The Food of Love (8 page)

all she had been allowed to bring. As the letter of acceptance from the Anglo-American University in Rome had breezily informed

her, ‘Closet space is cramped in even the grandest Roman apartments - and believe us, yours won’t come into that category.’

Before she could get to her suitcases, though, there was the

small matter of Passport Control. Like Passport Control halls the World over, the one at Fiumicino contained two separate areas:

one for locals and one for everyone else. A series of zigzags

painted on the floor, culminating in a yellow line in front of each little booth, indicated where you were meant to form an orderly

queue before stepping up to present your papers. That was the

theory, at any rate. In practice, only one booth in the entire place was open. Crammed into the tiny interior were three young men

in elaborate uniforms, complete with military hats tilted at jaunty angles, while in front of them surged a great sea of travellers of different nationalities, all brandishing their passports in the air,

gesticulating, and shouting angrily at the trio of officials, who paid them no attention whatsoever.

From her position at the side of the mob, Laura was able to see

the cause of the delay. A young woman wearing tight cutoffs and

a very brief top, which highlighted the small tattoo high up on

one shoulder, and whose sleek blonde hair was threaded with the

earphones of an expensive-looking MP3 player, was leaning up

against the booth chewing gum while the three men flirted with

her under the pretext of examining her passport. One of the officers even seemed to be writing out his phone number for her, an

action that caused the hubbub from those waiting behind to

double in volume. Eventually the young woman was allowed to

pass, though it was not until her impressively pert behind was

completely out of sight that the young men were able to drag their attention back to the job in hand.

When Laura finally had her own turn at the booth, she laid her

passport on the ledge and tried her very first’Buongiorno’.

The official glanced at the photograph, then back at Laura.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said in perfect English. ‘Where will you

be staying in Rome?’

‘At the Residencia Magdalena. It’s in Trastevere.’

‘Bene. I will come and meet you there on Saturday night. We

will go out on a date.’

Laura’s mouth dropped open. Then she laughed.

‘No, why not?’ he insisted, sounding a little hurt. ‘It will be

fun. We will have a good time.’

‘Scusi.’ This was one of the other officials, reaching over and

picking up her passport. He was wearing a more extravagant

uniform than his colleague so presumably he was the more

senior. He examined her passport minutely, turning it this way

and that.

‘Is there is a problem?’ Laura asked.

‘Si. The problem,’ he announced gravely, ‘is that you are so

much more beautiful than your photograph. I should like very

much to take you out to dinner.’

The third man said something rapidly in Italian. The first official translated. ‘Alessandro, he would like to take you out too. But

I asked you first.’

A very short nun pushed her way to the front of the booth and

started haranguing the men in a shrill voice. ‘Enjoy your stay,

Laura Patterson,’ the first official said, unperturbed, as he stamped her passport. ‘Prego? All three came smartly to attention and

saluted her as she walked away. The nun they waved through

without a second glance.

When Laura found the minibus that was to take her to where

she was staying, the girl with the small tattoo was already sitting in it, surrounded by a vast pile of luggage. It soon became apparent that this was Laura’s roommate, Judith. It also became clear that Judith’s interest in Michelangelo and Raphael was rather less than her interest in Versace, Prada and Valentino. She was majoring in Fashion Psychology but had almost been thrown out after a term:

her parents had insisted she go abroad in an effort to get her to concentrate on her work. ‘They wanted to get me away from my

boyfriend, mostly,’ Judith confided as they were driven at breakneck speed through the suburbs. ‘They seem to think I’ll calm

down if I’m not with him. He’s a vampire.’

‘What?’

he

You know. We drink each other’s blood.’ Judith dug into her

cleavage and retrieved a phial on a silver chain. ‘This is Jeff’s, and he’s got mine. Great farewell gift, huh?’

‘Right.’ Laura’s visions of discussing fifteenth-century painting techniques late into the night were evaporating rapidly.

After they had settled in - the letter had been right, by

American standards the apartment was minuscule - they set off to explore Rome, armed only with bottles of water and identical

copies of the Lonely Planet guidebook. It was hot, and both

women wore shorts. The reaction was extraordinary. Cars

sounded their horns like huntsmen sighting prey. Shopkeepers

standing in their doorways hissed at them like geese. Young men

on scooters - even those with girlfriends on the back, impossibly beautiful Italian girls with cascading black tresses and perfect burnt-umber skin - slowed down alongside them to call cUeh,

biondineV appreciatively, muttering rapid-fire suggestions.

‘Do you get the feeling we might be underdressed?’ Laura said

eventually.

They took to the subway, only to find themselves trapped in a

carriage with three beggars, a mother and her two tiny gypsy

daughters, who immediately surrounded them, clamouring for

money. Judith pressed a note into the smallest child’s hand. The money vanished and the child’s pestering redoubled.

‘No,’ Judith said firmly. ‘Finito. No more. Chiuso.” The beggars ignored her, pawing her eagerly with their outstretched hands. At the next stop a uniformed guard got into the carriage. The girls heaved a sigh of relief, then watched open-mouthed as the mother reached into the folds of her clothing and pulled out a fistful of money, which she brazenly handed to the guard before resuming

her harassment of the Americans unchecked. To cap it all, when

they finally got to the object of their journey, the Museo Vaticano, a nun picked them out of the line and sent them away for showing bare legs.

The next day had been Orientation Day. The first to stand up

to address the assembled students was Casey Novak, the president of the grandly titled Student Government. Casey smiled brightly

as she gave the assembled newbies the benefit of her own six

months’ experience. The food here was nice, if a little oily, but be careful what you ate - many restaurants had really gross stuff on the menu, like wild songbirds or veal. Remember to tell your

waiter you wanted clean cutlery for each course. Everything was

shut between two-thirty and five for siesta, and on Mondays and

Thursdays most shops were closed all day, which was a real pain

but you got used to it. Girls should wear a wedding ring to deter unwelcome attention. The university could provide a trained

counsellor if you got really homesick, though there were so many social activities on offer that you were unlikely to have time to get depressed.

‘What else?’ Casey had mused. ‘Well, CNN is on channel sixteen.

MTV is on twenty-three. There’s a good American music

radio station called Centro Suono. Italian music is truly awful, by the way, but not as bad as Italian TV. They use the same two

voices to dub every American show - there’s a guy with a butch

voice, and a girl who’s supposed to sound like a sex kitten, which is kind of weird when you’re watching Friends-which, incidentally, is on every Thursday evening.’

By the time Casey sat down to a scattering of applause, Laura

felt a bit like a moon-colonist - safe as long as she stayed inside her air-tight capsule with the other colonists, but surrounded by a

deadly atmosphere outside.

The next person to stand up was the elegant figure of il dottore.

‘Bienvenuti a Roma, la cittd eterna,’ he began. He spoke in

fluent Italian for a minute or so, then switched to English.

Welcome to the birthplace of Western civilisation. I promise that you are about to have the most extraordinary year of your life.’

This was more like it. Laura listened intently as Kim Fellowes

told them which art galleries had ruined their treasures with

restoration, and which were closed all day Monday. He told them

Which galleries had introduced half-hour time limits on viewing, which famous sights were ghastly, and which were exquisite. The torrner included almost anywhere frequented by tourists; the latter included most small churches. He even told them which guidebooks to buy: ‘Whatever you do, don’t get Fodor’s or the Lonely

Planet, unless you want to be taken for a tourist. Baedeker is probably still the best one. And some of the Italian-language art guides

are quite good, if a little insular.’

Laura had wondered if by the end of her year she, too, would

be reading guidebooks in Italian and, even more impressively,

finding them a little insular. She resolved to throw away her

Lonely Planet guide just as soon as she got back to her room.

‘But,’ he concluded, ‘if I could say just one thing to you about your year in Italy, it would be this. You are not only here to study the Renaissance, but to live it. This is the only city in the world where Renaissance masterpieces are housed in Renaissance masterpieces, where the drinking fountains, the bridges over the river,

the churches, even the city walls, were designed by the likes of Buonarroti and Bernini. To walk the streets, to eat in a restaurant, to have a conversation with an ordinary taxi driver about his football team, or to buy some fruit at a market stall is to be part of a

living work of Renaissance genius. Open yourself to Rome, and

Rome will open herself to you.’

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Casey said, standing up as Kim Fellowes

sat down. ‘The main place we hang out is an Irish bar, the Druid’s Den, particularly on Saturday nights. And there’s a baseball team that plays every Sunday.’ The cheer that greeted this remark

seemed to indicate that the majority of Laura’s fellow students

found Irish bars and baseball a rather more enticing prospect than Bernini fountains.

Luckily, Laura got on well with her roommate - better than she

had expected to, in fact. Her own reproduction Caravaggios and

Judith’s posters of death-metal rappers shared the apartment

peacefully enough, as did their owners, even if Judith’s vast

hairdryer tripped the apartment power-breaker every time she

plugged it in. The phial of blood, however, proved ineffective at warding off the temptations of distance. Every week or so Laura

would bump into one or other of the male students from the

course, half-naked, in the apartment’s tiny bathroom. Maybe, she thought to herself, Judith’s parents had known what they were

doing by sending her to Rome after all.

Little by little, Laura’s own days and nights fell into a kind of routine - lectures and seminars in the morning, followed by art

galleries or language lessons in the afternoon, and CNN or pizza in the evenings. Friday nights saw her at the Fiddler’s Elbow or the Druid’s Den with the other students, drinking Bud and watching American or British sports on TV. Occasionally they might go

to one of the little restaurants in Trastevere, and even more occasionally she might have a date with an Italian, each romantic

disaster being subsequently relayed by phone to Carlotta in Milan.

When homesickness crept up on her, as it did from time to time,

either she or Judith would make the trip down to Castroni’s and

hand over huge bundles of euros for a tub of margarine, some

sliced bread and a big jar of Skippy peanut butter. But then, quite by chance, she wandered into a little bar off the Viale Glorioso, and Rome - noisy, impetuous, colourful, chaotic - decided to

reach out and haul her into the dance.

At the restaurant, Bruno, unable to understand why nothing

was going right for him, shouted at the commis that the eggs

must be stale. He had never had this problem before with his zuppa inglese, and the meringues he was making had refused to harden too.

The unfortunate lackey scurried off to find more eggs. Bruno

felt bad. He knew it wasn’t the eggs. It was something to do with himself. To make dolci you had to be able to conjure yourself into a mood that was as joyous and light as the dishes you were creating But today he was distracted. He kept thinking about the girl in

the market, the girl he’d barely spoken to, wishing that he could have cooked for her the meal that he had cooked for Tommaso’s

girl last night. He could imagine her expression as she slid the first piece of lamb into her mouth, a mixture of rapture and astonishment, and then the gradual contentment settling over her face as

her appetite was sated by another mouthful, and then another…

He sighed, and tried to put the whole thing out of his mind.

The pizzas were cooked in the Roman fashion: thin slivers of

dough, as crisp as poppadums, slathered with a sauce of fresh

tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. Traditionally, a Roman pizza is

cooked for the length of time that the cook can hold his breath, and these had been fired to perfection in the wood-burning oven

at the front of the restaurant, making them hard underneath but

leaving the sauce still liquid.

To her surprise, Laura found she was starving. Last night’s

meal, far from leaving her sated, seemed to have awakened her

appetite, and she tucked in with gusto.