The Lover From an Icy Sea (27 page)

Two bags packed, Kit and Daneka retired the rest to an overnight storage facility, checked in at the car rental agency once again to register the postponement of their departure, then headed out to a taxi stand where they quickly found a car. Kit gave the name and street address of the hotel, and they were off even before he’d had time to close his door. A somewhat harrowing, but appropriately Roman forty-five minutes later through side streets and back alleys, they were standing in front of the hotel. Daneka paid the fare; they registered at the front desk; the porter took their bags; all three then ascended via a cramped elevator smelling of stale cigarette smoke to their floor and room.

This was decidedly not the Grand Hotel de Champagne, but Rome had not been part of their original itinerary. It would be adequate. It had a bed and a private bathroom. It was, as Kit had noted when they climbed out of their taxi, on a side street leading right up to the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori. What’s more—as the porter made demonstrably clear to them in the act of flinging open a pair of French doors leading out to a terrace much like the one they’d enjoyed in Paris—their room looked directly out onto that same piazza. As far as Kit was concerned—and he hoped, Daneka, too—it was perfect.

Daneka tipped the porter in a small stack of lire notes, and he exited gracefully.

“
Darling, I’m famished. How about a little stroll and then lunch?”

“
Great idea!” Kit answered, eager to get out and have a look around.

“‘
Give me two minutes in the bathroom, darling?” Daneka asked.

“
Certainly. Take your time.”

Daneka disappeared behind the bathroom door, and Kit unpacked their luggage. He made a quick check of his armpits and decided he and his shirt could ride for a few more hours without becoming offensive. Daneka re-emerged and picked up her purse. They walked out and locked the door to their room; took the stairs rather than the elevator back down to the lobby; then walked out the front door into bright, midday sunlight.

Chapter 36

The Piazza Campo de’ Fiori was essentially what he’d expected to find, if somewhat more festive. Perhaps, he thought to himself, the square had a dual personality: all business by day; all romance and intrigue—maybe even mayhem—by night.

Standing center-ring over the flower and vegetable commerce was the statue of a martyr—of Giordano Bruno, whom Kit could now only vaguely recall as someone who’d challenged the Church, who’d subsequently been condemned by the Inquisition in 1600, and who’d been promptly torched. Elsewhere on the piazza, the brother of Lucrezia Borgia had been poisoned: whether by the very same high priest of celibacy who’d impregnated her, or merely by one of the Pope’s lackeys, Kit didn’t know. Here, too, Caravaggio had served tennis balls—until, that is, love forty had led to ad out, had led to love nothing, and the player of acute artistic sensibilities had bludgeoned his opponent to death with something a little less delicate than a paintbrush.

That was as much history as Kit knew about this particular piazza. The more contemporary—and so, to him, far more interesting—history was the one he knew from his parents. They’d been present, off and on, in the sixties and seventies to participate in anti-war protests, the first of which had been against the French for their reluctance to leave Algeria and then Indochina. The French learned, however, and eventually withdrew. The Americans rushed in to fill the vacuum, and Kit’s parents rushed back to Rome to protest not only America in Vietnam, but also Portugal in Mozambique and Angola. Four years later, Salazar died—and Portugal’s colonial empire collapsed. They went to protest, certainly, but also to celebrate the act of protesting. After all, a good march or demonstration sure beat a nine-to-five job.

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 mid-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.