Читать книгу Walking Backwards - Mark Frutkin - Страница 9

Rome, etc.,

1967–1968

High in the air over the Atlantic, we are four hours into our flight. I sit next to Lebanese Michael on a chartered KLM jetliner that is winging us from Chicago to Rome, where we will begin our third year of university in the first week of September. The plane is packed with over two hundred students from thirty different universities around the United States and Canada who have decided, like us, to attend the Loyola University campus in Rome.

Bulging eyes bleary behind thick eyeglasses, Michael raises a bottle of Heineken to toast.

“To an outrageously fascinating year in Rome, one of the few major cities in the world with a specific date to mark its founding: April 21, 753 B.C.” Michael always had fascinating facts handy to spice up his conversation.

“No doubt. It’s already fascinating,” I shout as I glance around the plane. Approximately 220 students and four male KLM stewards are drunk. Not just tipsy, but head-smashed-in, buffalo-jump drunk — and raving. The noise level is shaking the windows in their plastic seals and the aisles are filled with running, jumping students, shooting booze at each other, suitcases tumbling out of overhead bins, girls screaming and guys hallooing. In the rear galley, two of the blond Dutch stewards are smashed, pink faces pinker now that they are flushed with drink. They sit with nineteen-year-old girls on their laps, all probing each other’s tonsils with their tongues. Next to them, another steward stands, downing shots of schnapps and taking slugs of beer, all while handing out free booze to anyone who asks.

No sign of the pilots who, hopefully, are not taking part in this madness, but safely steering the jet through its transcontinental arc as it returns to 41°54' North latitude, the precise location of both Chicago and Rome on Earth. Several hours later, the crowd settles into sleep just around the time we land in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport.

As we exit the plane, we notice that the air is sultry and there are palm trees planted in the parking lot. We stumble onto a bus and head off to the Seven Hills of Rome.

The school is located in an area of Rome called Monte Mario, the highest of the those seven hills, and consists of only two buildings. The larger one houses the residences and classrooms of the school, as well as the cafeteria in the basement, and administrative offices on the first floor. This turn-of-the-century, four-storey building on Via della Cammillucia was once home to the Pope’s Swiss Guards. I suspect the Jesuits, who run Loyola University, won it from them in a late-night card game. The other building, smaller, just one storey and almost new, is the student union. There is a bar here, with several dozen tables and a jukebox.

The long driveway that leads to the main building is impressive in a country-estate kind of way, entirely shaded with overarching trees that have been clipped into one continuous rectangular mass. One passes through a dark tunnel of forest to reach the school, leaving the bustling suburban neighbourhood of Monte Mario behind as you enter the quiet of the school grounds. From a window-lined room on the roof of the school, called the belvedere, it is possible to look out over a series of hills dotted with dwellings to the city of Rome below in the distance.

Over the next few months, I will begin to realize that there are as many eccentrics housed in this building as there are jocks, intellectuals, and beauty queens. One day, I’m standing in the wide hallway in the residence, on the second floor of the building, talking to Martin. Martin, with his tightly curled bush of brown hair, reminds me of a cross between the young Bob Dylan and Harpo Marx. He also somewhat resembles the playful and devilish Greek god, Pan.

“Where you headed, Martin?” I ask as I see him walking resolutely down the hall. In the background, we can hear our friend Jim bellowing in the shower. We have learned that Jim, who sports an impressive handlebar moustache, likes to sing opera at the top of his lungs while scrubbing. The strange thing is that he can actually sing.

The cherubic Martin smiles mischievously. “I’m going to visit the Vatican.”

I eye him up and down. “Think they’ll let you in dressed like that?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Martin is wearing a bowler hat on top of his curls, a long black cape, a white T-shirt, black shorts over fishnet stockings, and yellow running shoes. I know he’s no transvestite, or even a young cross-dresser experimenting with new styles, he’s simply cracked, like most of my other friends around here.

“Hi, Jim,” we say, as Jim, dressed only in a white towel, his hair wet and combed straight back, comes sailing down the hallway on roller skates, the noisy old type, before rollerblades made their appearance. Jim waves, the handles of his moustache flapping, as he zips past us. He roller-skates everywhere. I haven’t seen him out of his skates since we arrived in Rome.

“That guy’s crazy,” Martin observes.

We both turn as a door opens next to us, revealing Beanpole Bill, the long-suffering roommate of Martin’s best friend, Patrick. Bill is coming out into the hallway, shaking his head as he complains about Patrick. “He’s really losing it this time,” he says, swinging the door wide to reveal Patrick, all six-foot-three of him, dressed only in his white briefs, standing in the tall window of his second-floor room, facing out over what we know is the main entrance to the school. Students, male and female, are filing in and out of the entrance one storey below. Patrick stands in the window, his arms and legs akimbo like Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous figure of a man. At the top of his voice, he yells in frustration: “ALL I WANNA DO IS MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD!”

Beanpole Bill runs his hands through his hair. “Patrick’s really driving me nuts,” he complains to Martin and me. “Know what he did last week? Remember that flu that was going round?”

Martin and I nod.

“He had it bad. Pukin’. Diarrhea. The whole deal. Monday afternoon, he’s just coming back from a shower, dressed in nothing but a towel, naked underneath. He sees me standing in the room, whips back the towel, says he’s gonna fart on me. He comes over, sticks his butt out and shits on my foot!”

“That’s Patrick,” says Martin.

Irish Michael comes along. He’s only twenty-one, but looks like he could be in his forties. It’s scary how much he resembles everyone’s dad. He stops, looks Martin up and down and whistles. “Where you going, Martin, dressed like that?”

“Going to St. Peter’s. Think they’ll let me in?”

“Nope. Not a chance.”

Martin shrugs and steps into Patrick’s room. “Gotta try.” He turns to the window where Patrick still stands on full display to the uncomprehending world. “Come on, Patrick. Time to get dressed. Bring your camera. I want a photo of me in my costume in front of the Pieta.”

Irish Michael and I head off to the student union for a beer. Moments later, we stand at the bar, sipping our Italian Peronis, listening to the Beatles singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the jukebox. In wanders Professor Fink and orders a glass of white wine. We stand in a line, the three of us, at the tiny bar. Professor Fink teaches me art history. He is one of those professors, a German, who thinks he knows everything and wants everyone else to know it. A snob of the first order. Sometimes I think he’s actually stuffed. A Germanic mannequin. We drink and listen to the jukebox. The Beatles perfectly reflect the attitudes of a thousand million young people around the world: “Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about/Strawberry Fields forever.” Professor Fink turns around with a sneer on his face and says to no one in particular and to anyone who will listen: “Das ist not musik! Das ist noice!”

Irish Michael and I head for a table. Two of the tables in the corner of the student union are taken up, as always, by eight bridge players, almost all skinny bespectacled Jewish and WASP boys from New York City and a couple of pale girls who wear ill-fitting outdated dresses. The bridge players all look like they’re already well past middle age. They are intent on their card game. Their concentration is heroic, obsessive, complete. They will be found at these tables for the next nine months, every day from 8:00 a.m. until 11:00 in the evening. No one will ever see them outside, wandering the grounds, or in the nearby restaurants of Monte Mario. None of them will travel anywhere outside the campus. Even when they are sighted going to classes, they look like they are thinking about bridge. They are all eccentrics, visiting only with each other. They never drink. They never speak to anyone else. They never put a lira in the jukebox. They never learn a word of Italian. Bridge zombies.

Munich

At a time when it is difficult, if not impossible, for young American males to quit university and travel because of the ever-present threat of the U.S. draft, which could possibly force us to travel to the one place none of us want to go — Vietnam — the Loyola third-year abroad program is tailor-made for would-be wanderers. The school in Rome has scheduled significant vacation breaks that will allow us considerable travelling time while still in school. Ten days for American Thanksgiving, a full month for Christmas (when we will make the Istanbul trip related in Chapter 1), three weeks for Easter and, somehow, three five-day weekends in April and May.

The first major trip we take is one the school has arranged for a weekend in October. Five train cars have been reserved for the Loyola students who want to visit the Oktoberfest in Munich. Lebanese Michael and I decide to go with another friend, Wally, who is from a small town in central Ohio. Wally is interested in everything from Japanese gardens to Beat poetry, which is not at all typical of a Midwesterner from a small Ohio town. With his shock of black hair and his enormous round head on a stocky frame, he looks a bit like a cartoon character, a cross between Alfred Jarry and Charlie Brown. But he is good company and keeps Michael and me fascinated with the depth of his unlikely knowledge gleaned from library books in Dover, Ohio.

The trip up to Munich on the train is a replay of the KLM flight over to Rome. A drunken revel all the way — one that continues unabated on arrival in Munich where we will have to find our own lodgings. We never even consider spending the money for a place to stay and decide that we will either remain awake the entire weekend or sleep in the train station.

The Munich Oktoberfest, which started in 1810, is the world’s largest fair, drawing 6 million visitors a year. It is held in a spacious city park of forty-two hectares, called the Theresienwiese (Field of Therese), where Bavarian breweries set up massive tents. In 2006, the six major breweries sold 6.1 million mugs of beer at Oktoberfest. In addition to beer, typical German food is also served in the tents, including chicken, sausage, roasted oxtails, cheese noodles, and sauerkraut.

The first night, we find our way to the park where the Oktoberfest tents have been set up. Each brewery tent seats thousands of patrons at long tables, where that company’s beer is served. The three of us begin in the Hofbrau tent, which seats ten thousand people. We are astonished at the level of noise and the size of the waitresses. Each buxom matron carries three huge one-litre crockery beer steins in each hand as she serves, and God help the poor slob who gets in the way when one of these fleshy steamrollers is coming down the aisle. Everyone is shouting and singing and drinking and arguing like there are a whole lot of bad memories to be drowned out as soon as possible. We have no hope of keeping up with the drinkers around us, being North American neophytes with teaspoon-sized bellies. Nevertheless, we manage to down enough beer to float ourselves out of the park hours later when the tents start closing down.

As we head out of the park, tens of thousands of drinkers (the tents can seat a total of about a hundred thousand) are exiting at the same time. At the edge of the park, a small building serves as a public urinal. A stream of urine two feet wide and an inch deep is flowing out the door of the crowded, overused building, running down the hill and into the street. Everyone is drunk, some more than others. Young men and old are falling down in their own piss and not getting up (these are referred to as “beer corpses”), or being dragged away by their stumbling friends. Others are vomiting where they stand or kneeling on the churned-up ground. It resembles a scene from Dante’s Inferno, grotesque, overwhelming in its visceral, animal-like frenzy.

Our plan to sleep in the train station is quickly quashed by the police who come through and roughly toss out any drunks or malingerers. “Raus! Raus!” they shout, kicking stragglers with their high, shiny leather boots. Luckily, we have met a couple of friendly German fellows from Frankfurt, Jochen and Karl. They tell us we can sleep in their VW bug while they are in their rented room. They explain that they would happily sneak us in, but the landlady keeps close watch. The next morning, Michael, Wally, and I unbend ourselves from the Beetle and, not so much hungover as still drunk, go for breakfast with our new German friends. Another day of drinking lies ahead.

The train ride back to Rome proves to be significantly quieter than the journey up.

Perugia/Assisi

Taking a journey alone is a necessary part of every young man’s education. In early November, I decide to go on my own over a long weekend to two small cities in the hilly Umbria region due north of Rome. Perugia and Assisi are about halfway to Florence and I am able to hitchhike there easily in a day.

This is my introduction to Italian drivers, from the inside of the vehicle, that is, and my final ride is from a young, handsome Lothario who appears at one with his sports car as he delights in taking the twisting turns at top speed. Luckily, he has the skills required, downshifting into curves and accelerating out of them, the car hugging the road with the balance of a cat chasing down its prey along a balcony railing. I am pleasantly surprised by his obvious skill, for the Roman drivers were a scourge on every pedestrian daring to take the city by foot. We North American students quickly learned the rule of the road in Rome: “If you are killed while crossing in the crosswalk, the driver must pay for your funeral. If you are killed outside the crosswalk, the driver faces no such liability.”

In any case, I arrive in Perugia in one piece. The driver drops me at the train station and since it is dinnertime and I don’t know any better, I enter the station to take a meal. With the innocence of youth, I sit at the counter and order the fish of the day off the menu. The chunk of dogfish served to me by the harried waiter is bony and smells fishy as a men’s public toilet. I remember that I once had the misfortune to catch a dogfish while visiting Long Island with my parents when I was a young teenager. The damnable thing flopped about the dock barking. Barking, for god’s sakes. Its head, mostly mouth, was three times the size of its body. A freak of a fish. I recall gingerly nudging it back into the sea with my foot.

Holding my nose, I dig into my plateful of reeking fish. If the Italians can eat it, I tell myself, so can I.

Later, after walking into the centro area of the city, taking in the lovely views over the wide valleys below as I climb up the ancient streets, I find a place to stay. The room is in the second-floor apartment of an elderly couple at the top of a narrow staircase. As the pleasant matronly woman with a friendly smile is signing me in, I discover I’ve left my passport in Rome. I’m stunned. How many times was I told never to forget my passport when travelling? By my parents, by the school authorities in Rome, by the government officials who issued it in Chicago, by the Italian passport officials at the airport. Never, ever, forget your passport! I was left with the impression that a forgotten passport would lead to having to sleep on the street or in jail, perhaps getting mugged, maybe murdered. Never forget your passport!

“Scusi, signora, ma …” I try to explain in my halting Italian that my passport, my lifeline, my veritable identity itself does not exist on my person, but is back at the university in Rome.

Instead of immediately telephoning the police, she shrugs, waves a hand at the air, says, “Non problema,” and signs me in.

I go to my bedroom that is just down the hall from their sitting room where the old man relaxes in an easy chair, reading a newspaper while she putters about in the kitchen doing this and that. As I enter the bedroom, throw my knapsack down and test the bed, I’m starting to notice that my stomach is not happy. In fact, it feels as if it’s barking like a fish that wants out. And, in fact, it begins to feel as if a fish with rows upon rows of stiletto-like teeth is desperately trying to chew its way to freedom. Within minutes I am doubled over with intense cramps that threaten to tear me open. What to do? What to do? I’ve already been more of a problem for these good people than is justified for the mere handful of lire they receive for a night’s lodging. But I have no choice.

Out of the room I go, holding my stomach, and, once again, test my halting Italian on this motherly saint of infinite patience. She is all concern and knowing care. Immediately, she digs a package out of a cupboard, rips it open, pours the contents into a glass of water, and motions for me to drink. I gulp it down without hesitation. I’ll try anything to allay the pain twisting in my guts. Within moments, my stomach has settled and I am filled with gratitude for the easy compassion of this mother away from home.

If you are travelling alone, and you are young and innocent and lucky, I learn that the world will sometimes take care of you.

In mid-afternoon of the next day, after giving Perugia a cursory going-over, I head down the road for Assisi. A short ride brings me out into the countryside of low, rolling hills and wide, fertile fields with higher hills in the distance. I walk down the quiet road lined with trees, sticking my thumb out when the odd car or truck passes. Assisi is only twenty-five kilometres east of Perugia and, since the autumn day is warm and sunny, I don’t mind walking part of the distance, my knapsack light on my back.

In fact, it is a glorious day. A woman passes me with a large wooden wine barrel balanced on her head. I nod as we pass one another walking alongside the road. She doesn’t nod, for obvious reasons, but smiles instead. I stop and look about and suck the clear air deep into my lungs. I notice the light. There is something peculiar about the light here. I have never in my life seen the world lit with such clarity. The air sparkles. The sky, the trees, the nearby fields, and distant hills all glow with a luminosity and a radiance I have never experienced anywhere before. The sky is the deepest blue imaginable, on the verge of indigo. It is as if the light itself is lifting me, refreshing me, washing me clean, flowing through me. For a moment, I wonder if St. Francis was the result or the cause of this environment bathed in clear light. I walk on and catch a few short rides and eventually arrive at the little city famous for its good-hearted saint.

Assisi, sitting on the side of a broad, sweeping mountain, is nothing more than a tiny, ancient village. I climb into its serene narrow streets as if I’m walking back into the Middle Ages. The place is extraordinarily quiet. The summer pilgrims are gone. The place is empty. It feels as if nothing is happening here, as if nothing ever happened here, and that is just right, the way it’s supposed to be. Assisi feels almost austere in its serenity. A deep peace pervades it.

The cheapest place I can find to stay is in a convent at the heart of the city, nearby the Basilica di San Francesco. A short nun leads me up wide stairs and down an empty hall lined with doorways. She stops in front of one of the doors and lets me in, holding out the key while warning me that the front door is locked at 10:00 p.m. She turns and leaves.

I enter and consider the room. It’s a monk’s cell. I can tell we are on the convent’s top floor because the ceilings slope in at odd angles. The room whispers of simplicity: a narrow bed, an unadorned desk, and a small, square window that is caught in the angles of the ceiling. The window, no more than a foot square, is open and looks out on the wide distant valley to the west from a great height. I watch for a long time as the sun descends on the far side of the valley, a red dissolving gong, as if the sun’s setting is the faint noise of the world fading away. Silence penetrates the room. I have no desire to go anywhere or to do anything but sit and watch the light in its dying splendour. It is as if I too am slipping away. I think it wouldn’t be so bad to lead a life of quiet contemplation in such a place.

Breakfast quickly cures me of that notion. Early in the morning, I look straight down from my high window to see a courtyard where a dozen nuns and short-term residents are seated at a long, wooden table having breakfast. I dress and head down, not wanting to miss the breakfast that’s included in the cost of the room. I join the sitters and eaters, all chewing in silence. A nun serves me a bowl of cornmeal porridge with a teaspoon of milk on top. On the table is a basket of tough, tenacious peasant bread and a pitcher of water. That’s it. A simple breakfast, indeed. I eat, trying to savour the simplicity, the unelaborated flavours, the raw, basic nature of it all. It’s probably exactly what I need after my struggle with the fish.

I finish my meal, grab my knapsack and head out for a cappuccino. Later that day, after a quick exploration of Assisi’s sights and highlights, followed by a series of quick rides, I am back in Rome, at the school, preparing for the next day’s classes.

Greece

Thanksgiving break is coming. We have ten days to go somewhere. The most time off I have ever previously enjoyed for American Thanksgiving, in all my years in school, was four days, but the school is aware that students are here to travel and travel they will.

Lebanese Michael and I sit talking over lunch in the school cafeteria, which is located in the basement at the rear of the school villa. We dig into our pasta. Since we have arrived, we have eaten pasta twice a day, every day, and have grown to enjoy it because it tastes like no pasta we have ever had before. Light on the sauce, always cooked al dente, it proves the highlight of every meal. Whenever the Italian cooks, all middle-aged women built like bears, try to prepare something they think North Americans will like, such as hamburgers or steak, it’s a disaster. Burgers the size of fifty-cent coins and gristly bloodless steaks no bigger than the heel of a shoe are the inevitable result.

The other delight of every meal are the little panini buns which the students have taken to stealing by the dozen in order to use them in the daily panini battles that occur in the main stairwell that spirals up four storeys through the centre of the villa.

The Jesuit administrators, led by the head of the school, Father Felice, don’t quite know what to make of these insane North American students who seem to be more and more out of control every year, “but never like this year, never before.”

In an irony of grand proportions, the Italian word, felice, means happy. Father Felice is said to have fought in the underground against the Nazis during the war and looks the part — straight jaw, short, but tough-looking with killer eyes, he strides the halls in his black robes with grim purpose. He stands before the crowded cafeteria and raises his hand for silence. The conversations cease immediately. He is the only person whom the students in the school fear because he seems unpredictable and perhaps a bit mad. With the atmosphere of anger held precariously in check that he carries around with him, he is the only person who can control this tribe of spoiled malcontents and cracked idiots.

He pauses, his hand still in the air, measuring the silence of the room and says entirely without inflection, “There will be no more throwing of food in the school.”

And we all know the daily bun fights will cease.

Lebanese Michael and I return to our conversation. “Where should we go over Thanksgiving?” he wonders.

“I’d like to see Greece, but I don’t have much money.”

“Me neither. But that’s a great idea. Let’s do it. I hear Greece is really inexpensive. We’ll hitchhike there and live cheap.”

So it’s decided. We make our plans and head off a few mornings later.

First we have to get from Rome south to the town of Brindisi, which is on the east coast of Italy in the heel of the boot, overlooking the Strait of Otranto in the southern Adriatic. There we will catch a ferry to Piraeus, the port of Athens. On the appointed morning, we polish up our thumbs and head off to the Autostrada on the outskirts of Rome. We begin by trying to thumb a ride south. After about an hour, we are just starting to question the wisdom of this approach, when a brand-new red Porsche squeals to a stop in front of us. We hop in with our knapsacks — I’m squeezed into a back seat built for a toy poodle — and we take off. We soon discover that a student from the school who recognized us — a rich Italian kid named Victor, from Cleveland — has picked us up. We know he’s rich because his daddy has just bought him this brand new sports car, and we know he’s Italian because he keeps telling us. But he’s different than the Italians we have met in Italy. It doesn’t take us long to realize he’s a capital-A Asshole — self-obsessed, arrogant, stupid. He thinks the Italians of Italy are fools and idiots.

“Why do you think they’re idiots?” I ask in my innocence, ready to defend a people I have come to love in a few short months.

“Because they’re poor. They wouldn’t be poor if they weren’t idiots.”

Michael and I scratch our heads. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does.” He adds no further explanation, but goes into a long diatribe about everything that is wrong with Italy, Italians, Europe, the food, the beer, the politics, the postal service, taking every opportunity to praise every detail of the American way of life.

Because Victor has a heavy foot to match his fat head, we cover the nearly six hundred kilometres to Brindisi in record time, ripping past groves of ancient olive trees and quiet villages in a blur. It is clear he wants company on the long trip south so we oblige, but really what he wants is a captive audience he can bitch to. The price of admission for the hitchhiker. It’s a quick trip in his Porsche, but feels like a long trip, nonetheless.

We pull into Brindisi, buy our tickets for the ferry, and board. Because it will save us money, we have decided to get off with Victor at the small town of Igoumenitsa, on the north coast of Greece, across from the island of Corfu, and drive with him down through the mountainous countryside to Delphi and thence to Athens.

Once we leave the ferry at Igoumenitsa, the road south turns out to be a rougher ride than expected. About a hundred miles of the route is unpaved dirt and much of the mountain driving is Stairway-to-Heaven switchbacks, which Victor attacks like a dog on the hunt, driving his new Porsche as if he’s way behind at the Indy 500. Somehow I always get the back seat, which leads to what feels like permanent curvature of the spine. And Victor thinks the Greeks are even stupider than the Italians. Each time we pass country people walking along the road to their fields or tending their sheep, they wave to us with all the lovely innocence of rural people the world over.

“Don’t wave at those fools!” Victor barks at us when we obligingly wave back.

After spending a night in a sleepy hotel in a nameless Greek village, we continue the now-painful drive the next morning. Michael and I are happy to arrive alive in Delphi. We thank Victor for the ride but tell him we’re going to continue our trip to Athens by bus. Victor roars off in a huff and, although we see him at the school over the next several months, he never speaks to us again.

Glad to be rid of him, Michael and I explore the expansive ruins of Delphi. The location of Delphi, at latitude 38o28’, is one of the great sites of the world. As I peer out from the hillside to which the ancient ruins cling, on the slope of Mount Parnassus, I note that the view takes in two long wide valleys that meet in a T. This meeting point is where Delphi was built. If you look down the single leg of the T, the Gulf of Corinth is visible on a clear day, shining tens of kilometres away in the distance at the end of the valley.

Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, god of prophecy and patron of philosophy and the arts, is where the Delphic Oracle made her ambiguous pronouncements and prophecies at the behest of visitors from throughout the ancient world. It is said that even Homer himself once visited. Delphi was considered the omphalos, or navel, of the world, the centre of the Earth, and the stone that represents the navel was said to be the first thing that emerged from the waters after the great flood of ancient times.