How can fiction compete with this guy? I carry a notebook to the roof of the Academy and try only to explain the complexion of stones, the distant blues of the Alban Hills, the lines of landscape.
The gaze widens and drifts; the eye is insatiable. The brain drowns.
We interview another babysitter, an Australian girl who says she is here in Rome “to party.” Then we hire Tacy. She arrives the next afternoon and says she’ll watch the babies for as many hours as we need. Shauna and I descend into the city clutching the address of a children’s store. We walk miles, get lost twice. We ascend an artery called via Nazionale, an infinity of silk shirts and shoe shops, plunging staircases on our right, mannequin after mannequin modeling in windows. Energy pours off the traffic, off the sidewalks; it feels as if we are pumping through the interior of a living cell, mitochondria careering around, charged ions bouncing off membranes, everything arranging and rearranging.
Here is a pair of stone lions with crossed paws; here is a Gypsy sleeping on a square of cardboard. Down the white throat of a street a church floats atop stairs. A town car slows beside us, a gloved hand on the wheel, red lace in the backseat, a Siamese cat on the rear window ledge. Outside a hotel, a man with a bellows camera on a tripod ignites his flashbulb.
How old it all seems! And how new!—centuries bursting past in flashes, generations pouring along the streets like tides, old women, baby carriages, Caesars, popes, Mussolini—time is a bright scarf rippling past our eyes, columns rearing and toppling, temples rising and silting over and rising again.
We share a piece of pizza con funghi so full of flavor it forces our eyes closed: the oil in the crust tastes like sun and wind; then there is the salty cheese, and the deep-woods taste of oyster mushrooms.
It’s dark when we find the children’s store. Everything is very nice and very expensive. They have one backpack baby-carrier and one playpen in stock. We spend too much on both, carry them into the street, and climb into a taxi to go home.
Piazza Venezia rattles toward us on the left, the hub of Rome, no traffic lights, buses swarming round pedestrians, a policeman on a box orchestrating everything with white gloves. The soaring marble ledges of the Victor Emmanuel II Monument—the Vittoriano, Altar of the Fatherland, a colossal cascade of marble platforms—loom above us, ten thousand tons of botticino limestone. Fifty or sixty gulls ride the wind above the chariots on its roof, three hundred feet above the street. They turn slow circles in the spotlights, never lowering their wings. Ghosts, or angels.
Not until we’re back in our apartment building, riding the elevator, do we realize we only know Tacy’s first name and her cell phone number.
The stairwell is dark. The apartment door is locked. My heart disintegrates in my chest. We will never see our sons again. I will have to talk to uninterested police captains; I will have to learn the Italian word for abduction. I will carry Henry’s pacifier in my pocket for the rest of my anemic, broken life. I will have to tell my mother, “Well, we found her on the Internet…”
Shauna slides her key into the lock. We creep down the hall. The boys are sitting on a blanket on the floor with their toys. They smile at us. Tacy smiles. Everything—the little round table, the counters, the bottles in the sink—has been cleaned.
October wanes. We have lived in Italy almost a month. At the Palazzo Senatorio, a twelfth-century palace in the Campidoglio, right next to the Vittoriano, six hundred dignitaries stand in their dark suits and listen to each other endorse the constitution of the European Union. Five thousand security people; two tractor trailers stuffed with flowers. In the afternoon two stretched-out BMWs race past us on the street, each escorted by three police sedans, sirens turning, black windows flashing past.
Pomp, power, importance. I sit in the Tom Andrews Studio and read chapter after chapter of Pliny’s Natural History. He is half-genius, half-lunatic. It is as though Borges has rewritten Aristotle, patched in some Thoreau, then airmailed it to Calvino to revise.
Pliny the Elder was born in AD 23; he became a cavalry officer, then commander of an entire army. He was chubby, fond of baths, hardly slept. By age thirty-six, he’d completed three works: a treatise on how to throw spears from horseback, a biography of a friend, and a history of the Germanic wars in twenty volumes. But the Natural History was his magnum opus and is his only extant work. Completed in AD 77, it consists of thirty-seven separate books and addresses everything from geography to crystallography to the ability of hyenas to spontaneously change their gender. His subject is the universe, from stars all the way down to polyps, and ultimately what the Natural History presents is a panorama of an ancient world crawling with myth and misinformation, but also elegant and ordered and deeply beautiful.
The more pages I turn, the more I find an endearing sweetness in Pliny; he is so curious, so ardent. The elephant’s “natural gentleness toward those not so strong as itself,” he writes, “is so great that if it gets among a flock of sheep it will remove with its trunk those that come in its way, so as not unwittingly to crush one.”8
Later he marvels, “Where did Nature find a place in a flea for all the senses?”9
I descend into the Academy library, find the complete Natural History translated and unabridged, and borrow as many volumes as I can carry.
For Halloween we dress the boys as a lion and a dog and stroll them to the Piazza Navona, an elongated oval in the center of the city packed with cafés and fountains. The streets swirl with light. Shadows flicker and waver like candle flames; the sides of houses, caught by the sun, glow like embers. Crows (all black like American crows, except Italian ones have gray on their backs, as if they wear a sweater tied around their necks) hop through the piazza and pick through blowing trash. All through the historic center, even though it’s eighty degrees, Romans model leather coats. We sit on a stair outside an apartment; Shauna unzips her backpack and mixes our last two bottles of American baby formula. Shutters bang and the engine noise of the city rinses everything else away.
All week I try to force myself to set aside Pliny and fiddle with scraps of my novel. I spend a half hour changing a character’s name across four pages of text, then finish out the hour by changing it back to the original name. Each morning the ice that has formed over my draft feels thicker, my initial enthusiasm fainter. Reality subsumes fiction; how can I write about France in the 1940s when the countless faces of Rome (in our 2004, in Pliny’s 77) swarm all around me? The brittle crust of the present fractures; my feet sink into the quicksand of antiquity.
By noon I’m reading Pliny again. He is self-deprecating; he is scrutinizing things no previous Roman writer had ever paid much attention to: centipedes, pinecones, ravens. In his world comets, eclipses, thunderclaps, birds, fish, spiders, fig trees, natural springs, sneezes, and stumbles portend events;10 honey comes from air, butterflies are born from dew, cranes regularly assemble to hold symposiums,11 and moles tunneling beneath houses can understand what is being said above them.12 Lightning bolts make catfish drowsy,13 horses will burst open if they are ridden across wolf tracks, and dolphins “answer to the name of ‘Snubnose’ and like it better