Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  I do thank you, sage advice, got it, I hear where you’re coming from, I must stop.

  But then I realize — I am getting out! I’m out skiing the snowy Alps and walking dusty excavations in Pompeii (the fine grit of Pompeii’s ruins ruining Father Silas’s camera), I’m out for wild-boar sausage in Naples and good craic in Dubrovnik and dear dirty Dublin (though I loathe the techno maelstrom of Temple Bar) and I stroll sandy strands on Dingle Bay and cheer on pig races in West Cork, I’m drinking wheat beer under the street in Manchester (tiny stellar jukebox hung on the wall), sangria in Madrid, mariachi music in Mexico, I’m up in planes and I’m jumping out of planes, I’m violating Mayan airspace, I’m moving like an illegal crack-block through the high-stepping June Taylor Dancers, I even snowboarded sand dunes just outside Dubai and man oh man the sand hurts way more than snow when you wipe. No dead cowboy can accuse me of letting dead cats stand on my porch.

  Yet my moves and trips don’t seem to count in my own head, my jittery journeys on the Adriatic or Irish Sea don’t seem authentic. I am cowed, I am more awed by any stranger’s matrix of travel, real trips with tidy storylines and clear beginnings and madrigal endings and pettifoggers and riot-police Plexiglas and fine hotels in latitudes of lassitude. Why do my own journeys not impress me, why do I have no faith in my blurry couch-surfing pilgrimages to see graves and relatives and breweries and the haughty swans of Sligo. Why do I have no faith in my own life?

  The knifing in Napoli may have given me some gruesome perspective. This perspective changes moment to moment, but right now I think I’m weirdly better about Natasha.

  It is good to at least once be in a relationship with this kind of depth and fervour, to know it, but not to the point of leaping from a bridge. After Natasha abandoned me in a hotel I hit a point where I understood why people leap from bridges, I was on the bridge and fully understood the attraction, but I did not leap from the bridge. I am resilient, I will bounce back, I will be the Superball driven into the pavement and bouncing clear over the roof of my childhood home.

  It’s a bit of a surprise, but Rome’s rouge walls and running water spigots seem familiar and pleasing after Naples’s grey hulks and volcanic dust and volcanic drugs and jackal bedlam and mountains of aromatic refuse and a knife steering its formal way through the air of a kitchen party and a man lying like meat in the hall.

  I knew that Rome had a pleasant complexion, but until I left and came back I didn’t know that I’d taken it in my head this way, that I was returning to a place that seems an old friend, an open city that seems warm and broad and green — so oddly comforting to be held in Rome’s glowing walls again.

  As I walk Rome it seems almost a home, as if I know it well and have spent some bright worthy part of my life here, which may not be true, but is a fine feeling since I seem to have lost my sense of home and I don’t know if I’ll have it back.

  In Rome we live inside the beautiful sun; in Rome we live where the ambulances start. The ambulances park on the street below and race away to help the unfortunates, a pleasing musical quality to their sirens, almost mariachi. Where we live in Rome is not far from the river, a nineteenth-century district that Benito Mussolini expanded while feeling expansive, before things went bad in the twentieth century and they hung Benito and his mistress Claretta by the heels in Milan, the way the mob cornered Cola di Rienzo with all their sharp knives on the high steps, on the monumental steps leading up to the gods envious of our blades and opinions.

  So many blades and invasions — I can’t keep track — so much meat and so many martyrs and monsters and gargoyles and gods and I study Eve’s face transfixed listening to a woman’s high lovely voice singing music of such formality and grief, And thou true God gave thy only son. And Croatian daughters on hands and knees scrubbing halls to earn pennies.

  Il Signore sia con voi. The Lord be with you.

  E con il tuo spirito. And with your spirit.

  These Italian church refrains still familiar from childhood Sundays, bells pealing and Sunday memories turning over like those venerable Pontiac Laurentians with straight-six engines that run forever. In Regina the new country hanged Riel by the neck and stole his modest church bell, took it east to Ontario.

  Eve hovers near another varnished painting, cracked faces and black shadows, the stone church cool and quiet, mysterious as a suicide on a bridge, and all that sunshine just outside — just a dark chapel bent under endless stone light.

  Studying the Immortals makes me feel so very mortal, staring up at shadowy paintings and marble faces speaking of sorrow, staring at the work of murderous turbulent geniuses, at tapestries and crazily amazing ceilings, frescoes in colours like faint laughter from within planets, and angels and saints flying up into the sun, flying from sin and guilt, and collections of gilt Byzantine icons, gorgeous metallic paintings of the Madonna in starry blue robes with a tiny child and sober aquiline faces, faces bent into long cubist angles.

  These devout Byzantine faces make me want to jump up and tear across an ancient map to know Istanbul’s eastern empires and all the Virgin Mary’s collection of custard-yellow halos and cobalt gowns.

  Pliny the Elder tore around the ancient papyrus maps. I have an image of Pliny when he was much younger, as if I am there on the deck of his wooden boat, part of his crew and Pliny my captain cutting the waves in a speedy Arab felucca, firkins lashed down and sharp sails snapping and swinging around my sunburnt face.

  I hang my white shirts in the sun near a lazaretto, the hospital island named after the beggar Lazarus, the island where they sent plague victims on open barges to the sea and I wonder, how does Eve’s skin feel and smell, and what is it to cradle her limbs on a high Irish hill and feel her shirt, feel her shadow move over me like a cloud on gold grass.

  Mr. Tom Hanks has been zero help in my campaign to be Pope, I must now consider Tom Hanks an adversary. Memo: no more causes. Unlike me, Tom has the money to run a real campaign. And he is well liked. He may well be the next Pope instead of me, Tom waving from the balcony. Tell me, is luck a thing you manufacture, like a set of tires?

  In my hotel room late at night I can’t stop listening to Cat Power’s troubled cover of “Moonshiner,” listen over and over to her lament, if drinking do not kill me. Her voice, ghostly slow, seems to accrue more distant meaning and weight than the song’s plain words should ever be able to convey. It’s a spooky puzzle and I keep trying to figure it out, at two a.m. the matter seems of utmost importance.

  Eve downloads music on her laptop; she is a student of Italian opera, but she also likes drone blues and alt-country. Her strange authority.

  Eve says she can’t stop thinking of the art we’ve seen, like so much chocolate, too many treasures for one spot. We whisper to each other in the gallery: how was it all collected here in one spot, how many robbed and murdered in its superb suspect provenance?

  Eve says, “The big thieves hang the little thieves.”

  The groaning galleries and museums are too much to take in at once, we stagger as if eating too much, it’s staggering. But that rich swag is why we are here.

  Our sheets and shirts spread on the bright terrace as we taste apples from Afghanistan and dates from the Euphrates and sip sharp juice from blood oranges. It’s so lovely to eat outside with a view of this fabled city. Mangoes and blood oranges, mangoes her new favourite and Eve waves a tiny knife to demonstrate how to peel the lovely skin.

  She smiles widely. “Remember we saw that huge fish jump in the Tiber? What timing, just as we walked up. Two or three feet, and fat!”

  She seems bright today. Is sleep coming easier at night? Will we ever be reconciled with the knife at the party, will the mind forget the body twitching in the hall and the dead man’s poor daughter weeping? All those body parts worked as a perfect machine until the introduction of the knife into the sensitive wires under the surface. We escaped to the silent train and the town’s closed shutters.

  “What is Italian for blood oranges? I should
know,” Eve says.

  Later she remembers and emails an answer: Arancia sanguigna. Ci vediamo presto! xxx

  See you soon. In Gaspé the laundry lines so noisy flapping in the winds off the sea, but in Rome her sheets are silent in sun and heat, no noise or fanfare as moisture exits the cotton, cloth dry in moments.

  “Are you peckish? I have some smoked salmon and honeydew apples. We’ll have a bite and then go wander.”

  When wandering I enjoy happy accidents, enjoy my mind’s momentary lapses and I forget where I am. I wandered through Piazza Cavour the other afternoon and found a huge bruised palace fronted by groves of shaggy palm trees, tropical palm trees and erotic statues on stone plinths, this otherworldly palace decorated like a Cuban wedding cake — such long stripes of ornate balcony and porticos and fluttering doves and steroid blossoms pushed toward me from every meaty tree in the piazza. I stand in Rome and walk someone else’s fever dream of Latin America. What a dream, what a bewitching chimera city, where they beat the shit out of the patron saint of lovers, beat him with clubs and separated him from his head.

  In this concussed city Eve cooks a beautiful omelette of market eggs and goat cheese, in my tiny kitchen she chops spinach and green onion and layers a thin membrane of smoked salmon within the eggs. She wields a sharp knife. Does my cousin wish to kill me, leave me twitching in the hall? No, she slices her creation so neatly, half for her mouth and half for mine, and on the terrace her tender omelette melts on our tongue, the best I have ever tasted.

  Later we will walk fountain to fountain, drift palace to palace, painting to painting, but first we eat and drink at our small table on my sunny terrace. Tomorrow we will travel to Cannaregio to dangle our legs in a canal, sit at a canal drinking beautiful chalices of frosty white beer and eating tiny cicchetti from the bartender with the shaven skull at Birreria Zanon. I travel so large a world, but my favourite is the tiny world we create when two people are kind to each other.

  The Petrified Florist

  Eve lies on the sunlit terrace of vines and blossoms, sated after the meal, Eve is listening to Lambchop and that band’s strange sly songs make her remember the terrazzo stairs climbing past tall windows, circular stairs, each step of stone underfoot worn over decades to the curve of a wave. The stairs a coil around a lift the size of a phone booth, but for Eve the lift does not exist. Iron Italian bells fill the air outside with harmonic notes and scales and tiny birds flutter like moths in marble landings on the way up to the room.

  Eve wonders, is that the hour that is best? Do you prefer the daylight stairs, the heightened possibilities and beautiful moments before the knock and his door opens?

  Or is it after? She thinks of those sweet seconds afterward, two warm bodies close, a dreamy drift, almost unconscious, yet both keenly aware of Townes or Portishead’s perfect sway, perfect singers and songs and the best possible state to hear such minor-key melodies, their lost voices travelling over her and his breathing soft as a song along recent skin. Was after the best?

  In his room the wooden blinds allow slats of muted light, light the exact colour and slender shape of ice cubes, and Italian bells report their carillon music from another country and there is time to doze before you remember the stairs leading back down and the other decent lives the stairs lead to, to what follows, to after after.

  How to choose? Eve basks in the Roman sun and tries to not think. To choose is like a radio springing free songs from ridgeback hilltops and stark city towers or to choose is like erasing a recording. Which hour and light do you prefer and which life is best? There is a kingdom on this side of the mountains and a separate kingdom on that side of the mountains.

  To choose does not seem possible. Eve senses it is not in the cards to feel contentment in either country for more than short stretches, more than a few steps on the marble stairs. Before and after are both so fine in the exact moment, but one is destined to destroy the other. In fact, in the end, most of us are left with neither.

  Pompeii Über Alles

  Every morning war is declared afresh.

  — Marcel Proust

  In the modest Pompeii hotel the patrician couple from Berlin makes plain their demands.

  Where is orange juice! Where is marmalade!

  And Pico the portly Italian waiter hurries with their items as if balancing a head on his swaying platter. I didn’t even know our little hotel had OJ and marmalade; it is news to me that we can demand such items. I like juice and marmalade with breakfast, but I accepted the piquant dishes Pico brought to my table.

  These loud visitors from Berlin are all confidence, they are the new Americans, but I am weary of these confident ones. Give me a shy person any day. Some days I awake to almond croissants and sweet honeyed tea, but perhaps I deserve more bitter food and drink with my secret bitterness, my private culture of complaint.

  The marmalade trapped inside a tiny white dish triggers a lost memory of my Irish mother buying oranges to make her famous marmalade. Thick rinds hanging in their bitter world, and jars of crabapple jelly with gleaming lids. When, in that long series of concessions to age and Alzheimer’s, did my mother stop jarring fruit, stop baking soft Yorkshire pudding for my father? It seems shadowy eons ago, their decades of life after World War Two. By describing it, by singing about it, the Kinks destroyed my parents’ postwar world.

  The couple from Berlin shuns their warm croissants, take them away, they insist, making a minor scene, they want to put their teeth to hard biscotti from a factory. Pico stares at the rejected plate, a hurt look as he tiptoes back to the kitchen with the untouched crescents. A gentle mountain of a man with sore feet. The Berliners puzzle Pico. I like Pico. Why do they boss him so?

  I know not all Germans are as loud and demanding as this couple. Many years ago I fell in love with a thoughtful woman from East Germany, a devoted cyclist; she lived on a farm near Dresden, and we met cycling in the west of Ireland, near Dingle. Growing up in the German Democratic Republic she learned Russian as a second language; she had little say in the matter. When sledgehammers thumped into the Berlin Wall, her school switched from Russian to English, the language of the new overlords. She had little say in the matter.

  In O’Flaherty’s, my favourite pub in the world, we chatted and drank pint after black pint, her red-tint hair reminding me of the German actress in Run Lola Run. She was on holiday from a job in a hospital; she showed me a photo of her posing with a medical skeleton; she loved County Kerry’s mossy walls and monks’ stone beehive huts, she loved Ireland’s minuscule fields and did not demand marmalade.

  For hours we spoke shyly and listened to live trad music, close enough to touch the fiddler and accordion at the next table, brushing each other, not wanting to part, and the next day we cycled to the end of the peninsula; the next day in the rain we strolled a seaside strand and dried our wet clothes in Kruger’s pub as we ate sandwiches the old woman made for us, no one else there but the two of us and our bicycles and the walls and a view of stone islands surging in the sea, our own misty world and the talk between the talk.

  Where is that misty world gone, our magic talk, its memory itching me like a butterfly.

  Let me know if you come to Prague or Dresden, it’s very close to where I live.

  To make extra money the red-haired German woman sold rabbits from her small farm; she said her brother killed the rabbits with a small pistol. We said goodbye at a bus in Limerick and so I hate Limerick, sick rainclouds and gangsters and dealers shooting each other and electric blue light on the graves and I wonder if I will ever see her again.

  Travelling last Christmas I sat on a plane beside another woman, a woman escaping Berlin’s bleak Nordic winter, a professor of German language and history. A strong accent, but really Helga’s English was flawless. There is some complication with the washroom at the back, so the professor strolls up front to the sacred blue seats to use the first-class loo.

  “No, I’m sorry, that’s reserved,” insists the male Air Canada steward.


  “Reserved?”

  “Yes, we do ask that you please go back to your seat. We do ask.”

  “And they are reserved for who? The super elite? A superior race? And their asses are so different?”

  Helga’s glasses have big red frames and she peers out quizzically, her head tilted sideways, her thick blond hair cut short around her face.

  “And the toilet is gold? You are worried I will steal it?”

  Helga’s accent becomes more Teutonic with her rising ire, but the steward stands firm, turns back Helga, turns all of us back, the elite passengers undisturbed in their comfy blue coffins, civilization and golden toilets saved from our ministrations, our mithering.

  Helga returns to her seat fuming.

  “He will see,” she mutters, opening a German textbook. “That little eunuch, he will see.”

  They have us in their narrow slum, in their metal snakeskin. My bike seat — is it making me a eunuch?

  “Will you be all right?” I ask Helga. “Can you wait?”

  “I will wait, ja.”

  Helga waits. Our plane bounces a few times off the tarmac and turns hard to a brake-wrenching stop. We used to applaud, but no more. The crew poses by the exit trying hard to smile: Thanks have a nice day bye now thanks bye now. Three hundred times, give or take, one for each bitchy passenger. The crew must hate this part, although it means they are free until the next faceless batch lines up.

  Thanks bye now thanks bye now thanks.

  Helga approaches the exit and I am just behind her, our line moving inches at a time.

  Have a nice day, the steward says.

  I will, the German professor says.

  Professor Helga lifts up her skirt and squats to pee in the open galley area by the cockpit, passengers and uniformed crew paralyzed in a coiffured tableau. Her pent-up pee bubbles and tumbles to the edge of the plane’s mats and metal plates. We have not viewed this inflight movie before.