Eat, Pray, Love

Poor Giovanni! He asks in halting English if he did something wrong. Am I mad at him,
maybe? Did he hurt my feelings? I can’t answer, but only shake my head and keep howling.
I’m so mortified with myself and so sorry for dear Giovanni, trapped here in this car with this
sobbing, incoherent old woman who is totally a pezzi—in pieces.
I finally manage to rasp out an assurance that my distress has nothing to do with him. I
choke forth an apology for being such a mess. Giovanni takes charge of the situation in a
manner far beyond his years. He says, “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we
are only robots.” He gives me some tissues from a box in the back of the car. He says, “Let’s
drive.”
He’s right—the front of this Internet café is far too public and brightly lit a place to fall
apart. He drives for a bit, then pulls the car over in the center of the Piazza della Repubblica,
one of Rome’s more noble open spaces. He parks in front of that gorgeous fountain with the
bodacious naked nymphs cavorting so pornographically with their phallic flock of stiff-necked
giant swans. This fountain was built fairly recently, by Roman standards. According to my
guidebook, the women who modeled for the nymphs were a pair of sisters, two popular bur-
lesque dancers of their day. They gained a fair bit of notoriety when the fountain was com-
pleted; the church tried for months to prevent the thing from being unveiled because it was
too sexy. The sisters lived well into old age, and even as late as the 1920s these two dignified
old ladies could be seen walking together every day into the piazza to have a look at “their”
fountain. And every year, once a year, for as long as he lived, the French sculptor who had
captured them in marble during their prime would come to Rome and take the sisters out to
lunch, where they would reminisce together about the days when they were all so young and
beautiful and wild.
So Giovanni parks there, and waits for me to get a hold of myself. All I can do is press the
heels of my palms against my eyes, trying to push the tears back in. We have never once had
a personal conversation, me and Giovanni. All these months, all these dinners together, all
we have ever talked about is philosophy and art and culture and politics and food. We know
nothing of each other’s private lives. He does not even know that I am divorced or that I have
left love behind in America. I do not know a thing about him except that he wants to be a
writer and that he was born in Naples. My crying, though, is about to force a whole new level
of conversation between these two people. I wish it wouldn’t. Not under these dreadful cir-
cumstances.
He says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Did you lose something today?”
But I’m still having trouble figuring out how to talk. Giovanni smiles and says encour-
agingly, “Parla come magni.” He knows this is one of my favorite expressions in Roman dia-
lect. It means, “Speak the way you eat,” or, in my personal translation: “Say it like you eat it.”