3:AM Magazine

By Bruce Gatenby.

Chelsea walked past the Forno just outside Campo dei Fiori, the one with the holiday pastries displayed in twin windows, as well as the little penis-shaped pasta, cazzatelli, that always made her smile. She was a student at one of the two American-style universities in Rome, the one that wasn’t accredited, which meant that her degree wouldn’t count in the States, but since she was on a scholarship and soaking up Italian culture she didn’t care.

It was unseasonably warm for December and so she wore a short plaid skirt, black boots, and a red leather jacket. She turned right onto Vittorio Emmanuele II and walked toward the 8 tram, which crossed the Tiber and skirted the tourist shithole of Trastevere, which she called Trashtevere. At the stoplight, she paused next to an Italian raggazzo dressed in a blue suit, pink shirt and a silver tie. He was clean-shaven except for a little shadow of chin stubble and wore large fly-eye sunglasses. Sempre la bella figura, she thought, gotta look good.

Chelsea stared at him for a moment, then turned away and looked left at the warn-down Roman columns in Largo Argentina, fenced in with plexiglass and steel rails, the ones Mussolini had excavated in order to connect his fascist movement with the glory that was Rome. Then she felt a hand slide up her skirt and cup the right cheek of her ass. Fingers rested lightly under the soft mound of her panties. As the light changed he squeezed hard and walked away. She stood stunned, numb, unable to respond in Italian or English.

Later that day, angry with herself for not having said something, or slapped his clean-shaven cheek, or socked his stubbled chin, she told everyone she knew about the incident. When she told her boyfriend, a 28 year-old Italian who lived with his mother like nearly all celibe did, he screamed “che cazzo!” and slapped her for not doing something. After the fight they had sex in her room, and a week later he broke up with her.

***

Cynthia worked at FAO, the United Nations food program, where she specialized in African relief efforts that did little to relieve the hunger or poverty rampant on the AIDs and war ravaged continent. She was 35, an American academic on sabbatical leave from NYU, and lived in an expensive studio apartment on the Aventino, one of the seven hills of Rome, with a view of the Roman Forum and the Colesseum, an apartment the United Nations paid nearly twice the market rate for. She had an Italian boyfriend, Roberto, who was divorced and lived with his young son. The three of them spent weekends together in a cramped 30 square meter apartment in a shabby and crowded concrete building on the periphery beyond Nomentana, just outside the main hub of the city, near the GRA. She was long past finding this situation romantic.

Still, she liked walking home from work in the early twilight as the shadows covered over the dirt and grime of the city. One night she met Roberto and some of his old school friends for dinner at a trattoria in Testaccio, and satisfied and full of pasta cacio pepe and too much cheap Montepulciano d’Abruzzo house wine, she walked unsteadily up the Aventino after midnight. As she made her way through the large bushes that crowned the pathway, she heard grunting and heavy breathing and pretended she didn’t see them half-hidden in the dark, performing oral sex on each other.

She knew that unlike her boyfriend, most single Italian men, since they lived with their parents, didn’t have a place to do it and so they used their cars or motorini or park benches or other public places to have sex with their girlfriends or prostitutes—or each other. Later, she was uncomfortable to learn from her colleagues that Italian men didn’t consider getting a blowjob from a finocchio to be sex, that there was also a cult of worship centered on transvestites and their oral skills, and she wondered if her boyfriend ever wandered up the Aventino after midnight, since she didn’t like to do that.

***

Bobby met Valentina in a 2^nd class compartment on the train from Munich. He’d taught ESL at a language school in Ulm for two years and was moving to Rome to work for another language school. They started talking while stopped at the Brenner Pass, thirty minutes in the snow and cold where the workers switched train engines and turned off the heat and lights. She was a journalist who wrote about calcio, soccer, for a small Roman paper trying to compete with the pink pages of the Gazetto dello Sport. It was half the price but only one third of the readership. After chatting for the next five hours, they exchanged email addresses at Termini and promised to get together for coffee.

A week later he received an email from her and soon they were meeting on Tuesday nights for coffee and chiacchierata. Her psychiatrist lived on the same street as he did, a coincidence that he found both delightful and disturbing. On their third Tuesday together, after they’d had a coffee at Brasil Caffé on Via dei Serpenti and sat talking at the fountain across from the Monti church, she told him she lived with her boyfriend, Ciccio, whom she no longer loved and besides he was now too fat and lazy to have sex with. Afterwards, they walked over to the Forum and stood looking at the lighted ruins until 2 am. They didn’t kiss.

The following Tuesday night she drove him in her Panda up to the orange groves next to the Knights of Malta palazzo, where Saint Peter’s cathedral could be seen framed perfectly through the main gate keyhole. They parked next to a dozen other Pandas and Puntos and Stilos, and as he looked out the passenger side window he noticed the other couples having sex in the other vehicles. Valentina started kissing his neck and then reached roughly into his pants. He started laughing and then reminded her that since he wasn’t Italian and had his own room, they didn’t have to have sex in the car like the other poor celibe. She simply smiled, then bent down and slid his penis into her mouth.

***

Crystal had been waiting forty minutes for the 75 bus on noisy, polluted via Cavour. Three 84 buses arrived and departed, but no 75. This virtually guaranteed that when one finally arrived it would be packed, no seats available, standing room only. Just when she’d finally decided to give up and take the next 84 and transfer to the 44 at Piazza Venezia, a smoke-spewing 75 pulled up to the bus stop, its diesel engine rattling. As she’d expected, the bus was packed with people. She stepped up through the rear exit and pushed her way through to the center, near the twin exit doors. A single window was slid open. Over the front door a sign read: “NON SCENDE—NO GET OFF.” This always made her smile, because ATAC obviously didn’t have a clue about the idiomatic meaning of the English translation.

She wrapped two fingers of her right hand around the chromium pole and held on as the bus jerked forward. She started to lose her balance but fell back into another passenger, a middle-aged man in a tight-fitting jean jacket and black t-shirt, who ignored her scusi and continued looking straight ahead. When she leaned forward, he leaned forward with her, pressing into her. As the bus turned left toward the Colosseum, his hips started moving, grinding, thrusting forward, and she felt him harden. She didn’t know what to do. She had almost no room to move forward and there was no room to even turn around and scream. She felt him tremble as he continued pushing onto her lower back and down again. She felt sick, nauseous, but her gagging reflex held back the contents of her stomach.

Just when she’d made her mind up to elbow him, to say something over her shoulder, to do something, the bus stopped next to Circo Massimo, he whispered permesso into her ear, pushed past her and exited the bus. She stared at him behind the safety glass as he stood at the stoplight. As the bus pulled away, he looked up and winked at her.

***

Knox was an art professor who’d lived with Marcello for early a decade. Marcello was a museum curator and came from money, and so Knox lived in a beautifully renovated apartment near Piazza Esquilino and drove a new black BMW. It broke Marcello’s mother’s heart that her son was omosessuale, un finocchio, and she often prayed to the Virgin to make her son see the error of his way and come back home. Knox found this touching.

When Bobby first came to Rome, Knox mistook him for queer and invited him out to dinner at Da Paolo. A few minutes into the primo, Knox realized Bobby wasn’t queer. Undeterred, Knox explained that he slept with a lot of Italian men who weren’t gay, because culturally they didn’t consider gay sex sex. Bobby reminded Knox that he wasn’t Italian. Italian men, Knox added, worshipped transvestites and saw them as another way to avoid “cheating” on their wives or girlfriends. Bobby, who was broke at the time, thanked Knox for the meal, told him that Americans did consider it sex no matter who was doing the sucking, and as he walked home wondered if he would hear from the girl he’d met on the train down from Munich.

***

Nicole was a student at the other American-style university, the one that was accredited, and she liked to binge drink on the weekends with the other American and British students in the bars around Campo. She’d get really really drunk on shots of Sambucca and Baileys, hook up with raggazzi in the Drunken Ship, or Black and White, or Magnolia, then throw up afterwards on the cobblestones near the statue of Giordano Bruno. One night she even had sex with a raggazzo seated backwards on his motorino in an alleyway behind Supperclub. She had a boyfriend back home at Emory U. and really believed he wasn’t cheating on her while she was away on her study abroad semester.

***

Tatjana was 18 and spent her nights standing outside the Sky TV building on Via Salaria in a black miniskirt and thigh-high boots. She was tall and thin and had blonde hair and gray eyes. Her parents in Chisinau had sold her to Russian traffickers who first brought her to Naples, where she was locked in a room with six other frightened young girls and beaten and raped nightly. After two months of this she was moved to Rome, where she was expected to bring in at least 1,000 euros a night or face further beatings from her scary and scarred Bulgarian pimp.

She hated the Italian mariti in their Alfas, BMWs and Mercedes, who pulled over to the side of via Salaria and paid her 20 euros for a blowjob before going home to their wives and families and warm apartments. Prostitution wasn’t legal in Italy, but then again it wasn’t illegal, either. Occasionally she had to have sex with members of the carabinieri to stay out of jail; and on Saturday afternoons she was allowed to go to the cinema with two of the other girls. One Saturday they saw the Italian dubbed version of Under the Tuscan Sun at the Metropolitan on Via del Corso, and the three of them laughed so hard they all started to cry.

***

Valentina started coming over to Bobby’s apartment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and on the other days of the week she sent him SMS text messages, 25 or 30 a day along the lines of I’m thinking of you…are you thinking of me? He wasn’t, so he didn’t respond. In between text messages, his phone would squillo once, and then hang up. A squillo meant someone was thinking about you. He found her possessive and jealous Italian attitude toward their “relationship” annoying.

Later that week, Valentina called and yelled at him for not responding to her SMSs, and he explained to her that he couldn’t respond because he didn’t have any credit left on his prepaid SIM card (which was a lie) because the language school he was working for hadn’t paid him (which wasn’t a lie). The next day she charged his phone with 50 euros credit. Now he didn’t have any excuse not to respond to her, she happily explained to him in the small bed in the room in the apartment he shared in Monti with an unemployed Italian filmmaker. He smiled and the next day bought another SIM card with a different phone number.

She was the first and only Italian girl he managed to go out with. After two months of sexual inactivity, one night he pretended to be an Italian guy and made out with a drunken girl named Nicole or Chelsea, he couldn’t really recall, in the Drunken Ship. After closing time, they stumbled back to the student residence where she lived and had sex in a room with four single beds. He finally understood why Italian guys thought American girls were so easy: they were. They all wanted their “I had sex with an Italian guy” story to tell to their girlfriends back home; only this girl had had sex with an American guy pretending to be an Italian guy. He wondered if that counted.

The language school only paid him for three of the six months he worked there, and so in June he flew back to Newark and took a job teaching at an inner city junior high school, a two-year commitment that would help pay off his delinquent student loans. The following summer he met Cynthia at an anti-war rally outside the UN building in Turtle Bay. They were both surprised to learn they had been in Rome at the same time but had never met, and they considered their meeting in Manhattan an example of romantic fatalism. Under the charm of this coincidence, they got married the following Christmas on a Caribbean cruise and settled down to live their lives together.

A year later, they divorced.

# # # # #

BG: Five years of living in Italy showed me all those American and British writers idealizing Life Under the Fill-In-The Blank Sun are full of shit. I wanted to write about the Italy unknown to the house restorers and recipe peddlers living like the ‘locals.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Gatenby grew up in California but left the U.S. in 1998 and spent most of the next decade in Europe: Switzerland, France, Germany, and Italy, including Venice, Rome, and a rustic stone farmhouse in Umbria. He’s written four as yet unpublished novels, a dozen screenplays—including two with Ovideo Assonities, producer of the hit film “Scent of a Woman”–and published articles and fiction in magazines in the US, the UK, and Europe. He currently spends most of his time in Dubai.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008.