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a bowl of zuppa

sushma joshi

The dwarf who serves me the bowl of heart-warming, cheek-blushingly hot bowl of zuppa on that cold winter’s evening is short and squat, with a warm, stretched-out smile. The cloth on the table is cotton, checked with red and yellow. The tabletop is filled with glassware, like an apothecary’s shop. Olive oil and vinegar sparkle with red and yellow clarity inside elegant bottles. Wine glasses in different shapes and sizes stand side by side. Sunshine-yellow napkins nestle in the rounded depths of wooden holders.

“Roma! Roma!” The waiter is impatient as I try to dig further into the heritage of this tantalizing zuppa—Genoa? Sardegna? The steam rises from the thick broth.

Who’s the cook? I ask, as if I can extract the recipe by finding out the exact identity of the person who put it together in the kitchen. “My faather! My mooother!” he exclaims with impatience. He walks away, disgusted with this questioning. How could this foreign girl not understand a good Roman zuppa in a local trattoria when she saw one?

His irritation is instant. People in Rome, it appears, lose their temper quickly. They don’t have the large tolerance for strangers that one comes to expect from a tourist hotspot. This is understandable when you live in the most glorious city of the world, and the barbarians who invade it every day disgust you with their lack of ancient sophistication, and their gawking.

This place, for all its color coordination, looks like Delicatessen, the movie. It is long and rectangular, filled with exquisitely set tables, all empty, except for one table of jovial diners. The old man in the background, who I take to be the father, hovers with sad-eyed, wrinkled intensity. He holds a giant knife up as he stares at me. I am sola, a sole traveller eating a solitary meal in an eatery meant to be filled with the chatter of big families. The mother looks like the woman out of American Gothic, only more lean and mangy.

I hurry with my hot soup, savoring the broth and trying to finish as I see the group sitting three tables ahead of me pay their il conto. That group of people, refreshingly normal, chatter and laugh with the proprietor as they get ready to leave. I spoon hot zuppa into my mouth, sprinkling fresh olive oil on the bread, and stuff it into my mouth, trying to chew without hurting my new and ill-fitting dental crowns.

The long restaurant, curtained with red curtains, is eerie in its emptiness. I don’t want to get caught with Mama and Papa and dwarf son in Delicatessen alone. Strangers of the brown-skinned hue draw special disdain. I have seen Bangladeshi vendors selling umbrellas in the unseasonal and ice-cold December rain. Bangla immigrants, it appeared, were the Arabs of Roma—the scapegoats of all social and economic ills. Italy was sinking under a mass of imitation Italian designer goods, all made in China. The Chinese dragon was eating Italy alive, and the only way the Italians could get back was by savage treatment of the foreigners they could see. This meant the Bangladeshis, who tried to sell bunches of red roses to couples dining inside restaurants and got shooed out as if they had mental illness. This meant me—trying to buy a fake pearl and amber choker in the market, I smell the leather string jokingly to determine the exact status. I discover it is uncured rawhide leather. It smells rank. I wonder if I can put it in my carry-on luggage and not get stopped by the airlines staff. My expression riles the vendor, who says something so unbelievably bad that the whole tableful of browsing customers march off in protest.

Perhaps this hospitable couple had a cellar below their little trattoria where they kept a live tiger, feeding unwary aliens to the cat.

I met a predatory Roman the moment I stepped down from the Termini’s exit, stepping down from a train from Milan. The taxi-driver who had picked up me and my American friends demanded twenty euros for the taxi ride. The American friends, a nice, friendly couple with whom I’d spent a month at a scholar’s retreat, agreed without a squabble, smiling in their genial Mid-Western way. They waved aside my concern. I pointed out that my hotel-guide had told me it would cost 4 euros, but they didn’t mind paying extra. My suspicions aroused— I am used to taking cabs in Mumbai, where noone is to be trusted— I asked if I could be dropped off first.

“No, them first!” The taxi-driver said, with what appeared unnecessary force. Something about this didn’t feel right—my hotel was a four minute ride from the Termini. But because my friends smiled with such friendly trust in humanity, and because I was a stranger in town, I didn’t dare protest, and went along with the consensus.

The driver dropped off my friends outside their hotel. Then slamming the door, he got behind the steering wheel, and drove me to a nice, narrow street and told me to get off. It was a one-way street and he couldn’t drop me off to the door of the Hotel Des Artistes, he said. I looked left and right, and saw residences, but no hotels. I suspected foul play. I demanded he drive around to the hotel’s entrance. He scowled, and did a screaming U-turn into the alley. The alley, it turned out, was filled with posh residences, but there was no hostel in sight. He accused me of giving the wrong address. I demanded he drop me off to the hotel. The driver got in, slammed the door violently, and started to drive.

The driver drove, or rather speeded, down roads for about twenty minutes. The cab speeded through what felt like a highway. The driver gripped the steering wheel tightly. We appeared to be going a hundred miles an hour. That’s when I knew something was wrong. The hotel directions I had downloaded from the Internet had told me I would get to my hotel in four minutes. I had now been in the taxi for almost half an hour. “Stop!” I said. Or rather, I threatened. I can be threatening when I want, and even the most carnivorous of Roman taxi-drivers doesn’t like to be caught in a taxi with a screaming female. Finally, he stopped.

The driver opened his door, and stormed out. He was screaming and swearing in Italian. The road was deserted, except for two women who stood by their broken down car. I shoved 20 euros into his hand, started to drag my suitcases towards a building. The driver followed me, and grabbed the suitcases from me. “Thirty-six euros! Thirty-six euros!” he screamed. He shook his fists into my face—I sensed imminent physical violence. He was obviously in the midst of some intense hate orgy. His face was twisted with ugly rage.
“Please!” I begged the women by the road. “He’s supposed to take me to the hotel. The Hotel Des Artistes!” The younger of the two women, with thick black mascara, and red lipstick, an almost cartoonish figure of housewifely femininity, shakes her head: “No English. No English.”
They wanted no part in this scene, except to enjoy it vicariously. It was obvious these women would enjoy the spectacle, and whatever gory end it might bring, but they would not interfere.

The women’s lack of interest in the proceedings strengthened the man’s resolve. He got even more violent. He started to drag my suitcase towards his taxi. “I call the police!” he screamed. “Now thirty-six euros!”

I felt like I was caught in some movie of the Second World War—one where fascism still reigned supreme. This was not the Italy that Americans love, the “Eat, Love, Pray” variety of Italy. This was Italy as the Jews had known it between 1930s and 1940s. This was Italy as the Ethiopians had known it. This was Italy that Mussolini had created and reigned in. This was Julius Ceaser’s Italy, and it certainly did not drip with olive oil and homebaked bread. It stank of hatred. I looked around in desperation. The highway looked deserted. I was caught in twilight in the middle of Rome with a fascist driver and two fascist sympathizers. It was clear to me I would become a statistic of violence unless I took action.

That’s when I noticed the three men walking down. One of them was dark-skinned—he looked Arab, or African. “Please, I am supposed to go to this hotel! Tell me where it is!” I say, pointing to the map in my hand. It is amazing how you can’t really scream “Help!” like in the movies. In real life, everything is muted. A taxi-driver may be on the point of committing a violent crime, but all you can say is: can you please help me find my hotel?, praying that the people interceding will understand the language you speak.

The young man stopped. He came towards me. In broken English, he asked: “You need to go to hotel?” He seemed to know that something was wrong, but there was nothing in his response that reacted to the screaming driver. Instead, he appeared, on the surface, like a stranger stopping to help another asking for directions. Later, I would realize that the way he had dealt with the situation had stopped it from escalating. I looked at him in gratitude. The presence of the man caused the hyperventilating taxi-driver to walk back towards the taxi, punching his cellphone. “Polizia, polizia,” he screamed. He slammed the door, and sped down the highway. As he went, he screamed that he was calling the police on me.

The presence of the soft-spoken young man made me feel like I had stepped from some brutal Roman drama into the soft light of the modern world. As I start to walk away with him, the women called out to me: “Don’t go! Pericoloso! Pericoloso!” Black man dangerous, they warned, as if their abysmal indifference to my physical safety in the presence of their own countryman had transformed to acute concern now that I showed trust in the men they distrusted the most.

I ignored them, and walked away. “Which country are you from?” he asked me. “Nepal,” I replied. “And you?”
“Ethiopia.” Ah, Ethiopia! I had many Ethiopian friends, people who I had loved and spent many good days and nights with in New York. I try to tell him about these friends. My saviour’s English is basic. He nods at my effusive descriptions of New York’s wonderful Ethiopians—I am unsure how much he understands.

The Ethiopian man, very handsome and rather young, helps me with the suitcase till another road, and now I see that we are in the middle of a metropolitan area. There are gracious buildings right behind what I had taken to be a deserted highway. There are also a lot of cabs. “What if the taxi-driver will behave the same as the first one?” I ask, trying to communicate to my saviour with sudden anxiety.

The man views me with a certain wariness—he’s not certain that I won’t try to hold on to him and try to follow him back home, which would cause him inconvenience. At the same time, we are two young strangers, caught up in a strange moment of trust. I have put my life into his hands. There is something about this situation that creates an immediate intimacy.

“Don’t worry. Not all are the same,” he says. His voice is reassuring. He wouldn’t put me in a cab with another fascist. He hails an idling cab, and says something in Italian to the driver. I look inside. Its an older man with salt and pepper hair. I look at him with distrust and weariness, but there is no option but to get in. I try to think of an appropriate gesture of gratitude, but nothing comes out, other than a tired: Thank you so much! I think of giving the handsome Ethiopian my email, but it seems like an imposition, under the circumstances. It is obvious that the man has done no more and no less than what he would have done for any other human being. I don’t want to burden him with giving my contacts, with the added obligation of having to call and check up on a total stranger.

The driver is silent as we drive down to the hotel. He seems to realize what has just taken place, without being told about it. The drive takes approximately ten minutes, and I realize that the fascist had driven me around in circles. I hand another ten euros to the driver—idiot tax, I tell myself silently. The driver, as if to hammer home the point that not all Romans are vicious conmen, hands me back my change with care.

If this had been my only bad experience with a Roman taxi-driver, I would have thought it was an isolated case. But it happened again. Twice. A few days later, I would find myself taken on a merry-go-round by another taxi-driver, and have to drag my bags three hundred meters down a crowded road after shelling out another ten euros for the privilege of being scammed.

The third, and final time, I would be taken to the airport by a van driven by a man who is so angry, and so violent, I wonder if I will reach the airport alive. His anger is so extreme he appears to be a caricature from a bad film. His eyes bulge, he fumes. He is so angry at having to drive me to the airport he forgets to take the fare from me. I have to remind him as he wheels away to go— he turns back, snarls at me, snatches the money as if he cannot believe I called him back to pay him, and marches off. As I watch his back, I realize I’ve never been this glad to leave a city.

But it wasn’t just taxi-drivers and vendors. The Hotel Des Artistes, whose cheery lobby is filled with young Spanish tourists and a few camera-toting Japanese, takes one look at me and puts me in an abandoned building with a clanging iron gate. There are bunk beds in the ground floor. It is completely empty, except for me. I feel like it’s the nineteen seventies, and I’m the black woman who can’t enter the white establishment. They tell me the main building is full. I don’t believe them. This is obviously the dungeon they maintain for undesirables—although undesirables pay the same amount of money as desirables.

This building will be an important setting for another Roman drama, which I go on to recount to you, dear reader, at the expense of your disbelief. I can hardly believe it happened to me. The surrealism of this experience is only heightened by the clarity of my own knowledge, and the strangeness of its occurrence the chilling cold light of a December night in Rome.

The day after the encounter with the fascist taxi driver, I was invited to a family dinner with the friendly Mid-Western American couple. They had an American cousin living in Rome. Of course, I tell them all about the taxi-driver. I realized it sounded pretty unbelievable after I had repeated it—or perhaps they felt, in their lawsuit-wary American minds, that they were at fault, so they tried to minimize the incident. Either way, I felt like I had blown it up to more than was necessary. The story is repeated to our hosts for the night.

The American cousin, lets call her Cynthia, and her Italian husband, lets call him Marco, sympathize. Roman taxi-drivers are the worst, Marco immediately agrees. We enter the small flat, which seemed to be full of the colours of Italy—corn, chilli, green vegetables. We joke and laugh over glasses of wine. The young daughter, in her twenties, is also present. I sense a return of normality.

However, events soon take a strange—dare I say weird--turn. An American man shows up for dinner. It becomes clear, over the course of the evening, that this American is a “family” friend—and one who is so familiar he can order Marco around and tell him what to do in his own house. He is friend and companion of Cynthia, and one who shares her culture far more than Marco ever could. The American is wry, smart, funny. He makes everybody laugh. He is companionable with the young daughter. It becomes clear to me that Cynthia and this family friend share more than just a friendship. In fact, I get the strange sense that they’re the married couple, and Marco, who hides in the kitchen, is an extraneous being who happened to come along for the ride, by accident.

Two more things happen which may have triggered what happened next. I ask Marco for an old Italian song. He enthusiastically raids his collection on his computer to make me an Italian song CD. bonna notte, bonna notte, amore mio… We glance at him at work—and open on the desktop browsers are multiple hardcore pornography sites. Does this man spend his time surfing hardcore porn sites to dispel the frustration of his marriage, I wonder. As the thought crosses my mind and I move away from the computer screen to give him the dignity of privacy, He clicks the open windows shut causally. But he is aware that we’ve caught a glimpse of his private world. Maybe this is what fuels what comes next.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that after dinner, we all sit down to watch a 16mm home film. The film features Cynthia’s mother talking about the most wonderful event of her life—namely, the time when her husband decided to take her and the five young children for a world tour, even though they had very little money. The story was magical and wonderful. It felt like a sharing, and communing, of family life that was very important to Cynthia. The American companion loved hearing it. Marco didn’t seem to understand the voice of the old woman in the film. He stood behind in the shadows, puttering in the kitchen. I wonder how he managed to survive these cultural exclusions. Even I, a Nepali who had studied in the States, understood, and enjoyed, the story in a way he never could. This may have been the other fuel for the Roman rage that came next.

Marco drove us back to our respective hotels. I asked, out of previous experience, to be dropped off first. “What’s your hotel’s address, sweetie?” my American friend asked me. This woman was motherly and gentle, too naive about the world in many ways. Some intuition warned me to be careful. I shouldn’t reveal my hotel’s location. The last thing I wanted to reveal was the fact that I was living by myself in a dungeon in an abandoned building at what I’d now termed “The Hotel Des Scam Artistes”. I said I didn’t remember the number, just the street. Just drop me off in this corner, I said causally.

But the corner of the street was not safe enough. At twelve, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I was startled to sudden wakefulness by a heart-pounding sound.

“Go back to America, you bitch! You fucking bitch, bitch, bitch!” The voice screamed. “Go back to America!!!” I came awake with crystal-clear clarity. Somebody was running up and down the street outside my window thunderously. The voice belonged to a man’s, and the man was drunk. I looked up at the window, and realized that it was at street level. Only a grille and a thin pane of glass separated him and me. If he sensed I was inside, he would break the glass with a kick, I was certain. I could see booted feet pounding up and down the street. His voice, in the haze of half-sleep, sounded thunderous. I held my breath. If I shifted in my creaking bed, he would know I was a few feet away from him. I felt exposed—a little animal curled up in her zoo cell, hiding from the evil humans. He could break the glass and throw a lighted match into my room, and I would die engulfed in the blaze. The building was empty—I couldn’t call out for help to anybody inside it. If I tried to leave, I would be strangled, and left to die on the street. Nobody would come to help me. The heart-pounding fear I felt was not so much at the anger and loathing in his voice. It was the strangely vulnerable feeling of being betrayed, once more, by somebody who had appeared friendly and normal.

My American friends, when I recounted this incident after some soul-searching (my concern was more for Cynthia, married to this maniacal man), absolutely refused to believe this incident could have anything to do with Marco. They laughed. Are you sure it was his voice? Did you really hear…was it him? You say the voice had an accent… They asked me so many questions I started to doubt myself. Perhaps it had been a random incident. Perhaps an individual with a grievance against a woman from America had decided, the same night I had attended a rather strange dinner party, to run up and down the pavement next to where I lay sleeping for the night, screaming and choking on verbal abuse. Such incredible coincidences have been known to happen. But I doubted it. My fear was for Cynthia—I felt the incredible hysteria in the voice that asked the woman to return to her homeland was less for me, and more for her.

My American friends laughed. They said Marco adored Cynthia. Nothing would occur—no violence would ever take place, she would never be found in the garbage with her head inside a plastic bag. And later, I wondered if it wasn’t true. The passive-aggressive way in which he had assuaged his anger, by deflecting it to a complete stranger, would make sense from a man who would never dare use it to confront the subject of his real grievance. And that, I decided, is what was wrong, in a nutshell, with Italy. People were angry, but their anger was spewing at all the wrong people, not the ones who caused them grief. Their economy was water-logged, they were run by corrupt mafia, they had some of the highest rates of unemployment in Europe, but instead of kicking out Berlosconi and his cronies they turned their hatred instead to enterprising Bangladeshis and naïve tourists from Nepal.

This series of strange mutations of friendly people into ugly monsters didn’t stop. My friend Maria, anarchist, lover of African drums and activist marches, invited me to stay over with her in her sister’s apartment in Roma. Maria was one of my best friends in New York. I did not suspect she would turn into a monster. I took the train down from Florence just to see her. We had dinner, and saw a movie. The next morning, she asked me to leave—in the pouring rain, lugging three suitcases. She has been unemployed for several months, and living with her boyfriend in a very small apartment. I’ve talked about the scholars and filmmakers I met while in Italy, the fun I had in the scholarly exchange program I’ve been on. We’ve been living disparate lives. I sense economic resentments. She refused to let her boyfriend help me with my luggage to the subway station, which was several unfamiliar streets away. I managed to find the station, dragged my luggage down several flights of stairs, got into a train, and got out—only to find myself stuck at the bottom of a restless pile of people waiting for a dysfunctional escalator to resume its alpine climb. This is when I vowed I’ve had enough of Italy.

For one glorious day, I did walk through the entire city of Rome, seemingly stumbling upon all its great monument with intuitive ease, as if I was following a well-worn path that thousands of visitors had walked through. I needed no map. I seemed to know my way around town, going from the Pantheon to the Fontana Di Trevi, from St. Peter’s Cathedral to the Colosseum with effortless ease. And that is how I found the famous Trevi fountain—wandering down a lane, it just appeared in front of me. It seemed to me that there was some map already embedded inside my memory—a map that told me all about Roma even before it could tell me about itself. I had no doubt that in a previous life I had lived in this city, perhaps a hapless serf building some of these gigantic monuments and crushed under the weight of giant stones, perhaps a proud fighter fighting the lions in the Colosseum.

A Bangladeshi vendor told me I needed to toss a coin over my shoulder into the water with all those glorious statues. The water inside the fountain was sky-blue on that grey December day. I saw some strange characters around the fountain—an old man wearing clown make-up, a couple of freakish twins. I turned around, and tossed the coin it. “So you can return back to Roma,” he said in his thick Bangla accent. I was horrified. I thought I was tossing the coin in for good luck. I almost turned around and went inside the fountain to look for my coin. Two weeks in Roma had convinced me that next time I needed to explore an old civilization, I would choose Thailand.

The economics of an Italian vacation didn’t make sense. My eagerness to buy Italian goods—Venetian masks, the green and orange wool skirts, Murano glass bracelets, were greeted with active, and acrid, hostility. Later, I would discover those glass bracelets were now made in Taiwan, which may have been a reason for the unprecedented, and almost violent, vendor reactions. A stranger from Nepal spends a few thousand euros to come to Italy to buy a glass trinket manufactured in Taiwan, probably by migrant labourers, and then gets treated to the worst customer service ever. This didn’t make any sense. It made less sense when I saw the same trinket in a small lane in Benaras, India, being sold by the bucketful at a one-twentieth the price I had paid in Roma.

Rome wasn’t made in a day, and it takes more than a day to see it. So I spent two weeks wandering through the city. How could I not love all those crumbling monuments of past grandeur, the old facades of buildings from thousands of years ago, the Romans who seem to appear out of nowhere from small doorways? Rome was, to a Buddhist’s eye, a reminder of how useless, and how futile, it is to try to hold on to the artifacts of human civilization, because everything must, one day, decay.

And in that red mirror of Rome, I finally saw it-- the world coming to an end.
The city was in an orgy of shopping during Christmas. People were in a frenzy as they browsed through the stalls—the goods were so plentiful I wondered if all the factories of China had been looted to stock the shops of Italy. How many thousands of bonded and unpaid Chinese prisoners had worked day and night to duplicate the arts of Italy until every single sacred object could be bought for under ten euros in a street stall? Red lingerie was in my face wherever I looked. So was Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, advertising Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was unseasonal rain, so much that people were talking about old sites getting flooded and washed away by the rain. Global warming or cycles of weather changes that has occurred through millennia? The Romans I talked to preferred to think it was a geological occurrence, a cycle of weather patterns that had happened again and again over millennia. The activities of people, they said firmly, had no hand in the weather changes. The world, it was clear, was coming to an apocalyptic end. And all people could think to do was shop. And go to the movies. The sound of the fiddle was loud, but I could still hear the whole world burning.

Americans, especially white ones, were bewildered when they heard about my experiences. Isn’t Italy marvellous? They said. They all seemed to have had an “Eat, Love, Pray” experience. They were puzzled when I talked at great length about my fear of tigers and circuses.

I’ve finished my zuppa. The dwarf brings me my il conto. Papa, still holding a big knife, wipes his hand on his apron, comes forward and hands me a colorful card on my way out. His tired smile erases my suspicion, just as his soup had erased the cold. How could Romans with such good zuppa throw me to the lion, or the knife? I feel ashamed of my quick judgment. The bell rings as I walk out.
I am determined to return to that trattoria, and get one more zuppa before I leave Italy. But somehow Florence followed Venice, Capri followed Naples, bad pizza in tourist bistro follows bad pasta in overheated outdoor cafe, and I never make it back for zuppa. Just before my flight back home, I search for the street, just off the Termini, walking up and down the streets, the memory of Italian food as it should be made warming my freezing-cold bones. But for some reason, I never find the place again.

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Anno 7, Numero 28
June 2010

 

 

 

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