Days of wine and insalata

(Part 2)

What’s it like to be a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s study center in Bellagio, Italy?

First, the facilities and appointments: every fellow (or "scholar," as they’re rather grandly called) gets a room either in the Villa Serbelloni itself or in another building called the Maranese a few minutes’ walk down a footpath; with the room comes a separate studio, equipped with a late-model laptop (mostly G3 Apple PowerBooks, by the fellows’ own choice) and printer, office supplies and furniture (including, thoughtfully, a couch to nap on), and yes, a view as spectacular as views can get – village, trees, lake, mountain, and sky, broken only by the occasional bird or ferryboat. The rooms are as you might expect of a first-class hotel, with uniformed maids stepping in twice a day to put on the bedcovers and then to take them off.

A typical day begins with breakfast at 7:30 a.m. in the dining room – invariably, bread, butter, cheeses, jams, eggs, bacon, ham, fruits, orange juice, and all the cappuccino or café americano you can drink. If you like horned or tailed creatures the way I do, you better load up on the bacon and the prosciutto, because that’s likely all you’ll ever get for the whole day (and the only pork, too; in four weeks, I didn’t see even a bouillon cube of beef). Then it’s work in the studios, then coffee or tea at 10:30 a.m. Lunch is served promptly at 1 p.m.(invariably a vegetarian affair that I successfully evade by opting for a "picnic bag" packed with rice and tuna), usually followed by a stroll down to town and a nap, more work (or some gesture to that effect), then frantic preparations for the evening, which starts at six.

Let me explain here that the Bellagio Study Center – whatever else it may be – is part hermitage, part seminar, and part country club, and at any given time you’ll appreciate one function over the other. You’re there, of course, primarily to work on your own project, and so is everybody else; but the daily schedule is organized such that time must be set aside for socializing, here to be taken as more than being chummy with the rest of the world, but also as representing one’s country and one’s work in it. It’s a mini-United Nations, the Bellagio crowd, and even when you’re relaxing all together, you never quite forget that the impression you convey is what people will take home with them, and so you do your level best to sound reasonably intelligent and interesting. (Again, thank God there’s Beng to offset any social gaffes I commit, like passing on the veggies and asking for a double serving of the soup.)

Six p.m. is presentation time – meaning a one-hour showcase of one’s talents, done in the music room with all the fellows assembled in their dinner suits and dresses (dinner at Bellagio, the rules quite explicitly stipulate, is a coat-and-tie affair, although the ties soon give way to black turtlenecks). For my part I give a reading of some prose and poetry, quite well received, and I take pains to suggest that there’s a horde of Filipinos who write better than I do.

At 7 p.m., the fellows rise and repair to another room for aperitifs – a gin tonic, a bloody Mary, or some white wine, never red; at 7:30 p.m., a waiter appears to announce that dinner is served, and we are ushered into yet another room, the walls heavy on all sides with 17th century tapestries. Every evening brings a new menu freshly printed on cream paper, and this is how most of us learn functional Italian, by sorting out the zuppa from the tacchino and the inevitable insalata. After coffee and dessert come more drinks – Sambucca or amaretto for most, Beck’s beer or (goody!) Coke for this Pinoy cavalier – and some Gershwin songs around the piano, or some animated conversation on the sofa about higher education in South Africa or horses in Iceland or chemical weapons in Iraq. Before you know it, it’s 10:30, just time enough for checking the e-mail or – could it be possible? – some honest work, before bedtime at midnight.

And that’s the schedule for the month, weekends included. The rules frown on spending even one night out of the villa (goodbye, Florence, and goodbye, Venice), although we can and do make quick-and-dirty day trips out to Como and Lecco, not only as an antidote to cabin fever but also to do some serious shopping with what few euros we have. (The adoption of the euro, by the way, has to be one of the best things, aside from the Schengen visa, that ever happened for European tourism – imagine carrying just one currency practically equal to the US dollar. The only thing awful about the euro is not having enough of it.) Naively, I’d expected Bellagio to be a tiny Fellini-esque village teeming with precocious schoolboys and busty women (of whom I met just a few, not that I was looking – although the brassieres in the lingerie shops did seem formidable, in inverse proportion to the size of the, uh, lower undergarments). Instead, for all its beauty, downtown Bellagio turned out to be a tourist trap, full of pricey shops where the good shoes began at 100 euro the pair, against half that in Como. But of course I didn’t go to Bellagio to buy shoes (a conviction Beng and the other ladies most emphatically did not share).

And what of the novel? It’s still – sadly yet also happily – in progress, a good many chapters short of its titanic climax, but at least I know where it’s going and more or less how it’s going to get there. It took me four years to finish my first novel (and 11 years to complete one long story, "Voyager") so maybe I’m just a slowpoke, but I can only hope that the results will be well worth the wait. I can’t say too much more about this project other than that it has nothing or very little to do with my own life and character – which accounts, I think, for the great difficulty and yet also the excitement with which it’s coming together in my head; it will be finished when it will, sooner than later.

(You can get more information about the Bellagio Center fellowships and even apply on-line at www.rockfound.org.)

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Bellagio was wonderful, but even a month in virtual paradise can take its toll on the senses, and Beng and I were ready to go when my term ended in mid-November; I had a three-day window before having to return to the arms of that big hairy monster we call Reality, and we decided to spend the time in Paris, which we had visited just once before on one of those cheap cross-Channel weekend bus tours where Beng missed seeing Rodin’s The Thinker because she happened to be down in the on-board loo when the bus whizzed past it (and yes, we saw the Eiffel Tower – from about a mile away).

This time, Beng had this grim and determined look: she was going to see the Louvre, get on the Eiffel Tower, and gorge on a real French dinner (i.e., anything more substantial than the half-carafe of wine and the plate of olives we had the first time). I did my duty and found us a cheap fare and a not-so-cheap hotel a stone’s throw from the Louvre. Throwing all scholarly pretensions aside and acting like the shameless tourists we were (why is it that tourists have this thing about trying not to be tourists?), we mapped out our one full day in Paris thus: morning at the Louvre, afternoon at the Eiffel Tower, then shopping, then dinner.

You could do worse than enter Paris in the morning, on a train where the busker in your railcar plays "Mack the Knife" on his accordion (so okay, Mackie Messer’s German, but no song gets you better in a street-smart mood – and you have to be streetsmart if anything in Paris, where I had an interesting non-encounter with a roving band of four or five female pickpockets on the Metro).

And so it was that I finally saw the Mona Lisa, about six feet smaller than its reputation makes it out to be, making sure to take the obligatory "certificate-of-appearance" pictures of my companion, who would not have left France otherwise. (I prefer back-to-the-camera shots, producing an inadvertent history of my inexorable baldness.)

As I walked away from the Mona Lisa, I was struck by the thought of what rotten luck it must be for any painter to have his or her masterpiece hang next to La Gioconda. Imagine the hundreds of tourists, schoolchildren, scholars, and wackos who troop to the Louvre every day and who make a beeline straight for the Mona Lisa, hardly pausing to take in the Raphaels, Bellinis, and Vasaris on either side of the long hallway. And so I turned on my heels and went back to the Mona Lisa’s special corner, purposely to take a look at the paintings on either side of it – which, for the record, were both produced by one Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), a fine painter with a penchant for martial scenes, the unwitting Salieri to Da Vinci’s Mozart. You soon discover that the entire room, in fact, is devoted to his work – except for the Mona Lisa: what a fate.

What I found most amazing about those Renaissance masterworks was the vividness of their colors – the richness and the rarity of the blues and mauves, the sureness and the freshness of the painter’s hand; instantly you understood why the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling had to be restored as it was, for here were the true colors of the Renaissance, in their full glory. And here, too, I thought of how silly it was to spend all that money to keep Juan Luna to ourselves, when we could have shared him with the world and used the cash to help more Lunas in the making.

As we rode the elevator up to the top of Eiffel Tower later that day, savoring the haze and the chill of late autumn, I felt a rumble in my stomach, the old familiar echo of that voice that respects no national boundaries: "Rice…. Rice!"

That’s how Beng got two of the three things she came to Paris for – the Louvre, the Eiffel, and an unfailing succession of three Chinese lunches and dinners at the same tratoire chinois on the Rue de Provence, behind the Galeries Lafayette, not too far from where streetwalkers on stiletto heels bring nearly as much color to Parisian life as one Juan Luna did.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.