Eat, Pray, Love

ent nationalities and ages. Sofie has just taken a four-month leave of absence from her good
job in a Swedish bank, much to the horror of her family and bewilderment of her colleagues,
only because she wanted to come to Rome and learn how to speak beautiful Italian. Every
day after class, Sofie and I go sit by the Tiber, eating our gelato and studying with each other.
You can’t even rightly call it “studying,” the thing that we do. It’s more like a shared relishing of
the Italian language, an almost worshipful ritual, and we’re always offering each other new
wonderful idioms. Like, for instance, we just learned the other day that un’amica stretta
means “a close friend.” But stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a
close friend, in Italian, is one you that can wear tightly, snug against your skin, and that is
what my little Swedish friend Sofie is becoming to me.
At the beginning, I liked to think that Sofie and I looked like sisters. Then we were taking a
taxi through Rome the other day and the guy driving the cab asked if Sofie was my daughter.
Now, folks—the girl is only about seven years younger than I am. My mind went into such a
spin-control mode, trying to explain away what he’d said. (For instance, I thought, Maybe this
native Roman cabdriver doesn’t speak Italian very well, and meant to ask if we were sisters.)
But, no. He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh, what can I say? I’ve been through a lot
in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after this divorce. But as that old coun-
try-western song out of Texas goes, “I’ve been screwed and sued and tattooed, and I’m still
standin’ here in front of you.. .”
I’ve also become friends with a cool couple named Maria and Giulio, introduced to me by
my friend Anne—an American painter who lived in Rome a few years back. Maria is from
America, Giulio’s from the south of Italy. He’s a filmmaker, she works for an international agri-
cultural policy organization. He doesn’t speak great English, but she speaks fluent Italian (and
also fluent French and Chinese, so that’s not intimidating). Giulio wants to learn English, and
asked if he could practice conversing with me in another Tandem Exchange. In case you’re
wondering why he couldn’t just study English with his American-born wife, it’s because they’re
married and they fight too much whenever one tries to teach anything to the other one. So Gi-
ulio and I now meet for lunch twice a week to practice our Italian and English; a good task for
two people who don’t have any history of irritating each other.
Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to
my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in thick
black magic marker) because they were having an argument and “he yells louder than me”
and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.
I think Maria is terrifically sexy, and this burst of passionate graffiti is only further evidence
of it. Interestingly, though, Giulio sees the scrawled-upon wall as a sure sign of Maria’s re-
pression, because she wrote her curses against him in Italian, and Italian is her second lan-