Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

  La dolce vita! Sun-drenched vineyards! Seaside paradises! Sex! Drugs! Rock ’n’ Roll! Volcanoes! If you can never go home again, you may as well go to Italy. Mark Anthony Jarman’s latest collection is a rollicking cycle of connected tales that swirls around a dubious hero, a feckless man who finds himself gazing into the existential abyss. His kids have grown up, his wife is long-gone, and his girlfriend has left for greener pastures. And so he escapes to Italy, where he runs headlong away from the past and into newfound freedom. What he finds is not the escape he sought, but something richer and infinitely stranger.

  Knife Party at the Hotel Europa careens recklessly through Alpine snow, Roman markets, and the ash of Pompeii. The corpses of refugees wash up on the Mediterranean beaches while tourists bask in the sun. Beautiful Italians party in a Napoli apartment while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. The history of ancient civilizations wells up beneath the surface of modern life.

  By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this extraordinary collection of stories brings us face to face with the inescapable hereness of here and nowness of now, a perfectly executed exploration of what it means not merely to live, but to be alive.

  “In their bounce from Italy to Canada and back, these stories, so rich and funny and knowing, remind us that Jarman is not just one of our best stylists, but best writers. His sentences are cunning, like they have eyes that can see in the dark.”

  — Bill Gaston , author of Juliet Was a Surprise

  “Mark Anthony Jarman’s Knife Party at the Hotel Europa is an incendiary performance by a master storyteller. His prose is pyrotechnic bliss, the epitome of cool — adroit, eloquent, witty, hallucinatory, and sexy. He sets his stories in Rome, the blast zone of contemporary Europe, a glittering polyglot echo chamber of voices, packed with gypsies, druggies, expats, refugees, and tourists — something like A Room with a View meets Naked Lunch.”

  — Douglas Glover , author of Savage Love

  “In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa , love gone awry collides with Italy. From the warm, embracing glow of Rome’s walls to a beach party on the wrong side of a military base, a broken heart is no match for Jarman’s prose, which flies from all sides like jets in a dogfight, riotous and stunningly talented.”

  — Eden Robinson , author of Monkey Beach and Blood Sports

  “This is the work of a short-story master in full control of his work: tone, voice, audience are all in hand. These stories are very much like musical variations on a theme. What if the violin line leads? What changes when the oboe takes charge? The answer? Everything. Bittersweet and beautiful, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa is a jewel of a collection. If it doesn’t change you, your heart is too hard.”

  — Russell Wangersky, author of Walt

  Also by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Fiction

  My White Planet

  19 Knives

  New Orleans Is Sinking

  Salvage King, Ya!

  Dancing Nightly in the Tavern

  Poetry

  Killing the Swan

  Non-Fiction

  Ireland’s Eye: Travels

  Copyright © 2015 by Mark Anthony Jarman.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Endpaper map: Matthus Merian, Roma, 1641

  (Wikimedia Commons, Geographicus Fine Antique Maps).

  Cover design and page design by Chris Tompkins.

  Cover Illustration by Chris Tompkins.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Jarman, Mark Anthony, 1955-, author

  Knife party at the Hotel Europa / Mark Anthony Jarman.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-918-1 (bound). — ISBN 978-0-86492-740-8 (epub). — ISBN 978-0-86492-830-6 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8569.A6K66 2015 C813’.54 C2014-906847-6

  C2014-906848-4

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  Contents

  The Dark Brain of Prayer

  Butterfly on a Mountain

  Knife Party

  Hospital Island (Wild Thing)

  The Petrified Florist

  Pompeii Über Alles

  Hallway Snowstorm

  Adam and Eve Saved from Drowning

  The Troubled English Bride

  Party Barge

  Exempt from the Fang (Aircraft Carrier)

  Pompeii Book of the Dead

  Acknowledgements

  The Dark

  Brain of Prayer

  A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent (which without impiety I cannot deny that I possess) will go to seed if he always remains in the same place.

  — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  A slender hoop with seven charms hangs from a brass nail in my hotel room; Natasha the slender Russian librarian brought me these charms from Mexico, where she stayed at a cancer clinic, hoping to find a homeopathic alternative to surgery, hoping for a miracle inside her body, inside her uterus. How much did that trip cost her in American dollars and the quack clinic did nothing, despite her hopes, despite her prayers, despite her many charms.

  “I know you will scoff,” Natasha said, hesitating to tell me she was going to a costly Mexican clinic. And she was right, at least about my judgmental side. I did scoff, just as she feared. Natasha knew me too well.

  Seven tiny figures of tin: a goat, an arm, a leg, a tooth, a foot, a fish, and a veined heart with a dagger stuck through it. Milagritos, they are called, little miracles. At a shrine you pin them to a statue of a saint or the Virgin, one of the many Mexican Virgins, and pray for help. Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady for those who have no one with, Our Lady for those who want whiter teeth, Our Lady for those who went straight to video.

  For years Natasha was my shrine. Her many, many charms. She always meant well.

  In Rome a woman sips her drink and says of my weightless metal charms, “Yes, we are adept at mixing the pagan with the Catholic.” She lives in San Miguel de Allende and is touring Italy with Father Silas’s art group. My elderly aunt has known Father Silas for decades; they chat and walk by the river.

  By the river in Canada my wife asked, “Why didn’t you tell me Natasha had cancer? That changes things,” she said. “Something like that transcends petty differences.”

  Well, I thought you hated talk of cancer and hated her. And how to casually start that sentence, that information?

  Everyone around me seems to have cancer; I’m a new age Typhoid Mary, wandering Canada’s incoherent weather and at my neck a tasteful bell warning others of my danger.

  In Rome’s anvil weather I worried about her cancer and my future cancer and wore a damp white T-shirt, wet the shirt under a tap and walked into Rome’s heat, and sometimes a T-shirt over my head to protect my burnt scalp; I looked Arab, Moorish, I was turning Turk
. If under Pompeii’s wild sun I did not receive a catalyst toward skin cancer, then I will never kindle its benediction, its retaliation, its charm, its curse.

  In Rome an older Roma woman cursed me when twice I refused to give her money. Deep crow’s feet at her kohl eyes, or as they say here, zampe di gallina, hen’s feet. The woman guarded a set of steps leading from a broad piazza up to a park. Everyone was necking in the park. I went up the steps and said no to the woman and I came down the steps and I said no to her again. When I said no the second time the woman aimed a bony finger, made her most impressive evil eye and uttered in a horrible voice, “Today, you die!”

  Her scary evil-eye curse might have been more impressive if it came true (I didn’t die) or if she was a teensy bit more specific, e.g., Today you will pay too many euros for a shiny Hohner chromatic harmonica! And your beloved will dump you and you will rake leaves in stunned sadness, in furious cursing disbelief.

  My picture was in the newspaper in Canada and Natasha saw the photo. I had invented a combination bicycle and lawn mower, a bright orange frame with neat welds on the forks. Look at those welds, almost invisible! I was by the river in bare feet for one photo.

  “It was odd,” Natasha said. “Your feet were so familiar. I hadn’t realized how well I knew them.” Her words pleased me. To hold her foot again, to be at the foot of God, our secret gods.

  I remember her feet in the river shallows that hot humid day, how many years ago now. They slip past. Natasha was running on the north side past the shuttered mill, and by the sandbars and green rushes she stripped and dipped her beautiful secret body in the river to cool down her bare skin. Men in trucks stared and uttered quiet remarks to each other.

  Natasha emailed when things were good, when we were still possible. Miss you and can’t wait to see you! xoxo. PS I’m going to a baseball game tonight with Jack & Jill.

  These three are such good friends. And they are my friends too. It’s good to see everyone take such good care of each other, friends smiling at the sunny ball game. But Jack and Jill fall down the hill, Jill decides to leave poor Jack, Jill moves away to a far city, and then the tearful Jack takes up with my Intended and I am out in the cold. Turn right at the desert, teeth gnashing, and keep going for forty days and forty nights.

  Then in that desert I heard Cat Power singing about Major Tom drifting out in space, Tom’s a-cold in a spooky car ad with Cat Power. Amazing, I must tell Natasha! No. I forgot. That I’m not speaking to Natasha ever.

  But who else to tell? I have to confess to someone. The bomb doors wish to open; it is their nature to want to be used.

  In Italy I went to see the bombed ruins of Monte Cassino, where my uncle fought SS paratroopers in the valley below the blasted abbey. Dropping the bombs did not help matters, the heaped rubble from the bombs made the fight more difficult.

  My aunt lives by the Spanish Steps. She has arranged that I join Father Silas’s art group while I’m here. With Father Silas we walk crowded stone lanes, Father Silas limping slightly and using a cane as he shows me the sights.

  My aunt says, “It’s all changed, I’m afraid of the gypsies, I’m afraid to ride the bus. They let in anyone, Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians, welcome, welcome! We’ll pay your medical bills.” Father Silas looks bemused.

  My aunt says, “Do they think Italy is a landing strip? Any trash can float here, anyone can cross the border. The crime!” She turns to me. “Do you have this much crime where you live?”

  Before I can answer, my aunt holds her hand as if she has a knife, stabs at Father Silas’s torso and warns me, “They will kill you for ten euro.” My aunt looks tense, as if expecting a physical blow.

  “I think we’re supposed to call them Roma now,” says Father Silas. “Madonna said so.”

  “Roma, ha. To me they are gypsies. You know what Hitler did to the gypsies. Well.” She leaves the thought unfinished.

  Gypsies in Italy are accused of being professional pickpockets, unrepentant thieves, false cripples, confidence artists. Italians don’t like gypsies in their country, but Italians don’t like me either, they are tired of me and all the other sunburnt tourists, tired of drunken frat boys and fedora hipsters descending on Rome in cheap flights, the Italians are weary of everyone.

  Father Silas is kind to show me around the city he loves, but he has a bad knee or hip and at times has to give me directions and wait on a bench; he waits for me to come back and tell him what I saw; he details a serpentine route in the walls so I will be surprised by the view of each startling piazza. He loves Rome but can’t see it freely; I have a bad knee from skiing and this is one of my fears, to no longer walk.

  You’re not supposed to use the term gypsies (which comes originally from the word Egyptian), but in a city called Roma can you call them Roma? Or Romani? Or Bohemians? My aunt says the Italians call them zingari.

  In Ireland there are wanderers once known as tinkers, with horses and caravans, mending tin pots and pans, the equivalent of eastern European gypsies. Irish people seem able to spot travelling folk simply by their look, refusing them service in a public house or hotel, but genetic tests show their genes to be the same as most of the citizenry, they are Irish and not Roma. Father Silas calls them travellers, but my cousin in Dublin calls them knackers. It gets confusing.

  One gypsy woman in Rome was more specific in her words to me. She said, “You. There is something you are trying to forget.”

  I’m trying to forget Natasha inside a Midwest gas station; she was picking up cold milk and I was outside pumping gas into her beat-up car and watching her chat and laugh with the woman at the cash. I loved to watch the way Natasha moves and smiles and listens, yes, I love her so much, I think of her for hours on end and she does not think of me and she does not write or call. She transforms me into a child: it’s not fair!

  Resentment builds with each day of no messages, no word from her. Do you know the venom that can build from a Tuesday to a Sunday? Is that venom for takeout or here? Six days × twenty-four hours = 144 hours of pure venom (Rome wasn’t built in a day, ha ha ha). If an Irish traveller dies, they burn his caravan; no other traveller will use a dead man’s caravan.

  One day in Canada my stalwart fridge dies, howls its last day in the house, compressor agonistes. The noisy creature dies, but comes back to life on the day of the new fridge’s arranged delivery, the day they will come cart the old one to the knocking yard. The freezer is suddenly solid and roaring, a bon vivant, now the juice tins are frozen hard and our ale and bitter chilled again. Is it a miracle, another milagrito? Pilgrims come to my door and bow and pray and pin charms at this new shrine, this fridge by the roadside.

  Keep me, the machine begs. Don’t let them take me away.

  What to do? Like my old cat near the end: do I give it one more chance to live? Like with Natasha. Do I give up too easily? No, I think I hang on too long. I want it all. You must make a decision.

  “Does that cat scratch?” the delivery man asks. “Because I had a kitten that scratched my daughter and I tied it in a bag and put it under the ice.”

  Okay, I will keep the old fridge.

  I live in hope that someone will make me forget Natasha, forget that mental intimacy we had, the way she could read my mind, sitting through a horrible play or a band with winsome steel guitar, could give me a glance or a tiny conspiratorial smile and we both knew. But who can make me forget? No one, it seems. Now I hear a song by Howlin’ Wolf: old and grey, no place to go.

  Raking these wet black leaves in a yard so far from the white-hot Roman sun; this can’t be the same world. By a river and by a river. I rake and think too much: why do such fiascos always happen in late fall so that I face another winter alone, feeling old and cold, feeling already dead.

  This black mood passes, I recover my senses, but at that juncture it seemed logical, correct; at the time I kept thinking of death, understood its quiet attraction. I thought, Just bury me quietly like a cat or dog in the corner of the yard under the s
kunky leaves, under my butternut tree by the shed with the ants.

  Or wait — maybe a big New Orleans brass band and an Irish wake.

  Write on my tombstone that I can’t make up my mind, write that I am murdered by night-riders, by mumblers and nitpickers, by fellow travellers and Roman gods, by cold staring statues, by Hermes, by Natasha chatting at a gas station. Write that, like everyone else, I am murdered by love, that I am nibbled to death by ducks, brought low by normal events.

  In this state of suburban bathos I wish to see my dead parents again; the dead world courts me, invites me into its haloed bosom, its final mysterious orgasm. It is my choice, up to me: lie down dead inside a cold lonely graveyard or go back and live another summer, running around Rome eating and drinking too much wine. And Rome is so beautiful, so warm, such amazing food — squid ink linguini, fried chickpea fritters, sliced spleen sliders — Rome’s raucous life and appetites!

  Yet this choice, to snuff myself or not, is not obvious, my mind not right, as Lowell said. I am seized by dread autumn spirits, I myself am hell, said Lowell, said Milton, said Roman and Greek poets before any of us breathed and suckled at wolves and mothers.

  I must be nobler, be better than this. I must lift myself, steer my mind free of this base muck. I am not in Stalingrad, not encircled, not about to die. I must simply get through some time and then get through some more time. Though this seems impossible in the middle of the ill season, this dead season: can’t I just hibernate like a bear and come out when it’s over? Make it go faster.

  I’m not always this morose. Have I said how much I loved my rooftop terrace in Rome? I found joy just washing shirts in a sink and hanging them in the hot sun, Italy’s fireball sun burning my head, the sun killing me, a fire hanging over a desert. My damp T-shirt’s cooling effect didn’t last — soak the shirt at every fountain and the cool feeling on my skin lasts a few minutes and then the shirt is dry, water vanished from the shirt.