Rome

From the sound of things, we’re in Rome. Cars. The streets are teeming with them, and where in Venice there is water, in Rome there are cobblestones and as many cars as can feasibly fit on them. The entire atmosphere here is different, and I blame the cars. Pollution here is a moot point and largely goes unnoticed, and the same ancient feel of Venice is here, too. What’s different is the noise, the speed, the glint of metal, the persistent chorus of horns. The backdrop to the Eternal City, and perhaps its best reason for that moniker, is the echo of movement that continues to ring in your ears and in your memory long after you’ve escaped from it.

“Escape” is not a term I use in any derogatory way; indeed, it is perhaps the very movement and life of Rome that gives it its appeal and makes even the smallest task, such as finding our hotel room, an adventure. But the pace of the city, and its August heat, did more to manage our itinerary in Rome than anything, except for the unexpected closings of both the Roman Forum and the Coliseum on Monday. All the walking, all the heat—indoors and outdoors—all the logistics, all the frustrations, all the awe of the eternal city.

Our intentions were good: Rome in two days. Our expectations were realistic: hit the major sites, allow the itinerary lots of flexibility. With this plan in hand we hit the streets, but the streets hit back, first with sunlit lines for the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel that framed two streets around the compound; next with packed, airless metro cars; the closures I mention above we discovered only after walking a mile up and back; and, of course, that ubiquitous unforgiving sun that forced us into the hands of kiosk vendors who, no doubt in league with the sun, charged us EUR 4 for a small, cold bottle of Gatorade, of which out of protest we only bought one.

The ancient Roman ruins were impressive, but no more so than the memory of these moments of escape, one of which showcased some pillow talk on our first of two nights in the tiny hotel room. The essence of pillow talk is its spontaneity, the intimacy of its subject matter, and the tacit agreement to keep confidences. As such, no retelling of it as such comes after this introductory paragraph. But it seems appropriate and scrumptiously ironic that some of the more theoretical talk—that which perhaps lead to the opening up and retelling of the past—focused on what topics, if any, are off limits in the writing of biography. And here I find myself censoring details of pillow talk even when my stated position on censorship during that very pillow talk was categorically antithetical. Is categorically antithetical. I hold it out to the autobiographer herself to decide what should and should not make print as I maintain my own right to focus on the fundamental over the constituent details, on the temporal coalescence of two minds, already bound by hereditary and shared history, over the method and medium of that coalescence.

Rome, that big city, all bound up in cobblestones and concrete, at once weighed down and buoyed up by its age, home to layers of life, the new upon the old upon the ancient, the place for all things, as equally for argument as for coalescence. Rome, the midpoint in our travels, the closest we came to experiencing glitches in our nearly flawless itinerary, was the setting for the only friction Mom and I experienced on our trip, a friction with its source more likely in the frustrations of the city than in anything latent in the relationship (except maybe in the complexes nascent in carrying the moniker “baby of the family” long into adulthood). Typical of such general frustrations, the episode is silly. We’ve entered the Vatican Museum after a substantial wait in line under, as I mentioned above, a substantial sun; we’ve made the decision not to spend the six euros each on an audio guide; we’ve changed our minds about the decision not to spend the six euros each on an audio guide; we’ve entered the museum and found ourselves surrounded by countless works of art, sculpture, cartography, tapestry, fresco, and architecture without a real idea of how to operate our audio guides. We are thus lost, surrounded not only by the incomprehensibility of an overwhelming collection of art but also by the sinking feeling that we wasted money we weren’t even confident in spending.

And we each have our own disparate ideas about how to make the audio guides work. Mom doesn’t seem to buy my idea and I don’t seem open to any other ideas, especially hers. Along the process to Mom’s discovery of how it all works she asks questions to which I give, as it turns out, incorrect answers, and she continues to ask questions, the same ones, which seem nothing to me but the tacit incredulity of a parent to the unsubstantiated opinion of a child. And so I respond with the incredulity of a parent to Mom’s yet unsubstantiated opinion.

Mom: Maybe if we input the three-digit number that corresponds to the individual piece we’ll get the description of that work.

Nathan: Whatever, Mom, you’re on your own.

I first tried to mask my shame—the result not so much of being mistaken as of being dismissive—with the compliment, “It looks as if you saved the day, Mom!” though I couldn’t pull it off with much exuberance. Mom’s cordial acceptance of that thinly-veiled compliment made everything all the worse. Now we both knew that I was both ashamed and, now, embarrassed. Still I couldn’t bring myself overtly to admit fault, and so my second attempt at apology and reconciliation went off flatly enough to cause Mom to bring it all finally to a close: “You only compliment me to hide your own embarrassment.” Oh, it was painful! I had had such justification for my dismissal! Years of trying to prove myself smart and capable and accurate, and I choose to play that card when I’m at my most ridiculous, petty, frustrated, and incorrect. At this point I confessed all and conceded the point, and I felt happy to have it a part of this blog and the general cacophony so characteristic of Rome.

This part I may remember incorrectly, but the reconciliation was so sweet for me that I’m convinced it came over gelato, to which both Mom and I, we committed antagonists of all things sugary, opened our hearts and our mouths. Like so many things culinary, sweets have this power to bind people in a certain inexplicable shared experience, and especially for us diet-conscious types, in the complicity of indulging in the sweet, refined forbidden. Call it lapse of conscious, call it the traveler’s allowance, call it escape. Whatever it is, call it memorable, satisfying, and worth every euro.