Days of wine and insalata

( Part 1 )

I hardly know where to begin this rambling report on a month’s travels (and some travails) around Europe, so I might as well start at the very beginning, with the story of how early Beng and I turned up at the airport that mid-October afternoon for our evening flight to Rome on Lufthansa – only to find that the flight was being canceled because of a mechanical problem with the plane.

For someone so pathologically afraid of being left behind that he appears four hours before flight time at the check-in counter, bags and ticket in hand, a canceled flight is the horror of horrors; one has said one’s goodbyes, has shed whatever tears he has to shed, has begun thinking of how the skin of his cheeks will crinkle in a foreign clime, has begun to swill the cabernet in the cavities of his mind’s mouth – and then, poof! – it’s all gone, reduced to a humiliating ride in a cab back home, to the incredulous stares of relatives just beginning to pray for their pasalubongs, to opening cans of sardines for a hastily assembled dinner…. You thunder at the iniquity of having waited nearly six months for this moment, for your triumphal descent into the Eternal City, only to have it ruined by some stupid fuse in some stupid tube of metal. Ach, brave human adventure foiled by witless, feeble technology!

But there is, you discover, a God who shuttles you and your luggage to the last flight out to anywhere near Europe for that evening, a Cathay Pacific rerouting for Rome through Hong Kong, and your faith in machines and blinking lights is miraculously restored as you settle into your seat, charmed by the marvel of global travel and the power of airline agents to determine where on the planet you should have breakfast the next morning. You wear a sports coat to convey a studied blend of casualness and consequence, but you are, at heart, a boy in shorts thrilled by the revving of the Rolls-Royce engines, by the sting of the hot towel on your nose, by the free peanuts that roll down your tray like marbles. Wheee! We’re going to Rome!

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When in Rome… go to McDonald’s. I continue a noble tradition I began in Washington DC in 1980, and maintained through Osaka ’83, Detroit ’86, Macau ’87, Chicago ’90, Edinburgh ’94, London ’98, Amsterdam ’99, Auckland ’00, and Johannesburg ’02, a comparative study of Chicken McNuggets and KFC spicy wings in all corners of the world. I conclude that the McNuggets at Rome’s Stazione Termini are decidedly unfresh, chewy, and dry; I remember how soft and yummy the chicken was in Amsterdam’s KFC three winters past and want to weep.

It’s my first time in Rome, and I’ve come to Italy saddled with a famous loathing for cheese and a staunch refusal, also from boyhood, to eat most things green and healthy. I know I’m in serious trouble here, in the land of pizza, which I’ve described to unsuspecting friends as an open, week-old wound. But I’ve also come well-provisioned, with 16 packets of ramen in chicken, beef, and shrimp flavors, and four tins of spicy Ligo sardines tucked into my suitcase. I’ve decided to ration them carefully over the next four weeks, filling the yawning spaces in between by dashing to the nearest fast food joint. I wonder what my ultimate destination – Bellagio, up in northern Italy – is going to be like. Beng is blessedly, uncomplicatedly omnivorous, and is actually looking forward to eating real Italian and French dishes with names we can’t pronounce – you know the kind, anorexic quails, grilled capsicums, and artichokes made up to look like roses, served on plates fringed with chocolate dust, flanked by a bristling arsenal of forks and knives. I hate to be so philistine – no, actually, I don’t. I’m convinced that Western chefs (how come nobody calls them cooks, the way we say "Chinese cooks"?) spend so much time trying to surprise me with exotic fabrications, when all I want is a plain hotdog, so that I won’t be too surprised when the bill comes. But never mind that.

The McDonald’s outlets (yes, there are two of them within spitting distance) in and beside the train station are where Rome’s Pinoys meet on their Sunday jaunts. It’s hard to miss them – us – in their denim jackets and jeans, the nut-brown faces with tomato noses and watermelon smiles, chattering happily away in what must sound to foreigners like bird-talk. But I do make a mistake at the Internet café, where a Chinese-looking attendant, responding gamely to my English, leads me to a Hotmail station, and then hies back to her corner to chat with another kababayan in lively Tagalog. Later, on our way back to the hotel from the obligatory march to the Colosseum and the Forum, we buy bananas at a streetside fruit stand – where the vendor’s assistant grins and says "Hindi!" when we ask if he’s Filipino.

The next day – our one full day in Rome – we troop to the Vatican, and are properly awed by the paintings on the ceilings which, to spare your neck, have been thoughtfully reproduced in postcards you can pick up from the souvenir kiosks that dot the Vatican Museum every ten feet or so, just in case you forget. My mother has given us one holy mission: to locate, procure, and bring home two wooden rosaries (preferably blessed by the Pope, or some such bigwig), on pain of infernal banishment. Instead of looking for rosaries – dizzy and fatigued after a day without rice – I insist on finding a Chinese restaurant to cap my Roman holiday; there’s one, of course, near the Stazione, the suitably named "Hong Kong," where the service – as I’ve learned to expect from one too many Chinese restaurants abroad – is surly, but where the chicken with mushrooms is divine enough to make me turn tail and head for Beijing instead of Bellagio. (The chicken mami, on the other hand, is less than thrilling, made with round spaghetti noodles.) But duty beckons, and very early the next morning, waving tickets no one bothers to check (they don’t, either, on the Roman buses), we take the train back to Fiumicino airport, and then a small plane to Milan, and a chauffeured van to Bellagio.

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They call Bellagio "the jewel of the lake," and it’s easy to see why, once you get there – if you get there, which means surviving a zigzag road wide enough for a van on one side and a salamander on the other; but our driver Cesare’s an expert who honks his horn five meters before the curves, then whistles around them. Just when you begin to think you’ll see Naga City around the corner, a craggy white mountainside, flecked with tufts of cloud and swatches of early snow, appears out of nowhere, rising sheer up to the sky. A lake laps gently at its foot, the shoreline fringed by brick and mortar houses painted in creamy ochre. This is Lake Como, deepest of the glacial alpine lakes at over a thousand feet, forming a great inverted Y on the northern tip of Italy where it snuggles into Switzerland. Bellagio is the peninsular strip of land on the very fork of that Y; on the left, the lake leads to the walled market city of Como; on the right, to industrial, sports-minded Lecco. From Bellagio, on a clear day, you can see it all – the bowl of mountains holding everything together, the lake turning rose-gold in the autumn sunset, the Swiss Alps like a row of clean white teeth on the far horizon. The vivid beauty is almost painful; there is too much to look at, too much to imbibe, and over the next month we and my fellow fellows would explore the plenitude from every approach, yet never quite cover it all; there are too many villas, too many gardens, too many little lakeshore towns with names that sound like words of prayer: Cadenabbia, Menaggio, Varenna. We have been preceded here in search of refuge and repair by the impossibly illustrious : Franz Lizst, Mark Twain, Arturo Toscanini, among many others.

Cesare drives one final hairpin turn up a hill to a gated entrance that opens electronically (the kind of gate, one fellow would quip, where you expect to hear a sepulchral "Good morning, Mr. Bond"). A dirt road lined with olive trees ends on a bed of gravel in front of our new, albeit temporary home – the Villa Serbelloni, nestled on the hillside near the very top and center of everything, an 18th century mansion on a 50-acre estate, anciently the home of Pliny the Younger, that the Rockefeller Foundation received in a bequest from the American principessa Ella Walker (of the Hiram Walker whisky fortune) in 1959.

I have come here to work on a book – the much-delayed novel, Soledad’s Sister – hoping to unravel a knot in the storyline, and, dare I hope, finish a draft. Of Filipino writers I am only the most recent in a long line that began with NVM Gonzalez in 1964, followed by the likes of F. Sionil Jose, Edna Manlapaz, Marjorie Evasco, Eric Gamalinda, Ricardo de Ungria, Edel Garcellano, Marites Vitug, and Anton Juan.

You don’t have to be a creative writer or a journalist to come to Bellagio; over lunch of ravioli stuffed with spinach (no comment, other than that courage and goodwill save the day), I meet my batchmates – among them a South African novelist working on a volume of literary correspondence; an English scholar studying the Wycliffe Bible; a New York composer working with speaking voices and conversations; an Indian sociologist studying aging in the Netherlands; a pair of Ghanaian scholars writing a textbook on culture and feminism; and a Washington Post reporter doing a book on crime syndicates in the Balkans. We would later be joined by a Russian musicologist writing a book on American music; an American sculptor doing a series of works to complement a friend’s long poem; a Japanese-American weaver studying silk velvet techniques; Turkish-American sculptor employing mud for her complex designs; a Dutch sociologist analyzing human rights aspects of the Iran-Iraq War; a South African expert on higher education working on four essays in the field; and a 73-year-old Australian nun writing on the environment. Some have brought their spouses or partners with them, a generous feature of the fellowship.

Strangely enough I feel at home in the great variety of this crowd, all of whom turn out to be friendly and pleasant. I enjoy the company, but I decide from the second day onward to avail myself of the option of a "picnic bag" for lunch – in my case, a tub of rice, a tin of tuna, and, all right, some luscious slices of pomodori (tomatoes to you). More (and then no more) next week.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com..