The Three Graces 💚 Rome

Roma I

Campo de' Fiori

Sitting under a heat lamp at a cafe on Campo de' Fiori, Sandra noticed that the first latte came in a short glass with an octagonal base. The second came in a tall skinny glass with a round base. Five years ago, this would've bugged her. She then believed that all the odd little coffee shops in the world would turn into Starbucks.

The roads around Campo de' Fiori were the most uneven she'd ever seen, and there were wide, deep gaps between the four-inch stones. Not at all like the stonework in the old town in Geneva. Two women walked by in high heels, holding each other tightly, either for warmth or in case a stiletto got caught in one of the harrowing gaps. 

A gypsy woman walked over to her table. It was the same woman she had talked to in Piazza del Popolo that afternoon. It was windy in the open square, and her long skirt, which had a slit up one side, kept dancing up her legs. She didn't ask for money. She just wanted to talk. 

The woman was wearing a very low-cut blouse, more or less covered with a scarf that had a dozen shades of blue. Back in Geneva, Sandra's friend Julie would have asked, Why doesn't she just button up? Julie was very practical, and liked people to look Swiss, at least if they were in Switzerland. Or France. In any case, she didn't like minarets. She would have said that the woman looked too much like a gypsy. And that she didn't understand how buttons worked. And that the colours of her scarf shifted from mid-morning azure to late-evening cobalt, as if she had no idea what time of day it was. There wasn't an horlogerie in sight.

Zigana was gorgeous all right, Sandra had to give her that. Her Romani nose was almost Roman. Large, straight, strong. She looked like the beautiful soul-diva Nina Zilli, except that her skin was just south of olive.

Zigana's face wasn't as dark as that of the older, leather-faced gypsies on the steps of the cathedrals. It had lost much of its colour along the way, somewhere in Turkmenistan or Hungary. She could almost blend in, almost be Italian. 

Zigana's flowing scarf covered and uncovered the great gulf of her missing buttons, making Sandra wonder if she was going to fall for that kind of beauty too.

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Le Differenze

Sandra was an exchange student from Canada — from one of those cities with malls and mini-malls, and with a downtown that was vacant after 6 PM. She'd almost finished two years at the University of Geneva, and came to Italy to clear her head. She'd been having boy-girl troubles, and was hoping that a new country would help her see it all in perspective. She hoped to figure it out before returning home — to parents who didn't see the need for two points of view when one had done the job for generations.

She hoped that Italy would be different from Geneva, where the conformity was starting to make her feel that in some ways she was already home. She wanted a third perspective, to set against the two she'd been bouncing between for the last 20 months.

Yet she wanted to explore one more perspective — not two, and then three, and then a dozen! In Italy one difference seemed to spark another, which then ignited a general conflagration. It was like the Italian parliament, where political parties were forever fragmenting and coalescing, as if they were multiple subsets of some imaginary whole.

She was formulating a theory that for Italians it was differences — le differenze — that mattered. In this sense, she speculated, the Italians differed from the French, for whom difference itself, in the singular — la différence — was the key. She saw le differenze everywhere in Italy: in cars, in fashions, in the buildings that were never in the same shapes. Rome lacked the evenness of Geneva and the solid limestone avenues of Paris.

Sandra started developing this theory about a year ago, when she first met Giuseppe, a Swiss Italian from Lugano. Giuseppe was as lively as the Swiss Germans were sedate. (The French Swiss seemed to be somewhere in the middle. Sandra called them Goldilocks' Dream. Julie agreed with her about this, adding that in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud the people were just right.) Giuseppe on the other hand was truly crazy, partying all the time, looking at every girl that passed by. One minute he was into blondes, and swore that he could only drown himself in a pool of blue eyes. The next minute he was trailing after some desert Egyptian, insinuating by the sway of his blood that he'd always been a Berber, and that his people loved nothing but dark eyes and sand. But he never came out and said as much to Sandra. With her, he kept strictly to metaphors drawn straight from the green waters of Lake Lugano.

She was beginning to feel like a mermaid, with her flowing red hair , her blue-green eyes, and her long green tail.

But Giuseppe was too good-looking, the dark stubble on his chin was too perfect, and he had too much going on inside his head to let him get away. His ideas sprouted all over the place, in the same unpredictable way as his thick chestnut hair. Basically, she was too smitten to dump him. That is, until one night when he ignored her for two hours in a row.

It was at an exchange-student dinner at Les Quatre Canons, and she was wearing a green silk dress she'd bought for the occasion. The party was called The Silk Road, in honour of the fifteen exchange students who had recently arrived from China. Giuseppe hadn't even commented on her dress. Instead, he spent two hours talking to an exchange student from Beijing. He was obviously fascinated by the way she pinned her coal-black hair into an elegant globe with two chopsticks. As if her head were the Temple of Heaven. She was really playing it up. To make matters worse, Sandra was wearing green Chinese silk.

She started talking to the exchange student's friend Mei-lin, who had also been abandoned by the alabaster statue cum historical monument. Sandra could hardly make out a word Mei-lin said, and wondered if it was really a good idea for Chinese students to learn French.

Mei-lin's hair was so short she almost looked like a man. And she was also almost as flat as a pancake. Yet the way her nipples poked out of her thin shirt made it hard to confuse her for a man. A golden pancake, Sandra thought to herself, half-jealous. She took another look, and concluded, now almost bitter, one of those perfectly smooth ones off the griddle, buttery-soft, with a sheen, verging on a tint of brown. She laughed at her own metaphors. What was she, ordering breakfast?

She wondered if it was the mannish figure that attracted her or the smoothness of her skin. Could it really be as soft as it looked? And then she realized that it wasn't so much that Mei-Lin looked like a man as it was that Mei-Lin was a woman.

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Next: 💚 Roma II

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