Rome Diaries: Table for one

Dining with me, myself and I in the Italian capital

I’m trapped, I can’t get away. I’m standing outside a branch of Tonnarello, the pasta joint in Rome that always seems to have a line of people waiting despite having loads of branches all crammed cheek-by-jowl into Trastevere. This particular Tonnarello doesn’t have a line and so up I go to the waiter. I can see empty tables. And yet, for a table for one, it will be a little while.

Okay, fine. I can see that, really, there’s space, but I can take a hint. I’m about to turn and leave when a hand shoots up at a table in the corner. A woman is waving at me, waving to me in fact, waving me over. She points at the chair opposite her and waves again.

“I’ll join her,” I say to the waiter, who looks perplexed as I squeeze past.

I’m joining her, but I don’t want to. For someone who travels alone fairly regularly and claims to want to be social, to meet people, I’m actually awfully picky. I stay in hostels (in a private room, naturally), ostensibly because they have common areas, bars, gardens, where I can meet fellow travellers. I then don’t spend any time in these common areas, bars or gardens, I go straight out, alone. I suppose really I want the option to make friends but actually, I have quite enough already as it is, I can’t be getting many more.

I suppose I still could have left Tonnarello. I could have pretended not to see the waving hand, or saw it, noticed, and still turned around and left. But really I was never going to do this because picky about new people though I am, I’m also English. Had I ignored this kind gesture it would have haunted me for weeks, well after my time in Rome has ended. I would have woken up at night in a cold sweat thinking of this poor woman whom I was so incredibly rude to. She, of course, wouldn’t have thought about me at all.

So, off I go, to the table. I shake hands with my new dining companion who, it’s impossible not to notice, is already eating. This situation proves far too much for our waiter who shows he is not one of life’s great thinkers by taking a good few minutes to grasp that yes, I will also be eating but no, we won’t be on the same bill. That sorted, I am promptly ignored by the waiter for ten minutes in the hope that I will go away.

I don’t go away and get to know my new companion who is Anna, a Polish woman who is also travelling alone in Rome. She too has found it hard to secure a table, she tells me, so has taken pity on me.

I feel slightly guilty for assuming Anna would be a weirdo since she was waving a stranger over to her table, and relieved that I didn’t just walk away. Travelling alone does tend to elicit a few different reactions, most of them negative. In Iceland years ago a Belgian couple I was on a walking tour with gave me such a look of pity, “oh, you’re alone?”, that I thought they were going to adopt me and take me back to Gent or Antwerp or wherever they were from.

There tends to be an assumption that one is travelling alone because one is incapable of making friends and certainly incapable of romantic connection of any kind. I must travel alone because I do basically everything alone and because no one would actually want to do it with me.

Then there’s the more concerning but, unfortunately, understandable reaction: that I am travelling alone not because I’m a tragic loser but because I’m actively dangerous, a predator on the lookout for new prey. I have occasionally received this sort of look over the years and have often protested so vociferously that I basically prove their point.

I do this here, pointing out to Anna within about thirty seconds and with a vehemence I can normally muster only in slow check-out lines at supermarkets that I do in fact have a girlfriend, a real one, and that she happens to be in Disneyland. I say this with such enthusiasm and vigour that I’m absolutely certain Anna doesn’t think I have a girlfriend at all, that there are no doubt many women currently in Disneyland but none of them are in any way attached to me.

Still, she has the good grace not to stab me with her fork or get up and sprint away. She continues the conversation, talks about her life, her boyfriend (who I’m certain is real), her work.

We pass a pleasant half hour marred only slightly by the fact that I have to pretend that I haven’t eaten at Tonnarello before. When travelling alone I often choose the path of least resistance when it comes to dinner, having only so much stomach (so to speak) for awkward encounters with waiters and staring into the void where a person usually sits opposite.

I have chosen Tonnarello - though a different branch I should point out - because I know it to be impersonal, easy enough. I know the drill. Obviously the very notion of it being easy flies right out the proverbial window once Anna starts beckoning me over and I begin to live a lie. The path of least resistance - just going along with whatever someone else says - beckons again.

I study the menu as if it’s an ancient scroll it will take months to decipher. This is Oscar-worthy stuff, clearly, since Anna recommends a few of the dishes, their specialties. I know all of this information already because I ate here, or round the corner at the other branch at least, yesterday evening, and yet I sit and listen and say, hmm, interesting, and eventually order one of the dishes she recommends. They’re really good at pasta here, she tells me, and I say oh, really, though I know this already.

(Everywhere in Rome is alright at pasta, obviously, they’re just particularly good here).

Just after I finish my meal (as Anna is a nice, polite, normal person who waits for me to finish) she takes her leave and I’m left to stare again into the void. The waiter has absolutely no idea what’s going on by now, no clue how many people he’s supposed to be serving or taking payment from, but eventually the table is clear and I’m on my way, on my own.

I walk out of the restaurant and back into the streets of Rome, full of other locals and travellers. Perhaps I’ll meet some of them, make some new friends. Which I do have plenty of, I promise. They’re real, with real lives and real jobs. They’re just not in Rome.

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