One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  He was very surprised, therefore, that Meg sat in the back, silent as a stone. To open conversation, Aldo asked Meg who her favorite nineteenth-century American novelist was. Meg answered that she didn’t have one. When he asked if she read novels in languages other than English, opening the door for him to reveal the extent of his multilingual accomplishment, Meg said she was having a bad day and would he mind not speaking.

  Allora, Aldo did mind, grazie for asking. What was the point of acquiring six languages and dedicating seven years to the study of literature if he wasn’t allowed to talk about it? He clenched his jaw and made a mental note not to speak unless directly addressed and even then to restrict himself to monosyllabic responses. He turned off the radio so there was only the rumble of the engine to entertain them. Two could play at this game.

  Meg had no idea they were playing a game. She looked out the window, grateful for the quiet. As they traveled toward the outskirts of the city, ancient Rome gave way to modern Rome. Block after block of midcentury apartment buildings passed by. A chilling sameness spoke not of the grande bellezza but the daily grind. Laundry flapped from flaking balconies. Pavements cracked, and shoulders were infested with weeds and dying plants. All cities had places that were ugly and unloved, but she had never been to these parts of Rome before and was unprepared for this assault on her idealized view of the city.

  The landscape morphed into an eerie mix of rural and industrial, typical of so many areas around city-fringe airports the world over. Small commuter planes began to land regularly up ahead. Meg explained to Aldo that they were not going to the airport but somewhere near the airport. Following Stephanie’s notes, she instructed him to find the Via Giovanni Ciampini. Consulting his GPS, Aldo pulled off the Via Appia Nuova into the Via di Ciampino that ran parallel to one of the airport runways. They passed a burned-out chassis and turned into Via Giovanni Campini, a thin stretch of decaying asphalt, one car wide. On either side of the road, the brown tufted grass was strewn with building waste and plastic bags. To their left, a group of battered caravans had been bookended with conjoined portable toilets, jaunty red cubicles with white curved roofs and gray doors, covered in graffiti. This can’t be it, thought Meg. A little farther on, the road simply ran out. Aldo turned to her for further instruction.

  “We’re looking for La Bar-buta,” said Meg, unsure whether to put the emphasis on the first or last syllable.

  “The gypsy camp?” asked Aldo.

  Meg was relieved to hear that there was no alarm in his tone.

  Aldo looked around and pointed. Meg followed his finger across a wasteland littered with refuse to a wire-fenced enclosure with row after row of 160 identical red-roofed white-metal huts. Floodlights on tall steel poles towered over the settlement. Some poles supported surveillance cameras as well. Wedged between an eight-lane freeway, an airport runway, and a railway line, it was hardly the jaunty circle of painted wagons that Meg had imagined. It looked more like a prison or a concentration camp.

  Aldo turned the taxi around, drove back down Via Giovanni Ciampini, turned left, then left again into another lane also called—rather promiscuously, Aldo thought—Via Giovanni Ciampini. They approached the wire fencing and came to a gravel driveway that led up to the settlement. Aldo made it clear that he would go no farther. Meg had hoped that he would drive her right up to the entrance but decided not to push the point because she had bigger fish to fry. Also because she needed him on her side so he would wait for her to return. She handed him all her money—Stephanie’s eighty euros—and asked him to wait, promising to double his payment when they got back to the Storico Centro.

  Meg got out of the taxi and walked briskly up the gravel driveway. Aldo watched her until she passed through the open wire gates and disappeared behind a small mountain of bursting garbage bags. Then he called Rosa to tell her about the exciting adventure that was unfolding before him.

  Operating on his grandfather’s edict that the only bad story was a boring one, and drawing on seven years of the study of narrative, Aldo began to confabulate. He was with an Americana, he told Rosa, who, he was pretty sure, could be that mistress of the Mafia boss. She had gone to the gypsy camp to arrange an execution, maybe, of that other Mafia guy who puts toxic waste in the concrete pylons of the highways he builds. Rosa, who was not of a stable disposition at the best of times—hence the on-again, off-again nature of their relationship—accelerated straight from alarm to hysteria. Did Aldo not appreciate the danger he was in?

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the Polizia di Stato finally arrived in the Arco di Santa Margherita. Having listened to a sketchy and somewhat confused overview of events from the priest, the doctor, and the American, Assistente Capo Domenico Cilento began to take statements. During the forty minutes that they had waited for the police to arrive in their Alfa Romeo with the racy white stripes, Alec had calmed down. Once his anger had dissipated, he began to worry terribly about the kind of danger his headstrong wife could be in.

  As the CEO of a company employing hundreds of people, Alec was accustomed to issuing orders and having them acted upon promptly. He asked Stephanie to translate while he instructed the assistente capo to escort him immediately to this gypsy camp where they would hopefully find his wife in one piece. As an assistente capo of the Polizia di Stato, Domenico Cilento did not appreciate the tone with which he was being addressed. The English doctor was doing her utmost to couch the American’s commands in elaborately polite Italiano, but he was a man who knew when he was being bossed, and he did not like it one bit.

  Stephanie translated back to Alec as the assistente capo explained, slowly and with precision, the order of events as they were about to unfold: no one was going anywhere until the relevant parties had made their statements and the facts of the case had been established. Once the facts had been established, they would be acted upon. If he believed that the lady in question was in danger, he would not waste time driving across the city; a car or cars would be dispatched from a station close to the Ciampino airport. He did not know what it was like in America, but in Italy it was not the custom to endanger civilians by involving them in an investigation. If the gentleman was truly concerned with the safety of his wife, the best course of action would be to immediately and fully cooperate, which would allow him to get on with his job.

  * * *

  In the yard at La Barbuta, a dozen or so old cars were parked against the wire fence. Car parts and bits of broken furniture lay on the ground. The occasional whiff of raw sewage wafted through the hot air. Meg stopped and looked around. The sun beat down on a group of dark-haired children crouched on a stained mattress, freeing its fluffy stuffing from the torn cotton casing. Three little girls with braided hair played in a large pile of white gravel, their brown skin powdered pale by the dust. One of the little girls clambered over the pile and ran to Meg. She looked up at her with serious brown eyes, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  “Why you here?” said the little girl, who already knew enough about the world to use English with this woman.

  It was a very good question. Meg had spent most of her life pretending that poor people did not exist. She contributed regularly to several charities via a trust fund associated with their lighting business and felt therefore she had done her duty as far as the underprivileged were concerned. If Meg was the sun of her own solar system, the poor were orbiting somewhere out past Pluto. And that’s just where she wanted them.

  Meg looked over the head of the serious little girl, down the rows of white huts without a single stick of vegetation between them. They looked practical, she supposed, designed with kitchens and bathrooms and places to sleep, but it seemed they had also been designed to suck the hope out of people’s souls. Meg felt afraid. Not of the people inside the huts. She felt afraid of something much bigger, something she could not define, which made it all the more frightening.

  The little girl reached up and took her hand. Meg started and wrenched it back, frowning at the little g
irl accusingly. The little girl did not flinch. She held her gaze as Meg stepped backward, away from her.

  Meg wanted her blue tile badly. But she wanted something more. She wanted to preserve her uncomplicated sense of entitlement; it would crumble away from her if she stayed in this place for too long, she knew. She did not want to feel bad about being rich. Or wonder about what else she could do with money that she was spending on redecorating her house. Or think about the choices she could make that these people could not. Or ask why me and not them. The questions were as numerous as they were enormous. They came from a yawning bottomless pit from which there was no escape. If she fell in, she would keep falling.

  Two swarthy dark-haired men appeared around the corner of a hut. One shouted something at the children, who scattered. The men began to walk toward Meg. Meg felt her veins turn to ice. It suddenly struck her that she was in very real danger and that she had placed herself there because she was spoiled, willful, and foolish. These men might be approaching to ask why she was there. They might be approaching to rape and murder her. She could not know their intentions until they were upon her. When it would be too late. She had been living her life as if it were a game in which she could control every outcome and make up all the rules. Well, she sure wasn’t in charge now. Slapped in the face by the sudden acknowledgment of her monumental hubris, Meg turned and ran. A lump rose in her throat as she sprinted down the gravel driveway in time to see her taxi driving away. She shouted after Aldo and waved her arms, but he neither heard nor saw her.

  Aldo’s Rosa had worked herself into such a state about his misadventures with Mafia mistresses and the great peril in which he had placed himself that she was now standing on the stone balustrade of her grandmother’s Juliet balcony overlooking Santa Maria in Trastevere. A crowd had gathered in the piazza, drawn by her wailing. Rosa was threatening to jump. Aldo was racing back to Rome to resolve the crisis.

  “No!” screamed Meg at the disappearing taxi. “No!”

  On the dirt road, the cab vanished in a cloud of dust. Aldo showed no sign of slowing down, but this did not deter Meg from running after him as fast as she could. Even when she stumbled and almost fell, Meg kept up her pace. She did not look back to see that the men had not pursued her. She just kept sprinting until she left the dirt road and reached the asphalt, where she ran directly into the path of a yellow Citroën truck.

  * * *

  On the other side of the river, Assistente Capo Domenico Cilento had finished taking statements and was now dispatching two vehicles from the Commissariato Romanina to La Barbuta in search of, in no particular order, a vintage Gucci bag, a blue tile, a cross-eyed man in a green coat, and an American woman who actually sounded quite attractive from her description. The assistente capo assured the American husband that he would be in contact as soon as he had any information.

  “Do you want to come back to my place,” Stephanie offered, “to wait for any news?”

  Alec checked the time on his phone. “It’s almost three,” he said. “I think I’ll go back to the tile shop in case she shows up.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” asked Stephanie.

  “Thank you, no. I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  They parted in the Via del Pellegrino, and the doctor wished him good luck with a fond hug. Alec liked hugging this woman; she was soft and compliant, and her body seemed to fit with his. As soon as he realized that he was thinking this, he broke the embrace and stepped away, walking backward and waving awkwardly at the same time, dimly aware that had his wife been witnessing his unintended parody of a schoolboy, she would have laughed heartily.

  * * *

  Signore Horatio Zamparelli, tile maker, was accustomed to customers appearing in his cavernous shop in the Arco degli Acetari with astonishing and dramatic stories to tell. Indeed, they were the only type of customer who ever appeared. In the early years, Horatio worried terribly that he was doing something weird to attract them. Some of his predecessors spent their entire tenancy bewildered by the dramas that seemed to perpetually engulf them. Some were even driven to madness. And because I have no mouth with which to speak and no hands with which to write, I had no means by which to alleviate their confusion.

  Here is what I would have told them had I been able: most individuals develop the capacity to manage their own hearts well enough. Some, however, do not. Others develop the capacity but lose it, for an infinite variety of reasons. These people need help and are likely to be disturbed. It is my vocation to render them assistance. I cannot help everyone, of course, but those who come often bring chaos as their companion.

  Horatio, fortunately, had long sensed my presence in his workshop and intuited that this had something to do with the crazies who were drawn regularly to his door. Although it made little sense, he had decided to simply stop worrying about it. Thus his sanity was saved. And thus, as Alec Schack stood before him, narrating his nutty story of thieving gypsies and dungeons of bones, Horatio was able to listen with a sanguine and steady heart.

  Alec attempted to describe the tile that he and his wife were looking to reproduce. Blue. Beautiful. Shimmering. Magical. The words sounded faintly ridiculous spoken by a grown man, but the bonfire in Alec Schack’s eyes left Horatio Zamparelli in no doubt the American gentleman had come to the right place.

  He suggested Alec wander around his workshop and see if he could find any tiles similar to the sample that had been stolen. Alec thanked the tile maker and started to explore. A particular tile caught his eye. As he picked it up, a shaft of sunlight suddenly penetrated the shop, and the shimmering figure of a tiny woman appeared on its glazed surface. Alec looked to the open door where the silhouette of a woman had materialized. He thought for a moment that Meg had returned.

  “I’m feeling awfully guilty,” said the silhouette. It was Dr. Stephanie. “It was so stupid of me to pass on those details about La Barbuta.”

  “She bullied you into it,” said Alec.

  “You haven’t heard anything?” asked Stephanie.

  It had been half an hour at least since Assistente Capo Domenico Cilento had left and half an hour since two police cars had been dispatched to the gypsy camp. Alec checked his phone to make sure there was a signal and to check whether he had missed any calls.

  “I should have gone with her,” he said.

  “I can take you there,” said Stephanie.

  “Thank you,” said Alec, “but if you went missing, the health systems of several countries would completely collapse.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” said Stephanie. “I know I come across as some B-grade Mother Teresa, but I’m not that boring, really.”

  Alec felt terrible. “I don’t think you’re boring,” he said. “In fact, I think you’re…” He stopped, realizing that string of superlatives for which he was reaching may lead him somewhere inappropriate. “Not boring,” he said.

  “My car’s outside,” said Dr. Cope.

  NINETEEN

  Saint Barbara

  SO FULL OF ARTLESS JEALOUSY IS GUILT, IT SPILLS ITSELF IN FEARING TO BE SPILT.

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  The story goes that the third-century martyr and saint, Barbara, spent much of her life locked in a tower by her overprotective father, Dioscorus. Once, when he was forced to undertake a long journey far from home, her father built a bathhouse where his daughter might be kept away from crusading Christians whose stories of a man called Jesus intrigued and inspired her. Obviously the bathhouse failed, because Barbara not only converted to Christianity but installed a third window in the two-windowed dwelling as an iconological tip-of-the-hat to the Holy Trinity.

  Upon his return, Barbara’s father, clearly a man of exceptional perspicacity, immediately comprehended the spiritual symbolism of the architecture and concluded his daughter had become a Christian. When he confronted Barbara she confessed that she was indeed a believer, refusing to renounce her faith. This left Dioscorus no choice, of course, but to sentence her to d
eath. Barbara escaped, but her father tracked her down and cut off her head.

  Retribution came swiftly and, as a punishment for his act of filicide, Dioscorus was struck dead by a bolt of lightning. It was the bolt of lightning, presumably, that earned Barbara her place as patron saint of military engineers, artillerymen, armorers, miners, and anyone who works with explosives.

  The problem with Barbara’s story—admittedly there are a few problems with Barbara’s story—but the main problem was that her name did not appear in church texts until the seventh century. There was no reference to her in the early Christian writings, and this significant omission cast doubt over the historicity of her story. Which is why, when the church conducted a fresh sweep through its General Roman Calendar in 1969, Barbara, along with other saints who lacked documentation to support their legends, was quietly removed. She was in good company. Saint Christopher was reviewed at the same time, and although it is generally believed that both he and Barbara were stripped of their titles and “de-sainted,” this is not the case. Both still appear in the Roman Martyrology, an extensive list of most (but not all) of the saints recognized by the Catholic Church. Their stories cannot be proven, but they are nonetheless acknowledged as legendary saints and martyrs.

  As the two old British ladies sat in front of Barbara’s pietra dura altar, still in fine condition almost half a century since its restoration, Constance had the strangest feeling that Barbara was angry with her. She had followed Barbara’s removal from the General Calendar and, as a young mother with two babies running her ragged, had found time to send a letter of protest to her local bishop. “Just because her story sounds unlikely,” she said to Henry at the time, “doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  Now sitting before the altar she had restored all those years ago, Constance sensed strongly that Barbara had expected more of her. What on earth could I have done? Constance wondered. Who would have listened to me? And what would I have said anyway?