One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  Alice was wishing that the conversation had not taken a turn down this particular cul-de-sac. Once again she had steered them into the gloom and was hoping to find a way out—another silly game perhaps—when the Vatican came to the rescue: They reached the end of the Via della Conciliazione, and there was Saint Peter’s and its great square, demanding attention.

  The main section of the square was not a square but a huge elliptical circus framed by colossal Tuscan colonnades, four columns deep. The colonnades did not entirely encircle the forecourt but reached out from the basilica in two arcs, “like the enfolding arms of the Mother Church,” said August, who registered Alice’s bemusement and was therefore compelled to explain that he was paraphrasing Bernini.

  Alice accused August of showing off. August admitted he was. Alice asked him about the large obelisk in the middle of the square, and he immediately came unstuck. He couldn’t remember anything about the obelisk except that it had been pilfered from Egypt, as many Roman obelisks were.

  Had I been able to converse with August and Alice, I would have been able to enlighten them because of my fond connection with the obelisk. For one thing, it is older than I am—by almost a thousand years. It was moved from Heliopolis and reerected in Alexandria, taken down, shipped to Rome, and placed at the Circus of Nero, where it stood witness to the upside-down crucifixion of Saint Peter. This is why it is called The Witness, and this is why it was raised in front of the basilica in 1586. The obelisk was relocated by a team of 150 horses and 900 young men, among them one Benedetto Bresca, for whom I had just brokered a match with an enchanting girl named Maria.

  Using meters of rope fed through hundreds of pulleys, the men and horses hoisted the 330-ton obelisk skyward. The massive weight caused so much friction that the ropes began to smoke. Benedetto looked up, the first to see that the whole operation was about to end in catastrophe. “Water the ropes! Water the ropes!” he shouted.

  Because of Benedetto’s keen eye, the obelisk was saved and, as a reward, his hometown of San Remo was granted the honor of supplying the palm fronds that were distributed in the basilica on Palm Sunday. If August and Alice had arrived in the Piazza San Pietro at Easter, they would have come across worshipers holding the palm fronds that are still supplied by San Remo more than four hundred years later.

  Inside the grand ellipse of Saint Peter’s Square, August led Alice to one of its two foci. He felt sure there would be some kind of marker to guide him to the right spot, and there was. Among the cobblestones, he found a granite disk encircled with white travertine, carved with the words Centro del Colonnato.

  “Do I stand there?” asked Alice.

  “Not yet,” said August. “Look around first. Look at the columns. How many do you see?”

  Alice looked around. She saw hundreds, maybe more. There were too many to count. Each column on the rim of the piazza had a row of four or five behind it. She couldn’t tell exactly how many there were because the front ones were obscuring some of the rear ones.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Hundreds, I guess. It’s too hard to tell.”

  “Okay, but we’re agreed there’s a big messy jungle of columns surrounding us?” he said.

  “Yes, agreed.”

  “Okay now close your eyes and stand on the disk,” he said.

  Alice peeled off her backpack and handed it to him. “Do I need to say abracadabra?” she said with her eyes obediently shut. He positioned her on the spot.

  “Nope,” he said. “Just open your eyes.”

  Alice opened her eyes. All the columns surrounding the piazza had suddenly lined up behind each other. She looked around. Wherever she looked, the illusion held. From the jumble of hundreds, eighty-eight single columns stood at the perimeter of the ellipse with every other column in its row tucked in behind it so neatly that they appeared to have vanished completely. Epic order had materialized from apparent chaos. The simple truth of geometry was playing out in front of her. It felt like a trick, like magic, like a miracle.

  August looked at the wonder on Alice’s face and felt a rush of emotion so potent that he thought he might vaporize. Alice looked at August and felt her throat tighten. Who is this man, she thought, who is showing me these things?

  “Your turn,” she said quietly.

  Alice stepped off the disk, and August stepped on.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Arco degli Acetari

  O COME, BE BURIED A SECOND TIME WITHIN THESE ARMS.

  —William Shakespeare, Pericles

  Signore Gambetta felt slightly alarmed by the frantic American lady who was trying to use his mobile telephone. She kept punching in numbers, listening, then sighing in exasperation, punching in numbers, listening, then sighing in exasperation. He had just delivered three fine Cinta Senese pigs to his nephew who lived near the gypsy settlement when the lady had appeared in the middle of the road and slammed her hands on the hood of his yellow Citroën truck. For one terrible moment, he thought he would run her over. Fortunately, he did not.

  The lady did not speak any Italian, but she was very good at communicating. She had made it very clear that she needed to get to the center of Rome as a matter of some urgency. Because Signore Gambetta was driving back to his farm in Tuscany and not going anywhere near central Rome, he had agreed to take Meg as far as the junction of the E80 and the A24, which was as close to the capital as he was prepared to get. He hoped she understood.

  Meg sat in the stinky cabin of the filthy truck punching numbers into a cell that looked positively prehistoric. Because it was permanently programmed into her own cell, she had forgotten Alec’s damn number. She kept getting riffs of numbers, but they weren’t, evidently, in the right order. Eventually, it occurred to her that the call would also be routed via the States and would therefore need some kind of code. She was about to ask, or try to ask, how to dial international, when she looked over at the kind, frightened man who had lent her his phone and realized that the cost of such an exercise might bankrupt him. She decided to give up. She also decided that this had to be the shittiest day of her entire life. But at least this charmingly rustic fellow was taking her back to the tile shop where she would try to find a tile to match her stolen one and get the whole mission back on track. It would make one helluva anecdote for the readers of Megamamma.

  * * *

  As Dr. Stephanie drove her powder-blue Fiat into the wire enclosure of La Barbuta, they passed a police car driving the other way. Alec shrank into his seat until he realized that these particular officers had never met him, were unlikely to recognize him, or realize that he was defying the wishes of Assistente Capo Domenico Cilento by pursuing his own line of inquiry about the stolen bag and his missing wife. He tried to see if Meg was in the backseat but could not make out how many figures were in the car, let alone who they might be.

  A tinny version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” began to play. It was Alec’s phone ringing. He answered it, forced to talk loudly over the chatter of the gypsy children who had recognized Stephanie’s car and gathered to greet her. Domenico Cilento was calling. Alec handed the phone over to Stephanie for her to translate. She shushed the children while the assistente capo informed her that a thorough search of La Barbuta had been executed and that neither the wife, nor the bag, nor a cross-eyed man had been located. Inquiries would be made promptly at other gypsy settlements around the city.

  Stephanie hung up and relayed this to Alec, who wondered aloud whether they should head back to central Rome. “We’re here now,” she said. “Let’s see what we can find out.” Over the bobbing dark-haired heads, she instructed him to follow and let her do the talking. Alec noted how, once they were in her territory, she had naturally assumed authority. He could see how she might quietly command a field hospital or an orphanage of rowdy children.

  With a line of kids in tow, they crunched across the dusty white gravel to one of the huts. “Do you come here often?” he asked her. She burst out laughing at his unconscious reprisa
l of the classic pickup line. When he twigged why she was laughing, he laughed too.

  “No, not often,” said Stephanie. “Mostly I get them to bring the kids into the clinic in town.”

  A door opened before they reached it. A young mother with hooded hazel eyes and a whimpering child on her hip acknowledged Stephanie. There was little warmth in the greeting, but it was respectful. She invited them inside. Her small front room was furnished with colorful plastic toys and a worn brown leather sofa. On one wall a giant flat-screen television was blaring what appeared to be a weather forecast presented by extremely curvaceous, scantily clad twins. On the opposite wall, a luridly colored 3-D portrait of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux lifted her hands in prayer as Alec passed her. They sat, the three of them and the child, lined up on the sofa.

  Stephanie asked the woman a series of questions, making no attempt to translate back to Alec. After five minutes or so, the woman called out, and a man appeared. He was dressed in head-to-toe denim, cowboy boots, and a cream Stetson hat. Without making introductions, the young woman spoke to the cowboy, who avoided eye contact by tapping at the screen of a cell phone. After a while he left, and the conversation with Stephanie resumed. Alec gave up trying to second-guess what was being said and occupied himself by watching a series of frenetically joyful television commercials.

  Suddenly Stephanie got to her feet. The session was obviously over. Alec said grazie to the young woman and reached out to shake her hand, but the toddler on her hip started to wail, and she retreated. Walking back over the white gravel, he noticed the place was strangely quiet. The playing children had vanished. The hairs on the back of his neck tingled.

  “What did she say?” Alec asked Stephanie under his breath.

  “Sounds like Meg came,” she answered quietly. “She spoke to one of the little girls then left again.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Stephanie shrugged. “Maybe the girl gave her the tile.”

  “So the cross-eyed guy does belong here?”

  “She wouldn’t say,” said Stephanie. “She said she couldn’t help, but…”

  “But you think she can help?”

  “No, I think she will help.”

  “How? What do you mean?”

  A warm gust blew Stephanie’s hair around her face. When she swept it away, Alec saw that Stephanie’s hand was shaking slightly.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think we should leave now.”

  They walked around a stinking mountain of garbage bags to the refuse-littered car park. Both immediately registered that Stephanie’s Fiat had moved. Had been moved. It was now facing the open gates of the driveway, poised for a getaway. Stephanie riffled through her bag for her keys and produced them. She looked across at Alec, who nodded his comprehension that someone had moved her car by unconventional means in order to make some kind of point, or threat.

  They hurried to the Fiat and got in. It took two attempts to insert the keys into the ignition, but Stephanie eventually started it and rocketed down the driveway. They were going so fast when they turned into the Via Giovanni Ciampini that the car skidded across the gravel. Stephanie overcorrected the steering, lurching left then right, almost spinning out of control, before Alec reached over, grabbed the wheel, and steadied the vehicle.

  “We’re okay,” he said gently. “It’s okay.”

  “Sorry,” said Stephanie. “So sorry.”

  She glanced into the rearview mirror to make sure they were not being followed. Something on the backseat caught her attention. She looked back at the road ahead and looked in the mirror again. Stephanie slammed on the brakes and turned around. Alec turned to see what had startled her. Sitting on the backseat was Meg’s bag.

  Alec grabbed the bag and looked through it. “Cash is gone, but everything else is here. My wallet,” he said, producing his empty wallet. The tile was there, too, still wrapped in tissue paper. He looked up at Stephanie and smiled. She smiled back. He reached out and held her arm, accidently brushing her breast. “Thank you. You’re obviously a very big cheese around here. Thank you.”

  Stephanie reached out, put her hand at the back of Alec’s head. She pulled him to her and kissed him on the lips. Alec was slightly startled but mostly, suddenly, intoxicated.

  “Comes from being in war zones,” she said. “You take your moments when you can.”

  He could feel her breath, hot and shallow, on his face. A barb of lust sliced him wide open. He lunged forward and kissed her fiercely. It was a jaw-clanging exchange, lacking sensuality, charged with desire.

  They pulled apart.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I think we both know that’s not true,” she said.

  He put his hand to the bandaged cut on his forehead that she had stitched together only a day before. She leaned in to kiss him again, but he pulled away.

  “Stephanie, I’m not in a position to…”

  Stephanie knew enough to know that the moment had passed. For him, anyway. There was no point pushing it any further. He was not going to come back to her place and sleep with her. Or fall in love with her. Or leave his wife and marry her instead.

  Alec was both disappointed and relieved when Stephanie put the Fiat into gear and drove on. They headed back to Rome in silence punctuated by polite observations about the landscape or the traffic. Stephanie marveled at how quickly things had gone awry and kicked herself for mucking things up. Would she ever learn not to throw herself at men who could not be hers? As they were drawing closer to the center, Alec received a text from Meg. It was a long and rambling message about a Tuscan farmer who had promised her a lift but had abandoned her at the junction of two freeways. Fortunately, a German couple had picked her up in their campervan and lent her a cell phone. They had agreed to drop her near the tile shop. She was texting to see if he was at the shop. Alec texted back that, no, he was not there yet but would be there soon.

  Stephanie dropped Alec off in the Via del Pellegrino, and once again he found himself gushing his gratitude like a giddy schoolboy. She drove away in her powder-blue Fiat, and he made his way under the arch, crossing the courtyard to the tile shop. Stephanie turned the corner into the Via Sora, stopped the car, and banged her palms on the steering wheel. “Shit!” she shouted. “Shit bugger fuck!”

  * * *

  Inside the shop, Meg had just finished introducing herself to Signore Horatio Zamparelli, who had nodded and smiled as she described her lost blue tile with a feverish reverence even greater than her husband’s. Horatio was about to suggest that she look around the shop to see if she could find a similar tile to the one she had lost when Alec walked in.

  “Where have you been?” Meg said in a flat, dry tone that could only ever be used between husbands and wives.

  “Getting this,” said Alec, lifting her Gucci bag high in front of him. “Where have you been?”

  “Oh my God!” she screeched and raced to the bag, snatching it from his hand.

  “It’s still there,” he said as Meg rummaged through her bag for the blue tile. “What happened?” he continued. “Where did you go?”

  “Oh, Alec, we can talk about that later,” she said as she extracted the tile from her bag and began to unwrap it.

  “As long as you’re okay. I’m okay,” he said pointedly.

  “I can see that,” she said. Exposing her treasure, she took it to show Signore Zamparelli. “This is it, signore.”

  “The doctor took me out to the gypsy camp,” Alec said, pressing on despite her disinterest. “We’re lucky she has so much cred out there.”

  Meg swiveled toward Alec and issued a single command: “Later.” Then she swiveled back to Horatio Zamparelli and, in a much gentler tone, asked, “Is it one of yours?”

  Horatio recognized it immediately but made a great show of switching on a special lamp and extracting a magnifying glass. He bent over and studied the glaze, running the magnifier back and forth over the surface. He could tell it was not made by him but tha
t it did contain an element of the magical and mysterious ingredient that seemed to emanate from a certain presence in his workshop.

  “It is not one of mine,” said Horatio.

  Meg looked crestfallen.

  “But it comes from this workshop,” he added. “It is old, but not very old. Early twentieth century would be my guess.”

  Horatio was correct. It had been made in 1906 by one of his predecessors, Giuseppe Rizzi. Giuseppe had a knack for the unusual, and Horatio recognized his work. The glaze was obviously made from cobalt but with boron or borium as well, he guessed, and possibly even a touch of copper oxide. Turning it over, he was surprised by what he saw. “The base, you see, is most unusual, not red terra-cotta but white mostly, like the sand,” he said, “and the glaze is very thick with not much pigment, no color, you know?”

  “No color?” said Meg.

  “This special blue comes mostly because she is deep,” said Horatio, “like the ocean.”

  When he turned to Meg and Alec, he could see they were not following him. He told them to wait while he disappeared and reappeared with a beaker of water. He presented it for inspection.

  “What color is she?”

  “No color. It’s clear,” said Meg.

  “But what color is the water in the Mediterranean?” he said.

  “Blue, this blue,” she said, pointing to the tile.

  “It appears to be blue,” he said, enjoying his role as tutor. “The water herself filters out the other colors, but the blue remains. The blue light travels down and reflects off the white sand. The waves of light dance with the waves of the ocean. They are in a marriage, you see, of light and form.”

  Alec picked up the tile and looked across the edge of it.