In fact, I absolutely didn’t want to write about marriage and divorce in this book, even if in the Italian way, but my mother insisted on me. “But it makes me sad,” I complained into the phone. “You shouldn’t neglect it, though,” thought Mom, “because it’s part of your life.”
It reminded me of the first time I went to Italy when I was 22 – how I celebrated my 23rd birthday on a rainy autumn day somewhere near Venice. I remember waking up at a UFO campsite near the city, and an Estonian woman turned over next to me and moaned in her sleep in Estonian: “What gray weather.” That’s when I learned one of the first Estonian words.*
I have already told you about how we went to Genoa and the Cinque Terre, how we met rude tourists in Pisa and how we drank strange cappuccinos served by the glass in Venice, whose inhabitants are said to be not real Italians. What else do I remember about that trip? To be honest, it’s mostly a good feeling: being young and in love. It was now November and on the cloudless days the dim sunlight shone beautifully.
My partner was gorgeous. I loved his edgy, wild nature about him. He loved her messy hair and saggy tennis shoes. He had thin fingers with rounded tips that perhaps didn’t know a manicure, but were prettier for that reason. I experienced true passion. I looked at my photos taken at that time. I am literally beaming with love. I imagined that love had to be just like this, had to feel like this, at least at first. You have to feel an immeasurable passion and wake up on a gray November day in Venice among tangled sheets.
Of course, there were some silly incidents with Italians during that trip, which made me feel at home. For example, in Cinque Terre we met an old man who was almost as tall as me, or even taller, and he wanted to turn his back to us to measure exactly which of us was taller (I think he was a centimeter ahead of me). It’s worth noting that I didn’t even know his name and he was already acting like we were related. I also have a photo of a student who had just graduated. I did it in Padua. The girl wore black tights and a cape and condoms inflated like balloons while her older male relatives took photos of her. I also remember the gigantic bottle of wine I bought in the Cinque Terre to make pasta alla puttanesca, which we ended up dragging with us throughout northern Italy for days on end. I also remember the wonderful frittatas, Italian frittatas, that were sold right in the main square of Bologna, where we both sat on the cobblestones while eating them.
We also ate while sitting on ladders and decks, and stayed in cheap rooftop cabins that families rented to travelers. When we woke up in Florence, we could look out the roof window at the red tiles of the city center, glittering everywhere. I remember how blessed that moment was. I also remember how we kept running into the train. My partner had the annoying habit of going to the bathroom a few minutes before the train left.
Somehow we managed to catch every train, even though he always jumped at the last minute. We discovered firsthand that in Italy trains never leave before the scheduled time, in fact a little later, so that all latecomers can proceed well. That said, we stayed at a campsite on the outskirts of the city of Venice, where the cabins looked like tiny spaceships. I remember that on that ship we argued over all sorts of trivialities, for example because one or the other of us missed a nice photo click.
We threatened to break up several times, but we made up the same day. This is how I imagined love. Love must be a dramatic and dangerous victory. Even today you can read articles about neighbors calling the police for an Italian couple who were particularly in love, living all night. They continue to argue and make up.
I later heard from someone that Northern Europeans tolerate such emotional outbursts only in small doses. These are cold climate people who like to sit by the fire and drink tea. Unfortunately, this observation has little to do with the reasons why that relationship ended almost 15 years later. Who knows what exactly it was. But undoubtedly the cultural tension cannot be underestimated.
2023-12-10 10:00:00
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