Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (5 page)

One day in mid-October, about three weeks after I arrived, Meredith and I were walking down Via Pinturicchio to try out a new grocery store that was supposed to be cheaper than the Coop we usually went to downtown. I didn’t know it then, but it was just a few doors down from Perugia’s courthouse.

“Have you met any guys you like yet?” I asked Meredith.

“Giacomo,” she said, shyly but decisively. She had talked about our downstairs neighbor before. “I think he’s cute and nice.”

Not many nights later, the guys invited all of us in the house on an excursion to Red Zone, a popular club just outside of town. I was excited. It wasn’t usually my scene, but I’d decided to try something different and had already been to two downtown dance clubs, Domus and Blue Velvet. To my surprise, I’d had a decent time.

Laura and Filomena stayed home, but Meredith invited her friend Amy to come. The guys brought a friend from Rome named Bobby, whom I’d met once before. I had a cold sore then and was so self-conscious about it I just wanted to hide. Bobby said, charmingly, in English, “Why does it bother you? Many people get cold sores.”

Red Zone took up an entire warehouse. It was the largest, most over-the-top dance club I’d ever been to. The line to get in snaked around the building, and people were crammed in as if the place had been vacuum-sealed. It was hard to find any air. Bright lights flashed red, green, and blue, and the heavy bass seemed to travel through the cement floor and into my bones. Somehow we snagged a table, and Stefano ordered a round of sweet, electric blue drinks. I don’t know what was in them, but I got drunk almost immediately. We were listening to the music and laughing, getting up to dance every now and then. It must have been 102 degrees, and I was sweating, dripping. Bobby tried to talk to me, yelling over the music.

When I went to the bathroom, he followed me and waited outside the door. As I stumbled out, I grabbed onto him and kissed him on the mouth.

“Do you like me?” Bobby asked.

I nodded.

Then he kissed me back.

Just then, Marco passed by and started whooping and congratulating Bobby on our hookup. I have no idea how long we stayed at the club. When it was time to go, Stefano went for the car, and Bobby and I stood on the curb outside, kissing. Giacomo and Meredith stood slightly apart from us, entwined.

When we got home, Bobby followed me to the front door.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. This was the first time I’d invited a guy into my bed since I’d arrived in Perugia. We went to my room and had sex. Then we both passed out.

The next morning I got up before he did, got dressed, and went to make myself breakfast. Bobby came into the kitchen a few minutes later.

We were eating cookies when Laura came out of her bedroom. I’d never entertained a lover at the villa for breakfast, and it was awkward, despite Laura’s proclaimed sense of easy sexuality. All three of us tried to ignore the feeling away.

After breakfast Bobby left to return to Rome. I walked him to the door. He smiled, waved, and walked away.

I didn’t feel the same regret I’d had after sex with Mirko, but I still felt the same emptiness. I had no way of knowing what a big price I would end up paying for these liaisons.

A few minutes later, Meredith came upstairs. She and Giacomo had slept together for the first time, and she was giddy. It had been a wild night at No. 7, Via della Pergola, but it turned out to be a one-time thing.

A couple of days later Juve told me that Patrick wasn’t entirely happy with my job performance and wanted to meet with me on the Duomo steps. I knew I had been slow delivering cocktails and that I wasn’t attracting customers as they’d hoped.

To my surprise, Patrick was kind. “You really need time to pick up waitressing,” he said. “On busy nights I need someone who’s more experienced. You can keep working the slow nights—Tuesdays and Thursdays—if you’d like. That way you’ll be learning.”

I was relieved. I liked the purposeful feeling I got from working, but I knew this wasn’t the right job for me. I’d already started leaving my name at bookstores and other places around town.

I was just beginning my second month in Perugia, and I still felt uprooted from Seattle. But I felt I was finally starting to hit my groove. I recognized the faces I passed every day as I walked to and from school. More important, I felt that the choices I’d made were educating me. I just had to wait for what, and who, would come next.

Chapter 5

October 25–November 1, 2007

B
y chance.

I found my roommates by chance. I saw a poster advertising a performance of a string and piano quintet by chance. I met Raffaele Sollecito by chance.

On Thursday, October 25, Meredith and I went together to the University for Foreigners to hear Quintetto Bottesini. We sat together by the door of the high-ceilinged hall. During the first piece—Ástor Piazzolla’s “Le Grand Tango”—I’d just turned to Meredith to comment on the music when I noticed two guys standing near us. One was trim and pale with short, disheveled brown hair and frameless glasses. I was instantly charmed by his unassuming manner. I smiled. He smiled back.

When Meredith left at intermission to meet friends for dinner, the guy walked up to me.

“Are these seats open?” he asked in Italian.

“Yes, please to sit,” I said in my imperfect Italian.

“I’m Raffaele,” he said, switching to English.

“Amanda.”

Later I would wonder what would have been different if this hadn’t happened. What if Meredith had stayed at the concert? What if Raffaele had gotten there in time to get a seat? Would we have noticed each other? Would he, naturally shy, have introduced himself without the excuse of a needed chair? Would never knowing him have changed how I was perceived? Would that have made the next four years unfold differently? For me, maybe. For Raffaele, absolutely.

But we did meet. And I did like him. Raffaele was a humble, thoughtful, respectful person, and he came along at the moment that I needed a tether. Timing was the second ingredient that made our relationship take off. Had it been later in the year, after I’d found my bearings and made friends, would I have needed the comfort he offered?

Waiting for the return of the quintet, we talked. His English was better than my Italian.

“Do you like the performance?” he asked.

“Yes, I love classical music,” I said.

“That’s unusual for someone our age,” he replied.

He was right. The rest of the audience looked three times older than we were, and I hadn’t yet found anyone my age in Perugia who talked about classical music. Grabbing a friend and going to Benaroya Hall to hear the Seattle Symphony on my UW student discount was something I had done as often as I could back home.

During the second half, I whispered to Raffaele just as I had to Meredith. It was nice to have a shared, uncommon interest.

When we stood up to leave, he asked for my number. In Perugia, where I’d gotten this question a lot, my stock answer was no. But I thought Raffaele was nerdy and adorable—definitely my type. He was wearing jeans and sneakers that evening. Like DJ, he had a pocketknife hooked to his belt loop. I liked his thick eyebrows, soft eyes, high cheekbones. He seemed less sure of himself than the other Italian men I’d met. I said, “I’ll be working later at Le Chic on Via Alessi. You should come by.”

At 10
P.M.,
when I got to the bar, a handful of customers were drinking beer. Juve pumped up the music, and I tried to keep busy doing mindless tasks—refilling the snack bowls, wiping tables, ensuring the bathrooms were clean, checking my appearance in the mirror
.
I was grateful for the distraction while I waited to see if Raffaele would show up.

Every time I heard the door open, I looked up hoping it was Raffaele. When he walked in with three friends, my stomach did a nervous flip. I went over to their high-top table with menus and a huge grin. I found out later that, to get his friends to come, Raffaele had promised to buy their drinks.

For the next hour, I waited on other customers but only really paid attention to one. It was the first time in my lackluster waitressing career that I did exactly what Patrick had asked for all along: I magically materialized at Raffaele’s table well ahead of his last sip.

“Another round?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” Raffaele said. “When do you get off?”

“In about half an hour,” I said. “Would you like to walk me home?” Walking with a guy was a tactic I’d used a few times in Seattle to figure out if I wanted to see him again. A walk is a much smaller commitment than a date.

We wandered slowly through town, away from my villa, to the far side of Corso Vannucci—Piazza Italia. We stopped at an overlook in front of a low brick wall.

We stood high above the Tiber Valley, staring out at the speckled lights below. “This is the perfect place to think,” Raffaele said. His nervousness was palpable—and contagious. A fidgety silence hung between us as we gazed out, until, gradually, we looked less at the view and turned toward each other.

It wasn’t an electric first kiss that bound us together. It was gentle and soft—comfortable and reassuring.

I don’t know how long we stood with our arms wrapped around each other. When we pulled apart, the air was so sharp I could see my breath. But I knew that this was the warmest, safest, most enveloped I’d felt since August, when I’d hugged good-bye the people I loved most. After a month on my own, the exhilarating feeling of taking charge of my life had receded a bit. I wavered between feeling self-confident and needy. I was reveling in everything new and feeling homesick for the familiar. Raffaele, with a single kiss, had bridged the gap. He was a soothing presence.

Afterward we walked past the fountain in Piazza IV Novembre. Another five minutes and we’d be at my house. I so badly wanted to extend the moment. “Do you like marijuana?” I blurted.

“It is my vice,” Raffaele said.

“It’s my vice, too,” I said. I loved the phrase in Italian.

Raffaele looked surprised, then pleased. “Do you want to come to my apartment and smoke a joint?”

I hesitated. He was basically a stranger, but I trusted him. I saw him as a gentle, modest person. I felt safe. “I’d love to,” I said.

Raffaele lived alone in an immaculate one-room apartment. I sat on his neatly made bed while he sat at his desk rolling a joint. A minute later he swiveled around in his chair and held it out to me.

We talked as we smoked. He was twenty-three, from Bari, in southern Italy, and three weeks away from getting his degree in computer science. “I’m moving to Milan in the new year,” he said. “I’m hoping to get a job designing video games.”

We learned we had a third language in common, German. When I told him I’d studied Japanese in high school, he said he loved
Sailor Moon
, a Japanese comic book about girls with magic powers fighting evil; the TV series it spawned had been my favorite when I was younger. I was surprised by how childish his comic book interest was, but I thought his willingness to admit it was endearing.

The marijuana was starting to kick in. “You know what makes me laugh?” I asked. “Making faces. See.” I crossed my eyes and puffed out my cheeks. “You try it.”

“Okay.” He stuck out his tongue and scrunched up his eyebrows.

I laughed.

By then, Raffaele had moved next to me on the bed. We made faces until we collided into a kiss. Then we had sex. It felt totally natural. I woke up the next morning with his arm wrapped snugly around me.

After that first night, and for seven days, Raffaele and I were a thing. We spent all the time we could together. After breakfast I’d run home to shower—his was cramped—and change for class. We’d meet up back at his apartment or mine for lunch. In the afternoons, I did my homework while he polished his thesis, which was due in two weeks, a week before his graduation. His father was planning a huge celebration at a fancy restaurant nearby.

We communicated through a hodgepodge of Italian, English, and German—but often fell back on kisses and caresses. I loved curling up in his lap or hugging him from behind while he did the dishes. When we took a shower together, he washed my hair and then toweled me dry, even cleaning my ears with a Q-tip. To me, it was intensely tender; it felt as intimate as sex.

Meredith had just started seeing Giacomo, as a boyfriend, and she and I joked that we were living parallel lives. When we overlapped for a few minutes at home without them, we would both download. She said, “I like Giacomo, but he’s shy with me when we’re around other people. It really bothers me when he doesn’t say hello or even acknowledge me if I run into him in town.”

“Maybe you need to give him a little time,” I suggested.

“Yeah, that’s what I think, too,” she said. “But what about Raffaele? It seems like you totally like him.”

“Yeah, I really do.”

And I did. He was generous with his time and with me. He had a focused attention to detail. His shirts were soft cotton and his sweaters and scarves were cashmere—all a lot nicer than my jeans and sweatshirts. And even though I didn’t know anything about cars, he was proud to show me his Audi. When Raffaele found out I didn’t have a signature scent, as a good Italian woman should, he took me to a fragrance shop downtown to pick one out. I’d put a drop on my arm and hold it up for him to sniff. We settled on a perfume made with sandalwood—something light and earthy that reminded me of how Perugia smelled in the morning. Raffaele paid without hesitation and handed me a pretty shopping bag tied with a blue ribbon. The experience made me feel sophisticated and, for once, truly sexy. We walked to his apartment holding hands.

That night, when we were cuddling in bed, he turned to me and said, “
Ti voglio bene
”—literally, “I wish you well.” I’d heard this phrase a lot since I’d been in Perugia, and
TVB
is standard Italian text speak.

“
Anch’io ti voglio bene
,” I said—“I also wish you well.” I didn’t realize how much weight his three words could carry. It’s what Italians say to their families, just a step below the most amorous expression, “
Ti amo
”—“I love you.”

Raffaele looked at me seriously, appreciatively. “Will you be my girlfriend?”

We’d known each other for three days.

“Yes,” I said, feeling a tiny twinge that I took as a warning sign.
This is moving too fast. Is Raffaele making too much of our relationship too soon?
He’d already said he wanted to introduce me to his family at graduation, and he was planning our winter weekends together in Milan. We barely knew each other.

I couldn’t see how we would last, because we were a couple of months away from living in two different cities, and I was definitely going back to Seattle at the end of the next summer. Since a big part of why I’d come to Italy was to figure myself out, it occurred to me that maybe I should be alone, that I should slow things down now, before they rocketed ahead. But just because I thought it doesn’t mean I did it.

It was easy to shove my doubts aside, because I really liked Raffaele. He was sensitive, and I felt calm around him. And without any solid ties, I’d been lonelier in Perugia than I’d realized.

In hindsight, I recognize that he . . . that
we
were still immature, more in love with love than with each other. We were both young for our ages, testing out what it meant to be in a caring relationship.

Being with Raffaele also taught me a big lesson about my personality that I’d tried so hard—and harmfully, in Cristiano’s case—to squelch. I was beginning to own up to the fact that casual hookups like I’d had with Mirko and Bobby weren’t for me. I like being able to express myself not just as a lover but in a loving relationship. Even from the minuscule perspective of a few days with Raffaele, I understood that, for me, detaching emotion from sex left me feeling more alone than not having sex at all—bereft, really.

I didn’t know that this lesson had come too late to do me any good.

A
s it turned out, Halloween fell on the one Wednesday Raffaele and I were together. Unlike in the United States, kids in Italy don’t go door-to-door collecting candy. Still, in a college town like Perugia, Halloween offers an irresistible excuse for students to dress up in costumes and to party—and the local bars and discos go all out to oblige them. For clubs, it is
the
number one make-money night of the year.

Patrick had asked me to show up at Le Chic even though it wasn’t supposed to be my night, and Raffaele stayed home to work on his thesis. I’d been so caught up in my love life that I didn’t even think to buy a costume until it was too late. So I was pretty proud of myself when I dug through my closet and found a black sweater and black pants. Raffaele helped me draw on whiskers using eyeliner, and off I went, transformed into a black cat. The bad luck superstition never occurred to me.

The town was jammed, and all the masked, wigged, mummified students made the mood in Piazza Grimana feel ominous. Of course I knew the crowd wasn’t threatening, but I’ve always been kind of creeped out by costumes. As I passed long lines of people waiting to board buses chartered by clubs such as Red Zone, I sent Meredith a quick text: “What are you doing tonight? Want to meet up? Got a costume?”

The prosecutor and the press later used Meredith’s reply, “Yes I have one, but I have to go to a friend’s house for dinner. What are your plans?” as proof of our fraying relationship, even though she signed off with an
X
for kisses. But Meredith had her own set of friends, and I didn’t expect to be included in everything she did. I texted my friend Spyros, the guy who worked at the Internet café, and we agreed to catch up.

Le Chic, usually so empty and desolate feeling, was packed that evening, possibly for the first time in its yearlong existence. Juve was standing near the front door. He’d painted his face white and had fake blood trickling down from the corner of his mouth. “Where’s your costume?” he asked.

“I’m a kitty cat.”

“You’re supposed to be scary,” Juve said.

Patrick poured me a glass of wine, and I hung out on the edge of the crowd for a while. But, for some reason, I was feeling a bit flat. I caught Patrick’s eye and mouthed, “I’m leaving,” waving good-bye. He gave me a nod, and I was out the door.

Around 12:30
A.M.
,
when I met Spyros and his friends for drinks, I couldn’t get into the good time they were having. Even on a blowout party night, Perugia’s social scene didn’t do much for me, and the whole evening felt like a dud. It made me nostalgic for the sit-around-and-talk gatherings of friends at UW. I was glad when Raffaele came to Piazza IV Novembre to walk me home. By that time it was 1:45
A.M.,
and most of my eyeliner whiskers had rubbed off. Thankfully, Halloween 2007 was over.