美食祈祷与恋爱在线观看 《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 33 (69):城市用词

《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 33 (69):城市用词  

I step off the train a few days later to a Rome full of hot
sunny
eternal disorder
where—immediately upon walking out into the street—I can hear the soccer-stadium-like cheers of a nearby manifestazione
another labor demonstration. What they are striking about this time
my taxi driver cannot tell me
mainly because
it seems
he doesn't care. " 'Sti cazzi
" he says about the strikers. (Literal translation: "These balls
" or
as we might say: "I don't give a shit.") It's nice to be back. After the staid sobriety of Venice
it's nice to be back where I can see a man in a leopard-skin jacket walking past a pair of teenagers making out right in the middle of the street. The city is so awake and alive
so dolled-up and sexy in the sunshine.
I remember something that my friend Maria's husband
Giulio
said to me once. We were sitting in an outdoor café
having our conversation practice
and he asked me what I thought of Rome. I told him I really loved the place
of course
but somehow knew it was not my city
not where I'd end up living for the rest of my life. There was something about Rome that didn't belong to me
and I couldn't quite figure out what it was. Just as we were talking
a helpful visual aid walked by. It was the quintessential Roman woman—a fantastically maintained
jewelry-sodden forty-something dame wearing four-inch heels
a tight skirt with a slit as long as your arm
and those sunglasses that look like race cars (and probably cost as much). She was walking her little fancy dog on a gem-studded leash
and the fur collar on her tight jacket looked as if it had been made out of the pelt of her former little fancy dog. She was exuding an unbelievably glamorous air of: "You will look at me
but I will refuse to look at you." It was hard to imagine she had ever
even for ten minutes of her life
not worn mascara. This woman was in every way the opposite of me
who dresses in a style my sister refers to as "Stevie Nicks Goes to Yoga Class in Her Pajamas."
I pointed that woman out to Giulio
and I said
"See
Giulio—that is a Roman woman. Rome cannot be her city and my city
too. Only one of us really belongs here. And I think we both know which one."
我指这女人给朱利欧看，说：“瞧，朱利欧——这是罗马女人。罗马不可能同时是她的城市又是我的城市。我们只有其中一人属于这里。我想我们俩都知道是谁。”
Giulio said
"Maybe you and Rome just have different words."
"What do you mean?"
He said
"Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn—what is the word of the street?"
Then he went on to explain
in a mixture of English
Italian and hand gestures
that every city has a single word that defines it
that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place
you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be—that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city
then you don't really belong there.