Two homelands, one body

Essay by Eddi Bellando

Artwork by Emily Cross

The spoons are supposed to be in the drawer across from the sink.

I just arrived at my second home, and it always takes me some time to remember where things are. The same will be true for other essential items during the next minute, hour and day. This is what happens when you have two homes – a “first world problem” if there ever was one.

Living in two places began when my wife and I retired. We had lived in the same New York City apartment for 25 years, during which we spent two to three weeks a year in a small apartment in Turin, Italy. My parents purchased it in their old age as an investment. Many people in Italy put their extra money into real estate because many other investments are less stable. After a few months of strict COVID-19 lockdown in NYC, my wife had an idea: “Why don’t we spend some lockdown time in Italy and look at four different walls?”

When we left via JFK Airport, which is usually as crowded as a busy street market, it was almost empty. My wife presented her U.S. passport to the agent, who asked, “Do you have a different passport?” During the summer of 2020, Italy would not allow non-citizens into the country because of COVID. My wife showed her Italian passport, obtained years earlier at my insistence, and the agent checked us in. 

The other place

The plane was nearly empty, and so was the Turin airport. The Italian lockdown was even stricter than the American one, but our daily evening walk along carless avenues and in deserted parks was more familiar and comforting to me. These were places I had known since childhood.

So began our split existence: eight months in New York followed by four months in Turin. We are now in our fourth year of this arrangement. Despite the initial confusion, it is surprising how quickly the brain adjusts to being in a new place. Everything in the second place becomes familiar again and the “other life” fades away. You are instantly surrounded by loved ones, familiar places, old habits, favorite news broadcasts, and the other place becomes part of the remote past.

Does living in two countries lead to dissipation?

My current reality always takes precedence. I end up only following the news of the current place, and when friends ask me about things in the country I’m away from, I say that I do not really know. When I’m in Italy, I read Italian newspapers; when I’m in the United States, I read ones from the U.S.

Switching from the U.S. to Italy and from Italy to the U.S. have the same mechanical quality.

But dreams keep me linked to the other place. Many of my dreams are about situations, places and friends left behind in the other life, and some are a quirky mixture, with friends from the U.S. thrown into Italian situations. Some dreams  switch seamlessly from the U.S. to Italy to a place that is neither or both.

Many footprints

Carbon footprint is an issue. Domestically, my wife and I are fastidious recyclers and rarely use a car. However, a one-way flight between New York and Milan produces 2.1 tons of carbon emissions per person. That’s 8.4 tons every time my wife and I go roundtrip. It is our only yearly transoceanic flight, and it allows us to see family and friends (our mothers are still alive), but it does create a lot of emissions. The problem could be solved if we moved permanently to one of the two countries. But I am too attached to Italy, and my Midwestern-born, Irish-American wife is too attached to New York City and her family in Nebraska. One of us wouldn’t be able to see our families as often.

One of my friends finds it harmful in other ways. It makes one feel uprooted, he says, without a center, without a homeland, without a place. Another friend thinks that we are leading only half a life. We don’t have that many more years to live, and this constant back and forth cuts our lives in half by depriving us of a solid year spent in one place. But I have the opposite view: that we are living two lives, in two different, attractive places – which doubles the quality of our remaining years.

The tomatoes are different

It is futile to compare the two places. Nonetheless, we do make silly comparisons: tomatoes taste so much better in Italy, the bureaucracy is so much less daunting in the U.S., etc. The comparisons never go deeper than this trivial level. The two places are not truly comparable. Each has different characteristics. You have to take the whole package; you cannot start paring things down, picking and choosing what to compare. The U.S. is the U.S., and Italy is Italy. You cannot change that. Comparisons don’t just sound silly, they’re a waste of time.

We do have a better view from our NYC apartment. Through our windows, we can see the George Washington Bridge, the busiest one in the world. In Turin, we only see monotonous red rooftops out of our fourth-floor windows – a far cry from the wildly diverse New York City rooftops, crowned by fantastical water towers.

There is a framed reproduction of a 1797 map of Turin in my New York apartment, and there is a reproduction of a New-York Historical Society print of New York City, dated 1803, hanging in my Turin apartment. My two hometowns, six years apart, both looking gorgeous.

I have not become a “man without a country.” Rather, I am now a person of two countries, more firmly rooted in both. I feel more attuned to the wider world, and at the same time more rooted in the two places to which I truly belong.

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Eddi Bellando was born in Turin, Italy, in 1955, and worked as a journalist in Italy and as a writer/editor for the United Nations in Nairobi and New York. Eddi’s time at the U.N. included stints as an election monitor in El Salvador and the Central African Republic. Eddi recently earned his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University.

Emily Cross lives in the Skinker DeBaliviere neighborhood of St. Louis. She is “happy to be building a career as a cut paper artist.” You can find more of her artwork at www.etsy.com/shop/CrossCutPapers. Her Instagram is @crosscutpapers.

Editor’s Note: I’ve known Eddi Bellando for four decades, which is roughly two-thirds of my life. His erudition and aesthetic inclinations — to reading, playing the piano, visiting museums, etc. — have always pleased and impressed me. When I first visited him decades ago in NYC, his apartment across from the United Nations was small, spartan and contained few things other than books. More than a decade later, Eddi and his wife moved into a much larger apartment in my old NYC neighborhood, the realm of my childhood. Two summers ago, my wife, son and I had the pleasure of staying in their NYC apartment. The view of the George Washington Bridge is indeed spectacular, and, for a short time, I, too, oscillated between two homelands, St. Louis and NYC.

How many homes, past and present, are within you? They can be across an ocean or a country — or, perhaps, across town. They can be concurrent or merely live on in your memory.

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