Elisabetta La Cava
MEMORIZING ROMAN ROADS
In the front yard of my grandmother’s house in Venezuela, behind a four-foot fence, stood a white metal pole. She didn’t hang a flag on it. I was eight years old and didn’t care about the heaviness of bodies. I often inchwormed myself to the top of the skinny mast where I could study the lay of the land. Concrete walls separated us from the neighbors. Topped with broken glass, they zigzagged between homes. The view was foreign and didn’t loop me to anything I knew.
Even the trees were different here. They grew untamed—nÃspero, mamón, tamarindo, guanábana—they appeared to grow fruit overnight. Next to me, the top of the mango had leaves as big as my hands. I snatched a shiny one, tried bending it to see how far it would curl before snapping. It felt like plastic compared to the foliage that scrunched all over the ground in Rome.
Mamma made it sound like we were under attack, that trees could hurt me. Don’t stand under coconut trees, she always said. Or, stay away from manzanillas, I heard her scream. I was tired of her warnings. I couldn’t even get in the shade.
How was I to find home here, when even the trees conspired?
From the top of the flagpole, I absolved them, entertained myself watching our neighbors coming and going from their homes.
Cumboto Norte was a newish neighborhood in 1977, packed with European immigrants. There were scattered Portuguese families on our five streets, and of course, there were Venezuelans. But so many of our neighbors came from Italy or Spain. All the white stucco houses were solid brick and concrete, fronted by green lawns, edged by hibiscus and bougainvillea. The backyards were manicured gardens shaded by fruit trees. I learned how to climb branches to get over the walls. I could almost always eat the fruit, except for the guayabas from the Vargas home. They were full of worms that looked like seeds. I’d once bit into one then realized the leftover part was moving.
I spotted Signora Torretti three houses down the street. She was always there it seemed, watering her Bermuda lawn. Buongiorno, she said whenever I walked by her one-story quinta. She’d lift her sunglasses and wink, return them to the top of her nose. Something about her eighty-year-old body in a two-piece bathing suit made me want to smile. Her skin was leathery little folds that crinkled over each other.
Across the street from her lived an old sailor by the name of Antonio, who’d built his house in the shape of a ship. He didn’t have a family. Every day, he spent hours clinging to the helm on what should have been the roof of his house but was instead the imaginary upper deck of his vessel. He wore white, and a sailor cap on top of his bald head. I watched him and envisioned his escape, where he turned into a monarch and flew off his deck, ending up somewhere on top of a foreign mountain.
A breeze carried the scent of ocean, but I could not see the ocean. Puerto Cabello was exactly what my parents had promised—an endless summer and a town on the beach. But it was foreign to my senses, I could not take it in. I did not appreciate, not even a bit, the giant, dish-sized crabs crossing neighborhood streets. I could not love them. I could not love anything, not even the starfish.
I was sick with nostalgia—a word made up of Greek words that binds homecoming to pain, a term people use to discuss melancholy, the longing for a place in time. My father had removed us from Rome. After thirty years of longing, he’d returned to Venezuela, the place he left when he was ten years old. Maybe he had cured his longing and transferred his pain onto me.
I strolled the neighborhood, talking to anyone who’d listen. They all said the same thing, that in the end I would forget Rome. How could I forget home? I promised myself not to, even when the whole place was pushing in, sound and scent, with people who crowded me with their perspiration. There’s a certain feel to the skin of the tropics. It’s in a constant state of moisture. There’s stickiness, the fog of bug spray, mosquitoes that fly like helicopters, choosing a single person to torment. Crickets take over the night in the tropics, with incessant chanting, and my grandmother’s house smelled of dampness. The lights in her living room shone incandescent and turned the night beyond into a black box that threatened to yank me out, to boomerang me into the void.
Something that in Italian transfers no meaning, malattia di casa, that holds no good translation in Spanish, enfermedad de casa. Homesickness—it’s like trying to catch words echoing in the room next door. It would have served me to know the meaning of nostalgia. But in my family, we didn’t talk about these things. Maybe we were too close to the pain to name it. We’d all left home at some point, losing ourselves in parts along the way.
To remember was my cure for forgetting. At night, I lay on a twin bed under a rectangular air conditioner. The steady hum sucked moisture from the air, filled my emptiness with sound. I rested my head on the pillow and could see above me—two airborne red ribbons tied to the vent.
I lounged under the window unit memorizing Roman roads, and committed to remembering those streets, the way from one place to the next, from my home off Via Fani, to the ballet on Viale Angelico. Sycamores—they muffled the honking of hurried drivers, led to my father’s job, to those wide, crowded sidewalks facing one thousand glass stores. We bought pizza al taglio, wrapped in thin brown paper. Under the window unit, I closed my eyes and imagined the hillside, the observatory under a night sky, as the golden Madonna stood staring at Don Orione. The mechanical hum became the buzzing of Vespas, and I fashioned an atlas paved in cobblestones, sketched my way to the most sacred place. I climbed the steps to the Cupola at St. Peter’s Basilica, much higher than any flagpole, gazed at my Eternal City of Angels.
To be sick with nostalgia is to exist in mourning, in self-immersion of looping sorrow. My Roman roads are my home pain. They’re drawn in chalk. With each sketched path, I reengage a state of re-feeling, of risentire, of becoming ill. My mind and heart produce a loop of hurt that touches the familiar, something that helps me feel at home no matter where I go.
Nostalgia—I’ve spent most of my life living in this word.
Elisabetta La Cava is a double immigrant born in Italy and raised in Venezuela who became a Texan some years ago. She is an MFA Candidate at Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been seen in Another Chicago Magazine, Stone Canoe, The Pointed Circle, Hispanic Culture Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, and others. She currently lives in Austin.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #46.
