Still Life

By Kristen Kehoe

Angela's kitchen: 3 a.m.

I took a photograph of a 3 a.m. still life, unarranged. The borders suggested the entire space outside it as well as every Roman breakfast, from the misplaced chairs to the scattered silverware. Our landlady shared her home with us, and with it, her neglect of order and line. She was an architect. She was also a mess. 

But everything in her kitchen soothed me—things that never would at home. Her table amassed layers of pasta bowls, crumbs, wine corks, rum cake, and dirty dishes from previous days. These things tiptoed their way around me, and each day I would find a new element of the architecture of her character in that room. It is not the paintings that I remember now, nor the colors of the walls, nor the size of the room. Rather, the sense of place was in the smallest details, the things unseen by those merely passing through, the details that became a mosaic of my three-month life in Rome. 

Angela Lombardi was a mystery. In those early weekend hours, she came home when the sun just began to rise over the Vatican Wall. She walked softly through the heavy front door, the one that I always cracked against the wall after opening it. She knew exactly where the light switch was—the one I could never find in the dark. She dropped her coat on the floor and sauntered on stilettoed feet into the kitchen. She bit into the left over pizza and then rested it on the crumb-covered counter. She made tea and spilled some on the pizza. She washed her hands—not the plates—and left the dish towel draped over the tea.

On Mondays my roommates and I would wake up at 8 a.m., and so would Angela. In her bathrobe she would sit and eat with us, her hair still glossed with hair spray from a Sunday night out. Then she would work all day—sometimes all night—in her study. We couldn’t see her there, tucked behind the corner, but I always felt like she could see us.

Visitors, usually other architects, would gather around Angela’s study and line their laptops along the coffee table. If I needed something from the kitchen, I would close my eyes and pray that I wouldn’t have to engage in any real Italian conversation with them. If I was lucky, I would sneak quietly by on the tails of a mere ciao. I dodged Angela and her friends just as I dodged the landscape of the kitchen, fearful of making a mistake, of incorrectly conjugating a verb, or shattering a glass bottle.

There were always bottles of half-finished Chianti that, during parties, would oxidize atop cupboards or spill onto the table between pink, flower-shaped placemats. Puddles of red would seep around the edges of the glass into a circular crowd and stray droplets would mingle with the speckled marble floor, speaking in the untranslatable whisper of strangers. It always reminded me of the tourists who walked from the Pantheon to Campo de’ Fiori on the streets outside. The next day, the uncleansed table would boast a sticky surface of deep maroon that latched onto shirt sleeves and left a residue like candy on my skin. 

Somehow, Angela seemed to find the time to bake for her coworkers. I never actually saw her bake, but there were always homemade sweets around. She loved sharing the scents of her home—old and new, fresh and rotting—rising up from the bowls and pans that seemed frozen in mid-topple. As I took the photograph, the full mixing bowl stayed miraculously still, tall and proud, forming part of the teapot, wine bottle, mixing bowl triad. To me, the bowl was an upside-down dome or cupola. A maze of chocolate frosting was its ceiling, decaying from the touch of curious fingers and stale air, like a fresco.

There were things that held true, constants, during my time abroad. The foamer for morning cappuccinos always waited to make a sail of fluff and cream. The chairs, pulled out into the narrow alley between table and cupboard, were inevitably pushed aside in the pre-school, pre-work whirlwind, where we scrambled for pastries and fruit. And the sink full of unwashed dishes waited to be attended to by the sponges and soaps that stared from afar. The dishes were a work in progress, needing restoration so the ceramic beneath the oils, dust, and congealment could be truly appreciated, like the Sistine ceiling.

When I walked out my apartment door to class every day, I walked down the streets of Rome, through the colonnades of San Pietro, over the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II and past vendors and gelateria. There were always tourists, always the mad, small cars and
motociclette, and always the homeless men and women who hugged the walls. There were the ever-present cobblestones that tripped me if I didn’t keep my eyes to the ground; with my head up, I crashed...always. When I walked out of the apartment, I didn’t leave the unruliness of our kitchen, I just found it again on a grander scale.

The cakes in our kitchen became the churches that lined the piazzas. These cakes were concocted in the early hours of the morning, between architectural plans and blueprints. The churches were constructed centuries ago. When I awoke on my last morning in Rome, I found Angela Lombardi sitting at the table, pouring a bottle of rum over the glaze and spongy insides of the (for me, final) cake. I tripped across a rolling jar of spices and spun out of control. I caught myself, however, when I spotted the cake, which saved me with its attractiveness. Angela’s cakes were always too big for the whole apartment to finish, and sometimes too ornate, like the politics and grandeur of the Vatican. There was frosting on the walls and cupboard handles and in places that would lead to footprints across the floor, mapping out a path like the one I navigated across the city, the path that always brought me home to this table.

I knew both Rome and Angela from the things she left perfectly unarranged in that kitchen. This photograph is the last pristine image I have of Rome: the cake, the Chianti, the tea, and the foamer. Angela’s secrets, and the secrets of the city, were whispered in the vapors the foods breathed to me.  They seeped over the brim.

Kristen Kehoe graduated from Hobart & William Smith Colleges in May 2005. She majored in Writing & Rhetoric, with minors in Art History and the Writing Colleagues Program. This article is reprinted from The Aleph, published by the Partnership for Global Education.