Uno, due, tre. What comes after tre? Quattro!
Uno: Inhale.
Due: Hand on rail.
Tre: Right Foot.
Quattro: Left Foot.
Exhale.
Uno. Due. Tre. Quattro, Cinque… My lungs are fucco under the weight of my backpacks: Uno on back, due on front.
Sie flights of stairs and I’m still climbing. The first thing I notice is the darkness of the narrow stairwell lighten. Then a small green velvet stool tempting me to stop. Then a Roy Lichtenstein print of a woman shh-ing my haggard breathing. Around the bend, a green door opens.
“Buongiorno!”
“Acqua?”
“Si, per favore.”
…
“English?”
Riccardo lives in a palace. But you will not find it on the tourist map for Genoa, nor the prints they sell on the piazza with a brilliant blue sea and pop out graphics. But his palace is grander than the Palazzo Spinola (with its fresco currently under construction) or all the marble of the Palazzo Ducale (with its crowds waiting to see the Van Gogh exhibit). Every room has lovingly been painted, and populated with numerous plants, propicated and lovingly entwined into every available space.
He shows me to the terrace (another flight of stairs), which he has lovingly turned into a roof garden; a vibrant centre in a swirling maze of streets. Sette flights of stairs and I have found flight; breathless but green and glorious.
The next morning, he sets out breakfast on the terrace. I am joined by two other Australian guests, as well as Riccardo’s neighbour Nicola. After we have finished our caffè but are still busy at work on our yogurt and fruit, a tall blonde woman sonters in. Her short, curled hair, floral pencil shirt and elegant black heels give her away. As what? I’m not totally sure. Beautiful? Indeed. Not from here? Potentially. Italian? Definitely.
“Ciao, Daniela!”
She responds to Riccardo in that fast cadence only understood by those with passata for blood. She gestures to the empty seat beside me, “Si, Si, of course!” said with a mouth full of biscotti. We do the regular small talk, where are you from? etc. I ask her what food is good in the area. She’s new to Genoa, she’s only been here a month, she says. Originally from Venezia (Venice) however says there is a good vegano restaurant nearby, but she can’t remember its name. Eventually she falls back into Italiano with Riccardo and Nicola, leaving myself and the other Australians to fend for ourselves.
I bump into Daniela on the stairs as we are both leaving for the day. My ugly sandals had caught up to her black high heels. We end up walking the same direction past vintage shops that she thinks are too expensive, and handmade handbags that we are both dazzled by. Eventually, she stops by a small green sign, “Ah, Soul Food! That is where I go.” It’s the only vegan restaurant in town that she was telling me about.
“Can I join, do you mind?”
Attending a local restaurant with a fluent Italiano speaker is like magic; doors are opened, smiles exchanged, and seats given, in such quick succession I barely know how I made it to the table in the middle of the courtyard with an Italian cola and Pesto Genovese in front of me. While traveling, I have been asking everyone I meet from elsewhere: “What is your favourite saying in your language?” My friend on the Bernina Express said “Küchenschrank” (‘kitchen cabinet’ in Swiss German) because it’s how you can swiftly identify a local. He was born in the Philippines but could form his mouth into the centre of a new continent. His r’s rolled like soft close doors after retrieving a glass to drink from.
That day my favourite English saying was “____ is my middle name”, which we say when we enjoy something so strongly that we believe it to be part of us. I told him this, but didn’t say that I have been fraternising with making joy my middle name. It feels kitschy but I don’t want the joy I believe in now to ever not be part of me. I want it to be my centre; I want to wrap around its glorious, grounding focal point. I want my name to cozy up either side, beside its glow.
When I ask Daniela what her favourite saying is in Italiano, she doesn’t know what ‘a saying’ is. She then lists off some swear words, but she complicates them. She says they can be a curse or a term of endearment. Something about this feels quite Australian. As we continue our conversation another phrase enters the chat “rifiuto el tesoro”, it takes us sometime to find an English translation but I come to “rubbish is treasure” and Daniela seems satisfied with that. I ask her to write it on the paper laid out under my plate.
I think she is talking about recycling, she is upset by how much trash there is on the streets in Italy “I find, in the most stupid places” she says, going on to tell me in scattered English about a particularly harrowing incident when she came across a discarded washing machine far inside a forest while out on a walk. We return to this image of a washing machine left in the forest throughout our conversation.
“We are the forest” Daniela says with her hand clutching the table. I write it on the paper. She tells me about her sister, who is in Switzerland teaching teachers about the environment so they can better tell their students about nature and conservation (it took us sometime for me to understand this nuance and that her sister wasn’t a teacher). I’m starting to build a picture of Daniela and what she cares about most. She reveals to me that she once threw away her broken washing machine because she didn’t know that she might’ve been able to fix it. There’s an immense guilt to admitting this. I tell her it’s okay, no one person can do it all, we all just have to do a little bit. “Maybe for one person that looks like not eating meat, or picking up rifiuto, or for another it’s educating the next generation, for another it might be fixing washing machines…” She smiles in agreement and relief.
Riccardo shows up with shopping bags full of supplies for tomorrow’s breakfast (two pineapples, a rockmelon, biscotti, yogurt, milk, coffee) and snacks for himself (wheat-thins that he eats dry straight from the packet). He exclaims something in Italia and mimes walking away again as if to avoid me. We all laugh. He sits down and he and Daniela start rattling off in italian. Every now and then, Daniela stops to give me a few nibbles of English or point to a word written on the paper, or add another. I follow the conversation with my head, if nothing else, turning towards whichever mouth is speaking louder. Riccardo is rattling off something about streaming and Netflix after asking if we knew a film called ‘Soul Food’ (like the name of the restaurant we’re at). He then shushes Daniela’s response. Gesturing to the upstairs window where the chef and apprentice are shouting at each other. We all stop to listen for a few moments. Then the conversation starts up again.
I laugh instinctively at a joke Riccardo makes. He stops, “You understand Italiano?” No, no, no. I insist. He says to Daniela in Italian something along the lines of: “says she doesn’t speak Italiano but goes rosso whenever I speak about her.” I laugh and clutch my cheeks. “See!” He exclaims, “You understand! Speak to me in Italiano, no shame.” He suddenly looks at me very gravely, “no shame.”
“Her boyfriend is Italiano”, chimes Daniela.
“No, no, no. One of my best friends is half Italian,” I correct her.
“Oh, sorry, sorry. My mistake.”
There is a beat, it would’ve been the perfect moment to say “I’m gay.” But I didn’t, probably for the best. It would’ve partly been to pry and see if they responded with clues to tell me if they were queer or just Italian. Earlier in the conversation I swear Riccardo’s phone flashed with a Grindr message and his bnb posting online boasted “LGBT friendly”. In many ways Riccardo should be the main character here, with his palace and its red door beyond the kitchen that you just know not to enter. To add to the mystery of it, a painted portrait of him is stuck to the red door and sometimes you hear him talking to someone behind it.
Riccardo should be the main character but he isn’t, he potters away to meet his friend and tells us no more. I secretly pay for Daniela’s lunch, she smites me in Italian and then says “Later we go for Apritivo, I pay!” I agree. “But first I have to buy a bikini. I go to beach tomorrow.” I ask follow up questions and she tells me that she is going to visit a friend of hers who owns a big holiday house right on the water. She is a banker, she tells me. She’s not literally a banker but Daniela can’t think of the right words in English. She is then distracted by someone who has thrown their cigarette packet on the street nearby. She mutters and goes and picks it up. “Rifiuto el Tesoro,” I say and she smiles again.
When I get back to the palace after a solo adventure, Daniela is out on the terrace folding washing without a shirt on. Her skin is golden and lived in. We take our sweet arse time leaving the palace, I take a photo of her seated at the kitchen table, and by the time we make it to Piazza Lavanga it is drizzling: with rain, lively conversation, and music.
She orders us aperitivo (vegano for herself and vegetarian for me). Two large Aperol spritz arrive and a little later, two even larger boards arrive piled with snacks. Perhaps because it is night, or because of the wine but Daniela opens up to my questions. It turns out she sewed sails for boats in Venice for many years but had to move to a small town to look after her mother during COVID. “Had to drive even to get a newspaper!” she repeats several times, underscoring the isolation and disconnectedness of the place. She says her yoga practice kept her breathing.
“How long have you been Buddhist?” I ask.
“About ten years.”
I ask her about her banker friend. They have been friends for forty-eight years. I cannot fathom how much two people would grow in that time (being nearly two of my life times!).
“Did you sometimes lose contact and reconnect?” I ask.
“No. Never.” She responds and then mimics a phone conversation between them. Her voice goes up some octaves and she gets excited and I laugh with her.
Daniela tells me that her banker friend had cancer a few years ago and it took one of her legs. “She’s the best I know,” Dainela says.
Later, I (cheekily) ask if Daniela ever married. “No,” (gravely) “I am free.” (with a glint in her eye). I imagine her on a boat with her Buddhist chants billowing her handmade sails. She talks of her current instability and how she is relying on the kindness of Riccardo and their mutual friends to house her and find her work. She is currently working at a Japanese restaurant owned by one of Riccardo's friends. I imagine her writing chants on discarded receipts.
“Nam Myo-Mo Ren ge kyo”, she writes down for me on the backside of that same piece of paper I had been carrying since lunch. Beneath it she writes her English translation: “ the armony [harmony] with the sound of the universe”. She puts down the pen and says “you are the actor of your life.” I make some exaggerated movement falling back into my chair in awe. “No alibit.”
“You are the actor and also the ambiance of our life. Don’t be an alibi.” I write madly on the paper as she speaks. “The joy is in each moment. If you believe this, you capture the joy of life… this life is a joy”.
It’s been several days since I said goodbye to Daniela and Riccardo, they both waved me off with a kiss on both cheeks. And Daniela gave me her copy of a book of Buddhist chants, which she handed to me in a handmade green pouch. The sacredness of this gift is so profound, particularly for someone I barely knew for two days. I have the green pouch in my bag now as I hike from Levanto to Monterosso, which begins with a steep incline but eventually levels out into a winding path through a thick grove. I get emotional and have to stop. I sit at a picnic table under a canopy of dark trees.I try to work out what I’m feeling. I think of that Irish poem about a poet being as lonely as a tree (Bi i do chrann by Mairtin O Direain).
“Lonely as a tree, in a field of trees is the poet”
I was told recently that I have an ability to bring the silliness out of other people (here I was just going through life thinking everyone is silly all the time). Now, it’s not to say that I now feel burdened with this knowledge, or that it is a burden to connect others to themselves but there is a strange loneliness somewhere inside it. Do people connect to me or just this silliness or art that moves through me (that I feel no real ownership of)? Do people love me or just how I make them feel? Is that the same thing?
Am I a lonely tree? There is an irony in this metaphor, I think. At ground level it appears that a tree is alone, but one need only look up to see how many dancing branches touch those from its surrounding neighbours. Below the ground there are more concealed connections. A whole network of veins, we have to imagine, runs beneath our feet and these trees would be using it to communicate to one another as I speak (and not in some weird tail-fondling way like that traumatised all of us as kids watching Avatar).
I heard about the Irish tree poem through a Podcast my friend Tori sent me. Whereby poet and prophet Padraig O Tuama reads it during an interview. He talked about the arrogance within the assumption that a poet knows anything more profound about loneliness than anyone else. He writes: “All of us, perhaps, trees in a field of trees, Linked and lonely; lonely and linked — but we didn’t know it”.
Then is it loneliness that links us? Isn’t this then also a ballad to loneliness rather than an ode to the linkages between all of us… don’t we also connect through silliness, and love, and listening to the passion burst out of someone in between sips of spritz? Curiosity of both the passion and loneliness of others has a revenant connectivity to it. I think of Daniela who split her language open trying to help me inside.
I look away from the trees and notice a faded sign, when I stop to slowly read it’s Italian, the only word I can make out is “rifiuto”. I get weepy. If I am a tree, I am a very well connected one. The world sings with synchronicity. A man further along the path has pulled out his guitar and is singing loudly in italian. He isn’t particularly good, his voice sort of stammers through the trees but you can feel that he is feeling it. And bad art happens to be my favourite. I think about how in Australian English ‘favourite’ is spelt with ‘our’ in its middle, as if what we love most is always shared.
Art and favourites are always about connection then; a way of tapping into that subaltern network that connects all things. I also think about how the italian word for rubbish (rifiuto) when directly translated into English means rejection. In english, we don’t think of rubbish as a rejection but more so use the word rejection in relation to people. I wonder if Daniela’s saying could also mean rejected people are treasure?
With joy,
from Roisin
No notes, mate. No notes.
Bellissima x