He got a lump sum of cash from the army, he’s going to golf, going to the beach in Croatia, going to Prague for pilsner under the spires. I can’t blame him, I hope he finds some peace in Prague or Bali. After so many corpses in Iraq this is not what he seeks, another bone orchard; after the IED and sniper bullets at the sandy wall he doesn’t share our interest in dead Romantic poets.
Did he study war before he went, has he read of Viet Nam (we had to destroy the village in order to save it), does he know the war to end all wars? Did he know anything about Iraq or did he sign up in a Pentecostal fervour to zap some rug-riders? Each new war delivers some collective amnesia and surprise, the wrong people go to fight every time. The soldier has been injured at war, so I expect some wisdom, but he seems a bitter witness with little to tell that is profound. Perhaps the wisdom will come later. Or the dreams.
My father never talked of the war, and one day after the cancer it was too late to ask. The warriors return without tongues, they can’t spell out what they saw. Eve has more sympathy than I do, she worries about the high number of suicides among veterans, one an hour, she says, an assembly line of suicides, imagine them all gathered in a gym, the clockwork suicides.
In a grocer’s aisle I met the Iraqi woman who fled the same war, fled the American invasion. She was studying a package and I had to reach past her. Scusi, I said, and she smiled brightly and asked me if lard was listed as an ingredient, lard might mean pork. I assured her it looked all right.
Her dark bangs and dark flashing eyes and a soft gold chain at her neck. Is she local? A Mediterranean face, this might be the face of Christ’s mother or she could be a Spanish Jewess or smiling princess from Bombay. I could not tell, had to ask her.
“Baghdad.”
Now I want to ask about Iraq and the war. I am allowed to walk her to what is now home and she chats easily. Baghdad is past tense. Her parents made her leave her home after her brother was kidnapped and held for ransom. Her mother almost went insane with worry. They paid the ransom, but had to sell their house and possessions at a bad price and had little left to live on. War isn’t good for the real estate market. Her brother was found alive in the wilderness, hands bound with plastic cuffs.
“We were lucky. I know of others killed even though the ransom was paid.”
Kidnapping becomes a lucrative niche business after the American invasion, a growth industry, anyone can make some easy cash and an expensive car or suit is a target. Suddenly it is too easy to be shot in the skull.
She tells me they phoned the family and in the background she heard voices speaking English. She believes that American soldiers orchestrated the kidnapping, but I wonder if it might be mercenaries and not regular army. I can’t explain this idea, though her English is very good. Her brother’s silver BMW singled him out; she says he got in the driver’s seat and they ran up and put a gun to his head. Her brother became silent after his kidnapping, the man wandering in the desert was an exact duplicate, the same hands and cheekbones, the same fingerprints and driver’s licence, but no longer the same person.
She smiles and is pleasant as she tells me her family stories. Before the invasion she drove a gold Mustang, a gleaming American car, but it was crushed by an American tank in Freedom Square and street people had to smash the front windshield and pull her with rough strife though the broken glass as the back of her car was flattened by the moving tank, a violent rebirth with glass in her eyes.
There had been an explosion in the square just as she drove up, and barrels of gasoline were in flames. She told me the barrels of gasoline were left by the Iraqi army as an emergency measure to stop the Americans, but the gas had not been used. Now they were on fire, the square a pall of greasy smoke, and she stopped her car, unable to see, afraid to move in the murk. The wide Abrams tank did not want to slow down. Someone told her an American was shouting that the tank had no brakes, but it is likely the crew inside feared an ambush, another explosion in a daisy chain trap. Her car was simply a dwarf in the path of a massive tank. Trading her life for theirs, they kept the tank rolling in the smoke. They voted on it, they were bringing democracy to Iraq.
Her father came to search for the street people and reward them for saving his baby daughter; she was alive and he was generous, though she insists to me that they expected nothing, they just wanted to help her. She moves my fingers to touch where chunks of scalp and hair are still missing at the back of her head, where she has braided in a hank of hair to cover the scar. Her sister is a doctor, and this sister worked on her at their family home to pluck glass from her eyes and to bandage the abrasions in her scalp. In strong light she must wear large sunglasses.
The Americans offered high salaries to both sisters to work for them, one as a doctor and one as a translator, the Americans liked the sisters, both polite, attractive; fashionable heels, nail polish gleaming on their fingertips, their English superb, but neighbours warned them of reprisals for collaborators, they might be beaten or killed as traitors for helping the American invaders.
Her parents worried their youngest daughter would be kidnapped or killed and drove her to the border to Jordan, made her leave her home, her country. Her mother has not been the same since the Americans came. Her house in Baghdad was a small palace of antiquities and volumes of books and cool marble underfoot, and now in Italy she searches for menial work. Once she drove several family cars and now she doesn’t even own a bicycle and worries her money will run out soon.
From her I learn so much of the war and I learn so little from the soldier. Did the two of them cross paths in Iraq, even briefly at a checkpoint? Was he one of the young Americans who asked her to stay and translate, to tell the other drivers what the soldiers wanted? Was he the soldier who asked to see her passport and then tore it up so she couldn’t leave the country? After the roadside bomb exploded under him, a mammoth transport flew our soldier to Germany for surgery, and her wounds treated by her sister at home. Now she can’t bear loud noises, now she must wear dark glasses in bright light, now she has very specific nightmares. Our soldier is stalled, angry, drinking. She doesn’t drink. She has no options. They don’t know each other, they are a honeymoon couple in Rome, both heads altered by invasion.
“Here’s Shelley’s grave,” says Eve. Shelley’s stone is almost anonymous compared to Keats’s star treatment.
“How can he be here? I thought they burnt Shelley’s body on the beach.”
“Well his marker is here, there must be something buried. I heard that they kept his heart in Italy. Or wait, did they send the heart to England?”
Someone walks past. “Dude, where’s Jim Morrison’s grave?”
“Wrong city, asshole,” says the ex-soldier.
Now he is opening up, now he is communicating.
Eve bends over the headstones. “Corso the beatnik poet buried with Keats and Shelley? So you can just buy a spot here? Put it on Visa? How did Corso do this? Can I get in here? I’m impressed.”
“Well, I guess as a poet he wanted to be buried beside Shelley.”
“The beatnik’s last wish. Good name for a band. He hung out with Ginsberg and Kerouac. Didn’t Corso kill someone in New York? Look, this grave is Antonio Gramsci; he was a member of Parliament and the Fascists threw him in prison.”
“Who? Gramsci? How do you even know of him?” I ask.
“My older brother was really into Trotsky and had Gramsci’s book Prison Notebooks. Gramsci was a hunchback, terrible health, got on Mussolini’s wrong side and he died in prison.”
“Mussolini was such an ass.” Saved once by Hitler’s paratroopers, but then caught by partisans and strung up by the heels at a gas station like a dead hog.
Inside graveyard walls we move past the maimed cat and violets and shade trees, we move past the poets’ graves and the strange Pyramid of Caius Cestius and its traffic circle, move past the war in Iraq, we are alive and healthy and jumping on an ugly B-line train that reminds me of Philly, train windows all tagged and bedr
aggled, but when we climb out above ground the Roman streets are gorgeous again, we climb back into air and afternoon light at a station in Prati, local cafés and grocers and palm trees and peach-coloured buildings radiating in lovely lines.
Sometimes my eyes are wasted; like St. Lucia I should poke them out. All this time walking and only now I realize there are no high-rises in Rome’s centre, no brutalist blocks, no faceless slabs. Was I blind? The scale of roofline and window is human and my eye finally notices, my eye loves it. Classically proportioned views run east and west and this new sunlight on ancient stone arches zaps some Luddite pleasure centre in my brain.
“How is the wine?” I ask Eve.
“Very drinkable.” She is open, I have yet to hear Eve declare any wine undrinkable. I like that and I like to jump city to city and lose track of exactly where I am on the map of a continent. But I am running low on funds in my jumps: in the daily business of eating and drinking, my money rides off madly in all directions.
Via Virgilio, a pretty café lit at night, an old-fashioned café of golden trays and sea-horse-shaped bottles of oil and golden rounds of cheese and salvers of noodles and bread strewn on the tablecloth and seafood delicacies in her mouth and I like the feeling of forgetting who I am and where I am and the flavours are so sharp; how do they do it? We sit on a narrow lane and my cousin looks as if she has a happy secret, which many prefer to an unhappy secret.
But Eve says over her dark wine, “I don’t find secrets that fun.” The word resonates for her and not in a good way. She asks the waiter for a spicy dish redolent with chili peppers, arrabbiata, angry pasta.
I don’t tell her that I love a life of secrets, love her secret face in candles. Everyone has their charged secrets, even her, despite her convincing disavowal. It’s the one thing I’ve learned that is true, all of us nursing worries and secret powers.
Eve says, “I just remembered to tell you, I googled Gregory Corso, the beat poet we saw buried beside Shelley. What a life. I had no idea he was in jail with Lucky Luciano, the godfather, a prison in New York State, right on the border with Canada. And they had a ski hill and Corso learned to ski!”
“A ski hill in prison?”
“Well, a ski hill might be a good idea for every prison,” says Eve. “We should ski the Italian Alps someday. Livigno is not far, just north of Milan, it shouldn’t cost us too much.”
“I’d like that,” I say. “Or we could go to prison and ski for free. How did our Uncle Aldo make his money?”
Eve says, “I think he made his money in money.”
“Ah, the old-fashioned way,” I say.
But what I really mean is the new way. Derivatives and default swaps and trading floors and million-dollar bonuses: such astral salaries and then a cool mil on top, such gravy. I worry that making money out of someone else’s money has become the last big industry and I am not part of the magic assembly line, I am far outside of the factory gates, walking the weeds and abandoned slabs.
Eve breaks crusty bread, hands me a platter of fragrant salty oil. “What was our aunt saying — odd to think that there are refugees out on the water as we speak, coming toward us as we eat and drink whatever we wish in this beautiful spot. It’s the poor children I worry about, on those leaky boats. Do you miss your children?”
“I do. They’ve been really good kids.”
“They seem good. Versus some of the little monsters out there. They’re in Air Cadets? Do they still play Hungry Hungry Hippos? Have I made you sad?” She touches my arm.
“No, it’s okay.”
She holds a photo of my children and their dog. “They are so beautiful, all of them,” she said. “Rome is so beautiful. Is Rome better at day or night?”
Who can answer, who can think straight after these evening hours pass and we are the last in the cozy café, sated, sitting side by side, my hand slightly pressuring her warm leg, where it might or might not be noticed (nearer my God to thee). Did Corso’s godfather connection help him get a poet’s place in the Italian cemetery? I wonder if he ever skied again after prison. Did Lucky Luciano strap on skis? The waiter has put on his coat and stands by us, the waiter waiting.
At night the blood-red wine presses circles on the starched tablecloth, cobbled blond streets bend under descant melodies and invisible three a.m. emails and the black sparkling river arranges its lights, its candles, its bed of stars. At night our urban universe rearranges itself, seems to be the opposite of dead.
“Are you decent?” My cousin raps at my door, sweeps in bright morning sunshine. Naples is on an exquisite bay, but Rome seems more open to light. Eve is playful, energetic.
“Come on sleepyhead, get moving, let’s go out and do something.”
“I can’t move. I have multiple neurosis.”
She laughs. “Do you need help getting dressed?”
“There’s no rush. We have all day.”
“We’re in Rome!”
“Rome’s not going anywhere. It’s eternal.”
I add honey to my boiling tea. Within my tiny fridge float such fragrant aromas: smoked salmon, salsa, hummus, Italian pepperoni, berries and apples, all mingling pleasantly. I breathe in the spicy aroma and feel happy about what seems my creation; surely I can bottle and sell this fragrance, Brad Pitt pitching my designer scent on wide screens and in glossy fashion mags.
“You should try goat’s milk,” Eve says. “Cow’s milk has hormones.”
“Maybe I need hormone replacement.” I laugh, but really I don’t trust goats and monkeys. My cousin waits for me while I shower. She carries two Eccles cakes from a patisserie and I feel such tenderness toward her, a flood of associations with this flaky pastry.
The odd thing is I can’t recall the exact associations, when I last had an Eccles cake. Who was I with? What port of call, what beautiful kingdom where flags droop like horses and passports open to wow smiling guards and the bright maps fold so perfectly, what ensnaring sunlit coast where I walked as a model citizen? I can’t remember specific details, but the pastries affect me. Your old lives wash away in a languorous surf and I am curious what is happening to my mind, my memory. Still, I am so happy to have Eccles cakes again, so rich and sticky.
Eve says, “I looked up Keats dying in Rome, at the end he was spitting up cups of blood, and remember at his grave we saw that poor cat breathing out blood from its ruined face.” I must confess to a tiny chill when Eve mentions the bloody cat, though I am usually a skeptic about such matters.
Keats was almost dead when he arrived in Rome, delayed by a long quarantine in Naples. The poet came to Italy for warmer weather, but Rome was freezing, damp. The doctor in Rome bled Keats and starved him. From Moorgate and Gravesend to this agony on the Spanish Steps. Avoid the Spanish Steps, I say, a horrible part of Rome. Keats was born in the Swan and Hoop inn and his father fell from a horse and broke open his skull and left no money. Keats made love his currency, his religion.
Love, I think, is admirable; what else is there? My aunt in London took me to the poet’s house in Hampstead and, a malcontent, I didn’t appreciate her efforts, her love, I wanted to see the Banshees and the Jam, not Keats; I didn’t know I’d stand at his grave and think of my aunt and love her when it’s too late. The poet’s room in Rome is now a tourist trap, but I’m not sure how original the room is: after Keats died of his illness, the Italians tore up the flooring and windowsills and burnt his furniture.
I remember the fallen oranges and swarming ants near his stone at the pretty Protestant Cemetery, the Cimitero degli Inglesi. In the nunnery yard below my room oranges or apricots lie on the ground, but there is broken glass set into the top of the wall. We are separated, we are partitioned. I can look down into the garden of orphans and no one picks up the apricots.
Eve sits cross-legged on my bed with my tiny new digital camera, figuring out the buttons. She says she dreamt she went on a date with Salman Rushdie; he was a perfect gentleman, but when they arrived at a palatial estate house another woman sta
rted yelling at him, so Eve had to go find her car, but where was it parked? He tried to help her, but the woman kept yelling.
Sleepy and relaxed in the heat, I lie flat on my back, a pillow under my head, a white towel wrapping my midriff. She takes random photos of my hotel room, the flowered terrace and our tea and cakes, takes photos of me in my towel.
My cousin leans over and opens my towel. She holds up what is beneath with two fingers and peers at it, as if intrigued by a curious new toy.
“Senti com’è morbido al tatto! Feel how soft it is to the touch!” Her Italian accent is so much better than mine. She lifts it and lets it drop several times to see if it falls over the same way each time. Her expression is studious. And the old Adam grows larger with her attentions.
Do people act differently in hotels in Europe? There must be a study, a doctoral thesis underway. Did I try to engineer this situation with the shower and towel? Natasha used to joke that I should have an engineering degree.
“Are you decent,” Eve asked at the door. Now she asks, “Does it point one way?”
“Well, I dress left.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Well, it hangs to the left. My left.”
“It’s really curved.”
She seems to forget that I’m even there as she moves it this way and that. I sense that this is the first time she’s been relaxed enough with someone in daylight to really look at one and move it about and feel free to ask questions about this odd object. I am strangely happy to be part of this study, even if I am literally only a part. I can tell that playing with it is making her amorous.
“Weren’t we going to go out?” I ask her. “And do something?”
“Later,” she says, eyes focused, serious, a dedicated student. “We have all day.”
Yes, we have the day, we have the great George Jones singing to put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone, George Jones sings and a grinning George W. Bush visits Rome at the same time as I do, the President visits odd corners of his troubled empire at the precise end of his sad reign. The President is a religious man, seems a decent sort. Does he think of all those he’s touched in the head, all those walking around and cursing him and all those dead and all those with nightmares? Does he toss and turn and need little blue pills to bring on rest? Or like me, does he sleep like an oafish bear? George W. insists he is a new Winston Churchill, he says history will look back and judge him a visionary warrior, a prince. And it’s true, history will judge him.
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 11