The Lover From an Icy Sea (29 page)

Chapter 38

Kit awoke several hours later after a long sleep and crawled carefully out of bed so as not to wake Daneka, who seemed almost to be in a coma. He surveyed the chaos in the room and chuckled, then slipped on a pair of jeans and walked to the French doors and out to the terrace overlooking the piazza below.

It was early evening, and nothing in all of Kit’s experience had prepared him for the sight of an early-evening Italian sky in late spring. He was a photographer who knew how to create magic with light, shadow, shade and all of the nuances in between. And yet, he was at a loss to name—much less describe—what met his eyes.

The sun had apparently already dipped below the western horizon. In its place, the promise of another far more subtle visual delight now climbed up from the same favonian source behind the thirteenth-, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century residential buildings surrounding the piazza. As it passed through filters of dust particles close to the earth’s surface and then feathered out onto billowy cumulous cushions, this refracted light played with a palette of pinks, oranges and reds unlike any Kit had ever seen replicated in a color spectrum.

At the same time, gangs of swallows chased flying insects, when not each other, in funnels up and down and across the piazza—a pointillist’s portrayal of whirlwinds, occurring and then dissipating just as suddenly and as randomly as they might in the desert or at sea.

At ground-level, he noted activity quite different from what he’d seen earlier that day. Preparations were underway for some form of entertainment or spectacle. If Paris could have its summertime son et lumière on the Champs Elysée, and Athens its equivalent at the Acropolis, then Rome, Kit suspected, could certainly accomplish something more on the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori than mere window dressing for the next day’s bit of business. What luck—he thought to himself—that we weren’t able to drive directly on to Positano, but instead decided to spend the night here!

Elaborate scaffolding stood at center stage just behind the statue of Giordano Bruno. To what purpose, Kit still didn’t know—and nothing about the scaffolding itself gave him any real indication. It was obviously robust enough to handle something reasonably heavy, but not large enough to accommodate too many of whatever—or whoever—was going to sit or stand upon it.

As he looked to his far right, he saw a flatbed truck arriving through one of the side streets leading into the piazza. On it—and surrounding some large, black, solid object that Kit couldn’t yet identify—were about a half-dozen young men. As the truck came into clearer focus, he realized the object was a piano—a grand, no less. So that was it: a concert of some kind; and if a grand piano, then probably something classical. But looking at the throngs of younger people starting to enter the piazza, he somehow doubted it. This might well be the country that had given birth to grand opera, but young people were young people the world over. He didn’t suppose that hundreds of young people—though beginning to look more like potential thousands—would come to the center of town on a weekday night to listen to a classical recital.

No, he decided. It had to be something else. But what?

Kit dressed quickly but quietly. Daneka was still fast asleep and—he noticed for the first time—snoring. How delightful! A snoring Danish mermaid.

He opened and closed the door quietly, walked the couple of flights down to the lobby, then decided to check with reception to see whether someone might know what it was all about. He approached the desk clerk, who looked up with a cordial smile.

“
Buona sera, Signore
,” Kit said.

“
Buona sera!
” the clerk answered with what Kit thought was slightly more enthusiasm than a mere exchange of greetings should warrant.

“
Mi dica, Signore. Sa che cosa sucede nella piazza stasera?
”

“
Ma si, Signore. C’è una dimostrazione contro l’invasione
.”

“
Contro l’invasione?
” Kit asked. “
Contro che invasione?
”

“
Ma contro l’invasione dell’Iraq. Me ne dispiace
.”

Kit couldn’t believe his luck. “
Grazie, Signore. Mille grazie!
”

“
Prego.
”

The one night in his entire life he’s in Rome—an extraordinary bit of serendipity to begin with—and he’s going to witness an antiwar demonstration?

If only I’d brought my camera
, he thought wistfully. But no. This evening, his eyes would be his camera. This evening, he’d make himself look and record with his mind and not with film; he’d force himself to remember—then later, when he next saw his parents, to relate—every detail of the drama he was about to witness. This evening, he’d participate for a change, and not merely chronicle.

He walked out the front door of the hotel, turned and crossed the thirty feet of cobblestone between the hotel entrance and the piazza. He was already being jostled by far more pedestrians than he’d seen in the same place earlier that day, though commerce was not the reason for this human tumult. Their reason was a cause, and the cause was one to which Kit subscribed. What they might do if they discovered he carried the passport and spoke the language of the “enemy” was something he couldn’t know. He hoped, if his identity were somehow discovered, they’d be generous enough to overlook his passport and his age and accept his show of solidarity—to accept him, simply, as one of their own.

At the same time, he hoped there’d be no flag-burnings or anti-American sloganeering. Kit deplored patriotic displays no matter what the cause. A part of him actually hated the Fourth of July—its excess—and the refuge it afforded every scoundrel to wax bombastic about something for which most had never spent a single drop of sweat, never mind blood. Likewise, he found the mob chorus of “USA! USA!” at international athletic competitions so repugnant, he could no longer even tune in to watch the events on television.

For the same reason, however, he hated to see flag-burnings—whether of his own stars and stripes or of any other country’s colors. Flags, he knew, were merely a symbol. But they symbolized as much the poetry and pain, hard work and high hopes of simple people as they did the military or economic might of a nation—or lack of it. He knew it was the simple people—above all the poor people—who were history’s waifs. That it was they who’d died defending not a mere flag or a way of life about which they could only dream, but rather defending the hope that some little portion of that dream could one day be theirs; or if not theirs, then their children’s—or their children’s children’s.

In flag-burnings and sloganeering, Kit knew, the mob ignored those people and their dreams. And so, they were twice cursed: once to serve—to become wounded or crippled for life, possibly to die—for a cause and a way of life they could at best hope to enjoy the crumbs of; and a second time in being included in the general condemnation—and so, rendered mute, voiceless and every bit as villainous in their graves or in their wheelchairs as those who waged war in their names and who sent them into battle by the truckload.

Now, just a couple of dozen feet away from what was obviously a stage of some kind, Kit looked at the flatbed and thought there were much more worthwhile things one could do with a truck than haul soldiers into battle.

The half-dozen or so young men aboard the flatbed wasted no energy on banter as they prepared to lift the grand piano to the stage. Kit heard “uno, due, tre” as they all simultaneously reached under and lifted up, moving the instrument carefully to its recently erected platform. Let the world say what it might about Italian engineering know-how and can-do attitude towards hard work—or lack of, as the case might rather be. In this instance, both were proving to be quite up to the task.

The piano in place, the ad hoc crew of young roustabouts turned its attention to power. Within minutes, they’d jury-rigged an electrical system for microphone and lights that put the stage in sharp relief against the piazza that surrounded it, practically invisible in its obscurity as night had indeed descended like a heavy, black curtain over Rome, over the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, and over the demonstrators. Incredible as it seemed to someone who lived in a city where the lights never really went out, and who had consequently never seen the stars from street-level or even from his rooftop, Kit looked up and saw an entire panorama of them twinkling like little beacons. At the same time, he surveyed the circumference of the piazza and remarked, in amazement, that every window had gone dark; that in each stood a candle; that from behind each, in pale reflection of the meager power each candle projected, a face—sometimes two or three or four—looked out in eager anticipation of the spectacle that was about to take place.

This, then, was the romance and the light he’d seen so often in his parents’ eyes whenever they’d spoken of their Roman moment. And here he was, a generation and thirty-plus years later, about to drink from the same fabled fountain.

Kit felt gooseflesh rise up on his arms. At the same time, he realized—whatever the consequences—that he was stuck. The piazza was packed. How they’d all gotten in so quickly was a mystery to him, but he couldn’t deny the evidence of it: he was locked in by warm bodies. As he looked from one face to another in the crowd, the names Rafaela, Julietta and Beatrice occurred to him again for the first time since his arrival at the airport. He’d never seen so many gorgeous women—or men for that matter—in one place at one time.

A bearded, bespectacled—and somewhat less than gorgeous—someone or other ascended the platform and stood in front of the microphone. “Testing, uno, due, tre,” he said, and apparently found the volume and clarity entirely satisfactory. Then, for the obvious benefit of some of the old-timers in the crowd, he bellowed: “Fate attenzione! La CIA ci spia!”

A roar went up in response. It may have been an old sixties chant, but it had clearly lost none of its power to electrify a crowd. The CIA was always spying on someone or other, though in more recent times, rather less effectively. Given the effusiveness of the roar—and Kit detected a great deal of laughter in the mix—maybe even the Italians understood that.

The speaker droned on for a bit about Irak, about Afghanistan, about Yankee imperialism, about Western imperialism—the usual stuff of antiwar demonstrations. He introduced a few other bearded somebodies or other who read from the poems of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alfonso Gatto, and Cesare Pavese; one or two articles from Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison; translations from Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke; and finally, but from the lips of a woman Kit thought resembled a jean-clad Greek or Roman goddess more than any mortal he’d ever seen, a couple of the antiwar poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti followed by a rendering, in Italian, of three or four of the love poems of Pablo Neruda. Leave it to the Italians, he thought, to kick off an antiwar demonstration with paeans to love!

Just as she concluded to rather too-generous applause—at least as much for the visual privilege of her reading as for the aural honor of Ungaretti’s and Neruda’s writing, Kit was certain—the first bearded, bespectacled somebody returned to the microphone. Now, he informed the crowd, the music would begin, and he had the privilege of introducing two relatively unknown, but—at least in his opinion—highly regarded artists. Both carried passports and spoke the language of the “enemy.” The crowd booed and hissed. But both, he reminded that same crowd, spoke for their own countries’ opposition to the invasion. The fickle Roman mob cheered. What’s more, he insisted, each did it in his own way with music and poetry that was on a par with the best antiwar lyrics ever written. The skeptical crowd remained silent.

The first man to be introduced was as much a mystery to Kit as—he assumed—to most if not all of those present: an Australian by the name of Eric Bogle—a squat man with a pot belly who wore a funny old hat. He was accompanied by an entourage of musicians bearing various kinds of guitars, a cello, a flute, a recorder, a fiddle, a mandolin, an autoharp and a dulcimer. One of them also wore a harmonica around his neck—Dylan-style. Bogle himself carried a banjo and a guitar. He laid the banjo down and stepped up to the microphone to introduce his band.

“
Buona sera, compagni e compagne!
” he started off, his Aussie accent coming through loud and clear in a bumbled attempt at Italian which the crowd quickly warmed up to.

He gave a nod to his band, then started in on a song that Kit recognized immediately:
No Man’s Land
. The crowd was amazingly respectful, Kit thought, as many around him quietly provided ad hoc translations for the benefit of those who didn’t understand enough English to get the gist of the song.

Bogle concluded his first number to enthusiastic applause. He put down his guitar, picked up his banjo, and announced his second number in English:
And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
. Kit had never heard of it; but by the second stanza, he was mesmerized by the simple lyrics. Once again, many around him served as translators to others. As Bogle approached the conclusion of the song and started in on the more familiar refrain of the original Waltzing Matilda, Kit was amazed to hear the crowd sing along with him. A chorus of thousands of peaceful voices could be a moving thing, especially when those voices were singing in a language that was not their own. However much he might have deplored America’s part in making English the de facto lingua franca in the commercial world, this was one instance in which he felt something approaching pride.