Alpe Selviana, and stopped to pour water over my head at a freshwater spout by the side of the road. Just then a compact car sped past me, and the person in the driver’s seat looked an awful lot like Adriana Giametti. Her dog barked at me (almost viciously, I thought) out the window.

Of all the places in Lake Orta she could have been, she had to come to the waterfalls on that day, at that time. I had to laugh at the allegorical import of the situation — I had worked and sweated hard to get this far, and she just motored up in her neat little auto. Quality.

“Puttana,” I called after her, for no one’s benefit but my own.

Elke had started out ahead of me, in the morning, from Bisetti, and I found her sitting on a rock platform above one of the pools. I left my backpack with her and ventured down toward the water. These falls were more spectacular than our little waterfall at home. An algae-green river cut through a steep, plunging canyon of wrinkled metamorphic rock; there were myriad platforms and pools for swimming and sunbathing, accessible by climbing precariously over the rocks alongside the water. I had thought the place would be much more isolated and private, but there was one male nude sunbather up above, and another down below. Nearby was an old man in a Speedo. And then there was Gina, sunning herself naked, looking very fertile and National Geographic.

I staggered back from the edge of the rock where I stood, feeling nausea again. Seeing her au naturel was, for me, about as pleasant as seeing the neighborhood dog eat his own vomit. (I think I would rather watch that, actually.) She must have seen me see her, because promptly thereafter she passed by Elke and me, fully clothed, with her dog, uttering a cursory “Ciao” to which only Elke responded.

It was awful, running into her there, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence. I found myself wondering: did he bring her to the falls, his next to last day before he left? I even wondered, like a true paranoiac, if they’d met here before.

I knew I could torture myself with endless speculations (I’ve excelled at it in the past), but what’s the point? I’ll never see the man again, and I’ll be rid of her for good once the plane leaves the runway. Besides, someone had told me that she works in Omegna, the next town over, and none of the locals could be ignorant of the falls.

But some of you will no doubt remark on the synchronicity, regardless. And yes, perhaps the universe was trying to coax (coerce!) me into making some kind of peace with the one character in this story I simply cannot abide, but, as I said — I am not the Buddha. I’m just doing the best I can, dammit.

After Gina had gone I said to Elke with a sigh, “I wish you understood more English. Or I knew some German.” Elke agreed that this would have been a good thing, and haltingly expressed her frustrations with the language barriers she was encountering.

“Elke,” I said, “what’s the German word for ‘broken’?”

“Gebrochen,” she said.

“Gebrochen,” I repeated. Thanks to the Bach chorales I’d studied in college, I already knew the German word for ‘heart.’ “Mein Herze ist gebrochen,” I said.

That she understood. A sorrowful, compassionate expression passed over her open and kindly face. “Oh, oh,” she said, and moved to squat beside me and embrace me around the shoulders. No other words needed be sprachen.

Which was really nice. I think that’s the most significant communication she and I have ever had.

Soon after that, Elke departed for Pettenasco, and I went down to the pool by the elderly Speedo guy. He watched me most intently. I dipped my feet in the pool, and then had the idea to dunk myself fully clothed — a baptism, of sorts — which I proceeded to do. He motioned to me that I should take off my wet things, in response to which I thought — yeah, I don’t think so, Gramps. I climbed back up on the rocks and enjoyed the cool of my sopping clothes for a while. It was so hot that I was dry by the time I reached the Agrano town limits.

Could it be a feeling of control over the situation? I wonder, because of how negatively many men have reacted to my desire made explicit, and because the ones I’ve had most success with sexually were either former or current habitual drug users who repeatedly sought out a certain kind of surrender. (Now there’s a sentence my mother would love.)

This is just one more reason why I’m grateful for my weed-redolent young friend Rick, actually. He’s an outsider in many ways already, and he responds unconventionally to my unconventional talk. Our wildly divergent habits make spending time together a challenge, but we’re still in the midst of a very honest conversation, with a great deal of genuine regard on both sides.

“Do you love him?” asked my coach friend last week. “Yeah, a little,” I answered with a sheepish grin. I’m surprised how much this unlikely character has come to mean to me in so short a time. He scares me a little, but I think I scare him too. Who knows what will happen next? He has resolved to at least refrain from drinking around me; I’ve disclosed how intense my sexual feelings for him have become. It may not be long before we act on them…I feel vaguely like Thelma in Thelma and Louise, hooking up with this funny, sexy young outlaw (and while Rick is a far cry from Brad Pitt, as far as I’m concerned he is rapidly becoming the Sexiest Man Alive). Then sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of Say Anything with the hilarious and sincere underachiever Lloyd Dobler, while at still other times I think I’ve wound up in Buffalo ‘66 with a volatile but heartbreaking Billy Brown.

Yes, Rick is definitely lovable. And yet I don’t get the impression that he’s received a great deal of love thus far in life. I don’t mind giving him mine. I may have to stay mindful of my boundaries and keep my expectations at a minimum, but so far I’ve had almost unprecedented success with speaking my mind (and heart), a need of mine that seems to typically cost me relationship. Rick actually seems to appreciate that level of candor. For this alone, the endeavor has been worth the trouble.

But now I’ll give you what will likely be the last installment of my Italy diary, due to low hits and nearly nonexistent comments. I’m afraid I’ve killed my blog!!! What happened over in Italy with James seems entirely relevant, however, because it’s a perfect example of how my habits have worked so perfectly against me, at least with the majority of men I’ve known (Sonny excepted). I really was crazy about James. I sensed that he felt something similar. But I was left, as usual, swinging in the wind ass-out for confronting the situation the way I did.

__________

PART THREE: MORE THAN THIS

So. I’m finally over the raging cold I had for over a week, thanks to the hot days, cool nights, and the drinking of wine on those cool nights that makes one unaware that one is getting overly cool oneself. Fortunately Elke, my gracious German roommate, who speaks only slightly more English than I do German, brought along some homeopathic remedies, which she generously shared. Günter prescribed fresh ginger, which I took in hot water with lemon and honey. What would I do without the Germans? Ah, mein annen. (My ancestors.) I love to listen to them talking to each other in that singularly expectorating way, with all those patched-together words comprised of shorter words. Elke is delighted that my catchphrase has become Alles ist gut. It’s all good.

This cold kept me from going on a field trip with the others last Saturday. All the paying guests were gone, and the working guests went with some of the staff to Lago Maggiore, the big lake nearby that’s much better known than our little Lago D’Orta. Everyone raved about how lovely it was and what great gelato they had, but, as Bettina is fond of saying in English — what to do? I slept most of the day away. James came to find me in the morning, wondering loudly outside my door where that lazy American might be. When he poked his head in, I croaked from under my quilt that I wasn’t going to make it. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

Did I mention that I managed to fall madly, utterly in love with James?

I really didn’t come to Italy for that. No, really, I didn’t. I know people do, but I didn’t. The whole thing was completely unintentional.

You may have noticed that I was well on my way by the last episode. Alessandro, dear to me as he is, may as well be my actual nephew in his childlike and almost scandalous innocence. I’ve never met a young man in his twenties who was so utterly guileless and so oblivous to his own best attributes. You’d think his family had kept him in a shed in back of the house all these years. With Alessandro, what you see is what you get. Which should actually recommend him…there’s a lot to be said for someone whose thoughts flow unhampered to his mouth. If he thinks I’m a worthless piece of shit, he says “I’m a worthless piece of shit.” He doesn’t have to act it out so that you’ll believe it too.

But back to the matter at hand. I’ve read that an atom has recently been photographed as being in two places at once, so I imagine it’s not a theoretical impossibility for the human heart, either.

Life at Centro and Bisetti is definitely exceptional and intense, like summer camp in the land of Oz. You spend a great deal of time talking with your working guest comrades in this circumscribed but technicolor environment, amid green mountains and peacocks. Being a stranger in a strange land is a vulnerable position, and can make you more open more quickly than you might have been at home. My joke with James was that he and Alessandro were my Scarecrow and Tin Man. (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which is which. I suppose it’s not the nicest joke.) I recognize that this is all in fact like a dream, that I will probably never see any of these people again, and that my time here is precious. Ever since my little meltdown on the kitchen steps, I’ve held nothing back. What’s the point? I’m either fully here or I may as well not be here. Which means that I’ll also fully grieve leaving, along with all the departures and necessary losses that happen before.

James happens to be the first loss.

In “Lost in Translation,” a film James and I both loved, there is a poignant scene where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are out singing karaoke with some Japanese acquaintances. Murray’s character gazes at Johansson as he sings the words to Roxy Music’s haunting “More Than This.” More than this/there is nothing/more than this. These two English-speaking characters, afloat in a foreign land, separated by age and circumstance, act out a unique and unconsummated love story, and in that particular scene their unspoken yearning is palpable. At the time, it gave me goosebumps.

**

Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to be charmed by someone who has Denis Leary’s wicked sense of humor (as well as his potty mouth) and resembles Ewan MacGregor, even if I never considered Ewan my type (I’m more of a Johnny Depp girl). James and I spent so much time together, much of it involving me laughing uncontrollably, that I’m certain all of the other working guests thought I was getting colonized by the Empire. Eventually I had to put forth that possibility myself, seeing as I was technically bound by nothing at home other than the one-sided loyalty of my own heart. I had nothing more serious in mind than some good old-fashioned fooling around, because the cheeky limey was just so fookin irresistible, and the chemistry was so potent…

But as soon as I made the suggestion, I hit a wall.

Apparently James files women into two categories: viable relationship material, and shit. Actually, he called them one-night stand types, but really, they’re worthless. They must be reasonably hot, fairly stupid, and fail to amount to more to him than a stain on his shirt. I told him that I don’t really have categories anymore, I have priorities, and that beauty and joy have become more important to me than self-protection or sure things.

Thus began a two or three hour conversation in Bisetti’s kitchen, with James drinking more and more (he’s a real Englishman all right, I can’t believe how much he can hold). I’m sure he divulged more that night than he had intended. Essentially, without going into too much detail, I heard this young man’s court case against himself. He seemed to want very much to convince me that he was a sick, miserable, cold-hearted bastard, but all he did was convince me of the depth of his despair and the reality of his suffering. (Fathers and teachers, wrote Dostoevsky’s character Father Zossima, I ponder: what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.)

As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the more we understand such things about someone, the more deeply we begin to love him. So James’s tactic backfired quite spectacularly. What he said didn’t scare me; it didn’t suck me in; it didn’t shake my faith in the beauty of life, or even in the beauty of James. It was too familiar. I had been here before. Dostoevsky had distilled all of this anguish into the character of the Underground Man, and I had known this man. I had loved this man. I had even, in a sense, been this man. I’ll call his malady the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death: a classic and distinctly macho nihilism communicated by the likes of Friedrich Nietszche, Blaise Pascal, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and more contemporary writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Norman Mailer. It’s what happens when you prescribe for yourself the most impossible and inhuman precepts for attaining manhood, and utterly reject everything that smacks of what Jung characterized as the Eternal Feminine. For the more spiritually oriented, what you might call the Source, the Great Mother, the God who is Love. In other words, everything in life that makes tenderness and connection possible.

If you cut yourself off like this, banishing half of your humanity, it will not only make your soul sick, you may wind up putting a gun in your mouth. James seems to see Hemingway as an ideal role model. Certainly, the man could write, but he’s an awfully shitty role model. (A man would be much better off looking up to someone like Nelson Mandela. Dignity, strength, courage, compassion…now that guy’s got class.)

To put it another way, if James were drowning (and I dare say he is, in several litres of alcohol every night) and the Feminine were a life preserver, he’d go under the waves yelling “Fook off, ya pussy shit, and let me die like a mahn!”

The next morning as I hiked up the mountainside to Centro, I felt full to overflowing with a love and a joy I wished I could bottle and pour directly into James’s beer. When did I cease to be an Underground Woman myself, and surface into the light of day? How did it happen, and how could I explain it? I thought of Esther, a wonderful yoga teacher I know who is fond of saying “It’s all grace,” and I felt as if I’d been bodily lifted from misery by unseen hands. I began to sing the chorus of “Amazing Grace” as I walked, emotion making my voice crack.

When I saw him at lunchtime, I was amazed that he was still talking to me. I fully expected him to despise me out of shame, but over the course of the day he warmed up even more. After dinner, at Bisetti, a group of us watched “What the Bleep Do We Know,” which, one has to admit (whatever one’s orientation toward that goofy Ramtha woman) has some compelling things to say about the way we talk to ourselves. James, having smoked some weed with his alcohol, seemed affected (surprisingly, calling the film “brilliant”), and I wondered if any of these things would stick.

(Editorial note: in retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if I had slid onto the couch next to James after the movie, and taken a hit myself, and lain my arm across the back of the couch behind his neck…but hindsight is 20/20! I probably missed my only chance.)

It was the next afternoon, when he was acting strange and distant again, that I divulged that I no longer felt I needed anything from him, and that I loved him, that it was fierce and unconditional. His response was an icy “How dare you say such a thing to me,” and, of course, “fook you!”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” I replied with a resigned sigh. He smiled a little then, almost in spite of himself, musing on my choice of words and liking the use of the term “fierce.” At least the guy appreciates my diction. In a moment we were talking about something else as if we had only just been discussing the weather. (In a little while, we would go with the others to a bar in Pettenasco, and he would demonstrate the extent of his panic by immediately beginning to seduce a friend of Raffe’s.)

Ah, the dreaded L-word. Tell me, friends, what is the big fookin deal??? It should be the most natural thing in the world for human beings to say to one another, but thanks to this macho bullshit crap, it’s this outrageous declaration, laden with all manner of weighty prerequisites (in order to even utter it), and bales of shame. What happened between James and me, the sparkling rapport, the give-and-take of mirroring and response, that deeply satisfying pleasure of relatedness, it was all real, it was all true. Everyone around us felt it, the chemistry of our connection. There are witnesses, although I no longer need them in order to believe in its veracity.

**

My own father is not unlike Pascal — he filled the hole in his soul with religion, but he has little respect for anything other than the intellect. I don’t believe, like some psychoanalysts, that everyone we fall in love with is strictly some projection of our original caregivers, but there is a degree of truth to this theory. Anyone could reasonably say I have tried to win his approval in the persons of these unhappiest of men…but in that case I have also attempted to redeem him, to save him somehow. Call it pathological, but I don’t believe the attempt is without merit. James Baldwin, the passionate, gay black antithesis of the spiritually ailing Straight White Western Male, believed that only a human being can save another human being, and that we create one another’s consciousness.

Still, what struck me the other day, sitting in a ristorante in Pettenasco eating an insalata with fresh mozzarella (and keeping away from Bisetti), is that I have lately stopped courting my father by proxy — this episode has been something of a retread of old, painful ground — and that I am the one who has been redeemed. My equanimity in the face of James’s rejecting cruelty would never have been possible if an old pattern had not already been decisively broken. They say that to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result, is insanity…but what if you meet that one rare gentleman who can hear everything you’re saying, and not panic? It’s difficult in Western culture to encounter intelligent heterosexual men not somehow hobbled by the legacy of Hemingway. Speaking from the heart is seen as foolish (if not outrageous), and even we women are regularly shamed out of it.

But I have been redeemed: by the warm and affirmative response of a decidedly straight man who is not afraid of me, or for that matter of feeling, or connection, or the Feminine. Even if we were never together again, even if he chooses to be with someone else, or things just don’t work out, what has been done cannot be undone. I finally believe that It’s Not About Me. I am not crazy, repugnant, or fundamentally flawed. If you’re reading this, my dearest hipster daddy, let me just say this from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. My deja-vu experience has deepened my appreciation for you, and for what a miracle of a man you are. You think I exaggerate…but a sincere seeker, who has already been to hell and back, and who flings himself at life with an open heart and without the distortions of pride, is a much rarer thing in my experience than fanatically self-censoring, contemptuous misanthropes who won’t allow themselves the pleasure of a natural emotion. And I have known them already, known them all…

**

In the sunlit and car-free square of Orta, breathing in the aroma of what smelled like a local cousin of the linden flower and facing the magnificent medieval monastery on the island of San Giulio, I ate a cup of freshly made, creamy gelato, but after the first bite I could taste nothing but grief. It’s like what I told Alessandro that day in the square: you buy now, you pay later…but at least it works the other way around as well.

I felt that James was already gone; everything was over, it was in the past, even with him still physically present, shagging the Italian girl he had charmed the other night at the local watering hole. His room was located diagonally above mine, and late at night I could hear her giggling like a schoolgirl on dope.

With “Lost in Translation,” the audience, at least, knows how much Bill Murray’s character cares for Scarlett Johansson’s, even when he picks up the blowsy lounge singer from the hotel bar for a tawdry one-night stand. There was slightly vicious comfort in knowing that James would only “stuff” a woman he finds stupid and doesn’t respect…but listening to the whole business wasn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. I lay there feeling absolutely sick to my stomach, taking deep yoga breaths and trying to empty my mind. If I could have vomited, it might have brought some relief. I pretended that it was only a window on London, where he had flown already, picking up giggly blondes in dimly lit pubs. James was gone. It was time to let go, and to feel the loss of something that had been beautiful, if ephemeral as a mayfly.

Nietzsche, the proudest all-star in the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death gallery, was in Orta once, with the highly educated and independent woman of letters Lou Salome. She ultimately rejected him, whereupon he promptly became despondent (and allegedly suicidal) and went off to write “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” This explains a lot to me, as far as the man’s nihilism and raging misogyny are concerned. Later Lou would become the lover and confidante of Rainer Maria Rilke, a luminous man so unlike poor Friedrich that one waggish writer called him “the world’s greatest lesbian poet.”

I ate my dinner at Leon d’Oro, the hotel where Friedrich and Lou stayed: pasta with aubergine and pomodoro in a cream sauce, accompanied by a half bottle of Valpolicella. The waiter, to my astonishment, resembled Rilke. I kid you not.

Gazing at the beautiful island of San Guilio, I paraphrased James in my head, copping his attitude. That evil harpy of a woman! How dare she have the unapologetic gall to love me, and the unmitigated temerity to say it out loud? She must be put to DEATH!!!! Wine-warm laughter bubbled up from within me as I realized the ridiculous, Pythonesque absurdity of his position. What the fook, James?

And then I thought, Good God, but I like myself. It’s taken thirty-eight years, but I honestly do. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to apologize for. I have been honorable and true with an open and loving heart.

On the long walk back to Pettenasco at sunset, I bought myself a chocolate gelato in the shop by the rotary.

It tasted delicious.

**

I made myself as scarce as possible at Bisetti until the morning of his last day. Leaving for Centro early in the morning (I had breakfast dishwashing duty) I slipped a note under his door. It explained my absence, briefly, as the unwillingness to subject myself to watching what he was doing. I loved myself too. I wished him luck and goodbye. Expecting that to be the end of it, I went about my workday in a vague funk of bereavement.

He came up to Centro at lunchtime to say goodbye to everyone. When I first saw him walking up the drive, my heart leapt into my throat. While I was back in the work area behind the kitchen, squeezing fresh orange juice, he came to shake Bruno’s hand. I didn’t expect to speak to him myself, and after he left the kitchen I let myself cry all over the oranges. I was washing the juicer parts when I heard him say my name.

I turned to see him coming at me with a politely outstetched hand, as if to bid farewell with an impersonal handshake. Seeing my wet face and eyes must have been what made him open his arms. I flung my arms around his neck and clung to him, most impolitely, and for a long time, as he said something about Robert having his email address. I said that I’d send him my travel diary (boy will he love this one). Finally he let go of me with an abrupt English “right,” and I released him, turning my head to kiss his cheek at the jawline where his beard grew soft and thick. After he had walked away (never looking at me directly) I finished cleaning up, and then locked myself in the handicapped restroom and sobbed violently and inconsolably for about ten minutes.

When I emerged, I felt as fresh and clean as Colorado air after a hailstorm.

**

You may ask me: what the fook, C? He told you to fuck off and then went about poking someone else right under (or above) your nose, and you still feel this way about him?

That night in Bisetti’s kitchen, I told James that no matter how shittily the men in my life have behaved, in the end what stays with me are the wonderful things, and how much I loved them, whether it was for five years or five minutes.

I won’t keep the sick-to-my-stomach feeling. What I’ll keep are things like this: the raffishly saucy look in his eye as he bit a cluster of shrimp off of my proffered fork in Novara (my pizza had come with shrimp through a misunderstanding); the way he would say simply “quality,” with a grin, when something pleased or amused him; the night we watched Günter’s DVD of “Shaft” on my iBook in his room, and I wanted so badly to kiss him; the private universe we could be at a table full of people; and the soft-focus, almost melancholy look he had at Centro’s bar one of those last nights, when Robert played a torchy Tom Waits song for us from his laptop. So close he was, so close and yet so far away, my beautiful English so-called bastard. There is nothing/more than this…but to quote another Tom Waits tune, I’m gonna take it with me when I go.

**

What a strange week it’s been. I felt a bit knocked off-kilter by my coach friend’s sudden fixation on logistics and finances, things I tend to worry about to the point of losing faith entirely and giving up. I also had my first experience with Bikram yoga — thanks to the free yoga package I scored after writing an article on a Bikram studio — which I found to be an acquired taste. I’m not sure I like holding poses while dripping on the floor in sopping clothes and trying to breathe stifling air.

And then there’s my new friend. I can’t help but think of a funny, jaunty Jazz Age throwback remix track by The Real Tuesday Weld that goes When Psyche meets Cupid/don’t mind me, I’m feeling stupid/and terminally ambivalent over you. (Imagine my amusement when I found that the animated video featured a character in old-school prison stripes. See above link.) In terms of lifestyle, we’re almost comically incompatible, and yet he’s something of a natural philosopher, wholly unpretentious, and frank to a fault. Plus something about our chemistry you just can’t manufacture, even under ideal circumstances. I’ve met a number of men closer to my “type” and probably less “questionable,” but they’re not the ones I’m getting distracted at work fantasizing about. Still, I swing wildly between “This is such a bad idea” and “When the hell is he going to come upstairs and drop those baggy pants?”

Above all, I have to keep reminding myself not to take it all so seriously, and treat him as one treats a friend — allowing him to do his thing, without the over-identification that comes with certain forms of attachment. I’m not responsible for his choices. I can only try to continue to seek common ground where we can meet and enjoy each other.

**

But now on to Part Two of my Italy diary, where you’ll be introduced to James, the Englishman with whom I became so fatally enamored. This is quite possibly my favorite installment, because it includes what I consider one of the loveliest, happiest days of my life — a balmy summer afternoon walking around a small Piemonte city with Alessandro and James. I was drunk on all the beauty, of Italy, of the architecture and the gardens and of my two young male companions.

Somebody should have just shot me right then and there, because it doesn’t get any better than that!

**

PART TWO: I MUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING GOOD

I think they mean to work me to death here. My knees and my joints are killing me — the other working guests are all under 30 and still have all their cartilage — and I have a rash on the underside of my arm from the wrist up past the elbow. It might be from dishwashing several hours a day, but who knows. (I’ve had trigger-happy skin since I was in diapers.) The dishwashing is usually followed by several more hours of housecleaning, raking endless leaves, or working in the kitchen. I enjoy kitchen duty more than the other tasks, having been a prep cook in college. At least there I feel halfway competent, and I get to work with Cosmo, Mila, and Bruno.

Bruno is the chef in Centro’s vegetarian kitchen. He’s somewhere in his forties, decidedly short in stature, and thoroughly Italian in appearance. Shaggy-haired and craggy-nosed, he’s a bite-sized treat. I follow him around like a cocker spaniel, getting in the way and listening to his directions puppy-eyed. He regards me somewhat dubiously, but lets me handle the big knife to cut the watermelon. Above all I try not to do anything which elicits the dreaded “Che fai?!!” – What are you doing?!! — from the grande formaggio.

Socially, things got much better after that first day. Having found some emotional support from Raffe, and comparative facility of communication with Alessandro, the sinfully beautiful Canadian-Italian, I soon had another English speaker to play with.

James, a right smart bloke from a working-class town in England, had been off campus Thursday, but I met him at lunch the following day. He’s a witty and literate political science grad who actually dated someone from my obscure private college in Maryland. Golden-haired and fair, with piercingly blue eyes, he’d be almost too pretty if not for his beard, which butches up his appearance considerably. His eyelashes are a mile long. (I suppose, being in Europe, I should say they’re a kilometer long.) It was a delight to sit with him and Alessandro after lunch, complaining about Bush and explaining to them why many Americans believe he stole the election. (Oh wait, I mean elections.) For his part, James is articulate, well informed, and chock full of Brit colloquialisms that make me snicker. Exactly how mad is a bag of hammers? Who can say. He has more euphemisms for getting drunk than could fill a phrasebook, and more colorful obscenities than a room full of American truck drivers.

So far, these three seem to be becoming my chosen clan away from home. Raffe supplies unconditional, undaunted love and acceptance, regardless of language; Alessandro (about whom I had a dream the other night, in which I kissed him on the forehead repeatedly, which about sums up the nature of my affections) is like a terribly sensitive but perennially depressed adolescent boy; and James is a kindred spirit in intellect and humor. Communicating with him requires no effort whatsoever, which I appreciate after hours and hours of choosing the simplest words possible to inaccurately get my point across. We have a lark, we do, Yank and limey. He curses constantly, and I always laugh when he says “fookin,” as in “I’ve got the fookin dishwashing duties again!”

In the midst of a grinding week of physically demanding work, Monika — a cute young German so free-spirited and effervescent that the boys are all leery of her (I would have thought they would all be lining up to “tap that,” as James would say) — insisted that I lead a yoga class before her departure later that week. I protested that I wasn’t a teacher, I was a student, that I had never taught before, that I wasn’t certified, etc. Almost immediately Bettina, Paola, and Raffe all joined in the chorus: oh, please, please! So at six o’clock Tuesday evening, an hour and a half before dinner (meals are served late here) we congregated in the lovely meditation room on the upper floor of the main building called the “sky room,” and I began to lead four eager students in a series of the easiest stretches and salutations, demonstrating as best I could, and using the simplest words possible. At the end we lay in savasana, and I led them in a brief breath meditation before finishing with three rounds of om and my favorite teacher’s traditional blessing before the namaste. Afterwards they all told me how much they loved it, and Raffe wanted me to do it again tomorrow. Bettina, who is partially responsible for our work schedules, came up to me and suggested that she make leading an hour of yoga part of my work trade here. She also enthused about my teaching abilities (I had mentioned to her that I might take a teacher training when I got back home) and urged me to continue. She is a student of Qi Gong, which she practices every afternoon just before lunch, and has had several teachers. She said I was a natural. Well, well…

By midweek the guests had all gone, including the tantra workshop that had concluded with a ritual dance and the drinking of the “fire drink” (spiced wine, actually). The permanent bartender Robert, an aging American Lothario from California with a mane of heavy-metal hair and a laptop full of eclectic pirated music, delighted in telling us about the predatory atmosphere at the bar that last night. He’s one to talk, having latched onto 22-year-old Hanna early on. The more seasoned working guests here tell me he likes them young and vulnerable, and all appearances would seem to support this hypothesis. Alessandro dislikes Robert intensely because he sees Robert as a popular guy who enjoys success with women — the sort of guy Alessandro has never been, the sort of guy who picked on Alessandro in school. I tell Alex he has a totally distorted view of reality, and that Robert would trade places with him in a nanosecond. This ridiculously pretty baby, more than six feet tall with gorgeous eyes and a perfect bow of a mouth, could make millions modeling for Hugo Boss or Armani, and he doesn’t even think he’s attractive! I hope he gets discovered waiting tables in Roma. Or something. Some kind of external validation greater than my best encouragements can give him. He reminds me of myself in my twenties (although he often lacks the vocabulary for his despair), tending to be depressed, self-obsessed, and merciless in his judgments of himself.

On Wednesday another working guest, Elke, a fiftysomething German friend of Bettina’s, arrived, and the room situation had to be rearranged. I moved into the room that had been Alessandro and Stefan’s to share with Elke, Alessandro moved in with Christian, and James (who was not getting along with Christian) moved into the single room that had been mine. I did some obligatory bitching about it, but Elke has been perfectly lovely, and James is a lot happier in the single.

Thursday I was given the extraordinary gift of a shared day off with my boys, James and Alessandro. We talked about going to Milano, but there were no tickets available to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper (probably thanks to Dan Brown and the new Tom Hanks movie), so James suggested we go to Torino instead. Apparently there’s an incredible Egyptian museum there, the second largest in the world. Frankly, I didn’t care. A day trip anywhere in Italy with mi cari would already be heaven.

That morning they were waiting for me by the kitchen before I had even finished getting ready or gotten something to eat. I didn’t understand their hurry until I saw the 8:55 train leaving Pettenasco station from our vantage point on the hill. I apologized profusely; as a city dweller I’m used to public transporation that’s readily available and frequent, and I hadn’t thought to ask about the train schedule. We checked on the board, and the next departure was at 10:30. James settled on the station’s bench with a Tom Robbins novel, and I accompanied Alessandro down the road into Pettenasco to buy cigarettes.

After visiting the newsstand/tobacco shop (staffed by none other than Pettenasco’s female mayor) we sat down for a little while in the cobblestone square by the tourism office. Alessandro started in with his pet miseries, asking me what I thought of Robert. It was here that (for God’s sake, Alex) I had to tell him that I’d told everyone at home that he was ravishingly beautiful, and that he should give himself a break. I divulged that if I had met him at a different point in my life I would surely have been trying to get him into bed. He started to blush and smiled shyly, showing perfect white teeth. It was as if he’d never heard this sort of thing before. Apparently one of the full-time Centro employees had recently rebuffed him, and he was taking it very hard. I said that the souls who experience the deepest despondencies are also capable of the greatest joys, and suggested some authors he might read, starting with Rilke. When we walked up the hill he was positively hot to find an English language bookstore in the city.

James was where we had left him on the bench, although he had just walked down to the town himself to “take a Nixon” — the meaning of which I’ll spare you all. We all waited together for the train.

And waited. And waited.

We had a look around inside the unstaffed and generally abandoned building. The office had several boxes full of childrens’ textbooks in Italian, dating back to 1993, which engrossed the fellows for a short time. I visited the station restroom, and here I just have to interject – what is up with these Italian holes in the floor?! Do they think women don’t pee? (Thank God I do yoga!) And are they allergic to toilet paper, or what? If I were in a third world country I wouldn’t be surprised, but this is Europe for crying out loud. Even in fairly nice restaurants, where you’d expect something a bit more genteel…Bisetti’s rustic water closets are like the Ritz in comparison. Heaven help you if you’re an old woman, or disabled. I think I’d just as soon use the woods. It would feel so much cleaner.

It was eleven-thirty and the boys were getting cranky. James was ready to say, fook it all, let’s go down to a poob and have a beah. Alessandro was dead set on getting to a bookstore in Torino. I didn’t care what we did, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to choose between going with one or the other. Turning cartwheels by the tracks, I observed that it was a beautiful day in the Italian countryside, and that my companions were the two handsomest gentlemen at Centro d’Ompio. I really had nothing to complain about. James, cheered somewhat, called me a liar, while Alessandro (with uncharacteristic good humor and bravado) countered that it was half true, that half being himself.

Finally we walked down to town. Alessandro had a word in Italian with the mayor, who told him that at certain times of day (as I found, en route to Centro) it’s a bus that runs to the Borgomanero station, from which point one can take a train to Novara and then change over to the Torino line. The next bus came in ten minutes. James, already dreaming of a cold lager, reluctantly agreed to take it — we’d already paid for and validated the tickets, after all. So more than three hours after we set out, we were finally on our way.

The lakeside bus ride was a panorama of gorgeous views. I sat contentedly by the window next to James, brimming with pleasure as he took a catnap and Alessandro spoke Italian with the driver. From Borgomanero we caught the Novara train. I sat facing them and we had a remarkably personal conversation, the three of us, on the hour-long ride. James, who is rarely serious for three minutes, wound up advising Alessandro, like an older brother, about life and women. Alessandro is twenty-five and James barely twenty-seven, but the emotional difference is akin to that between a sixteen-year-old and a thirty-year-old. It warmed the cockles of my heart to see the cagey intellectual Brit sincerely offering his experience and wisdom to the entirely ingenuous blue-collar Italian boy from Toronto. With my typical bluntness I had let them know that I was completely infatuated with both of them, but not prepared to do anything about it (James says “Don’t shit where you eat,” at any rate), so sans that ambiguity, I had the enviable position of hearing some frank guy talk.

When we got to Novara after two o’clock, James convinced us that the trip to Torino would be useless (we’d have to leave after only two hours to catch the last train to Pettenasco) so we decided to stay in Novara. It’s a small city, but one of the largest in the region, with all of the ATMs and gelato shops and other amenities missing from our tiny little mountain town. I insisted on buying the boys lunch, including real Italian thin-crusted pizza (deliziosa!) and a pitcher of beer, because I’d made them miss the train, and because they’re just “so bloody lovely.” James eyed our waitress — randy as all get-out — and proceeded to check out the considerable local talent all afternoon. “It’s only fair,” I sighed — I had them to look at, after all, and none of the local men were anywhere near as attractive as my traveling companions.

We walked around the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Novara, which turned out to be a far prettier town than it had appeared to be from the road or the stazione. The old buildings were embellished with Corinthean leaf and scrollwork cut from stone, and many of the upper windows had wrought iron balconies bursting with cascading plants or flowers. We found several bookstores for Alessandro (although only one of them had a limited selection of English language books), and a graphic novel store for James.

In the center of town sat a magnificent basilica dating back to the 16th century. We went inside, and I was overwhelmed by the Baroque grandeur of it all. Intricate frescoes depicting Biblical scenes lined either wall, surrounded by large, fierce-looking stone statues of saints and apostles. The vaulted dome rose from above the altar, and here I find my descriptive powers fail me. Suffice it to say that its detail and its sublime geometry, with the sunlight illuminating the ceiling of that otherwise dark sanctuary, was suggestive of heaven. The whole structure was imbued with the gravitas of centuries of tradition and history, with its ferocious-looking saints and its painted skeletons dancing on either side of the Crucifixion. Unfortunately I had left my camera in my room at Bisetti, but James got some good pictures, opting for details like the expression on the prophet Joel’s face.

All day I kept pinching myself. Was I really here? In this place? With these guys? Somewhere in my youth or childhood, as the song goes, I must have done something good. I look at how my life was when I was roughly Alessandro and James’s age, how for so many years (verily, almost forty) it seemed like I wandered like Moses in the desert, and now, in my thirty-eighth year, it’s as if life has suddenly blossomed — exploded! — into unimaginable beauty. Even before coming to Italy. Things I no longer dared to dream became not only possible, but manifest.

Walking down the exquisite streets of Novara, peering through gates at hidden urban gardens, flanked by two positively glorious young men, I thought I would perish of delight. It’s really not true, after all, the cynical estimation that said I’d never be satisfied, no matter what. I have simply been lacking in the things that bring me joy.

Better late than never.

The train back to Pettenasco was hot, and the boys lay back against the seats in exhaustion and dozed. With their peaceful expressions and interminable eyelashes they looked like sweet, beautiful children, and I couldn’t help but perform a visualization on their behalf. I took it from Aleta St. James. (Say what you will about New Age hocus-pocus, I can’t tell you why, but this shit works for me.) I imagined them surrounded by hot pink light, like a blanket — color language for unconditional love — and I wished them everything that might bring them the kind of joy they’d brought me. To Alessandro, I said: Love yourself, baby boy! To James, I said: Be happy, darling. Otherwise, there were no words to the meditation, only emotions. James shifted in his seat and lay his knee against mine, and even in the train’s heat I was gratified by that warmth.

(I do want to observe, based on my unfolding friendship with the increasingly complex and sometimes volatile character known as “Rick,” that sometimes our passing attractions to people turn out to be unlikely opportunities to develop underdeveloped aspects of ourselves, and to exchange strengths. I don’t think it’s sentimental to say that nearly everyone — even the ex-felons and the chemically challenged — has something to teach us, if we’re open to listen and learn and not make everything about us.)

At any rate, upon my faithful German reader’s encouragement, I thought I would perform an exercise in self-reminder. That is, I thought I would remind myself of what I recently acknowledged as my Big Dream by sharing with you fine readers some, if not all, of my Italy diaries. Because I feel a little as if I’ve lost my way…

As I mentioned, I felt then as if I had finally found my place in the world, living these experiences and writing about them. I hope they don’t disappoint…some of my friends at home, Sonny included, were hooked, as if on a TV series. They do start off on the factual side, as I get acclimated, and become more introspective over time.

Most of the names have been changed, as is my custom on this blog.

**

PART ONE: CULTURE SHOCK

So: I’ve realized that I’m no Elizabeth Gilbert.

The delightful and funny woman who wrote “The Last American Man” and “Eat Pray Love” has a genius for travel. She can land anywhere without a plan or a knowledge of the language, and by the weekend she’’ll be staying in someone’s house being toasted by a table full of locals. She makes it sound so easy.

Maybe it is…for her.

Sometimes you’re just a beginner. And I haven’t felt like such a rank beginner in quite some time.

1. Mi Dispiace, Non Parlo L’Inglese

The flights were uneventful, although I wasn’t able to get much sleep on either leg, not even the eight-hour transatlantic flight. (Both flights somehow managed to show “Big Momma’s House.” One viewing may be more than it deserves.) When I reached the tiny airport in Milan I exchanged my dollars for Euros, incurring more than $15 in service charges. Outright theft (!), but I suppose you could consider it the fee one pays for being a greenhorn. The bus was easy enough to locate — I spoke a few words in Italian to the driver and felt so very proud of myself — and the ride to Novara gave me a chance to check out the landscape. I was struck by how much the quality of the light is like the American West’s — bright and direct, shining down out of an expansive blue sky. But it’s much greener here. On the highway, you think you could be anywhere (it resembled the American Northeast) but the inhabited areas are full of palms and other more exotic Mediterranean flora, even this far north.

We drove through a few small towns, after which some American resort towns seem to model themselves, with familiar red tile roofs and beige facades — some of them crumbling picturesquely. Everywhere I saw old women riding bicycles. The motor traffic seemed to regard the many bicyclists as legitimate vehicles, even on these narrow streets. In Novara, traffic slowed to a halt near the stazione, but it seemed to have been the natural order of things. No one so much as honked a horn.

Inside the station I managed to buy a train ticket to Pettenasco (in Italiano), but once outside I had no idea which track I needed. The direction I had been told was Domodossola, but there was no ‘Domodossola’ on the signs. This is when I first found out that, generally speaking, no one in the smaller towns speaks English. The people at Centro confirmed this later. (Thank God I know how to ask where the restrooms are in Italian, it was the first thing I taught myself! I could go off on an ugly American’s tangent here about my experiences with Italian public restrooms, and how the station’s was barely a Port-o, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.)

My anxiety mounting, I approached a fiftyish gentleman who had come to look at the schedule of destinations and track numbers. In the United States, fifysomething gentlemen are nearly always favorably disposed toward me, even when no one else is, and I hoped that the rule might apply internationally. Mi scusi, I said, Me scusi, non capisco. Sono Americana. Dov’e…? and I pointed at my ticket. He peered at my ticket and at the schedule and seemed to be as flummoxed as I was. He told me (as best as I could understand) to follow him, taking my suitcase, and I trotted after him up the underground walkway steps to a uniformed man by one of the tracks. They conversed rapidly in Italian and the uniformed man consulted a map, pointing out (quite serendipitously) the train behind us that was about to leave. Mille grazie! I cried to them both, and ran with my bags to the train. My Samaritan followed, sitting across the aisle with another middle-aged man in a baseball cap and sunglasses. He only rode three stops, but I heard him tell the other man that I was an Americana.

At the next major train station the train stopped, and everyone, including the conductors, began to deboard. I looked in confusion at the man in the baseball cap. Che stazione? I asked, and he said “Borgomanero.” I must have looked crestfallen. He reached out for my ticket. “Pettenasco,” he murmured, and then said something that sounded like Ven conmigo, which means “come with me” in Spanish, along with a string of words I didn’t understand. I followed him out of the station, and around what appeared to be a major construction project. Maybe that’s why the train stopped there? At any rate I was becoming nervous. Perhaps I should find a phone and call Centro. Where was this guy taking me? “But the train was supposed to go all the way there,” I said, and he turned around. Mi dispiace, signora, non capisco…non parlo l’inglese. Sorry, ma’am, I don’t understand, I don’t speak English. For all I knew, he was leading me to his den of iniquity, or into some international slavery ring…

But instead he led me to a bus that said “Trenitalia” across the front of its window, whereupon he spoke more rapid Italian with the driver, apparently asking if he went to Pettenasco. The driver nodded. Si, si, Pettenasco, he said, motioning to me to board. I didn’t have to pay — apparently this was some sort of extension of the train service. We both got on the bus, and I sat up front behind my second graying savior, who proceeded to engage in a long, animated conversation with the driver and a sweet-looking puckered old woman who was sitting behind the driver.

The bus wound its way up into the mountains, on impossibly narrow streets, through Orta (which shares its name with the lake) and into Pettenasco. Signore Baseball-cap helped me with my luggage and I told him and the driver Mille grazie, siete molti gentili. Thanks a million, you guys are very kind.

There was a phone kiosk just across the street, and I went over to it only to find that it took neither coins nor my credit card. Well, I’d made it that far…maybe I could use someone else’s phone? I pulled my luggage up the street and noticed a sign on a building that said something about an ufficio and turismo so I went behind the building as directed and found a small office full of pamphlets — but no people. I had just gone behind the desk there to inspect an old, non-working telephone when a woman with a name tag hurried in looking purposeful. I came toward her gratefully, full of explanations, but she shook her head and raised a hand to halt me.

Non parlo l’inglese, she said.

It seems they don’t speak English in the tourism office here either. I managed to communicate my needs with telefono and Centro d’Ompio. She led me into a small, much more modern back office where I was able to call Centro, and they were able to send Günter (who is from Germany) down with a car.

2. Centro d’Ompio, Bisetti, e la ‘Meltdown’

Günter is a full-time employee at Centro, a cheerful but serious taskmaster whose chosen mode of leisure dress could be described as heavy-metal-musician-meets-bondage-master. He likes to go shirtless, and is so hirsute as to qualify as furry. Günter oversees the center’s groundskeeping, and manages the working guests’ residence, Bisetti, a half mile down the mountain from Centro.

Günter drove me at breakneck speed up a slender road full of hairpin turns, honking his horn to alert pedestrians or other cars. There was hardly room for one car to pass, so I’m not sure what happens when there are two going in opposite directions. We arrived in the gravel parking lot at Centro and went up to the office on the second floor of the main building, where I was introduced to Paola, the pleasant young Italian woman who helps run the office. Paola took me downstairs, whereupon I met several of the other working guests immediately — Christian, from Norway, Stefan, from Switzerland, Hanna, from Finland, and Alessandro, from Canada. I also met Cosmo and Mila, full-time kitchen workers who are native Italians. Stefan was leaving in a day, but the rest will be my companions for the majority of my stay here.

Christian is bearded, lanky, and ponytailed, and smokes expensive cigarettes. He works in a clothing shop back home in a small Norwegian town, and speaks English fairly well. He makes me a little nervous, however, with his lingering, sultry looks…such unabashed boldness strikes me as a marked cultural difference, something tres European, along the lines of nude beaches and legalized weed. I meet his gaze and smile…but not for too long.

Hanna is a sweet, shy young slip of a thing still in university, with scholarly glasses and delicately pale skin. Her English is decent, if limited, but it’s all we have to work with as I don’t know a word of Finnish. She looks at me with an almost awestruck expression, which I doubt I deserve, and speaks to me with the utmost fondness. What did I do, sweetheart?? Please tell me so that I can repeat it everywhere I go.

Alessandro is (in my humble opinion) the resident beauty, dark and stunning, the child of Italian parents who reside in Canada. The poor fellow has dual citizenship in Canada and Italy — can you imagine a worse fate?! — and ultimately wants to move here. He would rather be a waiter in Italy than an accountant (as is his training) in Canada. Six months ago I would have surely and rapidly alienated him with a clumsy and singleminded pursuit, but at this point I’m content with just talking and looking. To be honest, we don’t have a whole lot in common, but he’s good-hearted and sincere, with an almost childlike quality. Our conversations actually remind me of the sort I have with my nine-year-old nephew.

Cosmo recalls to mind some character actor from the 1970s I just can’t place. He has frizzy graying hair and sly dark eyes that suggest to me that if I understood what he was saying half the time, I’d find him hysterically funny. Mila is slim, fortysomething, no-nonsense, but good-natured.

Centro d’Ompio stands on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Orta, with the little island of San Giulio, on which sits a medieval monastery, visible from the pool terrace. The lake itself is surrounded by steep green mountains. It’s a dramatic view. At the moment I’m unable to download pictures from my bargain-basement digital camera onto my computer and I’m not sure why. Otherwise, I would show you. Centro has several peacocks — one of them completely white – wandering the grounds and emitting haunting, catlike cries. They have no fear of people, and weave amid the outside tables at mealtimes. Seeing them after so many hours of not sleeping was a completely surreal experience.

What’s odd to me is how much less infatuated I am with it all than I expected to be, how unreal the scenery feels, almost like a photographed backdrop. I can’t explain why this is. I half anticipated feeling Frances Mayes’ instant sense of belonging.

But belonging is the opposite of what I felt my first evening…

After lunch, Günter drove me and my luggage down the hill to Bisetti, the guest worker house. He showed me my room, which was private (at least I didn’t have to share), located up two flights of outside stairs and then up a sort of ladder. (All of the rooms, toilets and kitchen included, let only onto the outside, like motel rooms.)

The sky had by this point clouded over and it had grown quite cold. I noticed that there was only one thin quilt in the chilly and unheated little room, and I wondered whether, with my tendency to get cold under the best of circumstances, I might in fact freeze to death.

The closet-sized toilets, shared by all, were on the ground level, and both contained a small cold-water sink. Then Günter showed me the showers. Two coed, communal showers, off of a room with a hot water trough-style sink for washing up and brushing teeth. One of the stalls wasn’t even in use, due to a leaky pipe that had flooded the adjacent laundry room. I looked at it all in a sort of despair. Was I a completely square American prude that the thought of showering within sight of the Norwegian, or for that matter anywhere where absolutely anyone could come and have a lookyloo, completely creeped me out? Was this how they did it in Europe?!! And what of the infernal swamp in the next room? Would laundering my dirty clothes be out of the question? I thought, I’m sure all my little anarchist friends with their communal housing and free love and unflushed toilets could cope with all of this just fine, but I’m an old broad who craves a few basic creature comforts, like a little bathing privacy and a warm bed. I said something to Günter about whether there was a protocol for the showers. He looked at me as if I were a completely square American prude, and said that there was not.

Of course all I wanted to do at that point was take a hot shower and go to sleep.

I opted to try for a nap. Layering up, I curled into a little ball under the white (yes, white) scrap of quilt and shivered. Eventually, after some yogic breathing and a Buddhist exercise in surrendering to “absolute cold,” I dozed off. I woke just in time to hike up the hill to dinner. At least the hike warmed me up. I ate with some of the Italian kitchen staff and Bettina, one of the people who worked in the office. I told Bettina about being cold, and she told me she could give me another blanket. I asked her about the showers, and her response was, more or less: you’ll deal with it.

She left the table, and I tried to have a halting conversation with the others, but both sides lacked crucial vocabulary and I wound up feeling even more like a stranger in a strange land. Mila did understand somewhat about the showers, and she said that maybe I could come up to Centro and use theirs. Her tiny bit of sympathy made me feel dangerously close to tears.

But she left the table, too, and I left Centro for Bisetti, feeling more profoundly lonely than I have in years. Sometimes being surrounded by a hundred people is lonelier than being alone, when language and culture prevent some sorely needed understanding.

But I was also trying to suck up and buck up and not appear needy, square, or uncool. I wasn’t going to be the whiny, high-maintenance American. No, no one was gonna see me sweat. I wouldn’t give them any more chances to judge me. I was afraid Günter and Bettina already had.

These efforts, however, were about to go straight to hell.

Bisetti is home to a number of small stray cats, about which I had been repeatedly cautioned. Don’t let them in any of the rooms, they’ll shit everywhere! They seemed to be regarded like pests, including the small, rather dirty 19-year-old deaf and blind cat that spends most of its day on the kitchen steps. One of the residents had kicked the poor thing out of the way before. This cat was on the steps when I arrived back. I bent to pet it, and it began to purr like a tiny motor.

Suddenly I saw myself in this helpless, despised, affection-starved little creature, and I sat down on the step beside it and started to weep quietly, stroking its bowed head. A small black cat (drawn, no doubt, by the purring) came running and jumped up in my lap. This second cat couldn’t get enough love either, and that’s when I really lost it, wetting its silky back with hot tears.

Just then Bettina came through the gate, and stopped.

She came over to me and sat down beside me and pulled me into a fierce embrace. It was no use hiding it anymore; I sobbed. She clucked sympathetically and said — You’re tired, and overwhelmed, and it’s your first day, and I know it’s all a bit much. We’ll get you a blanket, and if you like you can take a shower up the road at Leibich, our house. (The full-time year-round employees live in another, more traditional house a few doors down.) I can even give you a hot water bottle, if you wish.

And that’s exactly what she did. She gave me a wool blanket and a hot water bottle and showed me the perfectly lovely accommodations (complete with bathtub) at Leibich. We went into Bisetti’s rustic kitchen to heat water, and there I met Raffe, short for Raffaella, Centro’s cleaning woman. She is of indeterminate age, my height, pleasantly round, with large, kind green eyes and dark burgundy-tinted hair. I love the name Raffaella — it’s the name of the angel, played by Natassja Kinski, who watches over Karl (the angel who falls to earth) in Wim Wenders’ “Faraway, So Close,” one of my favorite films.

And yea verily, Raffe immediately sensed the state of my soul and began to minister unto me, that very evening, and from thence. Her English is not great (still much better than my Italian) but we manage to communicate in other ways. She felt the shower situation was undesirable too, and encouraged me to lock the door (as she does) when I went in. She heated the water for my water bottle and stroked my hair and kissed me and called me “Bella,” something she has done ever since. She always greets me with an Italian-style kiss on both cheeks, and it gives me a greater sense of belonging than just about any other thing or person here.

That night I locked the door and took a hot shower, right there in Bisetti. Afterwards I sat in the kitchen and drank tea with Cosmo, Mila, and the soon-departing Swiss. And later, I crawled under a warm blanket with a hot water bottle, lovingly prepared by my angel Raffaella.