They rise up, rise and stroll to their red Vespa, their scooter named after a wasp. The scooter and front wheel look so delicate.
Her boyfriend puts on his helmet, but first she opens a tiny juice-box for her sleepy spaceman, oh, she taps the straw oh so lightly against the juice-box, she is so tender, convincing the tiny straw it must please move just inside where the juice waits for us, and she pierces the membrane so lightly and lifts the juice to his mouth, a love letter to the pink tongue waiting in the opening of his black helmet. His face is not visible, a hidden knight; I watch her, just her waiting by the scooter.
“You’re staring,” says Eve.
Oh.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum; of the dead say nothing but good. In a few weeks the Beautiful Scooter Couple will die on the Amalfi coast’s narrow highway, a tunnel curve, their scooter bouncing like a toy off the front of a bus I ride, the couple above another kind of cliff on the coast, a sea-cliff that leans like a naval prow over the curling surf and cobalt water.
But this moment we are deep in the heart of Rome’s kingdom of private walls, where the boyfriend drinks the proffered fruit juice, her billet-doux, her juice in his throat and his stomach and then the young woman brings her long legs to the seat behind him and her arms and her legs cling like a twin to his body and the noise of the tiny engine as they vanish into Rome’s stunning riptides of traffic.
This Roman girlfriend gives me pause, her image lingers in my head, her tender hands cupping the juice-box. Has anyone ever been so tender and careful with me?
One person. Natasha said we were twins, but then my twin turned away in a far city. That lightning moment of liberal loathing and those malicious months that follow, your body delivering some constant terrible product (call now for your free trial!).
A message came from Natasha a few weeks before she turned away from me:
Hi charming boy, miss you, very nice that you called while I was on my bike in the country; I can’t wait to see you, get here as soon as you can. You are needed regarding pressing country matters. I will be your own personal therapist very soon; we can lie down on the blue quilt and talk about your troubling dreams. Love, your Natasha
P.S. I’m listening to Veedon Fleece; you lent it to me, remember?
I remember too much. That’s the problem. Sun through Venetian blinds on an easy chair, her tube amp and guitar, metal gleaming in the light, every detail delineated of the amp’s grey herringbone grill and her voice soft: When I lost my baby.
But I won’t lose my mind, won’t follow Natasha, thinking I can bring her back, I refuse to be some mawkish Orpheus descending a mall escalator into the hipster underworld.
I like the walkways along the river, though the sidewalks disappear in the spring floods. At the café at night Eve orders a dish called “strangled priests,” she observes that I am like her mother, putting butter on everything. It is odd to consider how much butter I have swallowed in my life, how many gallons, barrels, trucks, ocean-going tankers.
Eve tells us of the time she entered a tiny taverna deep in the south of Italy, asked a man for directions, and an ancient woman spit on my cousin’s bare arm.
“She spit on you for real?” asks Ray-Ray.
Eve says amiably, “I was wearing a top that showed too much skin.”
Usually she carried two shawls: one for her shoulders and one for her head, in case she was going into a church or formal event, but she didn’t think she needed a shawl in this shop.
“Man, no one spit on me in China,” says Ray-Ray. “Seriously.”
Perhaps that is why she prefers the north of Italy. She is unsure of the south; likes the Alps, but says her favourite place in the world is Venice, with its burnt opera house and blackened squid in seasick palaces. Not dear dirty Naples or Sicily’s dry hills.
On the terrace I stand and survey my kingdoms, my Holy Roman Empires, another Pope I am, a new King of Rome!
We eat and drink and walk and I realize I missed the streets and lovely murky rivers to the sea, what is borne by the chartered river past the red palazzos, the peach-coloured walls and cheetah shadows and forlorn Italian faces and frank sexual fashions. And I missed my cousin. I tell Eve of the angry prostitute in Pompeii and of Abby’s no-show.
She says, You are such a fool with women, but she listens and laughs at my tales.
Stand on a patio chair on my terrace and look toward the river; there is a glass and brass cupola and a huddle of polished white statues in situ on one high corner of a building jutting out like a ship above the Vatican north wall. I am a spy in a tower: who are these odd statues on a lofty ledge to the east of me?
My statues are nowhere near St. Peter’s high violet Basilica, my statues stand on an isolated corner in some plaintive ex-Catholic exile, their perch high with birds and helicopters, set on a corner far from the centres of power. Who are they? Perhaps the statues are a choir of strangled Popes or pretenders or disbarred lawyers or dubious patron saints or usurers hanging cozeners, bare legs tiptoeing their own cliff edge.
Here is the odd thing: I search all avenues under the wall, but I can never spot this mysterious group from below on the street. From my door I turn left and follow the vast wall, which should lead me speedily to them, but there is no sight of their faces above. My statues only exist when I look at them from my rooftop terrace, the statues are not visible at ground level. Am I the only one who sees them? Look, their milk eyes turned to the city, but if I run down the stairs they no longer exist.
I am fascinated by this lonely lovely group of statues. They look thuggish, hip, look like they played their first show at CBGB in the Bowery in 1975. Why can I not find them when I’m walking on the street? Is there an app? Should I sneak inside the Vatican walls to look for the dead white saints?
The Mexican rock climber in our hotel went over the wall for a lark and was caught immediately by the Pope’s Swiss Guard; hard to take them seriously in their court jester garb, but they are extremely serious, they have clout. They threatened to kick Father Silas and his entire art group out of the country and as penance Father Silas had to rush the rock climber to the airport and push him onto the next flight to Mexico; within hours of dropping like a spider down the Vatican walls the climber disappeared from Italy and he almost took the rest of the group with him.
My cousin and others in the group make a day trip to the beach at Ostia. Such heat, not used to it, air wavering in heat, like fumes dancing over a nozzle at a gas pump. My cousin’s sunburnt shoulders are so red and tender, and in the evening we are altered, groggy, as if felled by sunstroke, coup de soleil.
I have a round plastic container from the discount store, soothing cold cream, crema corpo, for her tender shoulders. She opens her blouse in my room. It’s better if I don’t know such things, if I am not allowed to see light on her.
In the amazing ruins we eat figs and apples and zampone, stuffed pig trotters, in the amazing ruins of temples, of marriage. There stands my cousin and her legs and lingering glances. Do not go near there, do not follow her frock in the frescoes as wild dogs run past, mondo cane.
Man is his dizzy desire and I desire knowledge of her bare shoulders, that curved planet, that new home. Her neck part of a naked crescent, a lovely curve from naked earlobe to naked shoulder. Why do I love her neck so, that nexus of delicate ear and fine hair and shampoo scent, the shoulders, the skin, the jaw and cheek, the shadows and perfume; it has everything, right there. I can hide my face there; what a world exists just there!
She asks for lotion for her skin. I approach my cousin with a round container of lotion from an Italian shop, approach a planet, once distant, now in view in Rome, a room with a view. Her shoulders glow in the spacecraft window, closer, closer to touch, a new looming planet, the lightest touch, my fingers like landing craft and her intake of breath.
Crema corpo, revitalizanta aloe vera. Rubbing her tender shoulders and her neck, her back, lightly down her spine to her round hips. I worry she’ll get mad, bu
t I can feel her body move nicely to my touch. She stretches her neck and shoulders, murmuring pleasant sounds, moves into my pressure as a cat will.
I will not lie with her, but I keep rubbing more lotion, her shoulders and back and lower and lower down her back, on the sides of her hips and brief forays near her belly and a bit lower below her navel, teasing, testing, lower and lower, circling closer and closer, so close, but never all the way.
My cousin says, “You have such a calming effect on me.”
“Me?” My mind is always racing and my life is chaos.
“You seem very calm.” The East German woman travelling in the west of Ireland said the same thing to me, used a German word for calm.
My hands wander, my mind wanders, catacombs and tunnels and travel, planes, airports and tunnels, my mind inside her, the lines where her strap was in the sun, the lines and borders, the line and colour of her face, the lineament of her eye and cheekbone skin. I think of the old woman in the south of this country spitting on Eve’s skin. Country matters.
My cousin gasps when my fingers stray and find where she is wet, my fingers connect with her brain, a direct tendril, another hidden passageway, her breath quiet as the mountain town that makes you sing.
My hand wrecked a marriage, wrecked unions, and I killed the Beautiful Scooter Couple, and I listen to the Fleshtones, their best album, Roman Gods. At night when I get under the covers my cousin seems awake, but she mutters a language I can’t understand.
What did you say?
She kicks my shin or calf. Is she being impish? She pulls at my hair. How to interpret this? She goes back to sleep, breathing rhythmically.
The next day she laughs with joy at my account. I kicked you? I spoke gibberish? She recalls none of it. She leaves my room like a sleepwalker. Soon we will all leave Rome. We move, we sin, we confess, we fly to and fro, we are on earth, then we are in the heavens, then we are not, we are on earth, then we are flung through the heavens, then we are not in the heavens.
And she loves me, then she loves me not, she becomes another woman who says in a doorway or in an airport, says I’d hate to lose touch with you, you know I love you in so many ways. Another one who says, It’s been wonderful, as did Natasha, Natasha my buried past, another quiet buried city.
“Don’t be depressed,” my cousin says, “I know you’ll be depressed.” Or did Natasha in Canada say that? All these people living in your past as if in a nearby apartment building and waiting for you to get there. The anatomy of desire and the anatomy of loss — I have them mixed up in my depressed, sunburnt head.
My cousin looks pale in the train window. My cousin is in my room, no, she is gone for good this time, she is walking a narrow lane miles away, she is coming downhill in another country, she walks a line between whitewashed homes that have been there forever, a lane curving this way and that and quiet as a suture. She leaves my room, leaves the station, leaves the airport and somewhere a waitress carries a big curved glass, walking a beeline just for me.
In Pompeii last week the hunched train lurched forward and the steel wheels did not slice off the dog’s head. Perhaps like the dog I’ll persist, survive. Perhaps the terrier did hear and heed me, perhaps the terrier knows many languages, will travel to Russia and China, will find our chambermaids in the white stone of Croatia. The sunny peak and the valley depth so close together. The Scooter Couple is so beautiful, yet they die high above the charming sea, the shallow coast, they fall from the ledge, the ledger.
Late in a trip: that urge to simply throw away your luggage. In my last days in Rome I grow obsessed by my group of statues peopling a ledge, this shadow empire. I stare out from my terrace and I pace back and forth on blisters under the high walls of the Vatican; before I leave Rome I must find where these milk-eyed figures live above us, these stone gods that only my eyes see.
I borrow binoculars from Marco the American intern and wonder if Marco could be our hotel thief. Marco knows the halls and exits, knows all the rooms and hours, has all the keys on their brass hooks, and Marco will vanish across the ocean at summer’s end.
As I focus the binocs on the statues they turn their heads to look toward me and lean to speak with each other, as if posing for an album cover, say early Blues Magoos or Velvet Underground. One statue wears Bob Dylan sunglasses, one resembles Lou Reed, another pats his perfectly curled hair. They whisper to each other and one statue turns his hips, wags a pale erection at me, his Roman good luck charm, a large statue gripping his generous white phallus with two hands far above milling streets crowded with tourists all dressed in Tilley and tombstone motley.
We meet in the street when it is dark and my new gang of ghostly statues brings me along on an illicit mission. The statues are not strangled Popes, they are not exiled saints, their ambitions are far simpler: they are lard thieves on the hunt, they steal used grease, fryer oil. The statue with Lou Reed ringlets is the ringleader. We gather in the alley behind a famous restaurant; money to be had in rancid lard and biodiesel, the price in our favour, the price climbs daily and they know someone who knows someone who moves grease, who will take this filth from our hands.
Cats rub our legs in the long alley. Wild cats roam Rome’s ancient sunken ruins while dogs run free in Pompeii’s train station, and this speaks to something about each city: Rome is feline and Pompeii is canine.
My cousin’s voice, my cousin’s song while our kayaks cut along smartly and her voice carried over the water. Dig in the paddle’s blade and the kayak responds. At the shore she swam into jellyfish, Eve recoiling violently to escape, but she rose from the sea with the touch of jellyfish stings becoming vivid red scratches, small red whiplashes lacing her right shoulder and breast, a kind of venom in the stingers, strange asps touching her breast. In our room she dabbed toothpaste on the burns to soothe them, Eve afraid to go in the sea. Was it the long tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war?
The man who rented us such bright kayaks said, I’m not saying I’m against them or asking to change anything, what I ask is that existing laws be enforced. They are illegal. You do not have to live here, you visit here only as if Italy is a museum, a theme park; you have no idea what it is to live here, how bad it is. It is not a theme park. There are too many foreigners, too many gypsies, too many Arabs and Africans. The northern countries don’t care, England and Germany simply send them back to us, but we can’t take them all. And our young have such little hope these days, our young must leave, they must leave while these others pour in. How can that be? We must close the borders or lose our way of life, lose our civilization.
Yes of course, I agree. Europe will surely implode, Europe will sink under frivolous debt, everyone must sell their Ferraris, their Audis, Europe will no longer exist and no longer will grocery clerks shout and throw the receipt at me because I don’t have exact change.
In Europe he looks at me oddly. I know he’s right, I know mine is a foreigner’s version of this country, but it’s the only version I have.
In the Hotel Europa Ray-Ray leans drunkenly at the bar, Ray-Ray says, “Oh I love women,” as if it’s the saddest sentence in the world.
Europe leans at a bar and my cousin passes on Rollerblades in the rain, her striking face in a crowd, hair wet, arms out for balance, legs looking longer for being up on the tiny wheels. No pads on her bare skin and I worry. She is learning something, a brain harnessed to flesh, or is it flesh harnessed to brain? Both brain and body can be lovely prisons.
Every day we drank frothy juice made from blood oranges, such a favourite since the group has been in Rome, but for two of us the vivid juice speaks also of the knife party (killer party, man).
At night I listen to Polly Jean Harvey and her low voice and words seems fraught, loaded, travelling to remembered places, certain shared shrines and rivers, and can someone else sense these places are in your eye again?
At night I see an older Italian woman walking two Jack Russell terriers and I must stop to talk.
Good dog, I say,
petting one under the neck.
No, she says, not a good dog. They are unusually friendly for Jack Russells and they lick my hands. The Italian PM says his hands are clean, mani pulite.
In the alley of grease we have our duties. If anyone troubles us, my role is to be confused, a lost tourist who speaks English only (seems easy), though the statues insist that ours are only venal sins and the police have their hands full with murders and the mob and anarchists and Ultras and bunga bunga parties. The Italian PM must pay his estranged wife a hundred thousand euro a day; how can he have that much and we don’t? The grease in our alley reeks. Lewd Priapus is with us, but he is not doing well, is not popular, his huge phallus gets in the way of lugging the sloppy plastic drums.
“Clearly he is of little use in enterprises such as these.”
Pliny the Elder died rescuing people from the volcano and here I am with greasy hands stealing casks of lard, looking for scraps others might leave us. Pliny was noble, sailed a fast cutter to find his friends. Fortune goes to the brave! he bellowed into the wind. Now there was a man! I must make sharp changes in my life, be like Pliny.
No, you are wrong, insists Priapus beside me in the alley. No, I knew Pliny well and he had grown quite corpulent, his weight and his knees troubling him, he died sitting down and his friends abandoned him in the pumice. He was no real admiral, he was given the naval command in Misenum as a patronage appointment, as a friend of the emperor Vespasian.
But Pliny sailed across the bay to rescue his good friends!
Yes, he did, Pliny was brave, but the wind pinned his cutter to the beach so he was trapped and there was no rescue; they waited and feasted and drank flagons and slept and snored loudly until the volcano drove them from the dwelling.
White pumice fell the first day, and showers of hot cinders and rocks. The doors were blocked yards deep, as if by a blizzard, they had to force their way out, with pillows tied to their heads as helmets. Roof tiles cracked in the heat, villas taking to flame, you can’t know what it was like. On the burning ground Pliny collapsed and he asked a slave to kill him.
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 23