Our America: Planet Trump
- By Frederika Randall
Went to the bar down the street for cappuccino this morning. It’s been three days now since the US election. NB: this is Rome, my home, where cappuccino takes only seconds to make and is generally pretty good.
I sit at a table outside, daring it to rain. After a few minutes a very elderly woman hobbles up with a friend and a badante, a caregiver, who asks if they can sit with me at this, the sole sidewalk table. Her ward likes to smoke, she says, and therefore they have to sit out in the cold.
‘Please do,” I say. “It’s not very cold.”
They sit down. The elderly lady then asks whether I will mind if she smokes. Oh certainly not, I say, my husband smokes like a Turk, as we say in Italian. The elderly lady, who’s quite smartly dressed and no fool, laughs, and orders a sandwich and a Crodino. She used to smoke very little, but when her husband died, she began to smoke more. For the company, if I see what she means.
“You’re not Italian, then,” she deduces from my accent. We speak of my country of origin, and this leads to mention of Donald Trump, and I feel the usual compulsion to mark my distance from the newly elected president.
This interests the badante, who tells me she’s from Ukraine.
“Donetsk,’ she replies to my further question. She’s very pleased about Trump’s election. He's a friend of Putin, while Obama is a criminal selling guns to the fascists. America wants to take over Ukraine, and put in fracking wells. Americans are criminals, they’re selling weapons, the fascists are shooting, children are getting killed. This is the point where I should have asked her whether she herself has children, whether she’s left them behind to come to Italy to earn a living. But I’m flustered, lacking the courage to learn whether perhaps some child of her own has been hurt. Or whether she has had to leave children behind.
We talk for a while. In her view, the US couldn’t care less about the Maidan protesters; we just want to extend our empire to eastern Ukraine, and then go after Russia. Democrazia! You can have your democrazia. Things were better under the Soviet Union. They had everything they needed. But America wants to divide up the territory and exploit it.
It’s hard work trying to explain that I don’t entirely disagree with her. She’s gotten up steam to speak truth to the enemy, and doesn’t want to know that I am not that enemy. I tell her I don’t particularly like Putin, but neither do I think he’s the devil incarnate. I say that the market, capitalism, brings terrible woes to the West, too. I want to be friendly, but there’s such a bitter, hurt weight to her every word that I know it’s impossible. I want to find common ground, but as always, when you are by far the most privileged one, it's expecting too much to want the other to acknowledge you.
The elderly lady’s elderly friend, who had gone off up the street for a moment, now returns. Neatly dressed herself, spry and sharp-minded, she looks to be in her mid-80s. As is the Smoker, who has finished her breakfast sandwich and is now lighting a cigarette with great ceremony. We're silent for a moment. Then this elderly friend, the Philosopher, lobs a comment into the Cold War stalemate beside her.
“As Rosa Luxemburg said,” she cracks a small smile, “you either have socialism, or you will have barbarism.”
It’s starting to rain. Socialism. It had something to do with what made things better before the USSR collapsed. Or maybe it didn't. The badante seems skeptical of Rosa Luxemburg. Or maybe she isn't. Unexpectedly, it's possible we all agree.
Sort of.
Frederika Randall was born in Pittsburgh and lives in Rome. She has worked as a cultural journalist for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale, among others. Her translations include novels by Luigi Meneghello, Ottavio Cappellani, Helena Janeczek, and Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of An Italian. Other translations include Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, Primo Levi's Resistance, and Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, for which she and the author shared the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature.
Read more voices on #OurAmerica here.
