and this year he has become fully a man, with every ounce of testosterone he’s been allotted in full surge. He has real shoulders, a deep voice, he even reeks of the cigarette he just finished. At seventeen, he has definitely had sex. Michele greets him also by insulting him about his poor grades at school and his failure to pass two of his subjects. Long high-pitched laughter. I live in close proximity to this man all year long and I am accustomed to this backhanded, reverse psychology, this way of actually saying: I am so happy to see you. I am so glad to be home. My family and country mean so much to me.
But I am always taken aback in the first few minutes of arriving into the fold of the Fuortes family that no one protests or bursts into tears. I would and do fall apart with such starvation for genuine affection and sincerity, for one crumb of the true contents of this man’s heart and mind. Yet no one but me winces.
For the past few years, I drive the car into Rome from the airport. Michele is better at handling the kids in the back of the car and I am better at driving, or at least this is what we have learned to cheerfully and constructively say to each other. It is a Saturday morning and the autostrada is relatively empty. As are the streets of Rome. The city has clusters of tourists, like overripe grapes, at every crosswalk, but the plague of wasps—the Romans on their Vespas—feels thin and hardly mortifying. I shift, accelerate, switch lanes, and take the corners as if I lived here year round. We pass ruins of aqueduct, Colosseum, and then wind down the hill around the fountain and the statues. Some of the tourists already have sunburn on their sleeveless shoulders though it is not yet eleven in the morning. This is, seven years later with two kids, no nighttime tour through Rome on the back of a lover’s motorcycle but even so, hands down, this is the most beautiful city on earth, even in broad daylight with a remote husband who’s actually considering buying a new iPhone. I love Rome.
We pull up in front of the large gate to the apartment and park under the tree out of the intense sun. Every single year we do this. The neighborhood is quiet, sleepy, intensely residential, and lately, too too civilized for me. Not one soul smokes on a balcony, suns themselves on a terrace, or reads a paper on a front stoop. The shutters are all closed but for a few windows of a few scattered apartments all around the adjoining and neighboring buildings. There is no music emanating from any apartment. No blare of a television. There are no children.
Michele’s sister Manuela and his mother greet us from the balcony overhead. They look just exactly the same as last year, and for a moment it seems as if the reports from Rome all winter about Alda’s failing health and failing memory have been exaggerated. It seems as if they haven’t moved from the very spot where we waved good-bye last summer at the end of our vacation. I feel genuinely happy to see them both. I really love them.
In our hug, Alda always says to me, “Come sei brava, Gabrielle. Proprio brava!” “Che coraggio!” And I always well up in this shower of her kindness. She is forever complimenting me on what courage and strength I have to haul the two kids across the ocean and deliver them to her doorstep. She herself has a magnificent fear of flying. Manuela, always maternal and sympathetic, says, “Stancissima sei.” Then she repeats “You must be very tired” in English, which she speaks perfectly.
The apartment in Rome where we spend the first couple and last few days—the bookends—of our annual vacation, is the whole ground floor of a large good-looking building that has been separated into two apartments. Manuela lives with her son Ando in one half—a beautiful sparse but tasteful apartment of four rooms with a hallway so lined with books in English and Italian and French that they reach the ceiling. And Alda in the other half, with Giulio, an elegant, massive apartment with three bedrooms and two large living rooms that is so packed with family mementos and heirloom silver and sepia photographs and centuries-old heavy furniture and wardrobes stuffed with exquisite linens and lace table covers passed