Chapter 16 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

In the parfumerie I don't find anything that suits YaYa but I buy something on the recommendation of the sales girl who has riveting green eyes like a chameleon.
"It's for a girl who said she smells like the Tiber.
Of course last night I protested. After all, what's a little coffee and sweat but heaven scent?
The sales girl is delighted to show me something that she herself uses, something that suits her perfectly as she demonstrates with a little dab on her wrist, holding it delicately out for me and turning it under my nose. I look up the slender white length of her arm to meet her grinning eyes that await my approval. "What does it mean I ask, reading the box out loud, "Occhi Verdi?"
Admittedly, my thinking is still a little soggy.
"Green eyes, she laughs, with her thin lips, "that is why it is my favorite, but really here, smell again, it is very calm and not too strong.
She holds her wrist closer to my lips and nose this time.
"Do you like it?
Of course I'll take it, even though I know it's wrong. I'll take anything that comes with an arm and a pitch like that.
"Does it smell as good on everyone? I ask, smoothing out my game.
She smiles, maybe not quite understanding, or not caring, and makes some register chat with me, throwing into the bargain a three inch wooden Pinocchio whose body twitches and collapses when you press his button underneath.
I leave the shop less than thrilled with my purchase but it's a start. I have another idea. Actually, I passed the place this morning before I left town in a fit on the scooter. And now it has to be that exact flower stand because that's where ideas like this leave me. I can't change the slide. I set out to find it again by feeling my way around the city walls.

The young lothario who runs the stall is eager to get to the bottom of my intentions before I even turn off my scooter. I knew I'd picked the right place. The questions come at once and in order he is able to gauge first how much I will spend, and then to what end the flowers are being offered, and to whom and when and so on. He sees my predicament right away and understands. A Roman girl he says to himself. Not to be believed he adds. And have you? - he asks, putting his fist and palm together. I lie. Last night, I say, at the river. Well then, why didn't I say so in the first place? Roses! Yes, red roses! Why there is no further question about it!
Here, I have these, he says, picking up a sagging bunch that are tied together with twine and laced with dust. He is asking more than I pay for my room at the pensione. What about these, I point? He picks up the purple daisies, strips a few yellow leaves off and holds them out for me. These are very fresh, he says. Today I have a good price. I'll take them, I say.
I place the flowers on the floorboard between my knees and feet. They squeeze past my legs into the fresh air like a wild bush. I try not to crush them as I drive but it is a struggle. By the time I get to the bar they are somewhat beaten by the wind and de-petalled. I hand them off to Maria, the woman who runs the place. YaYa is off doing some unnamed errand. At least the flowers are safe now and in the right hands. Maria will fill a vase and decorate the counter with them and they will make a nice surprise. Meanwhile, I take a coffee and slide off to change into some dry clothes.
When I return to the cafe YaYa is polishing the giant coffee machine. She is always cleaning it until someone comes in and orders a coffee. She manages a smile. She is tired, distraught, but warm in an instant.
"But how are you? I ask.
"I'm all right. She has a certain way of saying things from the depths of her brooding, which is more or less continual I'm starting to realize. Her manner is strong but a weariness taints everything. She smiles a forced, fleshless grin.
"I like the flowers, she says, flickering her tongue against the back of her teeth, about to call me a bastard for embarrassing her at work. She bends down to smell them and curtsies and then she takes a bite from them.
"How did it go?
"It was terrible," she says, with petals stuck to her lips.
"He came back this morning and said some things that I don't know what to think about yet. He was hurt, of course. He wanted to know why I gave him permission to love me and then took it away like that.
"I told him I didn't know if that's what I did. I don't know anything anymore. Our story has become ugly and stale and I want something else only I don't know what and I don't know if he is a part of the problem or if I still love him.
The word permission strikes me. Pinocchio squirms and collapses in my pocket.
"You have some work to do - both of you," I say.
"Yes, but I cannot forget his hands around my neck this morning. And I am still anxious about our story. I need this for myself. I want to see you tonight after work if it is possible.
"Anyhow, he is going tonight, leaving, and I don't want to be there while he walks around and gathers his things, inviting me to smoke fifty joints with him. We never go anywhere like that. No, tonight I need to have some fun and I hope you will come with me. I will be here at half past eight but I have to work now and you should go because my boss is staring at us. She is good friends with my man's mother, but don't worry she is on my side, she wants me to be happy - but the bar is her thing and there are customers and work I need to finish. I will speak to you later. Ciao Mac.
With that I bid her boss, whose position I appreciate but don't fully trust, a polite arrivederci and drive off into the bustling streets of the Viminale. For a while I am lost in the symphony of cars and scooters and then I make my way up the Campidoglio overlooking the ancient Forum.
I park and open my new notebook. I write down a phrase my grandfather used to say to me, made all the better now because I can summon it in italian for YaYa and maybe cheer her up.
Il mondo e fatta per te.
The world was made for you. At fifteen I didn't understand and I still don't. Maybe she would know.
I drive off to the cafe to send her an email so that when she gets home tonight she will have some company.
But suddenly I'm not so sure about seeing her, especially with her man lurking about. I consider going to the bar and calling it off. Already things are upside down. In one night everything is changed. She has seen something. She admits the compromises she has been making in her life for a roommate and a job but these are not easy to quit. You have to compromise to eat, to have a place in the barrio, to work a stupid job even.
She wants to leave, to live in a music video dream of California driving a flamed-up Cadillac. But I cannot be her hope. Besides, there are complications. With her backlog of court dates and fines she can't even apply for a passport. Does she really want to live in exile again like she did in Spain or London, always looking over her shoulder and surviving on the fringes?
She understands, I think. She has already lived too decisively to pin her hopes on me. She knows she has to be strong. She knows about resentment. She knows she must protect herself against anything that is soft.
If only there weren't so many questions. If only I could trust her but there is so much I will never know. She claims to have parents in Rome and a sister in Sicily - so there is that- and yet she seems more fond of her extended family, of those scratchy goddesses and vagrants and addicts and flamenco dancers and prostitutes from the bar, and from the streets, or those urchins from the gypsy camps, or the San Lorenzo squat, where she learned to make money in the piazza eating fire and dancing with swords.
These were her outlines, the unfinished sketches she shared on her skin. The rest she keeps to herself; those parts of her that run deep scars that surface on the broken corners of her travertine smile or in the black moons of her eyes.
"I'm all right," she would say with that weary inflection, tired from two thousand years of sleep walking, from pulling herself up ghostlike into the living and chaining herself to the toilet bowel, to our world she would say, not the one she wanted, preferring herself to pick up some ancient, mythic battle cooked up out of a hash soaked study of Babylon and do some real damage for a change.