Italian Affair

prologue SAN FRANCISCO Mi hai spaccato il cuore. You're reading a fairy tale in your evening Italian class when you come across this phrase. You think you know what it means, since the sea princess says it after her one true love abandons her, but you ask the teacher anyway. "You have broken my heart," he says, and he makes a slashing motion diagonally across his dark blue sweater. "You have cloven it in two." Mi hai spaccato il cuore. The phrase plays over and over in your mind, and the words in front of you blur. You can see your husband's face with his dark, wild eyebrows, and you whisper the phrase to him, Mi hai spaccato il cuore. You say it to plead with him, to make him stay, and then you say it with heat, a wronged Sicilian fishwife with a dagger in her hand. But he doesn't understand, he doesn't speak Italian; you shared so many things in your marriage, but Italy was all yours. Mi hai spaccato il cuore. You hear the phrase so many times that it loses its meaning, it just becomes Italian music, and it takes you into another realm. You're in another world, a place where people linger over lunch, drink full-bodied coffee, and stroll arm-in-arm at sunset. A place where the towns are built on such thick layers of tragedy and romance, stacked up like stones, that you can't take anything that happens to you very seriously. A place where you wouldn't be worried about running into your husband, who left you after a year of marriage for an old girlfriend, at an intimate little restaurant in your neighborhood. Where you wouldn't be home making dinner, expecting to hear the thumping sound of him doing fast-paced yoga in the bedroom upstairs. Where you wouldn't walk into the bathroom in the morning and miss having to pick up the Scotch glass and wet mystery novel he left behind on the ledge of the tub the night before. In Italy, you would be far away. Mi hai spaccato il cuore. Let's say you have a few friends in Italy and you speak the language well enough. Maybe you could go there, just drift away from all of this and leave it behind. Maybe you would feel more like yourself again. Why not? And then a fantasy flickers and you think perhaps an Italian man might not be such a bad idea, either. Someone speaks to you and you look up and see bright blue eyes with smile lines and a head of gray-black curls. Your Italian teacher. He puts a hand on your shoulder and you realize you are crying. "Laura," your teacher asks. "Che c'e?" What's up? You quickly wipe your eyes and gather up your books. "Mi dispiace tanto, ma devo andarmene," you say. I'm so sorry, but I have to leave. one FLORENCE When the plane touches down in Florence, it's evening. Lucia is there, waving from outside the security area, flipping her short dark hair away from her angular face. She kisses you on both cheeks and says you look great, even though that can't possibly be true. She speaks Italian faster than you can understand in your bleary condition, but you're glad to just follow along. Lucia loads your bag into her miniature car and goes careening around the perimeter of the city and into the center. Just outside the pedestrian zone, she maneuvers into a tiny parking spot, and you walk from there along the narrow cobblestone streets until you reach a pensione right in the historic center, near the Piazza della Signoria. You're staying at a little hotel this visit because Lucia, an art teacher who was divorced, unhappily, in her late thirties, has a new boyfriend who stays over. So there's no more room at her place. You donFraser, Laura is the author of 'Italian Affair' with ISBN 9780375420658 and ISBN 0375420657.