Chapter 13 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

13.
I wake up in my child-size bed at the Pensione Kate. The noise from the weekday market climbs up the drainpipe and through the shutters. As I open the window, gold light bounces off the palazzo across the street, and floods my tiny room. I hear someone clearing their throat. A door bangs open and someone else beats a carpet. My feet hit the cool terrazzo floor and, as always, I smell laundry hung out to dry and fresh cut basil. The Signora is singing outside my room. I pull on a shirt and head down the hall, grabbing yesterday's USA today, and it is a good thing because I am still muddy in the mind of sleep when I realize there is no toilet paper.
I begin to call out to the Signora but I stop because I don't have the word yet and I don't want to sit there and pantomime. Instead, I tear the newspaper into strips and reach over to moisten them in the sink. The papier mache is soft and cool and I am pleased with my solution. Back in my room I catch a look at myself in the bureau mirror and sure enough there is newsprint smeared all over my ass. It is better than shit I suppose. Merde, there's a word I know. It is written everywhere on the walls as graffiti.
I check my dictionary for the missing paper word and make another trip down the hall to scrub my ass. This time the Signora has refilled the carta igienica, but I say it anyway, out loud, just to practice.
When I finish dressing I go to see Luna, the Signora. She's in the kitchen heating milk on the stove. I sit down for coffee and biscotti. She's very talkative this morning, which is exhausting because she doesn't speak English. Still she insists that we make a good team. She understands enough of what I say and vice versa. She tells me that I look like a policeman. From what I've seen of the Carabinieri, this is a sly way to say that I am a handsome, working class brute. I point at my shirt, blue, the same blue as the police uniforms. Eh, she says. She circles her own face and then points to mine. Then she pulls Vittorio down from the shelf. He is wearing a crisp military uniform with a trim moustache and sparkling eyes. There is not a thought in his head. She looks at him and then to me. She is good-natured. She shrugs her shoulders but it's plain she misses him every day, year after year.
The room gets quiet and I start to excuse myself but Luna puts a solemn hand on my shoulder and then I remember my quest to see Berto this morning. He's the waiter over by the station, the one who has a thing for Melodie. Last night he waved to me from across the street but I was on my way to see YaYa so I never stopped to find out why he was glad to see me for a change.
As I get up Luna begins to laugh at something the photo has handed her, and her laughter builds until it threatens to become a serious condition. She breaks wind and sweats and almost chokes. She is laughing to Vittorio and then to me and then all three of us share a laugh. She is overjoyed. The tiny kitchen table trembles beneath her. She wipes her brow and pulls her housedress together while her voice adjusts to its formal register. She kisses him, crosses him and puts him back up on the shelf next to the ceramic farm animals when in comes the Jockey whose feet don't touch the floor when he sits in the kitchen chair. Luna wipes the tears from her eyes and serves him a cappuccino the size of his head and he hovers over it with his toothless grin, steaming his rheumy eyes open.
He's a crazy old man, more of a child than Luna's own two teenage sons and daughter. I gather he came along in the marriage. I liked him. He was a good for nothing. I don't even think he spoke proper Italian, not that anyone could understand him, but he did bring the wine out at dinnertime and pour it into straight glasses. That's all I ever saw him do around the place.
Otherwise I might run into him on the street or at one of the few cafes along the way. He sat for hours by himself with that grin on his face and no one seemed to pay much attention to him. Sometimes I would go and come back and there he still was. Luna must have given him a few dollars for wine, just to clear him out. She took care of him. He had clean clothes and a little bed in the corner next to a crucifix and a pin-up girl calendar, and of course, his meals. He didn't seem to have a care in the world. He just went up and down the street outside their building like Job.
Sometimes at night I would pick him up on my walk home, greeting him from the street as I passed. Invariably he was slung over a chair, smiling in whatever direction his head had fallen and when he saw me he would perk up and call out "Aoh! which was old and specifically Roman and meant "hey! and was generally considered slang of the unwashed. But of course I would relish the opportunity to call back to him, especially for the benefit of the late night crowd.
"Aoh! Come Sta Signore?
Sir, which no one called him, and he would bounce up, run under my arm, shrug his shoulders and dig his hands into his empty pockets and we would walk like that down the street back to Luna and her sleeping house.
Usually I'll have my keys out before he can even wrestle his hands free of his pockets. He is good to have around though, especially on a moonless night, because even in the dark he knows which keys fit to which door locks, a process which usually takes me five to ten extra minutes depending. It's those Roman locks, ask anyone and they will tell you that they are delicate mechanisms, even more so if you're holding onto a piss.
On these nights the jockey will laugh at me as he spins through a series of six locks with his eyes closed. I laugh with him - through the heavy outside door that fills an archway from another time, into the pedestrian foyer that houses the lift. Here we are at our loudest knowing that we aren't disturbing anyone - not in the street, nor over our heads because of the heavy construction of the palazzo.
Once inside he quickly flips his third or fourth lock and we are climbing past the floors in a metal cage that stands us together too close really for riot. Instead we giggle, the idiot and the child, like we have gotten away with something, having come this far in the world each holding a set of keys, and each more than a little drunk, riding a steel cage up and down in the grasp of the stairwell.
On the landing it is a different story. On the landing we are sober fellows. He is, by his age at least, the man of the house and I am his guest. He undoes the last three locks into the Luna sanctuary. The door is so heavy it creaks like a boat as he holds it open for me. Once inside, absent a hat he tips his hand to me. We are down to a wink and a smile as we pad quietly along our separate hallways in the dark to our rooms. Invariably, with my hands out feeling along the walls, eyes concentrating on the contours, I will nudge a heavy frame or a standing vase and the thud it creates will reverberate over the marble floors and echo in return a giggle from that swift little man who is already settling in under the covers. Bouna notte his laughter says. Yes a good night always, coming home like that, welcome in this house, and the one thing I could count on was that furniture and those artifacts to bump into and to guide me because like any good Roman the Signora loved to fill a space in any sense of the word.
And fill it she does, sweeping into the room, her housedress girding her like glad rags, as she opens doors and shutters and sings to the morning sun. The room fills with fresh air and light and the changeless quality of her voice which is like the music at a carnival.
"Eh? She calls out, seeing me pass in the hall.
I'm sweating a hangover with a low-grade headache and an itchy ass and she wants me to come. She knows how feeble I am right now, without coffee. She's honest like that. It's a prescient animal honesty. That's why it's hard not to be truthful with her. She always seems to know before you answer her.
"Ti piace? She is asking, do I like it? With her arm she is indicating an entire wall upon which there are several amateur art pieces, including prints and drawings and original paintings.
"Eh? She intones again because I am not quick to answer and her heavy arm is getting tired. She thumps me in the chest and shakes her head.
"Allrighta, huh?
When I move in on a piece for a better look, to get a signature or a note on technique, I'm hoping to find her name and sing her praises, but she is quick to pull me away.
There are more, of course, walls and rooms full, and if we are to get anywhere, we must consider them in broad strokes, in a single sweep of her arm, whereupon she pivots ninety degrees left or right to show me the next wall in its entirety. The Signora gives the impression that all this wealth exhausts her. Oh the dust! Yes the dust for one thing, she shows me, smudging a frame and then she whips off something fast, over her shoulder, admonishing in its tone. I hear the daughter's name, Gabriella, in a flurry, and then the names of her other two, softening a little, calling her sons Luca and Roberto.
"Stasera? Tonighta? Huh?
I'm not sure what she's getting at. I shake my head.
"Mangerai a casa mia. Tu! Thumping at my chest again for emphasis.
"Oh, eat! Yes eat, oh tonight?
She ushers me into the kitchen. She calls out to her brood again and turns to the sink. "Ok, ok, ok, mya housa she is saying, as though it is decided. "Gabriella, Luca, Roberto!
The problem is I have plans, or if not precise plans then the hope at least that my evening will involve YaYa when she finishes at the bar. I mean, I have to be available. What if dinner goes late? I can't keep her waiting like that. She doesn't last long in the Center, idling with her troubled spirit and her empty pockets.
She will flee like Cinderella to her little barrio in Centocelle where at least she can smoke some hash and relax. But the Signora has already planned the menu and is making her mental shopping list, singing over the hot water in the sink as her children stumble to, filing past in their grumpy shorts and nightshirts, grinning like children do when they are being scolded because they know it will come.
As she tends to them, mediating the grab for the dry toast and the first cappuccino, I hurry out down the hall. Even as I'm pushing the button for the lift I can hear the light slaps she doles out to them and the abrupt shuffle of chair legs that follows. And then the laughter of course, filling that tiny kitchen.