Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  No, that can’t be true, I insist.

  Yes, yes, Pliny said he couldn’t breathe, he sat down and couldn’t stand up and the party was afraid of suffocation, of being smothered in layers of lava and ash, fire and stones raining on their heads, they thought it the end of the world, they walked away and left Pliny out there in the cinders, laid him on one of his own sails for a last bed. They are as bad as we are, sinners all of us. Don’t be disappointed.

  I’ll try to not be disappointed. My cousin leaves me over and over, on a bicycle, in a kayak, but she has come back over and over, calm as Janus, divided as Janus. We made a bed of a sail, a bed of the grass and earth, pillows under her, the same pillow tied to Pliny’s head. Think of life as the fun between heart attacks. I see another firefly hover, a tiny lit bulb in the air, a tiny lit bulb near my brain, and I feel charmed, an omen. The past was so good and I have such faith in the future. I love the future just because it is so nicely vague; the future’s so vague I have to wear shades.

  The pale statues buy knock-off sunglasses from North African street pedlars. Priapus says, “Keep an eye out for that crazy little bear. He’s scratched up all the trees and last week the little bugger scarfed my burrito.”

  I can’t stop thinking of Pliny’s undignified death on the burning plain. A tall American man glares at our procession of talkative statues lugging drums of grease past the Vatican.

  “Now what in Sam hell?”

  He turns to his wife. “When we get back home, at church?” His Dockers hold a beautiful crease, he looks like he once flew jets and commanded aircraft carriers.

  “Yes, honey?” says his spouse.

  “I’m not giving another damn cent.”

  His wife stands frozen, her eyes linger on Priapus’s dangling gifts. Can this elephant trunk be real? He could pick up peanuts with it.

  Near the wife’s feet a swarthy man lies face down as if the sidewalk is a movie screen to be studied; the swarthy man refuses to look up at the crowds milling and wheeling by the Vatican walls, but his hand is stretched out for alms.

  Dark lumps push out from his scalp: are they a true disease? The lumps resemble small wooden knobs attached to his head, like stained knobs fashioned from smooth dark-grained wood. In Rome we are learning about craft, art. Can I have confidence, can I believe in his affliction of the head? Can I have faith?

  The Bible makes some obscure point about a camel and the eye of a needle, Jesus kicked over the salvers and tables of the money-changers. A woman knocks the Pope down in front of St. Peter’s, a group of radical women lift their tops in front of St. Peter’s, they show their naked breasts as a protest about breasts, breasts protesting about breasts, another group of women shouts, Manten tus rosarios fuera de mis ovarios, keep your rosaries off our ovaries.

  A man bloodies the PM while shaking hands, and we all line up for gelato the colour of tulip petals. I may join Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty Party. Faith or belief is too tender a thing for me, I must trust it to a larger organization. It’s a non-stop party, I gather; the politician leans to offshore accounts and underage models, complains his petulant wife.

  A mayor of a seaside town south of Rome is murdered for trying to stop illegal developments on the seashore; there are men with guns and suitcases of money and they want more suitcases of money and they want to build more apartments on the seashore.

  Is the man prone on the sidewalk a gypsy? A Turk? Croatian? Albanian? He might also like suitcases of money. We tiptoe around his extended arm wondering whether the doorknob lumps on his head are real or a con job to elicit sympathy and more coins. Others tell me this mottled man has been doing this for years, they always see this cousin of Lazarus the leper, his prone body part of the sidewalk scenery. Doves gather around us like my doubts. Like religion, like relations, how to know what is real?

  Before she left, my cousin lay pale as a statue under my hand, my white body creme over her back, and this Lazarus lying on the sidewalk on his face dark as a collier, one arm angled out to beg, waiting for the dogs to lick his sores. Is he one of the People of Liberty? Is Lazarus invited to the bunga bunga parties in Milan to eat what falls from the table?

  We must move on to our reward, our cash money, we move our drums of grease across the burning pumice. And the statues have a gig later tonight playing Fleshtones covers and some R&B in the cellar near Via Cola di Rienzo; we get one free drink; I’ll sit in on harmonica, try out a Bullet mic with my new silver chromatic, the one the Pope failed to give me.

  The street by the cellar is named after Cola di Rienzo, a rebel and Roman tribune who, like Mussolini, wanted to rule Rome and unify Italy as one kingdom. One Pope had him imprisoned, but he was freed by the next Pope. One mob loved him and one mob burnt his palace and chased him. Cola ran in disguise, but they caught him and cut him apart. So many knives and we have such thin skin. Now people shop for purses and shoes and walk little dogs on his street, on Via Cola di Rienzo.

  The other statues are resentful of Priapus, the way he loves to show off his epic gland.

  “Last time we bring him along,” mutters one statue.

  “He’s going to ruin my fifty-dollar buzz,” adds another.

  “I get tired of looking at that donkey dick.”

  “What a douche.”

  “Yeah guys, you know, I think I’m gonna jet. Peace out.”

  We resent Priapus, yet we have a strange pride in just knowing him. You should see this thing! We even tell our wives and girlfriends about his gifts, which might be dangerous if they become curious to know more, to become intimately acquainted with such a formidable phallus.

  The swarthy Lazarus lies begging face down on a wide sidewalk below the Vatican walls, tourists forced to step around his one outstretched arm and body. They cross the street to join a lineup at the bustling gelato shop. Well, which flavour do you choose?

  At night our mouths fill with dough and oil and wine in a republic of noisy hours. I consume Italy and Italy consumes me, devours me like a woman, I love it, love the wild sea and crazy cliffs and hilltop vistas and then the smudged slums on the horizon like magic, spires vibrating over the rails like a charcoal etching and we step off the train into the tremors and treasures of each Italian city.

  The skinny hotel thief must have tagged me; in the mirror I found blood and a scratch on my head and by the morning I had a very minor shiner. Was he wearing a ring? The scratch angled from the corner of my left eye and up and over my forehead.

  I’m a night owl, I saw a figure drop onto my terrace; I am territorial; moving without thought I tackled him. He fell easily, surprised by me, but he rolled to his feet like a cat and in that motion may have hit out with a quick fist, though I have no memory of a blow.

  Then the thin hotel thief disappeared, a wraith running hand and foot up the wobbly lattice of flowers and across the roof to leap the gap to the next roof. I did not follow the thief and I was wrong about Marco the American intern and Elena the smoking Spanish woman; I wondered if they were guilty and clearly I am no Sherlock Holmes. But I am the only one to know the thief Barabbas; I pushed his solid chest, brushed his shirt, we touched each other, intimate, connected as if by a rope, even though he flew home over the Roman roof.

  I will fly home from Europe eventually, I think, but I’ve lost my sense of home. I can’t sleep after the fight with the thief, I am awake all night, my head an adding machine fuelled by adrenalin. Nostos, to return home to be killed in the clawfoot bath, a knife in the leg. I miss my family, my children, that concrete manifestation of a home. Who murdered all the Popes? What makes a home? Drops of my own blood lie on the terrace tiles. Can you change your spots if you don’t really want to change? Groups of us in an eternal city avoiding eternal questions.

  Like my aunt, Angelo the hotel owner warns me to stay away from pickpockets and gypsies; Angelo won’t serve them in any of his businesses.

  “How does one tell they are gypsies?” I ask.

  “That’s easy. They look li
ke gypsies. They all have TB and they spit.”

  My aunt says, “True Italians have nice straight legs, but the gypsies and Albanians have crooked legs, from the knee down their legs curve out like a chair. I can tell who is who by looking at their knees and calves. And the Albanians are especially arrogant, while Italians are modest.”

  I climb the stairs to my room to pack my bags. I am forced to abandon Rome and my campaign to be Pope has come to nothing. I blame Tom Hanks; Tom Hanks really dropped the ball. I hope the next Pope will be better than this German one. The slaves escape from Egypt and aspire to middle management, to the soul’s erosion in the service sector; did I leave a CD in the hotel room? I must find Irena the chambermaid and give her a good tip, a gift for her work. She is Croatian; I assume she is not a gypsy. Rome has been sacked before and the locals worry it is happening again. The woman from Iraq has vanished, visited by her uncle and then she is not seen in the neighbourhood again.

  Out on my terrace I hear splashing sounds and gleeful voices below; I peer over the edge. In this insane heat someone has given my orphans a wading pool! This makes me very happy. They will never know that I care, that I watch from far above like a powerless God, that I look out and I am pleased for them and their little wading pool and their oranges.

  And now my latest spam email seems apropos. Dearest My Friend: This is to inform you that in my department we have the sum of 3.5 Million euro ready to transfer to you as you proves to me your humbleness and ready to use the money to help the Orphans in the world. This business is secret.

  Our secret. We are all playful orphans seeking to splash each other. Our needs are simple. Now I need to call a taxi. This final steadfast servant arrives outside the hotel door, the most silent man in Italy, perhaps the only silent man in Italy, and to this driver I gladly hand over my gold and last coins and folded bills of colour, the last of my amusing euros, and the quiet Italian steers me to the portals of an airport named after the genius Leonardo da Vinci, west of Rome (in my head the suicide Vic Chesnutt sings in his sad voice, he was looking, but he didn’t find his hospital island).

  I’m not happy to leave Italy, but I am happy I came, I saw, I want to come back ASAP, vorrei un biglietto di ritorno. Ritorno: that sounds so nice, return to the southern light, the light dusting of freckles on my cousin’s lovely skin. Red wine knocked over on a linen tablecloth, blood spilt on the sheets; in memory Eve’s world is so vivid. Eve ordered strangled priests, Eve pulled my hair and kicked me in bed, muttering a private language. In Naples or Pompeii, what were they saying, who were they kicking when the volcano buried them? The sea glistering below the volcano, like when skiing, my poor eyes bloodshot from the excess of light and beauty.

  In his fiery kingdom Pliny the Elder couldn’t walk and was buried in ash, they came back to find his body in the cremated world, the buried world, and now the Beautiful Scooter Couple dies on the narrow Amalfi coast road, the road so narrow, a wall to one side and empty sea air on the other side.

  A squadron of cyclists clad in tight fabric passes our bus when we slow and then we pick up speed and pass the slick cyclists on a hill. With their helmets and goggles and long thin limbs they resemble bent crickets.

  And scooter and bus race toward each other on the southern coast. Such stunning views, and the musical bus horn like a pleasing trumpet flourish at each corner and tunnel. These enchanted heights by the endless sea; it is clear why the ancients felt close to the gods here. On the bus three local women sit with bags of groceries from the larger town, lemons on sale everywhere. The women chat and do not bother with the view, while I stare down the deep ravines and scary cliffs, drinking in some kind of image burn.

  Vespa means wasp. The red scooter weaves quickly through cars, wind in their face, the scooter streaks through a galaxy of colours and roars inside a brief noisy tunnel and they accelerate to pass a slow car and in the next sunny curve the oncoming bus strays slightly over the line and the red scooter bounces off the bumper of the bus and breaks into pieces, the delicate scooter devolves into wheels and side mirrors and the bright orbs of plastic signal lights.

  The boyfriend’s helmet stays on his head, but the young woman’s helmet flies away and she skids across the road, her legs bare, no helmet, the ruins of her dress and torn skin, and the young woman tumbles past the cliff edge like luggage tossed from a balcony.

  A gap in the low wall and she is simply gone from us, she falls past the cliff turning in air, her legs up behind her and spinning down toward the green sea and her green eyes aim up at the clouds. The boy sits on the flat road far above as if alone on a stage, in shock, helmet on like a diver, his suit torn like sausage casing; the injured boy studies his broken leg and he lives to know that with his scooter he has killed his beautiful girlfriend, the girl I stared at in Rome, the young woman who tenderly gave his tongue juice as he stood with his helmet still on his head. An idea blooms now in his head, quiet as the white towel that once fell from her hip.

  Many Greeks sailed these seas before Christ did, before Christ became a fisher of men, pirate kings owned this rich coast and invasion fleets waited, nervous men in rows, bombers filling a sky overhead with silk. So many voices calling, the women jostling with their groceries from town, but the bus driver can’t open the bus door, bent by the impact to the front of the bus. The insect cyclists pass us again and the boyfriend crawls toward the edge of his stage and we can’t climb off the bus to stop him.

  The young man in the torn black suit glances around our narrow arena, limestone wall rising to one side, empty air dropping on the other. The young man stares at us, his audience stuck in our seats, at the bus that hit him, the bus that hit her. He raises himself on one good arm, pushes with his good arm, and like a crow he drops over into space to follow her down.

  And at that moment I begin to understand the language of race and age and grief, that you can have everything at once and suddenly nothing at once, like an orange bullet train shrieking past your platform in Dublin, blurred windows there in a streak you can touch and then just disturbed air ringing above the tracks, nothing else, the train vanished, but that echo of reverb still hanging.

  Both of them fly into space, such a height, and both fall to the sea, our Icarus in his tapered Italian suit and his pretty girlfriend hanging over the sea’s glare and boats with white scar wakes and lean sails. They fall from the Path of the Gods and meet again on the ancient beaches pinned at the base of these spectacular cliffs and SITA men in blue shirts wave small cars around the scarred wreck and a TV helicopter comes to eat the night with its pure light.

  The beautiful couple falls into new worlds and now our plane rises toward another world, now I fly to the far west in a giant machine, we have liftoff, hundreds of rows of passengers thrust west in the night, air clubbing through the gnashing turbines and giant black wheels spinning as they tuck themselves up into the Boeing undercarriage, tires and turbines and rows of seated travellers strapped into a dome of stars and jet contrails and blinking lights that betray our route in the sky to citizens who might gaze up at us from below.

  Our plane’s route takes us high under a ghostly cupola, our plane moves inside the jet-blue ceiling of a vast starry chapel, but are we amazed?

  Instead of being amazed, most of us choose to close our eyes, to drift into a preliminary form of vibrating sleep.

  As we voyage to vibrating slumber in that rocketing world the uniformed cabin crew wheels out their clumsy carts to serve all of us uniform trays of meals and drinks. Hundreds of our anonymous heads, over and over, day after day. The crew despise us (I would they were clyster-pipes). They don’t know what I saw and know of Italy, they can’t know the racket and form held inside my quiet head.

  While held like a brain inside our plane’s strange roiling motion I remember Pico toiling endlessly to serve us in the family hotel and I remember those workers digging out a cellar by hand and bucket and families unloading crates of lemons and peppers and crusty loaves in the tin-roof market
at dawn and O my love, will you and this song by the Decemberists always make me sad?

  I remember the young woman Irena washing the aqua tiles of my room with her hair (how I wanted her in my bed, the giant white bed floating in my tiny room, but I knew it would never happen) and in Rome they allow no high-rises and my floor tiles mimic peacock colours of the sea, mirror the collapsing wave’s complex codes and sine curve and the sea’s secret inhabitants.

  Luke the Apostle sits beside me on the plane, he’s cool, he asks his seatmates, Who is better, the one who sits or the one who serves? Every day we take what they offer to us, the cabin crew, the chambermaid, the baker, the waiter, every day we take what they give us, what they serve, muttering grazie, grazie, as they bend to our needs, our care, our eternal care.

  High above that charmed parish of villas lit by milky Italian moonlight, high above our planet, we simply sit. We do not swoon or high-five. We sit and we hold serviettes to our thin lips, listening to George Jones (put your sweet lips) or Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” and at our plane’s tiny windows our tiny eyes swivel in the crowded heavens above that turbulent benevolent boot of a peninsula (a little closer to the clyster-pipes), and we devour our last spicy repast and we turn our heads to those serving and we wonder and hope, if we ask meek as orphans, might there be a little more.

  And then we travel back to sleep and we travel back to the New World with ancient dreams of Rome’s glory and our lack of glory and Janus giving you the eye in Trastevere and the black shamrock sprayed on a wall by the river and under the Vatican my naked cousin Eve showering on a rooftop and the Pope blessing a woman’s sunlit form.

  Rome’s rooftops so raggedly beautiful, Italy so beautiful, the lunatic world so beautiful in its appetites and addictions; we must embrace the world purely, wantonly, for we passengers are alive and in motion, we are free, we are not lying at the bottom of a cliff. The skinny little thief hit me once in the face and I can live with that.