Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Read online

  I lack the money now, my euros are gone, but I hope to go back to Italy in the fall and have it to myself. I have years on me, but like a child I am greedy. I want Italy to be all mine. You see that I am all ego, that I lack the brains God gave a goose. Like a child, what I see I want all to myself, whether it is a laneway of ospreys or a giant country viewed from a plane or Natasha’s small anxious face praying for a miracle at the Mexican clinic.

  When times were best Natasha lay on my bed, lingering, without guilt, without the usual rush to rise and dress. The zipper on her jeans is so tiny, only two or three teeth, such a short journey, more of an off-and-on switch than a zipper. Someone sewed it there, but really, what is the point?

  In Ireland swans lazed outside the hotel in a dark river of stone bridges and past that a good pub. I took photos of her stretched out, as if I needed proof it was real, couldn’t believe Natasha was there with me in the same room. In the photos she looks at a bedside book, languorous, topless, in cute red panties, an arm over her eyes to stay anonymous, though I can sense she likes having her picture taken.

  Natasha holds a smile for the camera; women seem to know how to hold a smile in a way I cannot. In photos I am caught moving between expressions, smile faltering in slow motion. In slow motion I touched the small of her back, the curve of her hip — how I admired the pronounced shape of her hips, those parenthesis shapes, those commas in my life, commas in the middle of an unspoken sentence. Then she vanished before the end. Natasha’s phone rings and she flees from me.

  “There is something you are trying to forget,” teases the gypsy woman in Rome. I am a kohl-eyed raccoon at the stream washing a cube of sugar: where did the sweetness go?

  I dwell on affliction, on bloodstream messengers. What is the message? That it is hard to meet someone new. I’m thinking tonight of my blue eyes. Nothing compares to you. The jukebox plays the same loyal tunes and my skin rebels, my skin breaks out: a wet horseshoe-shaped constellation on the flesh of my palm, and rows of red dots on the skin above my wrist, like an addict’s route map.

  Are we travelling in the horse latitudes or in an ancient country or empire or home no longer on any map? Travellers travel to find the crooked self, travellers worry the edges of roseate maps, the map’s muddy skein and dark brain filia, the lost borders and routes and lost colours and no idea what they tread upon.

  Italy, Italy, Italy, all the glittering kingdoms shaken and mixed in my head, the long love song and boot and heel into the sea, the north, the south, the mountain kingdoms and wooden fleets resting under the cliffs, men and women draped in corvid clothes shrugging off the stunning heat to gather grain and grapes and olives. Marc Antony lying with Cleopatra (we have used our throats in Egypt), Caesar stabbed in the back, Il Duce hung like a side of meat at the outdoor market, crack Nazi paratroopers hiding in the rubble of the Hitler Line, young Canadians and Poles killed trying to climb bombed slopes and cliffs, the living forced to strip ammunition from the limp bodies of dead friends. Barbarians milling at the bronze riveted gate, armies on the azure beach, so many invasions, so many lost fleets, so many prayers to the wind. It all makes me want peace. I’m waiting for peace in our time.

  Che ore sono?

  What is the time.

  Time to move on, time to forgive? No, not quite yet.

  I wait a year, or is it two, and then I do meet someone new. She is brainy and pretty and funny and she lived once in Rome. The new life where she drops in for Russian tea in my kitchen in Canada. It seems very good.

  But a slight complication, a speedy psycho blocking my driveway who says you don’t know who you’re fucking with this time, who says I will break your face, I will fuck you up if I find that anything is going on with you and my girlfriend.

  His crewcut, his contorted face close to mine.

  You have the wrong idea, I say, though really he doesn’t.

  Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, unaccustomed as I am to getting my mouth smashed.

  I’ll fuck you up, he says over and over.

  Yes, I think you’ve made that clear, I say.

  Now I see why people carry a gun. Why is nothing ever simple? Should I keep a crowbar handy? She flees in her car and he follows.

  That was an eventful tea party, I say by email. Are you all right?

  It’s not the same after that. He has robbed us of the best part, the early part. Or maybe not. Maybe that’ll be our moment, our birth. This is my new life. What is best about us may be what dooms us.

  We met in winter, in winter downtown we walk an icy sidewalk after a good dinner, holding each other, holding a Styrofoam takeout container. Then the black pickup truck prowling King Street. How many hours has he been up and down King and Queen looking for us? He shuts off the engine, leaving his black truck blocking the middle of the street, and walks to us. Is he going to break my mouth, as promised? I stand there, strangely calm.

  “I’m not a lunatic,” he says to me.

  “The body’s not even cold,” he says to her, “and here you are with him. I love you,” he says to her in a trembling voice.

  I watch and think, I’ve had my heart broken, I don’t want to visit the same on someone else. A game of musical chairs, musical torture. But I stay.

  “This is stalking,” she says, her voice rising.

  “No it isn’t,” he says.

  Stands a boxer in a clearing, or stands a boxer lacking a clearing. He will not move on. This world is glazed in ice. Is there ever such ice in Italy? The river closes, the river opens again in spring.

  We met in winter and we survive winter and love is back: darling darling darling, when love comes back to town trailing its bridal train of verve and stomach aches and complications and sweetness. After two years of a form of solitude. Unaccustomed as I am. The lawyer wants to know if she should keep representing me, my wife’s lawyer wants copies of my last three tax returns. All rise.

  My new sweetheart has anxiety attacks at three a.m.

  “Good night, have a good sleep,” I say.

  “Sleep,” she says, “is something I can’t control.”

  She lies awake and worries about her bank statement, ballooning mortgage payments, power bills she is afraid to open, her dead father’s car, her line of credit, the future — she says she has always been suspicious of happiness, she says I am too guarded. At three a.m. she decides she must break it off with me.

  Guarded? I am no more guarded than the average paranoid person. I walk out to check my mailbox, and her ex who is not a lunatic drives past my house. The next day she phones me, says she misses me. She loves my smell! Clings to my neck and sniffs. She reads upstairs in my bed while I work downstairs and it is pleasant to know that she is up there in my bed. Can this work? Can doubt or love be measured by a machine?

  The word haven, her scarlet sofa overlooking the river trees and her fireplace burning all winter, months of fire, and her musical voice when she comes (the second one is always more intense, she says, as if all know this). Her private school idioms in my ear, her dead parents’ hardcovers lining the shelves, her costly see-through French bra!

  She dreams I carry her through her neighbourhood in Trastevere with one arm. If only she will read to me above the Tiber and I can rest my head in her lap (Lady, shall I lie in your lap? I mean my head in your lap). Would she recognize my naked feet? That she has doubts brings my own doubts, and the doubts have many children.

  Why her suspicion of our happiness? Happiness is all I think about. Is my concern with my own happiness egotistical, self-centred? Is happiness a dead end or is it the only worthy pursuit? She lived in Rome, was engaged, an Italian fiancé, she showered on a sunny rooftop terrace, a view of church domes as water ran her lovely skin. Like me, she was giddy on a cinematic rooftop. Love’s octane octaves in my head again, madly in love.

  But how much is madly? What portion? I want to know to the exact decimal point.

  No, I don’t, I never want to know that math, to dissect that division
.

  She sleeps beside me in a car to Sackville and I stare at her peaceful face. I want that peace, a haven. But it all makes me wonder, can love be both madness and a haven? Does temporary love burn brightest? A bright dewy chemical bursting in the blood, a world of pepper and gunpowder sparks, my chemical romance, my doomed petrol emotion.

  Climb above the world in a plane and on a steep mountain in the Rockies ride a chairlift strung dizzyingly high above a lunar crater of peaks. The conifers are tall as rockets, yet their sharp tips are far below my boots. My son shut his eyes on the chair, hates heights, which was news to me. The chair is a Poma lift, but I thought it said Roma and wondered if it was named after gypsies or the city. My eyes are bad, I’m a one-eyed knave.

  The lifties who help us on the chairlift are all nomads from New Zealand or Australia; the sunburnt lifties work and ski winter in western Canada, then the lifties jet down under to a second winter, and then the antipodal gypsies jet back to Canada to carve more powder, gypsies craving snowy slopes, shunning summer, gypsies chasing the thin air of permanent winter.

  I go to glacial mountains of peaceful snow and carving my first turns on the ski hill I find I can finally forgive the Russian librarian and her seven charms: the goat, the tooth, the dagger to the heart.

  I forgive everyone as we ski up and down all morning, up and down and stop in the lodge to devour hard crusts and cold butter and wild-smelling jam with scalding honeyed tea, and above the clouds and peaks (cloudland!) the old world has vanished and this other kingdom seems stunningly great.

  We leave a world happily to come up here and at the end of the day are happy to strip the snow-pants and hard boots to drive back down and embrace the lost world, the world below our feet, the gas pedal, the car moving past a herd of mangy mountain goats licking salt from the mountain road and a tour-bus driver honking at the animals, the car driving down to plates and glasses and a pub’s stone fireplace, to the many cozy worlds by the rivers that never cease running, the Kicking Horse River, the Bow, the St. John, the Liffey, the Thames, the Tiber.

  Ci vediamo, I think of those absent or shunned. We’ll see each other.

  Partway up the Goat’s Eye chairlift I see a big raven swoop downhill. The high sun pins the raven’s exact shadow on the bright snow just ahead of a snowboarder racing below my chairlift vantage point. The raven’s shadow, all wings and curved Roman beak, races at the same speed as the young woman’s board, moves just ahead of her like a future, and from above I watch the race and wonder if the snowboarder is puzzled by the shadow-shape she pursues, this jerky slide show projected on the snow, this raven’s perfect black shape flitting in her path as she surfs white moguls and leans into pockets of untouched powder just inside the magic-lantern blur of steep evergreens.

  Why didn’t you say she had cancer, my wife asked before breaking off contact at Easter. Sometimes my ex needs an ex break. A black shadow on an X-ray and this black shadow marrying the perfect white ski hill. Is it real? Do we need to pay attention?

  Once I saw two small bears outside a Bengali blues club in Rome, and at first I didn’t notice their slim silver chains and I wondered if bears were loose in the city like dogs. And by the Vatican I saw a girl tiny as a crow with iridescent red fairy wings attached to her back and a silver plane shaped like a sunlit cross crossing a world, rounded clouds in the distance like broccoli going slightly brown (my doc asks that I eat more broccoli). And the Pope in bright white and gold robes addressing the multitudes in St. Peter’s Square. Or the woman in the rooftop shower who meets my eye and says, You’re funny.

  These are moments my reptilian brain becomes confused as to what is real and what is a vivid dream, what you can talk about or keep to yourself, what is prayer and what is miracle.

  Twice now I thought myself dead, but clearly I am not dead, I am back on the crowded merry-go-round (you are merry, my lord), I am back in love when I thought it would not happen again, I am back on rental skis thinking that life can never be predicted and people you haven’t yet met are full of beautiful surprises and I am very glad I am not dead.

  I ride up the mountain as the light fades, ride past a lone tree decorated with beads and bras of all colours, a tradition to toss an item from the chairlift as you glide above the tree, and now whisky-jacks and ravens investigate the bright lingerie. I am elevated to great heights and stellar views of the top of the world and ski down as swiftly as I can and say thanks getting on the Angel Express and the Australian lifties so far from home reply, “No worries, mate.”

  The lifties lift us up, take our worries. My son learns to ski faster and faster with each run, he has a goggle tan and zinc on his nose and we ascend and slam down Viking Ridge and slalom Boundary Bowl and brash sunlight glows on distant snowy peaks à la Lawren Harris’s luminous oil on canvas and none of it real estate, none of it for sale. I can see so far into the next province, the next world, peak upon peak in lovely washed blues.

  On fat demo skis I am a loose cannon in the loose powder of the Continental Divide and I feel free, I bounce gleefully from one mogul to another, using the curves of the downhill slope, not battling the bathtub moguls but letting the bowls and sidewalls steer my way. I want to quit my job and be a ski bum, roar downhill as fast as possible (this is so great), ski faster than I ever dared as a kid, my speed a calculated touch past the edge of control. Speed equals danger, speed equals release, speed equals forgiveness.

  When the light goes flat later in the day it is hard to pick your turns, you quickly lose confidence, and your eyes ache to know. In a high-altitude whiteout my sister felt an odd form of vertigo, unable to tell up from down, but most hours on the mountain are so bright (this is so fucking great). I will try to not be suspicious of happiness, of the sun, of a life of tin charms and little miracles, milagritos, a life cobbled from fragments I have handy. We’ll work it out, we’ll see each other, ci vediamo, no worries, mate, as the lifties say.

  Our gondola hangs by a thread over the gorge, my winter ascension, lifted in my secret Shangri-La. Natasha was splendid and my new love is splendid and today’s skiing is splendid and the world on high is splendid: is there a better word to end on?

  Butterfly on a Mountain

  They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

  — Francis Bacon

  The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

  — Anatole France

  Perhaps there is no station waiting, no mouth. In lovely Roman streets a young woman begs for coins among drunken pub crawlers and Bengali men hawking red roses. A child and a young man wait nearby, all three faces handsome, but unhappy, a troubled trifecta, their cursed aura palpable, an urban detail you take in, like the dimensions of a sooty Gothic doorway.

  My cousin Eve and I have seen this trio in the street before, the way the young man glares at the woman: clearly their situation is her fault, saddling him with a child and no prospects in a joyless city. The child plays with a toy and the young man pretends to ignore them both. The young woman’s hair is longer than Eve’s and she wears a long skirt mirrored with silver threads and platelets, looking medieval amidst the tourist shorts and singlets.

  Eve studies the three, says, “I wonder if they are Roma.”

  “How on earth can you tell?”

  “Well, they may be zingari, gypsies, or they may be Croatian, or Tunisian, or they may be from Iraq or Afghanistan. Who knows these days.”

  The locals complain, merda, too many gypsies and too many illegals coming on boats from every direction, more every day! It wasn’t like this in the old days, they say. And last week a stowaway fell from the sky, crushed on city pavement, the poor guy, his head broken open after he dropped out of a DC-9’s wheel well. As they say, sin is geographical. The stowaway wanted this city, and he had such an amazing view of Rome’s river and steeples and temples until the wondrous diorama rose up to k
ill him.

  The young man crosses the road and straddles someone else’s parked motorcycle, his body bent forward and his hands wide on the grips to pretend that the powerful motorcycle is his own hard machine, and on this machine he is far away from everyone, zooming freely up some fine valley in a soft leather jacket, wind in his stubbled face and a fat roll of euro notes in his pocket, a dream valley with no begging for a stranger’s pennies and no child glancing sideways to gauge his surly moods.

  He hunches over someone else’s motorcycle and the young woman approaches merry drunken tourists for coins. Tour groups follow a flag-holder down narrow cobblestones that shake with tour buses; a bus kneels at a hotel door like a camel, a hydraulic trick. In the undeclared war, the winners are winning, but you know money is there, money walking past in wallets and purses.

  “Let’s go,” Eve says.

  I can’t move from the suggestion of menace. I feel I can read these three like watching actors work a lit stage: she is trying hard, but such streets are not paved with gold, no one will hire him, and in the script the young man blames the young woman, in the script the brooding young man will take it out on the young woman.

  In Rome, goldfinches; and goldfinches zip by my house in Canada. When I left Canada wobbly tulips were trying to straighten up under goldfinches flying in crab-apple blossoms and flooding rivers withdrew to let fiddleheads open their tight furls.

  My maple tree was starting to fill out and throw down shade on my lawn, but this Canadian season could not be called summer — winter still looms, too huge a recent memory, like an army departed in the night, raw gashes left on salty ground, grass boulevards in ruins and chunks of ice and straw and flotsam caught high in the river’s muddy trees where the water rose into the upper branches.

  That stunning crashing freshet and river ice seems only hours ago, I can’t forget it, an icy spectre that was just there. But stumble from a plane and Italy is already furnace-hot, no ice in this murky chocolate river and horses dreaming in the shade and heat addling my brain.