Chapter 10 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

10.
We stopped at a bar, near the Trastevere, for a bottle of Bardolino, an inexpensive red, that she picked out and paid for before I could protest.
"Good, she beamed on our way out, "Let us go to the Isola.
Stopping at the door, YaYa realized that we had no means to open the bottle. She walked back inside and handed it to the young attendant, giving him instructions. She stood over him while he butchered the cork, which made him more nervous. He tried a few times to jamb the broken cork back into the bottle. She hissed something at him and he finally forced an ill fitting plastic bottle capper on it.
"Shall we get glasses? I asked.
"No, they will only give us plastic and that is wrong.
"I can offer to buy some from the bar.
"No, the bottle is fine.
I backed off. I didn't want her taking her frustrations out on me. She had to put up with her own unruly customers any other day. Let her have some fun.
She mumbled some cuss or curse on the way past the owner who barely looked up from his chair the whole time.
"Did you see that stupid bastard? He tried to put the rotten cork back in. I told him to throw it away and he kept trying.
I took the yellow capper off the bottle and put it in my pocket, hoping to appease her, as we walked over to the Tiber. We found an unlocked gate at the Ponte Fabricio and followed the steps, which were cracked with weeds growing through the concrete and strewn with broken glass, down to the riverside.
"You have just walked past a bridge that has been here since before Christ. There!" she said, pointing, "That is the Tiber Island. Do you know about it?
"I went over there the other day. There's a hospital, and a church of course.
"Then you know that the church was built on a very important site. It was Rome's first hospital, named for Aesculapius - the god of medicine. There was a cult of women from Greece who came to this spot to treat a plague. When I was a girl, a young teenager, I stayed there too.
She pointed to the balcony of the hospital's successor.
"I was very sick in my lungs. I had to stay but I loved it. I didn't care because I could go out there and smoke and nobody would come and I would sit and watch the river and I could see all over the neighborhoods of Rome and pretend I was queen. It was fun. I didn't mind it really, being sick. I was sad when I had to leave and sometimes I dream that I am back here.
"They let you smoke when you were sick?"
"Well, I was very much on my own at the time. Come on, let's sit down somewhere."
We took a seat on the cement, a few steps back from the dizzying turmoil of the river so we could talk. A few feet below, the river crashed into a waterfall that reached all the way across. And further down, it slammed and swirled into itself at the tip of the island, under the single-arched remains of a stone bridge.
I pointed to it and asked her what it was, continuing our game. I liked her answers better when she didn't know but this one was no problem.
"That I can tell you - that is the Ponte Rotto. It means the Broken Bridge. It is a Roman relic and the old popes tried many times to fix it but it always kept breaking. I think it is beautiful just as it is.
I stood up with my hands on my hips, in imitation. I agreed. The detached arch was inspiring, monumentally aloof in the middle of the green current, casually joining the right and left flows together again.
After two thousand years of beatings and invasions and empires against those stone pilings, there they stood, presenting the river to its lost self, and presenting Rome to itself.
"There is an old saying that we Romans have. It says that to cross the Tiber is to go too far. Of course, in old Rome it was understood that on the other side, in the Trastevere, is where they used to put all the criminals and whores and plague victims. It was not considered a very nice place. Now of course, it is very different. It is popular and trendy and I think I like it better, knowing how it was before.
"You remember it well, of course?
"Shut up and drink with me before I have it all. She gleamed her purple smile in the moonlight that hovered down there on the current like a phosphorescence, and shoved the wine bottle at me, laughing, lighting another cigarette, chain smoking.
It was there in the glow of her cigarette that I caught something, but looking at her curled up in the wine dark night, I couldn't be sure. Was this really the same creature that held the crowd with her dragon charms yesterday on the piazza? I decided to drop it because I wanted her to choose what part of her story she would tell. Maybe the gypsy girl and the musician she went off with were critical to that story, but maybe they would take her away from the river.
We finished the bottle and I tried to tell YaYa about Los Angeles, about the neighborhood I lived in, the police brutality, the gangs and the availability of guns. Her suspicions, like everyone else's I've been meeting along the way, were confirmed. The U.S. is a violent place, especially, it seemed from the outside looking in, and they are not surprised in the least because nothing can be that good and they are right. They have reasons to doubt America, especially these days, and I agree with them.
"Tell me about a typical day - what do you see? she asked.
"Trees. Palm trees. That's the first thing. And then cars. And then the miles of empty sidewalks. Gleaming, perfect, white cement pouring into the ocean. In my neighborhood it is fun to ride a bike because it is poor and ethnic so everyone is on the street preaching or selling something.
"It sounds nice. It sounds tired, but in a beautiful way, like Centocelle, where I live, only there is no Hollywood, only Rome and the pope.
"Don't sound so cheated. History, god, great food, and a free press. That's hard to beat.
"Try it for two thousand years. Anyway, that is what I tell the old ladies on the bus when they pray into my ears. That I'm as old as their god. It's fun to disgust them because they look at me like I am dirt.
"I'm sorry to bring it up.
"Aye, I am sorry too - for my old ways. It is my instinct to protect myself. It seems like I have been fighting forever.

We were sitting close, looking into one other. Her face was clear and sad like the moon. She looked down into her lap, consulting her men's wristwatch that shackled her bony arm.
"Is it getting late? I asked.
"Only if he is waiting up for me.
"I didn't know.
"I'm sorry to bring it up. He and I have our own stupid story. But when you came back to the bar I knew I would go with you. I had to see where our story would take us and right now I don't care what he thinks, but I don't want trouble either.
"Look - we can go and that will be that and I will thank you for tonight.
She put a finger up to my lip and then shifted so her back was pressed against my chest. She sat inside me like that, like an old Hopi in a bearskin, staring out at the river.
"I used to kayak she began after several moments, and I could feel her smiling.
"I had a teacher, an old man who didn't care about anything else. All he did was smoke a spliff and go down to the river. He was funny and smart. He was an anarchist and I wanted to be just like him.
"Where is he now, the old man?
"I don't know. I lost track of him. I ran away, first to another neighborhood - to San Lorenzo to be a punk - and then to London and I lived in a squat and got pregnant twice and when I came back to Rome my life was different.
"Do you go on the river anymore?
"No, purtroppo, my kayaks - I have two - are in a garage far out of the city.
"We'll get them sometime. We can do it here, in Rome?
"No, not right here, but further up where it is a bit slower and we need a car to get them. We won't get very far walking around Rome with kayaks on our heads.
"I can rent one.
YaYa fell quiet again, lying against me like that. I rubbed her bony wings and she sank further into me.
I worked over her shoulders and neck, rolling her forward a little. She moaned quietly against her breast plate as I worked her curled spine.
She then lifted her shirt and flipped her hair forward over her head. There were three small targets tattooed on the back of her neck. I kissed each one and waited.
Suddenly I thought of Cassi in my hands, under a similar spell. I thought of our last days together, before I left. We waited quietly, without hope, wearily engaged in our routines of drinking and watching television. I packed slowly and tried to hide my enthusiasm. We barely got a good-bye goose in, even as we faced all that time apart, and now here I was, another night along the river.
I must have stopped because YaYa turned around to face me. I picked up each of her hands and regarded her tattoos, turning her arms over and tracing them with my fingers. There were bright red flowers growing out of solid black geometries; Pulcinello masks danced over flaming rivers. Most of the work was unfinished, like the ink had run out. The biohazard symbol marked the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. I pondered this death grip and then I asked her about them softly. Which was first? Did it hurt more here? Will you add something to it? Typical questions while I continued to stroke her arms.
"And are there more? I asked, knowing full well the usual terrain in question.
She pulled up on her pant leg to reveal a flowing Chinese design that shifted into a dragon as it wrapped her calf. I bent down to stroke and kiss this beast.
I looked up from down there with my tongue still attending. She lifted her shirt over her stomach to reveal a long dagger with a wavy-edged blade that started at her rib cage and cut across her glowing abdomen to disappear below her waistline. I followed this one with my tongue, pulling her belt loops down to reveal the poison tip.
"I have a sword like that at home that I used to carry everywhere.
And I knew then for sure. That was her the day before on the piazza.
"The police almost took it once but I got away on the bus. We all went around like that - we were crazy. We didn't care. The cops were always after us and so we were very dodgy. One time they caught a friend of ours and so we went to the station and hammered on the gates until they chased us away with guns. We were only kids then, twelve or fourteen and we didn't have weapons, except for my sword.
I was reminded of the joyous revolt of Pasolini's children - of Lelo and Tommasino and Shitter cruising the parks and terminals and river beds and dragging ass home, covered in shit or blood, the cheaters cheated, beaten up, robbed of their ill-gotten gains, in the dawn always, and always beyond the last tram stop, the furthest reaches from modern Rome.
"Why did you carry it?
"Just for a bit of fun but after a while I started using it in my act. I still work the square sometimes. I dance a gypsy dance and I eat fire. I use the sword to show off.
"I saw a group on the Piazza Navona the other day.
"Yes that was us. My man plays the guitarra, and Sanella, the gypsy girl too, you might have seen her. We all take care of her. We are her family in some ways. And it is nice to perform and make a little money besides, except when the cops decide to go against us and I cannot afford to get busted anymore so I don't go out with them very often.
"You have trouble?
"It is kid's stuff. We all have records and when you are living in a punk squat you cannot pay your fines and eventually, if things don't go well you have more fines to pay and you miss a court date on occasion and pretty soon one day you cannot even have a driver's license or a passport.
"But you were a kid."
"Yes, well, I can only say that I have been very good for two years now with no hassles from the cops.
"It all started when you ran away?
"More or less but that is my own shithead. You should have seen us. We had a whole building for many months and there were at least twenty of us and three floors and a hundred cats and nobody bothered us because San Lorenzo is a poor neighborhood and people are busy with their own troubles. Except once, the cops came, after that night we went to the jail, but we were ready for them because we had been saving our piss and shit in buckets for a whole week, and when they came there were many more of us than them, and all the neighborhood came out to watch and cheer us on and we were on the roof."
"And what happened?"
"We threw a burning mattress down at them so they left.
"Not your buckets?
"No, later we took them and threw them at a military building and after all this we knew we had to leave the squat for good because they would come back and kill us once the neighbors went to bed.
I looked at her sitting there, drawing a glow from the water, her arms crossed on her knees. A smile spread under the moons of her eyes as she listened to the river.
This was her crease of sunlight. The memories of a child queen kayaking through Rome. Down here she didn't have to crawl. That is why she brought me here, to show me her act on the balance beam.
But who is this woman huddled next to me, confessing her shithead? Who is this woman ten years my younger, and hardened wise beyond her years, who worships a banished prostitute goddess of the ancient world, who hungers for Tom Robbins books, feathery lingerie and milkshakes, who laughs at that 'made you look' joke? Why, I wonder? Why her? Why bother? Why am I here?
Well that is the gift of love and I will get to that, but tonight, under this moon and along her river, I must heed the voices of the sirens in the distance as they canopy and lope down the via del Teatro de Marcello in a river of dancing flames.