Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Read online

  “Everything is temporary,” I said to an Iraqi woman at the market, then she vanished, proving me right.

  I must get back to those small thrills. I grow giddy at Roman markets when I find the right food, the right words, find I have exact change. The store a chore for some, but for me it’s a minor buzz to hunt and gather in a foreign city.

  I love the vast outdoor market arrayed under a shaky tin roof, a roof sheltering slopes of apples, olives, pears, peaches, greens, and heaps of strawberries with a striking Italian woman at the top. She looks like a buxom cinema idol, Gina Lollobrigida posing at the top of the pyramid of peppers and tomatoes and strawberries, but this is not a studio and she is not a salaried movie star and she will grow old and cold toiling one winter at the outdoor market on Via Andrea Doria.

  And across from her, that bread with the brown crust —pane di lariano — should I buy that? Or ask for the gleaming eggshell loaf?

  But they are so impatient, don’t ask any questions, hurry, hurry, fumble a few words or just point and pay for your loaf or vino or green bottles of Peroni and Moretti or frothy wheat beer. I am so happy in Italy to just cope, but the Iraqi woman is depressed about the future; she won’t go out for a meal.

  “I’ll never see my mother again,” she weeps before she disappears, “I can’t go back to Iraq, I can’t pay my rent here, no one will hire me, I have no prospects, I am homeless, my life is hopeless.”

  There are times I feel I have no home, that this is a tough part of my life, but I am aware that I am very lucky compared to this young woman exiled from Iraq by a fool’s war. And look at that homeless man who mumbles past me on the street, truly lost while I have a key to a room with towels and a terrace and Egyptian pearls and seven hundred euro hidden in an envelope under the bed. I bought running shoes for the Iraqi woman, I took her past the buskers and bought her fruit and coffee beans. I think of Joni Mitchell’s song about the clarinet player playing for free while she shops for jewels.

  Every day a metropolis of jewel-light and gold awaits us — every day candle-flame cafés and tanned faces and blurred dancers and yellow cobblestone lanes below and a celestial alley of blue stars above — and ceiling frescoes where we lift our pious gaze to indoor skies of pale robin’s-egg blue behind frothy pink clouds and Ecce Homo, Christ crowned with thorns.

  A few from Father Silas’s art group meet for drinks on my tiny rooftop terrace and tiny Tamika says with some regret, “I fly back so soon to Philly.” A wallflower, Tamika has not made friends here among the drunken college crowd. I saw her in bright white sneakers walking the Coliseum on her own, like my son doing the same in his lonely schoolyard, and for this she has become my hero. On her own she has grown to love Rome, to learn more about Rome than the others in the group.

  “Back to reality.”

  “Give my best to reality,” says Ray-Ray. He was born in Nigeria, now lives in a satellite suburb past Pearson airport, but has flown to Rome all the way from China. “I hate reality, man. Are you hungry? You must eat. That is reality, my friend.” At a modest flame Ray-Ray makes us a quick dish of fish and rice and I am impressed. Initially I had been suspicious of him, a smiling con man with maxed-out credit cards, but this gesture makes me like him.

  I will fly home someday, but I’ve spent my sense of home; by being so serious I’ve made my life frivolous.

  Sunday morning sun ripples on the river and healthy joggers stride proudly under trees where, just moments before, drunks staggered in the dark and purged and bellowed like elephants. A strange change of guard, but the exact same turf.

  The women take off their business suits or loose dresses and run. Some runners are shy and hide themselves in big sweatpants; more athletic parties don teensy sport bras and black shorts that cleave to the inside of pelvis and buttocks and make sufficient data available to any interested eyes.

  In Indonesia’s Aceh province, to promote strict moral values, the police are handing out loose dresses to women and confiscating tight trousers. I will try to be loose, I will try to be tight, I will try to be a saint from now on (riding on the back of saints or pinned under sinners). No more cheating on the rituals, the concert wristbands.

  The wrist I need, the world I need, the world I want to love. There is beauty in clouds, a world above, and my beautiful one lives in cloudland. On the plane to Rome I stared at cloudland and thought of her wrist, those blue veins I kiss in the skin, beautiful thing. Moonlight in the bedroom, a delicate vase, her derrière and legs in moonlit strips and sheets beautiful as a pension.

  Natasha and I used to joke about cloudland as our secret place, we thought we had made it up, some ideal world where we could have oodles of free time without fear or guilt or hurting someone else, some locale free of complications. Then I learned that the Greeks of old had the same name and idea, my idea was an easy Xerox and cloudland was not ours. On the plane to Italy I stared at cloudland for centuries.

  Italia; what a word, what a pretty cracked world. Wasn’t Christopher Columbus Italian? The day he found America — it was trying to hide, like Natasha’s cancer, but he found its shores. Go back, go back to Spain, to Italia, go back to childhood, to cloudhood. Go back to the wind blowing off the sea for centuries down dolomite passes and rivers, fly back to floral meadows and mountain chained to mountain like slaves and Centurions killed in lines in valleys and beaches, buried with murdered martyrs and whores and Popes and pretenders and partisans in the heat and dust of tainted town squares.

  My tainted life, my travels: vaguely free to travel to Italy, Ireland, Death Valley, to ski distant peaks on a whim, mobile, but always a trade-off, no stable home life, no one to depend on. Perhaps because no one can depend on me?

  My wife sends me a newsy email from home, what was home.

  All the boys are working, Calvin got a haircut for his job, and I bought that house by the church. His hair looks good short, but no one recognizes him. The house is more than I wanted to pay, but I think it will be okay. Nice hardwood. As you say, if I run into problems, I can just sell. I didn’t think it would happen this fast. Calvin’s hair or a house. Still kind of in shock and not really breathing yet, but by the time you get this, it will probably be better. I deposited that cheque, hope that’s okay. I paid $300 for the brakes. I know it’s my car now, but you can use it when you’re back. The dog is fine, say hi to the green parrots.

  My father was happy to stay home; my mother wanted to go out; I seem to have inherited a healthy portion of both tendencies, inherited two masters.

  My son is so polite to me on the phone. “Please hold on.”

  He looks like me, but I feel like a stranger. I have fixed his bike, want him to have a working bike, to be mobile like me. Trying to think of him, be a good father. At school he is flunking math. I was terrible at math. How can I help?

  He says, “No, I have no need for a bike.”

  “Want to go skiing with me next time? I hear there’s a great mountain in Newfoundland.”

  “Yes,” he agrees with some gusto, which makes me happy.

  I tamp loose French Mariage tea into a silver tea-ball and am reminded of my polite father tamping cherry tobacco into a pipe. In this new kingdom I am a weak lord and the radio plays marches to our Dear Tyrant; the tapeworms are kicking in, demanding a tithe.

  Chinese men killed their friend playing a drunken joke, he was passed out, they inserted an eel into his rectum. This part troubles me, I am not that familiar with my friends’ rectums even when intoxicated. The eel damaged the man’s intestines and he had internal bleeding and died. A prank. Like Natasha and me, what seemed a good idea at the time.

  Her large eyes when she listens. The horizon widens, but I want it to shrink. There is that odd piano again. Did you know I can see through matter, through concrete? But I can’t change the ending of the story. Natasha and I ate fresh bread and taut blueberries, but I’m sure she’s forgotten.

  In Italy the evening shades darken, rich. Elephants climb the Alps, a piano sou
nds. Here are fishbones in stone and the brook where the priests of Cybele washed the image of the goddess.

  Come stai? How are you?

  Bene, grazie.

  Night. Like stealing a kiss, like stealing a drink straight from the chill milk bottle.

  Once I asked Natasha if she would put me in her mouth while she peed sitting on the toilet, just to see what that was like.

  “Let’s try it,” she said happily. She said she liked my imagination, Natasha was always agreeable, yes, always splendid. She said yes, but ultimately she said no. I am dense, but I can see that our life is severed, over. I was a servant trying foolishly to serve two masters, trying to keep a home calmly intact while pursuing her like a relentless dog. Who now will admire my ineptitude, my talent for irritation? I will never forgive her for making me consider forgiveness.

  Below the towering Vatican walls stand my more modest walls and my clay pots and pink geraniums and flowering trellis vines. The many flowers on my terrace belong to the residenza, belong to a tall older man, but I care for them since the automated sprinklers are not working. I don’t want the flowers on the terrace to die on my watch.

  Natasha liked the flowers I grew every summer and she emails that she is growing black-eyed Susans on her balcony in my honour. One winter she dreamt she came to visit me in a house in the woods, a house surrounded by my flowers. Is she dreaming and waking in stone mountains and swimming glacial waters right now? She visits a valley of firs so far from Italy and so far from me. She loves her summer river in the Kootenays, the flat rock at the river’s edge that catches the sun, warming her long limbs like a cat on the stone ledges.

  I climb into the gondola that hangs on a string over the Alps, climb away from the plain to ski, or I climb into my kayak in Canada to separate myself from shore, separate from her, paddle waves for hours to forget her, my shorts sodden from waves washing over the low kayak, river water keeping me cool for hours in the heat, like my damp T-shirts in Rome’s redolent furnace.

  South of Sorrento and Naples and Pompeii a bus moves like a gypsy down the coast, light on striated cliffs and walls, villages viewed from the sea, villages glued like nests to dizzy cliffs. Does the rain fall on you like doubt? Does volcanic ash freeze your world? Light hits the sand and I am kicking diamonds at my feet.

  Rome’s art groups and sick golden art and all these gilt frames, all these rows of gold rectangles, are too much to take: is that what drove po-mo painters to those pizza-tinted abstracts and rusting I-beam installations? I’m such a sucker for surf guitar. I came, I saw, I went away, I want to come back, vorrei un biglietto di ritorno. Ritorno: that sounds so nice.

  Once Natasha and I played in that lucky movie where things go well, lit perfectly, our backstory made perfect sense. Natasha made me laugh as we walked by the water, as we spied bald eagles and mottled ospreys, she made me happy in ways I can never explain to her or others. Like sunrays catching far bridges, pleasing stone balustrades lit in late sunlight and river water the colour of gold pilsner and mysterious green shadows lurking beneath the curve of mossy stone arches.

  Then Natasha moved to Vancouver for work. One fall day we stood chatting and laughing in Vancouver in a Mexican bar. Come visit, she had said on the phone. It was a galaxy diminished, I knew she had met someone else in this city — well, had met Jack, who I knew too well, but I was trying to be an adult, and the visit was lovely in its way, in her way. It seemed fine. We were laughing when her cell rang.

  “Where are you?” he asked suspiciously. I could hear his voice from the small phone.

  She panicked, not wanting to wreck things with her brand new bozo.

  “I’ll be home in five minutes,” she yelped to the phone and she ran to the exit sign, vanished. There was no warning and I was a TV left at the curb. I knew of Jack, knew this was a possibility, but what had been manageable as a mature conversation was now animal, mineral, visceral, sickening.

  After that my hotel room seemed haunted by my ecclesia, my drear congregation, I was afraid and had to have all the lamps lit, no sleep, thinking and creeping room to room slow as a monster. From a Mexican clinic to this fake Mexican bar in Vancouver and then to nowhere really, to a bill slipped under the door.

  The big country was no longer big enough for my bile. After she abandoned me in the fake bar, anger became my giant country. To cross that anger became my choice, I paid my way across, the same way I paid money for six hours of growing hatred on the plane, fleeing her face, fleeing her western side of the country, her side of the argument. On the plane I could not shut down my mind, I could not stop dwelling on her provincial cruelty mile by mile in that seat, in that bland tunnel.

  What is the antidote to your own mind, to poison filling your ear? Trapped in the seat I purchased (fly the unfriendly womb), the seat I chose from among all the seats without thought, without knowing how bad the trip would be, when it was still going to be the best visit ever. It changed so quickly.

  “Come visit anyway,” Natasha said when I expressed my reservations, now that Jack was in the picture.

  “It won’t be the same. Maybe I should cancel.”

  “No, come visit!” she insisted. Her voice always so nice. “It won’t be the same as we expected,” Natasha said, “but it will be good.”

  And it was fine at first, but then her exit from the Mexican place like a physical blow, I was staggered at the bar. Can I please crawl out your window? Why did I listen, why did I travel? I should have stayed home.

  I had thought she was a home. I lost my first home and then lost this home and had no home to go back to (the goddess Athena cast an obscuring mist over the familiar landmarks; he did not know his way home). I was an experiment that failed badly, an explorer so far from cheer and my former state, too far gone. Maybe I’ll go to Rome.

  In the Baltimore airport I began to come apart, a subtle disintegration, or was it Buffalo or Winnipeg, some modernist metal-and-glass outpost of vertigo and tears, another gypsy way-station in the chartered tunnels that worm their way through the false wall of the time zones, and the English ballad “Matty Groves” echoing in my jealous head: and how do you like my feather bed and how you like my sheets and how do you like my lady gay who lies in your arms asleep?

  But what do I want from my lady gay? Do I want her to beg me to come back, claim it was a huge error, can you ever forgive me? Maybe I do want to hear those words, but it’s moot, she will not say that. I know this and I hate this knowledge. She made her choice the way I chose a seat on a plane, the way I dispose of my faithful howling fridge.

  Time passes, as one hears it will. Days crash into nights and trembling ghost-jets criss-cross over my head, leaving white glowing contrails in the sky, jets playing a giant game of X’s and O’s. I am blunted, a former expert, I stared into the abyss and the abyss tried to sell me life insurance. I am living in cool Canada, but one ordinary day I flash back to Italy, I swear I’m in a sun-washed crosswalk outside my hotel in a vision of warm Roman colours and spinning tires and spooky statues with empty eyes staring overhead.

  Why the hallucinatory flashback a year or two later? I’m in Canada and I’m in Rome at a crowded gelato shop spooning out crazy colours, not a memory but a palpable feeling that I’m walking noisy streets, I can see and smell Via Candia this moment in the heat and din of scooters and skirts and the Mouth of Truth, which bites off the hands of liars; and which side of the street has shade to protect my roasting head and where will my black shoes stroll in Rome today? What is the catalyst for these delayed Italian flashbacks?

  The very next day I am inside my house, but I am also prowling Trastevere’s twisting lanes, exploring dim chapels and brew pubs and swallowing the sun-warm juice of blood oranges. What is the trigger in my head? I am standing in a room in Canada, but I swear I’m across the sea in bright Italy. A flashing sun and an odd sensation; something mysterious transports me twice and I walk in more than one place.

  So odd to have lived where those odd gods live,
those hungry, ravenous ghosts. Noisy troubled Italy troubles me in its absence, Italy so crazy and corrupt and cryptic, so loudly lewd and warm and violent — nimble cutpurses and thieves trotting our roof tiles, and who are these three dead gypsies who could not swim? Three limp bodies laid on heavy blankets on the beach under the cliffs, dead wanderers at a way-station, wandering no more. These travellers tried to eat the world, but the world ate them, left them nameless, purse-less.

  Somalis and Afghans jump off vessels and in the port fight each other over turf, Italians in the prosperous north look down on those in the hardscrabble south, and I look down on the dead bodies at the bottom of the cliff.

  The waitress says in all seriousness, “Can I beverage you?” Can I forgive her? I can’t forget Natasha. Nor can I forget Napoli’s nipples and slim limbs and cocaine murders or Rome’s nine hundred churches and beautiful clothes and faces in the Metro.

  And what was the name of the wind darkening the sea, and what names have those gaunt churches hidden in the dark brain of unanswered prayers and humans falling from high cliffs and a woman attacks the Pope and a man bloodies the prime minister and an enforcer shoots a mayor in a seaside town — what an odd place is Italy — yes, yes, I’ll be back in Italy just as soon as I can.

  Maybe I can travel using points, fly into Rome in the off-season, say September or October, when Italy’s poised boot is sweetly breezy and the peninsula’s marble-fountain piazzas are less crowded with cameras and pilgrims roped in line to view the endless miles of framed faces and silent statues in sorrow and moonlight.