Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (32 page)

And the timing was ideal. As much as I loved hearing Washington friends and acquaintances marvel at how much weight I had lost, their comments were a constant reminder that in Washington I wasn’t simply fit: I was the fat guy who’d
become
fit. People there saw me through the prism of my weight, and every compliment was a retroactive gibe.

I wanted to be seen as who I now was, or was quickly becoming: a normal guy, neither trim nor tubby, whose size didn’t warrant particular notice, positive or negative. In Italy I could be that guy, so long as the absence of Aaron didn’t trigger a backslide.

I certainly feared a backslide, but I also knew that I couldn’t lean on Aaron forever or let worries about regaining weight hold me back from the sorts of adventures that were the best part of life. I had withdrawn from the world during my fattest years. I wanted to throw myself back into it now. I wanted to know what it would be like to walk through Piazza Navona on my way to work, to hear the music of the Italian language every day, on every street corner. I wanted gelato. No, I’d have to go easy on the gelato, to give myself a better chance at an Italian romance, which I wanted, too.

So when the
Times
formally offered me the Rome job in late May 2002, I took it, agreeing to land in Italy by the middle of July. Then I signed up for a crash course in Italian, put my house on the market and sold my car.

Shortly before I left, I went to Scarsdale to visit Dad. I hadn’t seen him or any of my siblings in months. Mark was also visiting, with his wife, Lisa, and their kids, and at one point we all went to the Scarsdale Golf Club to use the pool. I splashed around with the kids, and when I climbed out of the water and stretched out on a lounge chair, I didn’t bother to put on a T-shirt.

Lisa looked me up and down, smiled and uttered just two words, as powerful in their way as Harry’s remark at that New Year’s Eve party.

“Nicely done,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.

Nicely done.
I kept hearing the words, basking in them.
Nicely done. Nicely done.
They were musical. They were the two happiest words I could think of.

Critical Eating

Think of Italy and you think of food. You think of
prosciutto
,
pancetta
,
guanciale
and all the ways that enterprising Italians have devised for butchering, curing, smoking and ingesting a pig. You think of veal, or at least you should, because Italians are nearly as calf-adept as they are pig-obsessed, and I’m not talking veal
piccata
(too austerely lemony) but rather veal
saltimbocca
(the pig joins the calf!) and
osso buco
(a fatty cut of shank, with a cavity of marrow to boot) and
vitello tonnato
, northern Italy’s nonpareil contribution to surf and turf. For the uninitiated, it’s a quasi carpaccio of thinly sliced meat smothered in a paste of tuna and capers and anchovies—but just faint traces of the anchovies, for an extra-salty edge—and olive oil. Imagine the richest, most
liquid
tuna salad you could possibly whip up. Now imagine pouring it without particular restraint on the pinkest, most delicate ribbon of baby beef you could find. That’s
vitello tonnato
at its best, and that’s reason alone to fly round-trip to Italy, no matter how awful the euro-to-dollar exchange rate, no matter how much the airlines have started charging for an extra suitcase.

Beyond the meat there are Italian cheeses, matched in quality and variety only by those of France, certainly, and maybe Spain. I suppose there’s an argument for Britain, too. But that’s it. And none of those countries have anything exactly like Parmesan, intensely salty and at once gritty and milky, or like Italy’s
mozzarella di bufala
, made with milk from water buffalos, which gives it a vague, pleasant sourness that rescues it from any blandness, a taste crucially racier than the cheese’s texture.

And the pasta. I haven’t gone into the pasta. There are more kinds of pasta than most non-Italians ever realize: quadruple the number, quintuple, as if the historical purpose and defining mission of this boot-shaped peninsula—at least once it moved past aqueducts, plumbing and all those other basics-of-civilization advancements—were to curl, straighten, flatten, thicken, elongate, abbreviate, coil, spiral and otherwise sculpt noodles until any and every conceivable shape had been achieved. There’s a pasta to evoke butterflies, for which it’s named:
farfalle
. There’s a pasta mimicking little worms, for which
it’s
named:
vermicelli
.

Does a cuisine need
bucatini
as well as spaghetti in addition to linguine and on top of tagliatelle? All are long, relatively thin strands, but an Italian will tell you that no two types of strand hold sauce quite the same way, so different dishes call for different varieties. There’s no fudging or approximating or compromising when it comes to pasta. A given dish, meal or appetite needs what it needs, and there should be a noodle to meet those exact criteria. Italians are picky that way.

So why aren’t they fatter? That was a question—asked not only about Italians but also about French people and some other Europeans—that I frequently encountered in articles in American newspapers and magazines, perennially intent on explaining our own country’s plumper populace. And when I moved to Italy, it was a question with special resonance for me.

If I could just figure out how Italians staved off second chins and love handles, maybe I could do it, too. The answer might give me some sort of meaningful protection—not just another new, doomed trick—as I romped across a landscape more delicious than any I’d previously inhabited.

 

 

 

 

The answer wasn’t exercise. My experience trying to find and use a proper gym—somewhere with a full complement of weights, an attractive array of cardiovascular machines for rainy or cold days, and a setting that blunted the potential drudgery of it all—made that immediately clear.

In the center of Rome, where the
Times
office was located, there was nothing like a spacious, gleaming Equinox. What passed for legitimate fitness centers were the sorts of perfunctory setups you found in hotels: a few rooms with meager scatterings of equipment. They were depressing. They weren’t going to motivate me to visit often or linger for more than a few minutes at a time.

But in a slightly less central location, along one edge of the Villa Borghese park, was the Roman Sport Forum, or
La Roman
, as people in the know called it, speaking of it as they might La Loren or La Jolie. Romans saw it as an ostentatiously endowed diva of a gym, even though it was little larger or better outfitted than the kind of health club you find in any strip mall in any American exurb. It had a modest pool, a weight room with scores of machines, a glass-walled exercise studio for calisthenics, and perhaps two dozen treadmills, StairMasters, recumbent bikes and the like. It was darker than any American gym I knew, making me wonder if Italians considered mood lighting a catalyst for working out. I was thinking along the wrong lines. Working out wasn’t really the point of La Roman.

In fact the managers of La Roman seemed intent on
preventing
it. For starters, there was the signed doctor’s note they insisted I get in order not just to join the gym but even to venture as far as the locker room during an initial visit. I produced a note, paid for a six-month membership, changed into my workout clothes and found an available treadmill. I had been on it less than five minutes when I noticed one of the gym attendants standing at my side, flapping his arms and yelling at me.

“È vietato!”
he was saying, and I would soon realize that whether you were speaking to an attendant at La Roman or reading one of the many signs posted on the walls, that phrase was the most prevalent one, a kind of motto for the gym.
È vietato! È vietato!
Translation: it’s forbidden. But precisely
what
about my activity on the treadmill was
vietato
?
Running?
All the Italians on the treadmills around mine were walking, and they were walking rather slowly at that, nary a pinprick of perspiration smudging their fashionable exercise outfits. My own T-shirt was already mottled and wet. Maybe sweating was
vietato.

The attendant explained that while the note from my doctor entitled me to use the gym’s pool, weight machines, locker room and of course snack bar, it didn’t entitle me to use any cardiovascular equipment. For that I needed to submit to an independent examination, including a stress test with heart monitors taped to my chest, by the gym’s own physician. It would cost me a hundred dollars. And an appointment wasn’t available until a week from then.

I bided my time, paid my money, passed the stress test and returned to the treadmill without incident, using my gym visits to run three or so miles on a treadmill and spend thirty to forty minutes lifting weights. In the weight rooms were signs spelling out, for unexplained reasons, that it was
vietato
to chew gum. It was
vietato
to leave free weights lying around, a transgression that might require one of the half dozen attendants to do something other than gossip with one another, harangue unauthorized treadmill users and unwind in the snack bar, which was a nearly full-scale trattoria, with seating for dozens and a menu that included
bucatini all’amatriciana
and
prosciutto e melone.
My path to and from the locker room skirted its tables, at which I’d sometimes spot, on my way out of the gym, the same La Roman staffers and members I’d spotted on my way in.

It apparently wasn’t
vietato
for a member of La Roman to lean against or straddle a weight machine for twenty uninterrupted minutes, monopolizing it without attempting anything more physical than the arching of an eyebrow. La Roman members did this all the time, provided that the weight machine in question afforded them a good view of other patrons and vice versa. Although most of them were thin and no small number of them were gorgeous, their time at La Roman deserved little credit for that.

I was marveling one evening at their languorous, even phobic relationship with physical exertion when, yet again, a flapping, yelling gym attendant materialized at my side. He spoke in such rushed, histrionic Italian that I had to implore him a half dozen times to slow down, back up, repeat himself, maybe use fewer polysyllabic words. What exactly was
il problema
?

He pointed to my gym shorts, then grabbed my arm and tugged me toward a sign I hadn’t noticed before. It explained that it was
vietato
to wear shorts that didn’t adhere tightly to your legs. My shorts didn’t, and were thus
vietato.

Trust me on this: the shorts I was wearing were as unremarkable and unobjectionable as athletic shorts could be. They were precisely the type of shorts—ribbed waist, drawstring, thick cotton, material reaching more than halfway down the thigh—that every college since the dawn of academia has printed its logo on and sold in the student store. They weren’t flamboyant shorts. They weren’t tattered shorts. They weren’t skimpy shorts. They were archetypal, boring athletic shorts.

Why did it matter whether they adhered to my legs?

I told the attendant, in my flawed but functional Italian, that for my next visit to the gym, I would get and wear shorts that were adherent or adhesive or whatever they were supposed to be. Then I turned away from him and headed to the next weight machine I planned to use. I felt a tug on my arm. He wouldn’t let me go.

He held up an index finger—the international signal for “wait a second”—and bolted away. Within less than a minute he was back.

With two thick blue rubber bands.

I’d seen rubber bands like these before: they were the kind often wrapped around the base of a head of broccoli. Maybe that’s where they’d been at some point. But as he handed them to me, I understood that where they were supposed to be now was wrapped around each too-floppy leg of my too-floppy cotton gym shorts.

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.