The truth is that she could also have stayed silent: The effect on me would probably have been the same. I was in love with Giulia from the moment I saw her. I’ve never believed in the classic thunderbolt. I’ve had a certain number of women, some of whom — including the two I married — I liked a lot at first, but I’ve never really lost my head. I suppose that as a boy I must have had, like everyone else, a crush on the cutest girl in the class, but as soon as I reached the age of discretion I left romanticism behind; love songs, for one thing, have always seemed to me banal, foolish, excessive. I found all those sighs, that agitation, vaguely comical; they seemed a pose, an attitude, rather than expressions of true feeling. With Giulia, however, it was like plunging into a state of adolescent regression. To please her, win her, possess her suddenly became my only purpose in life. Every other concern or consideration disappeared. I had to make an effort, that night on the plane, not to make myself look ridiculous by kneeling at her feet and declaring my love, then and there, in front of stewardesses and passengers.
When we landed, I asked for her phone number, and proposed that we see each other the next time I came to Rome. My stay this time would actually be very short: I had to leave within twenty-four hours so that I wouldn’t miss a court hearing in New York. “I’d love to,” she said simply. And we parted.
Phrases that are repeated an infinite number of times, in an infinity of casual encounters, in the course of a life. We might never have seen each other again. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Giulia, and after just a few days I called her from New York. “Ciao, it’s Jack Galiardo... I’d like to see you again,” I recall myself saying, emotionally. I got immediately to the point: “I could come to Rome next week, if you have time.”
She had a moment of hesitation. “You’d come to Rome just for me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She paused again, then said, “All right.”
Our first meeting was at Villa Borghese. Sitting on a bench, I made the declaration of love I would have liked to make on the plane. In a mixture of English and Italian, I described my image of her: alone, in a state of crisis with her husband, desperate for affection, for a man who desired her as no woman had ever been desired. And that man was me. Slightly put off, she said that I had misunderstood: She had agreed to see me, but that didn’t mean that her marriage was in trouble. I apologized. I added, however, that this suited me as well. That is, I was still happy to be there, on that bench, near her, even if she wasn’t having trouble with her husband and I was, at most, just slightly likable. It wasn’t a strategy to induce her to yield. I really felt that way: I felt that my love was so great that it was enough, at least at the beginning, for both of us. We got up from the bench and walked in silence for a little while, barely brushing against one another. In the square overlooking Piazza del Popolo she let me kiss her. We had lunch on the terrace of the Hassler. We continued to kiss, and then to touch, on the sofa of a deserted drawing room in the hotel, after lunch. We took a room there at the Hassler, although I was staying in another hotel. We made love until late afternoon. Then we descended to Piazza di Spagna, where she hastily said goodbye and got in a taxi. Walking as if in a trance, intoxicated with happiness, not knowing where I was or where I was going, I got a message on my cell phone: I already miss you. At that moment I knew: I had been knocked down. And I’ve never gotten up.
Rome, from then on, became the fixed destination of my vacations. As soon as I have a few days, I get on a plane and fly to Italy. Every so often, it happens that I can stay for a week, and then I manage to see Giulia two or three times. More often, they are whirlwind holidays: I leave at night from New York, arrive in Rome early the next morning, stay a day and a night, leave the following morning: a weekend in all, including the nine hours in the plane to get there and the same coming back. But it almost never happens that my Roman weekend coincides with an actual weekend. In fact, on Saturday and Sunday she has to be home, except for one weekend a month, when it’s her turn in the office, and so she’s just as busy. On some pretext, she can take a day off during the week as compensation, and devote it to me. Usually we see each other a couple of times a month. It works like this. I arrive and take a double room at a luxury hoteclass="underline" the Hassler on Trinità dei Monti, the Hotel de Russie on Via del Babuino, the Plaza on Via del Corso, the Raphael near the Pantheon, the Excelsior on Via Veneto: These are my favorites. I earn a good living, enough to afford them, and besides, I love five-star hotels: They’re the only luxury I indulge in. But in this case I choose them for other reasons. They’re in the center, first of all, and Giulia lives in a residential neighborhood in the south of Rome, so it’s less likely that she’ll meet someone she knows. Furthermore, in these hotels the doormen are worldly, used to looking the other way in exchange for a generous tip, if in the late morning a woman accompanies a guest to his room without presenting her documents, as is usually required in Italy. Thus I spare her the embarrassment of disclosing her identity, of leaving traces. Finally, since we spend most of our time together in the room, I like it to be large, comfortable, elegant. I always wait for her in a café near the chosen hotel. When I see her coming, I get up and pay the bill, and she follows me, like a stranger, brushing my hand, pausing to give me a kiss in the doorway of a building, then immediately starting to walk again. Arriving at the hotel, we begin kissing in the elevator, start again as soon as I’ve closed the door of the room, and almost never stop. We take off our clothes quickly, we fall into bed, we make love — in every possible way — until evening. Maybe we fill the bathtub and spend awhile there. Sometimes we have room service: When the waiter comes in with the table, she goes into the bathroom, even though it’s obvious, from what we order, from the unmade bed, and from the Do not disturb sign hanging on the door, that there are two people in the room. Sometimes, at night, we have dinner in a tourist trattoria in the neighborhood between the Pantheon and Piazza del Popolo. Rome is full of these trattorias; they are places where no Roman would ever eat and so there, too, the risk of running into someone who might recognize her is not so high. It’s a system that guarantees eating badly, or at least not especially well, but it’s not the food that interests me. For Giulia and me, it’s enough to sit together in a dark corner, our knees touching, hands seeking each other under the table, letting ourselves be dazed by wine, only to hurry back to the room as soon as we’ve finished eating.
There have been exceptions to the rule of these encounters in the two years since we’ve been seeing each other. Once we went together to the Sistine Chapel, she hidden under a scarf and a pair of big dark sunglasses — well camouflaged among the legions of foreign tourists. Another time we took a car and went to Fregene, out of season, to stroll on the beach. It was sunny, we tumbled among the dunes. We also went to the movies one afternoon, not for the film but for the excitement of finding ourselves in the dark, in a half-empty theater, doing everything that is forbidden. Occasionally, I climb up behind her on her motor scooter and she drives me around, with no set destination: Since we’re wearing helmets we’re both unrecognizable. And since so many Romans travel around the city the same way — two wheels are the only alternative to the slow pace of cars and the inevitable traffic jams, Giulia explained. Protected by the mask of the helmet, holding onto her, I traverse the Eternal City like an invisible man to whom all is granted.