Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Everything is radiant. Distant trees toss; faraway walls gleam. The mountains at the horizon have switched on like streetlights, stark and defined, giving way to still more distant ranges.

Then everything goes dark again, the clouds knitted together, the mountains sucked back into silhouette, Rome sinking into shadow.

Mornings I try to get to work early, hurrying down the long, red-carpeted hallway on the second floor of the Academy, past dozens of closed doors. Behind them sleep visiting scholars and the fellows who don’t have children, Franco the oil painter, John the architect. I unlock the Tom Andrews Studio, drag open the big window. Pliny’s Natural History, the field guide to trees, and the war book sit on the desk; two pencils wait in the drawer. A few notes for my novel flutter on the cot.

I paper one wall with grainy photos of bombed-out cities. Saint-Lô. Dresden. Hamburg. I read about the Allied assault on Germany, incendiaries, firestorms, infernos so hungry for oxygen they sucked trees from the ground and human beings through walls. Beyond the windowsill, chimney swifts dip and turn over the garden. I open a notebook, sharpen a pencil. Paint flakes off the baseboards; a spider crouches in her web in a corner of the ceiling.

Some mornings, this is as far as I get.

We’ve been in Italy a week when a car kills two pedestrians a hundred yards from our front door. Our windows are open and I am putting a jar of baby food into the microwave when I hear the smack.

It is one of those noises you know instantly is a bad noise. There are sirens, more than usual. We carry the twins down to the sidewalk and watch the fire trucks, the ambulance, the insurance man taking photographs. A little rental Peugeot is smashed against the stone corner of the Porta San Pancrazio, the big archway at the end of our street.

The pedestrians were in a crosswalk. Parents of a ten-year-old, who was walking with them. The Peugeot was driven by an American tourist in his seventies. Both the tourist and his wife are hospitalized, in shock. As is the boy.

In our week here I have pushed Henry and Owen through that intersection three or four times a day. Yesterday, in a rainstorm, Shauna and I stopped the stroller beneath the Porta San Pancrazio and studied our map while traffic splashed past all around us.

Go to Rome, rent a compact, decimate a family. One instant, like any other, but in any particular instant everything can change. Obvious, perhaps, but it’s one thing to think I understand this, and another to stand in our kitchen and hear it.

All afternoon I feel like lifting the boys out of the stroller and holding them against my chest. Sunlight filters through the olive trees in the garden, and the Street of the Four Winds down by the bakery comes alive with blowing leaves. In the evening I lift Owen high in the air and yell, “Crazy cannibal,” and he squeals as I pretend to take bites out of his stomach.

Reinhold, a Venetian scholar studying centuries-old financial records in the studio next to mine, has a silver beard and an impossibly kind face and always wears corduroy. He tells me, in English, that parrots sometimes visit the garden. You have to be up early, he says. Keep your eyes out the window.

Parrots? The boys wake us before dawn every day; I have not yet missed a sunrise. Most days our little family is awake, I think, before every other person on the Janiculum Hill. The window in Reinhold’s studio overlooks the same wedge of the back garden that my window does. But I haven’t seen any parrots.

Flyers appear on Academy bulletin boards, a trip to ancient Ostia, a tour of something called the Cloaca Maxima. Am I supposed to know what these attractions are? The sign-up sheets are completely full of names anyway. Shauna and I bring the boys to an Academy lunch, six or seven tables arrayed in a corner of the courtyard. Around us are academics, scholars, a visiting luminary in rumpled linen.

“…but the ecology of formal systems in Italian gardens prevents…”

“…consider public religiosity…”

“…of course Piranesi is about spectacle as much as…”

I hear someone—a classicist from California—at the table behind us say, very clearly, “You haven’t been to Arch of Janus Quadrifrons yet?”

Henry bangs a spoon on the table; Owen dribbles milk down his chin. All the time here, it seems, we’re missing things. I still have to stop myself from calling the Pantheon the Parthenon. We’ve been in Rome nearly two weeks and still haven’t seen the Vatican.

Instead, we wrangle mashed bananas into the mouths of our sons. We wait ten minutes outside the office to ask the Academy’s assistant director of operations, Pina, if she knows a shop in the city where we might buy crib bumpers.

At night Rome bangs, roars, peals. Car alarms, the shunting of a distant train, backfiring Fiats—at 2 a.m., someone below our window sets off a string of firecrackers. At three, the trash truck grinds up the street, upends the Dumpsters across from our front gate, and drops them again onto the asphalt.

Our building funnels noise strangely, too: a chair leg squeaking in the upstairs apartment, a door slamming downstairs, a girl’s laughter clear as day through the wall behind our headboard. Even when the twins are sleeping quietly, I spring up in bed, thinking I’ve heard them wake up.

I shake Shauna’s shoulder. “Are they crying? Which one is that?”

She groans. She stays asleep.

When the boys first came home from the hospital, six months ago, they had to be fed every three hours: three, six, nine, noon, three, six, nine, midnight. They were slow nursers and Shauna was breast-feeding eight hours a day. Owen had acid reflux and had to be given drops of Zantac every few hours. Henry had to be strapped to an apnea monitor the size of a VCR that squealed like a smoke detector any time his breathing paused or the adhesive on a diode slipped off his chest. The doctor had us put caffeine in his milk.

Once or twice a night, during those first weeks as a father, I would be drifting toward something like sleep when Henry’s monitor would start screeching. The dog would leap trembling into the corner, Shauna would bolt upright, and I’d be scrambling out of bed, thinking, He stopped breathing, he stopped breathing, only to find Henry sound asleep and a loose diode stuck to the inside of his pajamas.

After a month it got so we could not remember whose diaper had been changed, who had been given what medicine, or even what day it was. There were nights when Owen screamed from dusk until dawn. There were nights when we had poured enough milk bottles and changed enough diapers and stayed awake enough consecutive hours that the rituals seemed to become somehow consecrated. I would stand dry-eyed over Henry as he stared up at the ceiling at three or four in the morning, and in something like a waking dream he would seem so wise and sensible that he became like some ancient philosopher.

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother’s love, his brother’s ceaseless crying; he was already forgiving me for my shortcomings as a father; he was the distillation of a dozen generations, my grandpa’s grandpa’s grandpa, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the thin slip of his ribs. I’d hold him at the window and he’d stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing in his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky.

Occasionally I’d be lucid enough to think: This is not normal. I should not be trying to write a book during this.

By summer, after they were three or four months old, the boys started sleeping better at night. Four hours. Sometimes five. There were even one or two rare and terrifying times when both would sleep six hours without waking. But by then it was too late. So many nights of sleeplessness had broken some flimsy little gyroscope inside my skull, and the rested world had left me behind.

I’d lie awake and the clock beside the bed would flip through the minutes, click, breathe, click, breathe, and the moon would crawl across the panes of the windows. I’d worry the boys were suffocating in their blankets, I’d worry over the impending publication of my second book, I’d worry about September and moving to Rome. I’d worry I was worrying too much. I tried Unisom, exercise, alcohol. I tried thinking the same word over and over, blue blue blue blue blue rain rain rain rain rain. Shauna would take both boys all night, offering to, as we called it, throw herself under the bus, but still I’d lie awake, pillows clamped over my ears, heart roaring.

The only way to fall asleep is to stop trying to fall asleep. Sleep is a horizon: the harder you row toward it, the faster it recedes.

Now we have moved to Rome, my second book has just been published, and it is happening again. I stare at the ceiling, I paddle for the horizon, I hear what I am sure is a screaming baby. I tiptoe down the hall in the darkness and listen outside their doors. Nothing. Phantoms. Ghosts.

Our first storm: Lightning lashes the domes of churches. Hail clatters on the terrace. In the early morning, the air seems shinier and purer than I’ve seen it. Dawn stretches across the gardens, pulling tiny shadows out of the blades of grass, draining through the needles of the umbrella pines. The old walls look washed, almost new: a thousand speckled tints of bronze, trailing lacework of ivy, glossy tangles of capers.

We walk to the Vatican. It’s closer than we expected, maybe five hundred yards along the rim of the Janiculum, past a huge statue of the nineteenth-century patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi on horseback, past dozens of stone busts of Garibaldi’s lieutenants, past a children’s hospital. We descend a steep alley, slip beneath an archway, skirt some shuttered restaurants. Suddenly St. Peter’s and its vast piazza are upon us: the twin arms of a pillared colonnade, a ring of saints standing sentry around its circumference, a massive obelisk in the very center sending a needle-tipped shadow across a knot of tourists. The boys are quiet, huge-eyed. Twin fountains spray and gurgle. I feel my breath leave me, a flood of different sensations: the roar of space; sunlight coming in streaks through the haze; the huge dome of the church seeming almost to hover above the façade. It is as if, while we look, the basilica expands, swells, adds another layer. Country, continent: the piazza is a prairie, the church a mountain range. And the city crowds in all around it, panting, thronging, sulfurous.

That evening we eat tortellini on the terrace in a daze. Henry falls asleep in my arms. The sky passes through a sequence of darkening blues.

Is this Rome? Or a dream?

Streetlights blink on. A block away, the Fontanone roars over the city. As I’m setting Henry in his crib, a lone church bell, somewhere beyond his window, begins to clang.

We interview a babysitter. We have found her telephone number on wantedinrome.com. Filipina, referenced and experienced babysitter, speaks English and Italian, looking for an afternoon job. She knocks quietly and takes off her shoes before entering. Her name is Tacy. She has a son, back in the Philippines, who is fourteen. She has not seen him in two years. Her socks are navy blue. In under a minute we have run out of questions. She sits on the edge of the couch and holds her glass of water with two hands. What else are we supposed to ask?

“We need two or three afternoons a week,” Shauna says. “And a night once in a while. We’d like to see some things around the city. We haven’t even been to the Colosseum yet.”

Tacy hasn’t been to the Colosseum either. She has been working in Rome for two years, changing the diapers of an old man who has finally died. She likes to buy silver at the flea markets. She likes to read. Her leather jacket smells faintly of cigarettes. Before she came here, she had been a pharmaceutical rep in the Philippines, traveling between islands. Even then, she had to continually leave her son.

“Was it hard for you to come here?” I ask.

“Maybe fifty minutes by bus. Not far.”

No, I want to clarify, was it hard for you to leave home, leave your son, but Shauna gives me a look. So I walk Tacy back down the hall, tiptoeing past the closed doors, the sleeping babies.

She slips on her shoes and points at Owen’s door. “May I see?”

“It’s a bathroom.” I shrug. “It’s darker in there.”

We stand over the crib in the gloom. Owen is asleep facedown, sink on one side, tub on the other. His back rises and falls. His fan whirs.

“I hope I get this job,” she whispers.

“I do, too,” I say.

In the Tom Andrews Studio I try to research German occupations, revivify my characters, coax my imagination onto a hillside in Normandy, but my brain is tired, my eyes are sandy. Words unmoor from their locations on the page and drift, turn, slide toward the margin.