Eat, Pray, Love

guage, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose her words. He
said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger—which she never does, be-
cause she’s a good Anglo-Protestant—then she would have written all over that wall in her
native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous
and potentially deadly when they do blow up.
“A savage people,” he diagnoses.
What I love is that we all had this conversation over a nice relaxed dinner, while looking at
the wall itself.
“More wine, honey?” asked Maria.
But my newest best friend in Italy is, of course, Luca Spaghetti. Even in Italy, by the way,
it’s considered a very funny thing to have a last name like Spaghetti. I’m grateful for Luca be-
cause he has finally allowed me to get even with my friend Brian, who was lucky enough to
have grown up next door to a Native American kid named Dennis Ha-Ha, and therefore could
always boast that he had the friend with the coolest name. Finally, I can offer competition.
Luca also speaks perfect English and is a good eater (in Italian, una buona forchetta—a
good fork), so he’s terrific company for the hungry likes of me. He often calls in the middle of
the day to say, “Hey, I’m in your neighborhood—want to meet up for a quick cup of coffee? Or
a plate of oxtail?” We spend a lot of time in these dirty little dives in the back streets of Rome.
We like the restaurants with the fluorescent lighting and no name listed outside. Plastic red-
checkered tablecloths. Homemade limoncello liqueur. Homemade red wine. Pasta served in
unbelievable quantities by what Luca calls “little Julius Caesars”—proud, pushy, local guys
with hair on the backs of their hands and passionately tended pompadours. I once said to
Luca, “It seems to me these guys consider themselves Romans first, Italians second and
Europeans third.” He corrected me. “No—they are Romans first, Romans second and Ro-
mans third. And every one of them is an Emperor.”
Luca is a tax accountant. An Italian tax accountant, which means that he is, in his own de-
scription, “an artist,” because there are several hundred tax laws on the books in Italy and all
of them contradict each other. So filing a tax return here requires jazzlike improvisation. I think
it’s funny that he’s a tax accountant, because it seems like such stiff work for such a light-
hearted guy. On the other hand, Luca thinks it’s funny that there’s another side of me—this
Yoga side—that he’s never seen. He can’t imagine why I would want to go to India—and to
an Ashram, of all places!—when I could just stay in Italy all year, which is obviously where I
belong. Whenever he watches me sopping up the leftover gravy from my plate with a hunk of
bread and then licking my fingers, he says, “What are you going to eat when you go to India?”
Sometimes he calls me Gandhi, in a most ironic tone, generally when I’m opening the second
bottle of wine.