Magna Mater IV

Later he was walking down the via d’Portico Octavia and the woman in the micro skirt exited a building and walked beside him for a few moments.

            “You’re not Italian?” she asked, just as they reached the Piazza Mazzini.  They stopped in front of the Fontana delle Tartarughe, the Fountain of the Turtles, and as they spoke, the demure marble turtles gurgling sluggish water from their down turned beaks and into the brackish detritus of the fountain.   

            “Is it obvious?” Servi asked with a slight smile.

            “Not the face,” she said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and offering Servi one, which he declined.  She frowned at him and lit up. “You have the map of Rome drawn on your face.  But you dress like a man that lives in one of those holes in the Claudian Aqueduct.  I thought you were Greek.  They come to Rome and treat it like a cess pool.”  Servi then told her that he was an American.  On hearing this, she removed the cigarette, its tip stained with red lipstick, from her mouth and whistled through her teeth.

            “When my mother was a girl and American men came to Rome, she tried to date them.  Even the poor Americans  were wealthy by Italian standards.  But now it looks like the tables are turned: American paupers are washing up on our shores.  What is the matter, didn’t your mother and father give you enough funds to live in style for your year of Michelangelo and fucking?”

            She spoke a rapid Italian, and often switched from standard Italian to the Roman dialect with little transition, using pungent slang that confused Servi.  But Servi understood the gist of what she was saying; he could discern the general contours of the life she lived in this ancient city, crouched low and long along the banks of the Tiber.

            “What is your name?” she finally asked, and Servi told her.  She dropped her cigarette into the fountain. “My God, that is my last name too!” Suddenly her face, which had been sublimely blasé, was animated with excitement.  “Do you know how many Servis there are in the Ghetto, in Rome?  It’s an old name.  As old as these stones,” and her little heels clicked on the cobbles.  “Of course, hardly any Jews live in the Ghetto any more.  We are spread out all over Rome.  Italian Jews have always been well integrated into this city.  But when someone gets married or dies, it all happens in the synagogue, and then everyone eats here.  Of course, there are some old people still  here.  I visit my great-Aunt Sylvia every Thursday and bring the poor sick woman some coffee and brioche.  She has had a tough life.”

            After this meeting, Servi found himself with an unexpected thing in Rome, a friend.  The two Servis, as Francesca called them, became inseparable.  She came to visit Servi in his room in the Ghetto, but after a few times, no longer had the stomach for the dankness.  “This pig who takes your money should be thrown in jail.  He should pay you to live here!”  So Servi began to visit her in her apartment, a small but neat flat, just off the metro from the Circo Miximo. 

          She occupied the top apartment of an old villa which had been divided into apartments.  The beams of the attic jutted through the whitewashed walls.  Her tiny kitchen was a model of European economy, and her small bedroom was nearly stripped of ornamentation.   

         But the finest feature of the apartment was the balcony.  There Francesca had lavished her tastes on wrought iron chairs and tables, over sized terra cotta pots stuffed with miniature palms and overflowing with bougainvillea.  

         Far below in the street Servi could hear the whine of motor scooters and even catch the hint their exhaust on the breeze, but the canopy of birch trees below shielded them from view, so the scene was pastorally calm, as if Servi was floating above Rome in an envelope of cushioned greenery.  And in front of him, all of Rome’s red tiled roofs lay spread like a checked table cloth.  In the distance, the dome of the Vatican rose above the unfolded metropolis like a button on top of a small, but nobly proportioned mountain.

            It was just on this terrace one night that Francesca took Servi’s hand.  At her insistence, they had both gone to a disco, to behave like young people for a change, she explained, and not like pensioners.  Francesca dressed in her most dangerous mini skirt, a garment that daringly revealed nearly three-fourths of her upper thigh.   

            When he glanced at her quickly, before he could consume the details of her features, she looked like one of those women on the via Saleria who he engaged in furtive conversation.  Afterward, on the balcony, she sat close to him while they drank red wine; then, uncrossing her legs, as if to invite Servi to caress the sheerness of their length, she held his hand, and then placed them not on her knee, as he expected, but on her pert right breast.  She reached over and kissed him, and after a moment, Servi found her tongue in his mouth, exploring its recesses.  She sensed Servi’s bland reception, and stood up, trying to pull him from his seat.

            “Come on, Aarone,” she said teasingly.  “Come to my bed.  Our courtship has lasted now nearly two weeks.   You’ve been the perfect gentlemen.  I’ll take you home to meet my mother.  But now it is time for the honeymoon.”

            “No, Francesca,” Servi answered softly.  She immediately released his hand, and placing her arms akimbo, began to question him, in heavy Roman dialect, about his unwillingness to have sex with her.  Was he impotent?  Did he have one testicle?  Was he really gay?  Did he have some disease?  Was he married?  Did he find sex unappealing?  Was he appalled by nudity?  Didn’t he enjoy sex?  Especially the sex that she was offering him!  She did not want a husband, fiancé, or even a boyfriend.  She did not want American citizenship.  Everything that happened in New York City happened right here in Rome and it was a lot closer, she explained. Are you scared of women?  Are you scared of their power?  Servi answered no to all her questions, kindly, and only lost his patience when she asked, in her pointed Roman dialect, why couldn’t they just fuck like animals instead of conversing like human beings?  One night, as much from pique as from arousal, she came out of her bedroom naked but for tiger skin panties, her white conical breasts swinging back and forth, seeming to revel in their freedom, and sat on Servi’s reluctant lap.

            “Don’t you want this, Aarone?” Servi felt his will buckle as her rounded buttocks nestled into his crotch.  After a moment of dizzying indecisiveness, he pushed her away from him.  Francesca began to scream at him, incomprehensibly at first, but then with more pointed rage, accusing him of being less than a man.

            “What twenty-two year old man does not want to fuck?  God damn you Aarone!  What, are you one of these men who can only fuck whores?  I’ve seen you talk to those Serbian cunts!  Fine, let’s play:  You want a hired pussy, fine, pay me half a million lire and fuck me!”

            On hearing this, Servi got out of the chair and left her apartment.

          

Magna Mater III

One morning, he woke up later than usual.  He felt unnaturally sluggish, and the summer sky was a uniform soggy gray – as if it would soon rain.   

He took a walk out to the Tiber Island, thinking he would get a light breakfast in Trastevere.  But a stiff breeze was blowing dust or pollutants up from the Tiber, so he turned back to the Ghetto and entered a little kosher bakery that he typically avoided with their pricy coffee and sweet breakfast confections.   

As he sat with his coffee at a café table, he moved aside a pink sports paper and picked up a Roman daily and began to scan the articles.   The headlines were splashed with scandal after scandal, most involving the misappropriation of municipal funds.  The main story was a lurid tale of the use of public money to finance a call girl operation in the Rome’s mayor’s office.  

Servi grew bored of the story, although reading such things helped him contextualize his Italian; much of the local Roman conversation was concerned with recounting these salacious tales; Servi skipped to the center of the paper, where for no apparent reason, or perhaps as the visual counterbalance to all the verbal descriptions of sex, were pictures of scantily clad or nearly naked women in large, black and white photographs.   

The monotony of their bodies, twisted in faux artful poses, bored Servi; the slick mass production of their parts and pieces, instead of rendering them appealing, whitewashed them to airbrushed sterility. 

They were the ideal counterpart to those poor women on the via Saleria; women for hire; women who men believed existed only to please men.   It was at this moment that Francesca walked into the café and in a few moments, came out again.  When she walked by Servi, she saw the open paper and the buxom woman with the sizable nipples spread out over the table: she looked at Servi and then the woman with bemused annoyance.   

Looking at him quizzically, Servi thought she may be wondering why the café was letting a homeless man occupy one of their precious tables.  Perhaps the incongruous line separating the emaciated, scruffy Servi and those well-fed, curvaceous beauties, was a dichotomy that intrigued her.   

She gazed at the paper again and then at Servi’s upturned face and then back at the paper before she began to walk imperturbably down the street.  Servi noted her long legs in the short micro skirt she was wearing; for a top, she sported a long men’s jacket, so on the retreat from Servi she looked entrancingly nude beneath the coat.  On the walk out with the little tray with two coffees and two brioches, Servi imagined she was returning to a bed where a naked man lay and wait to break his night’s fast.

Magna Mater II

Servi had met Francesca four months ago.  He had taken a room in Rome’ old Jewish ghetto: a dilapidated walk up that did not have a bathroom, was oppressively, hot in the the long Roman summer, and drafty and damp in the gray Roman winter.  

He had to walk down a greasy staircase to use the bathroom three floors down.  He took his meals (which he had frugally reduced to one and a half a day) at a cheap trattoria just outside the old Ghetto’s bounds in the Piazza Mazzini.  But his money, which was meager to begin with, began to evaporate like the water in the fountain of the Fontana Tortuga in the summer heat.  He stopped cutting his hair, and it grew bushy  atop his head like a mangy animal curled in fitful sleep.  He grew a beard, or a youthful version of one, a fringe of soft fur lining his lower jaw and neck as satiny as a mink stole.  Along with his financial constriction, he found that all his intellectual and artistic hopes and endeavors, inaugurated so stridently when he alighted the Al Italia direct from New York, where almost as bankrupt as his checkbook.   

He woke up in the morning and put on the closest approximation of clean clothes he could find in his meager wardrobe and then wandered about Rome for the day.  He had long since stopped going to the museums and major attractions: they were too expensive for one, and he felt exposed and dingy next to the well heeled throngs of tourists.  

So Rome, a large metropolis, served as Servi’s artistic challenge.  He tried to find, each and every day that he woke up, a new street, a new neighborhood, some out of the way chapel or church off Rome’s beaten down tourist tracks.  He felt under whelmed by this life; as his sense of Rome’s physical and chronological immensity confronted him, his own sense of irrelevance metastasized. Aaron Servi had nothing to show for his life but a US passport, some shirts, pants, underwear, two threadbare jackets,  and a few worn books.   

And no matter how far he walked, Servi eventually wound his way back to the Ghetto at night, like the Jews in the Middle Ages, forced to return before the doors in the walls were closed for the evening.  In his mind, Servi closed the doors of the Ghetto behind him and then retreated to the dark hold of a room with its peeling paint hanging from the walls like faded streamers, its bare light bulb suspended from a frayed cord, and  finger sized cock roaches.  Servi felt, when he laid in bed at night, that the trajectory of his uncertain future would remain an essential mystery, as difficult to plumb as the “essence” of a great city like Rome.  

For there was always one more street, one more church, yet another little gem of a piazza, following a slender thread to infinity.  Just as mysterious as all these vexing questions, it seems, was what would Servi do the next day?  Where would he go?  Which direction would he take?  And as was his custom, Servi would fall unconscious in a panic of fear that was only overcome by the irrepressible urge to sleep.

Magna Mater (short story)

            

       “Why are you afraid to go to bed with me?  Because we have the same last name?  Are you afraid it would be, how do you call it in English, incense?”  She said the last word in English.

            “Incest,” Servi said it in English and then Italian.  He studied, with rapt attention, the long arc of Francesca’s slim, pale neck; she resembled the images of countless Roman murals he had meticulously studied in Rome’s museums: the elongated, chiseled cheekbones, and darkly etched eyebrows of the classical Roman face, frequently viewed both in reality and on museum walls, but still startling enough in its disquieting beauty to be anomalous.               

             Behind her, the arch of the Porta d’ Octavia framed the beguiling curves of her petite body like a statute in the niche of some sacred space.  As if to confirm this, Servi was aware of a tingling sensation all about her pale, nearly luminous skin, like minor electrical disturbances in the air surrounding her.  And all around were portents pregnant with meaning.  Ahead, and to the right, was the small chapel of San Gregorio della Divina Pieta.  Above the lintel of the door was an inscription in Hebrew and Latin, beside an image of Christ crucified: a rebellious people, which walks in a way that is not good, after their own thoughts; a people which provokes me to anger.”  

             There, up until the tenth century, the Jews of the Roman Ghetto were forced to hear sermons denouncing their recalcitrance.  Christ had died for their sins, but the Jews of Rome turned their stiff necks away from there redeemer, and here, of all places, in the very capital city of Christendom.  Looking at Francesa Servi, this beguiling, unexpected creature seated in front of him, improbably bearing his own last name, Servi thought it best to be like those Roman Jews and go after his own thoughts and his own thoughts only.

            “Aren’t I attractive?” Francesca asked leadingly in English, and then switched to rapid fire Italian. “Don’t American men like Italian women?  I thought that is why you all come here, to sleep with the dark daughter’s of Rome, with our wide hips, big boobs, torn stockings and ragu bubbling on the stove.  You think you fool me, but I am no fool. You are known for talking to all the whores on the via Saleria; what, am not as good as some Yugoslav bitch?”

            “Stop that,” scolded Servi.  “I don’t sleep with those women.  They feel sorry for me.  It is a common reaction: the female takes pity.  It isn’t that you aren’t attractive.  Or that we share the same last name.  I just decided, when I came  to Italy, to concentrate on other things beside sex.  I decided I didn’t need the distraction.”

            “That is a ridiculous answer,” Francesa hissed, and withdrew her hand from Servi’s, for she had just seized it when she began the subject of sexual relations.  She pushed her coffee away from her, as if she meant to stand up and leave, but she merely folded her arms and seemed to scowl at the building behind Servi, as if his stubbornness was somehow written on its pitted facade.   

            “What kind of distraction is sex?” she continued.  “You think about it, get exited about doing it with someone you like, do it with that same someone, and fifteen minutes later, or a half hour, or four hours, whatever it takes, you get up and put on your clothes and do something else, and you don’t have another thought of sex to distract you!”

            Servi laughed.  She almost had him.  The scenario was so deceptively lucid she could be talking about the working of two finely made, greased machines, and not emotionally flammable twenty-two years olds.   

            For Servi, there was every reason in the world to take Francesca to bed.  But when he thought about it even more, when he pushed the powerful drive to have sex to the side, as if drawing a curtain over impulse with restraint, a world of reasons to refrain from sex presented itself like an alternate universe.  Beyond the fact that he was painfully lonely, that he had not had a woman in over a year, and that Francesca was the very rubric of Roman attractiveness, the female embodiment of the eternal city sculpted in the cascading line of her hips, in the beguilingly bulge of buttocks, in the supple promise of her conically shaped breasts, magically standing at attention, like two Swiss Guards, despite all this, Servi could not find a valid reason to sleep with her.

            “I’d rather we just stay friends,” Servi answered lamely, for want of a better response.  Servi then switched to Italian. “I don’t want to get into a relationship right now.”

            “Aarone,” she answered, wringing her hands emphatically, “you are not listening to me,” and then she switched to the clipped Roman dialect, as she always did when her dander was raised. “I’m talking about sex.  Let me be blunt: I am talking about fucking.  Everyday, if you want it.  If you can handle it!” and here, Servi laughed.   

             Francesca’s disputation was beginning to sound comic.  In the year since he had landed high and dry in Rome, he had not met anyone who had taken such a proprietary interest in his life.  He often felt like a piece of flotsam amongst these indifferent Romans, who treated each other, but strangers especially, with the same causal indifference as domestic cats: they were aware of your presence, but were congenitally incapable of forming lasting connections.  And why should they?  In a city that constantly reminded you of time’s vast scale, and its corrosive force, petty states like friendship were dwarfed and stunted to insignificance.  Like many large towns, and like Servis home of New York City, Rome was an ideal place not to find oneself or others, but to become utterly lost.

The Wanderers

The collection of Tolstoy’s short fiction, The Devil and Other Stories, contains some of his finest work.  Take but one example, the story "Father Sergy".  Tolstoy takes the story of one man, and his spiritual quest, and makes it a type of microcosm for the entire human encounter with the divine, and by extension, humanity.

In Father Sergy’s quest, from dashing young officer to Russian Orthodox monk and priest, Tolstoy shows both the benefits and limits of organized religion. Of course, human nature meddles in his efforts as well.  His difficulty overcoming pride, and especially lust, dogs him into his sixties. As a famous hermit with the power to heal, he succumbs to the charms of a sick woman.  Dogged by his sin, he then becomes an unknown wanderer, moving from place to place, begging for food, having no possessions.

It is obvious that Tolstoy had great sympathy for this type of religious life, as many of his characters who struggle with religious questions end up as wanderers.  Positive characters with pearls of wisdom to deliver are usually wanderers as well.  No doubt he saw in this life a recapitulation of the life of Jesus and his early followers.

In his fiction, all these ideas interact with one another creating a lively and varied account of all that people are capable of; Tolstoy is not to be messed with.  In terms of literature, he is one of the big boys, and every writer should read him, and then read him again.

Ban the Frack

My new town, Ulysses, appears poised to ban hydrofracking by updating its zoning laws.  

This is a far cry better than the Town of Caroline, where a move to ban banning was just recently defeated.


So far, the towns of Dryden and Ithaca have effectively banned hydrofracking. I hope (and trust) that Ulysses will soon join them; from my understanding, the town council is firmly behind it.

When need to send a firm and unwavering message that fracking has no place in Tompkins County.  It is the desire of the the very few to impose their will on the many.

Not Very Good at All

The collection of stories in Tolstoy’s Divine and Human were picked for their connection and concern with political themes.  Unfortunately, most of the stories are a bit stiff, obvious, and lack the fine touch of Tolstoy’s greatest short fiction. 

“What for?” deals with the subjugation of the Polish aristocracy under Russian imperialism.  The long story “Divine and Human” with the fate of failed revolutionaries and political disappointment  The final story in this slim collection, “Berries” appears to not deal with politics at all, but through the subtle use of the image of under ripe berries, actually is all about the class conflict.

Without an obvious spiritual dimension, these stories don’t carry Tolstoy to the grand heights of his more fully realized fiction.  In Divine and Human the stories are interesting, in that here we see Tolstoy the social reformer without any guise, but that is as far as the interest goes; these stories are good, but with consideration alongside the rest of Tolstoy’s oeuvre, this means they are not very good at all.