When Claudia returned she had changed into a robe. Servi was still at the kitchen table, drinking a coffee.
“Do you mind if we do it on the couch?” she asked, moving past Servi and into the tiny living room. “I share the bedroom with Paulo and he is a light sleeper.”
“Do what?” Servi asked.
“Sex,” the woman answered quizzically. “I have never been stalked before but I imagine you did not follow me around all day to just eat my pasta? From what you have said you have been in Rome sometime, doing nothing really, and must have seen all the sights, and you don’t speak French, German, or Hebrew, no? And besides, your eyes never left me…”
“I thought we could talk first,” Servi said, rising from the table and moving toward her. Claudia had removed her robe and reclined on the threadbare couch without a stitch of clothing. Servi loomed over her for a moment and she pulled him down to her. “No time for talk Americano,” she continued, grappling with his clothes. “I have my first tour at 7:30AM. It’s now or never.”
As it was apparently now, Servi helped her removed his clothes.
Servi sat and watched Claudia prepare Paulo for bed. She fed both Servi and her son at the kitchen table. The little boy appeared unabashed by a strange man at supper, but when Servi mentioned he was from New York City, the boy brightened somewhat, and asked a series of questions about the city formed from a pastiche of movies, TV, and international cliché which floats rumors about large cities like pollen in a great meadow.
“You talk too much, Paulo,” his mother scolded him. “Eat. Don’t wear our guest out for me.”
But the boy continued, and Servi felt a bit like the older brother returned from the great overseas voyage. Feeling like Claudia’s son did not damped Servi’s attraction toward her, but the source of the sensation unsettled him, and he pushed it to a remote corner of his addled mind. All evening long he had watched her in a little sun dress, studded with daisies, moving about the kitchen like an Italian matron: padding back and forth on bare feet from the stove to the sink, the sink to the kitchen with pasta, bread, wine. Servi watched with devotional awe the surge of muscle beneath the sheer material of her skirt, and marveled at her slim arms and sharp elbows, as if the dichotomy of this woman made in flesh was also etched in the universal form of Female Herself.
When the meal was over and the boy was in his pajamas Claudia told him to kiss Servi. The boy did so dutifully on the cheek. It was 9PM in June, and streaks of ruddy light arched over the Roman sky, as if the sun had not really set, but was merely hiding beneath the horizon, awaiting for an unsuspecting and auspicious moment to reappear where it has just gone missing.
Claudia led Servi through a winding alley which ended in a high courtyard. A line of clothes hung above them; shirts and pants rustled stiffly in the warm breeze. Servi felt yet another shiver at the confluence of memory and experience: he had, as a boy, escaped from nearly every institution designed to provide him with care. Most of the time, he knew his way home, but once, during afternoon religious instruction at his local Roman Catholic Church, he was following his class down a hallway when he saw a door. Doors are for exiting, so Servi found himself on the street. He was not familiar with the neighborhood around Saint Jude’s Church, so after wandering around for a half hour, he began to cry. After another half hour, he was in front of the rectory. An old nun saw him and accompanied him back to his class.
Servi was suspended in some form of half-life, some purgatory designed not to expunge his soul of sin, but to keep him from choosing between either or or. He wanted to be home but despised it; he fled his mother only to return. He corroded the valves of his heart with emotions as conflicting as identical poles of two magnets, forced together again and again without natural compliance or complicity.
And now he was here, at twenty-three, being led by a mother to a son, an escapee who had so ritualized the routine that it had become as mundane as a neighborhood football game.
Claudia entered a rectory and on a broad, wide oak table sat her son in front of a plate of cookies and a glass of milk. An old priest with wide, round glasses like an owl’s eyes and a head shaved to a gray stubble, was quietly speaking with the boy in the soft accents of the Roman dialect which are employed domestically, over a supper table or in a bedroom.
“Ahh, Senora Sacredotte,” the priest rose up from his chair. “You are here for Paulo, no?”
Servi walked quickly alongside Claudia Sacerdotte. She asked him several pointed questions about his visit to Rome, and upon hearing his answers, clicked her tongue in evident disapproval.
“A young man should not waste his time like that,” she said, glancing at him as they walked. “How old are you, anyway?” Servi told her. She clicked her tongue again. “I have ten years on you, so I should know about lost time.”
From the flow of the conversation, from the biting edge of her words and her teasing, tense and imaginative sense of the world, Servi thought they may sleep together. He imagined her as the tour guide of eros, giving him instructions in French, German, Hebrew, English, Italian, in technique, speed, etiquette; she would attach to sex the same commando style which she imposed on a group of aging Germans: firm, gentle, brisk, polite, but always with one eye on the clock, continually aware that days and nights and sex were cycles to be enacted, and that like a guided tour around the heart of the capital of Christendom, it must come to a conclusion, whether satisfying or not.
Servi watched Claudia speak with one of the day school attendants, who told her that her son Paulo was nowhere to be found.
“Oh Jesus,” the attended explained, looking about. “He’s escaped again.” On hearing this, Claudia did not register any visible distress. She just glanced at Servi knowingly.
“They can’t even keep track of one little boy,” she said to him loudly, so the other woman could hear. “I can lead forty French pensioners around by their noses but they can’t hold onto one boy.”
“We have a dozen little boys here, Senora Sarcedotte,” the woman answered primly.
“Your son is missing?” Servi asked Claudia, alarmed.
“Don’t worry,” Claudia pulled Servi away by his arm. “He is only ritually lost. He always goes to the same place.”
The day went on like this: three German groups, two French, a group of Scotswomen in English. The guide did not stop even for lunch. Servi did not get off the bus. The woman changed languages but not the intensity of her presentation and the veracity and firmness in which she projected it: the Vatican, the Pallazo Nova, the Pantheon, the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus, the Forum, a roll call of Roman antiquity in four languages and four gears, with marginalia presented by the bus driver, who grunted and groaned at the woman’s whispered commands. This was the same will which she had used to drop off her reluctant son at the day school. The impulse which Lot’s wife succumbed to, but not this woman.
Then it was all over. Servi was once again alone on the bus but no other group came on. The woman was in front of him, casting him a wan smile, an expression which all at once seemed to inform and confuse him about her motivations and drives. She threw a bag over her shoulder and placed both her hands firmly on her hips.
“Now you have to get off,” she said in English, only to finish in Italian. “The bus goes back to the garage and I must go fetch my son.”
“I can come?” Servi asked.
“To the garage?” the woman answered, raising her eyebrows.
“No, to get your son.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, turning away. So Servi followed her into the street.
Servi did not look out the window. He simply watched the woman speak Hebrew into the microphone. The hail of words were incomprehensible, but occasionally Servi could hear such terms at Vatican City, the Pope, Michelangelo, the Sistine Ceiling, and noticed without intersest that he was in front of such and such a monument to human artistic achievement.
They would get down on the street, and the woman would point and speak, and then they were on the bus again, moving rapidly down the Via Veneto. Scooters surrounded the bus, like sucker fish near a shark, moving ahead and behind, forward and back, of the larger beast. Servi saw this only through the corner of his eye, for he solely watched the woman.
Now, after nearly an hour of surveillance, he thought that perhaps she was not really like his mother at all. Her face was far more theatrically inclined; the lines beneath the eyes gave the woman a certain gravity to her expression which offset her quick step, her fast talking, and the glimmer of her white skin like light kissing the surface of polished marble.
And then it was over. Servi was all alone on the bus, and the woman was no longer at the microphone. All the elderly Israelis were gone, and Servi sat in the seat in front of some second class hotel he did not recognize on some side street he could not name.
The woman was talking to the bus driver in Italian. The man was grunting in response. Then she was in front of Servi. She did not even try to address him in Hebrew, but in English.
“You need to get off,” she said primly. “We have to clean the bus for the next group.”
“How did you know I speak English,” Servi answered in Italian. The woman just flicked her wrist.
“I do this for a living,” she answered in Italian. “I can tell from a glance who is who and where they are from… even someone like you, who tries to hide it with your big beard and shabby clothes. You can’t hide it from me,” she wagged her finger at him, as if he was a naughty child. “It’s in the face, the hands, the walk, America, America, America.” She seemed irritated, but she smiled at Servi. “You have to get off, another group is coming.”
“What language?”
“German,” she explained, placing a hand on her hip. She gazed inscrutably at Servi.
“I can’t understand German either,” Servi answered.
“Well,” the woman explained, dropping her hand from her hip, “then there is no harm in staying on, I suppose.” She smiled brightly at this idea, but then the smile fell from her face, as if the notion pleased and displeased her in such rapid succession, the sensation was irritating.
Then Servi was once again surrounded by elderly people, and the woman took up the microphone and addressed them in German.
Servi watched the woman as she approached a door surrounded by a phalanx of other women and children. The woman passed off the boy somewhere in the scrum, and walked briskly away, never looking back.
Servi followed her. She trotted down the street in medium sized heels. He watched the long arch of her legs, her sturdy calves as they tensed and flexed as she skipped down the sidewalk, the hint of strong thigh revealed through the tight outline of her skirt. Her upper body was skimpy compared to her lower, as if a creator had meant to fashion a woman out of hardy, peasant stock and ran out of material above the waist. She wore some sort of uniform on her tapered upper half, a vest emblazoned with words which Servi could not read.
Then it all became apparent: she bounded on a tour bus and quickly addressed the driver, who was waving a hand dismissively toward her. She picked up a microphone and was about to address the crowd behind her as Servi moved to take a seat near the front.
For a moment, she looked at the young man keenly, as if she may know him, but then blinked and the expression fell from her face, like a curtain falling from a window and revealing a rainy day. She licked her lips and began to speak. She spoke to two dozen elderly men and women quickly in a language Servi did not recognize. She spoke rapidly but efficiently in this strange tongue, harsh with gutturals and sudden with full stops and brimming with brisk, skipping vowels. Servi thought it was Arabic, but then saw an Israeli newspaper in an old man’s hand and realized it was Hebrew.
The woman began to gesture with her right hand out the window as the bus pulled away from the curb and into a harrowing wall of Roman morning traffic.
