Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Stray dogs run past and I sit outside the hotel at a wobbly wicker table with a huge cold bottle (grande, per favore), waiting for her to call or stroll in the front entrance. Two dogs stop and lie at my feet. Dogs here seem to like me, the strays identify with me, though I suppose Hitler or Pol Pot could make the same claim.

  A woman walks past with a leashed dog that lunges at a stray at my feet.

  “Julio!” she calls.

  She looks at me as if it’s my fault — does she think every stray dog is mine? I keep buying big bottles in the lobby and the old man has to rise each time from watching his tiny TV, he does not approve. More beer! Why does the Canadian not drink wine?

  Sumerians in the Fertile Crescent invented beer, for which I thank them, but then they disappeared from the Land of the Civilized Lords. Maybe a connection, maybe they liked the brew too much. I suppose I could demand big bottles of marmalade.

  See you there Tuesday.

  Four.

  Four.

  Now is the appointed hour, now it is five, now it is nine.

  Trying to seduce a young American woman on the train to Naples is somehow more honourable than paying a prostitute in Pompeii. Wherein lies the logic? Abby and I were walking and kissing after the train, strangers on a train, two brains connected in the huge station’s glass walls.

  Two parts of the brain — the insula (in the cerebral cortex) and the striatum — are players in processing intense pleasure and the development of sexual desire into love. The striatum is related to our leaning to drug addiction, our obsessive desire to see more of that person (or drug), that person paramount in our thoughts, her face like a sunny movie in my head. The cerebral cortex calls the shots on memory and perfume, the charged glance and smell of skin, the strata of clothes strewn, the sound of a cork popping as a Stratocaster plays, or whales breathing and diving in the bay, images that linger, that play in the sea in the head.

  South Park is on television in Italian, so I assume the match is done and it didn’t go well. The Germans pass my wicker table, still speaking solemnly about the economy: “They can no more balance a budget than balance a piano on the end of their nose, but I will admit they can make coffee!”

  I touched Abby’s neck and smelled her skin, was allowed a view under her blouse, but I will never quite get under that enticing black bra. Abby decides I must wait, or something happened to her in Naples. How to know? I can’t live like this much longer. I thought she’d make me whole somehow, keep the pieces together, she would be my duct tape.

  All these people packing the street and shops: how do they do it? They move directly, they know what they want! They function as if they designed themselves and no need for duct tape.

  Maybe she is delayed or ill, I worry she has been robbed in Naples or hit by the same model of Pontiac I used to have, and I’ll never know. I wait hours at my table, sick with the knowledge of failure, that yet another person is standing me up. It’s too many in a row, I’m not designed to take this. As the dispirited boxer said, No más. Something has changed in me since Natasha. I have been resilient in the past, tough, even callous, but now I have no defences, a child, an infant to a milky breast, welcome, you have been born into a puzzling world full of slaps and kisses and nipples and crowbars. No más.

  Do you think there will come a day when I will hang out with someone calmly and happily as part of a normal day? To just walk and maybe hold hands and look up at the flawless blue sky and perhaps an eagle there in eyesight, a blithe eagle circling on thermals and we agree that really is something or maybe in Sorrento we glimpse the sea through the crumbling Greek Arch, hey let’s take a picture, and perhaps a cold drink on the beach, foaming surf and a bar with shady umbrellas where the woman says six euros, special price for you, and the next place way out on the pier, breakers rolling right under us, they charge only four euros for a good beer, some special price, and ha ha we laugh because it’s funny, the world is funny and sunny, and kiss kiss, and maybe a movie or floodlit green fountains or mottled ruin or a bus on a cliff and it could be love, it could work, it could be a pipe dream or it could be fantastic. But if I ever use the word closure or say, I’m blessed, truly blessed, then you have permission to kick me.

  “What’s the story, morning glory?”

  “What’s up, fool?” Ray-Ray and Tamika stroll toward my wicker table.

  “Look what the cat dragged in. Pull up a chair.” I buy them anything they want (name your poison), happy to see them, to break my funk, my lowered spirits, happy to have their company at my lonely table in Fortress Europe.

  Stucco walls line the road. A yellow sky smeared like oil paint and above that yellow smear perches a mumbling thunderstorm. No rain in weeks and now we drink inside a giant jagged tunnel, light waning after a bright boiling day. As the new weather alters the air’s colour, the street moves through many shades of mauve, and finally it rains, canary-coloured plaster going dark in rain, in welcome rain.

  Thunder and lightning reverberate over the ruins and the volcano and my moods; our nervous hotel dog opens his jaws and speaks to the sparking sky, loose dogs loping everywhere. In wicker chairs we watch the wild sky and street and rain dogs.

  The dogs running free make Tamika jumpy. When we walk to a piazza, dogs trot out of nowhere, surrounding us while we seek a bank machine that will take our cards. Ray-Ray needs to move small payments from one credit card to another to keep the cards alive like premature infants. I remember doing the same when I got out of school and was unemployed, courting my wife, paying the bar tab with plastic and keeping the cash others threw in for their part of the bill.

  “Damn! That’s not right!” Tamika exclaims, swinging her head on a swivel to track the dogs. “Where are all the dogs coming from? I don’t mind them on leashes, but I don’t like them running free.”

  It is perhaps a naive or racist notion, but I had assumed Tamika would be in favour of creatures being free. I’m free, I’m no longer married, and how odd that concept seems.

  Ray-Ray stops to talk with every black he sees in Italy. He grabs my arm, asks me, “Where is Nowhere?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those guys I just talked to say they live in Nowhere.”

  “They’re homeless? They live on the street?”

  “No! A real place, man, they said they live in Nowhere.”

  “A place called Nowhere.”

  “It’s way up north, man, they said it’s a good place, I should come visit.”

  “It’s a country up north?”

  “Yeah, man, way up there.”

  “You mean Norway?”

  “Yes, man! Nowhere! It’s a good place. I should go up and see Nowhere, I don’t dig it here in Italy.” Ray-Ray lowers his voice to a confidential tone. “In fact, I think I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “Give it a chance.”

  “Man, they like me way more in China. People bow to you! China is smart, they might be communist, but they’re business-minded, they know you’re there for a reason, and they want you there. If you need something they want to help! And the Chinese love basketball, man, they thought I was NBA, girls wanted to know if I knew Kobe Bryant and Yao Ming and them. They don’t like me here in Italy, so why should I give it a chance? Italy is closed, man, just a way different mentality, folks here don’t have a heart the size of a pea.”

  Ray-Ray has disappeared a number of times when our group is on the Metro (he had lost his pass) or in the halls of a museum, falls behind the group and vanishes. He says he ran into some great people from Nigeria who had a barbershop in Rome; in fact, they owned the whole block, all Nigerians. He likes that idea. While we gazed at vases and ancient marble he spent the whole day happily hanging around the barbershop, drinking beer and chatting with all who came and went. They could tell Ray-Ray had not spent all his life in Nigeria, his face was smooth and unmarked and not showing hardship. He was in a great mood after, he liked his barbershop hours better than strolling the grand boulevards or standi
ng under dead saints and pillars and great marbles.

  In Italy we walk such crowded cities and underground grottoes stuffed with grinning skeletons crowded in bunks and deep hallways like mine shafts and then on trains we see so much empty countryside between the big cities. Millions crammed tight into projects and slums and bulldozers pushing mountains of trash, yet so much wide open country just past the door, just down the road a piece. I suppose the same is true in Canada, the same all around the world.

  We don’t want lebensraum, we shun the orchard above the stream and we love cement curbs and peeling walls. If we are not born inside the city we move there as soon as we can, we follow our bliss, our desire for hustle and excitement and dumpsters and rats in stairwells and staple guns and opiates, to hang out on a concrete corner or line up for a bonehead job and pick each other’s pocket and scent doorways with the ammonia of our urine and exist without leafy trees or pink blossoms, our desire to avoid God and nature and to take elevators, to ride machines climbing toward boxes set atop boxes like bone ossuaries set in the sky, our manic desire to stand on each other’s head to the soundtrack of machines on the walls and machines past the window circling the sky and machines rumbling the ground under our feet.

  Ray-Ray said earlier that he felt sick, maybe he caught something in China or on the plane.

  I ask, “How you doing today?” I shouldn’t have joked that they probably spit in our food.

  “Man, thank you for asking. I could be dying and that dude running this show doesn’t care.” Ray-Ray says, “I’ve had it, man, I’m leaving tomorrow.” He forgets that he says these words to me every day.

  Once again to the trains, all the trains in the gloaming and buses beneath olive valleys and aqueducts and trefoil arches in plumes of diesel. Factions of our group always on the move like vapour, up and down, back and forth over roses and skeletons, changing towns and minds, changing trains and tunnels, crowded platforms and subterranean stairs and no seats on the trains and such sweaty carriages under the looming volcano, and cactus and lava fields and burning rock once taken for portals to hell.

  A shantytown burns below a freeway (is it a Roma enclave?) and I know I could drip my endless sweat over the class-war conflagration and easily extinguish the flames. I have never sweated like this, I’m sure our collective sweat will pool on the floor of the train until our ankles are deep in sweat, in aqua vitae, the salt water of life.

  Naples, the city streets at night — ah, I can still conjure the scent of crazed Vespas in the heaped garbage and brilliantined pickpockets — then to pull ourselves from a mattress at dawn for another woozy train to Pompeii’s sun-bright ruin, and a milk-train back again to Naples in sore shoes to climb a narrow thirteenth-century alley of cobbles and scooters and skewback abutments and we dodge the Vespas and wolf down the best food ever laid against my tongue.

  The Naples station, where I last saw Abby, makes me feel like a loser, the Naples station a sad axis. I buy a ticket at a machine. All the redolent names, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Sorrento, Amalfi, Positano, and soon we will be back in the bosom of peach-coloured Rome.

  We climb on the last train and down the aisle. I take a seat on the right. Ray-Ray takes a seat on the left of the aisle. Ray-Ray tells me he is the second son of second wife, he says this is lower status than the eldest son. This was years back, in Nigeria. I never know what to believe, what is real.

  Ray-Ray says to me, “Bet you five euro no one will sit by me.”

  Ray-Ray chases all the chambermaids and is a bit of a con man, but he is a cream puff at heart and he loves life, loves the world. But he is so tall and black; the Italians fear his looks.

  “Will you take my bet?” Ray-Ray asks me. “Five euro.”

  Sure, why not. Someone will sit by him. The seats around me fill up. The rest of the train fills. The feeling of pure will as the train shunts out of the station, every seat taken except for three empty blue seats around Ray-Ray. I pay him his five euro.

  In Rome we traverse train station tunnels and subway stairs and we stumble up into ground-level sunlight and cross the street to a tiny corridor of mirrors that passes for a hotel lobby, mirrors offering so many puzzled burnt versions of me coming through the door.

  This narrow hallway seemed lunatic the very first time I entered, funhouse mirrors and a frenzied school group trying to check in, herds of children screaming and climbing heaps of crocodile luggage — Italy seemed crazy, but now to my eyes the mirrored enclosure is endearing, normal.

  Monique at the reception desk hasn’t moved from her perch and she sends me to my same room, the sunny terrace and fat ceramic urns waiting at the top of the stairs, which pleases me, as if Monique the French woman and Marco the American intern kept the room empty and waiting just for me, even though I hadn’t reserved it or asked. And that lovely feeling, at the sink washing dark mountain grapes that float and bump in water pooled in my hands, as if cupping a cold stream, chilling my fingers. Rome! Grapes! See, I am not always complaining, not always morbid.

  Eve finds me for a drink and chat on my high terrace. Eve comes and goes from city to city, my cousin is contained, I know nothing of the rest of her life, of Switzerland’s dark peaks and fireworks by the quicksilver lake, the Jardin Anglais, the weed and eau-de-vie. I’m living near the top of a tree; I stare out at Rome and the green parrot in the tall trees pleases me; trees sway in green hours and I water my flowers again. No sign of the smoking Spanish woman in the atrium, but my orphans and nuns below make me happy.

  Eve agrees with me. “It’s so beautiful here that it makes me happy; the colours, that sun every morning. But I have trouble with happiness; I’m suspicious of it. My mother always said I was a very serious child. I should eat something. You’re always laughing at me, mocking me.”

  “I am not mocking you.” She always thinks the worst of me. I swear on a stack o’ bibles that I am more mocked than mocking.

  A light dusting of freckles on my cousin’s lovely skin, like an animal imprint. I like them. She hates the freckles, uses lemon juice to fade them.

  My cousin had two periods in one month. Short cycles, she says, and lots of blood. One day I saw her wince from a cramp and gave her some of my painkillers. She washes her sheets in her shower and dries them on my terrace, which has far more room and sun.

  “You must wash blood quickly before it sets. Do you ever think about what it’s like to have a period, to have blood flow from you? What if your penis was gushing blood? Do you ever think about what it’s like for women?”

  “I certainly will think about it now.”

  She says it so casually, but now I can’t lose an image of my cock gushing blood. I give her raisins for iron, give her a bottle of stout, which also has iron.

  “Did you know,” she says, “that the beer bottle was invented in 1850?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “What did frat boys do before 1850? Is the chemist’s open still? I am out of womanly aids.”

  We walk streets to the river and river walls; at the top of a dizzyingly high river wall, far above the Tiber, a couple reclines lazily on a bench dappled by plane trees, olive-coloured trees that look tortured, the skin flensed or peeling.

  “The Beautiful Scooter Couple,” whispers Eve, as if pointing out a doe and fawn that might bolt before we can steal their picture, as if pointing out minor Carnaby Street gods. The Beautiful Scooter Couple’s jaunty red Vespa leans on its kickstand while tiny Italian cars speed past, gleaming and frantic.

  The young woman gazes at a book while her boyfriend snoozes, his head resting lightly in her lap as she reads, a fashionably sleepy couple lounging at the top of a perilous wall, a steep embankment hewn of stone blocks, mattoni, and the sunny river far below.

  I envy this fabulous boy and girl, calmly part of their world, part of the bench and wall and shade trees — trunks muscled, priapic, the odd skin of the trees mottled like military camouflage — the boy and girl so relaxed with each other while just inches away
crazed Roman traffic assembles itself and tears away again and the Tiber flows under the high stone wall, our Italian couple perched at the edge of a precipice in such peace. They have such easy ownership of themselves!

  The Tiber below the precipice is a discouraging yellow-green, but fish are alive in the rilled murk. Melville called the Tiber a ditch, Hawthorne saw pease-soup, and David Garrick termed it a scurvy draught, but I have affection for the purling river.

  Breezes push the surface of the Tiber upstream in silent V shapes, as if the muscled river wants to swim overtop its own current.

  Eve hums almost inaudibly, “Let’s go down…Funkytown.”

  From the heights we stare down. In a bridge’s shade stand shirtless men fishing an ancient river. Eve studies the men’s shoulders and sun-lined features, Eve says, “Caesar, Nero, Caligula, or Christ, the fisher of men, any Pope, any time, you’d see the same faces down here by the water.”

  The shirtless men fish with red bait waiting on wax paper like vivid hamburger or crushed meat, some kind of blood language to the fish. Despite having been warned of robberies and thieves, I enjoy exploring the paths that hug the shore right at water level.

  Thanks so much for putting that song in my head: Funkytown!

  At the bench atop the cliff the scooter boy naps in the girl’s lovely lap, and then the boyfriend wakes and opens his eyes, looks about slowly, where am I, sleepy as a cat. Bemused at his befuddled expression she lowers her book. He says something in her ear and she lifts her face and laughs and as she laughs she pulls his arm tighter to her, a heartbreaking move to some of those watching, surely she must know that.