My mother’s parents—brown-eyed, olive-skinned, with thick, dark hair and a few rogue genes that produced the occasional blue-eyed cousin—rarely looked backward. Indeed, Jennie Comparato had no Italy to look back to at all, being the first of her eleven siblings and half siblings to be born not in Naples but on Mulberry Street in New York. Her husband, Antonio, from the dirt-poor Neapolitan hinterland, went through immigration at Ellis Island in 1906 with his parents, sister, and older brother, Pietro. Antonio came out Tony. Pietro came out Pete. But Pete and his parents and sister came out with one last name, Tony with another. Both brothers spent the rest of their ninety-odd years arguing placidly, but pointedly, over who left immigration with the right family name. Neither ever established which was correct. Neither, in the end, truly cared. Considering themselves Americans, what did a final vowel really matter?
Two sets of grandparents, two separate worlds, my mother’s parents embracing America, my father’s parents ignoring it. My mother’s mother smelled of Fabergé; my father’s mother of Cocilana cough drops. My mother’s mother wore snazzy high heels, sheer stockings, and fashionable dresses; my father’s mother favored clunky lace-up shoes, thick cotton stockings, old-lady dresses before she was old.
My father’s parents drank the wine my grandfather Leone made in the cellar from his own fat blue Concords, filled in with cases of California grapes. Leone’s grapes grew on homemade iron-and-wire trellises that outlined their massive vegetable garden and formed a shady arbor over the heavy wooden table and benches he had built to eat their summer meals al fresco. My mother’s parents, perhaps convinced that wine would brand them forever as hopeless greenhorns, drank, when they drank at all, “Blood Marys,” as Tony always called them. We always ate and drank with my mother’s family or with my father’s family, never both sides of the family at once. They were just too different to spend time together.
F
or months after we moved into Rome, John would hide himself in our bedroom and sob or cry at some point or points nearly every day. I felt the little ground we had gained in Trevignano had been lost. A ringing phone—an emblem of the outside world, his old job and life—was the most likely event to provoke the floods of sobs and tears. Some days John’s sobs and tears were howls, which rang and echoed through the flat. Some days his sobs and tears were silent, accompanied by a heaving chest, clenched fists, and occasionally by the hollow, horrifying sound of his banging his head against the iron bedstead or the bedroom wall. Some days the sobs and tears were muffled, when the sudden ring of our phone or doorbell caused such terror that he would burrow under the bedspread, pillows, blankets, and sheets, trembling uncontrollably until he felt the terror had passed.
Worse than the sobs and tears, though, was John’s silence. From the time I met him until the time of the shooting, he had never once stopped talking. It was the quality and the quantity of his talk that so drew me to him in the first place, and to lose that part of him was to lose a lot. Now he might grunt an answer if I pressed him, he might nod, but he did not converse. Had he been a quiet sort before his illness, it might not have been so difficult. But John had always loved to chat and talk, kibitz, and joke. To me it seemed as if John’s normal effervescent self had been surgically excised, leaving only the sullen, somber shell of a stranger I could no longer even recognize.
It made me sullen and somber, too, and frightened. I never really wondered at that time whether everybody whose spouse struggled with depression felt the same way I did. I never even thought to pose the question to my father, who had been through five bouts of my mother’s recurring depression, who called me unfailingly every Sunday to talk for an hour. But even if I never posed the question directly, I know now that my father was trying to respond to my worries whenever I complained to him how difficult it was to live with someone who was, for all intents and purposes, no longer mentally there, and who no longer reacted as if I were there, either. “Just remember, Paula,” he would repeat endlessly, in a voice filled with concern for the two of us, “it’s not John, it’s the sickness.”
As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, I felt increasingly helpless with each new spasm of terror John suffered. He was usually in bed, trying to nap, when one of these episodes started. I would hear him from the living room or kitchen, doing his best not to make much noise as he keened into the bed linens. I would listen a bit at first, hoping the terror might just pass this time, but when it did not pass—and it never passed—I would go to him and try to calm him, with soft words or none at all. Often I simply encircled him with both my arms, an embrace meant to say he was not alone, that I would not let him go, that I would not let him be flung off into nothingness. But those embraces, I see only now, were meant as much for me as for him. If I held on tight enough, I hoped that he—and I—would hang on, too, and not be flung off this revolving globe the way my mother had been. If he hung on, maybe I could, too. The three meals I prepared for us and that we ate together each day were simply another kind of embrace, a way to remind him that he was not alone, that I was not abandoning him.
Nothing I ever said or did during these moments of panic and terror seemed to have any effect, positive or negative, on John. After a certain amount of time had passed, the terrors seemed to die away of themselves. John would slowly turn slightly less frantic, then perhaps catch his breath. Once he caught his breath, the panic might begin to recede; once the panic began to recede, then slowly his breathing might calm; once his breathing would calm, he might even fall asleep, or feign it, his eyes shut, but his body still rigid, as if waiting for the next onslaught.
The rigidity of his body during the height of these terrors in turn terrified me. I felt as if I were watching a horror movie, as if an alien being had slipped into my husband’s soul and sucked his spirit dry, and left his body filled with wood, stone, metal, or concrete instead of blood and guts, the pulse of life. During these months, whenever John moved, he walked with the stiff, rocking gait of a B-movie horror monster. He lumbered and lurched when he moved, his knees locked or nearly locked, and he rocked first to the right, then to the left, as he swung his legs first outward, then forward with each step he took.
B
ecause everything was still in storage, we had few belongings when we moved back to Rome from Trevignano, just three changes of summer clothes and the half-dozen bright yellow bath towels and the few bits of kitchenware we had bought when we moved in. Yet I found I rarely missed any of our stored belongings. Our lack of possessions did not in any way mean that our daily life was simple, but rather that we had simplified our daily life. A much simplified life was all either of us could possibly handle, as we tried to make the psychological move from the vacationland security of Trevignano to the workaday chaos of Rome.
I never consciously chose to put aside my terror of what might be coming. I never consciously chose to stop looking ahead, as I always had, far into the future. But at some point, within weeks of moving back to
bella Roma
, I found that I was more comfortable when I looked only as far as three meals ahead of myself. Before I even knew what was happening, it seemed I had found my comfort wandering through the food stalls that lined the Campo dei Fiori.
Cooking was my way of trying to make us both feel at home again, to make us feel as safe and nourished as we did as children, when we ate all our meals surrounded by utter familiarity and routine. During that year on the Via Giulia, I went to the Campo six days a week, to multiply the good I took away from each visit. I bought enough food to last for a day, two at most. Everything we ate seemed to have been picked just the night before, just for us. During that year, I cooked every comfort food from my childhood and John’s: pastina in chicken broth for me, simple risotto or chicken baked with garlic, rosemary, and potato wedges for John. I bought every seasonal fruit and vegetable I could find; I catered to every
wool-eee
that made itself known.
Talking to the vendors at the Campo, I learned to make Roman comfort food, too: oversized tomatoes stuffed with rice and herbs, and baked with potatoes;
straccetti
, or “little rags,” of tasty beef, barely cooked in hot olive oil with garlic slivers and fresh rosemary, then topped with fresh, peppery
rughetta
; baby artichokes braised in olive oil, water, and handfuls of parsley and wild fresh mint, the artichokes so small and well trimmed that we could eat them whole, along with the long, narrow stem. Even today, just the thought of those old Roman dishes makes me long for them and the strength they gave me to face another day. It was during that year on the Via Giulia that food solidified as an emblem for us, of good times remembered from childhood, of healing in that stretch of trouble, of promise that we would once again have a future to enjoy, if only we could hang on till the fever of depression passed.
Never mind that most days started badly, with a nightmare that would jerk me out of sleep so suddenly that it seemed as if a rifle had fired, a bomb had exploded, a siren had screamed in my brain. Never mind that my eyes would fly open in the darkness and I would awaken to find myself already sitting up, my hands in fists, my breath coming fast, one leg half out of the covers, ready for fight or flight, I never knew which. John would stir in his sleep at the commotion and I would lie back down, trying not to fidget while the dreams that had awakened me continued to run, fainter and fainter, in my head. For an hour I might lie there pretending to rest, but the effort would wake me so thoroughly that in the end there was nothing to do but get up and escape. I would dress, throw open the oversize bolts on our heavy front door, and walk the five minutes to the Campo.
Day after day, listening to the gulls and bells—for Rome, in the quiet of early morning, retains the medieval cacophony of a city of wheeling seagulls and pealing church bells—I would make my morning walk. Day after day, I found, my breathing would slow and my heart would stop racing shortly after I walked into that enormous cobblestoned rectangle of open space. It might have been the uncharacteristic hush of early morning that soothed me. It might have been the comparative calm of the merchants, who at that hour would be companionably stacking endless wooden or cardboard flats of fruits, greens, vegetables, and roots in relative silence, adjusting their dirty white tarps or huge
ombrelloni
to keep the sun or occasional rain at bay. All I am sure of is that by the time I arrived at the Campo, I felt better than when I had slipped out of the flat, leaving John to toss, moan, and shout in the last hour or so of his ever-restless sleep.
The sun would be up, throwing a soft half-light over the cobblestoned piazza. Some of the vendors would still be swallowing their morning shot of
caffè
as they unloaded the last of their produce. The oldest, the thick-fingered grandmothers in dark dresses whose children and grandchildren had long since taken over the running of the stand, would already be surrounded by cases of tangled, muddy greens:
rughetta, cicoria, spinaci, broccoletti, scarola
. These they would strip, trim, wash, pick over, and otherwise prepare for the pot until it was time to close for the day.
I liked the Campo best then, when the light in the square was soft and pink, when everyone in it seemed unnaturally subdued, the vendors still fighting sleep rather than the demands of customers or the sun’s fierce heat. Even at that hour, the smell of wood smoke and just-baked bread would be seeping out of the doors of the bakery at the northwest corner of the square. I liked to stroll among the vendors first, not buying immediately but searching out what looked best to bring home for that day.
A half-dozen fresh eggs, a bit of straw clinging to their shells. We could eat a soft-boiled egg for breakfast, followed by thick slices of crusty bread from the bakery. Jam, for John, we had, but maybe some more butter from the dairy shop, along with a slice of Gorgonzola and a fresh
mozzarella di bufala,
chased and captured in the whey-filled bowl by the counterwoman’s hand, then encased in a small plastic bag. A few late purple-skinned figs, perhaps, or a fat bunch of blue-black grapes, with just the right glossy sheen.
The figs, paired with a slice of
coppa
, would be perfect for lunch along with a quick soup made from last night’s leftovers. The grapes for dessert. And for dinner, spaghetti doused with a tomato sauce flavored with fresh basil, minced garlic, and olive oil, all barely cooked so that the garlic’s taste stayed light and sweet. The pasta would be followed by thin scaloppine of pink veal, cooked quickly with a big, fresh sage leaf and a small piece of
prosciutto crudo
on top—so good they would fulfill the promise of their name,
saltimbocca alla romana,
and truly seem to jump in one’s mouth. A half-kilo of fresh
broccoletti
, their long, skinny, bitter stems parboiled, then sautéed for a few moments in hot olive oil, minced garlic, and a tiny, hot
peperoncino rosso.
A small salad of tossed greens. A fat pear for dessert, with more of those blue-black grapes.
Those few moments of marketing, in the early quiet of my Roman mornings, were the only moments of semi-normality I lived during those weeks and months after we moved back to Rome. Greeting the people who sold us our food, talking with them about what looked best, were my daily attempts to live like other people, to live a normal life as I always had. The tomatoes and broccoli; the baby artichokes and spinach; the mozzarella and scaloppine they sold me; everything I carried home, cooked, served, then ate three times a day at the tiny oak table in our dining room became my lifeline to normality. For even though John could not talk, he could eat, and the two of us—somehow—managed to eat most of our meals in a silence that was at least companionable. For the entire year we were there, those quiet meals at our narrow oak table were a thrice-daily truce. Not once did John experience an anxiety attack at table. Not once did he sob. Silent tears never ran down his cheeks. And once his doctor discontinued the medications that weren’t helping anyway, his digestion and appetite returned to normal. He may not have been able to talk at table, but neither did he act out his troubles. It all reminded me of his convalescence in Munich, when the doctor ordered him to eat so that his body would have the power to heal. It reminded me of my childhood illnesses, when after a week in bed I had suddenly gotten back my appetite and couldn’t wait to eat.