"Love in the Tropics with Marco"

Everybody warned me. You’re too emotionally involved. Try the boy next door or someone at the library. Not a man you don’t know, who also lives eight thousand miles away!

I only paid Marco for an hour, but he stayed online longer, until his dinnertime, which was my breakfast time. Every time our Italian lesson ended, our parting was, to borrow from Shakespeare, a “sweet sorrow.”

“Eh, devo andare,” Marco would say. Eh, I must go!

“Sempre bene vederti,” I’d say. Always good to see you!

He was born in Italy but made his home in Thailand. I was interested in Thailand, a country which I pictured full of Buddhist temples, because I was looking for peace inside myself. In my country, the President had recently caused a health crisis. Measles, whooping cough, and foodborne, parasitic outbreaks were causing panic in his second term.

As the number of deaths climbed, Marco became concerned about my safety.

“La mia cara amica. Hai ricevuto tutte le vaccinazioni infantili?” My dear friend. Did you get all your childhood vaccinations?

He said that Thailand, although a poor country, had a Ministry of Public Health that efficiently delivered free vaccines to most citizens.

“Resta al sicuro,” he told me. Keep yourself safe.

I found distraction from the crisis by teaching English to high schoolers, which was my profession, and by learning Italian.

The grammar rules of Italian differ from English. Marco taught with a saint’s patience, despite my frequent errors.

“Tu va bene,” he’d say, encouragingly. You’re doing well.

But after a while, it wasn’t learning Italian that was important. It was learning about Marco.

To me, his baldness gave him a virility greater than Samson’s lengthy locks gave him. To borrow from Shakespeare, Marco's startlingly blue eyes shone like “celestial orbs.” He rarely smiled, except when I made him laugh.

One day I told him that I thought Americans were prudish, for all their talk about sex.

He laughed, blushing. “Il sesso e la cosa piu naturale del mondo.” Sex is the most natural thing in the world.

That I could make him blush charmed me. He was sweet! A tough guy, who was really the opposite. In Italy, he had discovered his wife cheating. He had wanted to work things out. She had wanted to move on. Heartbroken, he’d moved to Argentina, while his heart mended. Then he’d moved to Thailand, to open an Italian restaurant. It had failed because happy people, when employees, don't work hard. So he became a tutor and farmer. Not dependent on anyone.

I will never forget the time he had to flee his house for a hotel in a nearby city because border skirmishes between Thailand and Cambodia erupted into war. Bombs fell near the house he lived in, until he’d had to pack an overnight bag and drive himself and his puppy to safety on his motorbike. For several weeks, he delivered lessons from a hotel room.        

While America slipped into dictatorship, I read heavily in self-help books to preserve my sanity. The cruel, incessant attacks on everyday people by an aspiring dictator, whose rich and powerful friends he put in positions of power, were exhausting. People were putting their heads in the sand. 

Marco worried about me getting hurt because I was not among the favored “one percent.” He also worried because I was Jewish. He had majored in international political science at the University of Turin. He told me that anti-Semitism was not popular in Thailand, which traditionally tolerated different religions.

Then Thailand went to war again against Cambodia a second time, after a fragile truce unraveled. Bombs dropped in Marco’s backyard, and again he fled to the city with his puppy and a hastily packed suitcase. For two weeks, he taught from a hotel room. Then a truce was reached. 

In a self-help book borrowed from the library, I read that the worst thing a person can do is to not say everything she feels. The words prompted me to act.

“Don’t hate me, Marco,” I said—lapsing into English, instead of Italian— “but I must tell you something I’ve been holding back from saying—”

“I love you!”

Marco was quiet. Then he said, in a delicious, Italian-accented English voice, “Too bad we live so far from each other.”

“We almost couldn’t live farther,“ I said.

Then during the next lesson, he popped the question. Well, not that question! “Why don’t you come here?”

My heart leapt. He continued, “You’re unhappy with the way your country’s being run. I live in a benevolent dictatorship where you don’t need a lot of money. It’s very different from the West. People are happy. They live simple lives, marrying and having children, and going to work. They don’t work that hard. They don’t try to make a lot of money. Tutoring students around the world gives me a connection to the wider world. My smaller world is my farm, where I raised pepperoni last year. This year I’m growing mangoes. It’s very hot, but the landscape is beautiful. I work long hours under a hot sun, but I like making things grow. I like nothing better than to be with nature. At the end of the workday, I go inside, and I’m very thirsty. After a hot day in the sun, taking a long draught of cold water is wonderful! Taking so much such pleasure from something so small ... Life doesn’t get better than that!”

Then he said, “With you, I would have something else to brighten my day.”

Could I give up everything I knew? The life that was so familiar to me? Could I walk alongside this man, who had chosen such a different path?

Then America was gripped by a new crisis: severe storms paralyzing communities, not only destroying property but cutting off electricity, gas, and water, engorging sewer systems that overflowed into streets. One such storm had done this to my neighborhood. For several days, I walked up and down in a building whose elevator didn’t work. I slept two nights at a friend’s unaffected house, and during the day, I relied on a nearby Starbuck’s for a bathroom, water, and food. Without air conditioning, it was impossible to stay inside my apartment, but I wanted to stay nearby.

It was a lesson in the power of gratitude. A quarter of the planet lacked these necessities on a daily basis. Knowing this did not make things less scary.

Near my house, someone had lost his life, hammered by a tree that was split in half by a bolt of lightning. I saw the cordoned-off top of the tree lying on a nearby sidewalk.

With life so dangerous, I wondered if I should deposit myself in a far distant place. After all, it did not then seem an irrevocable choice.

A half year later, I found myself living beside Marco in a house that he had built for three thousand dollars. There was a drought, and the Thais were praying for rain. Marco didn’t depend on his crops for food. His tutoring covered his living expenses. But as a farmer, he hoped for rain for the sake of his plants. He said everything deserves to have life’s necessities. It was a fundamentally just and democratic notion from which the United States was moving farther and farther every day.  

Once I moved to Thailand, I found an answer to Juliet’s question: What satisfaction can't thou have tonight? How tender and patient Marco was! He delighted in every part of my body, whispering terms of endearment, until I entered a kind of sworn, finally bursting with the pleasure of it.

When we would sometimes disagree about things, such as his habit of going to sleep early, more or less with the sun—I was used to staying up late, watching movies on TCM—a flicker of doubt crossed my mind. But only for a moment.

I was curiously content. Not deliriously happy, such as I had been taught to want to feel by bestsellers worldwide—authors, academic scholars, and celebrity speakers—who spent long work hours promoting the idea of following your dream, of having it all, and especially, of becoming rich. Neither did I feel anything that I had been encouraged to feel by reading about hormone-driven Romeo and Juliet, arrogant Emily and her childhood friend Heathcliff, frustrated Emma Bovary and her lusty backwoods amante.

Then the heart-rending news arrived. The American President—who so many people had voted for but grew to not understand—had brought upon his country a war with China. He had provoked the Chinese to commit the unpardonable. China had dropped a nuclear bomb on Washington, D.C.

The spoke on which the wheels of the United States turned stopped. The lurch of its brakes was a sound heard around the world.

No one was able to get out of the United States. And no one wanted to get in.

I had no option but to go with the one I had chosen:

Love in the tropics with Marco.