02.10.09. Collegio life.
The window off my room opens grandly. Large wood-framed glass doors swing wide to reveal a pod of trees reaching up to my fourth-floor room, and the garden and street below. It would be a lovely balcony, were there actually a platform on which to stand. As it is, an ornate metal grating is in place to keep me from stepping out and plummeting to my expatriate demise twenty-some-odd meters below.
The Italian dailies must take the blame for my occasional thoughts of accidental death or suicide. In my ten days here I have seen three front-page articles having to do with people falling to their deaths. Two were older folks, and one an infant. Older folks often have things worse than the rest of us—maybe their pensions are dwindling, maybe they just lack the sure footing on which they once depended to hike to school two miles in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways. They may be excused for their falls, and mourned as is the practice for those who leave us in tragic ways. But I don’t understand how the infant could have “precipitated itself” from a second-story window, this according to the paper. A one-year-old is barely strong enough to hold its head upright. It would seem that the parent must have placed the baby on their ornate railing giving onto the cobblestones below, then gone to make a cappuccino. Are we really so careless with each other?
At the collegio, the easy silence of my initial days has vanished. In its place, scratching at my back as I stare from my window: a slightly regulated chaos that has pulled me back four years to my first days at the University of Oregon. That period of dorm life started somewhat inauspiciously, as I ate some bad macaroni salad and spent what would have been my first night on campus curled up by the toilet at my parents’. Not that my absence that first night lacked a silver lining. I believe I gained a bit of an aura because of my late arrival; it was as if I, the savvy local, were simply arriving fashionably late rather than persuading my bacterial macaroni to drop its weapons and come out with its elbows up.
By contrast, I arrived here as the trailing arbutus, “pink, small, and punctual.” But the others must have eaten bad macaroni salad, or else the fish entree on the airplane; I had the place to myself until the past few days. When the rest began to arrive en masse, word of my presence leaked faster than an Afghan war memorandum. Many people came by to offer their services with regard to collegio tours and classes, or which local soccer team I ought to root for (the consensus is Juventus). I have done pretty well remembering their names, given that the Ghisleriani number around two hundred, and all have their own “sopranomi” (something along the lines of Goose or Iceman). But many names continue to elude me, and with respect to those people with whom I have already become level two-, three-, or even level-four friends (e.g., sharing a backseat on the way to the disco; out of a possible five levels), it is much too late to ask their names now. In these cases I must resort to guerrilla tactics—introducing them to other people, having them use their name in a sentence, asking what their favorite word is that rhymes with their name (as of yet, none has cited “Mulva”). If all else fails, there are two failsafes: Lorenzo and Chiara. A half-dozen of each roam the collegio, which makes me remember even farther back to second grade when I shared a classroom with Chris Cauthon and Kris Nelson, and possibly Garrett Christopherson.
That I struggle to remember so many names might be expected. All except for the first-years have already met everyone else, whereas I am starting from scratch. What makes me self-conscious is that nearly every person I encounter greets me with a hearty, “Ciao Chris!” Unlike cocktail parties and business luncheons in the U.S., they don’t do this to show off their knowledge of my name. Italy is a country founded on family—households often include members outside the nuclear family, and bachelors and bachelorettes might stay at home into their thirties—and this tradition holds at the collegio. Students come to live here for five years, and during this time the line between friends and siblings blurs. Even the hired help—the cooks, the maids—are known and called by name. And while I don’t yet know everyone who lives here, I am a part of the family. These people whom I cannot call by name would take for me—not a bullet, but probably a hit from a Fiat. (But then, it might be more dangerous to step in front of a Power Wheels Barbie Jammin’ Jeep.)
The names will come, though. Some will slip through the cracks—I never did meet a few third-floor recluses in Walton McCalister at the UO—but the rest of us will become amici per la pelle. One of the greatest aspects of this living situation is the security and comfort it provides. The UO dorms had their communal aspects, and I met some lifelong friends there, but I also locked my laptop to my desk. Here, locking one’s door is considered insulting. Would you lock out your brothers and sisters and parents at home? Maybe, depending on their curiosities and your secrets, but you would be sending a message of exclusion and seclusion. So it is that I walk down halls here with doors flung open and nothing inside but computers and stereos and stacks of euros.
Acclimating myself to this style of dorm living has been difficult. The first few days I locked my door when going downtown, but if somebody saw me he would pull me aside and explain how things went here. “Nothing has ever been stolen here,” one told me. “Not in four hundred years.” I continued to lock my door for another day or so—on the sly, when nobody was watching—but then got caught with my key out while returning. The guy didn’t say anything, but eyed the key in my hand. Things couldn’t go on like that. I am now proud to say I am on the wagon, or else off it, and lock my door only when going to sleep to keep out the pranksters who wander the corridors during the wee hours.
Apropos the wee hours, the other thing that makes me feel at home here is the toilet paper. My parents—and here I must beg forgiveness for having to reveal sensitive family information for the greater cause of this essay—my parents generally buy battalion-size packages of Kirkland Signature rolls, which I consider subpar. Kirkland Signature is one of the hallmarks of American capitalism, providing enormous quantities of quality products at affordable prices, but their toilet paper is not as opaque as I would like it to be. General rule: if I can see my hand through the tissue, there aren’t enough plies. The toilet paper at the collegio is similarly translucent and provides inadequate protection. But the problem goes farther: our roll supplier doesn’t perforate. If ever one sought proof of a country’s backwardness, non-perforated toilet paper is it. Perforation is one of the greatest and simplest inventions of recent times. With ease, one can rend things otherwise impregnable—ketchup packets, raffle tickets, notebook paper, stamp rolls, condoms—yet the Italians have failed to exploit this technology that hails to the 1840s and ’50s (and here I go out on a limb once more citing Wikipedia). The result is that I find my hygienic compass hopelessly askew. Ordinarily with a translucent tissue I would just double up on my squares, but without perforation I can’t control my ratios. I sometimes find myself in a tight spot if I have torn off too much, which gets in the way, or too little, which is like an offensive lineman missing his blocking assignment during a pass rush. The quarterback inevitably is sacked.
But I pick nits. While it rains in Eugene, the sun has beat with a heat of 25° celcius upon Pavia the past week and a half, and the icons of the extended forecast promise only more rays. So as classes start, I amble to class in shorts and sandals and fan myself with my notebook in steamy seventeenth-century classrooms. I stare out my menacing window at glowing red-tile roofs and imagine that we are instead in mid-May with the trailing arbutus blooming and school winding down. But those days remain far off. During the intervening months the trees outside my window will fall bare and I will observe Italians crawling as ants below in boots and overcoats, hiking to school and work in the snow, uphill both ways. All will be enchanting white and magnetic, nearly touchable from my perch, and when I descend to be among it I will try to remember to put on my shoes and take the stairs.◊