We’ve been in Rome the past week and in Italy for nearly three weeks, and in this citadel of Catholicism, I’ve learned a little something about sins. In the medieval church in San Gimignano in Tuscany, images of Lucifer and eternal damnation are painted on the ceiling above where the parishioners sit (or cower, if they look up and see what the hell’s above them, so to speak.) A horned, hulking devil crouches on the ceiling, grasping Cassius in one claw and Brutus in the other, while below him demons skewer adulterers in unmentionable places – well actually, in the places that caused the adulterers to commit the sin of adultery in the first place (adulterate? adulterize?) Near them obese gluttons yearn for platters of food that are just out of reach, and liars and cheaters and God knows what else-ers are punished by demons who seem to really love their work.
Michelangelo’s version of the last judgment on the walls of the Sistine Chapel is similarly cheerless, featuring Chiron beating the crap out of sinners with his oar as he rows them across the river Styx, where they are greeted by more gleeful demons who have just spent the last bit of eternity thinking up new ways to drive home the message of “you play, you pay.”
Amidst this milieu of crimes and punishments is a new entry: house exchangers who fudge about their houses. In Catholicism, I believe this is called a “sin of omission:” that is, failing to provide information in such a way that you are, in effect, lying without drawing a heavenly red flag and demonic penalty points by actually uttering an untruth. In House Exchange-ism, I believe this is called “bullshitting about your house,” or in Latin, domicilius bullshitius. We have run smack dab into a Casa BS that’s all about omitting certain details that, come to find out, are rather important. Here’s an example of a sin of house exchange omission: our current location was described as being a 35-minute train ride from Rome. This is technically true, but that sentence omits certain other truths such as the fact that the 35-minute train ride is preceded by a bus ride that can be either 15 minutes if the driver is operating the vehicle as if he were being chased by the hounds of hell, or 30 minutes if the driver indulges in what we call “mystery stops” where he pulls over on the side of the road and stares into the middle distance in a contemplative fashion, or even 45 minutes if the driver is fighting insane traffic caused by people leaving the beach to return to Rome. In the traffic jams, the normally two-lane road turns into a five-lane road: one lane for outbound traffic, one lane for inbound traffic, one lane between the lanes of traffic for death-wishing motorcyclists, and a lane on either side of the road for parked cars. The bus ride, in turn, is preceded by a 10-minute walk to the bus stop. So with the walk, the shall we say “mercurial” bus schedule, and the train ride, a good hour-and-a-half is taken up in getting from our house exchange house to Rome. Then, once we’re in Rome, we face the exciting Roman subway, all two lines of it, or the city buses, which apparently went on strike a few days ago, which explained – unfortunately, in hindsight – why we stood for a bloody half hour at a bus stop waiting for a bus that never materialized. I find the effectiveness of a strike is somewhat lessened when no one knows it’s happening, and the absence of a workforce is felt not as a political statement against oppression and poor wages but as just another instance of crappy service.
So to say that the house exchange house is a 35-minute train ride from Rome is sort of like saying that Nixon left office abruptly while failing to mention that pesky Watergate affair.
But I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it takes us the better part of 2 hours to get anywhere in Rome because there are undeniable perks about where we’re located. Yes, it’s one of those glass half-full/half-empty situations. We’re in Torvajanica, which is on the Italian coast southwest of Rome. It’s a little beach town clustered along the sandy shore and I’d like to say it’s adorable or quaint but I can’t because it’s kind of a dump. It’s a cross between a Mexican beach town and a smaller, off-season New Jersey beach town, a place that’s in transition but it’s not clear if it’s going up or coming down in the world. At the moment, it’s not particularly ugly but it’s also not particularly pretty. Our exchange is a 2-bedroom apartment on the ground floor that the family bought in the early 1990s and used throughout their children’s childhoods, which accounts for the detritus of 20 years that’s shoved into every closet and scattered across every countertop. When you are traveling for four months, you cook whenever you can and that requires at least one flat surface in a kitchen not covered by plastic cups, mismatched salt-and-pepper shakers, assorted wicker baskets, and half-used bottles of olive oil. God knows I am all too familiar with how your belongings can creep up on you, but there’s a microwave in this apartment that I swear the Allies brought with them when they landed, just down the coast from here, in WWII. Then there’s the toaster, which is less effective than simply laying slices of bread out on the terrace in the direct sunlight.
However – and here is where we get into the “glass-half-full” part of this situation – however, there is a beautiful, wrap-around yard that is a pure delight to sit out in, with stone walls covered by masses of blossoming jasmine that scent the air, and cool breezes. There’s also a patio with a regulation-sized ping-pong table, and that counts for something when you’re traveling with a 13-year-old. And of course, there’s the beach, which is just a block away.
The Italian beach scene is not what I imagined, at least not around here, which is certainly not Capri or the Riviera. The beachgoers are mostly families and couples, plopped down in the sand for a nice day out. Most look pretty good but there is the occasional man wearing a speedo bathing suit who causes you to avert your eyes to avoid permanent retinal damage. There are lone salesmen who roam the beach peddling jewelry and sunglasses, and they’ll come up to you and stand, arms outstretched with their goods, and just stare at you even after you’ve said “no thanks” in every known language, including that weird African language that consists entirely of mouth clicks. But it’s a sandy beach and the water is shimmering blue and you can’t go too far wrong with that combination.
So there are some big benefits from our location. Plus the fact our house exchange partners met us in Rome and the man took Jeff and Max here in the car with our suitcases, and the woman took me via the train-bus connection so I would know how it works, all of which was very nice. Plus they then toasted us with a bottle of champagne and drove us to a nearby restaurant to pick-up some take-out for dinner, so what’s not to love? I’ve personally always followed the “out-of-sight, out-of-your-hair” approach to our exchangers, and made it my business to be out of our house when our exchange partners arrive and away from it while they are there, but who’s to say that actually meeting the people whose home you are using isn’t, in fact, a very rational idea?
Along with the beach, the yard, and champers-upon-arrival, this exchange allows us to see a part of Italian life that we’d never otherwise witness. Like the train into Rome. There are two kinds of trains. There’s a new, shiny train that has no internal doors through its entire length, meaning that you can stand in the first car and look down a stretch of ten cars to the last car with no interruptions, like staring down a long silver tube. The other kind is like a classic New York subway train, covered with graffiti and old as the hills that rattles so hard you literally can’t hear yourself speak. The train, old or new, is filled with commuters: it’s sort of like the MARC train from DC to Baltimore. There are a few well-dressed businessmen but the rest are shop girls or workmen, going to work or coming home, and there’s not an American – or for that matter, an English speaker – among the lot. To be among regular Italians, and stay in a beach town where we are absolutely the only Americans, is a big plus in my book.
So too is the ability to see weird, freakish or funky things, which you can do much more easily when you’re walking down streets, waiting for buses, or bouncing along on trains. We were captivated this week by a clearly crazy woman who boarded the bus wearing a fetching home-made bonnet crafted from what appeared to be colored paper coffee filters folded into an intricate arrangement that resembled a kerchief. She’d also edged her blouse in an eye-catching border of duct tape, which she’d also used to create a stylish matching belt and attractive purse. Accessorizing with duct tape has never occurred to me, but she pulled it off, proving that even insane Italians still have style. She was like a poster girl for hardware chic, the “Miss Demented December” in the hardware pin-up calendar.
If we weren’t staying out in Torvajanica, we would never have had the opportunity of living next to an Italian deaf-mute family. You may ask yourself: how did I know there was a deaf mute family next door since, presumably, they’d be about the quietest family on the block? It was the bellowing screams that first caught my attention. For reasons I simply do not understand, and here I am admittedly running the risk of a serious politically incorrect observation, both the man and particularly the woman insist on verbalizing even though they can’t hear each other. It’s one thing if one was deaf and the other was not, and they exchanged comments both via hand language and the spoken word, but in this case, both the man and woman are stone cold deaf. I tell you, it comes as a bit of a shock to be in the kitchen, working away on the two inches of uncluttered counter space, and hear what sounds like a guttural scream followed by a hollow shout-moan coming from the next-door yard. It’s an unsettling sound, there’s no two ways about it, and it draws you up short when you hear it. I glanced over to their house in shock and there they were, framed in their kitchen window, signing each other and bellowing at the same time, and since they are Italian, they are expressive signers: arms flail as they spell out words, shoulders shrug, heads bob, all the time their fingers are talking a mile a minute and they’re interspersing their dialogue with the occasional guttural roar (man) or high-pitched wavering shriek (woman). It proves that no matter your handicap, you’re an Italian first and foremost, and that means you’re going to talk a lot whether or not your partner can hear you.
Italians gesticulate and remonstrate; their sentences tend to sound like “I’m-a little-a whiny-a” accompanied by expressive shrugs and throwing up your hands in a waddya-gonna-do? sort of way. I wondered how this affected their signing: does a deaf Italian sign differently from a deaf German? I imagine a deaf German must have to go home and soak his hands at the end of a long day since German words are about six thousand letters long and would be a real pain to spell out, but I also bet that he gets the job done with a minimum of dramatic remonstrances and expressive asides. I can’t imagine a hearing Italian saying anything without using his hands for additional emphasis, which must create a challenge for a deaf Italian since how can you make grand sweeping gestures while trying to convey basic information like pick up a liter of milk on your way home?
Between Ms. Duct Tape and our shrieking next door signers, I thought we’d plumbed the limits of noteworthy behavior but that was before I watched the Italian maintenance workers “fix” a leaky toilet in the ladies room of our local train station. The experience made me nostalgic for DC as it evidenced the same commitment to quality craftsmanship that I’ve come to expect from DC service providers.
There were two workers tackling the problem: an older guy wearing a baseball cap and his younger colleague. First they stood and stared at the toilet, which was continually running. Staring seemed not to fix it, much to their irritation. So the next repair step was taken: getting a mallet and hitting random parts of the toilet bowl, the flush lever and the pipes. Again, disappointment. The third step of discussing the problem also failed to result in the longed-for repair. Drastic action was needed. So the older maintenance man set about hammering a nail into the doorjamb and then trying to latch the door shut with it. The problem would evidently cease to exist if no one could see it, a sort of plumber’s version of a tree making no sound if it fell in the forest without witnesses. But a particularly hefty whack caused the nail to bend over, at which point the younger man threw up his hands in despair and stalked off: no man should have to put up with these kinds of trials. The bent nail meant the door’s latch wouldn’t attach to it, throwing a real monkey wrench – so to speak – into the plan of simply closing the door on the problem. Creative thinking was called for and luckily, our man was just the fellow to do it. He walked over to a piece of railroad equipment that was parked on a nearby set of tracks. It looked like something you’d send out to repair a stranded train with. Our guy zeroed in on a clump of cables running out of the machine’s engine. He reached over and grabbed one of the cables and gave it a good tug, freeing it from the bundle of cables. He then pried a wire out of it and, getting a firm grip on it, ripped the wire free. Back he walked to the toilet door, the wire dangling from his hand. In a quick second he’d wrapped it around the latch and run it over the bent nail, and then twisted it tight. The door was now wired shut. Problem solved! Of course, bad news the next time someone tries to fire up the railroad equipment to go help a stranded train – there will be some wiring surprises there for him to deal with! But the immediate issue of the pesky toilet had been resolved, though we could hear the sound of the water gurgling as it continued to run, unchecked, in the toilet bowl.
As far as our intrepid maintenance man was concerned, the problem was solved. He turned away from the bathroom, grinning with satisfaction, and it was then that I saw the single word emblazoned across the brim of his cap: GENIUS. Really. So true, I thought to myself, so very, very true.
So on balance, I have to conclude that the 2-hour commute and ancient household appliances and general clutter of our house exchange house are all worth it. In fact, it could be said that finding this house exchange was – well – pure genius.
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