Amore and Amaretti (11 page)

From Cairo we catch the train and follow the Nile down to Luxor, a village-city whose very name evokes dusty musky sensuousness. We visit the bewilderingly vast architecture of the Karnak temple complex and roam through the bleak and arid landscape of the Valley of the Kings; at night we eat carp and rice washed down by pink wine that tastes like turpentine. Aswan is our end of the Nile; we had hoped to travel as far down as the High Dam at Abu Simbel, but the minute we glimpse the Old Cataract Hotel we decide we are going to stay there for ever. We sit on the cool verandahs of this enormous orangey-pink Moorish-style building sipping gin and tonics, staring at giant palms in gracious grounds and the Nile before us with its gently bobbing feluccas.

Of course, we know we cannot stay for ever at the Old Cataract – we must return to Rome and our ordinary lives, and we still have a week in which to explore the Red Sea. And so we catch the bus through a monotony of desert, Ignazio ashen-faced from the stomach cramps he has mysteriously incurred overnight. From there it is – and we should have read the signs – downhill all the way.

It is by the Red Sea that I throw away our return air tickets to Rome. More accurately, it is in the foyer of the Sheraton Hotel just outside the Egyptian deep-sea diving resort of Hurghada. Ignazio and I have been tipped into its muffled beige luxury from the taxi that rescues us from the bus stop. Ten hours of a bumpy journey across the Arabian Desert mostly standing up has left us fragile with exhaustion. Propped at the main desk of the Hurghada oasis attending to the necessary formalities, I plunge both hands into the pockets of my jacket and empty their contents into the nearest rubbish bin, as if ridding myself of the chaos and clutter of the past day.

We only discover about the airline tickets the following day when, refreshed from a good night's sleep, we decide to organise ourselves for the home run to Cairo before flying back to Rome. When we stop panicking, we start to make phone calls: to both Italian and Australian embassies in Cairo, to Ignazio's parents in Florence – and incomprehensibly not to the airline company.

Our holiday funds have almost disappeared; we move out of the Sheraton and into the shabby Shedwan Hotel, where loose wires droop out of holes in the peeling bedroom wall, and slink several days later onto a Cairo-bound bus. At least we have the assurance of new airline tickets furnished by Ignazio's generous parents awaiting us at the airport. But meanwhile we have a day in Cairo, and so book into the Anglo Swiss Pension, a seedy hotel in a scruffy part of town. It is while we are sitting on the sagging bed biting into tomatoes and bread purchased earlier from a street stall that I have a sudden vision of the Sultan's Breakfast a fortnight previously. I had taken a photo of Ignazio sitting semi-naked on the giant bed of the Nile Hilton, framed by a line of golden pharaohs on the dark, wooden bedhead behind him. The bedlinen is crisp and white, the table pulled up to the bed has a gold linen cloth folded neatly over it, and from it Ignazio is spooning sugar into a cup from a silver bowl. Filling the table are more silver bowls, glassware, my carelessly crumpled napkin.

At least we have the tickets home.

Scalda piu l'amore che mille fuochi

Love burns more than a thousand fires

Back in Florence, the days shorten and I find myself in the kitchen preparing food and feeling nauseated beyond belief. All I want to eat are hard-boiled eggs. A pregnancy test is positive. The abortion, which we both feel unreservedly is the best decision, is efficient and forgettable. That same day I am back home, where Ignazio waits on me with devotion. There is no sense of loss or grieving; on the contrary, I am struck by a feeling of weightlessness and freedom. Crisis averted, we resume our placid cosiness.

By the time I met Raimondo, and then later his wife, they had been together for many years. Raimondo tells me he met his sweetheart Annamaria on the Ponte Vecchio, where he had set himself up with easel and paints. Being a painter is one of many skills: pianist-accordionist, polyglot, bon vivant, gardener, waiter, singer, cook and drinker. He is ten years older than Annamaria and, like Gianfranco, a boy from a small Umbrian village. Annamaria, on the contrary, comes from a good Florentine family. She has waist-length hair, enormous sorrowful eyes behind thick glasses, and a wardrobe of sensible Ferragamo shoes with flat heels. He works and lives in Florence, while she is a teacher of English to foreigners at the University of Perugia and lives in a little flat like an eyrie in one of the steep, narrow streets that drop away from Corso Vannucci. She speaks calm and exquisite English with a trace of an American accent, legacy of the years she spent at Harvard University acquiring her second or third degree.

The day Raimondo brought Annamaria to the restaurant to meet me we loved each other immediately. After the healing, soothing time I spent in the country following the Gianfranco breakup it was to Perugia I headed, boarding a bus to stay with Annamaria. In the week that I was there, we both gained five kilos due to nightly sessions of wine and cheese while I poured out my sorrow, usually lapsing gratefully into English as the evening wore on. Annamaria and Raimondo are my solid rocks, the most romantic story I know, two people so extraordinarily unalike, whose love withstands long absences and little infidelities. Perhaps it is precisely because they are such an odd couple that they accept so unblinkingly the oddness that is Ignazio and me.

Change seems to know when to strike and, as much as I feel that I control my life and determine my destiny, I see how I am just being buffeted along, tricked into placidness in order, perhaps, to be better prepared for the next upheaval. Unlikely we may be, but twelve months into the relationship Ignazio and I are very settled.

Then Raimondo does what he has long talked of doing: he buys a restaurant. The restaurant is in Perugia, so he can finally be with Annamaria all the time, and he offers a share in the business to Ignazio, who accepts. Not without hours of dialogue, discussion and debate with me, the upshot being that I too agree to leave the restaurant, where I have no further to go, and move to Perugia as well to seek work. I am conscious that there is much at stake in this decision, and that what is about to happen will alter the nature of my relationship with Ignazio, with whom lately I feel bothered, obscurely, by a score of details. He has changed so dramatically from the beautiful child that I lured into my clutches to a self-confident young man, smoking too many Marlboros and experimenting with facial hair. He goes to Perugia to set up the restaurant with Raimondo and to find us a little apartment in Via Deliziosa – I feel I could only love a place in a street so named. After a month, I have formally extricated myself from the restaurant and packed up our apartment in Via Ghibellina, storing boxes of books and summer clothes at Ignazio's parents' place. Then I catch a train to join my beloved.

Non tutte le ciambelle escono con il buco

Not every doughnut has a hole

(or, things don't always turn out as planned)

The steep, narrow streets in Perugia turn into tunnels for the wind and all the stone fortifying the town seems to contain and transmit the cold. Not quite as cold, however, as the previous winter, when the front page of
La Nazione
featured a photograph of nuns skiing through the streets of Rome, and when millions of hectares of precious grapes withered and died. Into Bar Sandri blow men in overcoats and women with scarves. Everyone is laughing and talking in high-pitched voices; the barista pours a stream of thick creamy milk into coffee cups lined along the bar. There is a complicated perfume of vanilla, hot pastries, grinding coffee and Fendi. Someone leaves with the wrong umbrella by mistake and rushes back in apologetically; everyone becomes suddenly involved in the incident and there are jocular cries to guard carefully one's own umbrella. My cappuccino has a heart on it where the steamed milk has been carefully poured, and from behind the bar the glamorous middle-aged woman with extraordinary glasses passes me a jam-filled brioche wrapped in a tiny serviette.

Perugia: closed stone city of walls and silences, muted women murmuring through passageways, a sudden muffled flutter of pigeons. And then the gaudy warmth of the piazza, lit up and twinkling with the beautiful people strolling and gesticulating and embracing, scarves and jackets swinging, boots clipping and shoulder bags sailing through the crowd. Sudden little streets as narrow as alleys dropping away from the main beat, twisting into cheese shops, bakeries pungent with vanilla and a tiny yellow stationer's cluttered with cards. The wood vendor is next door in his low-ceilinged garage with swarthy men who move soundlessly, piling wood into hessian bags. I climb the long, delirious streets until I reach Annamaria's apartment, where the fire in the kitchen is lit. We sit at her wooden table over wine, toasted slabs of bread with garlic and oil, creamy sheep's cheese and salad, and finish off with strong, good coffee.

In Via Deliziosa, I sprawl on the double bed filling in pieces of a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, bored by too much sky. Ignazio bustles off early each morning and in the beginning returns mid-afternoon to spend several hours with me before heading back for the evening shift. I am half-heartedly looking for jobs, contemplating joining a gym, smoking thin joints of hashish in the evenings with introspective Talk Talk songs on the stereo. After a while, Ignazio begins to come home later and later in the afternoons. I am revisited by the Gianfranco experience – sick, lurching suspicion and jealousy – so one day I set off for the restaurant to look for him. Through the glass I see him sitting at one of the tables in the empty dining room, reading comics and stubbing out cigarettes. I creep back home and mention nothing.

All through that bleak isolated winter, I prickle with indecision. Despite the occasional company of Annamaria and Raimondo, I am not enjoying Perugia. I roam around the beautiful old town, drinking solitary
proseccos
in the lounges of fading elegant hotels, buying paper bags filled with assorted shortbreads from pastry shops, and writing long, introspective diary entries about my pointless life. I feel that I have taught Ignazio as much as I am capable. We make love uneventfully because I realise, too late, that in my challenge to educate him I have omitted to tell him how to best give me pleasure. I am reluctant to look for a job because of being so undecided. For the first time in four years, I begin to think seriously about returning to Australia; I change my mind every day.