by Joanna Scott
With a Danish girl she meets in Paris—an eighteen-year-old girl graced with snow white teeth and a stout bosom, the daughter of a dentist—Nora travels through Germany and Austria into Hungary. The border is sealed with barbed wire, the station platform full of soldiers and their guard dogs waiting to board the train. Nora and the Dane pretend to be asleep when two guards enter their compartment, but the guards wake them with rude nudges and proceed to rummage through their backpacks. Nora is afraid they’ll confiscate her dollars as contraband, so when they find her cigarettes she motions them to take the whole box. This is enough to persuade the guards to leave them alone.
Nora stays in Budapest for less than twenty-four hours—long enough for the Danish girl to fall in love with a Hungarian waiter she meets in a park. Nora is disappointed to lose the company, but she’d rather sleep on a train than on a floor in the waiter’s apartment listening to the noises of lovers in the dark.
She heads back to Austria on the night train. She is alone when an American enters the compartment. He is a student from Dartmouth, an eager, blond rugby player named Trevor. They are both relieved to share a language, and after a short hour of easy conversation Nora is already suggesting that they travel together for a while.
In Vienna they share a hotel room with twin beds. The first night they sleep separately. The second night they move tentatively into each other’s arms only after they’ve turned out the light. They linger in the mornings over a breakfast of bread and sliced meats and coffee topped with mounds of sweet cream. After three days they head south.
They are in Switzerland when Nora learns that her great-aunt died two days earlier from a massive stroke. Nora’s mother gives her the news over the crackling connection of the call Nora makes from a phone center in Lugano.
“But I just bought her a present,” Nora protests, as though this would be reason enough to undo reality. “I bought it five minutes ago,” she lies. She’d bought it yesterday in Bern. “A music box. A little chalet thing with pebbles glued to the roof and window boxes with tiny velvet flowers. You open the roof to start the music.”
“I’ll keep the ashes,” her mother says. “We’ll have the service when you’re back.” Even with the poor connection Nora can tell that her stoical mother is already used to the idea that her aunt is dead. Nora is silent, unable to come up with words of sympathy because what she wants is to ask permission to come home. But her mother urges her to go on with her travels because that’s what Aunt Lucy would have wanted.
Nora says that she has to hurry to catch a train. She promises to call again soon. After she hangs up she lets herself sag into Trevor’s arms. Trevor’s kisses on her forehead are more comforting than he could ever know. She dries her eyes with her shirtsleeve and hooks her arm around his, hoping he can sense her gratitude.
Trevor suggests lunch. Trevor loves to eat. Trevor has a little pot of a belly now, the kind that foretells a big pot spilling over a tight-cinched belt in middle age. Trevor loves to sample regional specialties, which in Lugano is a first course of wide flat noodles in cream followed by a horse-meat stew.
Nora watches him eat. After their meal they rent a paddleboat and paddle far from shore and make out, nibbling at each other’s tongues as they bob over the crisscrossing wakes, their kisses gentled by their understanding that they won’t speak about the future.
The next day Trevor and Nora take the train back to Paris, where it is raining. They split the cost of two-star accommodations in the Marais. That evening, Nora counts her money and is astonished to find that she has just short of one hundred and fifty dollars left. She stiffens with suspicion and glares at Trevor, who is lying in bed reading a comic book, but when he looks up at her under the pressure of her stare, his innocence is plain. Trevor doesn’t need Nora’s money. Nora needs Nora’s money, and she’s been spending it carelessly over the past weeks, leaving herself less than the cost of a plane ticket home.
Trevor’s offer to cover all expenses arouses scant protest from Nora, since Trevor is the one with his father’s credit card. Thanks to Trevor’s father, they can keep moving. The next day they go to Bilbao, the day after to Madrid. “Where are we?” Trevor asks when they are eating a lunch of sausage and wine on a park bench. “I mean, what city?”
In March, in Barcelona, Trevor confesses that the last time he called home his father objected to the girlfriend and her expenses. Nora, who by then has less than fifty dollars left, is furious, for as she sees it she let Trevor pay for her only because he insisted. But she keeps her voice low, and as they finish their paella, they work through their argument toward the quiet agreement to go in separate directions.
Nora adds easygoing-Trevor-from-Dartmouth to her list of regrets. She is sorry she ever befriended him, sorrier to lose him. She takes the train back to France, while he heads toward Portugal.
In a compartment by herself, Nora props her backpack in the seat next to her and fiddles with her music box, opening and closing the lid, starting and stopping the whir of its tinkling melody while she imagines her great-aunt’s cold fingers reaching through the darkness, tapping Nora’s arm to hush her.
LET’S SAY THAT ON A WARM SPRING AFTERNOON in April, six months after she left home, Nora is alone, stranded in Rome during a national strike. The rail workers are on strike. The tram and bus drivers are on strike. The postal workers, the museum guards, the street cleaners, even Nora in her own way—everyone is on strike.
She figures she can sleep on the floor of the train station if she can’t find anything better. She’s done it before—once in Nice, once in Brussels. She’s been spending next to nothing these past weeks and still has thirty-four dollars in her backpack, along with a mix of foreign currency in change. She is surprised by how little she needs day to day. She wants to test herself to see if she can live on even less.
She is sitting on the steps of the fountain in front of the Pantheon when the piazza fills with a parade of bicyclists. There are young people, old people, children, babies in baskets, unicyclists, and even a blind man pedaling on the backseat of a tandem. Though the scene should have been boisterous the mood is somber, the wheels creaking slowly over the paving stones, the cyclists singing in subdued voices. They are all singing—pedaling forward through their song and circling round to a simple chorus of Ciao, bella, ciao, bella, ciao ciao ciao!...circling like some of the cyclists circle around the fountain, drawing the people idling there, Nora included, to their feet.
The two young women beside Nora start singing with the cyclists. A waiter clearing a table stops and sings. A mother clutches her two children by their hands and sings. The stooped beggar woman lifts herself up, floats her cane above the stones, and moves her lips to mouth the words: Ciao, bella, ciao, bella, ciao ciao ciao!
The parade straightens, and the cyclists ride on toward Piazza Navona, their voices lingering in the air behind them. Nora feels cheered by the song, though she doesn’t understand its meaning. She is used to not understanding what she hears around her. She doesn’t even know whether the cyclists are celebrating or protesting, or whether the song is about saying hello or good-bye.
The singing fades back into the clamor of the piazza. Nora watches the beggar resume her stooped, plaintive appeal. She watches children chasing each other. After a few minutes she decides it’s time to move on, thinking that she might try to catch up with the bicycle parade. But when she reaches for her backpack it isn’t there on the steps where she’d left it. It isn’t on the other side of the fountain or even in the arms of a boy running from the scene. It is nowhere. Or it is somewhere and Nora is nowhere—without her money, her address book, fresh underwear, an extra sweater and jeans, a sleeping bag, a music box, a rail pass.
What can she do now? She’d be wasting her time if she went to the police to file a report. And she doesn’t want to ask for help at the Embassy. She hasn’t had a proper shower in days. How would she explain letting herself sink to this state of carelessness?
She does
the thing that comes easiest: she wanders—around the center of Rome, through the ghetto, up the lush, quiet streets of the Aventino, heading uphill by instinct.
The park beside Santa Sabina is empty except for a few mangy, watchful cats and an old man who is playing simple scales on the flute—trilling up the scale, trilling down. Nora sits on the grass with her back against an orange tree. Soon the sun will set. Already the sky is crisscrossed by pinkish wisps. It is pleasant here with the music of the flute and the perfume of oranges in the air. Although she’s lost everything but the few coins in her pocket, the parade she’d watched has revived her sense that she is living through an adventure that can only turn out all right in the end. Isn’t it much better to be alone on an adventure than alone in a lonely house? She will be all right. She is living bravely, taking in the world. She is free.
But she’s too skittish, or reality is too dangerous, and when some rough-looking boys enter the park and light up a joint, Nora decides that it would be best to leave the park. She heads down the hill into the darkening twilight, the smoky blue of the sky visible above the knobby limbs of the sycamores. She follows the rim of the grassy bowl of the Circus Maximus and heads toward Piazza Venezia. She lingers at the bottom of the dirty white stone of the Campidoglio stairs. She watches a girl tip with her Vespa as she buzzes around a corner.
Nora could just as easily turn left; she turns right. She could go around the piazza; instead she follows the maze of crosswalks. She could go anywhere, do anything, and for this reason can only wander deeper into the night.
She passes a drowsy little girl sitting on the sidewalk with a kitten on a leash and an accordion on her lap. She passes a German tour group gathered around a juggler, who is setting up his stage. On the wall, an allegory of what? A portrait of whom? The Sabines are being raped, manna is falling from the clouds, the wind is picking up, and there is a smell of rain in the air. Ciao, bella, ciao, bella, ciao ciao ciao.
She stops at the first hotel she sees, a hovel not far from the train station. The man behind the desk looks her over, from the filthy frizz of her braids to her muddy boots, and answers her inquiry with a single word: Completo. The same is true at the next hotel. She heads down the Corso. When she passes a small but elegant hotel, the Hotel Ricci, on the corner of Via Piemonte, she hesitates, and then keeps walking down the block. But when she feels the first raindrops she turns around, heads back to the Hotel Ricci, and pushes open the heavy glass door while a uniformed doorman helps a woman into a taxi.
What could she possibly want from the concierge? He stands behind a high wooden counter and lowers his glasses, propping them on the tip of his nose, to stare at her. He has grown what remains of his brown hair long enough to tie it back in a ponytail. He looks to Nora like he has stepped from the eighteenth century.
He is half Dutch, it turns out. She explains her situation in English and asks if she can sleep on the floor somewhere, in the basement, on the roof. He smiles at her—or is he leering? He says he will help her; he directs her to come back at midnight.
Okay. Midnight. She’ll walk into this lobby at midnight and offer herself to this man in return for a bed to sleep in. Sure. Other girls do it all the time.
She whirls around, offended, and marches through the door that this time is held open for her by the grinning doorman.
It is raining, though not hard. Nora considers her predicament. How can she stretch what she has left until the end of time? She would call her father in Indonesia if she had a number for him, but she won’t call her mother at Gus’s. She doesn’t want to admit to her mother that she needs help, and she certainly doesn’t want Gus to know that she needs anything. Though he’s never breathed a word of criticism, she can just tell that he’s the kind of person who would treat her forever after with the condescension of someone who knew long ago that she’d never amount to anything.
She takes shelter under an awning of a closed store on the Via Ludovisi and watches the traffic. Every other car is a taxi transporting stranded tourists. Water sprays from the windshields, splashes up from the gutter.
She spends seven hundred lire on a tepid caffe She stands at the bar’s window with her empty cup for an hour or more watching couples huddled under umbrellas walk past. Inevitably, the women stumble on their high heels, one foot twists under, but they are able to steady themselves with the help of their escorts and go clacking on.
The barista watches a soccer game on television. Other customers come in, down a drink, and rush out. Nora is the only one in the world with nothing to do. She glances at her watch. With an unconvincing gasp of surprise at the late time, she hurries out the door.
The rain has stopped, though the wind is sharp and damp. She enters an all-night pharmacy and bides her time browsing until the glare of the pharmacist becomes unbearable.
She is an innocent American girl on a European tour, she’s cold and exhausted, and she’s not to be blamed if at midnight she makes her way back to the Hotel Ricci and goes in to find the man she’d spoken with earlier sitting on a chair in the lobby like a king on a ziggurat, waiting for her.
There’s a cot in the hotel dining room, the cot this man who introduces himself as Frederic usually sleeps on during his shift. Nora can have the cot. Frederic will sleep in a chair.
He’s leering again, obviously plotting how he’ll use his strength and twenty years’ superiority to do whatever he wants to do to her tonight. His fingernails are long for a man’s, filed into smooth arcs, the whites tinged with yellow. He walks around the lobby in his brown socks. But he is eager to help Nora, and she’s too tired to go through the dance of polite refusal. He has offered her a place to sleep. She has accepted. She doesn’t have the stamina to be afraid. After he leaves the room she collapses on the cot, drawing the starched sheets and heavy wool blanket over her.
She wakes often during the night—every time the hotel’s front bell is rung by a guest wanting entry. As she drifts back to sleep she wonders when Frederic will come for her, when he’ll ask for payment. At one point she is vaguely aware of him standing in the doorway watching her.
The Baggley boy passes through her dreams, along with Larry Groton, Gus, Trevor, her mother, her great-aunt, her father, all of them ringing the bell to bring Frederic to the door.
And then, miraculously, it is morning, and Frederic is urging her to wake, bending over her with a smile that in daylight has lost its quality of greedy insinuation and is simply expressive of his curiosity and kindness. He must set the tables for breakfast; Nora offers to help. They fold napkins, arrange bread and pastry in baskets, and when they have finished they sit down together to big milky cups of coffee and a plate of cornetti. When his shift is over at nine, he will take Nora to the American Embassy a few blocks away. She doesn’t bother to point out that they’ll take one look at her and decide to ship her home.
What is she doing in Italy? he wants to know. How long will she stay? Where has she been? She tells him that she has come to work on a photography project for school, but her camera and film were stolen along with her backpack. She spins the lie easily, for no other reason than to try to prove to him that she hasn’t been lazy.
When two waiters arrive, Nora retreats into the bathroom and leaves Frederic to his work. She washes her hair in the sink with the foam of hand soap, shakes a cracked tooth from her comb after pulling it through a tangle. She pauses to study herself in the mirror, her reflection familiar and foreign and inadequate, like an old photograph of herself—the narrow nose, chapped lips, brown eyes, and heavy brows all sharing the label of her name.
Back in the lobby she sits in a chair and waits for Frederic to return so she can tell him that she doesn’t want to go to the Embassy. She tries to concoct a new lie in order to get away, though what she’d really like is to stay here for a week at least and sleep on Frederic’s cot, eat a hotel breakfast, wash up at the sink in the ladies’ room.
The desk phone rings. Frederic doesn’t arrive to answer it, and the
re is no doorman at this hour. The ringing stops for a few seconds and then begins again. Nora feels herself drawn to her feet by the responsibility. She wants to answer the phone herself and almost does, but it stops again. She waits for Frederic. He has left a newspaper open on the counter and his jacket hanging on a hook. He has left a pack of cigarettes in one pocket, his eyeglass case in another pocket, his wallet in the inside pocket.
She lifts a few cigarettes for herself and then reaches for his wallet, struggling against the impulse to hesitate. She pries open the billfold, takes out a lira note, another note, another. She has no idea how much she is stealing. She just takes the paper money from the wallet, tucks the jacket closed again, and bolts. The glass door eases back on its hinges behind her, closing with an accusing groan as she hurries up the sidewalk.
THE THIEF KNOWS that the thief’s remorse is worthless, as long as the thief takes no reparative action. The thief knows that it is better to be free than in prison. The thief is three hundred thousand lire richer, and that’s plenty to keep her going for weeks.
The strike is over, and the thief takes a train north toward Milan. She stops off in Florence because she has never been to Florence. She visits the Duomo, dodges taxis, explores the San Lorenzo market. She discovers that stolen money isn’t easy to spend. She can’t find anything to buy that is worth the value of her guilt.
After a few hours the rain begins again. The thief is wet. The thief is weary. The thief walks past a Gypsy huddled on the steps of a church and takes refuge inside. She rests there, revives, and because it is still raining she wanders around inside the church trying to see the paintings through the thick darkness. She fiddles with the light switch of a nearby lamp and fails to make it work. The best she can do is drop a five-hundred lira coin into a slot, lighting one electric candle in a row of twelve.