Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

Darcy had to stop playing after too many concussions and now goes ice fishing and skidooing and is buying post-crash real estate in sunny Florida, says the market is picking up now. Scallops and bacon go in the stove and he has ribs and boiled peanuts and bottle meat from Newfoundland, rabbit and moose, and maybe we’ll shoot off some guns.

  Coach says he can take bottle meat if it’s cooked, but Darcy eats it raw. We stay up late devouring his victuals in his garage right on the frozen river as the storm rages.

  Darcy deals well with winter, but after every game his big toe is frozen a ghostly white. A few years back a neighbourhood kid tried to steal Darcy’s truck from the driveway and Darcy flew outside in the snow in boxers and bare feet and collared the kid, but his nervous wife made him stand outside with the juvie until the police arrived. He had a doormat, but that freezing night made his feet even worse. At our games he tries a folk remedy, putting pepper in his skates to warm them.

  Coach sympathizes, says this stormy winter is making him spleeny, he’s almost seventy-five, he’s getting too old to keep going out late on these cold nights. Like me, he thinks this might be his last year. In the winter some of the players go south to Cuba or Florida. I ask Coach if he ever thinks of going somewhere warm, but he scoffs, has zero interest in some resort. I can’t picture Coach without his ballcap and coat, I can’t see him in a Speedo on a beach buying beer from a Rasta.

  Coach has been a repo man, a meat inspector, a race car driver, trombone player, a goalie and a backcatcher; now his knees are tricky. He smokes like a chimney and I worry when he coughs as he lights up. His car smells like smoke, even in the trunk where I throw my gear and team water bottles. Coach drives me home, insists on driving me right to my back door in the drifts.

  “How’s that for service?” He treats me far better than I deserve.

  I go inside and all night the candid blizzard argues with my house, tries to find me, loose wooden windows leaking air and thumping in their frames (heating this barn by the river will bankrupt me), but I pile on blankets in my cold bedroom and that night dream I’m in a Venice full of puttering Evinrudes and the hot sun glitters on canals and a warm grocery cashier likes me and instead of yelling at me she leaves the till and leans to put her plump lips to mine. A lovely dream of Italy.

  In the morning the snow and wind stop. I go to the mud room door and pull it to me, but wind and snow have formed a second door, an exact imprint, every detail pressed in the snow, the rectangular panels, the screen, the handle, an exact white copy of my door filling the frame.

  It seems a shame to alter such a creation, but I leap through this new door, destroy this delicate doppelganger. Outside the sky is a forgiving blue, my yard calm and sunny, the wind’s fury gone, our world back, our scoured world restored to order.

  I shovel paths to my doors. Out front the sidewalk snowploughs have pushed through and cut high perfect walls in the drifts, beautiful white hallways that travel miles across the city like some complicated art installation seized with light, like trenches from the Great War, but the war is over and it is bright and clean, no rats, no mud, no snipers in this stunning new world.

  Cars pass by, but the snow is heaped so high I can’t see them and all sounds are muffled. White walls, higher than I’ve ever seen, but ceilings of blue sky, like walking passageways in an albino Pompeii, roofless and bright, infinite and surreal, and I can follow these weird perfect hallways all the way across town saying good morning, how you doing?

  The new walls glow in the sun and I want to enjoy them before the big dogs arrive to mark their territory, before the bootblack mud and sand and grit arrive like five o’clock shadow to make me forget this beauty. I want to hang a thrift store painting where the perfect white hallway passes my house; in the walls I expect to see light switches and doors and offices with photocopy machines humming inside huge snowbanks, offices printing out more white, and snow and light everywhere so bright it’s a form of distilled noise.

  Trieste, Trogir, Havana, the Baja. These places boast palm tree beaches and admirable climates and painterly hues, they know limos and palaces and delicacies and glitzy pop stars with thread-count concerns, but they’ll never witness this creation of a clean new world, this stormy cold war and sunblind euphoria that follows.

  Adam and Eve

  Saved from Drowning

  When we are not sure is

  when we are most ourselves.

  — Graham Greene

  I remember leaving Canada for Italy’s hallucination nation, a late flight over the silver Atlantic and the strange interior night until a new morning’s sunrise moves us past dusty Spanish plateaus and ginger points of light, past Barcelona until our plane hangs over cobalt water. The pilot announces that we are west of Rome and the phrase rings in my head and I am excited to see such a sharp mountain rising in the water, a peak alone in the sea, can it be Corsica or Napoleon’s Elba, then, look, look, a much larger island wreathed with talc beaches and azure bays.

  My neck bent like a giddy child for my first glimpses of a fabled country, finally my eyes on Italy, my neck bent in the plane to peer down upon boats and pure wakes and glittering seas leading toward speedy voices under a volcano. Do I look foolish in my excitement? I travel alone, no one to share this with, no one coming on like novocaine.

  Outside the airport terminal serviettes blow over breezy runways. A careless handler spilled a box of paper serviettes beside a plane, and these folded squares skim the carbon tarmac, pale paper herds zigzagging sullen plains. The grumpy handler will not give chase, matters are officially out of his hands. They career, but their travel is so quiet.

  I can’t pull my eyes away — something spooky about paper serviettes levitating, moving back and forth in dreamscape silence — what is it they seek?

  And how have I not noticed this silence before? Miles and miles of glass the colour of glucose allowing no hint of the shrieking decibels of a dozen jet engines. Tell me: are international airports not amazing structures with beautiful citizenry and upright pilots and stewardesses in Siamese silk costumes and so many magic portals! The speaker in the ceiling apologizes to Gate 34. We move along, a doorway to Dublin beside a gate to Singapore right by an entrance leading to Zagreb’s Britanski Square, where someday I will say a novena over glowing pilsner. Such different worlds, strange cavern entrances just paces apart. And those serviettes, meant for our lips, and then came the careless handler.

  I am happy to share a cab into the city, a couple from Quebec introducing themselves to me in the taxi line. She is a stewardess, has flown to Rome hundreds of times, will guide me, a good omen.

  “Where are you from?”

  Our taxi driver ferries his three passengers from Ostia Antica into cloudy Rome, the west side of the river, a Byzantine trip in lanes of tangerine stucco and high stone walls blocking any view of the city, driving past cracked walls and hedges and iron gates and swarthy security men in dark uniforms slouching at mildewed guardhouses like roadside tombs, a city of tombs and walls, and in the walls we turn right and left, left and right, until I have little sense of where the driver has placed me in my new alien landscape.

  “Clouds in Rome? I’ve never seen it like this.”

  The Quebec stewardess is affronted by the cloud cover; she reminds me of Natasha, her worship of the sun, our tenuous love.

  “Quanto costa?”

  We stand in the street and the driver writes the number fifty on the dusty window.

  “Fifty!” The stewardess says no.

  “Not fifty each. Fifty total.”

  Ah. I am pleased to put in twenty euro to cover my end and take care of the tip, happy not to deal with this alone. I was lucky; the stew rescued me from an unregistered taxi driver who collared me at the airport doors; seventy euro he was going to charge, but the hack driver ran at the sight of an approaching uniform. So twenty euro is great, twenty euro is nothing in Rome, a city plated in gold. Gilt frames, hammered gold, coins and tribute, sunlight and gold chalices filli
ng family chapels, museums, galleries, churches, palaces; Borgia loot and the overflowing Borghese villa and the Vatican’s endless halls and scarlet chambers.

  How many rooms of art and how many arrangements and thefts, how much treasure stolen from kingdoms and nations, stolen from other families, Pope to Pope, nephew to nephew. You first parents of the human race, who ruined yourself for an apple. Why so much loot in Italy, so many shiny apples.

  They are dedicated to Jesus, but do they believe that Jesus would like this display of wealth, would Jesus make his nephew Pope and loot the world and pile the treasures in gilt chambers? Yet that is why the crowds and I have flown here, not for the fine words of Jesus, but to view the piles of loot.

  My mother and father so devoted to this church in Ireland and Canada. I wish I had their faith, I envy them. I became an altar boy and took the host and my parents helped build the local cathedral. The archbishop washed my feet at the communion rail. But really, what connection do I have to this series of questionable Popes in such a distant chaotic country? Perhaps as much connection as Jamaican Rastas to Hailie Selassie in Abyssinia or dingbat acolytes with faith in flying saucers. The archbishop washed my feet and later Natasha held my feet. We are all dingbat acolytes.

  Ah, hotels: the towels so brisk and young. Can you find Balkan music on the red Bakelite radio? Wowee-zowee, it’s a garage band show and that wacky piano solo from “Pushin’ Too Hard.” It makes me happy. Once my dead teachers had high hopes for me. Maybe I can be happy just being dull.

  Near the Spanish Steps I visit my aged aunt and uncle to sip tea from bone china. I must ask where they were during the war. That rich oxblood colour as the boiling water hits the tea, releasing it; it was hiding and now bright as a flag, the sight makes me nostalgic and happy.

  “And how are your parents? Well, I hope?”

  “Yes, very well thank you.”

  Why wreck things, why tell the truth?

  “You look so much like my favourite brother; it makes me happy to see you.”

  My aunt and uncle have lived in these rooms forever; the place should be knocked down when they depart, so it remains forever theirs. Their legs are gone, no more tennis and cream. They want to hear of everywhere that I’ve walked, envious of my rambles in the city. I love being mobile, love walking for miles, and this is what I can look forward to: having no legs.

  My aunt and uncle are so kind, they’ve been with each other so long (I hear the English football chant, you’ll never walk alone). Why can I not do that, be kind, stay? It seems so simple.

  My cousin Eve is here again, my aunt and uncle not sure why. Eve seems free to take time off from her school and it’s not that far to the frontier, to Italy. Eve told me that her students live in Switzerland, but their families live across the frontier in France, a short train ride. The parents make good money in Switzerland, but it is cheaper to live on the French side, so they go back and forth. Eve leans in the doorway, does anyone want to walk to the famous Protestant graveyard?

  “Now you two watch out for pickpockets,” warns my aunt at the arched door. “Things are so complicated now. Did you read the paper where the gypsies kidnapped that poor little blond girl? I don’t feel safe anymore, foreigners everywhere and more over the borders every week. There are no jobs to be had here, but they come by the boatload. It can’t go on. People have talked about what will happen here soon. They have started to talk about that everywhere, even in the supermercato.”

  My aunt had an operation for cataracts and now can see clearly; she laughs, says her own face in the mirror was a shock, this stranger in the glass, this move from fog to terrible clarity. Eve pulls me, my aunt like Janus in the doorway, in love with us, madly waving goodbye.

  At the café I slice my dessert in half; it is too large. “I will save some for later.” I don’t trust orange shampoo, but I buy a bottle because the price in the shop is so good and Rome is so costly.

  “You’re so abstemious.” I can tell Eve enjoys this word, enjoys laughing at my habits.

  Sometimes a glutton and sometimes I know when to stop. Sometimes I am smart and sometimes a fool. We are never just one.

  “Ciao, bella.”

  “This is so good.”

  “I’m never eating a tomato in Canada again.”

  Like a fashionable spider, my cousin Eve walks among the tea shops and twee shops, skinny black pants and skin-tight black boots among other solemn spiders parading cobbled boulevards. Do these creatures devour the male or do they love the male? I can never remember when I need to.

  Life is a tragedy. Life is a lark. Which mood is truer, finer? A firefly wandered right toward me and the dish ran away with the spoon. After the rain my cousin rides her rental bike through all the puddles, laughing gleefully as water sprays her back, and I find this endearing. I like her body language, though she rides away from me.

  My swings, my low hours, low days, convinced that I’ve wrecked my smoke-and-mirrors life, a horrible sense of regret, a mistake. What have I done?

  Other times I think, So what? Few lives stay the same for long, few lives work out smoothly. Why regret what I can’t change? I can try to learn, but I cannot alter what has transpired.

  A cat-burglar prowls the hotel roof at night, a slim hand in the window, some cash, some jewels, a camera. The thief must be a local who knows his silent way around the top of the neighbourhood; these jaded buildings stand cheek by jowl and most are connected or separated by a small leap. German and Mexican students party on the rooftop terraces and thieves trot the sloping roofs.

  Marco, the American intern who works the desk, knows about the thefts. Some residents have heard and some have not, the hotel is not warning the guests. We hear conflicting reports. Eve claims someone on the balcony, a hand through an open window. Tamika says no, the intruder was right inside the room. Ray-Ray heard money and a camera, Tamika says no, family jewels and blown glass from Venice. Tamika says, and I agree, why bring jewels on a trip?

  We can see the Vatican walls clearly, like a vast drab fortress beside us, but the rooftop thief does not fear the Pope. God is dead, ideology is dead, and the microwave is dead in my room, Barabbas the thief released instead of Jesus and now a lithe thief strolling above to pluck jewels and cameras and phones from our hotel.

  In my top-floor room I am like a hawk perched atop a square tower. Will the thief drop onto my terrace next? I keep a length of wood handy. Knives sleep in the drawer, but could I actually stab someone? I assume the perp is a young male, but what if the thief is an old woman, merry as a grig? Do you still hit such an ancient visitor with a length of wood? What does Emily Post’s advice column suggest? Does Emily Post know a hawk from a handsaw?

  “Things are not stable here,” says my aunt, returning to a favourite topic. “The Italian economy is the worst since the war. Governments come and go and what have they done? A lot of blather and we’re still in the same boat. Our pension has been reduced, they tax everything twice now, demonstrations, strikes, so much unrest, so much chaos, and yet these people come in leaky boats from everywhere, Albania, Romania, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq. Why on earth do they come? Do they expect a Shangri-La? We can’t take so many. The city is all…” She pauses, choosing her words. “All foreigners now.”

  “Aren’t we foreigners?”

  “You can’t know what it’s like. It is unbelievable. Some are starving themselves, to protest, that they should be classified as political refugees, for asylum, but the government doesn’t want them. They all want free health care. Many immigrants are in the hospital now and they will probably die soon. It is very sad.”

  Is there even a molecule of the poet Keats left in the sacred graveyard ground? All the famous bodies resting in rows under the cypresses, but it’s the bloodied cat walking the poet’s grave — I can’t forget this mangled cat in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, the cat’s face sneezing blood and doesn’t look like a cat anymore, its nose completely gone, like the faces of so many chipped Greek and
Roman busts. Can it survive with such injuries?

  At the graveyard is a twenty-three-year-old American who was injured by an explosion in Iraq; we met at an Irish pub in Rome where we’d stopped for shade and cool libations. The American has a Purple Heart and a 30 per cent loss of hearing after an IED blast under his vehicle; he says one day they dismantled eighteen roadside bombs — in one day! He has a crush on Eve (I suppose we all do), tells Eve he is depressed and pissed off because he always wanted to be an officer, to be chosen, but his military career is toast now. I wonder if he unconsciously surveys the graveyard trees to assess where a sniper might hide, where to set up an ambush or field of fire. Does the disturbed soil remind him of an IED planted in the laneway?

  “The army discharged me because of my loss of hearing. Which loss came from the fucking army.”

  “Where was the IED?” I ask. I’m interested in how it was hidden. Was he driving, was it buried under the road surface or beside the road at a soft corner? He seems to not hear me. What, is he deaf? Oh yeah, I forgot, he kind of is.

  “They say officers have to be perfect and now after the IED I’m less than perfect. As if they are all perfect.”

  “That’s terrible,” says Eve.

  “The whole show is a fucking crock,” he says.

  “Well, why did you go in the first place? Thank God Chrétien kept us out of that mess.”

  I didn’t tell the young soldier to go shoot up some village across the world and I don’t like it when they claim that bombing some Podunk hamlet is for my freedom and I should be grateful and tearful for such heroes in our midst.

  “Who is Chrétien?”

  On the ground by Keats’s grave are fallen oranges and on them ants and butterflies acquire their vitamins. I grow weary of heroes and parades.

  “You know what,” the young American says to Eve, “I don’t want to be in any graveyard with mutilated cats.”