Without Reservations (35 page)

The two men ran after me. I continued making as much noise as I could, overturning some trash cans along the way, hoping the noise of the rolling metal, plus my screaming, would alert someone. It did. By the time I reached the corner of the main street, doors had opened and several people appeared on the street, yelling at the two men to stop. It worked. The men chasing me immediately took off in the opposite direction.

After watching them disappear I sank to the curb. I sat shaking, the adrenaline still pumping through me, my head and ears pounding. I hadn’t yet allowed myself to fully acknowledge the fear I felt. That would come later. Mainly I was embarrassed. What must the small crowd gathered round me think of this crazy woman who’d run screaming up the street?

But that seemed not to be what they were thinking about at all. What was on their minds was my well-being. I was touched by their concern and kindness as they helped me compose myself, asking over and over again if I was all right.

Si, si, grazie, I am all right
, I said. I kept repeating it—
Si, si, grazie. I am all right
—until the crowd dispersed.

But I wasn’t all right. Something had happened to me, something that left me feeling vulnerable in a way I’d not experienced for a long time. It was as though a tiny hairline crack had suddenly appeared in the self-sufficient image I had constructed over the years.
Not since my mother’s death ten years earlier had I felt so painfully aware of how little control I had when it came to the grand scheme of my life.

Things happen, I thought, and we respond. That’s what it all comes down to. To believe anything else, as far as I could tell, was simply an illusion.

Over the next few days I found myself unable to stop thinking about the incident on the Via Borgognona. First came the self-recriminations, and the attempt to deal with feelings of guilt that somehow I was responsible for what happened. My thoughts raced:
I should have taken another street. I shouldn’t have been wandering around alone. I should have been more alert. I should have carried pepper spray or Mace. I shouldn’t have looked at the man in the café.
Intellectually, I knew none of these things applied, knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong or anything I hadn’t done safely a hundred times in the past. Still, a voice kept saying:
My fault. My fault. My fault.

Worse, however, was the loss of confidence that settled over me. I was overcome with a heavy inert feeling, one that prevented me from entering into life with any sense of trust. I tried putting into action the theorem I’d attributed to Albert back in Oxford—M=EA (Mishap equals Excellent Adventure)—but to no avail. I simply hadn’t the energy or desire necessary to make such a plan work.

Now when I was out on the streets, I was so busy looking for danger that I barely saw the city. At night I slept with the bathroom light on, comforted by its dull glow through the half-closed door.
Sleep, however, did not refresh me. I awoke fatigued. It was trauma fatigue, I decided one morning after waking to a memory of the chronic tiredness I’d felt years earlier after serious back surgery.

It was time, I decided, to get out of Rome.

Intellectually I knew Rome wasn’t the problem; that I was the problem. Still, when I changed my train tickets to Florence for an earlier departure, I breathed a sigh of relief. From Florence I planned to take the bus to Siena, a town I remembered as quiet and serene, one bereft of motor scooters and dangerous situations.

In the two days left before my departure, I spent my time taking bus tours organized for tourist groups. That way I was never alone. In the evening I followed the routine of eating dinner at a fancy hotel near mine and then returning to my room to sit outside on an adjoining veranda.

The veranda had come as a pleasant surprise in an otherwise disappointing choice of hotel. I’d discovered the outdoor balcony only a few days earlier, after opening a door hidden behind a curtain in my room. Like my room, it was in need of sprucing up—dead leaves lay scattered on the stone floor and the metal chairs were rusted—but I liked it anyway. It had a nice view of the Via Sistina and I found if I leaned over the stone balustrade and looked to the right, I could catch a glimpse of the Spanish Steps. Given my mood, the veranda was exactly what I needed: a retreat where I could sit and think. Or, more often, sit and
not
think.

In the evenings I’d sit there drinking wine and smoking an occasional cigarette, a habit I’d retrieved after the attempted mugging. I’d wait until the light faded and the lamps came on over the Spanish Steps before walking up the hill to have dinner at the usual place. Afterward I would return and, wrapped in a blanket, sit outside looking at the stars.

On my last night in Rome the rains came, turning my veranda
into a shallow swimming pool. Reluctantly, I abandoned my usual routine. Instead I propped myself up in bed and turned to my old friend Freya, hoping to find comfort and, perhaps, advice in her books, her observations. As usual, she did not disappoint.

“The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares,” she wrote. “To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.”

Reading this, I let out a small shriek of recognition. It was as though someone in charge had said to me: not guilty. Permission granted to continue on with your life as usual.

It would take some time, I knew, to regain my confidence about approaching life’s corners. But, as Freya pointed out, avoiding them would be the same as saying “no” to life. And I wasn’t about to do that.

I had been asleep for only an hour or two when a loud, booming sound awakened me. For one wild moment I thought a bomb had exploded. I sat upright, still groggy. Then I heard it again.
Boom!
It was even louder than the first one. Suddenly a great burst of light lit up my room. I ran to the veranda door and looked outside. Rain was pelting the empty streets below and forks of lightning illuminated the dark sky like arteries exposed on an X-ray. Thunder rolled across the city in great waves.

I looked at the clock. It was 3:00
A.M.
I was already packed and ready to leave for Florence later that morning. If I went back to bed right away, I thought, I could catch maybe another three hours of sleep.

But I already knew I wasn’t going to do that. Instead I put on
my Reeboks, threw a raincoat over my pajamas, and left the hotel. It was as impulsive an act as anything I’d ever done. But something in me said: never again will you have the opportunity to stand at the top of the Spanish Steps with Rome lit up and spread out beneath you.

Put that way, I had no choice.

Outside, the streets were empty. The lightning and thunder were now off in the distance, but the rain had not let up. Leisurely, almost playfully, I walked the short distance—a hundred feet or so—from my hotel to the top of the Spanish Steps. There, like a sentinel I stood watch over the sleeping city of Rome.

With the city stretched out beneath me I looked off into the distance, across the Tiber. I watched as silent flashes of lightning, like strobes going on and off, revealed briefly domes and towers and church spires set against the sky. For the first time I felt the ancient majesty of Rome. Caught up in the strange beauty of the storm, I imagined all the Romes buried beneath this one. It was like being back in Pompeii. Watching, my thoughts excavated the city back through the centuries, back to a time when all roads led to Rome.

As I stood at the top of the Spanish Steps—a temporary traveler passing through Rome, and through life, in
anno Domini
1993—an intense feeling of awe and respect came over me. Rome had endured. And when I was gone from Rome, and from life, she would still endure. It was then that I bowed with respect, like a younger member of the tribe, to the wisdom and tradition possessed by this honorable elder.

When I returned to the hotel I was no longer sleepy. The rain had stopped so I stepped out onto the veranda. Again, I wondered why I’d acted so impulsively. Was it because I needed to feel in control
again? Perhaps. Perhaps not. For some reason the question no longer interested me.

I stood looking down over the streets near the hotel. Directly below on the Via Sistina a few people were venturing out: early risers, dog-walkers, people coming home from jobs that ended as day began. The street lamps were still on, but dawn was moving up quickly into the sky, turning it into a pale pink dome.

I ran back into the room and got my camera. Then, leaning out as far as I could over the veranda wall, I faced the Spanish Steps and gently squeezed the shutter release. It was my first photograph of Rome. And my last.

Whatever I wanted to remember of the city, I decided, would be there, in that single picture of Rome after the storm.

T
he minute I stepped off the bus in Siena I heard the music: strange noises created by drums and what sounded like high-pitched wind instruments—recorders perhaps. Whatever it was, the sound was captivating. It set my imagination spinning off into the Middle Ages, evoking powerful images I’d stored up; dark, fairy-tale scenes of fierce battles and axes and terrible deaths from the plague. For me it was part of Siena’s appeal, this ability to tap into the primitive, mythic remnants of childhood fantasy that lurk beneath the adult sensibility.

Immediately, I checked my suitcase with a porter and ran toward the odd-sounding music. There, on a street lined with thirteenth-century stone buildings, men dressed in medieval costumes paraded by the shadowy arches and tall wooden gates that opened into private courtyards. In solemn rows, filling the width and length of the Via della Galluzza, they marched to the music; men both young and old, some carrying flags that floated in the air above their heads. A few marchers wore armored breastplates, calling to mind Siena’s history as a powerful fortress once capable of defeating the Florentines in battle.

As I stood watching, a wide shaft of sunlight angled its way down into the narrow street, highlighting the buildings opposite me. Suddenly I saw two parades: the real one and a parade composed
of shadows marching across the sunlit stone walls. The ghostly figures reminded me of the Halloween night parade in Baltimore; of how as a child I loved the excitement of moving through the stream of goblins and witches wandering the streets on that one night. Safe behind my own mask, an anonymous observer, I was free to watch without being seen.