Roman Holiday 2
Outskirts
The Gypsy
The buttonless gypsy was offering to put Sandra up for the night. That Sandra already had a room on Via dei Pettinari didn't seem to make any difference. Zigana said that she really ought to see more of Rome, and that while it would be easy for her to find a better room, she'd be hard-pressed to find a better bed. Sandra thought again about her room on Pettinari. Outside her window drunk students shouted and sang all night, on some early morning pilgrimage between the bars of Trastevere and Piazza Navona. Till four in the morning. She could definitely use a break from that.
Zigana said in English that she lived on the outskirts, which Sandra took both literally and metaphorically. She was, after all, a student of Post-Modern Semiotics, or PMS. She inhabited a realm of hyphens, margins, and indecipherables. She'd just written a term paper entitled, Untranslating the Translation.
Sandra wondered if she should chance doubling the metaphor of the outskirts. What would it be like to live inside a skirt like that? It billowed in and out like her blouse which floated over smooth mountains scented with vineyards and myrrh. There was something vaguely Semitic about this gypsy, reminding Sandra of The Song of Songs. Something about running away together, olive oil and vineyards, borders of gold with studs of silver, and lying all night between her breasts. In any case, something reminded her of grapes.
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Mei-lin
Last Fall she'd signed up with Mei-lin for the vendange, on a vineyard a dozen kilometres west of Lausanne. They shared a small room with two Sicilians, several hundred meters above a shimmering Lake Geneva. The room was cold and had only one bed, hardly large enough to be called a double bed. Sandra and Mei-lin could see their breath, and shook in an exaggerated way in their strangely-matched flannel pyjamas. Mei-lin suggested that they should sleep back-to-back to keep each other warm.
Somewhere in the middle of the sleepless night — after the back of a leg strayed across the back of a leg, and then pulled back reluctantly; after an arm fell backwards onto a hip, and then slid off, slowly; after one girl would sigh in a way that said, I can't sleep, can you? and the other girl would sigh back, No — Mei-lin rolled into Sandra, and kissed her on the neck.
At first, Mei-lin seemed like a man in her arms. But then her smell was different. It was hardly there, and what was there was light, like a thin layer of the most expensive hand cream. Her skin was so soft it seemed to melt into her own. And then she moved her lips across Mei-lin's neck. From that exact moment — 3:28 AM October 1, 2012 — Sandra forgot about men. This softness, this fine curve of a neck, this closeness to the warmth of her doubled pulse, was what she wanted.
It was like an electric current which had always flowed against her blood and was now flowing in the same direction, in and out of the pounding chamber of her heart.
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Zigana
Zigana was another cup of tea altogether, Sandra mused. If Mei-lin was jasmine in delicate porcelain, sipped in intimacy at the back of a second-floor tea house in Suzhou, Zigana was strong mint tea in chipped stoneware with dark cracks, sweetened with coarse brown cubes. She ought to be downed in gulps, next to a windy tent on a deserted steppe. Sandra started to laugh to herself at her silly metaphor when Zigana tossed back her remaining half glass of grappa, and slammed her glass on the table. So, are you coming?
Outskirts in this case wasn’t just metaphorical. Zigana took her from their cosy table on Campo de' Fiori down alleys that were dark and cobbled, where snippets of Italian flew out, on ribbons of sound, from bright surreal cafés that dotted the dark streets. They boarded a tram and then a bus, full of blue-collar Italians and Sri Lankans, to some place so far south that it wasn't even marginal. It was off her map. It was a far cry from the Roman Holiday she had imagined, one that would change her world in some exciting wonderful way.
Gregory Peck & Audrey Hepburn still taken for film Roman Holiday (1953). No copyright notice. 1953, Paramount Pictures. Permission (Reusing this file) The photo has no copyright markings on it as can be seen in the links above. From Wikimedia Commons.
Yet this was what Sandra wanted: to go beyond all the trendy nonsense — the post-modern, post-colonial talk of hyphens and margins, the eternal negotiations between Europe and the Other. The Other, how she hated that term, especially since everybody felt compelled to capitalize it. To her, it just seemed another way of talking about European guilt and about the European centre, long after it was central. Her professors went on and on about Eurocentrism, yet she couldn't help noticing that the next words that came out of their mouths had to do with London and Rome. Of course Rome and London were important. Yet surely, at some point, there had to be something else.
She had seen a film on the worst of Italian organized crime, set in Scampia, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Naples. The film was called Gomorrah. It had all of the violence and none of the sex. She had no idea that Italians lived in places like that. It terrified her, but in the same way Hell terrified her: it was so far away that it seemed mythical.
Zigana lead her down a pot-holed cement road several kilometres past the outer highway, the Grande Raccordo Anulare. She saw broken concrete, garbage on the streets, and rusted caravans. She thought about the Campo de' Fiori, with its perfect imperfections, its buildings at angles that would make Haussmann call out the wrecking crews.
In the back of her mind she knew that this was a small taste of the way the world was for much of the planet. This was just an intimation of Dharavi or Tondo.
At the moment Zigana opened the flimsy door, Sandra thought longingly of her third caffè latte, and the mystery of its final shape, under the heat lamps of Campo de' Fiori.
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Next: ⏦ Nothing in Damascus