Hill Towns (10 page)

Joe had his blue blazer draped over his arm. His fair hair and mustache were darkened with sweat, and he kept blinking. Salt drops must be trickling into his eyes and creeping behind his contact lenses.

“A shower is going to feel like heaven,” I said.

“Now aren’t you sorry about what you called the poor old Cavalieri Hilton?” Joe said, grinning. “At least you can be sure a Hilton will have a shower. And air-conditioning.”

“If the
sciopero
hasn’t got it,” I said, and he grimaced. Then his face cleared.

“There’s always the pool.”

“Ah, yes, the pool,” I said. “The one and only reason we came over four thousand miles to the very heart of Rome to stay in a Hilton Hotel.”

The Cavalieri Hilton International Roma had been Maria’s idea. Or, rather, her mother’s celebrated distant cousin Ada Forrest’s idea. Ada had written that perhaps the American friends of Maria and Colin would like to 76 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

stay at a hotel with a pool; Americans often did, and she was very fond of the Cavalieri Hilton. It was, she said, just above the Forrests’ flat in Trastevere, on a lovely hill, and Ada and Sam always enjoyed swimming in its pool when friends stayed there. There was a lovely restaurant too, with a breathtaking view of Rome; she could recommend the restaurant highly. She and Sam had had many memorable meals there. In light of this transatlantic endorsement, and in view of the fact that Joe and I would be accepting the Forrests’ hospitality several times, it seemed churlish not to stay at a hotel in whose pool and restaurant we could recip-rocate. But…a Hilton? I had envisioned something small and vine-shaded and ancient, with wooden shutters and peeling plaster walls, overlooking a piazza with a fountain, surrounded by the cobbles and roof gardens and statuary of old Rome.

“We’ll have all that in Venice and Florence and Tuscany,”

Joe said. “Maybe it’s a good idea to ease our way into Italy in a Hilton.”

Stumbling beside him through the gloom toward the bay for the Alitalia bags, sweat running and mouth foul with heat and tension, I thought he might be right.

When we reached our bay, there were no bags on the motionless carousel. They had been piled to one side, and there were not many of them. We waded into the small pile, along with the other stragglers from our flight, and eventually captured my one large bag and two small totes. Joe reached for his, frowned, and straightened up.

“That’s not my bag,” he said. “It’s just like mine, but it doesn’t have my identification tag on it, or that scratch on the side.”

We looked again, but his bag was not there.

HILL TOWNS / 77

“Oh, good Christ,” he said tiredly. It was obvious what had happened. Someone with a suitcase identical to his had mistaken Joe’s for his own and taken it home. Or taken it somewhere, at any rate. Joe poked at the bag, but there were no longer any identifying tags on the outside by which we might trace the owner and reclaim our things. I thought of the rooftop rehearsal dinner at the Forrests’ we would be attending in less than four hours, and of my own two best dresses, which I had tucked into Joe’s suitcase at the last minute. I did not think we would be going to Colin and Maria’s party, or meeting Sam Forrest for the first time, in the clothes we had planned to wear for the occasion.

We dragged the strange bag over to the baggage master’s cubicle. He was very cordial and very sorry for our inconveni-ence, and very anxious to be helpful, and properly annoyed at inconsiderate people who snatched bags without verifying their identification. He spoke very good English. He accepted the American bills Joe pressed into his hand with gratitude and sweetness and said that the minute, the very instant, the other bag was returned, he would personally notify us at the—ah, the Cavalieri Hilton, was it? A fine hotel; many Americans stayed there; the concierge was a friend of his—and we could come and claim it. And ah, he was sorry, he was desolate, but he could not open the bag and see if there was any identification inside. It was against the rules.

The owner could sue if his bag was opened without his permission. He, Guido, could lose his job.
Che posso fare
? What could he do?

“But I don’t have any other clothes except the ones I have on,” Joe said incredulously, as if he was just registering that fact. “I don’t even have any clean underwear. And I have to go to a very important party tonight.”

78 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

The baggage master was stricken. But then his brown simian face brightened. There were very fine shops in the Cavalieri Hilton, he said, shops that were accustomed to American gentlemen and their requirements. He was sure Joe could be fitted with something suitably elegant for an evening party.

“You go to Ortini’s, in the lobby, and tell them Guido said to fix you up,” he said, beaming, with the air of one who has solved an enormous problem. “I send many Americans to Ortini.”

“One for every bag that turns up missing,” Joe said under his breath. He gave Guido another dollar.

Guido gave Joe a handful of forms and disappeared.

The two of us, with phrase book and dictionary, spent nearly an hour completing the forms. When we took them back to the baggage master’s cubicle, Guido had disappeared and a very thin, bored young blond woman with ebony eyes and roots put down a movie magazine, took the forms, glanced at them, and tossed them in a drawer.

“I’m only going to be in Rome for a few days,” Joe said clearly and slowly, his neck swelling and reddening. “I have got to have that bag before I leave. Guido said he would take care of it.”

“Then he will,” the young woman said in accented English.

“Guido gone home, but he take care of it tomorrow or next day, whenever he get back.”

“What happens if the guy who took my bag brings it back and Guido’s not here? Will you be here?”

The young woman looked at him as if he had lost his mind. It was clear that no one in her experience had ever brought a bag back. I felt a sudden weary certainty that if we fell upon the bag identical to Joe’s and ripped it open we would find dreary, ill-made clothes far past HILL TOWNS / 79

their first youth; no one in their right mind would return the good Brooks Brothers slacks and jackets, the Ralph Lauren polos and thick, creamy oxford-cloth shirts Joe had brought.

Or the two dresses of mine. They were by far the prettiest and most expensive dresses I had ever owned, or probably ever would.

Of course the bag wouldn’t be coming back.

“Tomorrow is my day off,” said the young woman. “But if you want to come back here, the bag will be over there.”

She gestured toward the carousel, which still sat, motionless and barren, in the gloom. “If the guy bring it back, I mean.”

“Never mind, I’ll get this straightened out at the hotel, or maybe the embassy,” Joe said furiously, and whirled and walked away. Behind him, the girl shrugged.

“
Che posso fare
?” she said, and picked up her magazine.

We took my bags through customs without incident.

Outside, the sun was slanting lower off the ranks of farting buses and snarled taxis. It seemed that every horn on every vehicle in Rome was there, and blaring. I looked at my watch. Nearly four. The party began at seven, and we had no idea where it was, except somewhere in Trastevere. We were to call Colin and Maria at the Forrests’ when we got in, and they would give us directions.

“Joe, wait,” I called after him, as he snatched up my baggage and strode toward the cab stand.

“What?” It was a sharp bark.

I felt a surge of sharp irritation, followed by a slower, deeper tide of hurt. Joe very seldom snapped at me. And I was just as tired and hot and exasperated as he was, and nibbled ragged by the tiny teeth of the not-quite-quelled fear to boot; he knew that. But the two flushes 80 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

faded. I might not have a pretty dress to wear to the party, but I had clean clothes, enough of them to last me through Italy. Joe had nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said, catching up to him, “but we’re going to have to cash a traveler’s check before we can even get a cab. Don’t you remember, you said we’d do it here? Your book says there’s a booth by the doors to the taxi stand.”

We looked. There was indeed a booth for the changing of currency and the cashing of traveler’s checks. One booth, with one attendant in it.

As we started over, a massive black-clad nun herding a phalanx of Asian schoolgirls descended upon it and began an involved operation in which each child, giggling, went shyly up to the window in turn and presented a handful of documents and stood back, finger in rosy little mouth, as the attendant examined each documents with the steely scrutiny of a Siberian border guard. I felt tears spring into my gritty eyes and heard Joe say something swift and horrible under his breath.

I counted.

There were thirty-two of the Asian children.

When we reached the pavement outside at last, it was five-thirty, and the first fresh breath of the air of the Eternal City smote my face and neck like the belch of a blast furnace.

Wordlessly, we crawled into the first cab in the line and Joe said, “Hotel Cavalieri Hilton,
per favore
.”

“I don’ go up there,” the driver said, not looking around, not even looking up from the exquisite buffing he was giving his fingernails.

“Up
where
?”

“Up there. Up the mountain,” the driver said, gesturing contemptuously.

HILL TOWNS / 81

Joe fished in his pocket and thrust a handful of bills through the Plexiglas shield that ostensibly protected the driver from the barbarian likes of us. I could not see what they were, but the digits were not single ones.

The driver grunted, pocketed the bills, clashed the taxi into gear, and we roared out into the river of traffic toward Rome.

I remember everything about my first glimpse of it, and nothing. The careening, squealing, honking, shouting, pounding, brake-screeching trip took fully an hour and three-quarters, and I got no single clear vision of Rome in all of it. Later we learned that Leo—the name of our driver, posted on the filthy Plexiglas that separated us; Joe said he was sure it was an alias—had without doubt taken us via as long a route as possible. I don’t doubt that. Romans can smell vulnerability on
stranieri
as wolves can blood. And then, of course, we had hit the villainous Roman evening rush hour head on. And Monte Mario is a long way from Fiumicino.

About as far, in fact, as it is possible to get and still be in Rome. But still, it is a long time to spend in a car and not remember one clear scene, one heart-stilled vista, one breath-snatching frozen moment.

But impressions were another matter. After all this time, and after all the country we have traveled since that first day, when I think or hear the word “Italy” it is this suicidal ride in a battered, shrieking, evil-smelling cab that floods my mind and heart. Nearly two hours of apocalyptic traffic and stifling heat and exhaust fumes and cursing; of darting motorbikes and massed street corners full of dark, lounging men and vivid women in stiletto heels; of gestures and music and laughter and screams; of balconies and roofs spilling vines and flowers and Cinzano umbrellas in street cafés, and wide tree

82 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

lined avenues and dark, narrow cobbled streets leading back into unimaginable caves of shadow; of a flashing view of the dark Tiber between its concrete banks (“But it’s a culvert, Joe!”), and grimy pockmarked saints lining a bridge, and a looming apparition that was Castel Sant’ Angelo; of beetling walls of brick so ancient they were scarcely recognizable, and medieval piazzas flashing past and giving way to shops and greengrocers and pharmacies and pizzerias; and, finally, of a twisting ascent up a suburban mountain that might have been a hill in California or Oregon, except that when I turned my head to look back, the entire old city lay below me spread out on its hills, brown and umber and copper and alabaster and cream and russet, bathed in a clear gray-gold light that seemed to spring out of the very earth and air. And in the middle of it all rose the great luminous dome of Saint Peter’s.

I began to cry. Oh, Italy. The first time I ever came down off my mountain, and it was to this!

Joe laid his arm around my shoulder and patted me, and I knew he was praying that I was not beginning some sort of terrible, escalating attack of the panic. His hand was heavy and lethargic, and I knew he was past dealing with hysteria.

I reached up and squeezed it, to show him it was not the fear. But I did not know what it was, only that I could not seem to stop crying until the taxi squalled around a final hairpin turn, and shot through an enormous open gate into a vast parking lot, and screeched to a rocking stop under the porte cochere of the Cavalieri Hilton International. I stopped then and began to hiccup and then to giggle.

“Does Donald Trump know about this?” I choked.

“It looks pretty goddamned good to me,” Joe said, and jerked himself out of the taxi and began to scrabble HILL TOWNS / 83

furiously in his coat pocket for his wallet. A shower of crumpled bills and a spray of silver coins shot out at the feet of the uniformed doorman who had just that moment materialized. He and the taxi driver pounced on the booty. Joe turned red and then deadly white. I fled into the haven of the huge, ornate, glacial lobby and sank into an amber velvet banquette, trying desperately to force back the insane giggles.

I was dirty and hot and jet-lagged and strung tight as a violin bow, with the fear trying to push its way up into my chest and throat past the laughter, and at that moment I was as profoundly grateful to old Conrad Hilton and his dream of air-conditioned grandiosity as I have ever been to anyone in my life.

“If they live just below our hotel, they must live in a tree,”

Joe muttered half an hour later. “Ada Forrest obviously suffers from depth-perception deficit.” We were in another taxi, winding back down the mountain road we had just caromed up, but this time we rode in soft, cold silence. The doorman, obviously impressed with Joe as a source of endless American largesse, had hailed and rejected two or three cabs from the line at the bottom of the parking lot before selecting this new air-conditioned one. Its driver had not cursed or gestured or banged the side of his vehicle once. Indeed, he had not even spoken. When Joe had said, “
Via della Lungara in Trastevere,
per favore
,” he had merely looked back impassively. Joe produced the piece of paper on which he had, at Colin’s suggestion, written Sam and Ada Forrest’s address and their directions, and the driver had stared at it with an equal lack of affect. The doorman strode over and took the paper from the driver and studied it, and then said 84 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS