Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

“Rock and roll,” she says weakly.

  “Pronto!” calls the man. He is having such problems with the tunnels. “Can you hear me now? Now can you hear me?”

  When he finishes his conversation he says Ciao musically five or six times, then looks at the phone: did I say it too many times or was it just right?

  We stop and start with the train’s moves, lean into each other, her head fitting under my jaw. I like my cousin’s warm form against me.

  The room is warm and Eve lies on my hotel bed stripped down to a T-shirt and small white panties. She says, “You don’t need to sleep on the floor because of me. But I’m afraid to be in my room alone. You still have the dead guy’s dope?”

  “You don’t want that now.”

  Her clean leg by my eye. She says we can share the bed. The unstabbed skin of my cousin’s fine thigh leading my eye up to her hips and her secrets, where I want to touch, tension vibrating in the air like silver wires, I will explode if I don’t touch, but I don’t touch her. Mortua manus, the dead hand. She is worried, jittery, but there is no knife in her leg. The night air is sweet and light golden on cobbles below.

  “At the topless beach today I was so happy,” Eve whispers as she moves into sleep. “I met those Italian boys. We’ll pray for him. In a real church. Promise? That one with the amazing Caravaggio that just pops. The other paintings, no. That Caravaggio is the one. Promise?”

  Yes, I promise. She is drifting off in my bed and I stay on the sea-coloured tiles the Croatian woman cleans every morning. In my head for some reason an old Blondie tune, “Fade Away and Radiate.” Those NYC junkies, the Chelsea crowd, how did they hang on through all the shit like this? Does Eve mean the Caravaggio with the boy bitten by the lizard or the crucifixion (some noteworthy, but not Christ) or the man on the horse or the daughter breastfeeding her father who is starving behind bars? My cousin’s face looked so pale reflected in the train window in the tunnels, our train inside a dark mountain, something pushed into a body. Tomorrow we’ll pray for everyone. I promise.

  Later that week I discover that my party souvenir is gone, my baggie with the dead man’s cocaine is gone. Maybe Naples is also gone, buried once again by the volcano.

  Could Eve have taken the baggie? She is, as the police say, a person of interest. Certainly not clean-living Tamika with her bright white shoes or the train conductor who loves his wife so. The pretty Croatian woman who cleans my room? Or did I consume all of the dead man’s cocaine during a deranged night and also consume the memory? That has happened before.

  Around this same time Father Silas misplaces his fat envelope full of so many euro notes (cash is king at Italian hotel desks) and now our group is bereft, now we are bankrupt. Is our dauphin getting dotty or were the euros nicked by the rooftop cat-burglar who plucked an American’s Rolex and Nikon camera from an open third-floor window? Knaves and harridans and coal-burners and a slim hand coming into your room.

  Our director wears a houndstooth jacket draped on his shoulders like a cape, hoping for that continental La Dolce Vita matador look. How will we survive now that our leader has lost all our money? How to pay for meals at Francesco’s café, for so many nights at the hotel? How will we get home? Perhaps our future holds a giant dine-and-dash with luggage. Can we sneak our backpacks past the vigilant French woman who never leaves the front desk?

  And what happens after you feel the sly knife penetrate your thigh and you expire in a kitchen across the hall from your home? Can you bring your staple gun to heaven? His daughter was there at the party, saw her father die. I don’t know how I missed that, but my cousin insists this is true (no lie, GI). In the hall the weeping daughter held her father in her arms as we left the party, as he left the country, as the father vanished into the afterlife.

  The stoned girl with the cobalt vein and volcanic hair: I threw my drink on her to help her, did we have some strange chemistry? Maria! How do you solve a problem like Maria? So many things you will never know, so many naked legs you will never touch. But if any of us make it to heaven, I hope these matters will seem less important.

  Some nights Eve can’t sleep and takes tiny blue pills; my pretty cousin says she remembers the knife and can’t sleep. Like me she remembers waiting on a train and willing the monster to move. But time passes and we forget. I love time. Time gives me everything, time cracks me up, time kills me.

  Hospital Island

  (Wild Thing)

  I would have made a good Pope.

  —Richard Nixon

  The afternoon sun hides a thief in my eye. My cousin Eve hides so little as she sunbathes on my rooftop terrace, hides almost nothing as we read the newspapers or work together on a crossword. She loves gazing at newsprint; I believe if Eve owned a moped here in Rome she’d happily read a rattling paper while buzzing Rome’s boulevards. When was the last time I drove!

  Eve and I fled like thieves back to Rome via high-speed train, the trip seemed only minutes, cool air and blue seats on the train to Rome and no one in the car talking, a train so much quieter than the old train circling the volcano. In Rome I can’t believe how comforting it is to be back in our same rooms, the hotel a refuge; we hide inside and lie away the day, eyes shut, but Eve can’t sleep after the knifing at the party, Eve can’t stop thinking about the knife in the Italian man’s thigh and why so much blood, she can’t stop thinking.

  “How does one just go to sleep? It’s as if I’ve never learned.”

  Yet I sleep soundly, a genius of sleep, which my wife resented greatly. I sleep like a groggy winter bear; what is wrong with me?

  I say, “Can’t you think about something else, try to not worry?”

  Eve looks at me for a moment as if I am a complete moron, but does not say that. She says, “That’s like saying, Why is the sky blue?” That it is part of her makeup to worry. Her tiny sleeping pills are bitter on the roof of her mouth.

  “It’s not the best sleep,” she says, “but it’s better than none.” A green lizard peeks out from a hole in the wall as we start in on a bottle of ferocious red wine.

  My mouth tastes of mufflers and conflict (Rome throat, says Eve of the exhaust clouds and particulates in the air we breathe, she says it’s like smoking a pack of cigarettes, that only Bulgaria is worse), but the moped riders look so beautiful, sleek executives and office workers in silk suits and fluttering dresses and sharp winkle-picker shoes coming at you in formation, a phalanx of Valkyries balanced on tiny toy wheels.

  They killed St. Valentine on February 14th outside the Flaminian Gate during the reign of Claudius the Goth. Valentine’s skull was crowned with birds and flowers, he gave eyesight to the blind, hope to the bland. They beat him with clubs and stoned him and later severed his head at the gate; they took their time. Christian couples came to the city gate, young couples he had secretly married, they came and left gifts for this martyr as he died slowly for his true faith. Or this saintly man did not exist and was invented by Chaucer, or he worked for a chocolate lobby group, like the Easter Bunny. The Church is no longer exactly sure.

  But the riders look so beautiful. My admiration for Roman drivers grows and grows. Local drivers seemed crazed at first, but now I see their staggering talent; cars and scooters fly from all sides like jets in a dogfight, but I have yet to witness an accident. Lanes and lines mean little and at each red light hordes of scooters wobble past rows of stopped cars and assemble ahead of their bumpers, a dozen scooters across the real estate of two tiny lanes, scooters ready to roar away at the green. Drivers share such little space without border wars, without crashing, though I did see a woman fly off a moped on a corner by the open-air market, her moving cry the exact pitch of the engine she was leaving behind. The ambulances park right on our street so she was in good hands.

  “Look at this photo,” says Eve. “Before the war, the German company Hohner gave Pope Pius XI a chromatic harmonica covered with jewels.”

  Eve passes me her book with its colour photo: a gorgeous harmonica with fluttery brass
reeds and a gold casing encrusted with jewels and ivory. We both glance over at the imposing Vatican wall; is the harmonica still there?

  “Can we ask the Pope for a look?”

  “The current pontiff doesn’t seem very approachable. He is not simpatico, he is not, how do the Italians say it, not papabile. They need to clean house.”

  Eve doesn’t like this German Pope, she says his raccoon eyes speak of bad vibes and red-hatted cardinals stabbing each other in the back, Eve says you could hang pork chops from both his ears and the dogs still wouldn’t play with him. She wants a new Pope, she says. “You’d make a better Pope than this Nazi goof.”

  The green lizard glows in the wall and we punish the bottle of red. Eve becomes more and more certain that I can be the first Canadian Pope. (I wonder, can we count Louis Riel as a Pope of Assiniboia?)

  “Yes, the votes are being counted,” says Eve, “now I can see the white smoke from the chimney, they’ve decided!”

  What odds would British bookies give on a foreign tourist becoming the new Pope? Slim to none. But I am not the worst candidate. Once I was an altar boy serving First Fridays at dawn, I know my way around the rosary beads and confessional and Stations of the Cross, I know some Latin, the Credo and the Confiteor, and as a child I left room for my guardian angel to sit beside me at my school desk and I left room for my guardian angel alongside me in my tiny childhood bed.

  “Listen,” says Eve. “The Pope is Catholic and you are Catholic, or were once; the Pope has a cool apartment in Rome, you have a cool apartment in Rome; the Pope does not golf, you do not golf; the Pope does not ride a noisy Vespa, you do not ride a noisy Vespa; the Pope likes ‘Wild Thing’ by the Troggs, you like ‘Wild Thing’ by the Troggs.”

  I can see no flaw in this logic. I am made in God’s image while this Pope’s raccoon eyes speak of secrets and bad vibes and Machiavellian rooms of red-hatted cardinals. How would I look in a scarlet cassock and beanie cap? My first act will be to free the Pope’s butler from his Vatican jail cell and he will kiss my mobster holy-man ring out of gratitude. I’ll have a butler! Ditat Deus, God enriches.

  As a child I wanted to be a priest and I envisioned my guardian angel as blond and slim and kindly, not unlike the Quebec stewardess who helped me with the taxi, not unlike Natasha, who was kind until the moment she left me. Has that childhood religious vision affected my expectations of real women later in life, of those I make room for in my bed?

  I say, “I always assumed my guardian angel was blond. But Jesus was Middle Eastern; would he not be dark-haired?”

  “How many angels are there in total?” Eve asks. “Does the Pope know? Do all the angels sleep together in a dorm and have pillow fights?”

  There are gaps in dogma, but I love the look and colours of Rome, its lovely hues stuck in my eye, shades of crimson and cinnamon, salmon and sienna, charcoal and blood, black brick touching blond brick touching walls of ashen stone, ochre clay and yellow plaster and tile in startling nebula swirls and slabs of veined green marble.

  I could live here, where cobblestones lift around the bases of ancient trees and that bridge over the river dates from before Christ. Once they loaded plague victims on barges to float them out of the city to the sea. Laundry on the next building slaps in the breeze, a nautical effect, linen and blouses like mizzen skysails and royal staysails and flying jibs, as if the tenements will also weigh anchor and slip into the Tiber to drift downriver to Ostia and the sea.

  “Chin-chin,” says Eve in a toast, “to a Canuck Pope.”

  Voices drift to us in perfect clarity.

  “Tom Hanks just walked right by!”

  Tom Hanks is filming some Dan Brown crap in a nearby piazza.

  “On the set he made a sour face when someone blew a take, but he just seems so nice!”

  Maybe Tom can help me, he’s got connections, he’s got juice, he knows where the bodies are buried. But what if Tom Hanks also wants to be Pope? Maybe that is his real reason to be in Rome, and this execrable movie is a foxy diversion. Tom has boatloads of money: why doesn’t he try making a good movie instead of a bad one?

  Eve tells me of past Popes, reads a list of how many Popes were murdered and how many Popes were murderers. This is not a happy story. Constantine II: murdered. Stephen VII: strangled in prison. John X: strangled in prison. John XI: died in prison. Benedict VI: strangled in prison.

  “Is Pope Joan on the list? What was the life expectancy? This sounds a dangerous job.”

  “But you’d be famous. The first Canuck Pope.”

  “Louis Riel had a similar idea and I seem to remember that led to Mr. Riel hanging on the end of a rope in Regina.”

  Fame to me does not seem a good thing. Fame seems like some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s where everyone knows you but you don’t know them.

  Pope John XIV was killed by a certain Francone, then the newly installed Pope Francone was himself murdered and Pope Gelasius was set upon with stones and arrows. Pope Gelato was destroyed by diabetes and Pope George Ringo lost his record deal.

  Italian newspapers drift soft as Kleenex outside every station of the Metro. I look at each page for a news article, but the nervous suburb under the distant volcano seems to have absorbed the bloody knifing without comment. They expect it of Napoli.

  Eve puts aside the book, says, “See that cloud? It looks like a penis.”

  I wouldn’t have thought that. “Very like a penis.”

  The clouds are there, but the rain is holding off.

  “Or a killer whale.”

  She says, “I want to see the fresco The Liberation of Saint Peter from Prison. I saw the David long ago and it looked so lonely.”

  Eve is scholarly, better at languages and accents than I am; she can mimic any passing tourist voice (how much is that in real money?) and she comfortably teaches in French and Italian at her school in the Alps. She skis mountain frontiers and she appreciates fine food more than I can, has made a point to educate herself in French and Italian cooking, likes meat rare where I want it charred black, makes a tasty piece of salmon. When a meal arrives she admires the bright vegetable colours, meals so pretty we don’t want to disturb the plates.

  “Wait,” she says, “wait. The eye must eat before the stomach.”

  We are deep in a city of millions, but songbirds flit the nearby boughs and a green parrot balances at the tip of the tree; it makes me happy to spy the fabled green parrot in the tree, my eyes, my tree, my parrot’s weird chirping as goldfinches zip behind Eve in lines of yellow light, swift radiant birds leaving the imprint of a sunlit laser show on my eyeballs, wild birds asking nothing of me, selling nothing, possessing nothing but beauty and song.

  On the sunny terrace above the shaded warehouses my cousin reads to me from her book of Roman history; she knows I am obsessed by Pliny the Elder and she feeds my obsession: here is Pliny battling in northern swamps, Pliny fighting barbarian tribes on horseback, Pliny beating up the Franks, Hungarians, Vandals, Pliny smoking blunts and tossing deadly javelins from horseback.

  Pliny rides and our green lizard glows in the wall. The next bottle of wine is reminiscent of cabbage and sardines so we decide it must be way good. My bookish cousin Eve looks nice in that female-who-isn’t-yours sort of way: dark glasses, pigtails, capri pants, Chinese slippers.

  St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers and travellers, so I feel close to him (does it really matter whether Valentine existed?). I’m not a beekeeper, but bees seem to like me and I’m a traveller. Pliny travelled the far edges of his Roman world, but he came back to the centre of empire to die under the volcano, asphyxiated near Pompeii, or did Pliny suffer a stroke? The volcanic cloud rose through green sky, a ghost tree hanging over beautiful villas until the shape collapsed and crashed in ash and heavy stones to crush the beautiful villas. I can’t stop thinking of Pliny and his last deadly moments in Pompeii, sky gone black as a room with no light, his small apocalypse in the same town as the knife party where the unwanted neighbo
ur fell in the hallway and we ran like spooked goats.

  During the day I worry about Eve’s pale skin in Italy’s powerful sun. My cousin doesn’t worry, no, she thrives on sun and heat in scanty summer outfits. Others limp back to their rooms exhausted from our exalted tasks in the world of art and red-faced from our master the sun, but she seems unfazed, Eve thrives.

  As the sun fades behind walls I quietly play my new chromatic harmonica, silver flashing as pink Roman stone turns dark, and I gaze at her form, a thief hiding in my eye.

  On my rooftop terrace Eve says, “You know you have to get over her. Dwelling on it is not going to magically change things.” Eve enjoys lecturing me about my lost Natasha, my girl from the north country. Eve has brought beautiful tart berries from the street market to our rooftop, she passes me a cold lemon drink and reads an André Gide aphorism from her endless heap of used paperbacks: To be utterly happy, you must refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past.

  Yes, but how to not compare? How to stop the built-in comparison machinery in your head?

  “Well sir, that’s another problem,” says Eve.

  Archimedes worked out problems in the sand. They killed Archimedes in 212 BC as he was drawing his circles in the sand, his colony invaded.

  Wait, Archimedes said reasonably as crazed Romans attacked him with swords, wait until I finish my math problem, my circles in the sand.

  We must all deal with our problems, the zestless bottled water, the border wars over armrests in dark cinemas, the lost yellow-cake uranium, we must forgive the recalcitrant lawn mower.

  But did the Roman soldiers wait for Archimedes to solve his crisis of the lawn mower? No. They put Archimedes to the sword, soldiers invaded the colony, invaded his body. I suppose that is a sort of solution to a problem. Or the problem is swiftly made a lot less relevant.

  I am aware of my need to get past this niggling crippling memory, to put to the sword this rash abandonment by Natasha. Don’t be a stick in the mud, they say, get out more. LBJ said to me once on his ranch in Texas, “Son, don’t let dead cats stand on your porch.”