Born Round Read online

  I fingered them. Looked strangely at them. Looked strangely at him, trying to work some self-pity and pleading into my expression and get a pass. He didn’t waver. And so I bent to his will, or rather snapped to it, and spent the next forty-five minutes stalking La Roman like a human broccoli, each thigh banded in blue.

  A few days later I ran into one of my few acquaintances at the gym and asked him if he could shed some light on this floppy-shorts policy.

  “You can’t wear floppy shorts,” he explained, “because if you did, other people could see up your legs, to your crotch.”

  “But all they’d see is my underwear,” I said.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “The problem the gym was having was that some people were wearing short, loose-legged shorts and not wearing underwear.” He paused, then added: “Deliberately.”

  Now I understood. What was actually vietato was flashing your fellow gym users, and what many La Roman regulars most wanted to do wasn’t shoulder presses and a full half hour on the elliptical. They wanted to pose (hence the mood lighting), preen (hence the avoidance of perspiration) and give their fellow fitness enthusiasts a gander at the family jewels. That last impulse explained not only the policy on floppy shorts but also a sign posted in the men’s locker room.

  It stressed that it was vietato to shower with the door in front of your individual stall open.

  So what was it then? Why was the typical Italian I met so much narrower than the typical American?

  Were Italians walking more? I kept an eye out, and what I noticed wasn’t a pedestrian utopia. What I noticed were motorini (the Italian term for small motorcycles or mopeds) snaking between cars, skittering down cobbled alleyways, threatening to mow down anyone who stepped in front of them and blocking the doorways to stores and apartment buildings, which had been turned into unauthorized motorini parking lots. Romans were indeed less reliant on cars than Americans, but that wasn’t because they were doing anything as potentially attire-wrinkling and brow-dampening as traveling across the city on their own two legs.

  What about smoking? Was nicotine restraining the Roman appetite and accelerating the Roman metabolism? While Romans did, as a rule, smoke more than New Yorkers, that was becoming less true all the time. During my first months in Rome I noticed the NO SMOKING signs (è vietato!) proliferate, and that trend continued until I left nearly two years later. I met more Romans who didn’t smoke than Romans who did. And there wasn’t a noticeable difference in the relative slimness of one camp versus the other.

  Another slender-Italians hypothesis that I heard all the time was that Italians didn’t have Americans’ taste for sweets. But walk into any coffee bar, which is where seemingly every Italian man has his breakfast, and what’s he eating? A cornetto, which is the kind of pastry—often loaded with sugar, sometimes filled with custard—that’s designed to accompany his sugary cappuccino. If you spot him twelve hours later, shortly after he’s finished his dinner, he may well have a cup of gelato in his hand. Sure, he’s not drinking vats of Coca-Cola or Dr Pepper, but his day is bookended by sweets.

  By my observation the Italian secret wasn’t aerobic activity or cigarettes or an avoidance of sugar or even lighter drinking, though most Romans indeed chose wine over hard liquor and stopped at two glasses, three tops. It was this: they didn’t supersize anything.

  The 7-Eleven Big Gulp? Neither it nor any Italian analogue existed here. The Starbucks Venti-size cappuccino? Romans drank their cappuccinos from squat, old-fashioned coffee cups, and where Starbucks was concerned, Italy had sealed its borders tighter than North Korea’s. The all-you-can-eat buffet? That was, technically speaking, what the antipasti tables in some Italian restaurants amounted to, but no Italian would ever describe them that way, with an implied exhortation to test the limits of a stomach, with an emphasis on quantity over quality. Quality was what mattered to them, and it was most aptly savored in modest portions.

  That morning cornetto and that cappuccino were often the whole of an Italian man’s breakfast, sugary but too modest, in volume, to do much caloric damage. That nighttime gelato was usually the equivalent of one large scoop or two small ones.

  In Italy pasta came on plates, not in troughs, and the amount might not be more than a dozen forkfuls. A roasted chicken was more likely to serve four or even six people than two. As for snacking between and before meals, Italians limited that, if they did it at all. I seldom saw them tunneling idly into bags of chips or hauling in nuts by the fistful. On Italian bars the bowls of peanuts weren’t more than three inches in diameter and an inch and a quarter deep, and you plumbed them not with your fingers but with the kind of itsy-bitsy spoon also used to stir espresso. The spoon was there primarily as a hygienic measure, but its size was an indication of the restraint with which Italians parceled out their epicurean pleasures.

  In the end, Italians were generally slimmer than Americans for the plainest, most obvious reason of all.

  They ate less.

  The meals at the first dinner parties I attended and at the first Roman restaurants I visited were revelations, because I had erroneously equated Italian food with bounty, with superabundance, the defining characteristic of a Bruni family feast, in which food remained a badge of affluence and generosity long after anyone had anything to prove, in which the approach to special-occasion eating had its roots in a particular kind of Italian soil: southern, rural, peasant. Superabundance had also been a selling point of many of the red-sauce Italian restaurants that were the only, or at least the main, Italian restaurants in America when I was young. A bottomless bowl of pasta: now that’s Italian! Or so we were all led to believe, and I didn’t pay enough attention during my first spin through Italy in my early twenties to be disabused of that myth. I was too busy consuming nothing but bread and beer for days on end.

  This time I took note. I went to a fancy event in a Roman socialite’s sprawling apartment beside the Quirinale, the building where the Italian president lives, and watched white-gloved servers ferry silver platters. There was beef carpaccio in thinly sliced ribbons, and each of the guests around me took just one. I had been contemplating four or five. We were given clean larger plates for a subsequent course of fettucine with cream and mushrooms, and I figured the size and emptiness of this new canvas were signals to fill it up. But no: the modest hillocks of pasta that my tablemates gathered onto their plates had circumferences little bigger than a baseball’s. When the rack of lamb came, each guest took just one tiny chop. I’d allotted three per person on a few occasions when I’d cooked rack of lamb for company in D.C.

  In a Roman restaurant I’d order a primo piatto, or first plate, of ravioli, and there’d be just three or four round envelopes of pasta, each smaller than the base of a wineglass. The secondo piatto would come: maybe six ounces of filleted orata (sea bream) or rombo (turbot). Dessert would be modest and would be followed by an espresso that went down in only a few sips, continuing to make the point: the fineness of the sensations you experienced trumped the number or the duration of them.

  I was getting a reeducation in what constituted indulgence: not second and third helpings but a leisurely, prolonged time at the table, during which the virtue of a four-course meal—antipasto, primo, secondo (with contorno, or side), dolce—was the rhythm it established, along with the variety it permitted.

  Italians weren’t wasteful like Americans, who have an ethic of boundlessness woven into our national character. Instead they were particular, convinced they had cracked some epicurean code and were following some epicurean master script. They cared about having the right things at the right times: cappuccino in the morning, for instance, but never, ever after dinner, the theory being that consuming milk in the wake of consuming wine would foil proper digestion, which would be assisted by the bitter acids of coffee only if they were unencumbered by milk. They cared about having superior things: prosciutto as it was prescribed around the city of Parma; mozzarella di bufala as it was perfected in the countrysid
e near Naples.

  At lunchtime, if I was working in Rome and not traveling somewhere for a story, I’d often walk just a few minutes from the office to a cheese shop in a tiny alley off a back corner of Campo de’ Fiori, one of Rome’s beautiful piazzas, which hosted a sprawling outdoor market every morning. Sometimes I’d get ovoline, or “little eggs,” of mozzarella, which was always stored in milky water, so that it remained as silken and creamy as possible.

  Or sometimes I’d get ricotta fresca di pecora, sheep’s milk ricotta, which had a different kind of creaminess, vaguely chalky instead of silky, less luscious but heartier. There would be an enormous cake of it, round and tall and pure white, behind the counter, and one of the shopkeepers would place a long, flat knife just above its surface, then slowly move the knife sideways, measuring the size of the piece you wanted.

  “Di più?” she’d ask (“More?”), and drag her knife farther along the surface of the cake.

  “Di meno?” she’d ask (“Less?”), and then move the knife backward.

  When the knife was precisely where you wanted it, you’d say, “Basta così.” (“That’ll do.”) She’d cut the slice, then wrap it in thick, patterned paper, folded so carefully and crisply it almost qualified as origami. That was the Italian genius: finding opportunities for art and for prettiness in even the smallest gestures and most basic chores; filling life with beauty and ritual.

  My ritual was to go from the cheese shop to a brick-oven bakery and buy some pizza bianca, essentially naked, undressed pizza, just the cooked, crunchy, golden brown dough, sometimes with a sheen of olive oil on top of it, sometimes with just a rumor of herbs. Somewhere along the way I’d pick up a plastic knife. I’d walk to Piazza Farnese, a quieter, more elegant piazza between Campo de’ Fiori and the Tiber. I’d take a seat on one of the stone benches that were essentially part of the front of Palazzo Farnese, a sixteenth-century palace whose design and construction reflected input from Michelangelo himself.

  Staring out at one of the two regal stone fountains on opposite ends of the piazza, I’d put the ricotta in my lap, unfold the patterned paper around it. Then I’d use my plastic knife to spread it onto one square of my pizza bianca, then onto another and then—sometimes—onto a third. I’d eat slowly, listening to the splash of the fountain, hearing the hum and buzz of unseen motorini nearby. Maybe I’d turn off my cell phone, even though I was usually loath to: the Pope might die; another Italian government might tumble. So be it. A fifteen-minute delay wouldn’t put me too far behind, and a man deserved a moment’s communion with his ricotta. Italy was teaching me that.

  This wasn’t the lightest of lunches, but it wasn’t gluttonous. It wasn’t about the act and thrill of simply filling my stomach. Whether at lunchtime, dinnertime or points in between, I fixated on which store I’d go to for my Parmigiano Reggiano, which for a porchetta sandwich. A sense of adventure and discovery replaced the abandon of overeating, which came to seem some violation of the whole Italian ethos. I didn’t feel the urge to eat so much because what I had to eat was so excellent.

  And I also had Louis.

  I met him in Athens, on a reporting trip: the geographic purview of the newspaper’s Rome bureau extended to Greece, which had plenty of stories to check out. It was going to be the host for the 2004 Olympics, and international Olympics officials were in a constant, justified panic about its state of preparedness. It was a European Union newcomer, and thus a prism through which to assess the dynamics of power and disbursements of money within the EU.

  Louis was an American who had been living and working in Athens for several years, and he knew people who knew me, so when he saw that I was the new Times correspondent in charge of Greece, he got in touch and suggested we share a meal when I found myself in Athens. We had that dinner in a seafood restaurant near the peak of a steep street in the city’s fashionable Kolonaki neighborhood.

  We’d been talking for an hour and a half—about European politics, European gyms, his weakness for black musical divas, mine for dubiously poetic white female singer-songwriters—when it hit me how much I liked this man. I wanted the conversation and the evening to last another hour and a half, and then another hour and a half after that. Well educated, well traveled, well acquainted with high culture and low culture and all culture in between, Louis could talk. He could talk more and faster and better than I could, and I was a talker. I finished sentences he had begun; he revised and refined sentences I’d thrown out too hurriedly and sloppily. The space between us was crowded with words.

  I usually went for more strapping, darker types, and Louis had pale skin, freckles, blue eyes and light brown hair that had obviously once been blond. He was shorter and much slighter than I was. Younger, too, by a few years. But there was an energy in his eyes and he had oversize lips that I suspected would be fun to kiss. I hadn’t kissed anyone in years.

  We began flirting by text message and by e-mail within minutes of parting and continued that flirtation over the days to follow, when I was back in Rome. The boldness of the compliments we gave each other and of the questions we asked each other grew, to the point where I suggested he use an upcoming three-day weekend to fly to Rome and stay with me. He agreed to.

  My apartment had two big bedrooms, each with its own private bath. As I imagined his arrival in a few days, I sweated over whether I should carry his suitcase to the spare guest bedroom, just to show that I wasn’t making any assumptions. Or would that cause him to assume I actually wanted him in a separate bed, which I certainly didn’t? Was “assumptions” even a word that should be in play? Although we hadn’t even kissed, he was flying two hours for a second (or, depending on how you counted, first) date. Was there really any ambiguity in that?

  I made dinner reservations. I plotted walking routes. I plotted espresso stops. I bought flowers and put them in vases that usually went empty. I visited La Roman on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and again on Thursday, careful each time to wear something acceptable, which in my case was my typical cotton gym shorts over a pair of clingy, adherent, longer-legged bicycle shorts. This way I conformed to gym rules without letting anyone see me in something so formfitting that all the flaws in my form—and there were plenty left—were immediately evident.

  To start the weekend on a warm note, I arranged for the driver who sometimes sped me around Italy for Times work to pick Louis up at the airport when he was due to arrive on Friday evening, at an hour when I was going to be tied up at the office. I bought a gift bag to be put in the backseat of the car so that it was waiting for Louis when he got in. Into the bag I tucked a tall bottle of water and a small box of hazelnut-filled Italian chocolates. I stuffed the bag with purple tissue paper, and within the paper’s folds I placed two compact discs, along with a note: “One of these you will like, and one of these you should like.” The former was a compilation of Whitney Houston’s greatest hits; the latter was the newest release by Tori Amos, titled Scarlet’s Walk.

  Louis had the gift bag in his hands when I opened and let him through my front door. As we headed toward the kitchen to get some wine, I left his suitcase where he had set it down on the foyer floor. I didn’t volunteer to carry it to, or suggest that he put it in, either bedroom. A few hours later, I put it in mine.

  I went to see him in Athens about two weeks after that. From that point forward we managed a visit about every three weeks, usually in Rome or Athens, sometimes in some other European city where we both wanted to spend a long weekend. After about four months of these visits and of nightly phone calls, he decided, with my encouragement, to put in for a leave of absence from work and, as soon as that took effect, move in with me in Rome. Before we’d known each other for even a year, we were living together.

  If the Italian attitude toward food was one big reason I didn’t regain weight in Italy, Louis was the other. My relationship with him was completely unlike my relationship with Greg, whom I had come to take for granted. My attitude was different: more grateful and more fearful. Maybe b
ecause Louis followed so many years of nothingness, maybe because he wasn’t given to sweeping declarations of ardor, I worried all the time: that he’d wake up one morning and decide he’d made a mistake; that the inevitably fading intensity of our physical interactions would leave us with too little too soon; that I’d gain five pounds and tip the scales against me. I treaded lightly around Louis, and that meant eating sensibly and supplementing my time on the treadmill at La Roman with runs through the Villa Borghese park and along the Tiber river; along the Arno if work took me to Florence; along the Seine or Danube when Louis and I traveled. I was motivated by more than just holding on to him. I was motivated by how I wanted to feel when we were holding each other, by my determination to enjoy that and my desire for only a third of my brain, as opposed to all of it, to be conscious of what he might notice—too much flab, too much softness.

  I was motivated by my movements through the world beyond Louis, too. During the Washington years and even during some previous periods, my thoughts before meeting someone for the first time, whether in a social or professional setting, whirled around the questions of how heavy they’d deem me, what they would read into that, how much it might lower their estimation of me, whether it would make me seem coarse or sloppy or just plain sad. As I fretted over whether I was saying the right things or asking the right questions, I would fret even more over how I looked. Now it was different. I could concentrate better on something other than my physical shape.

  I wasn’t yet pleased with it, and guessed I’d never be. In Rome I wore size 36 pants that were somewhat loose and size 35 jeans that were somewhat tight, and I could feel myself moving up and down within perhaps a five-pound range. At one point I even got on a scale. Of course I didn’t own one, but I spotted one on the bathroom floor of a hotel room I was staying in. Curiosity got the better of me, especially because the scale was in kilograms and I knew that would mean a lower number.