Anna von Wessen (42 page)

“For goodness’ sake, then!” said Anna lightly, in an effort to dispel the pain engendered by Vaya’s sudden gravity. “Have you a coin about you?”

“I changed a bill some time ago,” answered Vaya, “just for the purpose. There is a great wad of Ephram’s money, you know, here in the lining of my cloak. We shall use some of it, at least, for our room tonight. The very largest, very nicest room we can find!”

She reached into her pocket, passed a two-euro piece to Anna, and then pulled another out for herself. “Two,” she said, “for better luck.”

They stood quiet for a moment before the fountain; and the passers-by to either side seemed, all of a sudden, to fade entirely away. They pressed their shoulders together, closed their eyes, and flung the coins. Even after they had done so, they were motionless for some long number of minutes. When finally they were stirring, their previous cheer was tinged slightly with melancholy; and they looked about them, almost in a sort of daze.

But Vaya’s attention was arrested suddenly, by the clicking noise of a camera-shutter on her left-hand. She looked to it with a start, and gazed questioningly at the camera in its owner’s hand. Then she leant towards Anna, and whispered, “What is that?”

“What is what?” asked Anna.

“That,” said Vaya, pointing.

“Oh! That’s a camera.

“Camera? A
camera obscura,
you mean?”

“Well – no. They’ve rather improved over the years. People point them at things, press the button – and they make portraits.”

“Permanent ones?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“With no tracing?”

“Very right. In fact –”

Anna left an astonished-looking Vaya, went to the gentleman who held the camera, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir,” she said.

The man turned round, and looked into her face. Straightaway his eyes went wide, his mouth fell open slightly, and he nearly dropped the camera into the fountain.

“You speak English?” she asked doubtfully.

“Oh, yes!” he exclaimed. “Yes – I’m American.”

Still his eyes were fixed like rivets upon her. But when they began to fall a little from her face, as though wondering whether there were anything else very interesting he might see (and his thoughts, to be sure, portrayed no intentions much more honourable), she chucked him lightly under the chin. “Fortunately for you I’m in a good humour,” she said. “But I was wondering – is that a very expensive camera you have there?”

The man’s wife was standing by, and looking very disdainfully at Anna. She glanced from her to her husband; noted with ill-disguised contempt that there was a bead of saliva beginning to drip down from the corner of his mouth; and shoved him roughly in the shoulder.

“Oh, no,” he said suddenly, spurred on by the blow, and realising that he had not yet answered the question Anna put to him. “Not expensive. It’s instant – it’s a Kodak.”

“Well, whatever that means – would you allow me to pay you for it?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, with his eyes wandering ever so slyly towards his disgruntled wife. “We’ve quite a few good shots on it by now –”

“You can’t have it!” his wife said shrilly. “Go away, now!”

“Well, not this one,” said the man with a sheepish frown, as he reached into a little bag which was strapped over his chest. “But I think I have another – ah, here it is!” He handed it to Anna, still encased in its bright yellow plastic wrapper.

“What do you want for it?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing!” he answered. “You can have it.”

“Yes, take it!” said his wife. “Take it and go!”

She took hold of her husband by both arms, and steered him away like a wheelbarrow. But he craned his neck back over his shoulder, gazing raptly at Anna’s shrinking form, till finally his wife pushed him round a corner, and he knocked his head against a low metal scaffold.

Vaya was laughing wildly. She moved from the place where she had been standing aside, and came to kiss Anna’s cheek.

“Now,” she said, “what are you going to do with
that?
”

“We’re going to take a picture,” Anna replied, as she succeeded finally in ripping the wrapping from the camera. “I can knock a wall free from its anchors, with no trouble at all – but this blasted plastic!”

She looked quickly around, and spotted a little old woman standing several yards away, gazing up at the fountain with a complacent smile.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” said Anna.

She needed repeat this greeting several times, before the old woman finally turned to her. But when she did, it was with nothing of a diminished expression of cheer. “Yes, dear?” she said.

“I apologise for bothering you, ma’am, but I wonder – do you know how to use this?”

“That camera, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Of course I do! Would you like me to take your picture?”

“Yes, that would be very kind of you.”

She passed the camera to the old woman, and then went to stand with Vaya. The woman held the camera for a moment before her smiling face, and pressed the shutter.

“There we are!” she said gaily, as she shuffled to return the camera to Anna. “I think that was a very nice one, too! You’re both very beautiful girls, you know.”

And with that, she shuffled away.

~

Anna and Vaya turned South, then, and began roaming round in that general direction. Anna knew, all the time they walked, that Vaya was thinking of the house of Clarisa Bartoli. She waited to see whether Vaya would say that she wanted to go to it; but she never did.

After a time, they passed along the way where the Colosseum lies. They stood for a little outside the great amphitheatre, if only to marvel at its magnitude – for they had no
genuine admiration for it, and no real desire to go inside of a place so intrinsically linked to bloodshed and death, for reasons fairly obvious (and, indeed, already alluded to).

After this brief pause, however, they found that they were not yet weary enough to go to their rest. So they wandered farther and farther along, rather Westward this time, till they came again to the River Tiber, which they had crossed first on their way from the Vatican City. At the place where they stopped, they saw the Isola Tiberina floating there in the midst of the river, with a great bridge passing from it, to their own side of the way.

“This,” said Vaya, “is the Ponte dei Quattro Capi.”

“The what?”

“The bridge of the four heads. You see that, over there? Go nearer – you’ll see.”

They mounted the bridge – which was relatively free, at that moment, of traffic – and went to stand at its side, so that they might look down into the river. There, too, Anna saw more clearly the Quattro Capi, or the four heads. Relatively small in contrast with the largeness of the bridge, they stood upon the parapet: two marble pillars of dual-faced Janus, “god,” he is called, “of beginnings and transitions, endings and time.” 

“This bridge, you know,” said Vaya, “is the only one in the city still standing since ancient times. Some BC year, I think, which was fairly just before the AD.”

“How very strange to think of it,” Anna murmured. She leant a little farther over the parapet, and tried to imagine all the feet which had trod the bridge, since it was first put up. It nearly made her head spin, to be sure.

Darkness had settled down some time ago, but was taking hold now in all its inky density, to obscure and soften the harshness of the world’s edges, and leave only the essence of its beauty. The lights from the buildings on the banks, as the blackness increased, seemed to grow larger, and slowly crept across the ground to shine out upon the water, looking like a vast multitude of fireflies whirring over its surface. Aboveground the sights were nothing paltry, either; for the sky was spotted, at that very moment, with innumerable dancing stars. Anna’s gaze went slowly from the river, upwards to the sky. But then her eyes began to fall again; and the first thing they viewed was Vaya’s face, which was turned already towards her. And that, she thought, was the very most beautiful of all.

“To end one’s summer in Italy,” said Vaya, “is no doubt one of the very most favourable things one could hope to do. And it’s so much warmer here! The air is sticky, almost. But it’s very nice.”

“Indeed,” rejoined Anna. “But to think – the end of summer! It’s come so quickly. Now that you’ve made me think of it, though, there’s one thing we must do.”

“And what is that?”

“Come.”

Anna took her hand, and led her quickly down from the bridge. They began to walk along the bank.

“And where could someone who has absolutely no idea where she is going,” asked Vaya, “possibly be leading me?”

“Well,” said Anna, “I know where the river is. You see? It’s just there!”

Vaya watched her with a questioning half-smile.

“And since the river is what I want,” Anna went on, “I am quite as informed as I could hope to be.”

They continued on for some little distance, until the people about them began quite suddenly to disappear, and the darkness seemed to grow even thicker, as there appeared a number of small trees overhead to aid its work. There opened up a peaceful little field, which was filled with all manner of fragrant flowers, and high grass that swayed gently in the breeze. The road began, at this point, to wend crookedly away from the river. So they stepped off of it, and into the grass.

“How funny!” said Anna. “It’s as though this place came just on purpose.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

But Anna only laughed, and led her on. They walked through the empty field, down to the river, whose opposite bank was filled likewise with trees and quiet. There was not a soul to be seen.

“As I was going to say before,” Anna spoke into the silence, “it would be a pity to spend such a warm and lovely evening, without having a swim.”

“A swim!”

“And while the water doesn’t look exceptionally clean – it seemed a little brown and mucky by day – surely the likes of ourselves can survive it, and will come out none the worse for it! So I’ll leave you here to decide for yourself. I’m going in.”

She shed her clothes in an instant, and walked into the river, till she stood chest-deep in its cool thickness. By the time she looked back to the bank, however, it appeared that Vaya had already made up her mind; and Anna had just enough time to raise her arms in the air, to catch her as she leapt from her place in the muddy grass.

Vaya gave a shriek of laughter, and threw her arms about Anna’s neck. Anna held her a little out of the water, so as to be able to look up into her face. But Vaya slid down of her own accord, just enough to kiss Anna’s lips, and hold her head for a moment to her chest.

They paddled round in the water for a while, laughing and splashing. If anyone spotted them from the banks, they drew no attention to the matter.

~

When finally they were tired, they drew their clothes back over their wet skins, and (forsaking their earlier plan of locomotion, and feeling that it must be very unfortunate to be human indeed, when one was weary, and one’s place of rest lay at no little distance away) shifted from beneath the dark shadows of a nearby tree, to a little alley behind the hotel where they had already decided to stay. Their damp shirts and mussed hair obtained them a none too friendly glance from the boy behind the desk; and though he took the money from Vaya’s pocket with no qualms whatever, he did not afterwards deign it necessary to speak another word to them.

“Rude of him, to be sure,” Vaya muttered, as they went away from the desk. “But, seeing as I already know how to read . . .”

She looked down at the room key, and said, “Ah! It’s to the twelfth floor with us, love.”

When they had gained that particular storey, and had succeeded in prying open the sticking lock of the door to their room, Anna took Vaya much by surprise, when she caught her up suddenly in her arms, and carried her over the threshold. She kicked the door shut behind her, and bore Vaya to the bed, which was lit up bright with the silver stream that poured through the wide double-windows. They scurried under the covers, and looked for a moment through the windows, to find themselves quite a-ways above the ground, and a checkerboard of life, stone and moonlight arraying the world beneath them. Away from the busy city, their thoughts began to loosen in the confines of their skulls, and to float out between them, forming a thick and buzzing galaxy in the air over their heads.

Vaya had her cheek laid against Anna’s chest, and was listening with a faint smile to its steady beat.

“I love your heart,” she said. “I love it so.”

“Then take it, do. I hate how it pounds.”

“Do you?”

Vaya raised her head a little, and pressed her hand to the spot.

“What is it?” Anna asked.

“I only wonder.”

A long pause ensued, till finally she added, “Why do
I
have a heart? It can only serve to kill me.”

“I don’t believe that.”