Chapter 14 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

14.
My first impulse once I hit the street is to go straight to the bar, to her bar. I know she has the run of the place until lunchtime when her boss arrives. But what if she doesn't want to see me yet? I only put her in a taxi six hours ago. That left four sleepless hours of trouble with her man. I decide to go in the afternoon when she is a little worn in by the day. If I have a gift for her all the better. After all I am here. The market practically begins at my door and what a way to greet the day. I take a coffee with the old woman who looks like my grandmother Santina fifty years ago in her print dress and horn-rims. This woman doesn't speak either, but she is not crippled by a misguided lobotomy, she is just shy.
I buy some overripe cherries and a newspaper and then I browse the hosiery and the wallets and the ass that outnumbers me ten to one on this little strip.
I wash my cherries in one of those public spigots. Every cart is a landslide of harvest bursting with the aroma of morning dirt. I understand the still life now that I have seen fruits and vegetables thus as opposed to the irradiated, sterilized abundance washed in florescent light in every produce aisle in America. No wonder we don't eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables - they are made to seem common and ugly. Here they have brought us closer to the original and I have not tasted better. I believe it is something with the soil in this peninsula, in the collective soil of these people that brings the goodness of the earth to our lips using the simple palette of the sun.
I walk to the next stall with my plums. I am comparing. I am looking ahead at what I will buy tomorrow or the next day, naming things to myself as though I have never seen them. The vendors cry out like birds in an aviary. It goes back and forth like a three penny opera, or a three ring circus, a tit for tat and the like, addressing each other, lifting an apple to be washed in the light, pulling a bunch of rival grapes out of a customers bag to inspect them, filling crisp brown sacks a tad over, their wrinkled dirty hands arranging and displaying and praising with such snap and gusto. "What else? What else? They are calling out. There is so much they want you to try a little of everything, of theirs.
I stop at another fountain midway down the block. Water flows freely all over Rome. I could watch it roll off into the gutter all day. I wash my hands, my plums, my face, my sweaty neck, my feet - why not? - and take a drink. Then I fill my water bottle. It takes a simple luxury such as this to brace up a man. Cool fresh water for everyone, everywhere.
I know I can go on now. I am ready for the day. I take on the rest of the market at a clip. I buy some fresh socks and throw away my old ones right there. T-shirt too. I do a quick jog a few blocks east to Termini, the train station, where I seem to start and finish every day. I don't see Berto at the cafe so I go west to Piazza della Repubblica and the Via Nazionali. I go slowly in and out of the used bookstalls that line the Piazza del Cinquecento. I stop at Santa Maria dei Angeli church and light a candle and say a prayer for my own soul and that of an old friend. Before I leave I check the progress of the restoration in the sacristy. I've missed the art students who climb the scaffold in their one-piece jumpers with paintbrushes in their teeth. I go next door to visit the ruins at the Baths of Diocletian. My favorite statue is the seated bronze Pugilist inside the great octagonal hall. It is from the first century b.c. and it is after the fact - his bruises and cuts are rendered with missing inlays and his precious eyes are gone too, but he is still with us.
I walk past the University of Philosophy, next to dei Angeli, where the students gather enthusiastically on the steps or in the entryway, excited to do nothing. There is a cafe nearby, in the shadows. It is another one of my haunts where I come to watch the procession of ass thread the whip of zigzagging cars and mopeds around the circular of Repubblica.
There is nothing like an ass that is scared - all at once it is as tight as it goes, moving as quick as it can and yet something is held back, the apprehension of one quarter of one cheek not in agreement with the rest in the choice to dart in front of a lorry that is trying to get on the inside track, whose driver is hung-over with a bad tooth besides.
In fact he will tell you by his expression that he drank whiskey all night to kill the pain because he couldn't afford to take the day off from work today. He will also tell you that he doesn't give a shit about your ass. He'd rather curse and spit on you if it didn't hurt so much to work his jaw, but he won't hit you because if he did - well, it's just not done and there are many more pleasant things to do.
Besides, Italian drivers and pedestrians are better than that. There is a relationship here, as you can see in this circular, with one quarter of one cheek and a bad tooth working it out.
I jump into the circling mess, entering the street without the aid of a crosswalk, because in Rome that is the sure sign of an amateur. I cross over to Feltrenelli's bookstore and waste valuable daytime perusing translations. "Tropico di Cancro "Paradiso Perduto "I Piccoli Fratelli "Fratelli del Vino
The book titles amuse me but more than anything it is air-conditioned and there are always young pretty girls shopping and ringing up sales. I buy a Primo Levi collection in English and flirt with the college girl at the counter. She is wearing an armload of rubber bands that she accrues while stocking paperbacks. She's a little punk, cute, and she speaks English. I compliment her taste in jewelry and she blushes. She takes off half of them, and puts them on my wrist. I leave glowing like an idiot and after a few turns on the sidewalk, in front of the cashier window, I come back in to buy something else.
The blank notebooks I'm considering are right there at the counter. I take my time choosing but nothing comes of it. I buy my notebook and leave, schoolboy shy, without saying another word. Of course when I turn back in the doorway she is still smiling at me. I step out into the heat marveling at my paralysis.
I leave the bracelet on even though the rubber bands catch the hair on my wrist and annoy me. My first thought, however, is not that I am too old to be receiving and wearing such a gift, but that my fidelity to YaYa is being called into question.
It doesn't take long for my thoughts to turn against me and consider the real issue, 6000 miles away, an hour or two into sleep. Beautiful, young, faithful Cassi - a little beery perhaps right now, with blankets and dog bodies piled about her in my stead.
I start for the public phones across via Orlando before I come to my senses. I don't want to wake her and I don't want to call her when I'm guilty. The latter usually precipitates a fight. It's such an obvious, ordinary, self-deceiving projection and each time it happens right under my nose and what's worse, I refuse to avert it because in my twisted circuit that is a concession to it. I will not bend.
I decide what I need is another church. I follow a pack of art students into Santa Maria della Vittoria. It is a comparatively small affair - wildly gold and radiant in that spiky, geometric, byzantine style. The students plop down in the atrium and begin to sketch the ornate detail. In the forward apse there is a famous Bernini marble depicting the visitation of St. Theresa by Seraphim. He is about to inject her with divine ecstasy, or perhaps he's already taken a few plunges. Her expression could go either way. The scene is infected with a light that is not so heavenly. What is Bernini's position I wonder, and why is everything pointing that way for me these days?
I take a seat in the pew, again feeling lowly and unworthy and naked in god's house, but I don't try to hide my thoughts - apparently there is no use. Instead I let my eyes wander from Saint Theresa to a couple of the students who have gotten out their notepads. I like that they are so full of it, sketching away with excitement, their young pale flesh trembling, their soft curves pressing into the marble altar. What a time in their lives I am thinking to be given all this, well ahead of the rot that sets in with age.
But they are here to prove me wrong as I follow them out and they trundle off to a McDonald's down the street. What a furious lack of imagination it takes to go from Bernini to a Big Mac so joyously. I don't see how they can do it. I am convinced that they are not getting the full value of their experience here in the eternal city and for some reason this angers me. But then I wonder what am I getting from a wrist full of rubber bands and my schoolboy lust?

Berto is out on the sidewalk combing the tables from the morning crush, just in time for the aperitivo crowd. He is smiling like a penguin. He brings me a beer. He seems pleased with himself.
"Well what is it? I ask. "Did you finally get lucky with one of your customers?
"I called her! Our Melodie - I took the papers you left me and did something for once.
I'd almost forgotten about the map I gave him. The poor man. Of course I had no intentions of following up with her.
"And she remembered you?
"She even thanked me. I'm afraid it doesn't look so good for you after what I told her.
"I don't want to know about it. So I'm glad you did it. Now what?
"I'm quitting the cafe and going to visit her in Geneva and if all goes well my room will be empty for a while. That's what I wanted to ask you. Are you set? It's the least I can do.
"I don't know how long I'm staying in Rome. It depends. There's someone else.
"Already?
"Yes, already, a Roman. And I might have a visitor soon from Los Angeles.
"Your wife?
"Not quite.
"I understand.
Good for him because I didn't. I had to restrain myself from running off to find a telephone or that guy with the bad tooth and the whiskey breath.
"You know, your Melodie has a taste for vodka, I say.
"I can see you're dying to tell me all about it, but I'm still working here and I have some customers.
"She was studying to become a nun.
"Ammazzalo! he says, surprised. It means 'Holy Shit!' in the Roman street.