#27: Interlude

No header save the day of the week. Tuesday. Unexpected transformations, girls stumbling on cobblestones, back to apartments and closets on a single-minded flight as the ribbed grey doors of Palazzo Farnese threatened to slam shut for what could be another ten years. Next, morning and the Barberini bees.

One wide-ruled line in between. Tuesday afternoon would have to share one line with Tuesday evening. With all the English. And Chinese. Spanish and Italian. The latter, un po’. But enough!

Late afternoon on a weekday in Roman September, and the siesta was waning under a crush of people and things that spilled into the street. They did not go quietly. The broad newspaper littered sidewalk on the Largo Torre di Argentina was awash in streams of rollercoaster Italian. Some streams rose as others fell, and then there would be screaming as if the rollercoaster’s riders started free fall. Screaming came from car tires, burning and screeching past a line of taxis that somehow enjoyed its own separate lane, a ribbon frozen in the middle of a busy nexus of transportation. The tires’ owners did not seek the protection of their glass and metal; instead, their heads protruded from windows, hair slicked back, rippled by wind. Strands tickled the side mirrors of the parked taxis, any laughter drowned by the rumbling and squeals of smoking rubber underneath. This was Determination, where not even the glass of a windshield dared separate the seeker from the goal.

Leaning against the bus ticket dispenser I learned of unfocused eyes in chaos. Washes of color blended together and dimmed all shades until they faded into darkness, so one second was no different from the rest – the same movements, the same swirling colors. And then audio glimpses punctuated the black. Some Italian, words I just learned. English in snippets, their speakers obviously distressed; nothing new...

And words that rang like home and childhood and vacations in Hong Kong, memories made eight thousand miles away and now suddenly right around the corner. No, not dreaming. Two white bucket hats over jet black hair bent over an open palm of coins and confused fingers. The young couple spoke Cantonese! One dollar a ticket, right? Yes, but no ticket. It says here, the coin slot. Right, I know. Looking up, a man’s dark eyes framed by black wire, square but delicate. Thin like his hands. Behind the glass were eyes that expressed uneasiness first, then relief as they met mine. Saw a familiar face he has never met, never known, but understood even without words.

Scusi...Termini? The man’s pointed fingers left his pale hand, motioning towards the ticket machine in uncertainty. The machine motioned back with little words scrolling across a cracked green screen: INSERZIONE…

Yes… I knew, and answered. È rotto. Broken. Cantonese and Italian in the same breath! His eyes brightened and the swirl of noise began to wane.

Where do I… Pause.

Buy a ticket? I finished the sentence for him, cringing inwardly at my rough American-accented Cantonese. Too much twang. Over there, at the newsstand. You can say ‘vorrei un biglietto, per favore’ - I want a ticket. The woman at his side turned her hat three degrees. Red, white, black. Or ‘due biglietti.’ For two. And Termini you can reach by bus, the 64 or 40, the stop is on the main street.

Smiles and bows. We laugh at our coincidence, our luck. Three cultures, two languages, one sidewalk in Rome. Thank you, thank you. You’ve been a great help. Ah, what brings you to Italy? Tourist?

No, study, with an American university. And you? The man nods, adjusts his glasses.

We’re from Hong Kong, touring Europe for the summer. Where are you from?

Fourth week. Sono di Roma.

#29: Silent Lights

There is no sound in photographs.

Breaking glass. I learned to love the times when Rome awakened and shook us into consciousness with the dawn. Her transparent dead were everywhere, empty and prostrate but their spirits still watched over the Campo, haunting in the grey light, framing the littered expanse. Wounded soldiers joined them, grudgingly, still weary from a long night at their posts. These armies of stalwarts, garrisoned in alleys, under cars and bridges, seemed to explode from sheer boredom. Anything to punctuate a cloying silence, or a crowd’s monotonous hum. Sometimes a Roman would assist them and they flew through the air in shining arcs piercing the air with their sound. With time enough for just one cry, and then they were silent, sprawled against walls and cobblestones.

Rarer were the tall sentinels trained not to break with such ease. Vino, acqua naturale. Or frizzante, but birra was better for quenching that kind of thirst, thirst for cold acid and air. Towers of plastic cells all around us imprisoned their healthy kin, safe but not free to feel the stones we touched. Our feet knew Rome. They conversed with the little warriors, the conforming, the branded, the all, spent on that road - within their caste, some heavier, but outwardly each the same as the next. Until they spoke. As they fell by height or hand, unique voices rang out with surprise and shock. Different tones in different lengths. In their sound they were as varied as the shapes and sizes of their bones, which were scattered far and wide in the night but collected in the crevices between cobblestones, lying reposed in lingering channels of black water until they appeared as shards of flint bound to the stones inlaid, more rock than glass.

Some cries ended abruptly, as if plunged into water. Others rattled in sustained chords. Shattering in ones, sometimes twos, rarely threes. Triads of pitches and harmonies reverberated across the piazza and snuck up through the windows and under the covers; I learned to welcome the perfect, the fourths and fifths beautiful in violent crashing elegance. The meshing of others did not fall so well on the ears, if not in tone then in volume. Rome emptied her dishwasher each morning, one piazza at a time.

Pictures without sound. Sound without visuals. Video would provide both, yet damper each by leaving less to the imagination. Even if photographs could capture the morning’s welcome fanfare, would it be of the trucks and containers circling the square, sweeping and cleaning? Or would it be of the drunken revelers stumbling home, glazed and cracked like broken glass kicked to broken walls?