first day, when I think or hear the word “Italy” it is this suicidal ride in a battered, shrieking, evil-smelling cab that floods my mind and heart. Nearly two hours of apocalyptic traffic and stifling heat and exhaust fumes and cursing; of darting motorbikes and massed street corners full of dark, lounging men and vivid women in stiletto heels; of gestures and music and laughter and screams; of balconies and roofs spilling vines and flowers and Cinzano umbrellas in street cafés, and wide tree
82 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
lined avenues and dark, narrow cobbled streets leading back into unimaginable caves of shadow; of a flashing view of the dark Tiber between its concrete banks (“But it’s a culvert, Joe!”), and grimy pockmarked saints lining a bridge, and a looming apparition that was Castel Sant’ Angelo; of beetling walls of brick so ancient they were scarcely recognizable, and medieval piazzas flashing past and giving way to shops and greengrocers and pharmacies and pizzerias; and, finally, of a twisting ascent up a suburban mountain that might have been a hill in California or Oregon, except that when I turned my head to look back, the entire old city lay below me spread out on its hills, brown and umber and copper and alabaster and cream and russet, bathed in a clear gray-gold light that seemed to spring out of the very earth and air. And in the middle of it all rose the great luminous dome of Saint Peter’s.
I began to cry. Oh, Italy. The first time I ever came down off my mountain, and it was to this!
Joe laid his arm around my shoulder and patted me, and I knew he was praying that I was not beginning some sort of terrible, escalating attack of the panic. His hand was heavy and lethargic, and I knew he was past dealing with hysteria.
I reached up and squeezed it, to show him it was not the fear. But I did not know what it was, only that I could not seem to stop crying until the taxi squalled around a final hairpin turn, and shot through an enormous open gate into a vast parking lot, and screeched to a rocking stop under the porte cochere of the Cavalieri Hilton International. I stopped then and began to hiccup and then to giggle.
“Does Donald Trump know about this?” I choked.
“It looks pretty goddamned good to me,” Joe said, and jerked himself out of the taxi and began to scrabble HILL TOWNS / 83
furiously in his coat pocket for his wallet. A shower of crumpled bills and a spray of silver coins shot out at the feet of the uniformed doorman who had just that moment materialized. He and the taxi driver pounced on the booty. Joe turned red and then deadly white. I fled into the haven of the huge, ornate, glacial lobby and sank into an amber velvet banquette, trying desperately to force back the insane giggles.
I was dirty and hot and jet-lagged and strung tight as a violin bow, with the fear trying to push its way up into my chest and throat past the laughter, and at that moment I was as profoundly grateful to old Conrad Hilton and his dream of air-conditioned grandiosity as I have ever been to anyone in my life.
“If they live just below our hotel, they must live in a tree,”
Joe muttered half an hour later. “Ada Forrest obviously suffers from depth-perception deficit.” We were in another taxi, winding back down the mountain road we had just caromed up, but this time we rode in soft, cold silence. The doorman, obviously impressed with Joe as a source of endless American largesse, had hailed and rejected two or three cabs from the line at the bottom of the parking lot before selecting this new air-conditioned one. Its driver had not cursed or gestured or banged the side of his vehicle once. Indeed, he had not even spoken. When Joe had said, “ Via della Lungara in Trastevere, per favore ,” he had merely looked back impassively. Joe produced the piece of paper on which he had, at Colin’s suggestion, written Sam and Ada Forrest’s address and their directions, and the driver had
82 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
lined avenues and dark, narrow cobbled streets leading back into unimaginable caves of shadow; of a flashing view of the dark Tiber between its concrete banks (“But it’s a culvert, Joe!”), and grimy pockmarked saints lining a bridge, and a looming apparition that was Castel Sant’ Angelo; of beetling walls of brick so ancient they were scarcely recognizable, and medieval piazzas flashing past and giving way to shops and greengrocers and pharmacies and pizzerias; and, finally, of a twisting ascent up a suburban mountain that might have been a hill in California or Oregon, except that when I turned my head to look back, the entire old city lay below me spread out on its hills, brown and umber and copper and alabaster and cream and russet, bathed in a clear gray-gold light that seemed to spring out of the very earth and air. And in the middle of it all rose the great luminous dome of Saint Peter’s.
I began to cry. Oh, Italy. The first time I ever came down off my mountain, and it was to this!
Joe laid his arm around my shoulder and patted me, and I knew he was praying that I was not beginning some sort of terrible, escalating attack of the panic. His hand was heavy and lethargic, and I knew he was past dealing with hysteria.
I reached up and squeezed it, to show him it was not the fear. But I did not know what it was, only that I could not seem to stop crying until the taxi squalled around a final hairpin turn, and shot through an enormous open gate into a vast parking lot, and screeched to a rocking stop under the porte cochere of the Cavalieri Hilton International. I stopped then and began to hiccup and then to giggle.
“Does Donald Trump know about this?” I choked.
“It looks pretty goddamned good to me,” Joe said, and jerked himself out of the taxi and began to scrabble HILL TOWNS / 83
furiously in his coat pocket for his wallet. A shower of crumpled bills and a spray of silver coins shot out at the feet of the uniformed doorman who had just that moment materialized. He and the taxi driver pounced on the booty. Joe turned red and then deadly white. I fled into the haven of the huge, ornate, glacial lobby and sank into an amber velvet banquette, trying desperately to force back the insane giggles.
I was dirty and hot and jet-lagged and strung tight as a violin bow, with the fear trying to push its way up into my chest and throat past the laughter, and at that moment I was as profoundly grateful to old Conrad Hilton and his dream of air-conditioned grandiosity as I have ever been to anyone in my life.
“If they live just below our hotel, they must live in a tree,”
Joe muttered half an hour later. “Ada Forrest obviously suffers from depth-perception deficit.” We were in another taxi, winding back down the mountain road we had just caromed up, but this time we rode in soft, cold silence. The doorman, obviously impressed with Joe as a source of endless American largesse, had hailed and rejected two or three cabs from the line at the bottom of the parking lot before selecting this new air-conditioned one. Its driver had not cursed or gestured or banged the side of his vehicle once. Indeed, he had not even spoken. When Joe had said, “ Via della Lungara in Trastevere, per favore ,” he had merely looked back impassively. Joe produced the piece of paper on which he had, at Colin’s suggestion, written Sam and Ada Forrest’s address and their directions, and the driver had
Similar Books
