Chapter 4 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

4.
That next day Melodie took a room two blocks from mine, in the heart of Rome, near Termini, the central train station. We agreed to meet back at her door in two hours, refreshed and ready for dinner.
I stopped at the international call center in my neighborhood. It was run by African men in elegant white pajamas and there was always a police car at the curb, on the lookout for terrorists. I'm not sure what gelato and train station whores have to do with the global threat but the cops usually seemed pretty busy.
Inside I checked my email and then called Cassi, which I had been avoiding like laundry.
"Just seeing the sights baby," I said.
"I bet you are. I thought you forgot about me. I was starting to think you weren't going to call again."
"It's only been a few days."
"It seems more like a week. Besides, you said you would call."
Her usual laconic self. In other words, hung over and ornery. If I bit, this could flower into a monologue of banality that would either make me homesick or send me back to following women in the streets.
"Guess what your boy's doing?" She was referring to Shelley, my dog that she had co-opted and ruined.
"He's chewing up your slipper."
She was warming up.
"Listen baby, I didn't get a lot of time with this phone card - how you been?"
"All right I guess. Busy at the shop and I tell you, that asshole next door...."
"OK - hold on! I told you already, I don't have time right now."
"Sorry - but let me quick tell you one thing," she went on. "Well, you know I'm looking for a new car right....ok, well...Minivan! Tah dah!.....how does that grab you?"
"How drunk are you? How many fingers?"
Shut up. I'm lonely. I can't help it if I get obsessed. What else am I supposed to do?"
"Paint something. Clean. Work in the darkroom you had me build before I left."
"It's too hot in there."
"What do you want me to do? Why don't you go out with your girlfriends?"
"They're impossible. They spend more time calling and getting ready and then when we get there they want to leave. Everyone sucks."
"Listen, I don't want to get cut off. Give Shelley a kiss will you. I miss you."
"Oh you do, huh? Do you hear that boy? Your daddy misses us. Does that mean you're coming home?"
"You know I'm staying for the summer."
"I'm sorry. I just hoped you'd miss me so much you'd come back early."
"Come on. You know I've waited half my life for this. Some of us didn't go to art school in Paris on daddy's bill."
"Shut up asshole."
"That's my girl.
"Oh, one more thing. I've been looking at plane tickets. Do you still want me to come?"
"Sure baby - whatever you think. Let me know so I can plan the rest of my trip."
"You make it sound like a nuisance. You don't want me to come do you?"
"No, it's not that. But I don't want to double up on places. And I have to squeeze in my relatives too."
This was good because she knew that my father went to a lot of trouble tracking down the old lady and her daughter's family.
"So what do you want me to do?"
"Just let me know. Email me. We'll work it out."
"I already did. You didn't answer."
I deleted the email two days ago when I read it.
"I'm having trouble getting online sometimes. I'll try to find a better place," I said.
We said goodbye and I hung up the phone. I tried to summon the courage to call back and tell her to forget it, to nip it all right then, as I knew I should, but I didn't have the guts.
Instead I called my parents and left a message that I was trying to reach our relatives but so far hadn't gotten an answer - no machine or anything I said. Maybe they were all'antica, I said, old-fashioned. Or maybe they were already on holiday. I would keep trying and let them know.
The truth is, I wasn't doing so well with my father's quest to be reunited with his family. At the airport, before I even left Los Angeles, I reshuffled my pack and tossed some things into the porter's trashcan as he was cleaning the men's room. Along with a heavy sweater that Cassi bought for me and a pair of canvas tennis shoes that weren't all that comfortable, I decided to get rid off the manila envelope that my father had sent along. It was stuffed with names and addresses, xerox's of the deceased on our side of the Atlantic, and a crudely drawn family tree rendered in my father's neolithic scrawl. In all I suppose the packet weighed as much as a t-shirt. But what is the weight of a pebble in one's shoe or a gap between two teeth? Even a tag in a shirt collar counts for something.

Several blocks later, near the Roman Forum, I realized the importance of that phone call. After all, my family's hospitality had to be considered. Italians take a month of holiday in the summer. Cassi would need an astrologer and a telescope to thread their schedule.
How nice it felt suddenly to get off the sunny, crowded street and clear my head! How nice to follow an old Roman breeze, engineered between the buildings just so, and not have to look over and see if the other one was still with you.
After days of burning dust into the soles of my shoes, I have learned that in Rome it is always better to get lost alone, without your map, outside the throng. There is so much that will never make the guidebooks. There is even more here than most Romans can appreciate.
I descend the broad basalt steps into the Viminale, past yesterday and the day before, and stop for a drink from one of the hydrants that flow continuous sweet water from the aqueduct. I let it roll on my tongue as I walk in the shade of two thousand years.
Here the modern edifice sits like science fiction, and somewhere between the ancient brick and a shimmering wall of steel and glass, there is a bust of a lesser known patrician on its side in a weedy lot waiting to be pulled up and cataloged.
And to me that is Rome in a nut - a living excavation, a people digging themselves out, brick by brick, shard by shard, ancestor by ancestor. Here, no one is allowed to forget, and yet memory and history are continually recast.
It's an enviable position and a brave one but then what do I know? Still, I have to wonder where do they stop? Do they recognize the beginning or the end and find it sufficient, reared as they are on the dig itself?