The Pat Conroy Cookbook (20 page)

Later, Spiro admitted to me that he rented the house to my family only because I reminded him of the great Dan Wickersham.

Spaghetti Carbonara was born at the same time that Wickersham was liberating Rome. My neighbors at the Piazza Farnese told me that the army of liberation brought eggs and bacon into Roman restaurants and asked the chefs to make them a pasta sauce. The Romans quickly adapted the ingredients into this delicious recipe, and my family often dined at a restaurant near the bakery and the olive man in the Campo de’ Fiori with “Carbonara” in its name. The Romans use pork jowl, but pork jowl is hard to come by in America. I normally use pancetta, but the finest grades of bacon work well.

      
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SERVES 4 AS A MAIN COURSE OR 6 AS A FIRST COURSE

I
n the early eighties, I brought my family to live in Italy based on an ill-conceived theory I have about the effects of expatriation on writing. I’ve always thought that writers should spend part of their lives testing themselves in the crucibles of alien cultures. As a Southern writer I’ve worried that my prose would smell too much of okra and sweet potatoes, that my vision would begin and end along the drifting, surreal avenues of small Southern towns, and that all my novels would be summed up in the phrase “the night the hogs ate Willie in South Carolina.” For a long time I’ve looked on Europe as a kind of finishing school for writers, a place for me to replenish exhausted metaphors and to refresh my dimming imagination before I sat down to write a new novel. What I didn’t know but learned fast is that living abroad is Europe’s revenge for our ancestors’ migrating to the United States.

We chose Italy because of the weather and because Italians seemed as friendly as Southerners. My mother raised a grinning child with a congenital need to be around other smiling people. We rented a house outside Rome in a compound surrounding a castle called Largo Olgiata. We moved to ancient Rome to reside in a modern villa built in 1971. Our house was made up of rhomboids and trapezoids and had all the warmth
of a Rubik’s cube. But the house was authentically Italian, and we did without electricity, gas, telephone, heat, and water at various unbearably lengthy intervals during our time there. If something worked in Italy, it was considered accidental and temporary, and rather amusing.

Instead of writing deathless, flowing prose, I spent much of my time apologizing to my children for brutally uprooting them from the emerald city, Atlanta, and transporting them to Europe. Moving will never be easy for children, and no child will ever make it easy on his or her parents. I showed them the Alps, castles, medieval towns, the Sistine Chapel, the mustard crops of Dijon, the lake country of Italy, and all the glories of the Uffizi Palace, and they fixed me with their wounded, kidnapped eyes and wailed they would much rather be at Six Flags Over Georgia. High in a snow-glistening Alpine pass I heard one of the children whisper, “This is okay, but I like Stone Mountain a lot better.”

But the South was deeply in them. The fall we lived in Rome, Lenore and I took the children to Florence as a reward for not once mentioning Atlanta during a blissful three-hour period. We stayed at the exquisite hotel Villa la Massa, in Bagno a Ripoli, a converted palazzo overlooking the Arno River. The Villa la Massa was my candidate for the perfect hotel, with a splendid restaurant, a discreet staff, grapes ripening in the arbors, and a German shepherd named Otto who was multilingual and could say “good morning” in four languages. There was a small chapel in the garden, a bar with gold-leaf wallpaper overlooking the river, and brimming fishponds. The goldfish, wary of the resident cats, swished along the bottom like animated bullion. A perfect hotel can seduce even children, and I watched each of them solemnly sign the leather-bound guest book in the hotel’s sitting room. When I signed the book as we left, I read my daughter’s note. She had loved the hotel but was holding fast to her identity. The note read: Megan Conroy Atlanta, Georgia.
How ‘Bout Them Dawgs?

Yet education is a secret and indefinable thing, and I watched the effects of travel on my children, who changed, despite their allegiance to Atlanta. I had a feeling the sediments of Rome were going to rest in the hidden sills of their memories for years to come. While in Rome, they
went to dinner with an Italian countess who had attended bullfights with Ernest Hemingway; drifted silently beside the tombs of popes; went to parties with their schoolmates, Soorig, Dariush, Atubia, and Jean-Franco; ate octopus (“It tastes like a tire, Dad”), prosciutto,
finocchio
(fennel), and a dozen different varieties of olives and olive oils; tasted wine from almost every district in Italy; sledded in the Apennines with a writer who had written five novels; and lit votive candles in every church along the Corso in Rome. (They prayed they would soon return to Atlanta.) I no longer told them that they’d someday regret not getting more out of the Roman years. Rome did its work quietly on all of us, and there was nothing we could do about it except be grateful.

My youngest daughter, Susannah Ansley, was born on December 7 at Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome. I became the first Southern writer I’ve ever known who’s the father of an Italian citizen. She was delivered by cesarean section in the city where Julius Caesar drew his first breath by the same method more than two thousand years ago. When Sister Magdolena emerged from the operating room she carried an inert bundle in her arms and passed me without saying a word or nodding in my direction. Her face was covered with a gauze mask and the baby, ominously silent, lay still beneath a white blanket that covered her face. I trailed after Sister Magdolena until she came to a small chapel. She entered, held the child aloft, and genuflected before a crucifix.

“Sister,” I asked, “I hate to bother you, but can I ask you a question?”

“Sì,”
she answered through gauze.

“Is this my baby?”

“Sì.”

“Sister Magdolena, is the baby alive?”

“Sì
. Big. Molto grande. Tre kilos, sette cento.”

“Can I see the baby?”

“No,
signore
. You have many germs in the mouth.”

I could have lived in Italy for a hundred years and never known the true weight of
tre kilos, sette cento
. Later, an American friend with a calculator informed me that Susannah weighed eight pounds, three ounces. I called my mother that night and told her that the family had produced
another Roman. My mother was born in Rome, Georgia, and the binding of the two Romes provided a pure associative joy.

When she was old enough to understand, and we were back in the South, I told Susannah about Rome and her first days on earth and the friends who came to see her in the hospital. I told her why we went to Rome and how the city changed us forever. That is the singular gift of travel: it changes you because it gives you more to celebrate, to cherish, and to remember. I told Susannah how Italy changed me and changed how I looked at the world. It made me confront the essence of my being Southern. It had nothing to do with geography; it had everything to do with my own personal view of the world.

When I refer to myself as Southern, I am talking about the part of myself that is most deeply human and deeply feeling. It is the part of me that connects most intimately and cordially with the family of humankind. There are qualities of grace and friendship and courtesy that will always seem essentially Southern to me, no matter where I encounter them on the road. Then I told my daughter that I never appreciated the South until I left it for the first time. And that the reason you travel is to find out who you really are and what you really believe. I came to understand that the country of Italy produced Michelangelo, da Vinci, Dante, Garibaldi, and most significantly, for the history of my family, because of accident and writing and a need for definition, a pretty black-haired Roman named Susannah Ansley Conroy

ITALIAN SAUSAGE WITH CRISPY SWEET POTATOES AND WILTED BROCCOLI RABE
      
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SERVES 4

ROASTED FIGS WITH FRASCATI ZABAGLIONE
When my daughter was born in Rome, Italy, on December 7, 1981, I sent telegrams to the United States to the houses of Bo Marks and Mike Devito. The telegrams said, “The first true Italian has been born to our room, and her name is Susannah Ansley Conroy” For one week, until I registered her with the
questora
, Susannah was an Italian citizen, and I rejoiced in that sweet fact. I was the first to father an Italian child in the history of the Conroy family, and all the surprises and astonishments and switchbacks of fate and history lay contained in the joy of her birth.

While living in Italy, I grew familiar with all the small-change bigotries that the Italians from different regions have for one another. When I told an elegant Milanese businessman that I lived in Rome he sneered and said, “Africa,” summing up the northern Italians’ contempt for those in the south. I remembered Bo-Pig and Mike-Swine warning me about the provenance of each other’s families when we roomed together at The Citadel.

Mike would mutter darkly about Bo, “You cannot trust Bo-Pig. He is Siciliano.”

“He’s what?” I’d ask.

“A Sicilian. They are the scum of Italy.”

“Wake up, boy. You’re an American now.”