One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  Jean-Paul could see a large man grappling with a big vase inside the van. He could see the wooden ramp reaching from the ground to the van and made a quick estimation that he could squeeze past, clearing a couple of centimeters on each side. He did not, unfortunately, account for the gray bicycle with the straw basket chained to a street sign at the point where the vicolo narrowed to a single car width.

  “Watch out!” Alec shouted.

  Just as he was about to hit it, Jean-Paul clocked the bicycle and veered left. Two seconds later the left front wheel of the limousine connected with the ramp leading to the van, causing the car to roll to the right as it sped forward. For a moment it seemed the black car was trying to mount the white van in some bizarre mating ritual. At the top of the ramp, the terrified courier reeled backward, thrusting the urn forward to protect himself. It seemed to leap from his hands, counterattacking the attacking vehicle.

  Inside the limousine, the world flipped onto its side. Jean-Paul screamed. Meg fell on top of Alec. The right side of Alec’s head slammed into the car window. The car window cracked.

  Outside, the urn hit the cobblestones and shattered.

  Inside, Jean-Paul started to cry. Still attached to the rearview mirror, Saint Christopher swung victoriously over his head. Meg pulled herself away from Alec and looked at him. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. There was blood on the window near his head. He was unconscious—or dead. Meg slapped him hard. His eyes fluttered open.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he said quietly.

  * * *

  The seventh and final king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, reigned from 535 B.C.E. until the revolution in 509 B.C.E. In the process of maneuvering himself to power, he had arranged the murder of his predecessor, his brother, and his wife. He was a tyrant so despised by his people that they established the Roman Republic, intending never to be ruled by his like again (ha!). Historians will tell you that the king fled Rome and lived comfortably in exile in the court of Aristodemus at Cumae, where he died in 495 B.C.E. I will tell you what really happened.

  Tarquinius tripped down the steps of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus fleeing a mob of angry Romans and broke his neck. Despite the fact that he was already dead, they gave his body a thorough beating, dragged it across the city, and hurled it into the Tiber. In time, debris and silt accumulated around His Dead Highness and formed the foundation of what would become the Isola Tiberina. As it grew, the story of Tarquinius slipped into the mist, merging with myth and legend, but because of the darkness associated with its founding events, Romans avoided the island.

  When a plague ravaged Rome in 293 B.C.E., the authorities used the island to isolate the contagiously ill, but it quickly overflowed with the sick and dying. Running out of room, the Roman senators consulted the Tiburtine Sibyl, who suggested they enlist the help of Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing and medicine, by building a temple in his honor. All agreed that this was the most practicable solution.

  The plague passed, the temple was constructed, and the island began to forge a new identity as a place of healing. In 998, the emperor Otto III built a basilica on the ruins of Aesculapius’s Temple, and in 1584, Pope Gregory XIII called the Hospitaller Order of St. John of God to Rome and asked them to run the Hospital of St. John Calybita there, upstream from the basilica. More than half a millennium’s service later, it is still known as the Ospidale Fatebenefratelli. This cracks me up. It’s not so funny in Italian, but when you translate it into English, it’s the hospital of the Do-Good Brothers.

  “The do-good brothers?” spluttered Meg Schack, when she was informed they were taking Alec there. “Sounds like a boy band!”

  The ambulance driver exchanged a raised eyebrow with his white-uniformed companion and focused on the road ahead. They wailed down the Lungotevere and across the Ponte Cestio, the bridge connecting the south bank with Tiber Island and the hospital. Pale-skinned tourists and dark-skinned hawkers of knockoff designer handbags scattered from their path. The ambulance screeched to a halt. Meg shot out of its rear doors and raced through the swinging doors of the emergency ward.

  Wild-eyed, she shouted, “Dottore! Dottore! Pronto! Pronto!”

  A large male nurse wearing white scrubs and a navy-blue cardigan grabbed her immediately and tried to force her into a wheelchair.

  “Not me, you idiot!” she hissed.

  SIX

  Piazza della Madonna dei Monti

  IF WE WANT THINGS TO STAY AS THEY ARE, THINGS WILL HAVE TO CHANGE.

  —Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, The Leopard

  The gleaming white Mercedes taxi drove into the gently sloping piazza, scattering a group of lively schoolchildren, who retreated to the pale octagonal steps of the Fontana di Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, a simple, three-tiered travertine fountain installed to provide water for the locals in 1595. Outside the Hotel Montini, Constance paid and tipped the driver, Gianni. Having endured a vivid and gruesome description of the birth of his third son, they were now on first-name terms. Blasted by the Roman heat, Lizzie wrangled the luggage, while Gianni protested from the air-conditioned comfort of the driver’s seat, shouting at his credit card machine to hurry up so he could help the lovely signora with her bags.

  It was early afternoon, siesta time, and the two wooden doors of the crumbling hotel were firmly shut. Gianni fretted about this, but the two women ushered him off, as he was already late picking up his elderly mother for her podiatrist appointment.

  Lizzie pushed the brass buzzer and banged on the door for good measure. A young waiter appeared from the vine-encrusted trattoria next door but decided there was little here to hold his interest and retreated. Constance looked around. It had been such a long time since her last visit.

  Nothing much has changed, she thought. Except you’re not here.

  Ah, but I am, her husband chuckled.

  And he is, too, she remembered. In a box.

  The piazza felt as intimate as it always had, bordered on one side by the small white church of Madonna del Pascolo and Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and the yellow-walled palazzo Casa Santa Sofia. On the other side, two villas huddled next to each other, one deep yellow, one pale pink, both with pale-gray shutters. Locals sat at tables outside the piazza’s restaurants under stained white market umbrellas, fanning the hot air with menus.

  On the far side of the piazza, more sunny yellow buildings were overshadowed by the looming sidewall of Santa Maria ai Monti. A little girl in a pale-blue dress waved to the old ladies from a doorway. Constance waved back and turned to find Lizzie peering up at the bust of the strange goat-lion creature that supported a small Juliet balcony, directly above the front door.

  “Is that thing new?” said Lizzie.

  Constance turned. “What?”

  “That, the goat thing.”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I shall have them remove it immediately.”

  Lizzie smiled. “When is Charles coming?”

  Constance sat down on the largest of her bags. “Remind me not to complain about the heat,” she said. “It’s so English.” And then she added breezily, “He’s not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Coming,” said Constance. “Charles isn’t coming.”

  Charles and Marina were Constance and Henry’s two adult children. Marina, an oenologist based in Bordeaux, was married to a dull equestrian who had sired three children, now all in their teens. Charles, a consultant with the IMF, had adopted two children from the slums of Buenos Aires with his Argentinean polo-playing partner, Alfonso. Henry had made no specific requests about their presence in Rome, but Lizzie had assumed they would be here for such an important event. She was on the brink of registering her dismay when a man finally answered the door. He introduced himself rather mournfully as Bronco and carried their bags inside as if someone had threatened to beat him if he did not.

  Constance stood in the foyer and looked around. She could not r
emember precisely how many years it was since she had been here, but it was all exactly as it had been. The lift was only large enough for two. Bronco said he would take the bags up first and then come back down and get them. Constance said they would take the stairs and meet him up there. Bronco shrugged, closed the mesh doors of the elevator, and rose skyward.

  Lizzie could contain herself no longer. “Charles isn’t coming?”

  Constance started to climb the stairs. “Some conference in Berlin,” she said, “and before you go making a scene, he can’t get out of it.”

  Lizzie started to follow. “Not coming! To his own father’s—”

  Constance cut Lizzie short. “He’s done enough, Lizzie. It’s time he moves on. It’s time we all moved on.”

  They clomped up the stairs in silence for one flight.

  “Well, that’s a very odd thing to say,” Lizzie said finally. “Your husband, my brother, his father has—”

  Constance swirled on Lizzie with greater ferocity than she’d intended. “Stop right there, girlie. I will not spend this trip regurgitating our misery. I need to press on. I need you to press on with me.”

  She turned and resumed her ascent.

  Lizzie followed, flummoxed. “What about Marina?” she asked.

  “She’s flying in from Paris this afternoon.”

  “Good. Because Aunt Lizzie would have quite a lot to say on the matter if she wasn’t.”

  “I’ll bet she would,” said Constance.

  Lizzie had always felt at ease criticizing Constance’s children because she loved them as if they were her own. She had never made a conscious decision not to have children; she simply got busy elsewhere. In an attempt to prolong the Swinging Sixties for as long as she possibly could, Lizzie had left the London hospital where she was nursing and moved to a commune in Provence. She remained there through a series of unhappy love affairs until the midseventies, when she developed an interest in wine making and, supported financially by Henry and Constance, had restored a derelict vineyard in Pomerol. To everyone’s surprise it was a success. It was only when Charles and Marina began visiting regularly on school breaks that Lizzie began to ache for children of her own, but an appropriate co-parent never showed up, and besides, she was completely occupied with her business. It had nevertheless thrilled Lizzie that Marina had chosen to follow her into wine making, and she took every opportunity to dote on her niece and nephew, and her great-nephews and nieces as well.

  They reached the top floor to find Bronco waiting for them, smiling. With a shock, Constance realized that he might be attempting to look seductive. It wasn’t that she was too old to be seduced; even at her great age, men flirted with her. It was more that Bronco, with the exception of his luxuriant moustache, looked so worn out. She bustled past him and into the room. Their bags were sitting there waiting for them, but she knew at once that she was in the wrong place.

  “No, no, this isn’t it,” said Constance.

  “But, signora,” said Bronco, “this is the room you asked for.”

  “It may be the room we asked for,” said Constance, “but it’s not the room we want.”

  “Constance, does it matter?” said Lizzie. “We’re in the right hotel.”

  The room looked perfectly lovely to Lizzie. A little faded, perhaps, but large and light with an enormous fireplace and two sets of tall french doors (did one call them french doors in Italy?) opening to a verdant roof garden. Outside she glimpsed potted lemons laden with fruit and a riotous collection of geraniums. Lovely.

  “It mattered to Henry,” said Constance. “He wanted us to stay in room 34.”

  “This is room 34,” said Bronco.

  “No, it’s not,” said Constance.

  “Perhaps you just don’t recognize it,” said Lizzie.

  “I’ll recognize the floor.”

  “The floor? You’ll recognize the floor from thirty-eight years ago?”

  “How did you remember that?”

  “What?”

  “That it was thirty-eight years ago.”

  Lizzie shrugged. She had no idea how or why she remembered. She just did. She was more concerned about Constance, who stood transfixed, staring at the blue-green tiles of the floor. What on earth is going on?

  “There was a small tile, loose. I took it for luck,” said Constance. “I carried it around with me for years.” She offered a smile to Bronco. “This is the wrong room.”

  Bronco took a long breath and muttered something quietly, but not quietly enough. He had no idea that both the old ladies standing in front of him spoke Italian and therefore had understood that he had just said, “Probably got the wrong hotel, crazy old lady.”

  Lizzie and Constance exchanged the smallest of smiles and entered an unspoken agreement not to let Bronco know that they there were both fluent in his native tongue. Not yet, anyway. They were scary old ladies, and scary old ladies conserved such information for the moment when it would wreak the most havoc.

  Bronco slapped his forehead in a lavishly Latin gesture of forgetfulness and said, “There is an e-mail for you,” adding unnecessarily, “I forget.”

  As part of his elaborate plans for their Roman sojourn, Henry had banned smartphones and laptops, insisting they travel old-school. Constance asked Bronco, not very hopefully, if the room had any means by which she could access the e-mail. She imagined herself struggling to use an old clunker at one of those dreadful Internet cafés and made a mental note to disinfect the keyboard first. Bronco proudly led Constance to the dresser, where it was already printed out, waiting for her. She scanned the e-mail and related its substance to Lizzie.

  Marina had fallen from one of her horses. Nothing too serious, but she had sprained her ankle. The long and the short of it was she wasn’t coming.

  “I’m so glad I didn’t have children,” said Lizzie. “They’re so disappointing.”

  Constance felt something tugging at her sleeve. She turned to see a boy of ten or eleven, his shining white smile and flashing dark eyes embodying mischievousness itself. He stepped toward the door and motioned for her to follow. The moment Bronco saw the boy, he let fly with an invective of Italiano so fast and furious that, despite their excellent comprehension, Constance and Lizzie failed to follow. Whatever he said, though, was clearly of little consequence, as the boy took no notice of him at all.

  The boy led Constance into the hall and opened the door of the next room. He swept his hand in a gracious arc, inviting her to enter, which she did. Lizzie followed. Once again, Constance studied the floor. The room was almost a clone of the first one, but the tiles were different here, a purer, brighter blue. She looked up at Lizzie, smiling.

  Lizzie was about to say Oh thank God, but Constance suddenly frowned and started scanning the tiles again. Bronco joined the boy at the doorway, and they all watched as Constance appeared to hunt around the floor. She stopped at an old Persian rug and bent down. Using the bed to steady herself with one hand, she flipped back the corner with the other. One of the blue tiles was missing.

  “Oh,” said Constance.

  “What?” said Lizzie.

  “The tile,” said Constance. “It’s gone.”

  “You just said you took it,” said Lizzie.

  “Yes, the first time we came, but then I put it back,” said Constance, “on our last visit. Of course, that was thirty-eight years ago. Lord knows what’s happened to it.”

  She looked around, satisfied she was in the right place. “Anyway, the point is, this is the room,” she said.

  “But it’s room 36,” said Lizzie, peering at the door, inwardly berating herself for throwing a pointless wrench in the works.

  “They change the numbers,” said the little boy, “a few years ago.”

  Once again Bronco smacked his forehead. “They change the numbers!”

  Constance bent to the boy’s height and asked his name.

  “Marco,” he said.

  She thanked him in impeccable Italian and asked if they cou
ld have this room, please. Marco said yes. Lizzie watched Bronco realize that Constance could speak Italian. Then to assure Bronco that both of them had heard and comprehended his earlier insult, she also addressed Marco in Italian, asking about room service and breakfast. Bronco began to rub his forehead and shuffle his feet.

  “I get your bags,” he said, backing out of the room.

  When he had gone, Marco said, “I’m sorry about my cousin. He lacks charm.”

  “Well put, Marco,” said Constance.

  Marco was very pleased. He was learning English as part of a master plan to become a guide for American tourists, who, everyone knew, tipped large amounts of money. With the money, he would buy his family out of this hotel and then open more hotels and become rich and drive a red Ferrari 365 GTC coupe. Possibly he would become famous as well. But the first step, he knew, was mastering the language of international commerce. English.

  “Are you famous, Contessa?” said Marco, lining Constance up for a five-euro tip.

  “No, I’m not,” said Constance, seeing right through the charm but enchanted anyway.

  “I think you should be,” said Marco.

  He took Constance’s hand and kissed it.

  Lizzie put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.

  “Don’t you just love Roma?” said Constance.

  SEVEN

  Via dei Coronari

  BUT HE THAT DARES NOT GRASP THE THORN SHOULD NEVER CRAVE THE ROSE.

  —Anne Brontë, The Narrow Way

  At regular intervals along the irregular avenue, elaborate iron brackets reached into the air, each limb bearing a glass-paned coach light. Rick parked his motorino, but Alice remained seated for a moment, watching the lights flicker on, lost in the rich egg-yolky haze of their illumination. The sky was fading but still bright, which made the lamps seem an unnecessary but delightfully theatrical touch.

  The other boys dismounted their motorini and peeled their backpacks from sweat-stained shirts. Pea Green tapped Alice on the shoulder and said, “I’ll go see if they have a room for you.” He scooted into a tiny dead-end street rendered with such an infinite variety of autumnal patinas that Alice began to search for her cell phone so she could take some photographs. As she was doing this, New Alice told Old Alice that she was not to spend her precious time documenting the experience; she was to experience the experience. Look, she told herself. Look properly.