A Semester Abroad (10 page)

“You must see my country,” he said. I was confused about how he said the word; I thought meant country,
paese
, to mean his town, but after awhile I got it. To him, it was a whole different country; he wanted me to understand that. He raised his fork up at me as he chewed; he was holding it in his left hand. “You don’t want to see my country?”

“Sure, but you know,” I spoke Italian slowly, trying not to say it wrong, “I have a boyfriend.”

“I know.”

“Okay, good. So you understand I just want to be friends right? That’s okay. If we just go out as friends?”

“I have no friends that are women only, girlfriends.” I looked down at my pizza. This was a mistake. I should go home. It was too bad because I was starting to have fun, starting to follow. He was an attractive man, but I wasn’t ready to be with anyone yet. I just didn’t know if my body could stand to be touched by anyone else. I didn’t know if my mind could handle another relationship.

“You know why American girls come to Italy?” he asked at last.

I wanted to say in my most sarcastic way, “I have no idea.” But I didn’t know how to convey that the way I wanted, so instead I said something I was more used to saying, “No, I don’t know.”

“There are three reasons,” he said, holding up his thumb and first two fingers. He paused, trying to play up the drama. I didn’t say anything. “Do you want to know?”

“If you want to tell me.” He laughed and shook his hand at me.

“The reasons are…” He cleared his throat.

“Before I die,” I tried to say or something like it. I could tell he understood what I meant. And I was glad to, at last, get my point across in another language.

“Number one to buy shoes,” he said.

“I understand that.”

“To say they have.” I shook my head, rolled my eyes.

“And finally,” he switched to English so I could really understand, “to fuck Italian boy.”

I took a sip of my wine. I wondered if I was ever going to get my homework done.

“What do you think of that?” he asked. He was quite satisfied with himself.

“I don’t know.” The place we were in was too nice to be talking about this. “Who told you that? An Australian?”

“Well, what is your reason?”

“If you want me to pick one from those choices, I guess, for the experience. I’m Italian-American. I wanted to see this country.”

“This isn’t your country. Your people aren’t from this country.”

“
Stesa
.” I said, certain I was screwing up.

“It’s not the same,” he said correcting me. “They are different. Completely.”

“Okay.”

“I could teach you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“And your roommates?
Quella bionda
? What’s her reason?” I didn’t know what he heard about Janine. I wasn’t sure what I should tell him.

“You know if you are foreign or from the south everyone knows everything in Siena. They talk.” Then he cursed in dialect.

“I haven’t done anything they could talk about.” I said.

“Not yet.”

I wasn’t sure how to say I wouldn’t. I still wasn’t comfortable in
futuro
. I shrugged my shoulders. I held out my homework worksheet. “Do you want to help me or not?”

“
Allora
,” he took the worksheet and filled in the answers.

“No, can you explain it?”

And he did. He went over each question with me, explaining the reason for each answer slowly, so that I understood. And I did understand. I actually got it. The rules made sense for a change. For a little while, the tension I felt around him lifted.

We split a dessert,
torta della nonn
a. He kept touching his pack of cigarettes, his finger running up and down the side. It was making me uncomfortable, just like the way he kept looking at me. I felt like he was trying to figure me out. I had already been figured out. It wasn’t pretty. I wouldn’t let it happen again. I didn’t need anyone else looking me in the eye. I asked him for a cigarette, so he would stop.

“You can just take what you want,” he said. He handed me a smoke and held out a silver lighter for me.

“
Grazie
,” I said, letting the
e
ring out a little more at the end. He laughed and I thought I messed up again, over-accentuated if that was possible to do in Italian. “What?”

“You Americans always say thank you. You must not say thank you to your friends. You want to be friends? For your friends it must be a gift for them to give to you. To say thank you is unnecessary. Never to your friends. Okay?” He said friends,
amici
, with a smirk.

“Okay.”

When I finished my espresso, I took another cigarette without asking.

“
Brava
,” he said. This was the first of many lessons I would learn from him.

We left the restaurant. I was ready for bed. I felt the wine when I stood. He parked his
vespa
somewhere outside the walls and asked me if I wanted to take a ride. I still didn’t trust him.

“No, I’ll just walk back home.”

“Okay. I’ll go with you.” We started walking together; we cut through the
campo
and up the hill, chatting the entire way. I was surprised to carry on the conversation for so long. It was easy to understand him. It relaxed me or maybe it was the wine. It was cool to be out with someone, to be able to talk and understand this language. It was not just another night in a bar drinking or sitting at home wishing, again, that I had a TV or some other distraction.

At my
portone
, he kissed me formally on both cheeks. “
Okay, bella, amica, ci vediamo
.”

“
Ciao
,” I said waving. Then I decided to test my sarcasm in Italian. “On second thought, I guess I wouldn’t mind a pair of Italian shoes.”

He laughed and called me
pazza,
crazy, kissing me once more on each cheek.

I rushed up the stairs, trying to beat the electric timer on the light as usual. And, for once, I did. I was smiling and out of breath when I walked into my apartment.

“Looks like someone had a little
sesso
on their date,” Janine said from the dining room table. For once her schoolbooks were spread before her. Lisa was eating a package of cookies, shoving them into her mouth one after another. I could hear Michelle listening to some female singer behind the closed door of their room. It would have been nice if one of them were Kaitlin. I just wanted to get some girl talk.

“No, no sex, it wasn’t like that. It was just nice to go out, you know, talk one-on-one to one of them. We’re just friends.”

Janine, who had appointed herself an expert on Italian men since she slept with several of them, raised an eyebrow and said, “Do Italian men know how to just be friends?”

“Do American?” I asked.

“Well, I had a little friendly
sesso
tonight with a hot Italian who didn’t want to be friends. Now I have to conjugate verbs.” Make that more proof for Gaetano’s theory, I thought. I heard the kettle in the kitchen, and Lisa got up for some tea.

“Make sure to put enough sugar in mine,” Janine shouted into the kitchen at her. I watched as Janine’s hand, a toad’s tongue, reached across the table to take one of Lisa’s cookies.

A sickness started slowly in me. All of us in the group were coming down with one thing or another, because of the weather and the lack of heat in all the old buildings. I woke up one morning with my head feeling congested and heavy. I coughed throughout my language class, drawing annoyed looks from my classmates and Signora Laza. I couldn’t help it. The cough bested me. It could not be controlled.

I didn’t eat much because I couldn’t taste it. I bought canned soup from the store and heated it. I took a lot of naps and stopped going out at night. No matter what time I went to bed I felt exhausted. In the morning, my eyes were sealed shut.

I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I was scared, and I wouldn’t even know how to find a doctor or how to describe my problem. I considered asking Lisa for help, but decided against it. I just need more sleep, I told myself.

So I carried my sickness with me, bringing bits of toilet paper from the
università
wherever I went. I was disgusted with myself and I hid out in my room away from the rest of the dirty apartment and the dishonest food thief.

I didn’t miss class, though. I was there to learn. I owed it to my parents. Maybe I needed a break from partying and this was a way to focus on learning, though I could barely stay awake to do my homework at night.

It was on the way to the group class that I saw Gaetano again. It had been over a week since our dinner. I was bundled up with a scarf wrapped around my head, and my jacket that was not warm enough.

He called to me, as I almost walked by him. I stopped to talk, but I didn’t want to be out in the cold for long. I yearned for the warmth of the
università
. My head was so congested. I couldn’t think straight enough to worry about what he thought. I told him that I was cold and sick. And then I asked him if he could get me anything from the hospital, any drugs. He was a medical student after all, wasn’t he? He said he would try, but he didn’t really have that kind of access.

“I must get to my class,” I said in my Italian.

He smiled at my bad accent, worse from the cold. He told me that he would be at the Barone Rosso on Thursday. I nodded, said that I would try to make it.

In class, Arturo called on me and I could barely hear him from the pressure in my ears. My throat hurt when I tried to answer his question about which Lorenzetti brother painted the depiction of just and unjust governments. I had a fit of coughing in the middle of my answer, and I had to start again. I was required to answer in Italian, no less. Arturo corrected each grammar mistake I made, rolling the
r
’s and the
l
’s in the word
frattello
tauntingly. I raised my voice above the cacophony of coughs of the rest of the class. More than half of us sounded like death. I had to keep saying my answer again and again until it was perfect. Except for my accent.

On the way home, I stopped with Janine and Michelle at the
trattoria
across the street from our apartment. I hadn’t been out to the stores all week, and I had nothing to eat in the house except for some olive oil and old bread. When I sat down I began to feel sick. I ordered
tortellini in brodo
and both girls looked at me.

“Is that all you are going to have for dinner,” asked Michelle, who would eat a few leaves of lettuce and claim to be full.

“I don’t think I can keep anything else down,” I said, truthfully. My face should have conveyed my sicknesses. They nodded and changed their orders so that they got even less than me, so that they would not feel like pigs compared to me.

I ate two tortellini and tried to sip some of the broth. They cleaned their plates and finished my soup, shaking their heads as if I was not eating it because I didn’t like it. I gave them 8,000 lire and told them I had to go to bed and I would leave the front door open for them.

In my bed under the scratchy blanket, I peeled off everything but my underwear and a tank top. The room was cold, but I was sweating. It was only nine o’clock. I spent that night between sleep and wake. I was hypersensitive to everything happening in the house, to Janine staring at her face, plucking her eyebrows, to Michelle quietly puking my tortellini into our bidet and to Lisa crying into her pillow. I even heard the rustling of a bag of biscuits in the kitchen. The food thief struck again.

I heard all of those things, and they disturbed me. I could not rest because of them. I was not sure if everything was a dream, but every time I thought I might sleep peacefully, something else pulled me out of it. I tossed and turned all night, flinging off my covers and then desperately trying to get them back. When the travel alarm clock beeped in the morning, I shut it and stayed in bed for two days. I was missing a quiz and missing the trip to look at Saint Catherine’s finger remains in the church, but each time I went to the bathroom, I felt so unsteady.

The roommates, when they were there, brought me juice and water. They asked me if I wanted anything. They didn’t know me well enough to force me to drink or to eat the way Kaitlin would have. She would have made me soup by now.

What if I never got up? I had never felt so sick.

I didn’t communicate this to my roommates. During the day when I spoke to them I said I just needed rest and asked Lisa, who was, in spite of herself, in my level, to get my homework.

Jonas came to me during the night. He spoke words I couldn’t hear. All the things we said on the bus he said in a low whisper, just out of my reach. But he touched me. And his touch on my skin brought my fever up.

It had been almost a year since I walked into the room where he blew pot smoke in my face. It was after he waited for me at the bus stop. He invited me to a party, Kaitlin and me like it was no big deal. She raised her eyebrows when I asked her but put on her lipstick and came anyway. She was good like that. She indulged me when she knew better. She never said I told you so.

That night he danced a circle around me without picking up his feet. I knew that he had a girlfriend who lay sick in bed across the country in her hometown, but still her influence was strong. He kept his dancing circle wide enough that he was just out of reach, at least for a little while. He laughed when I passed the joint the second time and blew smoke in my face, smiling. I just inhaled his breath.