The Lover From an Icy Sea (30 page)

Bogle and his band finished up with a word of thanks. The demonstrators, in return, thanked him with thunderous applause.

The next performer was a tall, wiry American, a man by the name of John McCutcheon. Kit wondered whether the crowd would react with hostility; it did not. Either they’d taken their host’s earlier words to heart, or McCutcheon had a reputation here, locally, that would seem to have largely escaped him at home. He also greeted the audience with a cheerful “
Buona sera
” and then introduced his band on fiddle, viola, cello, guitar, mandolin, mandocello, and half a dozen other instruments.

As McCutcheon picked up his guitar and started in, Kit recognized the song instantly as one he’d grown up with:
Christmas in the Trenches
. The melody was hauntingly simple; the accompaniment spare and perfectly attuned to the stripped-down poignancy of the lyrics. As for the song itself, McCutcheon had the perfect voice: deep, unaffected; as clear as well water. Kit felt a tight spot in his chest as he listened. He looked around and saw tears on the cheeks of many of those in his vicinity who were listening with one ear to the singer, the other to a translator. It was a long song, yet no one seemed to tire of it. When McCutcheon concluded as simply as he’d begun, there was a moment of near-perfect silence, followed by the same thunderous applause that had greeted Bogle at the conclusion of his performance.

Kit wondered again at his luck: two talented musicians who clearly didn’t just happen to be passing through at the same time looking to busk on the sidewalks of Rome. He wondered, too, who could possibly follow them. The demonstration was not yet at an end; that much was clear to him. But how would it end?

Kit sensed a bit of a stirring off to the left and behind where he stood. Someone was coming through, and the crowd’s enthusiasm for this new arrival was not only audible, but palpable. When he was finally close enough for Kit to see a face, Kit didn’t recognize the man—middle-aged, salt and pepper beard and hair, wearing dark-framed glasses, dressed in faded jeans and a loose-fitting shirt. Kit didn’t, however, have long to wait.

A chorus of “
Antonello! Antonello!
” rose from thousands of voices. Kit was beginning to think he was in a dream. Could it possibly be—? The man ascended the stage and spoke a few words into the microphone. What he said had the immediate result of quieting the crowd to near silence. He then turned and said a few private words to the emcee and seated himself at the piano. Opposite him sat a second musician at a synthesizer. The two of them waited a few moments while Bogle, McCutcheon and both of their bands came back to the stage. This, then, was apparently the substance of whatever he’d just said to the emcee.

The still unidentified artist and his accompanist nodded to each other and smiled in that way musicians have of communicating—especially when they’re about to be transported by melody and rhythm. Then the man—this Antonello—lifted his hands to the piano and played a few notes. His partner answered after a few bars in what sounded to Kit like a synthesized hammer dulcimer, or perhaps a mandolin—he couldn’t be sure which.

Eventually, the man began to sing.

“
Campo de' fiori io non corro più, gli amici di ieri ,…
”

And then Kit was sure. It was. It was Antonello Venditti! And he was singing the song that took its title from this very piazza; the song that had been a rallying cry through the sixties and seventies for all kinds of protests; the song that had been the musical equivalent of baby’s milk to Kit in his infancy; the song that—no matter how bad their mood, how deep some passing disagreement—had always brought his parents into each other’s arms; the song that then stood for them as a reminder of better times, of bigger times and bigger issues than their temporary disagreement; the song that had, at some subconscious level, brought Kit to request a room in a hotel overlooking this piazza so that he could share all of it, in some way, with Daneka.

il tempo ha già sconfitto le ombre di un'età.

E gli amori, gli amori, sono proprio veri

e non ho più paura della li-ber-tà.

The tight spot he’d felt in his chest earlier as McCutcheon had sung his song now became a hard knot of emotion. The plaintive melody and lyrics recalling lost, carefree youth and an increasingly uncertain future threatened to overwhelm him as he suddenly felt, for the first time, what it meant to grow older and lose that gift of carefree youth.

As he first remarked how the other musicians, one by one, seemed to be picking up on the melody; as he further remarked that voices around him were starting to sing along with Venditti until the entire piazza was one mass of thirty, forty, fifty thousand singing voices; and finally, when he felt arms to either side of him slipping through his and pulling him back and forth in a human wave to the music; the music and emotion no longer threatened to overwhelm him: it did overwhelm him. As he felt warm tears running unabashedly down his cheeks, he looked at his nearest partners in this wave of human bodies and saw through smiles back to him and mouths rapturously moving to the song’s lyrics that their cheeks, too, were covered in rivers of tears run wild.

One of them—a beautiful, young girl who’d slipped her arm through his, and who apparently realized that Kit was not Italian, graciously—if unnecessarily and somewhat clumsily—began to translate for him:

“
Campo de’ Fiori: I no longer run among the friends of yesterday.

Time has already conquered the shadows of an age.

Love is now for real, and I’m no longer afraid of freedom.”

There are episodes in life that you take to the grave—episodes that remind you, in your death rattle, of why it was all worth it, of what it meant to be really alive, if only for those few moments. And of why every living thing, from a thousand-year-old Redwood to the ten thousand-year-old lichen that lives upon it, will fight to the death to maintain that life, sometimes against seemingly impossible odds. For Kit, this was one such episode.

Ma i tuoi bambini crescono bene,

rubano sempre ma non tradiscono mai.

Oh mai, oh mai.

Campo de' fiori io non corro più,

sulle strade di ieri

il tempo ha già sconfitto i soldi di papà,

ma le partite stavolta sono proprio vere

e adesso ho un po' paura per la libertà.

The young girl next to him continued to translate:

“
My, but your children grow well.

They may steal, but they never betray.

Never!

Campo de’ Fiori: I no longer run along the roads of yesterday.

Time has already exhausted all of Papa’s money;

and so the games this time are for real,

and now I’m a bit anxious about liberty.”

Only one thing lacked, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t thought about her in an hour. The thing keeping this moment from being a perfect souvenir was that Daneka was not present to share it with him.

I tuoi bambini io li vedo crescono bene,

rubano sempre ma non tradiscono mai.

Oh mai, oh mai.

Adesso ho un po' paura per la li-ber-tà.

“
I see your children growing up well.

They may steal, but they never betray.

Never!

And now, I am a bit anxious about liberty.”

He wondered if she still slept, and looked up again at the buildings surrounding the piazza. As before, he noticed that all of the windows were dark except for the dim flicker of candles burning in each. He then looked to where he imagined their hotel room to be. Light shown through a single pair of French doors—faintly, behind gauze-like curtains. In dark silhouette behind those same curtains, and in sharp relief against the light behind her, stood a woman. Although the silhouette revealed to him nothing of the face, Kit could make out immediately from her curves, from her height, from the way her hair fell to her shoulders, to whom that silhouette belonged.

She stood, unmoved and unmoving, not part of any wave. Not part of any wave at all, except her own.

Chapter 39

The demonstration concluded without incident. Kit exchanged quick kisses to the cheek with each of his two immediate neighbors. The one who’d just provided him with a translation of Venditti’s song let her lips linger a bit longer than mere European cordiality might have dictated, and Kit was acutely aware of it. He was equally aware of her breasts, now pressing against his chest in a way that suggested to him in the afterglow of the demonstration why Rome was called
la città eterna
. With her lingering lips and breasts that seemed to want to ponder where they could best press, she, too, apparently meant to remain eternal—at least in one man’s mind.

Her lips strayed from one cheek as he rotated his face to give her the other. Halfway through that rotation, however, they stopped and found his lips—and lingered longer.

She was gorgeous. Kit felt himself caught in a hiatus of no happy exit. The woman he loved was not more than two-hundred yards away—nothing in real distance, although he wondered how really far removed they were, one from the other. This other woman, this beautiful stranger, had her lips on his. Roman lips—like rose petals. Lips of almost unfathomable fullness. Lips that seemed to dissolve, then resolve, blending into his until he felt that his own were merely an obstruction.

He loved Daneka’s mouth. He loved what she could do with it and the words that came out of it; the expressiveness of it; occasionally, the wantonness of it. But hers were Scandinavian lips that could be smart, terse, indicative, directive, imperative.

These were Roman lips. These lips dwelt in the conditional tense and in the subjunctive mood: What if—? If only—. If one might—. If we could—. The conditional and subjunctive, Kit knew, were a danger zone. He took stock of the situation: he was susceptible at this moment and he knew it. Rome would not have him, not tonight. He broke the kiss.

“
Come ti chiami?
” he asked. She let go of his lips, but not of him. Instead, she leaned her lower body harder into his.

Her mouth slipped back from Kit’s and found his ear. “
Mi chiamano Afrodite
,” she breathed.

Kit wondered whether he was hallucinating and whether the whole last hour—and now this woman—were merely a dream. This Roman goddess of love could, he knew, easily tempt him into an Elysium of her own making. But he was already in love—and with another woman.

“
Dunque, Afrodite, La ringrazio per tutto
,” Kit said and gently disengaged himself.

Her hamster’s pout and withdrawing breasts felt to him, at that moment, like the contents of a canteen poured into the sand before the eyes of a man crawling out of the desert. But Kit had willed it. Just before he let her go, he kissed her softly on the forehead and hoped the gesture would help to remove any shame she might have felt at his rejection.

He made his way back through the dispersing crowd to the hotel, took the elevator up to the fourth floor, unlocked the door and entered. Daneka stood waiting for him with her back to the piazza.

“
Perhaps now, darling, we can get a little something to eat?” Her mood was neither peevish nor petulant. Apparently, she was just hungry—and now well-rested. Kit was enormously relieved. He was also eager to tell her what he’d just witnessed, to share with her in words what he’d wanted to share with her in person.

“
Where shall we go, darling?” He, too, could use the “D-word” once in a while without offending his own ear in its employment. It didn’t offend because he meant every endearing letter of it. She was, to him, a darling—and becoming more so by the hour.

“
Let’s walk a bit, shall we? Perhaps we’ll find something over by the river. I want to cross the Tiber at least once in my life and pronounce ‘
Alea iacta est!
’ She said it comic-grandly, and Kit thought he might just fall in love all over again with this daughter of Vikings now quoting Rome’s most famous general. He dropped to a knee in mock-homage and took one of her sandaled feet in both hands.

“
Allow me to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

“
Fiat!
” she pronounced, at which point Kit bent to her foot and kissed it—once, twice, three times. Her Latin then began to work its ancient wonders. He pushed her gently back onto the bed with no resistance. Instead, she looked up at him inquisitively and with just a bit of a smile on her lips. Kit removed her sandal and replaced it with his mouth. He slid his tongue between two toes, sucked on one and then the other, giving each a long moment and equal attention. Only once he’d sucked on all five did he allow his tongue to move slowly up her ankle.