Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Every hotel, every guest house, every B & B has offered me an “arrangement” to pay cash. No receipt, but the room costs much less. I find it hard to say no, as it saves me so much — hundreds easily; perhaps thousands, given enough weeks or months. Factor in millions of tourists wheeling luggage down Europe’s cobblestones and dropping cash only, and one sees why lawmakers and accountants have such trouble chasing their cut of the haul. As a spoiled North American I am so used to plastic, but cash is king here and my best deals are off the books.

  Marco’s work at the hotel has to do with the books; Marco’s task is to nudge the hotel into the computer age. The French woman still consults a huge old-fashioned ledger with our names and reservations written by hand. Marco is setting up a computer. Businesses in Italy often need two sets of books; after Marco is done, will the hotel need two sets of computers?

  God enriches, but cash is king, so we all must stash envelopes of cash, cash on my person or hidden in my room, more cash than I am comfortable carrying or hiding.

  Eve’s purse was stolen from her hotel room a year ago; she found a small footprint in a flowerpot on her balcony and her bag tossed to the next balcony. Luckily the young thief missed euros she had hidden in the WC. The art historian’s phone lifted as he walks a crowded street, a religion teacher’s wallet eased from his front pocket on the bus, a beatnik backpacker swarmed by children, turning and turning, a dizzy whirligig to keep their nimble fingers from his pack pockets, and a pink rental car stolen from a woman from Banff as she opened its door for the first time — she possessed the car for seconds and then the car was gone.

  Marco and Eve travelled to the police station to interpret for the hotel’s American family who lost a ring handed down from a great-grandmother, lost blown glass from Venice. A sweltering night, an open window or balcony door. The police type up a report, but what can they do, a waste of ink.

  Who expects someone from the roof? In all corners of Europe such a complex economy dotes on our purloined phones and cameras and we oblige, we carry cash, wallets and laptops, and we deliver them to the thieves. How they long for us like lost lovers in their damp winter and each year we come back like the blossoms of spring.

  Angelo had to sack an employee who lit rubbish on fire in a stairwell; the employee hated the guests, the noisy party animals, and he wanted to get off work early. So a fire against the exit door is the answer. Could he be the hotel thief? Or is it the blind man, bounding like a cat across the roof?

  Father Silas tells our group a farmer’s-daughter joke. And Natasha sent me email from her parents’ farm in northern BC. Why did I not think of this all these years: Natasha is a farmer’s daughter. I broke off contact with the farmer’s daughter, for my own well-being, but every day I have a physical urge tell her what I see and do in Italy, a habit.

  In Canada Natasha said we must stay in contact, an unbearable empty place if we stop talking, a huge hole in both our lives. She said those words, admirable thoughts. But in her life, in her distant city, she has someone there to turn to, to say she had a bad day, to say, He’s really upset, I just don’t know what to tell him. She can say to someone, Let’s go out for a drink, can say later, Hey, love you so much.

  Irena the chambermaid greets me, Come va? She does not ask, Come stai. Is she being formal with me as a hotel guest? Irena is always so friendly with me. Is she just as friendly with the others? I want her to like me. She wears cargo pants with numerous pockets to hold cleaning gear, waistband low on her belly from weighted pockets and pulled tight on her round rear. Irena’s shirt rides up as she cleans the room and I notice a puckered scar on her belly like a hieroglyph, a story scripted in a scar. In her supple hands a large sheet rises and settles as if on a breeze: her levitating art.

  Come stai? I ask.

  Sto male. She is sick. But she is working anyway. Maybe she caught whatever Ray-Ray had when he arrived from China. Some afternoons I see the chambermaids walk away from work in their street clothes, altered in their clothes, happy to be free on the sunny avenue, happy to be free of us.

  I hope you feel better, I say. She nods.

  Irena leaves the sex room, Eve leaves Italy like a merry sleepwalker, Excuse me, says Our Lady of Madrid, I must go. Soon all leave the city, the mountain frontiers, leave Europe’s stone quarters and catacombs, say goodbye to the orchards and marble excavations.

  It seems so long ago that Natasha phoned after silence to say there was someone else. I knew something was wrong but did not know what. I was married to the sound of her voice, talking to me when she was almost asleep, part of something beautiful and spooky and rare and rich, but part of nothing now, and another woman in a doorway or an airport says, I’d hate to lose touch with you, you know I love you in so many ways; says, It’s been wonderful. My half-buried past, my layered Pompeii, my quiet buried city.

  That day my faith was tested. Phil Ochs in exile from Ohio, kicked out of Dylan’s car, no more songs and the rope on the pipe beckoning. The snake-handler’s look of disbelief as he died in his own church, as he recalibrated his idea of being exempt from the fang.

  I KNOW I AM NOT SPECIAL: I must repeat this until it sinks into my head like a spike into a rotten log. Exiled from dopamine, from the snowshoes of yesteryear, I tape a piece of white paper to a mirror: For sleep, riches, and health to be truly enjoyed, they must be interrupted.

  On a map I showed her Canada, showed the woman from Iraq where I grew up. She is well educated, but has rarely seen a map of Canada. And America on the map right below Canada.

  “They have so much space; why did they want to invade our country when they have so much land?” She peers at the map of America with utter puzzlement.

  The billion-dollar question: why did Bush and cohorts invade the wrong country? Oil an easy answer, or they got their Auto Association maps mixed up. Or, rumours suggest, the invasion was revenge for an earlier plot by Hussein to kill Dubya’s father, George Bush Senior, and if the oilfields fall into friendly hands, that’s gravy.

  “Bush is in town; you could ask him.”

  “Bush is here? Where? I’ll go see him. Did you see him smiling on the aircraft carrier, he was so happy while we suffer. Bush is always talking of terror. My brother is not a terrorist. I am not a terrorist, I want to hurt no one. He has killed more than anyone in the world. Will someone hunt down Bush and hang him on a rope?”

  The woman from Iraq is very charitable, she is not anti-American, has relatives in Chicago and wonders about moving to live there.

  “I hate no one,” she says, “but I hate that man. When they threw a shoe at Bush, I was glad.”

  I do wonder about Bush, what he really thinks. “Did you ever see your Mustang again?”

  “Oh no, nothing was left.”

  Blow upon blow, her pleasant world dismantled by this stranger, this man Bush, her fast American car transformed into a tin can, her brother kidnapped and dumped in the desert in plastic cuffs, her mother’s breakdown and her fiancé dead in the rubble, her happy life stolen as if by a hotel thief. And on TV in Iraq the family reads the banner on the aircraft carrier: Mission Accomplished. After meeting her, I swear I’ll never complain again.

  Her mother misses her bright laughter in the house, now the house is quiet but for the noisy generator running outside the house; the power off and on since the invasion, so they must run a generator in the yard.

  “I was always laughing then,” she says. “Now I only laugh with you.” And somehow we do laugh a lot. Our odd connection.

  She says her mother needs to go to the hospital, but the power grid is so damaged that doctors are afraid to start any complicated surgery for fear the lights will go dark while a patient is cut open. She grew up in a prosperous, stable country, her father a professor, but now he can’t leave his home and risk the roadblocks where a human in a mask may execute you if you say the wrong word or drive the wrong part of the city.

  She misses driving her car in Baghdad.

  “Was your Mu
stang fast?”

  “Oh yes. I’m not a crazy driver, but on the highway one must go fast.”

  Marco convinces Angelo to lend me a two-door Fiat so I can take her for a spin and let her drive a car once more. I am nervous in Rome’s traffic. Sniffing Rome’s oily exhaust, she claims the petrol in Iraq is so pure that her car’s exhaust was sweet as perfume. Before the war every road was brightly lit and the roads smooth and broad, not so narrow as here.

  She asks me, “In Chicago, are there many blacks? I’ve heard there is work in Chicago, but it has many blacks.” She worries about blacks. “They scare me,” she confides.

  “Winters can be cold in the Windy City,” I say, “and you’re used to the heat.”

  “Yes,” she says, “I don’t know how you go outside in that cold. You whites are tough!”

  I get an inordinate kick out of being called a white. I put my arm by her arm and her skin is lighter than the skin on my tanned arm.

  “Summer must be very hot in the desert. You must need air conditioning.”

  “Desert? Iraq is not desert. There is a river, how can that be desert? There are plants, a hundred varieties of dates and olives, such flavours.” She is offended. “Iraq was a great civilization. Why do you say desert?”

  Sorry, but on TV with the rolling tanks and dust it looks like desert. When her car was too hot in the Baghdad sun she kept a special aerosol spray in her purse to cool the hot metal so she could touch the car door without burning her hand.

  Sipping leafy tea, we chat and laugh and by accident I discover my power over her: if I reach out in conversation, touch her shoulder or neck, the woman from Iraq swoons, falls into some half-awake state, not used to touch from a male who is not a cousin or betrothed.

  I ask, “Has this happened with anyone else?”

  “No one else has touched me but you and my fiancé. How you do that?”

  “I don’t know; it’s never happened before.”

  “Please don’t right now, I want to go out, I don’t want to be sleepy.”

  I touch her and her knees buckle, but she acts as if it is normal to have such power. She casually asks me to be careful. Yes, I will be careful. I have the strangest life.

  I strum a quiet Townes Van Zandt song on guitar and she says, “That’s nice, soft music.” The woman from Iraq jumps at any noise, even the sound of feet running on stairs. She can’t listen to loud rock or rap, she can’t take bright light, must wear her big sunglasses.

  At night she wakes from nightmares, has a frightening nightmare immediately after telling me the story of her fiancé and his bombed shop; her eyes closed in sleep, she relives the scene and I feel guilty for bringing on the nightmare. Any noise in a room above, a shoe dropping or a door slamming and she jumps in panic. I’m no physician, but these seem classic symptoms of trauma. The young American soldier in the graveyard may suffer from the same set of ailments, the war that always follows the war.

  Odd that I meet both in Italy, two brains creased slightly by trauma, two brains moving through train stations of beautiful flowering vines and thuggish teens.

  I heard the Iraqi woman weep on the phone to her mother, when a connection worked. Often her phone rang briefly and then went dead. I bought her time at a grubby internet café. She told her mother all was well in Rome, she didn’t want her mother to worry.

  We’ll talk soon, she said to her mother, God willing. She often ends sentences with this careful phrase: God willing.

  “If there is a God,” I commented once.

  “No if!” she said. “No if. Believe me, there is a God.”

  Is it the same God George Bush believes in? Perhaps my childhood faith will return and I will believe, will be an instrument. Am I taken care of? Sometimes it seems so.

  The woman from Iraq has such faith in God, that God will care for her, but she must sell the gold ring from her handsome brother who loves her, she must enquire into jewelry or coin shops. She can’t understand why this has happened, her father trapped in his eerie house, the old land of Persia laid low, his daughter exiled in a strange land, an orphan who is not an orphan, a widow who is not a widow, Babylon destroyed and giant tanks lumbering through the garden, tanks in the garden where we began as Adam and Eve. Then Adam and Eve forced to pack their bags, exiled to a less fashionable suburb.

  The woman from Iraq’s last email to me: Happy Birthday, I wish you the best wishes, I hope I’m the first one who remember your birthday, have a nice day and might be when I have time will do it again coz I will be busy tomorrow, have fun and wish you the best.

  Her name translates as some kind of desert blossom. And like her fiancé, she vanishes as if never there, like an ancient civilization, like dew leaving a blossom as the sun rises. No answer on her phone, no reply to email, no answer to a knock at her door. Weeks walk on and I finally receive email from her, but it’s spam, her email account hacked. I see her name, but it is not really her, she has been taken over, a regime change.

  At a hockey arena in Canada I heard a man say, “My truck’s got the same tranny as a tank in Eye-rack.” I never thought I’d meet someone who’d been crushed by an Abrams tank in Iraq. I hope the woman from Iraq finds a home, perhaps with her relatives in Chicago, a quiet home in the world.

  Bush stands on an aircraft carrier in his flight jacket and Father Silas is working in his curtained hotel room when I drop by to return a book on art in Naples. Out of the blue Father Silas tells me that his favourite sister is a serious addict.

  “She wakes up each morning and it’s a fight to not have a drink, not use something. I’ve seen it first-hand.”

  So Father Silas detests levity about staggering drunks or stoners and he loathes people profiting from giant pub crawls. My eyes open: so this is why he is always angry at the group’s manic moronic drinking, so angry at Ray-Ray’s APPRENTICE ALCOHOLIC pub crawl T-shirt, this is why he got in my face when I mentioned the cool little Italian-American Irish pub.

  “I worry some in the group will be on that same road because of Rome, and I don’t want to encourage it. That boy from Madison, blotto every night, but he makes it for every class or trip, up wearing dark shades in the morning. He’s coping, which is a bad sign. I don’t want something like that to start on my watch.”

  What about me, am I also coping on his watch?

  If he told the group about his sister they might understand his anger, not dismiss him as a Puritan out to kill the party, to ruin Italy. Can one hold up a sign? My sweet baby sister is a heavy-duty addict; please cut me a little slack.

  “More vino?”

  “Yes please.”

  “I like to do a good thing now. Like today at the elevator, so they think about it and pass it on and it keeps going. It makes my day, it really makes my day.”

  “A good feeling. I think I’m getting to that.”

  “Mary, you’re almost there.”

  “Ninety-five per cent?”

  “No.”

  “Ninety-one?”

  “No, eighty.”

  “Only eighty, only eighty.”

  “Sorry I’m so mean, I’m terrible, but Mary, I couldn’t lie to you.”

  Go ahead and lie, I think on my terrace, please lie to Mary. For fuck’s sake, tell her she is 90 per cent.

  A lightning storm hangs over the dark mountains, an X-ray shudder, a heart attack of bleached light, then the world brought back to dark purple, back to now, a form of time travel, two worlds at once. Near our high terrace an invisible dog speaks in an urban cave and the barking sound echoes into every neighbourhood wall. Which window or room is the dog? The woman from Iraq was not used to dogs; in Iraq they are stray curs or guard dogs, associated with fangs or power, not a favoured pet in your bedroom and never on your bed.

  Eve loves animals, bends to address every dog and cat she spies. This invisible dog speaks to something in the night of lightning and the two women on the next terrace speak their lines to the night as if in a play and I hear every word, yet my eyes ne
ver know their keen faces. Now I stop, now I close my terrace door on their secret mix of bonhomie and sadness.

  We all believe we have a corner on sadness. In our Jetson future perhaps sorrow will be valued as a renewable domestic resource. The immense power of sorrow will light our giant glass houses and pay the tab for our therapy and plastic surgery. In our jeremiad Jetson future they will mine our misery the way we frack the earth for shale gas pinned there like a cage wrestler. Our sorrow will fuel beautiful sports cars and sleek machines to Mars, our sorrow will employ our children’s nannies and reverse invasions and rescue the euro and dollar and make shuddering markets rise in joy, our reliable sources of domestic sorrow will make brokers rejoice with champagne smiles behind their complex buzzers and floodlit gates and blank limos.

  An animal speaks to lightning and a piano echoes tidy counterpoint. My small room sways above you, orbiting in a beautiful Roman sky, and the blind man walks our clean halls with his clicking white stick: Will you please ask them to be quiet!

  He can’t stop the raucous partiers, those who drink themselves blind. I close my eyes and see Eve at the black sand beach in the bay under the volcano, her pale form stretched to the black sand — like looking at a negative. The blind man wanders eternally, I expect him to carry a lantern at noon, Diogenes searching the halls for an honest man, Diogenes searching the deck of an aircraft carrier lurking in the gloom offshore.

  I walk down the stairwell with my eyes shut, I admire the blind man, I feel I owe him that much, but on the stairs I fail, I have to open my eyes, I have to look. Train your eye, he seems to suggest, see better, live better.

  I will try. We try on mysterious shoes, have mysterious offspring. One child wants to be a priest, one wants to be a pirate. The snake-handler and I are like Adam and Eve; we felt exempt from the fang, then something changed. We sin and are forgiven, we fly to and fro, we are on earth, then we are in the heavens, then we are not, we are on earth, then we are back in the silent cup of stars, then we are not.