The Rotten Bridge
A Gypsy Love Story
By Paul McConnell
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Paul McConnell
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Part 1.
1.
I am coming to see YaYa and if you must that is the plot. That is always the plot. I’ve hung up my rail pass and the keys to my other life and I am drowning in a river of her. But let explain before I lose my breath, while I can still conjure her. Tonight I boarded a boat in defiance of anything sensible. You see a ferocious storm was battering the island and my stomach was doing flips ever since the pizzeria where I had to ask the waitress to turn on the water so I could use the toilet. Even the plumbing was rotten.
Really all the place had going for it was the waitress, the proprietor’s daughter, and isn’t that how it always goes—a shy girl with a stammer and bad teeth and yet homely good looks that somehow pull you in?
The truth is she reminded me of my sweet Cassi back home. Not her teeth really, or even her looks. Just because. Because I was missing her right then and she used to tell me stories about being an awkward young girl working at a Pizza Hut in Pennsylvania.
In Cassi’s stories as an only child she is stranded on an island too with nothing but her imagination. When she was a teenager all the boys made fun of her because deep down they were afraid she might actually say yes. She told me as much herself. Anybody that was nice to her, she said.
I get the same feeling with this one, standing in her mother's pizzeria in her wallpapered world of rock and roll. As she takes my order she points to posters and playbills from concerts she swears she's attended all over the world, mostly from monster rock bands whose heyday was before her time. She even has concert ticket stubs that put her at two ends of the earth on subsequent weeks and tour shirts to prove it.
She goes on about them while I eat. I can't take a bite without her. She arrived with the pizza like a condiment and sprinkled herself at my elbow, talking with a slowness that made me want to chew through the table. And now it was a tug of war between the cheese and her monologue and I didn't want to know about it. I was already sick of her suffering.
I put my head down and ate the rotten pizza. This poor girl was marooned on the island of Sardegna with a virtual link to the outside world and I wanted to strangle her with her apron. I wanted to put her on a lifeboat once and for all. I swear I would’ve bought her a ticket to Rome right then and helped her find a real live concert if I thought that’s what she wanted. But that would’ve made her sad. She would’ve felt dumb and cheated by her life.
She was better off dee-jaying from the kitchen where she was safe. She'd never catch on fire at a club that was over capacity and she'd never wake up alone in a busted-up hotel room. Maybe I should have listened to her broken record. She probably could have helped me. She probably could have sat me down outside and made me listen to that howling wind and those crazy birds hiding in the trees and she might have said something about devotion, about Cassi living out her own sentence of seven years with her vices intact, waiting for me to say yes to a family, waiting for me to come home from a summer romp in Europe, grown-up and acting like a man.
But that's rear-view tenderness after what I've done. Besides, I've already called YaYa, and if she didn't exactly jump at my idea to come to Rome, she didn't say no either. It would be worth the rough trip across the sea just to surprise her and see her face although I didn't expect a homecoming. She was about to lose her apartment because of me, and her job, and her old man was forever moving out, a tenuous balancing act than required more than the dirty umbrella I was offering.
I finished my meal and tipped the pizza girl. She stood in front of me, staring at my beat-up army pack, and dusting the flour from her delicate arms, while she mouthed the words to some U2 anthem. Her mother, who had been keeping an eye on me from behind the counter, now came out to say good-bye and shake her daughter free. She dried her hands on her apron and smiled. I was still their only customer. I got the feeling that if I grabbed the girl and walked her out of there no one would protest. I could take her to Rome just for the company and then pimp her off for being so pathetic. At least that’s what her mother’s eyes were telling me.
I stood up and lingered. I wanted to say something—that I was content, that the pizza was good, that they had a nice place but I couldn’t lie in their tongue. Instead I bought a melted ice cream and hiked to the tram that would take me to the harbor.
At the port cafe, after a couple of beers to steady my stomach, I went to the gift shop to buy some wine for the trip because that is how you make friends in the cheap seats, especially on the overnight leg.
I know because I’m always seated next to the lunatics. Recently I shared a train cabin with a Romanian prostitute who was border crossing illegally to work. She was going home on the red-eye with two very heavy duffel bags that I helped her situate.
Along the way, because we had nothing but my wine, she opened one of her body bags to show me that it was filled to the zipper with tiny cellophane packages that squeaked like mice when she dug in with her hands.
She sifted through them like a prospector and fed me, having me compare the different cakes and fillings, telling me they were like gold to her, and that to have them at home, locked in her bedroom, where she could play with them, stack them, cupboard them and select them was forty pounds of individually wrapped heaven.
Speaking of the cheap seats—there are those that will come later, like the fat German man on the long haul, the mountain that will roll over me and fart like a landslide in the night all the way from Naples to Rome. The one who will run fluids in the morning from every orifice as though the daylight has pierced holes in him. The one who will press his body into mine and make me visit Cassi with my free hand. If only I have the courage to open some wine ahead of time perhaps, but we will have to wait and see.
And then there is YaYa, the cause of all this, as she proposes to me, sitting on the floor between train cars, speaking of the next time she sees me and how I will go away again, almost in the same breath.
I could go on. But why? And why me, I wonder? What unlikely companions do I merit or confer?
In my defense I am not always such a willing partner but an empty bottle between strangers is a good book. And here, tonight, on this boat, another loose bunch, connected by the criminal underclass, and I hand them cigarettes and pour wine into styrofoam cups which I don’t like to use because they crackle like foil on your teeth.
I lift my glass and settle in for a rough night, glancing over two rows at a family sleeping under a single blanket. I could be next to them I guess—but it is the luck of the draw really. Both rows of seats were empty when I boarded and sat down. Somehow it is just my lot.
Later when I tell YaYa these stories, of all the attention and hospitality I’ve encountered, she will say it is because of me. The idea of it will please her though I can’t tell you why. Deep down I know it’s a lie. She will say that I am not a typical American, and there is that word again—simpatico—that I keep hearing, and that others can tell right off. I don’t take that as a compliment. I am very much an American, perhaps even among the worst of them. How does she not see that?
But I have lost myself again. The plot! Always the plot!
Back in Sardegna I stood on a sidewalk in Sassari in the rain with a forty-pound pack on my back, rotten pizza tearing my insides, as I consulted the cracked heavens and contemplated my next move.
Like I said, I knew well ahead of the coin toss where I was going, but the ritual has become important to me. The few Sardi's that were caught outside in the storm seemed to appreciate my sidewalk performance. I knew those old shepherds still prayed to the rocks and the wind and I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a few witnesses around in case I washed up later on the town.
I held up the oversized coin, an untarnished Kennedy from my childhood that I carry in a special flap of my wallet. It was like greeting an old friend and lately we had become very close. I spat on him and shined him a little and then I warmed him up in my palms like a pair of dice. Naturally, for full dramatic effect I had already positioned myself directly across the street from the Tyrennhia cruise line offices and I looked at it like this—that there ahead of me were the ticket counters and salespeople, and behind them a few streets, the harbor, and beyond that the sea, and thereafter a short train ride to Rome, and there of course waited YaYa—an unbroken chain starting with my reflection in the cloud dark windows.
I will cross the stormy sea for her. I will come in the night and will not sleep. In fact, I will stand on the moonlit prow for much of it, facing the gale-spit, and I will see her round face brooding on the sea, a pale green light wrapped under her chin, her big eyes love broke, the question formed partway on her generous lips and I might as well admit it, because it's true: I kissed those lethean waters that first night of her along the Tiber and fell in for good. Leaning in over the edge I caught the green breath of the dizzy current like a nipple on my upper lip and I have not been able to let go.
And now, stopping the boat in its tracks, she wants to know why? I answer her, knowing that everything passes, by kissing each eye whole again.
Is this sea crossing idiotic beyond the normal turn of events I wonder? I’ve yet to see this woman’s bed—though I have failed miserably with her elsewhere. Of course, when she learns of it, Cassi, for all her love and patience back home, will never speak to me again even though I pretend it is out of my hands, the result of a haphazard coin toss.
Is this romance or ridicule? I let in the voices of my other life, of those who would critique me from their desks or standing over diaper, of those who have forgotten what it feels like to want to die in love because that is how much you want to believe.
Why? They still want to know. Because the Tiber runs out to the sea, I answer, and it refuses no one. Because everything else becomes a lie if you wait long enough. Cassi back home planning a nursery and a wedding all to herself. Titti ramming her little buttercup into the corner of her office desk longing for me to return like the wind. The rotten pizza girl and her bad teeth. Springsteen. The Rolling Stones. Kiss. The Cure. Motorhead. U2. The World Wide Web. All the auctions and collections in her head and that other one, that bag of confectionary sugar behind the iron curtain. Bad teeth and a fucked out pussy. One big cavity of hunger and isolation everywhere you look. That’s why. Because I want to believe in something again. And I’ll keep flipping the coin until I get the answer I want.
2.
When the train pulls in at Termini I am relieved. I have finished something. It is like the end of a good chapter, or a book even. I have gone and come back and in a sense I am home. That is what Rome feels like and I am no sooner off the train than I am absorbed into the derelict familiarity around the station.
I cross over the pebbled walkways, behind the used bookstalls at the Piazza del Cinquecento, avoiding puddles of urine, to walk along the sculpture garden at the baths of Diocletian. I turn up the via Volturno and salute the familiar shops and cafes along the way. I cross the street to get a better look at Green Eyes, the girl at the parfumerie who sold me the potion that did nothing for YaYa. I pull into a familiar bar for a coffee—a bitter freddo that is so cold it hurts my teeth.
This is my neighborhood and I greet it like an old friend.
A short month ago I stumbled onto this land of my ancestors, having arrived on a second class train with a forty-pound pack that smelled like a Parisian phone booth. The next morning I woke to the scent of fresh laundry dripping on a line and mixing with potted basil on the balcony of my pensione. I got out of bed and put my feet down on the cool terrazzo floor and that's when I knew. I laid down and got up again, and again, and several more times. Up and down like that, the soles of my feet conforming to the uneven tile floor as if from a lifetime of such mornings.
Before I left the U.S. my father pressed me into contacting his last known relative, his great aunt, whom his mother was named after. She lived in Naples and no one in my family had ever met her. In three generations only my grandfather, who was shot on the Adriatic coast during WWII, and my father, a scullion in the Navy during Vietnam, had ever been to Italy.
In fact my father's ship pulled in to port near Rome the day I was born. A passing U.S. warship flashed the news to him as they did then by semaphore. There I was bounced across these flat blue waters of no return for the very first time, a curious cipher of safety orange signaling ship to ship, two entire machines of war tied up in a silent communication about a boy.
I once carried a black and white deckle-cut picture of my father taken later that evening. In it he has run aground, drunk on the news of his first child, and is swimming in a Roman fountain after having sampled a bit of the sweet life. There he was- the picture taken by one of his mates who no doubt saw him back to the ship safely- in his navy whites, all one hundred and thirty of him soaked down and draped over the jaws of some mythological beast like a wounded Popeye.
That is the story of my birth in my father's head and heart, as solid a man as there is, a man who had already found the joys of family to be his calling and wasn't searching for anything but a ticket home.
Next I draw up along the market on Via Vicenza and now I am really home. These are the many faces among the carts of hosiery and earth-ripe produce that I have spent mornings with fresh from my bed at Luna. Day in and day out they are here, except Sunday, and it is always the same procession only I am coming upon them in reverse now, because Luna, or Pensione Katy, is to the other side.
I walk past the hanging bolts of fabric brought here across trade routes from the East, over the great Salt Road perhaps. There are the sun-burnt leather wallets and belts from Tuscany; the baby clothing and lingerie from sex and population centers like Romania or China; the thin socks and t-shirts that are a friend to the besmirched traveler; there is the latest in colorful house-wear from Africa; robes and pant suits and slippers that vomit rainbow hues into the grimy basalt cobbles. And then of course, anything else you want in this open-air emporium, from apples to zippers, it is all here—and if not, just ask and they will bring it tomorrow.
I stop to buy some peaches and cherries for the Signora, by way of dropping in on her and her family at the height of summer without warning. I also pick up a newspaper, at the corner stand where the old man is straining against the back of his little plywood kiosk, against the porno magazines and lottery tickets, trying to avoid even the slightest contact with the July sun. As usual he overcharges me for the USA Today, which I read because I can—it is in English. In any case, I don’t mind this one’s game. I think of him as the gatekeeper. Even at double the cost it is a small price to enter the city on these mornings with America tucked up safe under my arm or in my back pocket where it can do no harm.
On my way up the street toward Luna, I pass the Cafe Montenegro, where usually I can find the Signora’s in-law whom I call the Jockey. Then I actually run into my dear sweet pensioner as I’m going in to the Alimentari for some salami and bread. She is with her daughter and they have just finished the morning shopping.
Signora is as excitable as ever. She slaps me like one of her own, cracking a sharp “Eh?” a two-letter accusation that places the guilt of some past wrong against her on my shoulders—for not calling, for not coming straight to them, rather than dallying at the market, for paying too much for fruit maybe, or not sending a postcard as directed from every town along the way.
Who knows, it could even be something from before my time, from Vittorio’s time even, her dead husband up there on that shelf over the kitchen table, may he rest forever in peace.
Now our attention is turned to Gabriella—she is starting to show. Luna gives me the side-glance, bulges her eyes and turns her mouth down, at the same time rounding out her own stomach with a sweep of her hand.
“Eh?” she says, nodding the seriousness of the matter, and this time it means something else obviously. She is counseling me as though I were an uncle to the family.
I nod in return. I approve I am saying to them and then I smile. Now there is laughter and commotion and the Signora is talking a mile a minute and Gabriella, recovering from her slight embarrassment at being held up for inspection, picks out a few words, here and there for me, in English.
Luna is back to chastising me for not calling. She is a sly businesswoman and she knows that I am a soft touch.
The room is taken, but how long, she wonders, do I want to stay? And what can I pay? Whatever is fair, I say, but only if it can be worked out. I am happy to be a regular part of their operation. There is even a room they refer to as my own. After all I was their first paid lodger, coming to them on the heels of another Signora from down the street who could not keep me another day. She walked me to Luna’s in her gray apron and housedress one summer morning when things were slow and life around the apartment floor was quiet and dull. Suddenly there was a ‘guest’ and another mouth to feed and she rushed around cleaning and we sat up and talked about ways to increase her newly realized business that would one day support her burgeoning family.
“Come back later and it will all be fixed,” the daughter tells me.
They offer to take my pack the rest of the way but it is too heavy and they are already burdened. They tell me to come later—dopo—to eat something and then take my room. It’s as good as worked out.
What a comfort after the last 24 hours! Yesterday I stood in the rain on the gushing sidewalks of Sardegna and flipped a coin. Today I am meeting old friends on the street and everything is taking care of itself. I retrace my steps through the market. There is only one thing to do now. I postpone it only temporarily, while I drop my pack and freshen up at the train station. Now I am free to go to the bar and surprise her.
I cannot tell you how many times I have walked down these same stairs into the Viminale—perhaps in reality only a comparative few, but what are these times pitted against the fevers I have embraced? In my delirium I have become the eyes of longing, the eyes of waiting, the eyes of want, the eyes of the stairs and the walls and the fountains themselves and in my fleshless mind I have traveled time to be here over and over again while she makes her way past.
The Viminale, after all, is nothing special. In fact, while the rest of the city seems to circle around it in its hapless dash toward the future, the Viminale is a drop in the bucket, a paradise for throwbacks. Even the mouth of the Metro sits as a portal to another realm, facing off with crooked little streets named for gypsies and snakes and young female lions.
YaYa does not believe that yesterday I spoke with her from Sardegna and today I am in front of her. She is another one, reduced to a bit of nervous backdrop in the modern world. I can’t see her working anywhere else either. This bar is clandestine, an anonymous drop in the neighborhood which is tucked away like I say, and it suits her almost as much as it contains her.
Though she’s busy, she can’t help herself from looking up and grinning. Her surprise betrays the fact that she feels outwitted also. She calls me a bastard under her breath and briefly slips her damp hands over the counter and into mine. One of the customers, Abib—the young Algerian with his colorful robe over his western street clothes who treats her like a sister—is standing at the bar. He teases her for blushing and she shoots him a look, squinting at him and cursing. She uses Spanish when she conjures like this, a relic of her vagabond past, and I am reminded along these lines that she has yet to fulfill her promise to dance flamenco for me. Of course, she will insist that she is rusty.
“Maybe tonight,” she says coyly, surprising me this time.
“What are you doing later?” she adds, and her formality is odd to me—I mean, she has to know that I have come all this way for no other reason and yet? She is toying with me, it is plain.
“Half past eight at the needle?” I say, reminding her of our usual time and place—the 20 foot rocket ship situated outside of Termini that looks like a hypodermic.
“I reckon so.”
For some reason, that hijacked hillbilly phrase on those punishing lips of hers, in the lower reaches of M. Viminale, central Rome, makes me laugh and want her more, if that is possible.
“But be ready,” I say.
“I hope we can help you with your obvious frustration sir. If you like, you may talk to my boss, maybe there is something…I don’t know.” She is smiling like the Vestal Virgin herself.
I look her up and down and imagine what she is like under that filthy apron right now, standing there in those sink-washed panties that she has trouble getting clean. They were probably still a little wet when she put them on this morning and they are nothing fancy, I can tell you that—thin, white, cotton briefs that are stretched bare. The elastic is gone in the band and they just hang on her tattooed hips, revealing a large mole in the socket and a few wild grapes approaching her navel.
I remember her body as though yesterday I had laid on it with my limp dick, trailing my tongue over her, turning her on the bed and burying myself in her armpit, gliding past her nipples like a mist and then coming back to bite each one, sucking on her big muff for hours it seemed, until my tongue cramped, and then finding the strength to flick at it some more as a blind man might, concentrating every bit of energy and detail on the very tip of her clitoris which was hard as an olive pit, and eventually, with a few lucky strokes she began to moan “si, si, oh dio mio, si.”, in small letters like that, rhyming in that little voice, and that should be enough to rouse any man you would think, and even standing here in the bar, with her boss bearing down the counter toward us, I have to strategically turn and walk out, a little bent perhaps for the memory.
3.
Outside I am swept along by the dry shuffle of the streets, the heat-weary already loosening their collars and ducking into churches. It is too hot to be so tormented. I need something to hang my hat on. I begin to think of Melodie as I kneel against the cool marble. She was the Swiss who liked to reminisce about her days at the convent while she downed chilled vodka. As she drank, that cold winter light swallowed her eyes and she fluttered off. When she floated back in she told me she was in Rome to scout the art schools. I liked her enthusiasm. I told her I was in Rome for the usual reasons.
I met her at the Piazza Colonna, outside a Dali exhibit. She had been sitting at the base of Trajan’s column with her knees drawn up, soaking sweat through her tank top, and squinting at a map. I approached with my take-away lunch and stood over her blocking out the sun, licking pizza of my knuckles, until she noticed me.
I’d only been in Rome a few days but I felt like I had the place wired. I offered to help her find a pensione. She said she had money, but she was practical too, so we rang a lot of buzzers to find the best deal, making the rounds on foot. One letch even invited her to come back and sleep in his kitchen if she didn't find anything. It was hot and we were getting tired. We stopped for a drink and I offered my own lodging, at least for the night, so we could get on with the business of seeing the sights.
Of course that's not always an easy matter in Rome. Some days you can’t cross the street without parting a group of little leaguers or an assembly of gynecologists from St. Paul.
Melodie and I managed to find the tram that takes you straight to god. We became two in ten thousand joined together in our quest for the Holy City.
The car was so crowded it listed heavily into the gutter and it was blistering hot. We were packed together in odd pairings—emus and chickens, a pig and a stallion, two corn rats and a goat, a sheep dog and a crippled alpaca—all willingly off to renew our golden sacrifice at this late stage.
Maybe it wasn't so odd after all. That ripening circus car had something going for it, something communal and cinematic, in the Italian sense. The air was choked with bits of wool and feathers and we were being driven along by a serene civil servant in a tight blue shirt who was singing to himself, and to us all, as dry as can be. It was a scene befitting Fellini and his technicolor vision of Rome. It seemed at that moment that anything could happen and that was always a defining feeling for me.
Besides, it wasn't an entirely bad predicament—being squeezed up alongside her like that. She wore only a tank top and a thin flap of skirt, no more than a couple of ounces of material. That’s what struck me—just how little she was wearing—not to mention the sandals with one clean leather strap against those silk pillars.
But don’t get me wrong. She sweated as much anyone, but hers was glistening rose water against that humble perfume of the petting zoo. I’m not kidding. She seemed clean like that, like her country, although I’ve never been, but it’s an image. If I think about it I can probably make it go the other way. Nobody gets away with being that clean.
So when I said I was in Rome for the usual reasons, my nun, my little Swiss, sweet Melodie of the butterfly tongue and naked soul, she quickly became one of them. She was another guide to the eternal rhythms of my bullshit. We hit it off like a paint by numbers and I guess I didn't care why. Six thousand miles away from Cassi and three months as much as I knew. I didn't ask. Why is a secret ingredient. Too little and it doesn’t reach the tongue. Too much and it gives itself away. But the right amount persuades you take your place at the buffet when your number is called.
Anyway, many have come before the spell of this city and it certainly didn't bother me. What did I have to lose? There was Cassi of course and that should've been enough, but somehow it wasn't, not when I was staking everything else.
The fact is I was looking forward to dying a little and coming back with a story to tell, a real crusher, something to add to the family legacy. It was half expected of me. I was an ambassador in that sense—for those who have cut themselves off from life. I was the one, the big brother who always up and left, the son who couldn't settle down, the friend who everyone secretly worried about.
Anyway, to get on with Melodie. She was from the French-speaking side of Switzerland, from a village that holds a pagan festival every year that the townspeople attend in the nude. I found this an attractive piece of information and I realized, as with her talk of the convent, that this was part of her trap.
“So there is your mother”, she said in that music of hers that is like a hidden stream in the woods, “and the priest, and your teacher and the butcher—but no one is supposed to think anything of it.”
“And you, what do you think?” I asked, pressing in closer.
“It is very fun, especially for the children, and innocent. We eat cake and play games and sing and then we all bathe in the lake—just like any celebration really, except we don’t wear anything.”
She pulled her sweaty top away from her chest and fanned herself.
“If you are still on holiday in August you should come. I can give you the information of my mother’s village where I grew up. Of course you can come to Geneva and visit me anytime you like.”
She pulled down on her top again and smiled.
“You don’t know how lucky you are. You can enjoy them at least. For me, they are like children. They never behave like I want them to.”
Her watery caresses filled my ears and throat and I swallowed hard, staring down at her.
The tram hit a bump in the road and she fell against the seat we were holding, into a hackney trotter, who widened his nostrils at her, taking in her milky sweat.
“I don’t want to complain” she panted, “but I’m not used to being so hot.”
She was really running the tap, but we all were, everyone that is, except the black shawl gypsies, who beg and throw curses at you with dry moustaches.
I leaned in for a breath of her sweet air, half expecting vodka the way she liked to guzzle it. She lengthened her neck toward me like a Botticelli, pulling her hair aside.
“Here”, she teased, “try not to get drunk before we reach the Vatican.
This one had no off switch. I soaked my cheek and nose in her sweet water. She pushed herself against me, cold lips to mine, blue eyes smiling in faint wire rims, glowing that insect translucence of her northern complexion and for the next few moments I didn't dwell on anything.
4.
That next day Melodie took a room two blocks from mine, in the heart of Rome, near Termini, the central train station. We agreed to meet back at her door in two hours, refreshed and ready for dinner.
I stopped at the international call center in my neighborhood. It was run by African men in elegant white pajamas and there was always a police car at the curb, on the lookout for terrorists. I'm not sure what gelato and train station whores have to do with the global threat but the cops usually seemed pretty busy.
Inside I checked my email and then called Cassi, which I had been avoiding like laundry.
"Just seeing the sights baby," I said.
"I bet you are. I thought you forgot about me. I was starting to think you weren't going to call again."
"It's only been a few days."
"It seems more like weeks. Besides, you said you would call."
Her usual laconic self. In other words, hung over and ornery. If I bit, this could flower into a monologue of banality that would either make me homesick or send me back to following women in the streets.
"Guess what your boy's doing?" She was referring to Shelley, my dog that she had co-opted and ruined.
"He's chewing up your slipper."
She was warming up.
"Listen baby, I didn't get a lot of time with this phone card—how you been?"
"All right I guess. Busy at the shop and I tell you, that asshole next door…"
"OK—hold on! I told you already, I don't have time right now."
"Sorry—but let me quick tell you one thing," she went on. "Well, you know I'm looking for a new car right…ok, well…Minivan! Tah dah!…how does that grab you?"
"How drunk are you? How many fingers?"
Shut up. I'm lonely. I can't help it if I get obsessed. What else am I supposed to do?"
"Paint something. Clean. Work in the darkroom I slaved over before I left."
"It's too hot in there."
"What do you want me to do? Why don't you go out with your girlfriends?"
"They're impossible. They spend more time calling and getting ready and then when we get there they want to leave. Everyone sucks."
"Listen, I don't want to get cut off. Give Shelley a kiss will you. I miss you."
"Oh you do, huh? Do you hear that boy? Your daddy misses us. Does that mean you're coming home?"
"You know I'm staying for the summer."
"I'm sorry. I just hoped you'd miss me so much you'd come back early."
"Come on. You know I've waited half my life for this. Some of us didn't go to art school in Paris on daddy's bill."
"Shut up asshole."
"That’s my girl.”
"Oh, one more thing. I've been looking at plane tickets. Do you still want me to come?"
"Sure baby—whatever you think. Let me know so I can plan the rest of my trip."
"You make it sound like a nuisance. You don't want me to come do you?"
"No, it's not that. But I don't want to double up on places. And I have to squeeze in my relatives too."
This was good because she knew that my father went to a lot of trouble tracking down the old lady and her daughter's family.
"So what do you want me to do?"
"Just let me know. Email me. We'll work it out."
"I already did. You didn't answer."
The truth is that I deleted the email two days ago when I read it.
"I'm having trouble getting online sometimes. I'll try to find a better place,"
We said goodbye and I hung up the phone. I tried to summon the courage to call back and tell her to forget it, to nip it all right then, as I knew I should, but I didn't have the guts.
Instead I called my parents and left a message that I was trying to reach our relatives but so far hadn't gotten an answer—no machine or anything I said. Maybe they were all'antica, I said, old-fashioned. Or maybe they were already on holiday. I would keep trying and let them know.
The truth is, I wasn't doing so well with my father's quest to be reunited with his family. At the airport, before I even left Los Angeles, I reshuffled my pack and tossed some things into the porter's trashcan as he was cleaning the men's room. Along with a heavy sweater that Cassi bought for me, and a pair of canvas tennis shoes that weren't all that comfortable, I decided to get rid of the manila envelope that my father had sent along. It was stuffed with names and addresses, indiscernible xerox's of the deceased on our side of the Atlantic, and a crudely drawn family tree rendered in my father's neolithic scrawl. In all I suppose the packet weighed as much as a t-shirt. But what is the weight of a pebble in one's shoe or a tag in a shirt collar? Besides, I resented the imposition.
Several blocks later, near the Roman Forum, I realized the importance of that phone call. After all, my family's hospitality had to be considered. Italians take a month of holiday in the summer. Cassi would need an astrologer and a telescope to thread their schedule.
How nice it felt suddenly to get off the sunny, crowded street and clear my head! How nice to follow an old Roman breeze, engineered between the buildings just so, and not have to look over and see if the other one was still with you.
After days of burning dust into the soles of my shoes, I have learned that in Rome it is always better to get lost alone, without your map, outside the throng. There is so much that will never make the guidebooks. There is even more here than most Romans can appreciate.
I descend the broad basalt steps into the Viminale, past yesterday and the day before, and stop for a drink from one of the hydrants that flow continuous sweet water from the aqueduct. I let it roll on my tongue as I walk in the shade of two thousand years.
Here the modern edifice sits like science fiction, and somewhere between the ancient brick and a shimmering wall of steel and glass, there is a bust of a lesser-known patrician on its side in a weedy lot waiting to be pulled up and cataloged.
And to me that is Rome in a nut—a living excavation, a people digging themselves out, brick by brick, shard by shard, ancestor by ancestor. Here, no one is allowed to forget, and yet memory and history are continually recast.
It’s an enviable position and a brave one but then what do I know? Still, I have to wonder where do they stop? Do they recognize the beginning or the end and find it sufficient, reared as they are on the dig itself?
5.
The coffee was an afterthought. I only noticed the place because of the A-frame that advertised live blues during the week. I decided to peek inside, sidestepping two girls in white aprons who were having a cigarette in the doorway. Besides us, there were three leathery men hooked to a slot machine, cursing it in their harsh tongue. They didn’t seem to notice the Beach Boys medley playing on the house stereo at club volume.
I sat down at the bar facing a wall of glasses shelved against a mirror. One of the girls snubbed out her cigarette and saved it in her pack. She came around the counter, turned down the music and took up her conversation with the other one over my shoulder.
She’s the real reason I stopped to read the A-frame. She was thoroughly Roman, an emaciated Magdalena, ancient looking and dusty, like a faded Carravaggio—her eyes popped out of her grinning skull like two shiny black olives. She volleyed something over to the Balkan men when they threatened to topple the machine, but she was smiling, even as they cursed her. Then she turned to me and spoke in Italian.
“A coffee please” I answered, not sure of what she said.
“un caffe? ”
“Hmm? Yes… Si.”
“Si…” she countered, boring into me, weary of her own game already.
“Si, un caffe per favore.”
“Very good, I had a feeling about you when you walked in. I knew you could do it. Now where are you from?”
I told her.
She punched two buttons on the gleaming espresso machine.
“I was just getting ready to have one myself. Well, I see, California…so you must like the Beach Boys then?”
“Sure,” I lied over the hiss of steam. I started to ask her where she studied English—she had an attractive accent—but she turned away to shuffle the tracks on the stereo.
She returned, picking up the thread. “Even those killers over there, they like the Beach Boys and they don’t even know what they are hearing. It makes them smile. They can forget for a minute all the horrible things they have told me about their lives. Sometimes they will even start dancing and I will catch them and say ‘ah ha you bastards, you like it- you are dancing and you don’t even know it’ and they will shuffle back to that machine embarrassed to feel happy.”
She put the two coffees up on saucers on the counter.
“I have a dream—well, maybe it is not a dream because maybe one day it will be so—but I think I will live in California and drive a big Cadillac car with flames painted on the sides so if you ever see me around you can wave to me and say ‘hey, I knew that girl in Rome once.’”
While she talked, she danced with the strings of her apron, pulling them from one side to the other. I looked at her long hands. She had a bio-hazard symbol tattooed in the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She was thin, knobby even, loosely articulated at the joints and sockets like a scarecrow. I gestured at the tattoos coming out the three-quarter sleeves of her jersey.
“My boss says its ok but I wear the long shirts for the old Christian ladies who come in here. I get tired of the same questions.”
She huddled her shoulders, wrapping a pretend scarf under her chin whiskers and cracking her voice. “'Oh Ya-Ya you have such pretty skin why do you try to make yourself so ugly?'
“I tell them that it is very beautiful to decorate the skin and that they should try it themselves which makes them laugh with all their aches and pains. Of course they think I am crazy then but they always come back to talk because I am a curiosity to them and also I give them advice about their grandchildren.”
“You should have a talk show right here at the bar" I said, immediately wishing I had never moved so much as a magazine on a film set.
She pointed to the refugee men arguing with the spinning wheels of the machine. "Talk to them. They handle my business."
"You have a strong accent,” I finally managed. “Did you study in England?"
“Well not exactly. I lived in London for two years, mostly squatting like a gypsy, moving around, avoiding the Black Maria, that sort of thing. Have you been?”
“No. I’ve been out a few weeks and I’ve seen Paris, Amsterdam, and now Rome.”
“So you’re here alone then, on holiday? You lucky bastard. How long will you stay?”
“I don’t know—until I’m done. I'm taking the rest of the summer at least.”
“Well, it’s too bad for you that the Pope is feeling well. Everyone is in Rome and I don’t even want to leave my house.”
“I don’t mind. I have a knack for getting lost—like coming here. How many tourists did you serve today?”
“I had one couple and they were German. They were here before actually, some time ago, and they came back to say hello. They’re ok for pilgrims I guess.”
“Pilgrims?”
“Yes, the Christians.”
“Oh right, and they bother you?”
“Well, they are so full of it and happy, I can’t stand to see their smiling faces taking over my Rome. I reckon that’s reason enough?”
“I reckon”, I said in a darkwoods drawl.
Her radar flashed and she withdrew to a sink of dirty glasses.
"I guess it’s funny to hear a Roman girl say it," I said.
“Why not—it’s proper English?”
She turned around, flushed.
“Sure if you’re a hillbilly.”
“But they say it in London all the time.”
“I bet they do, YaYa.”
She protested. “That is an honorable name given to me by old gypsy punks. They said I couldn't have the same name as the first lady of the evil united states.”
“Which one?”
“The smart one with the blonde hair who will be your president one day.”
“You’re right. YaYa is much better.”
“I thought you would agree. You strike me as very sensible already. So tell me something about yourself.”
"My father used to live here in Rome," I said, and before I could stop I was pick-pocketing a book by the great John Fante. West Of Rome.
"He was working on a picture for Hollywood. He was one of their top writers and a big ladies man. I'm named after him."
"Is he italian then?"
"One hundred percent," I said. "He even speaks Abruzzi dialect."
"And what about you? Did your old man teach you anything?"
"No. He kept the family out of his affairs and he always stayed here alone."
She put our cups in the sink wash and wiped her coffee stained hands on her apron. I didn't know whether to go on so I ordered a beer to keep her there.
"There was a girl," I said, "that he always talked about, even when he turned gray and slack—maybe more so by then."
"I'm sure I don't know her but go on, this is more fun than cleaning this bloody machine."
She unlocked the little pressure cups and tapped the grinds into a bin on the side.
"It's not much to tell. When he was angry or happy he would threaten to leave us to come back here. We all knew the story of his raven haired girl, sitting next to him in the piazza Navona, spitting watermelon seeds to the pigeons and laughing. Sometimes he didn't have to say anything. You could tell he was here again. I don't think he ever recovered."
“Well, if it’s a tour of Rome you want you should just ask. I might know something about that,” she extended her blue hand over the counter. "I guess we can start at the piazza."
"I've already been there."
"Then what about the Trevi fountain?"
"They can drain it as far as I'm concerned."
"Well…the Tiber river then. It's only the most elegant feature of Rome. There's a place where the old ladies gather to feed the pigeons. Maybe your father's little rabbit is still there spitting out her seeds and laughing to herself."
She pulled her hand back from the counter to the knot at the end of her apron string.
"It is always nice to meet someone who appreciates the Beach Boys but I have a reputation to keep up around here. You'll have to see me another time if you want to chat. I close tomorrow at half past eight—maybe we can go around then and have a little something."
I was being invited to my first passagiata—that Italian ritual of evening where people look in on one another on the square or street and gather gossip over an ice cream or a glass of spumante.
Here I was being invited to this ancient spectacle by a proper Roman girl no less; odd as she was, skinny, filthy with coffee and scars; her wide mouth filled with too many teeth and crooked besides; her eyes bulging like two black moons from the wailing underworld; her unwashed hair stuck like a cape to her bony shoulders.
What an odd couple we would make going down the streets of Rome, and suddenly I knew I had a problem. It wasn’t the Swiss, no—Melodie would leave in a day or so—and it wasn't even Cassi back home because she was so far off and out of sight for a while at least.
Rather it was the trick of the fates to deposit you there on the brink, to make you want to hear her say ‘half past eight’ again with that screwed up accent of hers, to make you suddenly and urgently realize that you cannot pass through this spinning place without getting to know the dark creature that has just been placed in front of you, that your life, by this brief and random encounter, has intersected another’s and there a story must always begin.
6.
I walked back to the station to meet Melodie and we made our way across town looking to have dinner in the trendy Campo dei Fiori. I kept looking her over and comparing her to YaYa. Of course on paper it didn’t add up. Melodie had a more conventional beauty, a passport, money, big tits, clear blue eyes—all those things that might make a mate more attractive.
Along the way we turned in for a cocktail at an empty bar in the Trastevere which then filled up and emptied again before we were politely asked to leave.
For every glass of wine I had, Melodie downed a chilled vodka, until they closed the bar around us, the manager standing in the doorway jingling his keys and the staff outside already, behind him, laughing and waving goodnight, but still saying ‘please’.
After several rounds our intense conversation had transcended heavy petting and evolved into a lap-dance that continued even after the music had been turned off, and like I said, the bar had emptied.
We got up laughing and stumbled into the night, crossing back over the now quiet neighborhood, past empty tables pushed together under cafe awnings and pyramids of bent-back chairs; lingering in the florescent glow of racked-up pastries behind glass; past the hosed-down cobble gutters and the shuttered balcony doors dripping with potted begonia and basil.
Down into the Roman night, lying forever in the grass of some bronze statue, watching the tram wires slice the purple moonlight until someone kind enough comes along and informs us that the service stopped hours ago. That is when we cross the river, at the Ponte Garibaldi, and in searching the shadows for a place to love, we come an open gate at the top of the stair that descends to the concrete banks of the Tiber.
Did I know the river, that girl YaYa from the coffee bar had asked? Yes, I knew it now, I thought, fascinating and elegant as it was. Now that I have watched the armored rats bouncing along the cement concourse, their eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Now that I have smelled the acid-stench of centuries of filthy Romans pissing and menstruating. Now that I have knelt and squatted in the broken glass, listening to the laughter and dares of Pasolini’s children before they were drowned; to the wet cries of unwanted babies; to the silence of poets reluctant to swim one more mad stroke; to the wailing barges of prisoners and whores and witches chained together in the current; to the singing of dead Christians resurrected by god’s swift green wrath—I have heard all of it being churned under and sucked out to the bloody Tyrennhian Sea at Ostia, delivered at last.
I knew the river better than most I imagined, from the tangle of the weedy bottom, entering it through Melodie’s vodka soaked panties, listening to that innocent little voice of hers scrape against the glass covered levee to be swallowed up in the tidal roar, by that roiling backdrop of violence that shattered anything sensible in us.
I laid Melodie down in the weeds and sucked at her hot pussy and that was fun without the brink of fate and the pressures and torments from wondering what if—of course I wasn’t thinking about any of it just then as I listened to her carnivorous plaints—of how she wanted to make love—followed by a weak protest—but that she was bleeding, and the thing that kept going through my mind was not that I should be more careful, as I pulled off her panties, flickering cautiously at first, staying on her clit and then finally caving in with everything I had—fingers, hands, chin, eyes, teeth and nose—until she lay there quivering and moaning for my cork.
Nor was I thinking that someone might see us. In fact at one point I looked up and saw people stopped on the bridge and pointing in our direction albeit, from a hundred yards up and away, and obscured by the early morning animal darkness.
No, what I thought was that it has been a while since I’ve done this for a menstruate Cassi, something I had never really minded but at some point just stopped doing because special things like that between two people fade over time.
But there was Melodie with her gold rims tossed aside, grieving for it, begging me, all set to swallow my head if I didn’t comply, and let me remind you that we were laying in the scree and sand and broken glass and cigarette butts of a civilization gone mad -go to the banks of any great river in the world and you will see what I mean—and out of her lily-white voice came a song of sin and unrepentant lust, a prayer-like moan that reached the ears of the boatman Charon who stopped lunging his souls into the river to give me the go-ahead and so I flipped her over, under a 3/4 moon, along that filthy river, and I looked up to see people stopped now, in the pre-dawn, along the Ponti Garibaldi, under the yellow street lights, casting back the image of my parent’s Rushmore heads.
And I pounded that ponderous, quivering, glass-encrusted steak of hers as best I could until we both collapsed, exhausted and half dressed, nearly falling asleep in each other’s arms as the sun began to edge and pour it’s haloed and honeyed magnificence across the gray filter of night, and we stumbled to and found a cab back to Termini Station, the end of the line.
So after a light breakfast, we went straight to another house of god, to the Santa Maria of the Angels off the Piazza Replubblica because I wanted to show her the mural restoration work in the sacristy that I found there the other day. I thought at least she could speak with the students who were on the project and they would help inform her search for a suitable art academy, the resumption of which had not crossed her mind since we met, I was sure.
But why start now, she seemed to be saying? She would rather have a seat and tell me more stories about her days at the convent. Besides, the students have gone on break. It is too bad anyway because there was one jumpsuit-clad artista that I’d taken to watching on my daily rounds as she climbed the bars of the scaffold with paintbrushes set in her teeth like a mutineer. Maybe, I thought, I could meet her through Melodie.