Chapter 6 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

6.
I walked back to the station to meet Melodie and we made our way across town looking to have dinner in the trendy Campo dei Fiori. I kept looking her over and comparing her to YaYa. Of course on paper it didn't add up. Melodie had a more conventional beauty, a passport, money, big tits, clear blue eyes ' all those things that might make a mate more attractive.
Along the way we turned in for a cocktail at an empty bar in the Trastevere which then filled up and emptied again before we were politely asked to leave.
For every glass of wine I had, Melodie downed a chilled vodka, until they closed the bar around us, the manager standing in the doorway jingling his keys and the staff outside already, behind him, laughing and waving goodnight, but still saying 'please'.
After several rounds our intense conversation had transcended heavy petting and evolved into a lap-dance which continued even after the music had been turned off, and like I said, the bar had emptied.
We got up laughing and stumbled into the night, crossing back over the now quiet neighborhood, past empty tables pushed together under cafe awnings and pyramids of bent-back chairs; lingering in the florescent glow of racked-up pastries behind glass; past the hosed-down cobble gutters and the shuttered balcony doors dripping with potted begonia and basil.
Down into the Roman night, lying forever in the grass of some bronze statue, watching the tram wires slice the purple moonlight until someone kind enough comes along and informs us that the service stopped hours ago. That is when we cross the river, at the Ponte Garibaldi, and in searching the shadows for a place to love, we come an open gate at the top of the stairs that descends to the concrete banks of the Tiber.
Did I know the river, that girl YaYa from the coffee bar had asked? Yes, I knew it now, I thought, fascinating and elegant as it was. Now that I have watched the armored rats bouncing along the cement concourse, their eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Now that I have smelled the acid-stench of centuries of filthy Romans pissing and menstruating. Now that I have knelt and squatted in the broken glass, listening to the laughter and dares of Pasolini's children before they were drowned; to the wet cries of unwanted babies; to the silence of poets reluctant to swim one more mad stroke; to the wailing barges of prisoners and whores and witches chained together in the current; to the singing of dead Christians resurrected by god's swift green wrath - I have heard all of it being churned under and sucked out to the bloody Tyrennhian Sea at Ostia, delivered at last.
I knew the river better than most I imagined, from the tangle of the weedy bottom, entering it through Melodie's vodka soaked panties, listening to that innocent little voice of hers scrape against the glass covered levee to be swallowed up in the tidal roar, by that roiling backdrop of violence that shattered anything sensible in us.
I laid Melodie down in the weeds and sucked at her hot pussy and that was fun without the brink of fate and the pressures and torments from wondering what if - of course I wasn't thinking about any of it just then as I listened to her carnivorous plaints - of how she wanted to make love - followed by a weak protest - but that she was bleeding, and the thing that kept going through my mind was not that I should be more careful, as I pulled off her panties, flickering cautiously at first, staying on her clit and then finally caving in with everything I had - fingers, hands, chin, eyes, teeth and nose - until she lay there quivering and moaning for my cork.
Nor was I thinking that someone might see us. In fact at one point I looked up and saw people stopped on the bridge and pointing in our direction albeit, from a hundred yards up and away, and obscured by the early morning animal darkness.
No, what I thought was that it has been a while since I've done this for a menstruate Cassi, something I had never really minded but at some point just stopped doing because special things like that between two people fade over time.
But there was Melodie with her gold rims tossed aside, grieving for it, begging me, all set to swallow my head if I didn't comply, and let me remind you that we were laying in the scree and sand and broken glass and cigarette butts of a civilization gone mad -go to the banks of any great river in the world and you will see what I mean - and out of her lily-white voice came a song of sin and unrepentant lust, a prayer-like moan that reached the ears of the boatman Charon who stopped lunging his souls into the river to give me the go-ahead and so I flipped her over, under a 3/4 moon, along that filthy river, and I looked up to see people stopped now, in the pre-dawn, along the Ponti Garibaldi, under the yellow street lights, casting back the image of my parent's Rushmore heads.
And I pounded that ponderous, quivering, glass-encrusted steak of hers as best I could until we both collapsed, exhausted and half dressed, nearly falling asleep in each others arms as the sun began to edge and pour it's haloed and honeyed magnificence across the gray filter of night, and we stumbled to and found a cab back to Termini Station, the end of the line.
So after a light breakfast, we went straight to another house of god, to the Santa Maria of the Angels off the Piazza Replubblica because I wanted to show her the mural restoration work in the sacristy that I found there the other day. I thought at least she could speak with the students who were on the project and they would help inform her search for a suitable art academy, the resumption of which had not crossed her mind since we met, I was sure.
But why start now, she seemed to be saying? She would rather have a seat and tell me more stories about her days at the convent. Besides, the students have gone on break. It is too bad anyway because there was one jumpsuit-clad artista that I'd taken to watching on my daily rounds as she climbed the bars of the scaffold with paintbrushes set in her teeth like a mutineer. Maybe, I thought, I could meet her through Melodie.
But they were gone like I said, so I showed her the monumental organ in the apse which was built into the structure of the old Roman baths and then we took in Michelangelo's central cathedral, where she sat and whispered those lickerish words that curled in my ears, especially with her hand toying in my lap, seeing that I was in high gear and egging me on despite my evasions.
"But the Sisters always told me that it was ok - whatever we did during prayer hour - as long as we were here, before Him and acknowledging His love. For instance, they said it was ok to laugh, to sleep, to cry, to feel sad, to be humbled, even to have impure thoughts, because, after all, god is with us always and he sees all of these things in us anyway - and therefore, especially, when we are in god's house we shouldn't try to hide.
With that she giggled and swatted my hand away, out from my own lap, trying to conceal my straight-up-and-down shifter, but I couldn't help myself, still fresh from the riverbed and weak-willed and delirious from lack of sleep and that breathy sing-song quality of her voice, going up and down like a butterfly, and working on my inner ear like a vibrator over my perineum.
She was amused by this, of course, tickled in that clean, clear-eyed, perverted way of hers, although I was starting to understand the Swiss facade, that mask of propriety and pious love, of blue-veined milkmaids, and bonnets that conceal slight double chins, of sin-laced chocolates, and alpine-clear lakes and rivers, of crisp glacial air sweeping down over lush green lowlands to cleanse the spirit of any serious malady because it is always spring in that hedonist's paradise. Yes, I was starting to get it. They are so cleansed and pure that they have come out the other side to stand with Nature herself, and what, they ask, can be wrong with her?
The day before even, Melodie had no idea of herself when we were turned away at the Vatican. Of course the Swiss guard said it was because I was wearing shorts, even though I saw two wedges of sweaty blue cheese pass into the golden shadows just ahead of us. Then we both looked at Melodie, he and I. The tight top and the mini flap. She was as close to naked as you'll see in the piazza di San Pietro but she was completely unfazed. I'm glad he didn't ruin it for her. It would have crushed her to realize that her own people, the Christians and the Swiss both, had turned her away.
And here we were in the church of the morning after. I could only imagine what she has whispered to god of our romp along the river.
I remembered sitting in the church pew as a boy summoning all that surrounding flesh in the back of my prayers and never thinking twice that a crucified Jesus was mostly naked.
A row of sisters sat down in front of us. As they genuflected I grimly sensed all that sweat pouring underneath, hips creaking like an old staircase, and certain mossy regions. I couldn't help myself. A young Melodie toying in my lap didn't hurt either.
I got up from the pew like a filthy dog and we craned our necks to the angels on the domed ceiling. Dozens of camera flashes were going off even though there were signs everywhere prohibiting them. I began to have my own sort of boundless revelation as Melodie leaned there, pressed up against my shoulder blades, a film of perspiration between us - enough so that we stuck together where our skin touched - and every once in a while, she would dig her hands in my loose pockets and spill a little hot breath on my neck or earlobe. I was in the middle again, between her and god and boy those nuns really did a fantastic number on her.
And this is what Melodie has been sent to tell us - that you can't hide your rotten insides from Him, and you can't bury your morality in a crowd either - from flashbulbs to warships - we are all guilty, even if no one is responsible. For every conceivable action there is a perversity, an untoward or unjust consequence. There is nothing good, whole, clean or honest about any of it anymore, if there ever was. We stink. We stink to high heaven. No two ways about it.
Melodie wants to leave. She's seen enough and she wasn't getting anywhere with me either. We walked across Repubblicca and got on the tram. It was worse than pushing into a crowded elevator. Melodie was dipped in sweat. I longed for a bar stool but the doors had already closed behind us. We ride for a while and decide to get off at the next stop, near the river, only the tram doesn't move.
Suddenly there is a commotion in the aisle. A middle-aged American has lost his wallet and he is pointing at a young gypsy girl who is moving away from him, towards the exit.
The man is so full of spit that his wife implores the crowd for him. The other passengers react quietly, with faces imposed upon or yawning, adjusting their rosaries or checking their watches. The teenage daughter of the offended couple looks down at her maroon hi-tops, which match her hair. She seems ashamed to be the one to stand out for a change.
The crowd around the urchin parts and allows her to pass, grateful in its way not to be the victim. The tram operator watches in his long mirror up front. He could seal the girl in by putting the tram in motion, but instead he sits there and lets the doors be pushed open, and off she goes on her naked feet.
Melodie and I jump off behind her and without a word we begin to follow. Before we turn a corner and lose sight of the tram, I look back. The fat man and his family are outside trying to wave someone down while the tram idles at the platform.
We turn down the cobbled walkways of the Campo dei Fiori after this child. Melodie is ahead of me, in a fluster, her skirt flapping like a broken sail. I don't want to catch the girl, but I relish our window into this drama. Melodie kicks off her sandals and I slow to gather them for her. I don't reach her until she is stopped and out of breath and the girl, who looks like Esmerelda from the Lon Cheney Hunchback movie, has disappeared.
We pick through the crowded piazza and suddenly there is not one, but a dozen or so dirty little gypsy girls working the ranks of tourists, ducking underneath the umbrella of their shopping bags and video cameras like eels. The tiny black creatures send out in all directions. It's a funhouse effect, exacerbated by the upright sun and the gleaming white marble of Bernini's Fountain of Four Rivers pounding a beer-head into the draining center of Piazza Navona.
Anchored toward one end of the long oval sink there is a small troupe of dancers and players, and the colorful crowd glitters in that direction. We follow suit and move in to watch a ragtag chorus line as it picks up on the piazza's enthusiasm, working through cut-ups of flamenco and belly dancing.
A swirling mixture of guitar and penny whistle snakes through the air and animates the crumbling fabrics and bony limbs of the performers. The ancient jig goes round and round, working faster and faster, beyond triple and quadruple time to a signature that is so tight it spins like a dentists drill into the center of our heads.
And then it all stops, gathered there on the tip of that drill like a tingling nerve. When the smoke clears there is a young woman licking the flames and holding them in for a time before they burst from her like the devil's laughter.
I could feel the heat from the ball of fire as it dissipated over the crowd. I could smell burnt hair too. I looked closely at the girl, at her crooked smile and her sweat-smudged face, at the oversized sword she had lashed to her hip, and the singed black threads that hung to either side of her cracked lips.
She swallowed a few more rods of flame and took a bow, kissing each of her hands with fire as she came back up. Meanwhile the bent minstrels awakened, unfolding like ash covered blossoms under a new sun and the music plucked slowly out of the air, one string at a time, a bacchanalian helix of long single notes twisting together into undulating chords, wafting over us like incense smoke, an ancient phrasing that mesmerized us and told us that one was going anywhere.
The gypsy children began to work their way back through the rapt crowd, holding out their grimy hands or their wretched scarves and looking neglected. I dropped some coins into a tiny bruised palm and watched. Melodie was still searching the working spokes of this gathering wheel for our little pickpocket. I saw the girl but I didn't say anything. She was passing money to the fire eater. Their hands met, wrapped around the booty, one caressing, the other letting go. Esmeralda got on her toes to whisper something and then she slid down another spoke into the crowd and disappeared.
The raven haired performer laughed and joined the rest of the troupe in the center as they bowed for the tourists. Then she walked off with a guitarist and
I stood watching her sword and fire sticks drag behind her like morning shadows.