Читать книгу Don't Fall In Love With Marcus Aurelius - Eva Lubinger - Страница 5

In a bewildered fashion they stuffed the scattered items of clothing back into the suitcase and gathered up all their bags and bits of luggage. Now it was clear that they were at a major disadvantage, as Agatha, because of her rheumatism, couldn’t carry anything either, and Emily was likewise very much hindered by her considerable short-sightedness and her weak heart.

But somehow in the end they managed to get hold of a porter, and he in turn didn’t have the heart to rip off the elderly English ladies, who were tripping around their luggage like two lost chickens, this of itself was a genuine Roman miracle.

Now they both sat up in their beds in their room in a friendly Pension, close to Santa Maria Maggiore. The majority of their holiday clothes had already been handed over to a dry cleaner, which had come back to them with an invoice written in red numbers. Finally they had ordered tea to have in their room, feeling sad and that it was all a bit pointless. Emily tugged in a pensive manner at her hair curlers, which lent a grotesque expression to her dignified face, and Agatha read her favourite book, “King Solomon’s Mines” by Rider Haggard, which she had brought with her as a secure reminder, as it were, of her English home.

It would have been a pleasant night, if at eleven o’clock, just as Emily and Agatha shut their eyes with a peaceful sigh, a guitar player hadn’t started strumming soulful love songs in a backyard somewhere, accompanying himself from time to time with schmaltzy wailing. And when finally, tired of his courtship display, his guitar fell silent towards one in the morning, Emily then began with exasperation to fluff up her pillow. It just didn’t come close to meeting British standards: it was small, it was stretched too long. Sooner for her a hard roll than a sleep-promoting, feather-light pillow.

As a direct result of her bedtime reading, poor Agatha dreamt for a while of Zulu wars and skirmishes until she finally woke up and in the glow of the small bedside lamp saw Emily, looking like Medusa with her head full of curlers, executing a relentless drumbeat with her fists on the impassive Roman pillow.

She felt like complaining, but then she remembered the spilled tea, and, with a soft sigh, decided to hold her tongue. The absence of sleep pounded in her temples and she looked on apathetically, as Emily worked her corpulent body (not yet tamed by Weight Watchers) out of bed, such that the wobbly Italian bedstead, designed for much more delicate body types, groaned and swayed. She stepped across to the wash-stand, resolutely seized all the available towels and twisted them accusingly into a pillow-like mass, which, once she had got back into bed groaning to herself, she shoved under her head.

The first Roman morning dawned; it was light, bright and noisy. All the noisy people from the evening before were back in service after their short night’s sleep, back on their feet again and full of vitality, ready to fill out their existence with noise and joie de vivre.

Emily and Agatha rose, a little morning-afterish and flabbergasted on account of the seething Italian daily life going on all around them. Still just as flabbergasted, blinking in the unaccustomed brightness, they found themselves standing two hours later in St Peter’s Square, that majestic Piazza, infused with breadth and beauty, whose colonnades seemed capable of embracing every other square in the whole world.

They entered St Peter’s Basilica, the infinitely high ceiling of which is like a starry heaven, covering over a small self-contained universe, a sumptuous cool world of marble, too spread-out and immense truly to be thought of as an interior space. Neither of them said much: This church surpassed all normal dimensions by so very much that they were perplexed and felt slightly overwhelmed. Agatha gripped Emily’s hand as if for protection and not to get lost in the loneliness of that mighty space - a small speck of dust in a universe bristling with gold and marble.

Once they stepped back out into the open and the balmy waves of humanity and traffic noise broke around them again, of one accord they took a taxi and drove to the Colosseum. A zebra crossing led across to the other side of the road, which Emily wanted to get to, with a view to getting a better overview of that historical amphitheatre. Unsuspecting and trusting they stepped on to the designated crossing: Emily with heavy steps like a Roman mercenary of old and Agatha tripping along lightly beside her, chatting away cheerfully and excitedly.

They hadn’t even reached the halfway point before two cars came racing along the wide street from the direction of the Arch of Constantine and zoomed past so close to their noses that the passing slipstream whistled in their ears.

They both froze and instinctively took each other’s hands: What an unheard-of lack of discipline! Surely the police would soon be on the trail of these criminals! While they were still on the lookout for a police car, a couple more cars sped past at nearly a hundred miles an hour, and came so close that they almost brushed against Emily’s considerable behind. They drove with a sovereign and habitual non-observance of the common precedence given to pedestrians, those poor creatures who at the very least in other European cities are not completely outlawed on zebra crossings.

Agatha gasped for breath: “It’s not fair, no it’s really, really not fair,” she said weakly. The words were ripped from her lips by the next car and went on to flap like an imaginary hood ornament on the sleek nose of an Alfa Romeo.

The righteous anger of the former teacher was awakened in Emily. She positioned herself in all her glory, legs akimbo, right across the zebra crossing, swung the umbrella she had brought with her (despite the cloudless Roman skies) threateningly against the onrushing traffic, and cried out “Stop you rascals” with all the authority of a head teacher.

She cried out with that piercing voice, which had never failed to achieve its desired effect in her schooldays, but what happened now had never happened before throughout her long and distinguished career: she was disobeyed.

Agatha dragged the furious Emily between the cars that whizzed past and finally across to the other side of the road, from where they threw resentful looks back at the Colosseum, which was dozing in sublime timelessness in the midst of the city’s traffic.

Slightly exhausted by the sights and events of the day, by all the things that were so horribly un-English and could only really be encountered on the continent, the two ladies made for a small café near their pension, to refresh themselves with a nice cup of tea.

However the tea was yet another disappointment. The tea bag, swimming dismally in the hot water, gave out hardly any colour, let alone flavour. In England you wouldn’t even administer tea like that to an infant with a stomach ache.

Emily and Agatha gazed out, in between small disapproving sips of that concoction (so unlike tea!), upon the graceful and peaceful square, which was bordered on one side by the eastern facade of Santa Maria Maggiore. They had no eyes for the grace and bold vision of the three part stone staircase - one of many in hilly Rome - which for centuries had plunged down with a broad sweeping movement from the Basilica like a waterfall, whose rushing you are supposed to be able to hear on bright moonlit nights.

No, they were just upset about the bad tea and then about the Frutta di Mare for dinner back at the hotel which was dripping with fat and garnished with all sorts of greasy cold vegetables. Outraged, Emily and Agatha then dragged themselves back to their room, where Agatha took refuge in King Solomon’s Mines and Emily crocheted a small piece of wool in the shape of a petal, which at some later stage - with hundreds of other such pieces all side-by-side - was intended to form a bedspread. Bearing in mind her shortsightedness, this was a heroic undertaking.

The next few days were spent quietly. They took, as it were, careful sips and sampled the continent in small doses, which suited them much better. One particular bright spot was an outing to the Aventine, where amongst so many gardens, they felt content and almost at home. They wandered among the beautiful stone pine trees, whose shimmering green canopies stretched almost to the hill’s summit. It was early summer and the rose garden of the Aventine was in full bloom. They sat happy and joyous among the roses, letting the hours slip through their fingers, and watched peacefully, as the sun sank behind the outline of all the houses of the Eternal City, while the ancient ruins in the depth of the hill slowly drank in the red of the roses and clung on to it as deep glowing phosphorescence ready for the approaching night.

When it got dark, they took a taxi and were taken to the Trevi Fountain, where they both climbed down to the basin of the fountain, along steps that had been soaked by curtains of water, so that they could dutifully throw their coins into the fountain, which would guarantee their return to the eternal Rome. They stood there for a while and looked uncertainly into the fountain bowl, the bottom of which glowed silver with the coins of so many other foolish travellers and pilgrims who hoped, in their child-like optimism and hope which defied their better judgement, to pin down a wavering, wind-blown and uncertain future through one poor tiny coin and to be able to make that future amenable to their own wishes.

That night they slept long and deeply and in the morning Emily announced that it was now high time that they visited the wonderful equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill, which they had been saving up to now, plus Michelangelo’s facade, the long staircase leading to the summit, and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli which stood at the top. Once again they took a taxi which dropped them off at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. They climbed up slowly and painfully, and took a shuddering look back down the infinitely long and lofty staircase which led further up above them to the facade of the Aracoeli Church on their left in dazzling brightness. No, they couldn’t reach the top of these gruelling 124 steps, either on foot, or on their knees, like penitent pilgrims would have been obliged to do in earlier times.

So Emily and Agatha took a short breather. Above them the huge stone Dioskuri pair, Castor and Pollux, guarded the entrance to the Piazza del Campidoglio. Meanwhile Agatha caught sight of the wolf cage in between the blossoming oleanders and broke out into loud lamentations: “Look Emily, those poor poor animals...isn’t that terrible!”

Emily went over to Agatha’s side and, still panting softly from the unfamiliar exertions of climbing the staircase, they both observed with disgust and pity the skinny, shabby-looking wolves, prowling restlessly along the bars of the cage. The sight of captive wild animals, who had to live deprived of their natural habitat and their freedom of movement, was anathema to them.

And in addition Agatha, during her more active years, for around twenty years had been secretary to the Inspector General of the RSPCA: it was her vocation, so to speak, to be rebellious. It was a miracle that she didn’t sit herself straight down on the stone steps of the Capitoline and draw up a blazing protest letter to her former boss. It would probably however have been useless: the arm of the inspector of the RSPCA didn’t extend that far. And what could you really expect from a country in which, despite repeated appeals from Popes and many other sympathetic people, migrating songbirds from North and Central Europe are exterminated repeatedly and across a wide area every spring and autumn, and their small frail bodies - their songs forever silenced - are offered up on the menus of restaurants, to satisfy the thirst for profits of traders and the jaded palates of upmarket diners.

A well turned out, elderly gentleman had stopped next to the English women, and indicated towards the wolves: “Signore, this here is the Roman she-wolf, mother of Romulus and Remus....that was how the history della citta di Roma began.” He bowed slightly and went. But this reference to Rome’s foundation myth offered little comfort to Emily and Agatha.

They climbed the last few steps in silence, passed between the muscular stone calves of the twins Castor and Pollux and entered the splendid self-contained Piazza, whose floor was covered in a great star of wine-red marble. The perfect beauty and harmony of the Capitoline calmed their souls and in raptures they tripped around the equestrian statue of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius with its patina of shimmering green.

Emily planted herself in front of the horse’s nose, tipped her head back and narrowed her myopic eyes. “I can’t quite recognize his face,” she murmured. “That’s a crying shame as we are talking here about the only extant equestrian portrait remaining in Roman sculpture. Perhaps I could climb up on to the pedestal...and then get on the Emperor’s foot.”

Agatha wasn’t listening. She had sunk deep into one of her reveries. The golden light of that Roman morning seeped into her half-closed eyes, favourably tempered by the rays of the marble star at her feet.

A moaning sound summoned her back to reality. She opened her eyes wide in shock and saw Emily, as clumsy as a fat beetle, stuck on Marcus Aurelius’s foot. Her broad face was extremely red and her thick glasses wobbled on her nose:

“Agatha, I can’t get down.” Groaning, she lowered her foot into the void and then, discouraged, pulled it straight back again.

“Oh God, Emily, why did you climb up there in the first place?”

“I wanted to see the Emperor’s face, his actual portrait,” Emily replied meekly.

Enzo Marrone was passing the morning leaning against one of the warm sunlit columns on the edge of the piazza. He had his hands in his trouser pockets, his head leaning back nonchalantly, and his eyes half closed, chewing slowly on a piece of gum and otherwise doing nothing. It was the sort of morning he liked. He had watched idly chewing while this impossible foreigner had scrambled up the monument - Madonna Mia, what a crazy idea! Only tourists could resort to such stupidity and squander energy so pointlessly. He watched with a cold gaze, while Agatha made fruitless attempts to help her stuck friend abseil off the monument. Agatha reached out her hand and frantically grabbed a tuft of bronze horse-hair. At that same moment, the large diamond on her ring flashed in the sunlight, and Enzo stopped chewing. His eyes opened wide, he threw off the morning’s inertia and began thinking. Two wealthy foreign ladies apparently, and English too - that was as much as he needed to hear. One of them had placed her handbag on the statue’s plinth. Enzo sauntered closer. Taking the bag would be easy. But there was the ring flashing again....

An idea, a plan started to stir in Enzo’s mind: Why just slaughter the calf when with a little ingenuity he could have the cow as well?

He took his hands out his pockets, spat out the gum so that it flew in a wide arc down on to the star-adorned square where it stuck to the marble somewhere, and strode zealously across to the Marcus Aurelius memorial: “Permesso!”

He vaulted skillfully on to the plinth, took Emily by the arm, supported her so that she could let go of the Emperor’s foot, jumped down, gave her some support again and with an “Ecco” let her slide unharmed back down on to solid ground, which she had left behind just now so rashly and with such a youthful zeal for art history. “Oh Emily,” Agatha said, “you could have broken an arm or a leg. I was so worried about you. And you know, my rheumatism: I couldn’t have helped you because I have no strength in my arms.”

Emily was still gasping. “Is there anywhere round here where you can get a cup of tea, ” she asked dryly, and managed successfully to maintain her English stiff upper lip. She soon hurried off to the little bar on the edge of the Piazza. Agatha followed her but completely forgot in her usual absent-minded manner the handbag which sat unnoticed at the feet of Marcus Aurelius. Enzo saw the abandoned calf, considered the cow which he still wanted to milk, so picked up the bag and took it back to the ladies.

“Oh thank you, thank you. Emily, this nice young man has brought my bag back. And to think that people told us Rome was full of thieves!” With a gracious smile Emily took her bag back from Enzo‘s hand.

“I also want to thank you, very much,” Emily now said in her deep voice. She extended her hand to Enzo, and looked at him in a firm and admiring way, as she would have done in the past with a well-behaved and satisfactory student:

“Will you have a cup of tea with us? Without your help I might have broken my neck and it would have served me right.” Enzo inclined his head courteously and accepted the invitation.

In that corner, behind the Capitol, where the side steps led up to the Aracoeli Church, stood the vision of a tensed-up little Roman hoodlum called Luigi. On the end of a rope he held a mongrel of undefined origin, which must have been brought into this world by two random strays. It was a mix of rough-, short- and long-haired; of spaniels, poodles and curly-tailed pugs, and those elements of all the different breeds were combined in a most unattractive fashion. It whined softly to itself while pulling hard on its rope.

Luigi tried desperately to restrain it. No way could he let the dog run over to Enzo and spoil the enterprise. For sure, Luigi had no idea why Enzo hadn’t taken the handbag, that beautiful bag that seemed so full of promise: why he hadn’t seeped with it into the very cracks of the square, flitted round the corner with it, or let it be absorbed into the air...in short, why he hadn’t brought the whole undertaking to a reasonable and profitable conclusion. Enzo, however, would have had his reasons.

Enzo was smart, much smarter than Luigi, who had quickly cottoned on to this and who had accepted Enzo’s supremacy humbly and without condition. Things went well for Luigi when he was with Enzo. He was having a better life since he had joined forces with him and since Enzo had started to help him to even out their social differences just a little. He had helped him to a life where he could eat without having to work on a regular basis.

They both possessed an aversion to work. Enzo, son of an English mother and an Italian father, an unintended and unwanted consequence of a holiday flirtation between a British tourist with a predisposition to cheap Italian romance, and a fairly successful Italian beach Romeo...Enzo thus ended up a dark-haired handsome lad with blue eyes and a classical profile. He possessed the demonstrative charm of the Italians, the easy going and almost feline movements of the native Roman and was lean and tall because of his English mother, whose language he had mastered fairly well since early childhood.

You may well have called him handsome, if his eyes hadn’t been so peculiarly slanted. This was apparently inherited from his father, whose ancestors had come from one of those noisy, grimy little towns on the Bay of Naples, from that melting pot of oriental peoples, which had produced such rich results across the millennia.

With those sloping, narrow eyes, which lent his face a somewhat sly and fox-like quality, he couldn’t hope to make a great career in his father’s line of work, and so he made do for the time being with pickpocketing and shoplifting, without ever even entertaining the thought of conventional work. He’d see how it went later....After all, Enzo was good-looking enough that he’d be able to find a wife, who would happily work for him, he was certain of that. And with a bit of luck she’d also not have to do too much either and they would live as one and pretty well on her daddy’s money.

Meanwhile poor old Luigi - still behind the railings of the church steps - gave the whimpering dog a frustrated kick, so that it cowered down and stayed quiet, and he looked intensely and anxiously towards the group sitting round the small table outside the bar.

Enzo sat between the two English ladies and drank his tea with composure and decorum, a concoction that he detested like the plague. But he consoled himself inside that such things were among the perils of his profession.

Agatha fumbled around once again in her roomy handbag – the one which Enzo had so cleverly restored to her - in a quest to find her headscarf, and Emily followed her movements with glances of disapproval. Agatha always had to be searching for something or other! She just got confused so easily; and unfortunately this was getting worse as the years passed. Just watching her made Emily nervous, and with an inaudible sigh she turned to the tea-drinking Enzo:

“We like your home town very much, except that the traffic is much too hectic, but......” At that moment Agatha dropped the open bag on the floor and its copious contents, including passport, cash, cheques, receipts, keys, make-up articles and tickets - everything but the proverbial kitchen sink - sailed out across the beautiful stone floor of the Capitoline Piazza. Enzo’s professional interest sparked into life and he stooped down quickly: He could at least then check out what was waiting for him in the near future, and while with his well-practised fingers he helped gather up all the bits and pieces, his eye fell upon a much leafed-through set of travel documents: Calais-Rome, and, on the next page, Rome-Venice. And then by boat from Venice to Mallorca. So when they leave Venice, they leave Italy....

Enzo straightened up slowly and gave the bewildered and contrite Agatha back her belongings. And as he broke into a radiant smile showing his flawless teeth, his plan was already quite settled in his mind. He turned politely to Emily and picked up the thread of their conversation once again:

“Rome is not my home city, Signora: I am just here for a short holiday. My home is La Serenissima, the city on the lagoon - Venice!”

“No, really? What luck!” cried out Agatha. “ You must see us again, when you are in Venice!”

“The young man will have better things to do in Venice, than visit two old ladies”, said Emily slightly defensively and she looked reprovingly at her friend. Agatha was always so impulsive. Actually, she had changed very little since the time when they had both been at boarding school together more than half a century ago. Agatha then had been a widely acknowledged enfant terrible and the terror of their dormitory.

Enzo then saw his ship sailing away over the horizon, and answered hurriedly: “Oh no, Signora, it would be a real pleasure for me to meet you in Venice! I worked there for years as a guide. Now I only take my friends and acquaintances round the sights. I could show you the city: The Doge’s Palace, the Grand Canal, the Islands..”

Emily, who had been eyeing him closely through her thick glasses, interrupted the flow of his speech: “What job do you do now, Signor......?”

His tea, that disgusting brew, went down his throat the wrong way, and Enzo choked. He bowed slightly, while still sitting. “Enzo - Enzo Marrone!” He had translated his mother’s name into Italian without any pang of conscience. “What work do I do, do you mean?” Enzo put down his tea cup, coughed extravagantly again and continued: “I am a freelancer, doing market research - it’s interesting work actually.” Enzo leaned back. Once again he was pleased with his ability to give a rapid response. He hadn’t actually lied. Was he not in fact researching the market, persistently and thoroughly, with his finger on the pulse of civic life? And you could call his profession freelance, well yes, by God, that would be a very apt description of it: freelance just like any outlaw!

Emily nodded a little uncertainly. She just couldn’t picture it in her own mind and, had Enzo been one of her former students, she would have advised him to go after a profession that was a bit more resilient. However you couldn’t apply British standards anyway to these people from the Continent, and that was even more the case with Italians, who were such a unique, hard to comprehend people, who were always fluctuating between extremes. A person would just make do with the fact that they are not devoting themselves to a too bizarre and extravagant lifestyle.

Meanwhile, after further energetic excavations into the unfathomable depths of her handbag, Agatha brought to light a scrap of paper and a pencil and she scribbled zealously.

“This is the address of our hotel in Rome,” she said, smiling guilelessly, and basically placing the rope into Enzo’s hand, which would then make it much less difficult for him to lead them where he wanted them, like a shepherd and his soft wooly lamb. For her un-English behaviour, and for showing a deplorable lack of reserve, she reaped a disapproving look from her friend and companion Emily.

“It’s getting a little bit hot here, Agatha, don’t you think?” she said in a slightly raised voice and stood up. “I believe we’d be better off now going back to the hotel.” Emily was inclined to get away from the Capitoline, before Agatha, this scatterbrained philanthropist, invited the young Italian man back to their home in England. Agatha was capable of anything.

Agatha took leave of Enzo with gracious respect and made her way quickly to the stone staircase. Even gratitude had its limits.

Enzo waited for a while, still watching as the two English women called for a taxi at the foot of the stairs and were driven away in it, and then he whistled nonchalantly in the direction of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Immediately Luigi and Dante, the dog he was walking, came running across:

“Why didn’t you take the bag? There must have ben a whole pile of money in it! I haven’t eaten anything yet today.” “Shut your mouth and stop annoying me,” Enzo interrupted him brusquely, while he gently ruffled the fur of the leaping, joyfully whining dog. “I have a plan, do you hear, a good plan which is going to lead to great things for both of us.”

“What sort of plan, Enzo, enlighten me...”

“Not yet,” Enzo snarled, “right now I need a Campari. I had to drink tea with them. Tea! Tea makes me sick.” He spat in a wide arc on to the star-decorated Piazza floor and ordered a double Campari without soda. When he saw Luigi’s hungry expression, he grumpily ordered him a Coke. The dog lay down under the small cafe table and promptly went to sleep.