another departure

i campanili e il campanilismo

Or, in the less elegant translation: bell towers and parochialism. The two things drawing me back to Italy. I love that the Italian word for 'parochialism' is related to bell towers. There really is a tower in every little community here (or every few blocks in a bigger town), and I like to think that people cluster around them, making little worlds for themselves. I like to see the towers rising above the rooves, and I like to think they signify something I might find here. I am a bit scared of being lonely, you see. That's why I'm not looking for work in a big cosmopolitan centre like Rome or Naples. While I speak only rudimentary Italian, I want to be somewhere manageable where I am less likely to slip through the cracks. Searching for exactly the right town is difficult--too small or too large, and I could feel too isolated. It's a delicate balance and I'm relying on gut instinct to tell me when I see it. Wish me luck.

I started out in Trieste, that little top-right corner of Italy that is practically in Slovenia's pocket. I like it a lot--it's a working port town on the lake-smooth Adriatic. By the water's edge it looks a bit like Bondi, but the people and the sea are equally calmer. No dice there so far, though. I had a big interview set up that I was very excited about, but it turned out nobody had told the director I don't speak English. She suggested I take an intensive (read: expensive) Italian course and call her in a month. I had a suggestion for her, but I didn't share it.

I've just been offered a job in a little town in the middle of northern Italy called Reggio Emilia. I like the director a lot, but I'm not sure about Reggio. It's really very small. And I just visited the next town over--Modena, of the vinegar--and I have fallen in love with it. It's like getting a new boyfriend and then discovering you like his big brother more. I have a few days to decide what to do.

It's strange when you're standing on the edge of a decision that will affect your happiness for the next year to come. It's stranger still to be trying to make such a decision while you are completely stripped of context yourself. Here I am in a country where I don't speak the language, bumping around from one drab, neutral hotel room to the next, and trying to keep some hold on my sense of self. Thankfully I have chosen some good companions for my trip: my iPod, which is full of add-on personality to keep the cheap hotel blues at bay (I am not this bland, nothing space: I am Guero, I am Abbatoir Blues, I am Rachmaninoff’s 3rd); and Moby-Dick, which is subtitled or, The Whale, but which might as well be subtitled or, How To Live. If call-me Ishmael isn’t enough to inspire with his cheerful stoicism, there is his friend Queequeg, the cannibal prince:

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.

Anyway. My last few days in Paris were very sociable. I had some quality time with Macgregor before he left for a holiday in Berlin, I saw Hellzapoppin’ (which can only be described as wacky) with David and Angie, and generally had a nice time. Below are some stories to commemorate my Paris apartment, which was the scene of many good meals and conversations with funny Australians. It is so, so weird how quickly we peel off our old experiences as soon as we are thrust into the new. Already I feel like this was another life.


rear window

I said bonjour to a guy in the hallway and he responded with, “You live on the fourth floor, right?” Mmmm? “Me too, across the way.” Oh. “You work late, don’t you?” He mimed typing. I guessed that was true. “Me, I play guitar.” He mimed this too, somewhat redundantly. “Ah. You play very well,” I lied. “You sticky-beaking weirdo,” I didn’t add.


on doit se souvenir

I guess it’s built in, not to be constantly astonished, or else we’d all blow some sort of circuit. But when some place really captures you, you should remember it and be glad. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont did it, Venice did too. Port Stephens still has a hold on me, where my family used to go for holidays when my sister and I were really young. When I leaned out Macgregor’s window on hot nights it reminded me of Port Stephens. The warm wind, the sodium lights with their yellow dandelion halos, the ugly white eighties apartment blocks (the eleventh arrondissement harbours some of the vilest buildings inside the peripherique, I keep forgetting to mention that. When Pete arrived, primed from reading my blog, he could only say that he’d thought it might be more… picturesque). And there’s the two lines of parked cars that look, from up on the fourth floor, like some parallel-or-not-parellel perspective puzzle. It is only a small leap to add in the shushing of the little wavelets from the beach that ought to be two streets away, and the Pancake House with its white mayonnaisey mornays and chocolate fudge sauces, the catamarans for hire and the frangipani trees and the happy safety of it all.


chungking unimpressed

The other night Macgregor and I looked out the window and saw a fire truck in the street, with a lone fireman out front. A few people came out of our building coughing. I told Mac to call down and ask them what was going on and he wouldn’t do it, and I refuse to yell out a window in bad French, so we were left guessing. There was no smoke in the stairway or anything. We went back to our magazine reading. When I looked out again a quarter of an hour later, there were five fireys, and they had been joined by a group of girls in triangle bikinis and very small denim skirts with gold thongs on their tawny-tanned feet. Everyone just seemed to be milling and flirting, and I thought it was impressive of the teenlets to have appeared so quickly after the arrival of men in uniform. Mac and I watched the firemen for a few minutes, trying to decide which one was cutest, but nothing was happening. Then maybe half an hour later we could hear them all out in the central courtyard of the apartment block, and the fireys were breaking into a ground floor apartment.

I had other things on my mind, though, because I had just mentioned to Macgregor that I had some nasty mosquito bites and I didn’t know where I could have got them. He asked me if they were new since I got back from London, I said yes. Then he told me that his friend Sebastian, who crashed in my bed while I was away, had come from a stop-over in Hong Kong, where he had stayed in the Chungking Mansions, and that he’d had nasty welts on him for the rest of the week. We pulled apart my bed, inspecting it layer by layer, and under the mattress cover we found a great many furry caterpillar things, crawling around and having a party and generally looking drunk and bloated on human blood. So we ran down four flights of stairs with the mattress protector and tried very ineffectually to shake it out in the dark courtyard.

It was about that point that the police turned up and checked out the apartment that the fire fighters had broken into. I hissed to Macgregor to ask the police what was going on, since he’d chickened out of asking the firemen, but he wouldn’t do it. I didn’t have the guts either. We gave up on the shaking-out plan, which was a bad plan, and decided to leave the offending article by the apartment door until morning and pray the little furry bastards wouldn’t crawl far. But all the bustle in the courtyard had woken up the scary old lady who lives directly below us. As we got back up to our landing, she stepped out of her door and yelled “Who is that in the stairwell?” We both froze and Macgregor motioned to me to be quiet. We thought she’d give up, but she called out again. We don’t like this scary lady—Macgregor because she’s bossy, and me because she rants at me in French long after any socially-adjusted person would have noticed that I wasn’t understanding one word in five. Still, we should probably have said something. I was making emphatic gestures to Macgregor, opening and shutting my hand like a glove puppet and then pointing through the floor at the crazy lady, which is charades for “say something, damn it!” but he seemed to be having a sublimely uncommunicative evening, and just shook his head. To be fair, being over seventy isn’t really an excuse for yelling at people after midnight and demanding to know what they’re doing in their own stairwell. When she followed up with, “You don’t want to answer, unh? Unh?! What kind of games are you playing?” we just tip-toed into our apartment and locked the door.

We still don’t know what was up with that ground-floor apartment, but all that incident must have disrupted the chi of the entire building, because people were up clattering plates and watching bad telly into the wee hours. As for the bugs, I still don’t know what they were—google let me down this time—but I put the mattress protector in a hot spin dryer and that seems to have done for them. Damn those Chungking Mansions.