Seven hills of Rome above us and our quarterback views four breasts shifting in bright tube tops as if directional devices, first this way, now this way, cobbled lanes twisting through all of Europe to the next nightclub or piazza or party barge, and he knows he will kiss all four breasts before dawn, they’ll play Romulus suckled by she-wolves. Our QB laughs and buys rounds, he still has to pack his suitcase, he has to kiss the girls, he has to down more shooters and neon martinis, he has to scream PARTY!!!
He has to text his good buddy, more shooters, dude, where are you!!! How ’bout them Hawkeyes!
Wait, he has to hurl in the Tiber, dude, where am I, oh no, puke on a silk Italian shirt, that’s harsh, man, where’s my phone, I lost my new phone and lost the new dudette girls.
Morning comes and our Iowa boy didn’t kiss four breasts, morning comes and his buddy finds his phone and calls his room and yells PARTY!! and the QB says Dude shut up!! He still has to pack his suitcase, fuck the suitcase, fuck the hotel, you know what, I’m not even paying these greasy Eye-tal creeps.
With zero shut-eye he taxis his throbbing hangover head and burnt throat to the airport, what do you mean there are two airports! How the hell should I know which one, and the taxi driver rips him off and oh Christ he left his passport at the hotel desk, he still has to pack and curse every Italian and every blond skank and he still has to punch every wall in Italy, then he has to grasp his broken fist, his throwing hand, the Big Ten coach will be furious, ouch ouch ouch, he has to grasp his groaning head, has to buy shares in Tylenol, and why the fuck won’t you let me on the fucking flight, I’m not drunk, and what do you mean no more flights today, that’s it, no more trips anymore ever, screw George Bush and Homeland Security and screw all of Europe, Europe sucks in hard daylight.
But at night on the Tiber river other quarterbacks are alive and at large like animals among gorgeous party barges and all our glowing faces and from his lit window our Pope waves back and winks, our world full of razors and orphaned brain cells, but wonderfully wild and generous in nature.
Exempt from the Fang
(Aircraft Carrier)
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those
that tell of saddest thought.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Pope Rat watches Euro Cup, the blind man wanders our hotel halls, and I wander Rome’s swarming city. I soak my head and T-shirt in cold water to escape the Roman heat, I inhale cold bottles in a dark bistro, then I creep into another empty church — simple, not a rock-star church, but I must look. The streets burn in wild daylight, but inside is shadow, inside my eyes rise to a blue dome where a young Italian artist painted night stars inside the cupola before spilling from his high scaffold, the falling man ending his art and life in one downward stroke.
Ever so slightly sunburnt and intoxicated, I am in the precisely right state to take in the swooning gift of these stars glowing in a tiny compass of sky, this is exactly what a place of worship should do, lines of light guiding my eyes from the well bottom up to these high stars in a circle.
My cells vibrate happily, my mind and eyes ready to receive this perfect sacrament. Light like blocks of white stone fills the church windows, and in my head Gene Clark’s tremolo voice singing, ain’t it good to be alive. This temporal bliss won’t last, but in the moment its echo is beautiful.
Our world revolves about me for a few hours until like Galileo I know — what heresy — it doesn’t circle me, I remember I am millions of miles from the centre. But I’ll survive, I have options. What of the woman from Iraq with her injured eyes? She was once so happy, on her way to school she steered a blinding gold Mustang through the heart of Baghdad and courted bright ambitions, but after the invasion she has nothing, finds herself so far from the centre.
American soldiers liked the woman from Iraq, and Americans ran over her gold Mustang with a tank while she was trapped at the steering wheel and then I meet her in her new life in Rome, in her exile. Birds and countries flying through the air like scalding shrapnel, all these wax nations, all these melting borders and missiles into homes. Our hotel rooms have teensy televisions bolted to the ceiling and mine pulls in a German MTV channel, rock und roll, the VJ’s narration an unsettling mix of Teutonic Girl and Valley Girl. Our alliances and kingdoms change so quickly, fidgety as a blackbird’s eye.
Loaded down by buckets of dirt and rocks, men trudge out of the earth, carrying rocks by hand through the hotel atrium, lugging buckets to a tiny truck the size of a scooter. In a silent prayer I call upon the backhoes of the nation to help them.
I want to chat up the soft-eyed Spanish woman who inhales cigarettes in the atrium. Under her white sundress blood speaks in her skin and she reminds me of Natasha, a similar face and hair, as if I know this person, a sister-messenger, though Natasha is too health-conscious to smoke, Natasha is more green tea than Pall Malls.
Angelo owns the rambling hotel, Angelo delivers to our atrium party a giant vat of purple-black wine that resembles Welch’s grape juice, a giant ham, prosciutto di Parma, and a giant knife; Eve and I glance at the knife warily. Angelo moves slowly to a long table, his grey hair slicked back, a beaked nose like a hawk; he is generous to us, he is regal.
“Tonight we have a super-big party!” exclaims a smiling Angelo.
Eve can’t take the wine’s sweet taste, but Ray-Ray and the others like the hooch well enough. We also carve up a spicy sausage the size of a small pig and an amazing cake filled with light custard. Food is so good in Italy; it’s like being stoned.
Father Silas makes a toast, “Thanks to the hotel owner for a festa with real Italian girls.” And it’s true, Angelo did arrive with smiling Italian girls with big hair like Amy Winehouse or the Shirelles.
“The bigger the hair the closer to God,” says Eve.
“Grazie, grazie,” we all intone. Grazie. Am I saying it right?
Basta, Angelo says modestly. Enough.
Father Silas whispers to me, “If Angelo says Ciao to us, then we can say it to him.” Otherwise Father Silas worries we might be too informal.
The Spanish woman says Angelo’s men are digging a cellar for a basement café and gym. Angelo is ambitious, owns many buildings, and I find myself wondering how much real estate he has in Rome. Or how much does he owe, is he overextended. The crew has no jackhammer or BobCat. Excavators and dump trucks are too wide for the narrow lane. So the work is done by hand and back and legs, like labour scratched out thousands of years ago. Will the men’s picks and crowbars stab into artifacts, find bones in a well? Will our hotel collapse?
Every time they dig in Rome they find something, the Spanish woman says, reading my mind. It is impossible to do anything. If they try to expand the subway, they can dig a new line — a tunnel is narrow, that is okay — but a new station means excavating a much broader space and then they find a temple to Saturn, to Venus, they find a villa, they find rude frescoes, and work is halted. A stray cat crawls into lost catacombs and they must bring in specialists in archeology and incest. So apologies to the world, but Rome will have no new subway lines.
Bottles of champagne arrive, like the hand-cut prosciutto, courtesy of generous Angelo, and the champagne thrills Tamika, she scrambles for her camera to snap photos of the large dark bottles. I find this endearing, and wonder if Tamika wants the photos to show her parents or grandparents that she moves in champagne circles. Or perhaps they worry she isn’t having fun in Rome and here is evidence to send them, truthful or not.
I feel guilty lounging around with Eve and Tamika and the Spanish woman while the men work in this heat, passing by us with buckets of rocks and earth. They must think me a rich tourist, that I am lazy, that I am lucky. Am I lucky, I wonder. They dig under the hotel and I hope the undermined foundation will be all right.
Angelo’s cured ham is scrumptious and the soft-eyed Spanish woman sips spring water inside her cigarette fog, says, “I am here from Madrid to
help a friend at the hotel, a woman. I am not staying at this hotel, I am staying by Termini. Do you know my friend? Do you know Madrid?”
“Madrid is a beautiful city; I was there many years ago.” I struggle for memories: such striking architecture and art deco and oil paintings in the Prado and parks and tabernas, but what I recall mostly is summer heat ballooning in an airless upstairs room by the Puerto del Sol, the temperature driving me from the old hotel and driving me from the city to a cooler sea and a smaller harbour town. Perhaps the Spanish woman loves the heat, like Natasha. The Madrid hotel was shelled during the Spanish Civil War. And I remember San Sebastián and the threat of bombs in Basque country. Does Natasha still keep her hair long, light striking her like a saint?
Eve wears a fichu cape and a cute Oriental coolie hat to fend off the sun. An Italian man in the courtyard stares at her white T-shirt, a low scoop top. He speaks to her breasts in heavily accented English.
“Oooooh, look at you! That is a very nice shirt. My wife has been in the hospital for eight weeks, that’s her over there.” He points to a weary-looking woman glued to a phone, but his eyes stay riveted on my cousin’s chest.
“She was really sick. Yes, her kidneys I think, I’m not sure, but oh she was in so much pain. It was hard to take, but she’ll be all right.” His eyes never lift from Eve’s T-shirt. “You look so goooood!”
My cousin backs up, trying to get away.
“Oooooh yessss, I very much like your beautiful shirt.”
I chat with the Spanish woman several times in the atrium but find I cannot ask her out because I am sure she is waiting for me to ask her out and I hate the moves and the knowledge and the lack of knowledge.
“Are you interested in zombies?” the Spanish woman asks me. Her name is Elena. How do you say dinner and drinks in Spanish (the dream of a common language)? How do you say that you are so very tired of zombies? I wish I had my old phrase book from years ago in Spain. Mucho gusto.
Whenever I walk onto my room’s terrace I hear two women talking on their terrace.
“We went to Australia,” one woman says. “We went camping, it was fun. They offered me all kinds of seafood and I said no. We didn’t have money to buy. Well, we had some.”
“Don’t you wish you’d done some of those things?”
“You look back. There are memories.”
“Those are positive memories! Mary, you still have memories to come.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely! Life isn’t over. It’s a new chapter. And another chapter. A set of problems is just a new chapter.”
I make noise with a chair on my side of the terrace so they know I am there, but it has no effect, the two women keep talking, so I abandon my comfy terrace to zigzag over bridges crossing the Tiber.
I step inside out of habit and curiosity; every church has a relic, fragments of the true cross, bones, thorns, nails. What chance that they are real? There is Christ’s alligator suitcase retrieved from the Holy Land, there is Christ’s hair dryer, and his first report card, signed by Mary.
On the terrace Mary the nervous woman says, “In the old days I’d talk to men. Now I hold back.”
Her more confident friend says, “You’ve forgotten who you are.”
“I lost that. You understand?”
“Absolutely! What if he knew you were looking for someone new. I’d be interested in his reaction. I’d be very interested.”
“Maybe we’ll meet some Italian men!”
Ray-Ray says to me, “I hear you’re running for Pope. Very cool. If there’s an interview, just remember he’s human, he puts his pants on one leg at a time.”
Ray-Ray, so tall and smiling, has a girlfriend and a baby waiting back in Canada, but in Italy he’s on a quest for an Italian woman, even asking the Spanish woman for advice.
“Where can I meet them? What do Italian women like, what should I say?”
“It will not happen,” she says, “they live in another world. My apologies, but you must be Italian to seduce.” Ray-Ray has a few words of Chinese, but little Italian.
“One leg at a time,” she says, “yes, I understand such a motivational concept, but does a Pope even own pants?”
“He probably wears sweatpants at home,” says Ray-Ray, “you know, to chillax, eat chips and watch Euro Cup on the boob tube. But the man’s from Düsseldorf or somewhere. So what team does the Pope pull for? He’s hunkered deep in this crazy-ass palace in Italy, but, really, the man’s from Germany, right? And he’s got these Swiss Guard dudes, who do they pull for?”
“Is there a Swiss team in the Euro Cup?”
“The Swiss Cuckoos?”
“The Swiss Army Knives?”
“Ye gods,” mutters Father Silas, shaking his head while enjoying cake and custard.
South Africa is killing Italy in the Euro Cup; Angelo and the girls with beehive hair grimace as one. The goalie moves the wrong way with his ski gloves outstretched. Italy has a gifted team, but they seem jinxed, they lose every match. For the locals this is heartbreaking and suspicious: are the matches fixed?
Angelo holds one hand up high: “How the team should play,” he says. Then a hand low: “How they are playing instead.”
As a child in Nigeria Ray-Ray went to old-style British schools, obeyed a headmaster, wore school uniforms in the Nigerian heat. I try to imagine him in a blazer. Later he may try to kill himself in the Don Valley, but how can our group know that?
Ray-Ray says to the Spanish woman, “Did you know the Etruscan language was never deciphered?”
“That’s really a shame,” she says.
Ray-Ray keeps saying that he was a celebrity in China, the girls on campus loved him, flocked to him, thinking he must be an NBA star because he was so tall. But he is not so well loved in Italy. In the hotel Ray-Ray doggedly pursues the chambermaids room to room, his big wolf teeth in a grin.
“How you doing today, ladies?”
The chambermaids’ boss, a severe Aryan-looking woman, shoos the towering Ray-Ray away from her staff. “Go! Go! Let them do their work!” And we smile at the ribald drawing-room spectacle.
But what of my gaze, and my crush on Irena, our Croatian chambermaid? Am I so different than Ray-Ray? Every day I speak to Irena on the stairs or when she knocks on the door to ask if I need my room cleaned.
Irena gently scolds me in the hall: “You should not walk about in bare feet! You might step on broken glass! You are a free spirit. It is America.”
“It is not America.”
I delay wearing socks as long as possible, not to upset Irena the chambermaid, but because in bare feet the day remains somehow mine, I feel the chains when I have to don socks and shoes and move out into the world to take care of something dubious or pay money to someone when I’d rather not pay. When I get in the door I can’t wait to peel off shoes and socks, especially in this hot climate. And what chance of stepping on glass when Irena guards our sparkling halls? Being scolded by Irena is enjoyable. She first showed me the long route to my rooftop room. Why do I feel my pursuit of her is not base, but is high-minded, a noble romantic quest? “It is Canada.”
Marco the intern laughs about the hotel’s Croatian chambermaids. Three women were washing a floor and Marco had to get in the room for inventory, so he took off his shoes to tiptoe past. They were incensed; the clean wet floor should be made dirty rather than Marco take off his shoes. A man should just walk through.
“When I had to move out of my room and stay with the chambermaids I made my own bed every morning, but they would unmake it and make it their way. They are still very Old World.”
On my way out of my room one fine morning I see Irena making up the beds next door, in what I think of as the sex room, as this room is used by so many mysterious couples. Irena pauses by the bed, looks over.
“Do you need your room made up?”
“No, thank you. My room is fine.”
She asks me every day and I have the same reply. I have everythi
ng I need. Grazie.
You are lucky, she may say. That is the usual extent of our talk. But today she stops her work, today she wants to chat.
“You are wearing shoes today,” she notes with approval. “You are from Canada,” she says, “what is it you do in Canada? What is life like there?”
She knows some Croatians who like Canada. She says, “Canada has more interest in culture. Here in Italy it is all business.”
“It is?” I’m surprised.
“Here it is who you know. Want anything done? You need a friend, a connection. And if you have no friends? Nothing can be done for you.”
“I think of North America as all business. With Italy I think of art and culture.”
“No, no. Clearly it is the other way around.”
Now I’m puzzled. Irena tells me of her home in Croatia, the hills of white stone above the sea, she says in Croatia there are mountains, but not too high, they are just perfect. Her town once a Roman colony and now she is drawn to Rome, her town once a key port in the salt trade, but now a marina and pale beaches covered with roasting Germans, Germans everywhere, the EU accomplishing what Hitler could not.
Irena says, “I’d like to move to London and go to school there, but it’s hard.”
Irena has been working in Rome two years to save her pennies. London a magnet for her, but London is so expensive and school in England is so dear, thousands and thousands of pounds sterling. She worries, she worries about the crash of the euro and the terrible economy and the backlash in Rome and Athens and Madrid and she sees TV news of arson and riots and jobless males battling police and attacking foreigners (do we have that in common, Irena, we are both foreign?). She is an immigrant, as were my parents, but her hill town is close to Italy, she did not need to step into a sinking boat, she rode into Italy by fast train.
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 15
