To shutter my own eyes at night seems not always to deliver quietude; my sleep chaotic, unnerving, festive. I close my eyes to a strange movie-house in my head, fragments and half-lit clips, an unseen projector constantly grinding. A huge cast and the footage never stops. I have no idea where these night films come from, but I like them.
“Someone called him, ‘Did you hear of the bomb downtown?’ I begged him not to go.”
The woman from Iraq told me about her fiancé, though she did not tell me this part right away, it took her some time to get to the chapter of her fiancé.
“His business was in the bombed building, he wanted to see if his shop was hit. ‘Can’t you wait?’ I had a bad feeling, I pleaded with him.”
“Sorry, sweet one,” he said, “I must go see the damage”; perhaps his shop would be spared, God willing. His shop was his livelihood, his hope, their future, her fiancé was worried and he drove into town to see the damage.
The second bomb exploded later, timed to kill those who came to walk the rubble of the first bomb. The second bomb exploded and her fiancé vanished and she was a widow without yet marrying. As Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
“He was good to me,” she stated calmly, “he was modern, he told my parents when asking for my hand that he didn’t mind if I wanted to go to school or have a career.” The bombs had detonated only months before, very recent history, but she stared off, speaking flatly. It happened to someone else a long time ago in a world that no longer exists.
Thursday at dawn our art group rises grumpily to inspect the Sistine Chapel. Father Silas has a connection, he knows an ancient Irish monsignor who arranges a select viewing, but we must arrive very early, before the mad throngs block St. Peter’s Basilica.
Eve and Tamika crave more sleep and the party animals cradle monstrous hangovers from their dubious cooking wine. For a few cents more, decent plonk can be had, but they scoop up huge jugs of cheap cooking wine, amazed by bargain prices, but this is stuff the Romans don’t drink. At dawn they feel the hurt big-time, at dawn they can barely move, can barely text or kill aliens.
In my arms I once carried my dead dog from the street where it had been hit by a driver who did not stop: my dog’s beautiful brown eyes lost their light to a machine, the brown eyes had no depth, no engagement, no awareness. Some in the group have that dead-canine look as we shuffle down the block to Michelangelo and the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel.
My head! Man, why does this asshole make us go out so fucking early? Who wants to see some stupid Listerine chapel? Dude’s seriously harshing my mellow. And we’re missing the coolest Shark Week like ever. Got any Advil? Man, I can’t deal with fizzy water, going to hurl.
Father Silas hates alcohol and some suspect he has made us rise early to punish those with piercing hangovers. He reacts strangely when I happily tell Tamika that Eve and I found an “Italian-American-style Irish pub” called Fairytale of New York, a great little underground bar.
“American and Irish and Italian?” asks Tamika, interested. “What was that like?”
Before I can answer Tamika, Father Silas gets right in my grill.
“A place for American college students to get DRONK!” he shouts, his big reddening face in my eyes.
I want to say the pleasant arched cellar is not for drunken college students, but he won’t give me a chance. Everyone I meet in the cellar is Italian, lives in the neighbourhood, and the young musicians are local. But Father Silas hates any mention of pubs and pub crawls and Rome is crawling with pub crawls, posters and ads everywhere; Father Silas is furious when he spots Ray-Ray in a souvenir T-shirt from a pub crawl that reads APPRENTICE ALCOHOLIC.
Ray-Ray complains to Eve. “Man, why does he get so mad like that? I’m not a child. I can travel and check into a hotel, he’d be surprised. I can do all sorts of things.” The younger people in the art group hate it when Father Silas lectures them on how to behave in Italy.
Father Silas may not win a popularity contest, but he finagles us past the massive lineups in front of St. Peter’s, skipping mobs and security checks; his Irish connection in the palace of Popes pays off. As early birds we have time to check out the Sistine Chapel before the throttling crowds. How many times have I joked about some half-assed project, “Hey don’t worry, it’s not the Sistine Chapel.” Now it’s the real article, now it is the Sistine Chapel!
Father Silas expertly guides our eyes through each brushstroke and painted image on the ceiling, nude bodies and fresco skies of pale pink, robin-egg-blue, pale canary-yellow, Noah drunk and disgraced and martyrs and mild saints flung about hallucinatory heavens floating in this chamber. I love it. Grotesque figures and dizzy prophets lean out from high corners and sinners pulled to hell in this ecstatic artifice.
“Noah a drunk! News to me.”
“Don’t let Father Silas know,” jokes Eve.
The guards yell at us, “No fo-to!”
A young German backpacking couple elbows me, pushing past me to cram closer to Father Silas and hang on his every word; they are not in our group, but they are eager for Father Silas’s narrative of the Sack of Rome in 1527; some of our group couldn’t care if the Sack of Rome is in five minutes.
Eve nudges me, signals with her eyes at a bench where some of our disgruntled comrades perch: one art lover cradles his pained head in open hands, one holds his giant Dr. Dre headphones tight, one poor soul manages to tap out a text. In the Sistine Chapel they are all looking down! I will say this once and then let it go: the fucking Sistine Chapel and they can’t see, can’t lift their eyes to Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, blind to the arches and lunettes hovering above their dehydrated heads, blind to miracle and treasure floating over their trauma brains. Youth is wasted on the wasted.
Above us God divides light from darkness and we linger in the centre of the chapel, Father Silas ecstatic, the longest visit he’s ever had here. But as the room fills with travellers, guards spring up to move the crowd along the marble, to herd us to the exit.
“Keep moving. No fo-to.” Does the blind man know Michelangelo’s chapel? “Keep moving! No fo-to. Keep moving! No fo-to.”
A woman from Delaware asks me, “Where is Noah?” And I have the answer! I show her the ark and his drunkenness and she charms me as we chat, looking me in the eye — how to describe that permission to engage her eye, the face, that magnetic connection? But her tour group is gone from the tidal room and she worries she has lost them.
“Bye!” she says hurriedly, eyes still on my eyes. “Very nice talking to you,” she says.
I want to say more: woman from Delaware, you seem important. But what to say quickly that doesn’t seem lame? I fail to utter key words and she vanishes from sight. Sometimes I feel my own mind staring at me and judging like a separate person. Delaware: I’m picturing a river, a green valley.
In the Vatican café Ray-Ray buys three sandwiches and three drinks and thirty euro vanish in seconds; Ray-Ray puts it on plastic, does this over and over, Ray-Ray is always hungry.
A button on his tote bag says, I Was Raised by a Pack of Wild Corn Dogs. “Does the Vatican sell corn dogs? I’d kill for a corn dog.”
I don’t know if the Vatican has corn dogs. I will return from my travels to be murdered in the bath. It is the fortieth anniversary of the White Album; the Osservatore Romano says that the Vatican forgives John Lennon his “boast” that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
“Weird to drink beer in the Vatican.”
My parents loved the church and hated the Beatles. I am going to get me religion, maybe I’ll start a church, the church of cold toast. Natasha likes cold toast and cold butter, as I do. No one else likes cold toast. It’s a sign, she sank her nails into me, haunts me still. Like Pompeii after the volcano, the shore altered.
Through marble halls and chambers we find our way and stumble outside to battle sunlight in our slit eyes, we are in the vast pillared piazza in front of St. Peter�
�s Basilica, the floating dome, the silver spaceship, the mothership and its rows of myriad Doric pillars moving out like great arms enclosing a flat open space larger than a football field.
This is not the way we entered; this morning we slipped in the north side, and now we move under the church of churches, the rock of Peter. Byron admired this view, this architectural marvel, Melville stood here, Goethe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Jethro Tull.
“Are there any zombies in Rome? Yeah, zombies in the Vatican! That’d be a very cool movie.”
Ray-Ray yells, “HEY” and runs across the space to question an Italian man who is missing one leg and has an amazing comb-over, his hairdo a monument to tenacity.
“Hey man, is it true about phantom limbs, that you get an itch in the limb that’s not there anymore?”
Non capisco. He doesn’t understand English.
In the endless white light, in the corner of vision, a bear cub gallops through the forest of pillars. The bear must be panicked, but it looks very cute: dark fur, a pale brown muzzle, outsize ears and that rolling stiff-legged lope past our hungover group, past St. Peter’s, and barrelling toward the sidewalk men selling leather purses and sunglasses.
“How did a bear get here in the city?” asks Eve.
Is there a gypsy circus camped in Trastevere or the Piazelle del Gianicolo? The poor animal swiftly crosses a road, speeds down a narrow medieval passage, and I can’t see it anymore. People scatter before the bear cub, but some follow behind attempting shaky photos and videos. A tiny blue police car joins the chase and when the men selling sunglasses see the police car, they gather up their squares of cloth and footstools and vanish, a form of magic.
“Oh shit, where’s my iPhone?” calls out one of our group, half of a star-crossed couple who have fallen for each other on the trip but are betrothed to others back home. They spend much time in Rome pacing and staring at each other and sighing like tragic silent film stars.
“Did someone steal it? I put it down for like five seconds max. My mother’s going to freak!”
In Italy eyes are on us, waiting for the moment when we put down our laptop or briefly ignore our camera on the table. The thieves love us.
Eve says she was mugged for her phone in Chile: she laughs telling us, says the man asked for her phone, looked at it, an old clamshell with a duct tape hinge, and handed it back to her, her phone not worth stealing.
“What’s it like to not have a phone?” They ask me this question with genuine curiosity, as if finding a lone survivor of some polar expedition. Discarded phone cards litter the ground at our feet. They are so afraid of not being connected. I once left room for my guardian angel, they leave room for their device, uncomfortable if alone with themselves for a minute; everyone consulting a tiny magic lantern of a screen in that slow zombie walk.
Our hungover group walks away from the mothership’s giant field of pillars. Taking our place, a new batch of amiable tourists line up to display their girth and sunglasses; we are all part of a giant art installation, the pure products of America abroad, trodding leather and considering miracles in marble and wondering about hotels and drinks and dinner menus with no inkling that a cute bear cub rambled past us moments ago.
Ray-Ray stops me: “What kind of pants is this?”
He’s studying a woman swishing past in gold harem-pants; her walk has a pronounced twitch, fabric moving around her like shimmering drapes.
“Looks like MC Hammer.”
“Who?”
“You can’t touch this.”
“Touch what?” He looks suspicious; what am I talking about?
With the harem-pants woman we try our limited Italian. Dove un internet café?
There follow many speedy sentences and in seconds I’m lost.
Wait, non capisco. Holdo, signora, parla lentamente per favore, lentamente, please speak slowly, I am a foreign simpleton in your speedy empires of talk. Our group did not invent stupidity, but we are the latest visible practitioners.
Eve leans conspiratorially toward Tamika and says, “Those Italian men on the street! Their eyes, they look right into your soul.”
Tamika mutters, “It’s not your soul they are after.”
Amore, amore. Look at the eyes here, eyes like slow sunsets and foxfire and friar’s lantern, eyes like the feral cats in the temple ruins, diamond-eyed cats after rats.
My eyes roam the world too, looking for stars held in a cupola, looking for the right person, a person who likely does not exist, like my childhood guardian angel, an ideal that may lead only to disappointment. I’m not unlike the two women on the next terrace in that respect.
The promise of Rome and the promise of the Spanish blonde in the leafy hotel atrium, her adherence to smoke and water bottles; I work up my nerve for the question. And I never do this.
“Would you, um, care to go out for dinner?”
“No,” she says too quickly. “I’m having dinner with my friend when she gets off work.” So Elena was expecting the question and ready to say no. What is it like to believe in an anthem, I mean really belt it out?
I need a wee drink. The others keep working away on vats of sweet wine. In the laneway a few feet away a sweaty man with no shirt hits a motorcycle with a piece of wood, setting off a loud alarm. The man tosses the piece of wood and casually lights a smoke to wait for the resulting beneficial social interaction.
His hope: someone will approach and fight.
Our hope: he will go away.
All our tiny wretched hopes like cartoon thought balloons over each block of Rome, multiply these across the city street-map, across the wide world, all these hopeless little balloons of our hopes, like markers on a board game, like hotels on Expedia.
We are not always pleasant, but we all have our tiny hopes.
The blind man wanders the stairways in search of culprits and the women’s voices continue on the next terrace.
“I asked that nun for the time. In Italian.”
“We fit in.”
“We’re doing so well, we went right to the edge of our map!”
“No one would know we are tourists.”
Sun beats on our skin, leathers our lives of quiet desiccation, sun on lovely hours of fountain spray as Hotwire and Orbitz fight over my soul, and then the strange lost look of my street before dawn.
Get some sleep behind scrolled blinds and rise late and the sun always there until it must enter the horizon like a burning airship and a million emails jetting out to everyone in the world say A Special Offer Just for YOU! and at dusk swallows circle and blur in a mosquito frenzy and in her famous T-shirt my cousin walks out in the garden of green parrots just before rains sweep in from some distant sea.
The Italian man has eyes. As do I. I resent him as cousins might.
“It’s so cozy here,” says Eve. “I love the sound of the rain.”
Night and the light on Eve’s face may change your mind about the world. I have to gaze, to compensate for the blind man who can’t see her. Behind the city a wall of rain like green glass, like some remnant of hurricane season. Once she climbed above me in the fig tree and I was allowed a vision of her muscled legs and beyond, I see Paris, I see France, I dream of her at the beach, half nude at the shore, her freckled skin so lovely, to live inside it, to kiss her in the eelgrass, light under the harbour swell like light inside a fountain, to see her at the sea where she is almost naked with strangers, but I never go with the group to the beach, it is too scorching or I am not inspired.
Perhaps I’m a winter person, a touch of winter in me always. I should drop everything and be a ski bum in the blue glaciers before they melt and vanish, I could work on the hill, work as a liftie putting skiers on the Angel chairlift.
Eve knows the mountains and resorts, says, “No, don’t quit your day job. Being a lift-operator is a killer on the back and people are always falling over and poking you with their ski poles. Definitely join a band. Chicks love musicians.”
The lifties use shovels t
o level the snow where skiers load onto the chairlift, like shovelling coal, and Eve says at shift’s end they set their asses down in the scoop shovels and race each other in shovels to the bar at the bottom of the mountain.
God is irritable, God recently gave up cigarettes. At our subway stop I let Eve and Tamika step out first, and the doors close hard on my arms as I step out. Why do the subway doors attack me when I was so chivalrous? Perhaps the gears and sensors know something of my true nature, gods alive in our machines and devices. I must have offended the elders of the internet, a major disappointment to YouTube. I need to learn to love technology, must dab data on me like cologne from a dollar store.
In the neighbourhood café, Francesco knows our faces and gives us free morning coffee. Angelo, the aged hotelier, joins us for a late breakfast. Eve picks up an espresso and an Italian newspaper.
“Tell me, Marco,” Angelo says to the American intern. “Is it true that Americans eat donuts for breakfast? That is wrong.” But for his breakfast Angelo fills a sweet croissant with layers of whipped cream and chocolate.
Angelo says he used to know the Vatican crowd, but no more. I assume those men he knew are dead now (and there rose a pharaoh that did not know Angelo). He doesn’t look that old, but Marco says that Angelo is over eighty; he never stops working on his hotel, moving walls, refurbishing rooms, digging a cellar.
Eve and Tamika run off to a pro-choice rally assembling in front of Pope Rat’s place at St. Peter’s; Angelo finishes his whipped cream and Nutella and leaves; Marco lowers his voice to tell me of an old friend of Angelo at the hotel.
“The man paid me cash for three different rooms. Seventy years old if he’s a day. He books the rooms for four hours and I swear five different women showed up.”
I wonder if the noisome couple in the next room paid by the hour, the minute, or down to the second. Or hotel staff who know the room to be free? Or was it Angelo’s old friend with his harem? Does his harem wear shimmering harem pants?
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 17
