Chapter 5 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

5.
The coffee was an afterthought. I only noticed the place because of the A-frame sign that advertised live blues music on another night during the week. I decided to peek inside for later reference.
I had to sidestep two girls in white aprons who were having a cigarette in the doorway. Besides us, there were three leathery men hooked up to a slot machine, cursing the blinking thing in some harsh tongue. The querulous men didn't seem to notice the Beach Boys medley playing on the house system at club volume.
I sat down at the bar facing a wall of glasses shelved against a mirror. One of the girls snubbed out her cigarette and saved it in her pack. She came around the counter, turned down the stereo and took up her conversation with the other one over my shoulder.
She's the real reason I stopped to read the A-frame. She was thoroughly Roman, an emaciated Magdalena, ancient looking and dusty, like a faded Carravaggio - her eyes popped out of her grinning skull like two shiny black olives. She volleyed something over to the Balkan men when they threatened to topple the machine, but she was smiling, even as they cursed her. Then she turned to me and spoke in Italian.
"A coffee please I answered, not sure of what she said.
"un caffe?
"Hmm? Yes...Si.
"Si.... she countered, boring into me, weary of her own game already.
"Si, un caffe per favore.
"Very good, I had a feeling about you when you walked in. I knew you could do it. Now where are you from?
I told her.
She punched two buttons on the gleaming espresso machine.
"I was just getting ready to have one myself. Well, I see, California....so you must like the Beach Boys then?
"Sure, I lied over the hiss of steam. I started to ask her where she studied English - she had an attractive accent - but she turned away to shuffle the tracks on the stereo.
She returned, picking up the thread. "Even those killers over there, they like the Beach Boys and they don't even know what they are hearing. It makes them smile. They can forget for a minute all the horrible things they have told me about their lives. Sometimes they will even start dancing and I will catch them and say 'ah ha you bastards, you like it- you are dancing and you don't even know it' and they will shuffle back to that machine embarrassed to feel happy.
She put the two coffees up on saucers, on the counter.
"I have a dream - well, maybe it is not a dream because maybe one day it will be so - but I think I will live in California and drive a big Cadillac car with flames painted on the sides so if you ever see me around you can wave to me and say 'hey, I knew that girl in Rome once.'
While she talked, she danced with the strings of her apron, pulling them from one side to the other. I looked at her long hands. She had a bio-hazard symbol tattooed in the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She was thin, knobby even, loosely articulated at the joints and sockets like a scarecrow. I gestured at the tattoos coming out the three-quarter sleeves of her jersey.
"My boss says its ok but I wear the long shirts for the old Christian ladies who come in here. I get tired of the same questions.
She huddled her shoulders, wrapping a pretend scarf under her chin whiskers and cracking her voice. "'Oh Ya-Ya you have such pretty skin why do you try to make yourself so ugly?'
"I tell them that it is very beautiful to decorate the skin and that they should try it themselves which makes them laugh with all their aches and pains. Of course they think I am crazy then but they always come back to talk because I am a curiosity to them and also I give them advice about their grandchildren.
"You should have a talk show, right here at the bar," I said, immediately wishing I had never moved so much as a magazine on a film set.
She pointed to the refugee men arguing with the spinning wheels of the machine. "Talk to them. They handle my business."
"You have a strong accent, I finally managed. "Did you study in England?"
"Well not exactly. I lived in London for two years, mostly squatting like a gypsy, moving around, avoiding the Black Maria, that sort of thing. Have you been?
"No. I've been out a few weeks and I've seen Paris, Amsterdam, and now Rome.
"So you're here alone then, on holiday? You lucky bastard. How long will you stay?
"I don't know - until I'm done. I'm taking the rest of the summer at least.
"Well, it's too bad for you that the Pope is feeling well. Everyone is in Rome and I don't even want to leave my house.
"I don't mind. I have a knack for getting lost - like coming here. How many tourists did you serve today?
"I had one couple and they were German. They were here before actually, some time ago, and they came back to say hello. They're ok for pilgrims I guess.
"Pilgrims?
"Yes, the Christians.
"Oh right, and they bother you?
"Well, they are so full of it and happy, I can't stand to see their smiling faces taking over my Rome. I reckon that's reason enough?
"I reckon, I said in a darkwoods drawl.
Her radar flashed and she withdrew into a sink of dirty glasses.
"I guess it's funny to hear a Roman girl say it," I said.
"Why not - it's proper English?
She turned around, flushed.
"Sure if you're a hillbilly.
"But they say it in London all the time.
"I bet they do, YaYa.
She protested. "That is an honorable name given to me by old gypsy punks. They said I couldn't have the same name as the first lady of the evil united states.
"Which one?
"The smart one with the blonde hair who will be your president one day.
"You're right. YaYa is much better.
"I thought you would agree. You strike me as very sensible already. So tell me something about yourself.
"My father used to live here in Rome," I said, and before I could stop I was pick-pocketing a book by the great John Fante. West Of Rome.
"He was working on a picture for Hollywood. He was one of their top writers and a big ladies man. I'm named after him."
"Is he italian then?"
"One hundred percent," I said. "He even speaks Abruzzi dialect."
"And what about you? Did your old man teach you anything?"
"No. He kept the family out of his affairs and he always stayed here alone."
She put our cups in the sink wash and wiped her coffee stained hands on her apron. I didn't know whether to go on so I ordered a beer to keep her there.
"There was a girl," I said, "that he always talked about, even when he turned gray and slack - maybe more so by then."
"I'm sure I don't know her but go on, this is more fun than cleaning this bloody machine."
She unlocked the little pressure cups and tapped the grinds into a bin on the side.
"It's not much to tell. When he was angry or happy he would threaten to leave us to come back here. We all knew the story of his raven haired girl, sitting next to him in the piazza Navona, spitting watermelon seeds to the pigeons and laughing. Sometimes he didn't have to say anything. You could tell he was here again. I don't think he ever recovered."
"Well, if it's a tour of Rome you want you should just ask. I might know something about that, she extended her blue hand over the counter. "I guess we can start at the piazza."
"I've already been there."
"Then what about the Trevi fountain?"
"They can drain it as far as I'm concerned."
"Well...the Tiber river then. It's only the most elegant feature of Rome. There's a place where the old ladies gather to feed the pigeons. Maybe your father's little rabbit is still there spitting out her seeds and laughing to herself."
She pulled her hand back from the counter to the knot at the end of her apron string.
"It is always nice to meet someone who appreciates the Beach Boys but I have a reputation to keep up around here. You'll have to see me another time if you want to chat. I close tomorrow at half past eight - maybe we can go around then and have a little something."
I was being invited to my first passagiata - that Italian ritual of evening where people look in on one another on the square or street and gather gossip over an ice cream or a glass of spumante.
Here I was being invited to this ancient spectacle by a proper Roman girl no less; odd as she was, skinny, filthy with coffee and scars; her wide mouth filled with too many teeth and crooked besides; her eyes bulging like two black moons from the wailing underworld; her unwashed hair stuck like a cape to her bony shoulders.
What an odd couple we would make going down the streets of Rome, and suddenly I knew I had a problem. It wasn't the Swiss, no - Melodie would leave in a day or so - and it wasn't even Cassi back home because she was so far off and out of sight for a while at least.
Rather it was the trick of the fates to deposit you there on the brink, to make you want to hear her say 'half past eight' again with that screwed up accent of hers, to make you suddenly and urgently realize that you cannot pass through this spinning place without getting to know the dark creature that has just been placed in front of you, that your life, by this brief and random encounter, has intersected another's and there a story must always begin.