Oggi in Italia

ROMAN HOLIDAY

I studied in Rome my junior year of college. Did I already tell you that? It wasn’t like a lot of the study abroad programs I’d heard about where you live with a family in a picturesque residential town. It was Rome. A gritty, chaotic, gorgeous place. Filled with busy, cobblestone alleys and ancient ruins and cats and crack addicts and handsome Mediterranean people and pasta and pastries and wine. I lived on the top floor of a hotel on a busy street called Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle. The hotel was a nice, relatively upscale place. Outside of our room, we had a balcony that afforded an incredible view of the city’s rooftops. A block north you could see the dome of the Pantheon and about a mile to the west, the Vatican.

It was a surreal experience for me. Prior to going to Europe, I hadn’t been outside of the U.S. Had never ventured to even Canada or Mexico. In addition to that, the largest city I’d lived in was my college town that boasted a populace of a hundred thousand. Rome with its two and a half million residents was my first true urban experience.

So anyway, I liked Rome immediately. I loved living in a hotel. I loved the Polish maids that cleaned my room and made my bed. I loved the shy front desk guy named Mark who on the first day that I got there picked up my suitcase and declared with feigned shock:

“Molto pesante!” (very heavy)

There’s a lot more that I could go into, but what I’m thinking about right now are the homeless. Actually, two homeless in particular. These two played regular roles in my day to day Roman drama. Despite my close proximity and frequent interaction with them, I only know one of their names.

Carlo.

Carlo slept on the grate across from the little pattiseria where we ate breakfast and lunch everyday.* The pattiseria was located in the same alley as our classroom building. If you continued north up the alley past the patisseria, past our classroom building and library, you would run into the tiny piazza containing the Pantheon and the closest McDonald’s (built into the ruins of an ancient building).

*For those meals we were given a booklet of what were essentially food stamps. Each one was worth a certain number of lira and you received a new one at the end of each week. The insane thing was that this place also sold bottles of wine, so if you budgeted properly, you could purchase multitudes of liquid refreshment for Friday night fun.

A lot of the people studying on my program would buy Carlo a coffee or sandwich or piece of fruit if they saw him outside. He was nice, polite and well-adjusted in an above average way if measured against his peers. Every night at around the same time he set up his bed. He had a bottom and top blanket. Sometimes, a jar with a flower in it and a small bag full of his belongings that he used as his pillow. To go to sleep he would simply pull the blanket up over his head and curl into a tight ball on top of the grate that blew constant heat from the musty depths of the city.

If you bought Carlo a coffee, he would take it from you and inspect it intently for a few seconds before gazing up at you.

“Café?” he would always inquire nervously.

I would always respond, “Si.”

In my mind, however, I’d be thinking, ‘What the hell do you think it is? It looks like coffee, smells like coffee. Is warm like coffee.’ A few weeks into the program, Carlo was on a first name basis with me and most of the other students.

One afternoon midway through the semester I ran into him by the Pantheon. I was excited about this, because I’d been wondering what he did during the day. I couldn’t wait to gossip about it to the other folks on the program. As Carlo and I were passing each other, I called out to greet him.

“Buongiorno, Carlo! Come sta?”

He seemed not to have heard me, so I tried again.

“Carlo … Carlo. Buongiorno,” I waved at him in a frenzied manner.

In response to my enthusiastic ‘hello’, Carlo suddenly twisted his entire body in a way that was painful to watch and turned to look at me. The tourists snapping pictures of themselves in front of the Pantheon quieted and became wary. As did the numerous pigeons hustling around the piazza.

“Carlo?” I asked, suddenly feeling as if I’d unknowingly made a social faux pas.

Carlo was still staring at me, but with an absence of recognition that was disconcerting. I took a nervous step back and transferred my school bag from one shoulder to the other. Suddenly, he sucked in a deep breath and began shrieking while hitting himself on the head. Over and over. Primarily around his ears. The shrieks were chilling and endless and gut-wrenching. I looked around for guidance on whether I should stay where I was or leave. The tourists surrounding me were of no use, however. They refused to make eye contact, and instead stared at the ground or pretended to be putzing around with their cameras.

Finally, I took a step. Then another. Then a few more. As I was rounding the corner I glanced around at him once more before rapidly making my way home. The ceaseless shrieking carried quite a distance through the narrow alley ways, but was finally camouflaged by the sounds of traffic once I hit the main road. The honking and roaring of the cars created a pleasant white noise that helped to soothe my frazzled nerves. It didn’t serve to mitigate my guilty feelings, however. What had I done?

As I was walking up the sidewalk to the hotel, I saw the other homeless person. The female one. She wore her mental illness in a more obvious way than Carlo, but was incredibly friendly. I only saw her during the day when she stood about half a block from my hotel clutching a VHS tape. It was a porn video, and the back cover depicted a few still scenes of couples in various states of copulation. She always insisted on walking you through each of the tiny pictures while providing some sort of indecipherable narration for each one. It only took a few seconds, and, once she was finished, she expected compensation. Not much, just some coins or a few thousand lira. I always humored her because she seemed nice enough, and I liked that she was trying to provide a service.

She was a businesswoman, peddling smut and requesting payment for it. I’m not saying she was a good businesswoman. It was the same VHS tape every time, and, like I said, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Also, the pictures were kind of small and grainy. It was her initiative, though, that made me respect her. On this particular day, she didn’t get a chance to show me the back of the tape because as I was walking by she was busy peeing on the sidewalk.

On the busiest street in Rome. Six deep in cars, this woman hiked up her skirt and squatted to take a pee. Me? I would have located a quiet spot in an alley somewhere, but who am I to question her methods. She was the one with the entrepreneurial spirit.

Later that evening I decided to go to the library to work on some homework. As I approached the pattiseria, I saw that Carlo was there settling in. Seeing him slowed me down, and made me think that maybe I should go back to the hotel. My nerves were still ruffled from our earlier encounter at the Pantheon. I didn’t know if I could handle the guilt of causing another shrieking attack. I continued towards him a few steps and then hesitated. As I considered my options, I suddenly heard him speak in the barely audible voice I’d been accustomed to prior to that afternoon at the Pantheon.

“Ciao, Emilia,” he murmured, giving me a cursory glance before spreading his blanket across the grill.

I nodded, smiled shyly and walked into the patisseria. Inside I purchased a few pieces of candy and a cup of coffee.

“Café?” he asked nervously after I’d handed him the cup.

“Si,” I answered before hurrying on my way.

When I left the library later to meet some friends out at a bar, I passed by a sleeping Carlo curled up on his side with the blanket over his head. Light from the white sign of the patisseria shone slantingly down on the middle portion of his body casting the folds of the blanket and his frail figure into a shadowed relief. The alley was quiet, but in the distance you could hear the muffled sounds of people living in the apartments above, and the endless white noise of the traffic on Corso Vittorio. I glanced up to admire the eternal expanse of stars and saw that they had been framed in by the high, aged walls surrounding me. For a fleeting moment I was overwhelmed by a perfect feeling of happiness.

When it passed, I walked a few blocks to Campo de Fiori and met my friends at a bar called The Drunken Ship. Inside it felt the same as the bars back in my college town with the exception of all of the Italian guys hitting on the drunk female exchange students.

ALMOST FINISHED

I’m almost finished with War and Peace. Only two hundred pages left. I’m kind of ready for it to be over. Like when you’re sitting in a movie theatre towards the end of a long, epic film, and you think the movie is going to be done at any moment, but it’s drawn out just a little bit longer. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredible book, but the character I’m most attached to is in the process of experiencing a long, painful death.* Also, no matter how the story ends, at least one of three innocent people is going to have an unsatisfactory resolution because of a love triangle. Sorry, I sound like a happy, sappy American who thinks that everything is all sunshine and buttercups. It’s War and Peace. It’s Russian. It’s Tolstoy. I should know better.

I ran into the guy that loaned me the book yesterday during the train ride home, and really enjoyed discussing it with him. It felt like we were members of a book club that rides the rails, which would be a very novel way to hold a book club (that last part was an inadvertant pun). At one point he pulled Anna Karenina out of his briefcase. He said it was terrific and offered to loan it to me once he’s finished. I may have to take a little break, though, and read something that weighs less than thirty-two pounds before diving back into Tolstoy’s world. My wrist is actually sore from holding the book up so that I can read it. Any suggestions?

*I was getting weepy over it on the train yesterday. This morning forty-five pages later, he’s still suffering.

-i'll miss you princE andrEi bolKonsky.