/ Fiction /
“…for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
James Baldwin (“Giovanni’s Room”)
Fall
It’s an October day in Rome, the late afternoon sky tinted with pink and gold. I wear John’s blue jacket, even if I’m spending the weekend with Robert. John is my boyfriend in New York. Robert is a photographer who can’t get enough pictures of baroque doors, dramatic angels, fountains, and me. My favorite portrait of myself is the one he shot at Piazza Navona when the tramonto was almost over, the last streaks of sunshine brightening my face. I was leaning against an anonymous terracotta wall, infused with a vitality that only Bernini understood when he created the stone figures I was facing, the statues that ornate the fountain of Quattro Fiumi. In a fraction of a second, the time it takes for someone to snap a picture, we captured the scary amazement of a love story like ours. In that shot, lives were pulsing. Our hearts were raw and exposed, roaming free through Roman streets. I’m wearing oval sunglasses in the picture. Still, even if you can’t see my eyes, you feel the subject’s devotion to the photographer. What you don’t say or don’t show, that’s what the story is about.
“Come sei bella”, he said.
He used to say that all the time, how beautiful you are. In bed, in the street, in restaurants holding my hand across the table, when I was shopping for clothes and we made out inside fitting rooms. In that picture, my left hand gently touches my chin, and my mouth looks like a ripe fruit. Photographer and subject in perfect synchronicity, two fall yellow leaves dancing together in the air after being detached from the branches of a tree.
Winter
I’m still wearing John’s puffy jacket, but Robert is the one I hold hands with all over the city, under snow and grey skies. At home, I wear nothing: it’s just me, Robert, the unmade bed, coffee cups, and cigarette butts spent in an ashtray. During the week, we wake up at eight to go to school, two blocks from my apartment. We have a cappuccino at the bar before going to our separate classes. I’m studying to be a translator. He is a painter. He is obsessed with Modigliani, and I fear this is a sign of tragedy ahead. Amedeo Modigliani was handsome and wild, lived miserably in Montmartre, painted his soul, and died young, leaving a pregnant and desperate lover behind.
Some nights, I work at a pub as a bartender. I count the minutes until the end of my shift. At eleven o’clock, I leave the bar in the semi-deserted Campo dei Fiori without putting John’s jacket on before getting out. I finish zipping it up in Piazza Farnese, passing the pharmacy and the fountain. A chilly January wind starts to blow, and sometimes Modigliani comes to mind as I go down the narrow roads towards Via Giulia. I think of Jeanne Hébuterne, his pregnant lover who jumped to death from a window out of desperation after he perished from tuberculosis. I ring the bell of Robert’s 3rd-floor studio. Once he answers and hits the buzzer, opening the heavy door, I forget about sad stories, any story, and disappear into the somber hallway, up the stairs, two steps at a time, as if I’m desperately climbing to reach the last spot in heaven.
On Sundays, we make love all morning, listening to the neighbor practicing his saxophone on the first floor. Then I ignore the freezing rain, put John’s coat over my shoulders, and run to the edicola on the corner to buy newspapers. We read, drink coffee, talk in bed, our naked bodies so close under the thin checkered blanket we bought together at the Porta Portese market. Then we go out for the usual late lunch with friends.
Spring
I’m on a road trip with Robert. We rented a Fiat Panda. The first warm days of April make me forget John’s jacket in the back of the closet, the same way I keep him in storage in the back of my brain. Robert and I drive through Umbrian hilly towns. My long hair is tied in a loose braid, and I wear the same oval sunglasses from the Piazza Navona photograph. Robert takes a new shot: I’m drinking from a fountain, holding a paper cup, my pinky finger lifted, carefree smile, sun on my face. We are at the end of a trail atop a mountain outside Gubbio. My sweater is tied around my waist. I wear a plain white T-shirt with no bra. Again, I’m wearing sunglasses in all the pictures, but you don’t need to see the eyes to feel the happiness. It could be Italy, or it could be Robert.
Summer
I finished school and left Italy. John’s coat has been hanging inside the closet we have been sharing again on the other side of the Atlantic since late May. Robert and I parted on a sunny Roman afternoon under a sky so intense that it may change your concept of poetry. He was flying to his family’s home in a country far away from Italy and New York. I returned to John until I could break up with him and find another place. When Robert left our Roman room, I cried so hard lying on the small bed that I thought my internal organs would burst or be expelled out of my mouth. Later, motionless, sitting on the same bed, I look at photos from the previous summer taken in my apartment. My hair looks bigger and wilder in many of those pictures, except for one of the photos taken at a surprise birthday party. That night, it was domesticated in a tight ballerina bun, parted in the middle, and stretched to the back of my head with no room for curls. The last rebel wild strands disappeared under a lustrous coat of gel. Robert and I smile, arm to arm, leaning against the kitchen wall. We are surrounded by many friends who drink and talk, but they all seem invisible to us. In the picture, we behave as if we are the only people in the world. A few days before that party, he had kissed me for the first time at dawn, sitting on a bench in the Janiculum after we spent the entire night talking. We were not a couple yet. We are not a couple now.
Winter, Spring, Fall, Summer
I never broke up with John. He was the one who left. Robert got married in his homeland to a blonde straight-haired suburban girl. I heard he has three children and left his wife for a man last year.
In a few years, I’ll look at pictures of myself taken by ordinary friends. I’ll criticize every image: I look fat, that’s not my most photogenic side, and my nose looks too big. Something will always be missing.
I’ll still go to bars and drink gin and tonic compulsively. I’ll keep finding attractive men who will fall under my spell. I’ll date musicians, businessmen, performers. I’ll even date another painter who will use me as a model for almost a year. I’ll pose exactly as Modigliani’s Reclining Nude while I dream of chilly nights in Paris, imagining Amedeo himself portraying my wild beauty. I’ll wonder if he had affairs with all his models or if he cheated on Jeanne Hébuterne as I’ll be doing with most of my boyfriends.
In a given winter, I might take that old down coat from the back of my closet, the coat that witnessed my year of love with Robert. John disappeared from my life, but I inherited the coat forever. That blue, puffy old thing protected me from the cold in a distant Italian winter, a silent witness to 365 days of cheating on his owner and being frightfully happy. The coat, now stained and not as thick as years ago, supported Robert’s big hands on my shoulder as we walked from Testaccio to Campo Marzio, from the Pantheon to Trastevere, miles and miles under the winter drizzle. Most of the time, it was removed in the gasping desperation of love and lay abandoned on my bedroom floor or on the back of a chair in Robert’s studio. Downstairs, the neighbor played John Coltrane over and over on the saxophone.