Moving from the sordid room at the Di Rienzo boarding house into Sirio's apartment, near Piazza Re di Roma, was not a proper settling in. It was still provisional, still waiting, still uncertainty. But for the first time after my arrival in Rome, I had an address, a telephone at which I could be reached, and a door to which I could return in the evening. This modest stability changed my relationship with the city.

Until then, Rome had been for me a succession of compulsory points: Termini station, the boarding house, Caritas, the offices where applications were filled out, the phone calls made with hope and the walks taken on foot to save money. In Sirio's house, the city began to enter my daily life: the morning market, lunch at Caritas, evenings with the television, letters sent home and Italian lessons done with the dictionary in front of me.

Renting a room from Sirio

The weather continued to be suffocating. I had had enough of staying in that sordid room at the Di Rienzo boarding house, so, at Anca's suggestion, I began looking for a room to rent in the advertisements in Italian newspapers. With the help of the owner of the boarding house, I made several phone calls to the ads that seemed more affordable. After a few days, I found a room to rent from Sirio C., near Piazza Re di Roma. Sirio was a little old man of sixty-five, short, stocky without being fat, as many Italians are. He had small blue eyes that looked at me curiously from behind rimless glasses glittering in the light of the chandelier in the living room. When he moved around the house, dressed in shorts, his bowed legs, full of varicose veins, gave him a comic air. He lived alone in an apartment with two bedrooms and a living room in an imposing building in central Rome, built during the Fascist period. Sirio himself was nostalgic for Mussolini's time. His wife had died years before, and he had had to raise his three children alone: two daughters, B., the elder, and P., the younger, and, between them, a son, M., an architect. He had worked in restaurants and hotels, as a waiter or maître d'. He still received calls from former wealthy clients, with villas outside Rome, asking him to organize meals when they had many guests, and it seemed that Sirio managed wonderfully in his starched, immaculate white uniform. It goes without saying that Sirio knew how to cook, so we agreed that he would prepare my evening meal for a fee, while I would manage breakfast on my own at the stove in the kitchen, and I would continue to have lunch at the Caritas canteen.

It was clear to me that Sirio had rented me the room because he needed money. His pension was relatively small and he had to supplement it somehow, while the income from organizing elegant dinners was sporadic. A regular monthly income was a better solution. In time, however, I realized that Sirio also needed company, someone to talk to and to whom he could tell his life. His choice fell on me and, despite his grumpy and fault-finding character, I think he grew fond of me during the nine months I was his tenant, making me a participant in all his troubles and joys and introducing me, over those months, to all his relatives. Out of loneliness as well, on weekday mornings he had taken it upon himself to pick up his grandson Riccardo, B.'s four-year-old son, from the nearby kindergarten and take care of him until B., leaving work, came by to take the boy home. It happened that, when I returned from the canteen, I would still find B. at Sirio's house, having lunch with her father, and we would exchange a few words.

A day in the life of an emigrant

My days began to take on a more or less stable shape as I solved the immediate worries with the money from Anca. In the morning, I would go out with Sirio to shop at a small ad hoc market set up by producers on the pavements near our home, only until midday. Sirio would ask me what I wanted to eat, and together we would buy greens, meat, cheeses and fruit. Back home, Sirio would start cooking, while I dealt with correspondence received and to be sent, made phone calls in search of a job, or did my Italian lesson.

After eleven o'clock I would leave the house and head toward the Caritas canteen, about a thirty-minute walk away, in Via delle Sette Sale, on Colle Oppio, one of Rome's hills, near the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and Stazione Termini. It was known that in that area, practically right under the Caritas canteen and the surrounding buildings, part of the Domus Aurea lay buried, Nero's enormous villa, built by him over three hills after the fire of Rome. The villa, probably never finished, was destroyed after Nero's death, following the process of damnatio memoriae that followed his death and a fire precisely in the portion of the domus on Colle Oppio. Some of the surfaces belonging to the Domus Aurea were returned to the Roman people by later emperors; others were assigned to new uses, and thus began the demolition or burial of buildings, a process that continued in the following centuries. The part of the Domus Aurea that survived, by being buried, is precisely the one on Colle Oppio. It was hidden by the earth excavated for the baths built nearby by Trajan and therefore protected from the spoliation of monuments in the Middle Ages and later from the barbarities of tourism, until a young man accidentally fell into a hole in the park on Colle Oppio. On that occasion, an enormous hall was discovered, decorated with splendid paintings from the Roman period. Experts who came to the site found that, on contact with light and air, the paintings disintegrated, as Federico Fellini also shows in his film Roma, in the episode of the construction of the Roman metro.

Of course, none of this was on the minds of the foreign refugees waiting for visas, nor of the Italian beggars sitting quietly in line at the entrance to the canteen. The canteen opened at twelve, and all of us waited for the moment when we could enter and eat the two courses: the first was la pasta, one of the countless pasta dishes of Italian cuisine; the second was a meat dish, followed by dessert, everything on plastic plates and with plastic cutlery, provided to us in sanitized packages. The staff serving us consisted of volunteers, young people or pensioners, extremely respectful toward all of us. In the queue there were many Eastern Europeans: Romanians, Poles and Czechs, but also Moroccans and Tunisians. The Romanians, waiting for a visa for the United States, Canada or Australia, were of every kind. We more or less knew one another and grouped ourselves, almost automatically, according to preferences based either on cultural level, rural or urban origin, region of origin, or the trades practiced in Romania. We discussed what was happening in the country and in the world, what was being heard at the consulates regarding our interviews, how we were managing in Italy. Lacking any in-depth knowledge of the subject, we gossiped about the Italians, of course, criticizing them for their indifference toward us, for the exaggerated individualism cultivated over centuries, for their lack of civilization in a space that had been civilized and civilizing for several millennia and which they did not deserve, and so on. In all these absurdities we forgot that we were there in freedom, fed and protected by Italians, whether by the Italian Catholic Church or by the policemen who were not visible but who were certainly watching us.

After lunch I would return home slowly, if I was expecting a phone call, or wander through the center of Rome, trying to see everything possible, everywhere that did not require an entrance fee. Bookshops were a favorite place. At one point I discovered, near Piazza di Spagna, a bookshop with books in English. From then on I visited it regularly, looking for computer science books and magazines that I had been deprived of for so many years in Romania. I was informed that orders were also accepted, so I planned that, when I had money, I would order all the books for which I had longed in Romania.

Another place I would go toward evening was the large churches in the center of Rome, with their wealth of frescoes, paintings, mosaics and statues. I would enter on tiptoe during the service, waiting for the priests' homilies in order to try to understand their Italian, spoken slowly and correctly.

When I returned home in the evening, Sirio was waiting for me with the table laid. I ate alone, because Sirio drank only tea in the evening, while the two of us watched television, I trying to understand what was said in the news and talk shows, asking Sirio to explain what I did not understand.

Every evening, from my new room, I wrote letters to my wife, telling her about life in Italy and about future plans, without dwelling on the hardships or the uncertainty weighing on me. From time to time I sent packages with gifts to my family and relatives on their birthdays. I also sent postcards with views of Rome to all my friends in the country and abroad, with a few friendly words or jokes. I had to give them the impression that I was living well and that they should not worry too much about my fate.

Italian lessons

Worried that I might become a burden to my aunt, I decided to look for work in order to support myself in Rome. Once again, the classified pages of Italian newspapers were useful. I began making phone calls from my host's telephone, trying to find a job. Taking advantage of the free time before finding work, I set myself seriously to learning Italian, without which any job would be hard to obtain, most Italians not knowing English well enough to use it at work. Italian, sister to Romanian, belonging to the same Latin family, is in reality difficult to master well. The Italian operas I had loved since childhood, the films of Italian neorealism that I devoured in cinemas, had accustomed me to the resonance of the Italian language; I knew or, rather, guessed the meaning of many words, but to speak so as to make myself understood — that was quite another matter. I began going from church to church for the evening service in order to listen to the priests' homilies in Italian. With little money, I bought a guide to Rome and an Italian-English dictionary. Resuming a practice from my university years for learning English, every day I wrote in a notebook, in two columns facing each other, forty new Italian words and, respectively, their Romanian translations. I read them several times, then checked whether I remembered them, covering first the Romanian side, then the Italian side with my hand. Finally, in the evening, in front of the television, I conversed with Sirio, trying to use the words I had learned.

A few pages from my personal repertoire of Italian words have survived from that period. It was not a school notebook, but a tool of survival. The words, written in haste, corrected, crossed out and taken up again with other meanings, show better than any explanation how I was trying to transform a language close to my own, yet still foreign, into a means of daily existence. I was learning Italian not out of cultural curiosity, but out of the very concrete need to make phone calls, answer questions, ask for information, understand advertisements and, in the end, no longer be mute in the city in which I was living.

A threshold

Looking back, I realize that living at Sirio's was more than a practical solution. There I began to pass from the condition of a refugee waiting to that of a man trying to organize himself. I still had no certainty, I still did not know whether America would remain the final destination, but Rome was no longer only a waiting room. Slowly, and without asking my permission, it was becoming a possible life.

Sirio's house was important not for its comfort, but for its function as an intermediate shelter. Between the Di Rienzo boarding house and the first real job, between Caritas and the first courses, between the American file and Italian adaptation, it was the place where I learned to transform suspension into routine, and routine into the beginning of reconstruction.