Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  “I’m celibate right now for a while,” she says, “having a moratorium.”

  Moi aussi, I think, though the moratorium is not my choice.

  “But now I prefer older men,” she says. “I don’t think I can go back to younger guys, they’re so goofy.” This last idea from Abby was not expected.

  Abby still remembers her childhood trip to Gaspé, the massive sunlit prow of Percé Rock, crazed gannets diving for herring and whales lifting and sounding and so much light and fresh salt air like wine. The small motel was perched on a cliff; placid whales directed themselves below her balcony and she heard the whales snorting as they surfaced in the bay. I may have stayed in the same motel. In town I drank glasses of lovely cold Blanche beer after kayaking on the windswept sea, now in my head both Gaspé and Naples in a minor key.

  “Where is the sea? Is it by the station?”

  “You can’t really see it from here, but the harbour’s that way. We’re close.”

  “I want to see the bay and the islands. Ischia, maybe Capri. I’ll meet you in a day or two in Pompeii. Where are you staying?” she asks.

  Abby has already booked a hostel in Naples to save money. I am too old and cranky for hostels and bunks. It is on to Pompeii for me and the small family hotel. I have my hand on her neck, it seems so intimate. Her head is so close that I can see down her top and spy her black bra and small breasts nestled within. She doesn’t mind my touch on her shoulders and neck. Yes, I must go there, the Gaspé is so beautiful.

  I know it’s impossible, but I want to skip the awkward courtship steps and calls and restaurant candles, watching plump scallops shuck their bacon wraps. Can’t two people simply look at each other and know and walk by the milky sea, can’t one just say, You and me. And both would somehow know.

  And it can happen, it has happened to me, a matter of days, perhaps minutes, and it seems we know. But then all the other bad times. Do I have luck or do I not?

  “Email me,” I say to Abby, worried about cementing things before she walks away into the chaos of Naples, before I catch my train to Pompeii. “I can check at the internet café.”

  “No need to check, I’ll see you in Pompeii soon.”

  When she says these few words to me I am elated, suddenly I adore our world, my step light and posture improved and only yesterday I was ginger with vague grief and drear glaucoma.

  Abby buys a train pass, we say our goodbyes and she walks past taxi drivers waiting like wolves for the lambs, she walks into buzzing Naples to find her hostel, repeating my directions to the veiled Christ’s spooky chambers and Capodimonte’s Bourbon palace far up the hill.

  On a dark subterranean platform (Milan would never tolerate such a Stygian substation) I catch another slow train out of town, the windows on the right side suddenly full of light and unspooling views of aqua sea and up lift the tribal cameras and always a church like a narrow knife in the blue sky, a view of water on my side of the train, but also afternoon sun beating on that side so you pay for the view, body heat increasing markedly inside the crowded train as it travels the curve of the bay down to Pompeii and Sorrento (why is Sorrento so serene and Naples so lawless?), prickly pear cactus and wild lemon trees in the windows and Abby and a Smiths song in my head about fifteen minutes with her.

  I wouldn’t say no, I resolve that I will stop again in Naples and learn more of the harbour and the Spanish Quarter, the weird high avenues and that steep ancient alley that bisects the town like the line dividing our brain; Naples makes me nervous, but I feel I must get to know it. The milk-train travels in and out of mountains, in train tunnels we move in and out of daylight, pupils dilating, ears popping, pores sweating, neck sweating, until my body contemplates a switch to gills.

  Slightly dazed, I jump off the sweaty train at Pompeii and explore the raw ruins on foot and in the ruins I enter another tunnel, tunnel after tunnel, airports, trains, and now this underground forum. A dark passage leads at an angle into the earth and I follow this tunnel into the lower level of the forum complex, the Teatro, down into shade, hiding from the relentless sun for even a few rare moments.

  Gaspé’s cool breezes; northern glaciers and Columbia icefields; Hudson Bay floes and polar bears — can they be real? Any accumulation of ice or snow seems impossible in this poleaxing heat and dust.

  Tamika and Ray-Ray spot me from a distance just as I descend; they are following a stone street from the Villa of Mysteries, big oval stones set in the roadway and Tamika and Ray-Ray hopscotch stone to stone. They were in the Garden of Fugitives, they are excited, they saw the ghostly plaster forms of bodies and can’t get over them, the white shapes of bodies, the haunting postures, the dog that died in the House of Orphans, its contorted last moments; they saw the haunting plaster casts and they trudge dust and pigeons and follow me into the underworld, the dark tunnel passage cool, shade so lovely, so good to be briefly out of the sun under the forum complex. In the sun the burnt skin of my forehead hurts so much it makes me worry. I think we wandered too long on the mountain, too long in the sun.

  The famous volcano buried much of the theatre, though some of the walls were visible for centuries. When they dug out the forum’s lower chambers they found human skeletons and a horse. Torches and candles burnt in these haunted underground halls, animals and men waiting, waiting, sweating, then your turn to fight, time to be pushed out into the harsh sun, live or die.

  From the level forum floor we raise our eyes to the rising rows of stone seats heaped above us. Ray-Ray looks around. “I bet this was a very bad view for a lot of them who saw it.”

  The majority of people would be above, staring down at us. This minority on the bottom of the forum standing where we stand — slaves, foreign exiles, prisoners of war, gladiators, those of the infam pushed out into the sun — well, in a few moments most of us standing here would die inside this eerie stone oval.

  Trident pitchforks to your skull, Roman stabbing swords, curved Bulgarian swords, chains and nets and shields, starved African lions with their ribs showing and there are two entrances: the living march under one archway and the dead find their way out a second exit. A mob chanting above a low stone wall (do you feel lucky, punk) and, at the end, if not lucky, dragged bleeding across the sand by Juno’s spooky brother in his mask, dragged into privacy behind the walls by the masked figure, who swings his square hammer into the private curve of your porcelain head.

  In the ruins I see a dog running and jumping in the distance. The dog runs over lava and candy wrappers and kings’ tombs. Is that the same Jack Russell terrier I saw at the train station with its head in the diesel’s wheels? In this day’s heat the crazy dog chases pigeons in the grassy ruins of the Grande Palace, the dog galloping by ancient Corinthian pillars lined up in rows, pillars or stumps left to hint of the broad space where emperors and nobles and peacocks roamed gardens and reflecting pools before white pumice fell from the sky over the Temple of Jupiter.

  The running dog cares not a whit about royal gardens or hidden history or the future or the heat, the dog cares only for the moment and the nearest pigeon. The dog is running full speed in the heat when I arrive and will be running full speed when I leave. Its pink tongue hangs from his narrow jaws and I hear the creature pant, a distinct clicking sound like a tiny engine about to burst.

  “How does a dog find water here?” I ask Tamika. The sandy ground is like a desert. I’m told the buried ruins were discovered by a well-digger seeking water. Pompeii once sat on the sea, but the volcano altered the shore, the river diverted by lava and the sea rolled back. I wish I had a water bowl and spigot handy.

  The terrier stops and speaks to me with its beautiful brown eyes: Yes, I am the same dog you saw at the railroad track. I appreciate your concern, but you can do nothing for me. You are visiting here briefly, a stranger, a foreigner, while this is my life, short as it may be. You are used to one way, I am used to another.

  An Irish boy jumps away nervously as the dog madly rockets past, running down ano
ther pigeon he will never catch. The dog turns and runs again, over and over. That woman in Canada, I must change her mind, I must swim with her again in the mountains.

  A tiny corpse lies in the thick dust, lies flat as a comb.

  “Is that an antique rat?”

  “Yes, dear,” says the Irish boy’s mother. Antico.

  “Where’s me jumper? Can we go now? Where’s me jumper? Can I have a fizzy drink?”

  “I said no! Don’t start up.”

  The dog runs tirelessly, but the Irish mother is strained. Another dog pulls at a trash bag.

  “Not another word about fizzy drinks!”

  All the poor frazzled parents, all the offended children.

  Does the dog bark at Italian pigeons in Italian? It has no owner. I must tell Eve of the dog; the shore is altered and Eve rather than Natasha is my new confessor. The terrier is a stranger. The terrier is me.

  We tromp the same Italian dust that slaves and emperors and gladiators ate. Place this ancient soil in your mouth like a thick piece of pizza pie. Eat the rich past. Dig anywhere in Italy and you find the past, you can’t escape your past, your acid flashback.

  We stagger in the stone heat, we must leave these sand ruins for a drink, leave this skin that feels so sore from the merciless sun. In 1971 Pink Floyd played on this baked spot of real estate, played their slow psychedelia where so many died in Pompeii’s stone amphitheatre, the Spectacula. Gather the Teatro’s many dead into festival seating on the granite rows: what would the dead slaves and Goth captives make of Pink Floyd’s mountain of amplifiers and gongs and kettle drums and acid-trip soundtrack? I’ve seen the old film, but I’m not sure that Tamika or Ray-Ray even know of Pink Floyd or the clip echoing forever on YouTube searches for the piper at the gates of dawn.

  Down in this Teatro’s sunny bowl I will be torn apart for the mob’s pleasure, I will not leap the wall to slice open an emperor, I will kill another slave, I will fight a bear, I will fly on points and suffer tragic jet lag.

  I’m learning. What I didn’t realize about ancient Pompeii was how many got out of town. Most fled the city when the volcano started smoking, but some stayed put. I try to imagine that scene, you thought you’d be okay, then that realization, too late, rocks flying up into the heavens and dropping on you from the heavens like the worst meteor storm, parents and children at home crouched under the stairs, women and children huddled in a timbered boathouse by the sea, trying to shelter, and the men outside in the open, all waiting for boats at the pier. And their bodies excavated from stony sleep twenty centuries later.

  In the family hotel the staff and family members eat a late lunch after we have been fed and our tables cleared. The mother with dyed blond hair and the tired father with his neck brace — once so handsome, in the old black-and-white photos decorating the lobby and halls, posing with movie stars and singers and soccer players, but now he spends the day in the lobby with a tiny TV set and a neck brace. His heart no longer in the hotel business.

  Once dashing socialites, now they are aged parents, Euro Cup rattling a tiny TV and their slim son in his Italian football jersey and their daughter in her handkerchief top and low-rider pants that push out a round roll of fat at her midriff and a pampered little dog with cataracts; it stretches its bat-like torso on the cool tiles.

  Big Pico, my favourite waiter, sits with the family and beside him a skinny cook; they all lean together at the same table in mid-afternoon, huge man and thin man leaning toward each other over delicious plates and much wine. This is their time, not ours, an intimate inner circle, relaxed and pleasantly tired from waiting on us, from serving the guests breakfast and lunch. They speak quietly.

  In every bar and café and small shop the Euro Cup plays on television after television, the streets are deserted when a match is in play, even the uniformed police are inside shops and cafés watching the screen and calling out and groaning with the crowd.

  When I try to speak Italian I feel I am acting on a stage, Italy is theatre and you must commit to it, lose yourself in the role. But I cannot — I am too timid. The Euro Cup football players are amazingly theatrical, a breeze touches their cheek and they fall to the bright grass, the players writhe on the grass as if shot. After a missed chance they lift their eyes to heaven in wonderment or hold their faces in huge operatic tragedy. As in hockey, the goalies seem a separate breed, faces more aged than the other players sprinting across giant green screens all over Europe.

  “You are cheering for Spain.”

  “Because I wish them to beat the Germans.”

  In the open lobby two street dogs saunter inside and lie with us at the television as if come to watch the match. The line between street and lobby is not a clear border.

  “You are cheering for the Netherlands?”

  “Because they beat the Germans.”

  When the team is bad the nation grieves, the nation silent, but I don’t mind a touch of silence in Italy. I can tell whether they have won or lost by the noise in the street. The Italian team loses again and again (such lovely azure jerseys), but it is the British fans who seem to be vomiting. In the stadium fans make monkey sounds at a black player on the pitch and toss banana peels at the player.

  As a child I gathered that the Monkees were too busy singing to put anybody down, but the Italians I meet are catholic in their hatred; Italians hate each other and hate other towns and cities and they hate the Deutschlanders and the rest of Europe and they hate illegals and gypsies and they hate tourists like me.

  But for some stupid reason I want them to like me. I want Pico to think favourably of me, I want his approval, even though I will never see him again after this summer sojourn. And I fret about offending a prostitute on the street. And she is what to me? And in Rome, those charming young Croatian women splashing water on the aqua tiles every morning — I worry for them and want them to worry about me. This seems a design flaw on my part.

  A resplendent young couple walks through the lobby.

  “Matrimonio,” says the owner in his neck brace. It seems centuries ago that I was of a couple like them, borrowing a suit, toasting the future with champagne and love.

  I saw an English tourist pub in Sorrento with a chalkboard sidewalk sign: Come in and meet your future ex-wife.

  The German couple at the hotel complain to me. His name is Dieter; I know this because he left his wallet open on the table and walked away to peer at some disturbance in the street. He finds Italy distracting. With ease I pull out a fifty-euro note, to show Dieter to be more careful, clearly a good idea, but then find I don’t know how to explain what I’ve done, and the fifty-euro note stays in my hand.

  “Italians all lie to you,” Dieter says, “they promise you something and it doesn’t happen, they laze about, nothing on time or when promised.”

  Dieter’s wife speaks in German, yet I understand every word. “Twenty euro for a taxi, twenty euro for a drink, twenty euro for this, twenty euro for that. Mein Gott, our money goes like water!”

  “Um, speaking of money.”

  “I’ll never come back here,” Dieter says imploringly. “A horrible place.”

  Yet I love the horrible place so. In this tiny hotel I have had the best minestrone of my life, the best pesto and pasta and pizza and pork and the best seafood of my life. I love the food, the strange rooms in intoxicating cities, and these lidless ruins by the blinding sea, I love Italy. It is perhaps a foolish and typical tourist notion, but I think I could live in Italy happily. And Dieter says he will never be back.

  The German claims that Italians are lazy, especially southern Italians, terroni, but Pico in Pompeii works so hard for us. My hotel room has no clock and I travel light, no watch, no cellphone, no laptop. My room does not reveal if it is five a.m. or nine a.m. So I sneak down to the lobby to spy a clock, and I glimpse Pico bent in the kitchen creating his raw pastry, no one else about at this hour. He is here at dawn, he is here at night: when does he live, when does he sleep? I worry whether he has a lif
e outside this hotel, whether he is lonely, whether he will die from work and heat in his black vest buttoned up and long sleeves buttoned down. Does he live with his mother still? Does she wish he’d marry? His feet are killing him, a crooked gait when hurrying to a table; how can he rest his feet? He is not lazy. I worry about him and he worries about me, looks after me so well.

  I think of his pastry as croissants, but they may also be called corniches. Is that from the shape, curved like the horns of a bull? To put the horns on someone, which we did all the time as children or in photos, is a grave insult here, as cuckolds are objects of great derision in Italy. The two fingers behind the head is the cuckoo calling with bad news, ribald laughter at the cornuto, Othello’s fear of poor Desdemona giving him horns (I have a pain upon my forehead here). But now, after Natasha left for another, I have sympathy for cuckolds, I’ve seen that black cloud from both sides now. I’ll give Pico Dieter’s fifty-euro note.

  After another luscious dinner at the hotel, Pico brings me a simple repast, a naked superb pear, and he brings me a knife and fork. Pico has sprezzatura, a natural grace.

  “Okay?” Pico asks me.

  “Sì, sì!”

  Did he read my mind? The single pear is exactly what I need after all these rich dishes, such beautiful texture and sweet taste.

  Prego, Pico says so kindly every night, his hand and arm extended, like an actor in a silent film, directing me to my lonely table, welcoming me to the table for one, the only solitary place setting among the hotel’s couples and families and singing nuns. I am in my place.

  Abby, the woman from the train, said she’d meet me here today at four or she’d call the hotel. When the phone rings at the front desk I strain to listen. No call, no email. The sirens do not call to me from the blue grotto.

  But the son at the hotel desk has no English and Abby is Texan. He might not understand her accent, her message for me. Is it her on the phone? Does she remember the Alamo? How I wish I had more Italian, I could tell the son that she will call for me. Next time I will be sure to study harder (and you know I will not study harder).