On lifelines and deadlines - I

No sign of life was audible throughout the staircase of Via Nomentana Nuova 25 as I hauled my weight up to the seventh floor, lighting the stairs with my cellular phone. Even now, my apartment feels empty and dark, with no lights on, no distant rumbling of a TV, no computer screen shining, no sound of water heating… Only the clock ticking in the kitchen assures me that time still is, and the usual ambulance rolling with its sirens declares that a lifeline of Rome is still open, and the fight for life is still out there.

We’ve been without electricity for almost two days now. Our food in the freezer is already rotting and we are out of hot water. The bus drivers are on strike so walking to the university which is approximately six kilometers away is as good an option as waiting for the bus which is bound to arrive packed full of Romans.

The pizzeria and the small coffee shop in front of my block have been out of business for the same two days, so I walk to the next block to have a tramezzino and a caffé macchiato for breakfast.

After that, I walk back and climb once more to my flat. This, it turns out, is my first blog entry written with pen on paper.

This morning we sat down chatting with my flatmate Felipe, a Brazilian and a former banker, to discuss how in Italy deadlines are never met. When I bought my phone line, I was promised it would be activated the same day; but it was activated in four days at the end of my third round with the guy at the phone shop. My internet was a similar story with three days. We were promised we would wake up to this day with electricity, only to be disappointed.

Felipe has been in Rome for two months now with his acceptance letter in hand, and his class schedule was approved only yesterday. “They always say ‘tomorrow’” he complains…
I took out a weekly newspaper subscription, but I’ve come to stop hoping it would one day arrive.

For our doorman however, our little “energy situation” is quite tolerable. “What can I do” he exclaims when asked about our electricity.

“If it were in Brazil, I’d be on the phone arguing” says Felipe. Quite true. If it were in Turkey, I’d be on the phone yelling complaints. But here, we’re strangers from “developing economies”, we’re undermined for our ethnicities, and we also happen to be strangers to a strange culture.

Coming from those “developing economies”, we’ve been taught to work very hard to attain an above-average standard of living. We’ve also been taught to compete hard at every step of our lives, thus we feel, in a much stronger fashion than Romans, that incompetency should be punished. Still, we don’t get any buses and the electricians are nowhere to be seen.

“You’re right man, Italy is going down” says Felipe “Nobody likes to work here”, in response to my comment. Public offices are open for five hours a day, and retail banking hours are nothing different. Nobody we have yet seen likes working…

I remember reading Anthony Doerr, who was awarded the Rome prize by American Academy of Arts and Letters: “Italy is the place where a forty-year-old man can still roll dough and not be considered a failure”