“Hotter each day,” warns my cousin Eve.
I am not made for it, my thermostat very different than the Italians’. Why is it that I can reconcile myself to winters of thirty below and blizzards that would cripple and maim many Romans, but I can’t take this simple southern heat? After high school I worked on a paving crew, we created our own hellish climate laying down boiling asphalt, but I don’t recall this degree of heat.
The Quebec stewardess told me to not fight it. Give yourself over to the heat, she said, but I worry my brain is shrinking and bubbling in its bowl of bone.
Eve gazes around the empty piazza with her movie star sunglasses, looks north as if she might glimpse the Alps seething with snowy vapours just past the old city gate. The crowds in Rome will get much worse in a few weeks. Eve prefers the north of Italy, Milan, Bergamo, Venice, Italia Settentrionale. I only know the south, often seen as wilder, trashier, savage, dangerous. Rome is a pivot, a door. I try to stop staring at her. Her face, her body in a silk blouse, her hand, eyes; how many genes do we share?
“Do you miss the mountains?” she asks. As a teen, Eve raced the downhill event, was a fast skier where I was a coward.
She knows that spring skiing is an annual compulsion, my pilgrim destination, my religious service in the contorted peaks. But not this year, the peaks are too far away and I have no money left for my pilgrimage. Last spring in Canada I saw an orange butterfly high on a snowy mountain.
“How on earth did it get there?”
Eve smiles widely as I try to convey my amazement at the sight.
“Did the butterfly ride up on the gondola?”
“That’s just what I wondered.”
In Canada the puzzling butterfly fluttered the chalet’s snowy sundeck, a butterfly lighting on the boards under our massive ski boots. How did the tiny creature survive, map its way to such a cold altitude, flying in snow above the treeline? In a nearby hanging valley a lordly black bear once chased me, tried to kill me, and now a butterfly pursues me.
Why did the bear want to kill me? What did I ever do to the bear? His strange loves, no existential ennui for him! Our chemical moods: the bear wants me, I want Eve, and the butterfly wants satori on the mountaintop. What primal urge drew the butterfly to this lost world in the sky?
When skiing I forget that I am connected to the rest of the world, I am separated, elevated, changed, cupped in some odd land in the sky. I skied Tod Mountain years ago — new owners changed the resort’s name because in German Tod means death (welcome to Death Mountain) — and the chairlift carried us through clouds and above, clouds now a floor under us, an escalator piercing the clouds. A brighter higher world out of time, mythic, exhilarating.
I rise up a mountain and a stowaway sees the city for the first time as he falls from the plane, as his head hits the street, as his head breaks on a city. Now all our grandparents are dead and my parents dead and I am separated from my wife and children and this café in Rome seems a separate world from Canada. I left my father’s house decades ago, fell into the city; my mother and father are dead so there are walls between us, but I still see them, I still dream of my mother and father.
The butterfly opened and closed its wings, flew a few feet, but hurried back to us; I worried our great ski boots might crush the creature after it had moved like a genius so far across the planet and climbed to us on these windy hiemal heights. Guttural ravens I am used to at this altitude, white ptarmigans exploding out of a snowbank hiding spot, demented jays begging for snacks. But never a butterfly, especially when winter is still with us. How many million movements of the creature’s wings carried it from Mexico to this mountaintop?
That same day my worn ski boots, also orange, fell to pieces, I’d skied on them so long, frugal decades in the same boots, that the aged plastic simply gave out and trailed debris on the slope and I kept skiing hard down the mountain, bent over staring ahead, thighs hurting and my poles barely ticking the deep moguls, I didn’t even notice the debris. My eyes were bloodshot, almost snow-blind from the bouncing light, so my sister lent me dark glasses, clunky rectangles that looked like they came from Ray Charles. I skied all day in a white crater ringed with teeth in a kind of ecstasy, a king of ecstasy.
Eve worries, frets about the future, worries about her teeth and future dental bills and insomnia. I don’t worry — I just want to touch her and I’m not allowed. In the hotel I saw her open suitcase, beautiful French bras on top.
Eve’s father used to tell an old family story, they were living near Lincoln, Nebraska, and a tornado tore up their house and blew out all the windows. In the basement a heavy oak bureau fell on her little sister, and Eve, a skinny teen, lifted the piece of furniture and rescued the smaller girl. Eve tried later to lift the weight and she could not budge the mass of oak even an inch.
And more recently an addict boyfriend, when Eve refused to see him, dumped a load of farm manure into her white convertible. Or was it into a Jacuzzi on a cedar deck? The private girls’ school in the Swiss Alps is a long way from Nebraska and her old lives in Tornado Alley.
I ask Eve, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“I have to,” Eve replies. “This one ain’t working out at the moment.”
She surprises me. My eye and mind are clearly imperfect: everyone seems fine to me and yet they are not fine, not jim-dandy. I remember hearing from my mother that Eve was involved with an addict, painkillers from an old injury, a car accident, and then he wouldn’t stop the pills; I’m sure any addict has a few unlovely secrets. She couldn’t shake him, his weird love, she’d resolve to not see him again, they’d break up and get back over and over.
This pattern doesn’t seem true of her, but can you ever know anyone or even hope to know your own secrets? It’s a world of secrets. Once in a while we are given a glimpse behind the faces held up for us in a room, but such glimpses are rare.
Eve harbours doubts about the men she chooses, men with manure and front-end loaders. Does anyone get along? Are we all on the rocks? Is it even possible anymore, to get along for any length of time, or is that talent lost to most of us, a vanished skill? My grandfather the dowser could find water with a branch, but I can’t do it. Of late Eve has turned to Jung for answers, but I don’t know if that’s going to fly. The heart is part diplomat and part vandal.
Summer washes us in warm water, what is Hecuba to me? Part of me remains winter, always winter. I suppose I must go home sometime, when I am out of money and drinks and sofas to crash on.
On the other side of the gloaming river Eve and I walk hills and piazzas, haughty statues gazing as Mars rises over a gold church and precisely painted house. Rome is piled upon Rome, a field of broken crockery, a ruined kitchen. I follow Eve through demented crowds of hipsters and party girls sampling dipso concoctions that taste of fried bread and marigolds, bands on the river barges playing fuzzed-out meteor storms, bands on the river playing bits of accidents muted as cough syrup.
When Eve raced in the mountains she was fearless, on the ski team she liked the speedy downhill event and I was afraid that I’d die in the icy gates, die head-down in a tuck and zooming like hell, hoping your edges held as you flew up and down and the steep turns got greasier.
And if you skid off the course at high speed through the B-nets and hit a tree? I had a teammate who died that way. He was alive on the hill of pines and lifted in a chopper to the city hospital; we heard he was okay, but the blow altered something in his head, a brick dislodged, a hole opened somewhere in the brain. The next race I thought about that more, I preferred some measure of control.
Travel can be that balance between control and letting go. In Rome odd bits of memory surface from the ski team days: motel rooms, rising early with files and wax and my mother’s old iron to warm the wax, and what wax to choose for the weird weather and conditions on the mountain high above this motel. We were kicked out of one motel in Jasper for working on our skis in the room. The course has teeth and everyone else on the team s
o confident, bullish, wanting to win the race and I didn’t want to be on the team. Eve loved racing and I hated it.
I had zero confidence as a downhill racer, preferring the longer curves of giant slalom, leaning in and tagging the gates in rhythm (don’t catch your head in the gate), elbow almost on the ground and feeling your body swing like a perfect pendulum, the constant scraping sound, legs trembling and a rooster tail of snow behind when you’re in the groove and not skidding into the trees. Giant slalom is fast but forgiving.
Eve stops and kisses me by the subway stairs; I am Canadian, so used to being part of someone else’s empire. Narrow steps lead us down to a cellar’s brick arches and blue electric light where a band stops and a drummer crashes snare and toms and the audience applauds wildly.
“No!” moans my cousin, holding her head. “Don’t applaud.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t want to encourage drum solos.”
We keep moving fountain to fountain, as I once hoped to do with Natasha. I’ll sleep when I die, I feel wonderful staying up all night in Rome. My mother a night owl watching Merv Griffin, David Frost, me a night owl and Eve a night owl too — is such a thing genetic? A magnetic magic night, lights alive like glowing coals in the bottom of a river and in two café chairs my hand on her leg seems a very good idea, that shore seems possible. All of my body is keyed up, aware of the next body, the leg, waiting for a dispatch from the border.
“On the corner, those three again.”
Who? Oh yes. The medieval young woman begging for coins, the young man and child; hell, I’m in a decent mood; maybe they’ll be all right. Is the sky lighter? For some in Rome the night has too few hours, for other wanderers the night has far too many. Is the gap my fault? Come and give the fiddler a dram.
In sunrise’s tireless light my cousin and I cross back to our side of the river, cross the river to read graffiti on a wall: You Are Entering Free Prati. The words sprayed in English, not Italian, which puzzles us. A black shamrock is sprayed on the same wall: does this signify a lost tribe of the Irish?
“Il trifoglio,” says my cousin, “the three-part leaf, Nuovo Politica, more of a fascist symbol than to do with leprechauns. Fascism still has its appeal here. As does Mr. Mussolini.”
Another wall has a tag, Difendi Roma, Salva l’Europa. Defend Rome against outsiders at the borders, at the gates, from those falling from the sky like errant tightrope walkers. Those with money retreat behind walls and gates; what was ancient fortress becomes fortress once more.
“Wall-building must be a profitable profession here. Rome is all walls.”
Look this way a wall and look that way a wall and the Vatican walls loom behind us like a wide brown mountain around the old German Pope and down that side street I see spray-painted walls and locked gates linking more walls, more crooked graffiti and no greenery to soften the sunlit streetscape, few trees to shade the bourdon tone of traffic. But at times I glimpse lush plants and lewd blossoms past the walls, private gardens hiding in the block’s interiors.
I’ll never know interior Italy, the sedate green courtyards, only the chaotic exteriors and the jail of language, of not knowing the lovely language. So many curious tourists and camera eyes in these public spaces, but Italy is private, Italy is walled off.
Eve comes to see my high room and terrace and I am nervous with her in my room, I wonder about us. I show her my tiny bathroom with its screened window, the small square mesh like a confessional in the sky. Five storeys high, a fortress tower with an open terrace with vines and flowers and a vast white umbrella to shade us from the drugging sun, the stabbing light: Eve likes all of it.
“You’re very tidy.” I can tell she is surprised.
When drinking I can be reckless, my life is messy, as if in a car crash that takes many years to unfold, but my room is clean.
Dark-skinned children play inside the next walled garden under fruit trees. Are they apricots or tiny oranges? From five storeys above I can’t be sure. She leans forward and her taut calf seems to represent something.
“The orphans,” I remark to my cousin Eve.
They might just be daycare kids, but I enjoy thinking of them as my orphans. Nuns in white habits drift out to check on them occasionally.
Curious about these gardens and walls below, we walk the nearest streets until we find a locked gate and a brass sign affixed to the wall beside the locked gate: Istituto San Giuseppe Della Montagne, which I believe means St. Joseph of the Mountain. My mysterious neighbour!
Their compound and treed garden has a wary, guarded look, perhaps an old rectory or nunnery (the pure hortus conclusus), high walls with broken glass cemented into the top to belay trespassers (forgive us our trespasses), and inside the high walls fruit lies on the ground.
Who was it who built the first wall? Was it a wise God expelling a puzzled couple from the garden? Such a loss to him, and over a fig, fico, a trifle.
A view of gardens during the day, but at night my neighbourhood below behaves strangely. At street level are arched gates and palm trees and high walls a dun sand colour, so in evening’s diffused light I no longer see Rome’s riverine blocks, I gaze over a dim desert crossroads, an Algerian outpost, the sand and palm trees of a Moroccan fortress and Eve in my bed; we wait for a caravan of camels to cross under the next streetlamp, Bedouins whispering past in silk robes. Night alters the urban world under my flowered terrace, night reboots the look. I dream I find gold coins on the ground and I’m picking them up, but no one else seems to see them.
In the morning Eve pulls black tights over her pale legs and takes me to a giant street market, a vast display of vendors and wares under a roof of tin sheeting that stretches for blocks. Is this cornucopia world possible? Can the Pope, with all his treasures, ever say that: She pulled on her tights and took me to the market. Why would I want to change anything, be anyone else? I have it far better than Pope Rat, yet I am fascinated that a Pope is right over there with his gold, perhaps peeking out his window at my flowery terrace, gazing at our gardens.
We walk streets spilling with ripe fruit and herbs and oils, we take from the gnarled trees and vines and mustard valleys, we drop nets into schools of fish the colour of wriggling fire, haul sea bass and sea urchins and Jerusalem artichokes under this tin roof for all to gaze and taste, stall by stall, the way my Irish grandmother shopped every day in her Usher’s Island neighbourhood beside the River Liffey.
Flayed plane trees rise in crooked columns, but they disappear beyond the market’s tin heavens. Broad tree trunks rise in this interior, but our eyes cannot follow them all the way up, the tin roof interrupts, we cannot see the branches and foliage that blossom above the roof. It’s a form of separation — a strangely discombobulating effect, like huge elms growing inside your bedroom, like kindred city blocks cleaved by a stone wall or railroad embankment, the natural lines interrupted.
I see the young woman in her long dress begging down the street, but today I don’t see the unhappy young man with her. I buy two loaves of bread, they seem attractive to my eye, and each heavy as a baby. In the market they are all selling; what am I selling? The bone-green air between tree trunks, the green shadows between trunks: who owns that property? I feel that Eve owns that grainy air, right now I feel Eve owns any part of the world where my eye strays.
My cousin’s eager green eyes, her lovely jaw; am I allowed to touch her leg today? I offer one market loaf to the young woman begging and she looks at me suspiciously, says no, she refuses my loaf of bread. By the purple Christ what addled engineer designed the divisions in our heads?
The loaf is very heavy and almost yellow inside, corn perhaps. At the hotel I show the loaf to Angelo the hotel owner, proud of my acquisition, its heft and weight.
The old owner holds the loaf and shakes his head, then points at the paving stones.
A honeymoon couple falls into the hotel’s tiny mirrored lobby, a funhouse chamber, but they are not having fun, they are very upset. A unregi
stered taxi driver swindled them, nabbed them at the airport, forced on them a long tour of Rome that they did not want (yes you must see the Coliseum, and Garibaldi’s statue and the fountains) and then he demanded a king’s ransom before they could get out of his taxi, charged them five times what I paid for my taxi ride with the Quebec stewardess and pilot. At the airport the Quebec stewardess saved me from just such a crooked cabbie.
“We tried to get him to stop the tour, just take us to the hotel! Please stop.”
This is the couple’s honeymoon, and so much beauty and romance in Rome, such stunning sights, but their first moments in Italy sullied. And they paid the ridiculous amount just to be free of the driver. They came to this shore and he knew they had money on their bodies.
Monique, the French woman who runs the hotel desk, is jubilantly indignant, phones the local polizia.
The policeman says, “What can we do if they are stupid.” And it’s true, at times we must seem like morons to the Italians.
“What!” the French woman cries out. “They are not stupid! They are from somewhere else and don’t expect to be treated this way. They were like prisoners. You are the stupid one, you are an imbecile!”
Monique hangs up and says to me, “That’s the problem with Italy. They think it’s funny to trick people, they love the beffa, their tricks, they think it proves that they are so clever and you are so dumb. They think they are so clever. I hope someone drops a big bomb on that policeman’s head and then we’ll see who is smart or dumb!”
The French woman at the front desk has lived in Rome for decades, she is married to the hotel owner, but she has not taken to Italians. Their bread, Monique says. It just does not compare.
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 4