Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  An older British couple arrives at the hotel via Hong Kong, jet-lagged but very jovial, their annual European grand tour. The man is retired, an expert on archeology who at lunch must share his bullish expertise on details of Italian life.

  “Don’t order that! Try the tripe, try the Sicilian horsemeat! No, not beer, order wine. Live like the Italians!” he shouts as if I have a hearing aid. “That’s what I say!”

  With age they have started to look like each other, but he is loud and bearded and she is quiet and non-bearded, so I can keep them apart. He keeps using the word criteria, he loves coming to Rome, lives for his annual visit, and his joviality and erudite history lessons soon irritate and depress me.

  Shouldn’t I feel gladly connected to other humans? Aren’t we the same basic components? Shouldn’t we all hold hands and dance in a circle? Why am I so happy to distance myself, to just walk away from the ski team? We are all kin, idiots or not, and this truth makes me bitter.

  When I was a child it was a keen blow to realize that others have their thoughts, that others also have this private radio in them. This was an epiphany the opposite of religious conversion, this was a letdown, a violation of some implied contract. My mother said I was such a sweet child, so how did my bitter side triumph? Orwell wanted his tea as bitter as possible, but to add honey is not a crime.

  “We’re turning in for a ten-minute power nap,” the retired archeology expert bellows in the sunny atrium. “Helps greatly with jet lag,” he says. “I highly recommend it.”

  A full day later I see him rheumy and blinking in hallway light, forked beard askew, a King Lear of the long corridor.

  “Been sightseeing?” I ask, dreading more Italian expertise.

  “Well sir, I’ve been exactly nowhere. We fell asleep! What bloody time is it?”

  “Almost five p.m.”

  “Well what day is it?”

  The expert and his spouse lay down their heads for a few minutes after our lunch in the atrium and woke up the next afternoon with no idea of the day. Twenty-eight hours of sleep like bears in a cave. Yes, I can see that such a power nap might help greatly with jet lag.

  The twenty-eight-hour-power-nap couple argue at an adjacent table.

  She says, “This is about more than a parking space.”

  “No,” he says, “it’s all about a parking space.”

  In polluted Rome I am one of many millions and don’t enjoy that feeling. I only need a few people, maybe just one, but some lean into doubt the way others lean into faith.

  My cousin Eve says she must get back to Switzerland’s fresh air, she must cross the mountains that divide the old cantons, the honeymoon is over.

  I spend time with Eve, but it’s like visiting another country. I can’t really know Italy, can’t really know Eve. We change so quickly. Once alive with ardour and fever and whatever is the opposite of due diligence. Now we will float back to our possessions, their lovely burden. I kiss her at the taxi, but I’m not really allowed, she turns slightly, is no longer comfortable.

  In the garden oranges or apricots lie wasted on the ground; no one touches the fruit. In the garden the Pope’s nuns come out to look at the orphans, nuns like Bedouins in their flowing white habits, covered wholly in this heat.

  Nuns covered wholly in Rome, and on Canada’s snowy mountains women ski in bikinis, almost naked; the temperature not yet warm enough, but they want to ski in bikinis, they want to ski naked. The Ray Charles sunglasses borrowed from my sister were so dark, altering the world, the sunglasses made the women’s bare skin look purple, ghoulish, the colour of zinc lotion applied to a nose to prevent sunburn and skin cancer.

  In Canada we skied all day in a celestial crater ringed with teeth, up and down we went on the blinding snow in a pleasing rhythm, a whole crowd in sunglasses and zinc noses. My new ski boots were so hard they hurt my ankles. It is hard to walk in new boots, hard to tromp up the chalet stairs, trying to dig for coins for a hot chocolate.

  Everyone walking past has money, but no one begs for spare change on a ski hill. There are no walls on a ski hill. Perhaps the troubled trio could make the journey from Rome to Canada’s far mountains. All three could fit on a stolen motorcycle speeding north out of Rome past the northern gate and city walls and turn the wheel into glorious foreign valleys and this move may stay his hand from her cheek. But what are the chances? So many travellers and refugees at sea and stowaways falling from the wheel well as light snow falls from the sky, all of us believing riches are waiting if we find the right shore.

  No one asks for money while you wear ski boots, an unstated rule. My old orange boots — I’d skied on them so long they fell to bits. The new boots are so inflexible, and I like flexibility, but hard boots are needed to hold me tight in the quick turns in the ziggurat mountains.

  Is it luck that you find yourself on one side of a wall or the other? People sit outside in goggles and jackets and they spread their lunch at cedar picnic tables, eating and drinking and sharing sandwiches with joyful smiles. This is the way it should be for everyone. The chairlift moving station to station, the sky so high above the mountains, and wind always touching our faces in the strange hanging valley we dreamt of so long ago.

  Knife Party

  Mistakes are part of the dues

  that one pays for a full life.

  — Sophia Loren

  My wife is from Florida and is moving out of my house on the cold Canadian river while I stay in Italy. She takes the frisky dog down to the freezing river and hits a ball into the water with a tennis racket. The moving van comes and the moving van goes. The river moves and the faithful dog swims to retrieve the ball again and again, the dog floating in a state of grace.

  Our train speeds into the side of an Italian mountain and we have no eyesight, we knife noisily into black tunnels and then shoot out again, our new eyes viewing the patient volcano and ancient sea.

  Our noisy engine halts iron wheels at seaside towns where families alight with beach towels and fashionable sunglasses and sunburns that still have hours to flare into ripeness.

  We have entered the Mezzogiorno, land of the midday sun, so close to Africa. The train’s exit doors have small windows, but they do not open and the cars are furnace hot. Tough kids from the exurbs stand near the exit doors in an alcove with no seating. They hail from the illegal neighbourhoods built up the sides of the volcano, the zona rossa. If the volcano erupts again their homes in the red zone will be wiped out. Ray-Ray and Eve are thirsty, are looking for a bar car; some trains have bar cars and some do not.

  The ancient train moves into light and out. In the confines of a dark tunnel something incredibly fractious and noisy grinds against our traincar and the tunnel walls that hug us. The high windows are open to roaring air, open to relieve the hellish heat, so much noise already, but this new clamour makes all the passengers flinch and panic, metal debris bouncing and crashing and wrenching our heat-stroke dreams. What hammers are hitting the curved bell of our train?

  In the darkened alcove sketchy teenagers are moving shadows and I see a lithe shadow leap to kick a window in the train’s exit door. In the heat the teens demand a breeze. When the train is in a tunnel they attack the door’s sealed window, thinking no one sees them in the blackness.

  One kid swings nimbly on a high chrome bar, a true acrobat who, with both feet, hits the window hard, a human battering ram, and more fragments of glass and metal frame break away in the dark to clatter and bounce along the outer skin of the rocketing train.

  We burst out of the tunnel and they stop smashing the window to pose casually in mad light. In the next tunnel the kicking starts again.

  Wives look to their husbands: will you do something? Each Italian husband shrugs. Polizia ride many trains, but I don’t see them today. Where is the stoic conductor I like so much?

  The Italian teens try to look cool in huge mirrored aviator shades, but their childlike faces are so thin and the aviator glasses so large — the effect is of Clownis
h Boy rather than Top Gun Pilot or Corrupt Saigon Major. I should wait, but I react primitively at times like this; I know they carry knives, but I’d like to trash them the way they trash their own train, our train, see how they like it. But I know we’ll all be elsewhere soon if we just sit and do nothing.

  Don’t engage, my wife used to say to me, and it’s good advice.

  So why do I walk to the alcove and stand beside the cretins? My move was not well thought out. There are more of them in the hormonal antechamber than I realized and sullen girls lean in the mix. I wish my cousin Eve and Ray-Ray were here beside me, I wish I was a more confident vigilante man with amazing eye-hand coordination and hidden weapons. Those in the group look to each other for guidance in child-thug matters, but no one steps forward to test my skill set, my tennis elbow. Uncertain moments hang, served to us like writs.

  The unruly gang (am I way too ruly?) clambers off at the next stop, shoving each other out the doors with high masculine spirits.

  Ah, youth; how I hate them.

  The damaged doors opened for the rabble, but now the doors won’t close. Now our arthritic train cannot move. The stoic conductor examines the damaged doors, tries to heal them in the heat. He wears a dark blue uniform of thick cloth but seems unaffected by the southern climate, while sweat falls from my sleeves. Father Silas gave our group a talk that men in Italy do not wear shorts, that shorts are for children only. The conductor and another Italian man work to coax the doors to close.

  On the station platform I see my pretty cousin Eve and Tamika talking with the gang that smashed the doors. No sign of Ray-Ray, but that is par for the course, he disappears for hours, days. Why are Eve and Tamika on the platform? For pancakes and syrup? Did they jump off at the wrong stop? Why do people think turquoise track suits are a good look?

  I leap from the carriage just as the afflicted doors finally close and the train and stoic conductor shunt away without me. The suburban station sign and walls are crowded with Day-Glo graffiti faithfully imitating American-style tags, going for a Fort Apache the Bronx look. A new empire paints over an old empire and the rebels all agree on hairdos.

  “Hey!” calls Eve. “We met these Italian guys at the beach this afternoon. Really. This is Giorgio and Pepino and Santino and I don’t know all of them yet. They invited us to a party. Want to come with?”

  Tamika is not sure. “Maybe I’ll go back to the hotel.” Tamika is wise and she is shy; we both try to avoid crowds. “The next train won’t be long.” Tamika has some stick of polish for her white sneakers and they glow like lamps as she moves away in the sun.

  “Well, then you come with me.” Eve drags me by the arm. “Please!”

  Eve is visiting from Switzerland, where she teaches at a private school. I have no desire to go to this party, but I worry about Eve going alone. She likes to move, likes to jog and dance, is enthused by the world, where I am reticent, hesitant.

  My cousin says, “We can buy beer right here at the station.” Eve is betting that cold beer will appeal to me, she is canny.

  “You will come?” says Santino from the beach. “It’s a very nice apartment for real in a very nice freaking party. Yes, you may also enjoy it.”

  In a line we pass the military base and pass rows of monochrome flats, a line of pedestrians in a drab herniated Italy, walking to a party and party to an Italy that has little to do with tourist brochures and silk suits and Bernini’s genius marble limbs and asses.

  We walk inland, away from the sea, around a dun hill and heartbroken canal (oh what gummy toxic sludge dumped at these banks?) and a cluster of Chinese factories and a military base with dark green tanks, World War Two vintage tanks like hunched guardians either side of the gate. A fat bee accompanies us for a few moments, some kind of Mother Nature fugue I enjoy, then the rotund bee rejects us for greener pastures. Odd to think of all the centuries of history here, but to a local bee an empire means little, does not alter its minutes.

  Outside we can hear the party before finding stairs like a ladder into a crowd, a crowd spilling into a dim hall from the main rooms. In the living room leans a pole lamp with blue light bulbs, so we all look reasonably unhealthy, and every surface crammed with glasses, ashtrays, vats of red wine, cloudy ouzo, grappa, tins of German lager, and green bottles of Italian beer.

  Past the pink sofa hides an invisible but loud stereo: the Jesus and Mary Chain ply distorted fuzz-box ditties. Are Jesus and Mary Chain still churning out discs? I liked them when I was younger; funny to hear them buzzing in this other world. A circle is smoking dope and a young woman is coughing up a lung. The fuming joint finds its way to us. Of course I feel nothing at first, and nothing will come of nothing.

  A man flashes a glassine envelope of coke to the young woman. He’s a neighbour, we are told by Pepino or Santino —Eve can tell them apart. The neighbour lives across the hall, a party crasher attracted by the crowd, the women. The neighbour is not invited, he is not welcome, he does not carry himself well.

  “Come stai?” asks the person who is Pepino or Santino.

  “You are from America?” asks the other.

  “I’m not from America,” I say.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, Canada.”

  “Ah, Canada. That’s much better culture.”

  “Bene.”

  “So, Mister Canada,” asks a third man, “do you like Napoli?”

  “Sì, Mister Italy, certo, very much, molto simpatico, it’s amazing.”

  “Mister Canada calls me Mister Italy. Ha ha ha.”

  Eve laughs with them.

  The unwelcome neighbour offers coke on his wrist to Eve and the younger woman, he says, “My coke is very fine. Just think, all the way from Ecuador to Napoli and to your pretty nose. Think of that. I bring it here in crates of bananas.”

  “Don’t listen to his big talk,” says Mister Italy. “He doesn’t bring it here.”

  “You should watch your fat mouth,” says the neighbour.

  “Bananas!” says my cousin. “Bananas have big hairy spiders! I hate spiders!”

  Eve gets mad if I laugh about her spider phobia, my cousin very serious about this fear, as if spiders are hiding now in the small amount of coke. I wonder if I might sample some of that man’s product. We are sweating and I drink cold beer I bought at the train station. The party-crasher neighbour with the coke is after the women. Like me.

  Mister Italy tells the neighbour he should leave the party. Mister Italy turns away, the unwelcome neighbour sucker- punches Mister Italy, and the young man drops, holding his slim face.

  “Get out!” shout Santino and the others. They insult the neighbour, slap him, push him out the door to go back to his apartment. Eve looks at the table as if there might be spiders there.

  “That cake,” she asks me. “Is that icing or mould? It looks like mould.”

  “I’m going with icing,” I say and try some.

  “I can’t believe you ate that.”

  “I’m more pleasant when I eat.”

  In the corner a bearded young man rocks in the fetal position, arms hugging his knees while three women look bored. They are all younger than me, the new norm; now I am always the oldest person present as music plays loudly and wild ones turn this way and that, shouting into songs and bright conversations.

  I’m happy when I eat. Did I say that already? I’m losing my mind. I don’t want to be the guy with his fly open or food stains decorating a shirt-front, but I suspect it is in my future like a train approaching and not long before it arrives at the station.

  A stoned woman walks past with a half-open blouse, the curves of two breasts much revealed. Rare once to see even a lady’s bare ankle. Blouses fling open and life goes on. A startling blue vein runs down one breast to disappear into her blouse. Bright as a streak of blue paint or a cobalt serpent and she is so happy to make public the blood pulsing in her vein.

  My high school girlfriend worried about veins on her high school breasts. Your breasts are be
autiful, I tried to reassure her, but she worried about a tiny vein. And this Italian girl so happy to show the bright paint of her breast, a giant vein moving blood like a map inside her omniscient breast, a scaffolding in there holding up the 3D model. Blood is red as wine so why is a vein blue? Why am I blue? I wish to be canny, captivating: is that too much to ask?

  The neighbour motors back from his apartment carrying a staple gun, the neighbour crosses the hall, crosses the room, and puts the staple gun to Mister Italy’s thigh, driving in a heavy-duty staple. Mister Italy leaps, tears springing out of his eyes, Mister Italy flees the room yelling and cursing.

  “I’m worried about him,” says Eve.

  “Is he all right?” says the stoned woman. “Does he even know his way?”

  “To what?” I ask.

  The stoned woman disappears down the hall of muffled echoes. Later she comes back to the pink sofa and says to my cousin, “Don’t worry.”

  Good advice. I try to not study her sea-blue vein, though I find it fascinating and would pay money to look carefully and touch it, but I do not believe she would be interested in such an examination.

  The neighbour wanders off to the kitchen, still wielding the staple gun; everyone in the kitchen is shouting normally. The party in the living room rages around me, roller coaster voices, the droning fuzz-tone of the Jesus and Mary Chain picking up speed and slowing to a halt.

  The stoned young woman with the cobalt vein on her breast dances jerkily in the living room, blouse coming completely asunder, her skin taking in the air, the last button free, no longer intimate with eyelet. I assume Cobalt Girl is aware of her blouse and breasts out there like vivid menus, though who knows. Above her neck hovers her very own brain, choreographing her dance in conjunction with our music and shouting.

  My cousin pins her mouth to my ear. I enjoy Eve’s mouth at my ear.

  “What?” I whisper into her warm hair.

  “Have you not noticed?” My cousin directs my gaze with her eyes.