Why It’s No Use Being A Tourist
The real magic happens when we live in the places, not when we have only glimpses of it.
After my trip to Italy, I had promised you and myself that I intended to write a series of articles with tips on where to stay, where to eat, etc. However, in total, I only wrote two articles, informative, detailed, and perhaps very good for those who need to organize drawers, arrange thoughts, and need order in their lives.
However, now that May comes to an end, and my 10-day trip to Italy seems some time ago, my reflections on it begin to settle down.
And I came to the simple conclusion, from the height of my privilege, that the writing no longer flowed because it lacked the emotion of yesteryear. It lacked the thrill of having lived there and alone. It lacked the freedom to set my own pace of what to visit, when, and why.
My two articles reflect all that absence of feeling. Maybe it’s because the trip was just that, a trip, and was fast, and we didn’t have time to settle our ideas and feel that buzz that tickles our stomachs.
Whatever the reason, something magical was missing in me, and if I thought this trip would cover me with inspiration, it did not.
Having been a tour guide myself and knowing the industry up close, I had refused to use it. However, I now realize that I didn’t escape its clutches. When I was a guide, I used to observe tourists as if they were another class of human beings, and I always thought to myself, “poor things, they don’t know what they are visiting or even what they are seeing!” — I too was young and arrogant in my thinking.
However, this life of work and observing who I was serving made me quit my job and leave my country, and unlike many, go where I felt good, to my comfort zone. I quickly got a job as a babysitter when I lived in Italy. Home and food provided, plus a salary almost equal to my salary as a tour guide in Portugal.
But the best thing about these two phases of my life was the opportunity to see, feel, explore, and live Italian life as if I were Italian. I learned the language or parts of it. I talked to many people, slept on sofas, was taught how to cook, cried on the shoulders of friends of any age, slept on deserted beaches, and some stories were funny but perhaps too strange to share! Who knows, one day.
When you live something this beautiful, at an age when life seems eternally young, the most beautiful texts spring from you. There is a joy in living such as I have never felt, and the world doesn’t seem to be that globe full of obstacles in front of us.
And it is this feeling, that of one who has left nothing unlived, that is imprinted in the letters of those who wrote them and felt them.
I went back to places where I had been very happy, accompanied by my partner. The best part of the trip for me was to see again one of the girls I had taken care of.
Lucrezia, in her four tender years of age and I in my twenty-four years that I had completed in Saronno, and whose postcard her grandparents gave me on that birthday hangs on the wall behind the computer where I write these words.
“ 20 August 2014, un augurio molto speciale per i tuoi primi 24 anni, Buon compleanno e tanta fortuna in tutti e tuoi progetti, Franca e Giovanni”, the postcard says.
Lucrezia, now twelve years old, saw me again. How happy it was to feel that she remembered me. I thought I would have a little girl looking at me and wondering why I was there in her grandparents’ living room, but instead, no. She hugged me as if eight years had been eight days.
It was just one afternoon, and I thought I would get lost on the way to their house. But no! I went all the way around the town of Saronno, using my memory map, and there it was Franca and Giovanni’s house.
No matter what, time passing is something that will always unsettle me. Franca and Giovanni, Lucrezia’s grandparents, were in their eighties, and they are different but the same. Friendly and the most passionate couple I have ever seen in my life.
We walked around the house, talking about life but always with something hanging in the balance — I had dated one of this family’s best friends. He had been my first love, with whom I thought I would live the rest of my days, but life took care of not making it happen.
My husband was happy, and Lucrezia became a fan of his. Both walked around, with her showing him the nooks and crannies of a house where I could see myself there younger, sitting in the garden, playing with a restless little girl, swinging her constantly on a still lingering swing but now old with the marks of time. But it was as if I could see two alternative realities.
Little Lucrecia next to the young teenager, both going down the same stone path in the middle of the garden. The path that led to the turtles, the same ones who were alive in 2014.
Paolo, Lucrecia’s father, had appeared in the meantime. We talked, again with so much unsaid. I wish I had asked him
“What about him, is everything okay with him? With… you know?”. Maybe we had that conversation telepathically somehow.
He looked at me and smiled. He asked us when we would have children, and everyone has been asking me that since I turned 30. Perhaps, my husband knows me more than I think because he cut him off and promptly said,
“No kids.”
Funnily how life is, because I know that would be the same answer, Cesare, my ex-love, would say.
As I wandered through the city, I hadn’t thought about anything, and not one second did he come to my mind. But when meeting people from the past, there was a mixture of emotion, longing, love, joy, and unsaid words.
As Paolo left us at the train station, there was, in that alternative reality, not an Araci who escapes her husband and runs away because she knows she is in love with him. But in another reality, I had run to Paolo’s car and had simply said:
“Could you please tell him a “hi” for me?”
As Paolo drove with her daughter in the car, my husband held my hand, and that alternative reality vanished at that very moment.
“Will I ever see these people again?” I thought to myself.
We turned our backs to Saronno, and of we went back on the train.
Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal navigating her thirties. If you have enjoyed this article, maybe you would like to buy me a coffee here https://ko-fi.com/joanaaraci
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