Unbest

Rachel Bailey on Talking Heads’ “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)” (from Speaking in Tongues, 1983)
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There are times when you are traveling that the gravity of how utterly alone you are becomes suddenly, shockingly real and all you want is to go someplace that feels like home. For me, it was on the street in front of 21Via di San Francesco a Ripa in Rome, as I realized Nick and Tony’s pizzeria, my flimsy excuse for taking a detour on my journey from Budapest to Barcelona, was closed.

I had lived in Rome four years before, studying abroad for a semester at Trastevere’s John Cabot University. From the comfort of my friend’s place in Budapest, the idea of returning to my old stomping grounds, strolling the same cobblestone streets I used to walk to school every day and scarfing down all my old favorite local treats sounded like the stuff sepia-toned, nostalgic bliss was made of. But now I was here in the glaring sunlight, hungry, almost out of money and with no place to go. I didn’t see any of the smiling, familiar faces I had conjured up in my fantasies about coming back, and everything seemed sinister and strange.

I had been thinking of Rome so fondly, all dripping heaps of gelato and accidental sightings of the Pope, but as I slumped there on the cobblestones where Nick and Tony’s used to be, the lousier memories started bubbling up as well. There was the time a barefoot man, stumbling down the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon, had shoved his hand up my dress as I tried to squeeze past him. Or the time the guy tried to mug my friends using a comically long needle as a weapon. Or that Fat Tuesday we decided to venture away from the ex-pat bars and my purse was stolen, along with my iPod, a music fanatic’s worst nightmare in the days before widespread internet access. I’d spent the next four months singing Talking Heads’ “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)” to myself as I walked to and from school.

Come to think of it, that song had been with me every day of my old life in Rome. I sang it to celebrate after I understood my first joke told in Italian. I hummed it in the kitchen the night our neighbors climbed up from their terrace and through the window of my flat to cook my roommates and I dinner.

Maybe the place I had hoped to go and get a taste of my old life was gone, but one of the most fundamental touchstones of that life was right there in my pocket.

I popped in my earbuds and cued up the song, and the city seemed to come into focus around me, same as it ever had been. Here, the smell of orange peels ditched on the street. There, the wasp’s buzz of a Vespa. From a window above, the sounds of that regular at the café, the one who never stops whistling. And here comes that handsome Brit from the gallery down the street, the one all the girls at school used to fawn over. I had come back to the Eternal City after weeks of travel and novelty, looking for something I knew. And as David Byrne opened the second verse with those perfect lines, “Home / is where I want to be / but I guess I’m already there,” I knew what he was saying was true.

Rachel Bailey travels and writes.