Irena says she worries that what is happening elsewhere is sure to spread here and become far worse. Greece is a disaster, Spain, Tunisia, Libya, Syria in rubble, Iraq in convulsions.
“It’s not over yet,” she says. “On the contrary, it is just the beginning.”
She has worries and hopes, Irena seems impossibly nice. She asks where else I’m going and I mention Naples and Pompeii.
“Ah, Capri,” she says dreamily. “And you must go to Elba. Though Napoli has the best food. It is the best city.”
I wonder if Irena lives and works in Italy legally, but can’t bring myself to ask. Irena has three languages and I have none. I heard her speaking Croatian and the language sounded like jagged Russian colliding with musical Italian. How long must Irena clean tile floors in Rome, work in a hotel and save a few euro to put herself through school? She has no iPhone or tablet, no college-student pub crawls, no fast Bimmer or fake-and-bake tan, no Mom and Dad paying the credit card for a trip to the capitals of Europe.
Irena served and fed Marco when the hotel was overbooked and he was kicked out of his room and put up in the apartment shared by several Croatian chambermaids. A male guest in their home was not allowed to lift a finger, they cooked full meals and fed him plums from a mother’s garden in Croatia, plums a storm-cloud purple, taut yet dripping sweetly with juice, and sliced wrinkled apples that tasted like summer wine, as if the apples were ready to ferment. The young chambermaids treated him like a lord.
Irena’s stern blond boss bursts out of the coffin-sized elevator, an unwelcome genie with dyed hair. She stares, suspicious of a shirker, suspicious of what I am after. Irena’s face alters, eyes scared, and she scampers back to cleaning the sex room.
Sometimes I feel like an exact saint of restraint, sometimes I worry I possess the virtues of a dog running loose. At times I’ve been called a dog, but my mien leans more to milquetoast, surely I am more custard than canine. Galloping miles of halls and stairs to the Roman street (I don’t use the elevator), I hope that Irena’s Aryan boss won’t make trouble because she spoke to me. But I am happy Irena wanted to chat with me about her future life in the UK.
A sickle moon hangs over the curved brick portal arch, moon and brick permanent fixtures both. And statues everywhere in Rome, long lines of anemic statues peopling rooftops, huge armies of silhouettes and future suicides crowding ledges, arms spread as if losing their balance or to leap from the ledge and get air in their beards, fly off and shudder like shaky kites around the white columns and spires and tourist piazzas.
I stare at chalk-white eyeless statues and older Italians in the subway car stare baldly at Tamika’s dark round face and wire-rim glasses and dainty dreads. They are not shy, they stare wide-eyed, as if Tamika is some amazing piece of furniture perched beside me on a subway seat.
Tamika is super-shy and doesn’t fit into the group of young drunks and Tamika is very aware of the open stares as we ride buses or the Metro. In Philly she fits in fine; in Rome her dark skin draws unwelcome attention, eyes on her.
Tamika asks me, “Do people stare at you here?”
“Not really.” I am becoming invisible and to be invisible has its uses.
Tamika tells me that she ate something that disagreed with her and without warning she became sick on a moving public bus.
“I felt horrible, but I couldn’t get off in time. The driver stopped the bus and he called the police.”
“The driver called the police?”
“They took me off the bus and I sat for ages in the police station. No one seemed to be paying any attention, so after three or four hours I slowly stood up and walked out the door with some other people and came back and hid at the hotel. I get nervous when I see any police or a uniform.”
Shy Tamika the outlaw. Italy has an uneasy relationship with colour, with Africa, Africa once part of its old Roman Empire and still so close, a slow boat-ride away from Sicily or the Italian island of Lampedusa far to the south where refugees swim to shore at this moment or they fail to swim to shore.
Some citizens in northern Italy prefer the north, would like to be part of Switzerland or Austria or Friuli; Venice wants to be an independent serene republic. Italian cousins in the south are seen as uncouth, un-north, they are terroni, of the earth, swarthy peasants, lazy, corrupt, brutish, violent, invaded and tainted by Arabs and Moors and Algerians, by heated kingdoms of darker blood, by invasion after invasion.
Men ask Tamika, “Are you africano or americano?” They want to be sure.
Father Silas surprises us, saying, “Some Italian men have a fetish for black prostitutes.”
“A fetish? North Africa? West Africa?”
“I really can’t say, it is not my fetish.”
“It’s not that I’ve been cold to him.”
The two woman talk on the next terrace and I imagine my wife saying similar words to her best friend over a glass of shiraz, adjusting decades of memories. To hear this is depressing.
“You ask yourself what happened to all those years.”
The years of connections and cities and good times don’t alter or disappear. But now those years are different, tainted, to my wife, though not to me. The women talking on the next terrace are a vocal reminder of what I’ve done wrong and how I will be misunderstood and maligned over a glass of shiraz, perhaps at this very moment.
“This new therapist, he lets me come to my senses, he doesn’t tell me.”
“I like the advice this doctor gives you.”
“Is it out of fear I’m doing this or out of love?”
“You do what you have to do.”
“I don’t want my kids to be vulnerable. Damaged people gravitate to someone alike — to damaged people. I can empower my two children by standing on my own two feet. Or they’ll step into the exact same scenario. It’s a valuable lesson.”
“You know in your heart you did everything you could.”
Don’t the women know that I’m on my side of the trellis and vines, that I hear every word and sigh? Again I make noises on my terrace to alert them, but they are like oblivious shoppers who block the whole aisle with their carts, no one else exists.
“What if he came back? He’s not open, he’s not going to be expressive or lively or please me. He can’t find it in himself to be happy.”
“Can’t go down that road. Tell the kids when they’re older.”
“If I’m giving 150 per cent and he’s giving 80, it ain’t gonna work. Is that flame too high?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That fire worries me. Should we get some water?”
“It’s citronella. It smells nice. Ah, this is the life. Shopping in Rome.”
“Can we put it out?”
“Okay, okay. Feel better?”
“I do.”
Jesus, I think, let the stupid fire burn. I’ve lost my euphoric mood under the perfect cupola of chapel stars.
So once more into Rome I wander footsore, that one church on the edge, marble underfoot, tombs underfoot, reading graffiti, stepping over graves, over a lost city. Eve and I gaze at The Conversion of Saint Paul, but the canvas is so dark for an epiphany, it seems more the reverse of an epiphany, I see no light or illumination.
Saints line every rooftop and I pass the spot where the dead rat has been resting every day on cobblestones and when I wander back the two women still talk on the next terrace. Like me, like the woman from Iraq, these two women so dedicated to their dead country.
“I told him, ‘Wish you were here,’” she says. “Why did I say that?”
“Because that’s how you feel. Mary, you’re allowed your emotions.”
“If he was here he’d know every temple where Caesar was stabbed. I think women a generation or two back were stronger.”
“Hey, we’re two powerful women — we put out the fire.”
“Safety first, ha!”
“This is fun. More vino?!”
“We are having fun.”
“
Be grateful for small things. The here and now is important.”
“You’re wise.”
“Life isn’t over. It’s a new chapter. Life is a book. And each chapter…”
“See, in a marriage…well…he betrayed me. But I’m more angry about the car than that woman.”
“Tell him you’re looking for someone. Did you do that before?”
“Fool around? No.”
“To grow.”
“No.”
“I did, I went to someone else. I felt those feelings. It scares me that I don’t care. Is it because I’ve dealt with it? It’s wonderful to feel that close to someone. If I stumbled across her in a social setting, what does she look like, I don’t care. It’s almost creepy. It is creepy, a creepy creepy feeling. Every day I wake up and expect it to change.”
“The Mole called me back.”
“Who? Not him.”
“Turned me down, but he called me back.”
“You’re better off without him.”
The woman’s last words make me wonder: in the long run, am I better off without Natasha? I resist, but I need to believe this, need to take it in like an arthroscope to the knee.
Something in me can’t accept the finality, some part of me still wishes for contact, to hear of Natasha’s mother and father, the farm, her sisters. “My dad’s youngest brother died, only sixty-two; my poor dad, such a shock for him. My crazy sister is okay, but her boyfriend bonked her on the head with his laptop and she’s depressed a bit.”
And I want to tell Natasha all my Italian news, I feel a wave at times, a physical command: lift the phone, click Reply on her last email. But I have decided: no more.
It’s difficult, as we were so comfortable with each other; how to find that lost empire again in the stone mountains? It seems impossible. The anatomy of desire and the anatomy of loss — I have them mixed up in my sunburnt head. Brushing my right ear is the fever song of mosquitoes, then a mosquito frittering inside my ear, wanting my brain. I smack my own head hard, then cry out, “OW!” And Eve laughs at me: is such slapstick exactly what this mosquito aims for as evening entertainment? Like me, the mosquito has a soft spot for the Three Stooges. Rome’s hills and marble temples built above a marsh, and winter mosquitoes felled an emperor. In Trogir I leapt off a water taxi to see a Norman fortress in palm trees and walked Malarjia Park. In Rome we will devour delicious blood oranges and pray to Madonna della Febbre, the protectress of victims of malaria.
At night in the hotel stairwell I bump into a thin blind man. The blind man is shirtless and wields a long white cane, a slim stick, a pilgrim of sorts. His pale wonky eyes aim into deep space.
“I’m above you on the steps,” I say.
“Are you with that group?” His voice is assertive, angry about noise in our hotel. Would I be so confident if I might plunge down an open stairway?
He says, “I have a wife and a two-year-old trying to sleep. Can you tell them to stop chit-chatting?”
He may mean a noisy group up on the roof. I don’t know them, but I lie to the blind man, saying I will pass on his message. Is it more of a sin to lie to a blind person? Or is the sin pretty much the same?
Eve and I are crossing manic streets like expat experts, we’re leveraging complex transactions in fruit market bedlam. When was it I met the exiled woman from Iraq in a supermercato? Later she told me I did something that convinced her she could trust me, she told me that she can read people, was trained in it.
Was it posture, I wondered, how I clasped my hands?
She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but it was enough for her to believe in me.
I had no idea what I would learn about her family, her fiancé. At the time she was simply someone interesting I met by chance, one of Iraq’s numerous exiles, Iraq coming to pieces and so many forced to become gypsies, wandering like brimstone butterflies, the first to appear after winter.
She worked in a hospital in Jordan after fleeing Iraq, liked her job and the people and the dialect was similar, but Jordan was overwhelmed by refugees from Iraq. Every month she had to make her way to a police station and pay a monthly fee to stay legally in Jordan. The fee rose every month until it was too high for her to pay and she had to leave her job and had to leave Jordan and look for work in Italy.
She does not drink, is devout, well-schooled in the Koran, but she does not wear traditional garb, does not wear robes or a veil. She can look very Western in stylish jeans, makeup, nail polish, even a Mickey Mouse T-shirt if she is in a happy mood.
The woman from Iraq told me her father had kidney problems, she worried about him. She said to me with a serious face, “Drink only water when you wake up, and cleanse your kidneys.” No one else speaks to me quite like this. I enjoyed such times. She was always very clean, concerned with health and hygiene. At one café she wouldn’t sit on the seat cushions because they seemed dirty and she was used to better.
I bought her tea from Ceylon, Akbar big leaf, and one afternoon over tea I guessed her age.
“How did you know?”
I said I liked the henna tint in her hair and she asked, “How you know that word?”
“I know some things.”
Much of what I said seemed to surprise her. I told her about Natasha and she did not approve. “So she left after causing trouble with your marriage?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“No?”
She showed me the ring her brother gave her years ago. “He loves me. He is very handsome. And in Iraq it is real gold, twenty-one karat, not like here, ten or eleven. In the Middle East men don’t wear gold. Only women. Men don’t have earrings like here. If men wear jewelry, or a lot of gold, we think, eh, no.”
She looks at my hand. “There are no rings on your fingers? All those years, did your wife not give you a ring in all those years?”
The women’s voices continue on the next terrace.
“I fall for people. You understand? I fell into that trap.”
“Are you mad at me? What I said about the Mole?”
“He was nice. He’s okay. He had the Asian wife. He did seem interested in me.”
“He’s a microbe, a creepy little creep. He had an affair with the cleaner, can you imagine — creepy, on the desk.”
“No.”
“Yes. He’s a pervert. She got pregnant.”
“Maybe that’s why he was so hot and heavy to get a vasectomy.”
“He’s a perv. He has to send her cheques and his other wife has to get up at five a.m. to catch a bus and work at a factory.”
“She probably has no background.”
“Treat your spouse like that. It’s unbelievable. A perv.”
I listen to the women and think, Now I have joined the club of those sending cheques, joined the club of those termed a perv.
The woman from Iraq says, “Everyone I meet here, divorced, separated, divorced, separated. I think our system is better.” She may have a point. My drunken question to popular opinion: why does the phrase “night falls on Rome” sound cool, but “morning falls on Rome” sounds clunky and wrong?
She doesn’t drink, but young males stagger our hotel halls shouting, “MAKE SOME NOISE!” Rome has no history, Rome is a drinking binge with no parents to harass them. They lug huge jugs of rotgut wine, yelling, “Yo Yo Yo Yo!”
Young and loose and full of juice, drunk with what seems possible. Their shop has not yet been bombed to molecules.
In the Roman night someone is insisting over and over that she is not a hollaback girl. My high room is well removed from the inebriated and industrious fray, but poor Tamika’s hallway is the epicentre of several open-door party rooms.
Eve walks by bent to her tiny clamshell phone, her face serious, saying, “She told me three of the drugs she was on.”
Tamika says, “I can’t get any sleep with their drunken racket.”
Father Silas says, “I’ll see what I can do,” and walks over to a noisy open door.
“You ai
n’t my daddy,” yells a drunken female voice inside, “and you sure ain’t…” And then the voice trails off, seemingly stumped, and we all wonder: what else is he ain’t?
Tamika does not like the drunkards, Tamika a lone wolf roaming Rome while the others seem blind to the ancient city, see Europe as a hotel, an outlet shop, a humongous nightclub. They are the same age as Tamika, but she dismisses them with a world-weary wave.
“It’s so awesome here in Rome, but all they do is complain about everything, they bitch about the food, bitch about their room, bitch about walking through amazing cathedrals. They complain if they have to walk uphill! They bitch about having to look at Bernini’s marble and paintings by Caravaggio.”
Tamika mimics their voices: “It’s not fair! You can’t tell me what to do. This is boring. I’m hungry.” Tamika pauses for breath. “Rome is not boring, they’re boring.”
From my backpack I dig out a tiny sealed bag from my days in a loud band: the baggie is not drugs, but a packet of disposable foam earplugs for Tamika. Eve asks for some as well, worth a try to help her sleep and she is wary of depending on sleeping pills.
Tamika takes the earplugs with a skeptical look on her face, and eases the door closed on the drunken mayhem. She longs for sleep.
My cousin Eve has an uneasy relationship with sleep, uneasy with Morpheus and Hypnos, the father-and-son team running our sleep and dreams. I never know if she is awake or asleep, she has a night language, uses her hands to make a point or ask a question, wakes up laughing. It’s odd to watch. Eve dreamt the two of us were trying to find our way out of a city-sized department store and I fell down an open elevator shaft.
“People were running down stairwells to find you. Is that a 9/11 dream?”
Is the blind man’s sleep a steep grey cinema? Has he ever seen stars at night? Can you imagine colours and faces and fields in your dreams if you are born blind and have yet to see colour or a face? Can you dream light if you don’t know light? When the blind man is in a better mood I must ask him.
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 16
