A Place to Live Page 10

  I remember every dismal detail of certain places that appealed to me: a few decrepit houses in Monteverdevecchio, tarnished with age, in a state of profound neglect: their damp little gardens, their long dark corridors and wrought-iron lamps giving off a faint light, their tiny sitting rooms with stained-glass windows where little old ladies sat holding hand-warmers, their kitchens with smelly sinks. And the dismal details of certain apartments that appealed to him: a trail of rooms as big as barns, with brick floors and whitewashed walls, clumps of tomatoes hanging from the ceiling, Turkish-style toilets, narrow balconies facing courtyards as deep and damp as wells, terraces heaped with piles of rotting rags. Obviously our taste in apartments had nothing at all in common. There was, however, one kind of apartment that we both detested. We both detested, and to the same degree, the semi-new, sumptuous, and sterile-looking apartments in Parioli, which looked out over streets without a single shop, frequented only by flocks of “nurses” in blue veils pushing fragile black baby carriages that resembled insects; and we both hated the houses in the Vescovio area, crammed together in a tangle of streets and piazzas full of delicatessens and drugstores, covered outdoor markets and webs of trolley tracks. We went to see these apartments we detested anyway. We went because by that point we were both under the demonic sway of the search; we went in order to loathe them even more, for that instant of dread, picturing ourselves exiled in Parioli like goldfish in a bowl, or staring out at those little balconies that looked like flower baskets. Worn out, we would go home to our rented apartment with the yellow floors and ask ourselves if we really cared all that much about moving. In fact we didn’t much care. After all, we were getting along well enough where we were. I knew every spot and crack in the walls of that apartment, I knew the dark halos that had formed above the radiators; I knew the clang of the iron slabs that got tossed down at the front door, since our landlord had his workshop adjacent to the door: when we went to pay the rent, he welcomed us amid the flares of his blowtorch and the drone of engines. Each time we paid the rent, our landlord looked surprised; he seemed to have forgotten, each time, that he had rented us the apartment; he barely recognized us, though he was always very cordial; he was utterly engrossed in his shop, and by the arrival of those iron slabs that landed on the pavement with a clanging thump. I had dug a little burrow for myself in that apartment, a burrow where I could hide out like a sick dog when I was sad, drinking my tears, licking my wounds. It was as comfortable as an old shoe. Why move? Any new apartment would feel unfriendly; I’d feel sick living there. All the apartments we had seen and, for a few brief moments, entertained the notion of buying paraded before me as in a nightmare. They all made me feel sick. We’d thought of buying them, but the moment we had decided against it we felt a deep relief, a sense of lightness, like someone who has miraculously escaped a mortal risk.

  Could it be that any apartment, any one at all, might eventually become a burrow? Would any place eventually welcome me into its dim, warm, reassuring, kindly light?

  Or could it be, rather, that I didn’t want to live in any of them, any one at all, because what I really hated wasn’t the apartments but myself? Wasn’t it true that all the apartments, every last one of them, would do fine, so long as anyone but me was living in them?

  Finally we put our own ad in the Messaggero. We argued endlessly about its contents. In the end it read as follows: “Seeking apartment in Prati or Monteverdevecchio, five rooms, walk-out terrace or garden.” My husband was the one who wanted the words “walk-out terrace,” because he loved terraces and, as gradually was becoming clear, hated gardens: he said gardens were always full of dust and rubbish from the balconies above. So my dream of a garden was shattered: clouds of dust would assail those “tall, sturdy plants,” those shady paths cherished in my fantasies. Several people answered our ad, but the apartments they were offering weren’t anywhere near Prati or Monteverdevecchio and had nothing resembling a “walk-out terrace” or garden. We went to see them anyway. For more than a week after the ad appeared, our telephone kept ringing with offers of apartments. One evening the phone rang around ten o’clock; I answered and heard a stranger’s voice, a hearty, emphatic, triumphant male voice saying:

  “Hello! This is Commander Piave!8 I have a gorgeous apartment in Piazza della Balduina! It’s fantastic! There’s an intercom! There’s a black alabaster column in the master bath, with mosaics of green fish! When are you coming to have a look? Call me, if I’m not here my wife will answer! There’s an intercom! Your husband drives home at one o’clock, the doorman rings to tell you to start the spaghetti boiling! There’s a garage too! When are you coming? My wife and I would be delighted to meet you, we’ll have tea, I’ll drive you to the apartment. I have a Spider! My wife doesn’t drive, I’ve been driving for seventeen years, I had the apartment built for my daughter but she moved to São Paolo in Brazil, my son-in-law is from Brazil, he’s in the textile business, they met in Fregene. I have a house in Fregene too, a little gem, that one’s not for sale, why would I want to sell it, my wife and I go there every weekend. I have a Spider!”

  I had lived in Rome for many years but I still didn’t know where Piazza della Balduina was. I consulted my husband and he said he hated that neighborhood.

  There were three or four apartments we were on the verge of buying. As a rule, our desire to buy a place lasted two weeks. During those two weeks we went to look at it constantly, at all hours of the day: we tipped the porters and made friends with them; we brought our children along, then my sister-in-law, and finally the brother-in-law whose great wisdom my husband boasted of. We had to beg our children to come; they claimed they didn’t care anything about apartments, and they had grave doubts about whether we’d ever buy one—they thought we couldn’t make up our minds. My sister-in-law mostly paid attention to the floors: one loose tile, for instance, would determine her negative judgment on the condition of the apartment as a whole. As far as the brother-in-law, he would generally station himself in the entryway, standing stern and erect, swaying back and forth on his heels, with one hand under the lapel of his jacket and one finger rhythmically tapping his chest, and from there he would scrutinize the walls; his opinion of all the apartments was invariably negative, especially at the prospect of our buying one, but he managed to find different, though always alarming, drawbacks in every instance. Either he knew from his connections that the builders were unreliable, or he knew a sky-scraper would be put up right across the street and would totally block our view; or he knew the whole neighborhood was slated for immediate demolition—the owners would be dispossessed and forced to move; and in any event there wasn’t a single place he didn’t find dark, damp, poorly constructed and malodorous. He maintained that the only places we should even consider were those built twenty years earlier—not before and not after. Those were precisely the ones we didn’t like.

  The first house we seriously considered buying was located near Viale Trastevere. Later on, thinking back, we used to call it “Montecompatri,” because it was at the top of a sort of hill and my husband would say the air up there was very pure. “Did you notice,” he’d say, “how the air up there feels almost like being in Montecompatri?” “Montecompatri” was a new house, never lived in. It stood straight up over a precipice, a wooded ravine that went all the way down to the avenue at a point where it widened into an open space where an amusement park had been built. Now, some years later, the wooded ravine is gone, as is the amusement park. Now nothing remains but houses, so that when I pass by, I can’t even recognize the one we wanted to buy, tall and narrow as a tower, looking out over empty space. It had a terrace and a huge living room with large windows opening onto that wild green chasm, and we would often go there at sunset, when the panorama was solemn and desolate, with the city flashing in the distance amid fiery clouds. The house was owned by an agency whose phone number was written on a card stuck on a pole in the middle of the green chasm, but the phone was always either busy or didn’t answer. The por
ter told us to keep trying, which we did regularly, but with no success. The porter was very kind and sympathetic, and seemed eager for us to buy the house. One day we went there resolved to buy it. It was three o’clock on a summer afternoon and the sun was beating straight down on the red-hot tiles of the terrace; a strong odor of garbage rose up from the ravine; as a matter of fact there was a mound of garbage, which we’d never really noticed until just then, baking in the grass under the sun, a few meters above the amusement park. The amusement park was silent and deserted, with its huge, motionless Ferris wheel and rides and lowered awnings; off in the distance, the city was baking against a blinding blue sky. The panorama might be stupendous, I thought, but it inspired thoughts of suicide.

  So we fled that house for good. My husband realized the staircase was just too awful, he told me, precious and pretentious; also, that enormous black and gold spider in the entrance hall, two steps from the friendly porter’s booth—he couldn’t have tolerated the sight of that black spider every day.

  After that, we were charmed by two identical attached houses that were both for sale. They were right off Piazza Quadrata, an area my husband loathed. I, on the contrary, loved the area around Piazza Quadrata because I had lived there many years back, before I met my husband or even knew he existed; the Germans were occupying Rome and I was hiding in a convent in that neighborhood. It felt as if all the places I loved in Rome were where at some point in my life I had put down roots, where I had suffered and considered suicide, and walked the streets not knowing which way to turn.

  One of the two identical houses near Piazza Quadrata had a garden. What my husband liked most in this house was an inside staircase leading to a basement with a very large kitchen and a long, narrow dining room; in general, when we had some feeling for a house, we would constantly dwell on all the rooms and features we liked and try to ignore everything else. Thus, my husband kept going up and down that polished mahogany staircase, which he thought of as “British style.” He went up and down, stroking the banisters as if they were a horse’s rump. We both admired the kitchen, which had cheerful little tiles with blue flowers. For love of the staircase and the kitchen, we were inclined to overlook the fact that for our purposes, it was a room short: we would have to put in a partition to create a small bedroom in the hall. And my husband seemed to have forgotten how much he hated the neighborhood, as well as what he had always said on the subject of gardens—how rubbish and dust rained down from the balconies above. There was a small statue in the garden, draped in ivy, and a pergola with stone benches; we thought we might build a little gazebo in the center of the garden, where one of the children could sleep, thereby solving the problem of the missing room. The house next door didn’t have a proper garden, only a narrow strip of greenery: what we liked best in that house was a room with a bowed window looking out on the garden of the other house. The room had white gilded furniture, which was very lovely, but of course the landlord would be taking it away: we’d always linger in that room because we liked it and were trying to figure out if we would like it as much without the furniture, or with our banal, nondescript furniture. Then we tried to figure out whether we would rather look down at the garden from that beautiful bowed window or look up at the bowed window from the shelter of the pergola. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I said, if we could buy both houses? My husband pointed out that we couldn’t even afford to buy one of them. I was crazy, he said, a megalomaniac. We argued fiercely over those two houses. It wasn’t that either of us had a strong preference for either house: no, we both had grave doubts, and we each accused the other of being unable to decide, besides which, my husband started in all over again about how he had loathed the neighborhood around Piazza Quadrata from earliest childhood. Our children, when consulted, said that they too loathed that area, but that they wanted to sleep in the gazebo in the garden, the gazebo that didn’t yet exist but which they were fighting over, each one wanting it for himself. Then my sister-in-law came with us one day to see the house with the garden, but we happened to go on a morning when the living-room floors were being taken up and tarred, and from the way the tar was being applied my sister-in-law could tell instinctively that those floors would never be quite right, they would always give us trouble and aggravation, and she firmly advised against our buying that house, and by extension the other house as well, which we couldn’t see that day, but whose floors, my sister-in-law said, must be just as bad.

  After a phase in which I hated every apartment in Rome, I went through a phase in which I felt I loved them all, so much so that I couldn’t possibly choose one. Then, when it was clear we wouldn’t be buying the house with the bowed window or the house with the pergola, I started hating them all again. In the meantime I was getting letters from my father that inevitably began: “I must advise you that it would be wise to make up your mind to purchase permanent quarters.”

  And from time to time the phone would ring and we heard the usual hearty, emphatic voice: “Hello! This is Commander Piave! You haven’t yet come to see my apartment in Piazza della Balduina! It’s fantastic! The windowsills are all black onyx and the living-room floors are marble! There’s an intercom! I could even give you some plants for the living room, my wife has a really stunning pink azalea! My wife is wild about plants!”

  There was yet another house we were on the point of buying. It was a house with absolutely nothing to recommend it except its low cost. This one, too, was near Viale Trastevere, on a hilly street which, after about a twenty-minute walk, led to the Janiculum Hill. “Do you realize it’s only a few minutes from the Janiculum?” my husband would say, in praise of the house. But you couldn’t see the Janiculum from the windows; indeed you couldn’t see anything from the windows, not a thing except a sheet-metal roof and a blank yellowish wall, a few other buildings neither high nor low, and the street. The street was quiet and usually fairly deserted. The house had two floors: a “villinetto.” It was between a mattress-maker and a wine shop. It had a gray front door with a knocker. It had a terrace with a withered arbor. It was neither new nor old, a house without age or character. You went through the gray front door into a hallway with marbled tiles, and made your way up a large staircase with a bulging banister; on the ground floor were a kitchen, a bathroom and a storeroom where the landlord had stacked a collection of chairs; on the floor above was a series of rooms, neither large nor small, strung along a corridor with marbled tiles. All the rooms looked out on the street, that hilly street that did in fact lead to the Janiculum but seemed rather to go nowhere, an aimless street that felt arbitrary and forgotten; a peculiar street, my husband said, and yet one day it might become very important, a crucial artery linking the Janiculum and Viale Trastevere, in which case if we were to buy that house, we might very well suddenly find ourselves in a critical location, one of the most sought-after locations in the city, and then that house we had bought very cheaply would so sharply increase in value that we could resell it for more than twice what we paid. But if we have to resell it, I said, then why buy it? We’d just have to start looking all over again.

  It wasn’t only the street that was strange—though not unappealing, my husband said; the house was somewhat strange too, though not unappealing. The entrance, well, no, the entrance was hideous, those fake marble tiles were truly ghastly. The staircase wasn’t half bad. And the terrace wasn’t too bad either. (“You have to imagine a lush green arbor in place of that dried-out arbor. Just picture it. You have no imagination.”) We didn’t bring anyone to see that house. We didn’t talk about it with any enthusiasm. We might have been a little ashamed of it.

  Then one day, strolling around the city, we saw a For Sale sign tacked to a door. We went in. And that was how we found our apartment.

  It was right in the center of the city. My husband liked it because it was centrally located and because it was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. He liked it because it was old, big, and massive; it had old ceilings with huge beams which in certain
rooms were covered with travertine. It was the first time I had ever heard him mention travertine. Why did I like it? I don’t know. It wasn’t on the ground floor but on the top floor. It had no garden and there wasn’t a tree for miles around. It was stone in the midst of stone, squeezed between chimney pots and bell towers. But maybe I liked it because it was right near an office I used to work in many years ago, before I met my husband; the Germans had just left Rome and the Americans had arrived. I used to go to that office every day. Every day, for superstitious reasons, I would put my foot in an indentation in the pavement, an indentation in the shape of a foot. That indentation was right in front of a little gate. I’d open the gate and go up a small staircase. The office was on the second floor and overlooked an old courtyard with a fountain. The fountain, the little gate, and the indentation in the sidewalk were just a stone’s throw from the apartment we saw one morning, my husband and I, and when we walked out, we were resolved to live there. The fountain, the courtyard, the little gate and the indentation in the sidewalk were still there, but the office was no more. The rooms where the office had once been had returned to what they were before the war, namely, the home of an old countess. But it was still a spot in the city that I could recognize as friendly, a place where I had once carved out a little burrow. Not that I had been happy in that office; as a matter of fact I was desperately unhappy there. But I had carved out a little burrow, and the memory of that burrow of years ago kept me from feeling like a stranger who had just happened upon those streets and alleys by mistake. So the idea of that apartment wasn’t oppressive to me.

  Everyone advised against it. They said any place that old was sure to have lots of problems, leaky pipes, hidden cracks. They said it was bound to rain in on us. They said there would certainly be cockroaches (“beetles,” as my sister-in-law put it. Whenever we talked about buying an old place she would hastily say, “but watch out for beetles!”). All in all, they said every bad thing possible about that apartment. They said it would be cold in winter and hot in summer. Some of the things they said proved true. It was true that it rained in on us and we had to have the roof fixed. I found only one cockroach. I sprayed a little insecticide in its wake and it never turned up again. Now we live here and can’t tell anymore if the apartment is ugly or beautiful. We feel like we’ve burrowed in. It fits us like an old shoe. We’ve stopped thinking about apartments altogether. The words “walk-out terrace,” “individually regulated thermostat,” “five rooms,” “very sunny,” “down payment with mortgage,” “partial financing acceptable,” have dropped out of our vocabulary. But for a good while after we started the moving preparations, after we started the series of complicated investigations regarding walls, pipes, and water tanks and the involved negotiations with metalworkers, electricians, and carpenters, every now and then the phone would ring in the apartment we were about to vacate, which was full of trunks, wrapping paper, and straw. The phone would ring and we’d hear the familiar hearty, triumphant voice: