The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 20

  As Kit and Daneka walked among the flower and vegetable stands, he became almost nostalgic for a thing he’d never possessed except by proxy. He considered how little attention his generation had paid to the rest of the world. Wars, injustice and inhumanity had not stopped or even slowed down; the news of them simply didn’t penetrate. All pilgrimages now and for as long as Kit could remember led to celebrity; or if not to celebrity, then to real estate. Burn bright or buy right. Those were the only mantras of raging national debate.

  Kit didn’t exclude himself from his sweeping condemnation—not by a long shot. He considered how he’d chosen to make a living: by taking pictures of celebrities, or at least of celebrity-like mannequins. When had he last participated in a demonstration, or volunteered in a soup kitchen, or played father to a fatherless boy for a few hours a week?

  Kit suddenly felt the sting of shame. And yet, this wasn’t something he could share with the person he cared most about in the world—this woman who walked at his side, but whose commiseration, he suspected, would lead neither of them to a soup kitchen. As if to confirm his suspicions, she grabbed his arm.

  “Darling, shall we find a restaurant?”

  “I’m sorry, Daneka. You did say you were hungry, didn’t you?” Kit looked up and saw a sign announcing an eatery called Osterìa La Carbonara. It looked inviting enough, and Kit liked that they could eat al fresco. He pointed. “Will that one do?”

  “Oh, sure, darling. It looks as good as any other.”

  They walked over and looked among the empty tables for a place to sit. A waiter who’d seen them coming grabbed two menus. Not knowing in which language to address them, however, he hesitated until Kit provided a handle.

  “Buongiorno, Signore. Siamo due a fare colazione.”

  The waiter smiled. “Buongiorno! Buongiorno! Prego, Signora, Signore,” and here he gestured with his free hand to an empty table, seated them and handed over a pair of menus. “Desiderate qualcosa da bere?”

  “Abbia la gentilezza, Signore, di portarci una carta dei vini.”

  “Certo, Signore. Con piacere.”

  So far, it was working splendidly, and Kit was enormously pleased with himself. As for the grammatical errors he was no doubt committing, he didn’t care. He was managing, and that was the important thing. He wondered, however, how really fluent Daneka’s Italian was, and whether he was yet again making a fool of himself in her eyes. He didn’t know how to ask her, and she wasn’t giving out clues. She was in this—as in so many things—a complete mystery. Compounding the mystery of her inscrutability was the mystery of his own reluctance to ask the hard questions, to probe beneath the smooth surface of their day-to-day, hour-to-hour intercourse in order to find out who she really was, what she really wanted, what she really thought. He adored her wit. He adored her way with language—not just the words she spoke, but the way she spoke them: her body language. And yes, as if he needed to remind himself, he adored in particular the mechanism that made that language possible.

  But he abhorred the mystery—the part of her she wouldn’t reveal to anyone—or perhaps just not to him: her disappearances; her extended silences; her total withdrawal when- and however often she felt the need to withdraw. He decided, simply, to broach the subject head-on.

  “Daneka, please tell me you don’t also speak fluent Italian … ”

  “Oh, sort of, darling. But you’re doing just fine. You don’t need my help.” Kit was satisfied. He didn’t know what to make of the “sort of,” but he figured her qualifier would reveal itself to him over the course of the next few days. Besides, the waiter had just returned with the wine list, and Kit now had a more immediate issue to deal with.

  They ordered lunch and a bottle of the local red wine. Kit chose something pressed from a combination of Sangiovese and Montepulciano grapes: a wine of no particular account except for the delightful effect his order seemed to produce on the waiter, who appeared to take a special Roman pride in the promotion of anything homegrown—but more to the point, in the promotion of anything that was not from Tuscany.

  When they finished lunch, Kit ordered a pair of espressi and asked for the check. Their waiter’s eyebrows suggested disappointment that they were leaving already. Just as quickly, however, the same pair of eyebrows took flight—and their owner with them on quick feet—to the kitchen. He returned a few moments later with two glasses and a bottle of Grappa in one hand, a single plate—but two forks—of tiramisù in the other. He put down the check in its leather holder next to Kit.

  “Con i complimenti della casa, Signora, Signore.”

  Already light-headed from the combination of a hot sun and the wine, this unexpected kindness from a no-doubt jaded Roman waiter—not to mention the two additional shots of Grappa—all but lifted them off of their seats. It was now Daneka’s turn to take the lead.

  “Mille, mille grazie, carissimo Signore. E’ molto gentile!”

  Kit noted that her accent and cadence were flawless. It wasn’t envy he felt at the discovery: After all, his ear and mouth were quite up to accomplishing the same task with as much authority. Rather, it was an uneasiness, once again, at the mystery. ‘Sort of?’ What did ‘sort of’ really mean in Daneka’s mouth? Was it simple modesty on her part, or was it meant to diffuse a further inquiry into how, when and under what circumstances she’d learned this language in the first place?

  Kit had just become a victim of his own experience. He knew—and had repeated many times for the benefit of those who might be interested—that the only real way to learn a language was in-country, and preferably across a pillow. Years earlier, he’d spent the better part of two years in Madrid not with a dictionary or grammar book in hand, but with the real thing, head to head, on a comely Spanish pillow. His lover had had exploration and discovery in her genes. Moreover, she’d proved to be more catholic than Catholic in her tastes. He’d become, as a result, fluent in all things Spanish he cared to be fluent in—even if most of those things had more to do with erotic Goya beans than with exotic beings by the painter of the same name.

  Kit began to wonder how many languages Daneka spoke, and how many of them she spoke fluently. He remembered that he hadn’t seen a single foreign language grammar book or dictionary in her library or bedroom. So much, he thought, for his unique approach to the learning of foreign languages.

  During the several seconds Kit had been reminiscing about Spain—only then to send his thoughts off on a bumbling globe trot for the source of Daneka’s linguistic talents—she’d managed to slip an arm out behind his seat, snatch the leather holder, put her credit card inside, and deliver the lot under the table cloth to an amused waiter. She’d also managed to mouth—inaudibly, yet perfectly intelligibly—instructions to that waiter to add an additional ten points to the fifteen-percent gratuity. He was off and running as she delivered a first forkful of tiramisù to Kit’s mouth, pouting as if stuck in the departure lounge of some airport—and in very unhappy transit between two distinctly undesirable destinations.

  “Darling,” she said. “You look lost. Take a bite.”

  By the time the two of them had concluded feeding each other forkfuls of tiramisù, their waiter had returned. Daneka signed the receipt, took her copy and returned the rest. In a parting toast to love, to Rome, to the Osterìa La Carbonara, and to the honor of good waiters everywhere, Kit and Daneka raised their glasses and poured the rest of the Grappa down each other’s throats—but only after their waiter, in tears of gratitude, had snatched his own glass off a neighboring table, poured himself a hefty portion, and thrown it down his own throat.

  Embraces all around with cheeky kisses from the waiter to both Daneka and Kit, and they were off—feeling more wobbly than worldly, and in desperate need of some place to lie down and go to sleep.

  Chapter 37

  It might otherwise have been a short journey from the osterìa to their hotel, but they wanted to savor every step. Between the clip of the cobblestones underfoot and the hammer of the mi
d-day sun overhead, not to mention the wine and Grappa swimming languorously in between, Kit and Daneka somehow managed to bob and weave their way first through the piazza—already beginning to thin out as vendors gradually exhausted their one-day provision of flowers, vegetables or fruit, and so packed themselves, their new supply of cash, and their remaining belongings into small spaces in some means or other of transport and headed, without passion but also without tumult, back out to the country for an afternoon and evening of simple domestic quiet far from the oppressively crowded marketplace—and through the throng of hawkers, buyers, sellers, gawkers, children, babies, signorinelle with a plan, pensionati without a plan, tourists without a clue, cyclists, ventriloquists, artists, other lovers, dancers, necrophiles, necromancers, philosophers, nut-cases: in short, a sampling of the whole human race with its various and crushing thoughts, desires, likes, dislikes, expectations, illusions, delusions, confusions, smells, expectorations, urinations, defecations and deaths—and then rounded the corner into the Via dei Cappellari, at which point they spied the front door of their hotel.

  Finally free of the crowd, Daneka felt the rush of open space and dropped her guard. As they walked out from between two parked cars into the street at a spot just diagonally opposite the hotel entrance, she craned her neck up to give Kit a kiss on the cheek. At the same instant, a motor scooter approached on her outside flank. The driver navigated his scooter with the precision of a sharpshooter aiming through a scope at a two-inch target a hundred yards off: there was no allowable margin of error between the parked car on his right and Daneka on his left. His accomplice, another even younger kid, rode with one arm circling the driver’s waist. With his free arm, the accomplice swooped in like a falcon and snatched Daneka’s purse from her shoulder.

  The scooter accelerated. It was already thirty yards off before Daneka realized she’d been robbed, and then hollered without reserve: “Al ladro!”

  There was no need. A pair of shopkeepers at the far end of the street, out for a smoke and a chat, had seen the whole thing start to finish. As if acting on instinct to a scenario they might’ve witnessed many times before, they quickly armed themselves with tools of the kind shopkeepers use to roll their awnings up each day at the close of business, then took them in hand like javelins. One of the two men quickly crossed the street to the opposite side. They waited—and when the scooter finally passed by, each thrust his tool, now a weapon, into its spokes. The fine, metal spokes of a kid’s motor scooter were no match for the angry iron spikes in the hands of two defenders of a woman’s virtue and property. The scooter upended, sending its two occupants off and up, then slid on gracefully and eventually came to a mangled stop. Its two occupants flew through the air like plastic bags scooped up by a sudden draft, and slammed into the rear window of a parked car, shattering it. That same impact likely shattered several of their bones, but the shopkeepers paid no attention to the agony of a pair of young thieves. Instead, their eyes scoured the area for the location of Daneka’s purse.

  They spotted and retrieved it, then walked the hundred yards from where it had lain to where Daneka stood—and presented their booty. Kit marveled to see the quick transition: just moments earlier, two warriors bent on vengeance if not precisely on murder; now, those same fierce warriors meek and apologetic, as if they had committed the crime, or had somehow been involved in its perpetration.

  Daneka was equally quick to show her gratitude. What she said to them, or they to her, flew by Kit like gibberish. It was, in any case, clear she wanted to offer them something—some token of her appreciation. They refused. They were merely honorable men, behaving as honorable men should, in times that sorely tested notions of honor.

  Eventually they bowed, welcomed both Kit and Daneka to Rome, wished them an enjoyable stay—if possible, without any further such unpleasantness—then shook hands and left. Kit knew his first attention should be to Daneka; after all, she’d been the victim. However, he couldn’t get his mind off the two kids.

  “Are you all right, Daneka?” he finally asked.

  “I thought you’d never ask!” she barked peevishly. It was rare for Daneka to complete a sentence or a question without first making sure that the caboose of “darling” was firmly attached at the end. Leaving it sidetracked suggested to Kit intentional negligence—or worse, anticipation of a wreck up ahead.

  “Look, I know this kind of thing is distressing. I’m sympathetic. Really. But I’m also wondering about those two boys. They’re probably in bad shape. I need to do something.”

  “Why do you need to do something about them? Why can’t you do something about me for a change? They’re fucking criminals, for Christ’s sake. They just didn’t get away with it this time.”

  Kit was torn between Daneka’s clear yet callous logic and the need, his personal need, to help two young kids, however he could, out of a life-threatening situation. As he glanced first at Daneka—apparently at least as angry with him as she’d been, moments earlier, with her two assailants—then up the street to where the halves of two bodies dangled out of the smashed rear window of a parked car, he remained torn. The upshot? He stood motionless, pinioned to the spot by the weight of his indecision.

  As the same moment, he saw one of the shopkeepers violently kick the rear bumper of the car out of which the kids’ bodies half-hung, and he heard the same man give voice to his anger: “Cazzi napoletani!” he cursed, and Kit instantly recognized that other, larger, centuries-old prejudice based on geography alone. They could indeed be gracious, chivalrous—in all manner, perfect gentlemen to a light-skinned woman whose personal sanctuary, whose private fucking property, had just been violated. But they could be equally quick, equally ruthless, equally pig-headed, and yes—he allowed himself to draw the mental comparison—equally red-necked in rushing to assign guilt to half the population of an entire country for one act of villainy committed by an isolated pair of individuals. And why? Because those two individuals were obviously poor, probably unskilled, untrained, ill-prepared, hungry—and, most obvious of all—darker-skinned.

  Kit was as angry as everyone else, but he was angry for his own reasons—none of which had anything to do with Daneka, with the attempted theft, with the apprehension of the two criminals, or with the unfortunate outcome of that apprehension. He was simply angry at the world, at the way it operated, at the persistent and pig-headed wrongness of it.

  Finally, he channeled anger into action and started off in the direction of the injured boys, though not knowing precisely what he was going to do or how he was going to do it once he got there. Lucky for him, he was saved by the sound of an approaching siren. A small white car with a roof-mounted beacon and the word Polizia printed on the side ripped out of the Via Giulia and into the Via Cappellari, then screeched to a halt. Two officers in full battledress jumped out. What followed—at least from Kit’s perspective—resembled more vaudeville than police action.

  Both officers immediately unholstered their guns. They looked to one of the assembled shopkeepers for a clue as to where the miscreants might be lurking. They then crouched and made their way slowly towards the car whose rear window had, apart from the boys, borne the brunt of the damage in the whole incident. Each carefully unclipped a pair of handcuffs.

  What the whole scene lacked, Kit decided, was flares, or at least some kind of high-intensity lighting in case the original siren—and the drama of two cops on the prowl for a pair of world-class terrorists—wasn’t sufficiently attention-getting to round up a couple of hundred spectators. In the meantime, Kit thought, these kids were probably bleeding to death.

  When the officers finally made it to the back of the car and saw the kids’ condition, their first reaction was a clear sense of relief that they, themselves, were not in any danger. Each took out a cigarette and lit up. Kit couldn’t hear their conversation. But from their gestures to each other and their occasional glances at the two bodies, also from their obvious reluctance to retire the handcuffs, Kit could see tha
t law enforcement—apart from a quick cigarette—was still their first priority. They seemed, finally, to reach an accord and divided the boys between them. Then each took his own set of cuffs and clipped one end to “his” boy’s ankle and the other end to the car’s bumper. They then walked off, Kit noted, in the direction of a caffè.

  Law enforced. No emergency call. No administration of first aid. No examination of any kind to ascertain whether the boys were even still alive. Priorities. First: a cigarette. Second: their personal safety. Third: a cappuccino—maybe even a newspaper.

  Kit was on the verge of taking matters into his own hands, whatever it might cost him to challenge the authority of a cop in a foreign country. At that same instant, however, he heard a second siren and saw an ambulance turn the corner and pull up alongside the police car. Three emergency medical personal jumped out of the ambulance and ran to where the boys were located. All business, they set to work immediately to determine how serious the boys’ injuries were. They spoke in hushed, businesslike tones to one another, concerned only with saving a pair of lives that were clearly in jeopardy, and not giving a second thought to the question of whether or not these particular lives were worthy of being saved.

  Only when they’d made preparations to move the bodies to stretchers did one of the attendants notice the handcuffs. He gave his colleagues a blank, incredulous stare. Kit recognized a few of the expletives, but his Italian wasn’t fluent enough to understand and savor how each particular word or phrase condemned first the cops in their private parts; then the cops’ mothers in their private parts; then various acts between the cops’ mothers and a particular shepherd; and finally, similar acts between the same cops’ mothers and the shepherd’s goats. However, one thing was perfectly clear to him: love and respect between the medical establishment and those responsible for the enforcement of law and order in Rome might be lacking in what the Anglo-Saxon world might like to call, on a good day, vigor—and on a bad day, rigor.