Chapter 4 A Fling to Remember
A Fling to Remember
In early May, one month after Bianca’s breakdown, she flew to Bologna, Italy, to begin again.
She’d called each of her clients, explained her situation, and offered them alternative psychotherapist recommendations.
She’d put some things in storage and rented out her apartment.
Now she was armed with a purse, a backpack, two suitcases packed to the maximum, and her Italian passport courtesy of her Bolognese grandmother.
Bianca’s mother, Faith, didn’t have the most Italian first name, but she came from a long line of Malatestas, a family who’d inhabited Emilia-Romagna for centuries.
Even from the moment the wheels touched down, she felt a surge of life.
Through the window of the taxi that took her to her Airbnb, she could see her twenty-two-year-old self wandering these same streets, connecting for the first time with her heritage and shaking off the aggro-American ways she’d picked up from her father and four years of grinding at Pomona College.
She’d gotten accepted by the University of Texas to pursue a master’s in clinical psychology but had been granted a deferment for her Bologna adventure.
In so many ways, the break had saved Bianca’s life.
Faith had always encouraged a gap year. In fact, years earlier, she’d started a “gap year fund” for Bianca, squirreling away savings from her part-time work at a clothing boutique in Phoenix.
Bianca’s father, George, on the other hand, had stood strongly against the idea, saying that the world wasn’t a safe place and that she’d lose her academic momentum.
He was the one who’d burned corporate words like trajectory and momentum into her psyche.
Fortunately, he’d lost the battle then, and he’d lost it again this time.
He’d desperately protested when Bianca had called him weeks back to inform him she was returning to Italy for an undetermined amount of time.
His arguments echoed those of years ago.
“B, the world isn’t the same as it was. What if we end up at war?
Italy is unstable at best. And what about your work?
You might not be able to build up your client list again.
Don’t take your life for granted, honey.
Play this one safe.” That mindset was exactly why she’d found the courage to return.
She didn’t want to reach her deathbed realizing fear and “playing it safe” had dictated her life.
Coupled with her first taste of independence, she’d also enjoyed her first taste of love when she’d lived here, with Corrado, the chef.
Perhaps the brevity of it had been perfect, as it would forever stay in her mind as her greatest romance.
She could see herself now, her arm slipped around his, two young lovers weaving through the city streets.
Per his social media, which was covered in food porn, Corrado was in Paris now, cooking at the famous L’Ambroisie.
Even ten years ago, as a sous chef in Bologna, he’d set his sights on Paris.
They’d had fun together, the day trips to Verona and Venice, the countless late nights with friends, the meals he’d cooked for her in his apartment.
Tastes and scents of him and his food caused goose bumps to rise on her flesh.
What had happened to that Bianca? She’d been so free and full of joy, unworried about the future. Maybe her gap year had saved her, but she’d reverted right back to who she’d been before, a reflection of her father, a soldier of life, fighting an enemy within.
Had she and Corrado still kept in touch, he out of anyone would be the most disappointed in her.
“Promise me, Bianca,” he’d said at the table on her last night in Bologna, the night the picture was taken that led her back here.
“Don’t get pulled back into that American thing, pretending to be living, all the rushing around.
You’re Italian deep down. Don’t forget it. ”
Oops.
The first few days of her return to Italy went by in a blur. She worked with a woman she’d found in an online expats’ group who helped people find apartments. Bianca’s Italian had deteriorated, so it was nice to have a guide. They saw two or three places a day, but nothing had resonated yet.
In her free time, she strolled the streets, searching for the ghost of her past self as she paused to enjoy the graffiti that gave Bologna its wonderfully youthful vibrance, or as she dipped into the countless museums and churches, studying art and architecture that had once mesmerized her.
Though she was tempted to fill her Instagram feed with photos of all things Bologna, she held back, feeling like this recalibration was not for public consumption.
She could feel the other part of her—the rigid, achievement-focused American self—kicking and screaming. No matter; she’d keep filling herself with this life, waiting for Bologna to cast its spell.
To her followers who asked if she was working on a new book, she’d offer vague responses, like “Who knows?” But no, she wasn’t working on a new book.
Let’s try that again: absolutely fucking not!
Been there, failed at that. No more rejection, thank you.
Besides, she was trying not to think about the future too much.
She had enough savings to safely get her through a year, which was plenty of time to recalibrate and figure out her next steps.
Outside the building where she’d lived as a youngster, she touched the ancient wooden door and attempted to recall that feeling of satisfaction she’d found then, the sense of being in a state of peace.
This was a land where it was okay not to rush.
The Bolognese and even the city’s adopted children, the expats of foreign lands, lingered, talked, savored, and flirted with life, perhaps more aware than most that life was not defined by what was etched on your gravestone; it was defined by how you lived in the moment.
She sat on the steps in the Piazza Maggiore to watch a man juggle fire, then she dipped into the Basilica di San Petronio for mass.
A short walk away, climbing the Asinelli tower, one of the remaining two towers in a city that was once dominated by hundreds of them, she soaked in the view of the city and the surrounding Apennine Mountains, imagining life during the evolution of this land from an Etruscan settlement to a Roman colony to what it was now.
Was this where she belonged, the ultimate return to her roots?
Intentionally slowing herself down, she strolled under the elaborate porticoes that covered nearly every sidewalk, popping into boutiques, open-air markets, and art galleries.
And she ate far more pasta Bolognese and tortellini in brodo than she’d ever care to admit as she sat alone at small candlelit tables in quaint restaurants, reading a book or scribbling in her journal.
It was hard not to get mad at herself when her Americanness flared.
She’d once enjoyed countless three-hour meals, but now she often found herself antsy after thirty minutes of sitting alone.
It was so hard to be fully and wholly in the present.
But it would come back with practice, she knew it.
It’s just that she’d trained herself to be comfortable in a baseline state of movement.
What could be trained could be untrained, though.
Five days after landing, she met an old friend at Osteria del Sole, the exact wine bar where the photograph Bianca had thrown across her office had been taken. In fact, they sat at the same table where they’d last seen each other in person.
The Osteria del Sole was one of the oldest taverns in all of Italy, and what it lacked in modern appeal, it made up for with the palpable energy of a place that had been a watering hole for nearly five hundred years.
They were sharing a bottle of Lambrusco, a sparkling red wine favored by the Bolognese for its ability to cut through the rich dishes of the local cuisine. Bianca had drunk entirely too much of it way back when. “I can’t believe you’re back. You just up and moved?”
Carol was from Seattle and had been studying Italian in Bologna when Bianca had lived here, and they’d become fast friends.
Since they followed each other on Instagram, it had been easy to reconnect.
She was the same age as Bianca but looked like she was still holding on to her twenties, so light and free—and skinny, despite having two children.
A streak of orange ran through her indigo hair.
Her silk blouse was tucked into fashionable baggy pants.
“How long are you here?” Carol asked. “What are you going to do? What brought this on? All the things.”
Bianca beamed because there were so many unanswered questions, and what could be better than that?
“I’m embracing my inner Italian. Learning how to cook, finding an Italian teacher who can remind me of all my verb tenses, catching up on my reading.
I don’t know, just enjoying la dolce vita.
But slowly, all slowly. I’ve been running a hundred miles an hour since grad school. My nervous system is a wreck.”
Bianca shared a copy of the old photo on her phone.
“Weren’t we a crew,” Carol said, memories of her own clearly shimmering through.
“You wouldn’t remember this,” Bianca said, taking her phone back, “but Corrado told me something I’ll never forget.
He made me promise not to get pulled back in.
Remember how he was always making fun of us Americans for chasing our tails, never able to slow down?
‘You Americans,’ he’d say, ‘you’re like the movies.
Go, go, go. Don’t get sucked back into that, Bianca. ’”
“Hey, that was a good Corrado accent,” Carol said. Both of them eyed the derrière of the handsome bartender who reached up high for a bottle of vermouth. Some things never changed.