The morning after the vermouth party, Bernie admonished Nick: “Some of the kids got drunk and missed dinner; others were late to breakfast this morning. There’s a lot going wrong on this trip, but I can help you fix it.”
The same scenario unfolded every summer. This was Nick’s sixth trip, so he was accustomed to his role of crown prince. The owner of a robust ego, Bernie needed to be needed—a trip couldn’t be a good experience without him. So Nick smiled and played along, regarding the situation as practice for when you needed to kiss the ass of your boss in your first job; to get ahead, you saluted the uniform, not the man.
Over breakfast, Nick let us have it: “It played out as I warned you. Now please toe the line. Remember to walk fast and follow the golf shirt. Don’t lose him or the shit will hit the fan.”
In the soaking heat, we tramped out to the Forum, the Times Square of the Roman Empire. Over the next four hours, Bernie delivered a crash course on the rise and fall of Western civilization to a herd of toxified teens.
An admirer of the military ethos that I had only recently learned to ironize, he loved repeating his favourite quotation: “If you’re not the lead dog, the view is always the same.” I had been told that leadership and risk had a noble, altruistic side, but countercultural counter-indoctrination was planting doubt: as working-class GIs fragged their Ivy League officers in the swamps of Vietnam, I was bowing to the deity of Dylan: “Don’t follow leaders.”
Bernie’s ponderous lecturing style was enlivened by quirky gestures. Threading through the ruins, he held forth on the origins of the Forum, the evolution of Imperial Rome, and a litany of monuments, temples, palaces, basilicas, baths, fountains, columns, arches, amphitheatres, porticos, shrines, statues, walls, roads, bridges, mausoleums. When he lapsed into Latin verse, I thought of my battered yellow textbook Latin for Canadian Schools, and out of the side of my mouth, I shot puns and pig Latin in Sally’s direction. Loved Ben. Hated Hur.
Bernie knew kids liked sex and gore, so he deployed the occasional vivid visual scene to cut the tedium. In 46 BC, Julius Caesar paraded the conquered Gallic barbarian Vercingetorix to the Forum and right here, right under our feet, the Big V was strangled to death. When Bernie started in on the six vestal virgins, my ears pricked up. Hand-picked pubescent patrician girls chastely devoted themselves to pagan rites for thirty years, maintaining the sacred fire of Vesta, the goddess of hearth and home. The VVs were held in awe for their magical powers; if a man happened to see a vestal on the way to his execution, he was pardoned. On the downside, if they broke their vows of celibacy before the age of thirty—their chastity was tied directly to the health of the Roman state—it was considered an act of incest and treason, and they were buried alive, since the spilling of their blood was forbidden.
I was fascinated, but by hour four, we felt as if we were on a forced march. After we encircled the alleged spot where Big Julie was knocked off in 44 BC, I told Sally: “Time to knock off Bernie.”
* * *
—
Maybe it was the marathon walking and talking in the remorseless heat mixed with my compulsive glibness and skittering imagination that finally did it. Bernie explained that over the centuries, sediments from the Tiber and eroding hills had raised the Forum floor. Citizens simply paved over the debris that was too onerous to remove, building over earlier ruins, and the city rose. Looking up, I was made to experience Rome as Freud had—the accumulating detritus of the centuries reflecting the strata of the unconscious mind.
I guessed this was the intention: sooner or later, something serious would slither through our waxy earholes. I realized that as I stood under the same sun that shone on Julius Caesar, I was nothing but an infinitesimal microbe, yet dimly tethered to the idea of the infinite. I was occupying simultaneous layers of time and space—a twentieth-century reader of an Elizabethan play of Imperial Rome even as I dreamed of the millennial future. Raw awe seeped through me.
That night, we returned to the Forum for a sound-and-light show. Like a World War II anti-aircraft battery, columns of intersecting spotlights washed over the ruins to strains of grandiose music and an ominous, voice-of-God narration. The experience must have resonated because back at the hotel a bunch of us found ourselves sitting around telling ghost stories.
Around midnight, Kathy burst into our room, breathless and hysterical: at the Trevi Fountain, random Italian hands had thrust up her miniskirt. Peter had intervened and hustled her away, but he was nearly assassinated for his chivalry. Kathy’s spontaneous entrance quelled our ghost stories, but then out popped a crazy dare: why not spend the night in the Forum, sleeping on the stones where mad emperors had strutted? Only Kathy’s distress made us think twice.
The next morning, Nick led a tour of the Capitoline Hill, one of the famed seven hills of Rome. Standing in the grand piazza designed by Michelangelo to restore Renaissance Rome to its classical grandeur, he performed a killer imitation of his boss, signalling that he was on our side.
In the evening, we bused out to the third-century Baths of Caracalla to see an outdoor performance of Aida. We were crammed into a set of bleachers so far back that it was like watching a hockey game on a six-inch TV. I had no time for the tortured story of the doomed love of an Egyptian general for an Ethiopian princess, so I indulged my shoulder-hunching Ed Sullivan imitation on Sally, provoking Medusa glares from the avid opera fans around us. The more they shushed me, the more they fed my juvenile brat.
On our last day in Rome, Tammy led us to Vatican City for a tour of St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. Even I knew better than to crack wise here. The prodigious Michelangelo spent five years, from 1508 to 1512, painting the chapel’s forty-metre-long vaulted ceiling, lying on his back on scaffolding, paint dripping into his eyes. The nudes he painted in The Last Judgment, the monumental fresco behind the altar, so offended counter-Reformation clergy that they ordered drapery painted on forty of the naked figures. Shades of the Pompeii closet.
Filing into St. Peter’s Basilica, we glimpsed the majestic funeral procession of a cardinal, his confreres’ crimson robes signifying readiness to spill blood in defence of the Christian faith. Robin burst into tears at the sight of the Pietà, the marble masterpiece of the crucified Christ draped across the lap of the Virgin Mary. I was moved to take a closer look. Twenty-five-year-old Michelangelo was about the same age as Nick when he sculpted the Pietà. How did such an absurdly young man conceive such a thing, let alone hew it from marble by hand?
In the afternoon, Bernie led us into the catacombs, the three-hundred-mile network of burial grounds fifty feet deep, encircling the outskirts of Rome. Originally pagan, the burial niches and sarcophagi were carved into the tunnel walls. When the Christians were persecuted, they sought out underground shelters, and their martyrs were eventually entombed here. Pagans favoured cremation, but the early Christians buried their dead in the belief that their bodies would be resurrected with the Second Coming. Forgotten in the Dark Ages, the catacombs were rediscovered in the nineteenth century by candle-bearing Grand Tourists.
Goofing around, Stu wiggled through a clammy crack and mingled with the skulls and bones, a kind of backwards birth. I felt a weird tingle. Let down by parents and teachers who poorly parented and taught, I was discovering in my happy tripsters their glorious opposites, and through them disinterring a deep secret: all knowledge is carnal.
* * *
—
Taking our lead from Nick and Tammy, many of us were flirting with loose forms of coupledom, chemistry experiments that sparked or fizzled. Fitz and Sally, Sean and Jane, Peter and Nan were the most visibly “together,” the boys more hearts on sleeves than the girls. The second tier was more mercurial and kept the gossip mill turning: Rich and Liz? Steve and Nikki? Dave and Annabel? Will and Marywinn? Stu and Kat? John and Robin?
On our last night in Rome, a gang of us roved the backstreets on yet another let’s-get-lost mission. Into a dark nightclub cellar I trailed Sally. We headed for the dance floor
, ending up jammed tight to the band, the swinging guitar necks close to cracking our heads. When they ripped into “Paint It Black,” I was beside myself: “I could not foresee this thing happening to you…”
Without a break, the mad guitars switched gears, and we were driven into “The Land of 1,000 Dances.” My joints oiled, my limbs limber, I fell into a spiralling, undulating groove. Were we the first generation to invent rapture? Dave sidled up beside us: “Hey, Fitz, you’re a great dancer!” He was as amazed as I was.
When the organ riff for “A Whiter Shade of Pale” softened the pace, I faced my first slow dance with Sally Wodehouse. As if planning escape, I glanced at our table crammed with wine bottles and heaping ashtrays, then turned back to gaze into her flushed face. I slipped my arm around her slowly, tentatively, resting my palm on her lower back, curving into her hip, suppressing the impulse to clutch her too tightly. As she rested her head on my shoulder, a choir of voices rose in sync with the lyric that we all knew was coming: “One of sixteen vestal virgins…”
Back at the hotel, Bernie was pouring another round of sweet vermouth and casting a smile toward Nick: “No question, we’ve turned things around. I love the leadership potential of some of these kids!”
NINE
Buried Alive
A half-day northbound drive delivered us to Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, and with each passing moment I was soothed by the intuition that I was crawling out of my childhood in the direction of rebirth. In the lobby of the Terminus Milano hotel, Nick and Tammy fed us grand stories of the local all-stars, bright and dark—Dante, Michelangelo, Boccaccio, Galileo, Leonardo, Borgia, Savonarola, Medici, Machiavelli, Botticelli.
Since Sorrento, Sally and I had been gravitating to Sean and Jane. Sean was as enamoured of Jane as James was of Sally, an interlacing tension that would not have been building had the girls declared themselves boyfriend-less on the Raffaello. On the aimless cobblestones we four followed the falling dusk, settling in a sidewalk café on the edge of a public square, our exposed brown limbs caressed by a humid breeze. I couldn’t believe my luck: how could it be that, day by day, night by night, I turned to find a three-dimensional flesh-and-blood “girlfriend,” a girl who is a friend, constantly by my side? As my eyes drifted to the shadowed roofline of a medieval church, my whirling mental flywheel slowed, then stopped, and I was released into a wordless elation. Happiness, it seemed, was accidental. No one could ever steal this experience, and to myself I mouthed the words This moment happened. It is mine alone, and I will never forget it.
As we sipped our wine, Jane announced there was a postal strike in Canada, so the flow of letters would dry up. I glanced at Sal, but her face revealed nothing. I imagined that in her letters to George, I did not exist. Fair enough: I had been busy willing him off the planet. But ever since we started scaling the go-go boot of Italy, Sally had stopped talking about him, at least to me.
By 2 a.m., I was a goner, and Sally swung into nurse mode. Her shoulder under mine, she piloted us up to my room where we found Dave conked out like a newborn. I sprawled on the spinning bed and Sally shifted my long legs so they didn’t hang over the edge. Then the moment when dread meets desire: her long fingers pulled the back of my head forward, and she pressed her lips forcefully against mine. I was surprised how guilty I felt, for wasn’t this what I wanted?
When Sal disappeared, I was not sure if I was glad or sad or mad. Did she pull away or did I push her? I slid off the bed onto the floor, a wading pool of silent anguish. Longing for her to return and pick me up, all six feet three inches and 165 pounds of me, I hugged the carpet, half awake all night long.
* * *
—
The next morning, I found myself standing under a towering stone figure bearing the same name as my roommate. As we encircled David, Nick championed the genius of Michelangelo, a scant twenty-six years old when he started liberating this nude male figure from six tons of Carrara marble. Our eyes wandered over the statue’s head, hands and feet, all oversize, like an awkward adolescent. I was seventeen years old, and he was seventeen feet tall; if David was the punk, I’d hate to meet the giant. He was preternaturally sexy, the epitome of narcissistic youth, beauty and strength, ageless and timeless, caught in the critical, life-threatening moment of decision, muscles tensed, veins pulsating, slingshot shouldered like a Stratocaster. This guy was a rock star. Make love and war.
Bernie had followed us to Florence to oversee the shooting of a 16 mm film to promote the Odyssey across Canada. He cast a handful of the wealthiest and best-looking kids boasting Family Name Recognition, and when Sally and I failed to make the cut, we pretended not to care.
Nick proposed we climb the 414 narrow stone steps of the spiral staircase to the top of the Campanile. “A piece of cake,” he promised, but it was a piece of work. At the top, we were entranced by the vista of curving clay terracotta roof tiles, formed on human thighs, that seemed to undulate under the sun. Nick confessed that he had been mildly acrophobic ever since a close call atop Rouen Cathedral on his first Odyssey in 1963. While he was walking between adjoining towers, grasping a primitive iron railing, it had broken away from its rusted socket. But today, as usual, he was calm and confident, and I forgot my own fear of heights.
As my attention wandered during a tour of the massive Uffizi Gallery, Tammy pulled me back in with something that stuck: in the 1470s, the architect Brunelleschi invented three-dimensional depth perspective, revolutionizing European painting. So long, two-dimensional medieval art.
After the lecture, I followed Sally as she elbowed through the flea market. Bantering and bartering, she considered rings, gloves and sweaters before settling on a pair of leather sandals and a terrycloth dress. On the Ponte Vecchio, the closed-in arcade that spans the River Arno, she trolled jewellery shops with fervent intent, and I abandoned her to her addiction. Sally loved to shop.
Less than two years earlier, in November 1966, a flood had savaged the Ponte Vecchio and wrenched away five of the ten bronze panels of the Gates of Paradise, one of the famous doors of the Duomo cathedral, and flung them into the seething muck. Dozens of people were killed and thousands of art masterpieces and rare books damaged or destroyed. I could see the flood marks on the walls. Catastrophe, calamity, cataclysm—I couldn’t get enough of it.
* * *
—
I was in Nick’s bus bound for Venice, sitting beside Sal, obeying the unspoken rule: holding hands was uncool. We played Stump the Leader all the way to the ferry docks to the Lido, a seven-mile-long island on the Adriatic Sea. Half sandbar, the world’s first beach resort was complete with a string of hotels, whitewashed huts and private villas originally designed for the ninetheenth-century Grand Tourist trade. We checked into Cappelli’s Hotel, not far from the Grand Hôtel des Bains immortalized in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. An intrusion from a forgotten world came in the form of a letter from my brother. Mike had enclosed the box score of the Major League All-Star game, but for the first time in my life, sports didn’t cut it.
After a raucous dinner, we four wandered down to the beach, trading swigs from a bottle. Tonight it was the turn of Jane and Fitz to caretake, and soon it was only my arm around Sally’s waist that was holding her up. Her terrycloth dress was drunk, her purse was drunk, her flip-flops were drunk, her hair was drunk. She was bawling “Roll me oooove-rrrr in the cloooov-errrr!” as if there was no tomorrow. As I turned my mouth to hers, she belched, and I pushed her head away in the nick of time, dodging the reappearance of her pasta. Back at the hotel, I heaved her dead-weight body onto her bed, a mixed potion of lust and disgust churning my guts.
On a morning vaporetto into Venice, we threaded through striped barber poles jutting out of the water. Nick quoted Robert Benchley, a New Yorker writer sent to Venice, who cabled his editor, “Streets flooded. Please advise.”
The legendary pigeon shit of St. Mark’s Square was replenished daily with the help of vendors flogging bags of corn to tourists; when R
obin growled she’d love to brain the filthy feather dusters with a baseball bat, I was game. We were further put off when the girls were turned back from the Basilica di San Marco because their short skirts exposed columns of flesh. As we toured a glass-making factory, Sally spied a set of six florid red, blue and green Venetian goblets and urged me to buy them for my mother.
“Look, only $33 plus shipping to Toronto. What a deal. She’ll love them.”
“Naw, she never likes my presents.”
“Come on, you won’t be sorry. Trust me.”
All I saw was good drinking money circling the drain, but I caved, not to please my mother but Sally.
Back on the Lido, the four of us bought two whole cooked chickens and a giant bottle of Coke and headed back to my room, where we ripped off chunks of meat with our hands and stuffed them in our gobs like the barbarians we longed to be. When I chose to stay in and do my laundry—a cover story for resting my delicate guts—Sally teased: “You’re a killjoy.”
The next day, ten of us headed to the beach for the afternoon. Heedless of the warnings of stinging jellyfish, I followed Sally’s pink-and-green bikini bottom into the waves. The hot wind exploded her wet head into a shock of unruly curls, and as she struggled to straighten it with her palms, I wished she’d let it run wild. As I lay down on my towel, she started playfully tossing handfuls of sand on my legs. At first I liked it, but when the sand infiltrated my crotch, I didn’t.
“Okay, knock it off.”
“Now, don’t worry your pretty little head,” she teased. “Relax.”
Then everyone joined in: Jane, Sean, Rich, Peter, Margi, Chris, Ross, Annabel, all grabbing and tossing fistfuls of sand. In no time I was buried alive in a tomb-like mound, neck to toe, my head poking turtle-like from a shell. Sally knelt over me, a three-dimensional artwork of flesh, her long fingers splayed on her thighs, and as I played dead in my grave, I heard the clicking of cameras. Burying my libido on the Lido. Death in Venice.
Dreaming Sally Page 9