The Spanish Steps, Desperation At The Tiber River

We have one more monument to visit—the Spanish Steps—and then (it is promised by Nicoletta), we may go back to the hotel and to bed. Tomorrow morning, she reminds us, we must be up at the crack of dawn for our trip to Ostia Antica, the ancient city that lies in ruins just outside Rome.

“Andiamo!” she says, and waits for us to rise from the steps of St. Peter’s. The students who have just come down from the dome are still staggering with dizziness. “Andiamo subito!” We rise to the occasion, all forty of us in her thrall and at her mercy.

It must be said Nicoletta is more than generous with her city, her love of it, her knowledge of it, her pride in it. I wonder, though, is she not mortal and beginning to tire? But she can’t let us leave Rome without seeing the Spanish Steps in the Piazza di Spagna, the square that English poets loved, near which Shelley and Byron lived, and the very house where Keats died.

But do I really want to see the Spanish Steps or any steps? Do I want to encounter one more set of steps in this great city’s arsenal of steps? Could I even walk up and down one more set of steps and live to tell the tale?

As we trudge along, more a ragtag bunch now than a marching troop of soldiers, word comes down the line that we are going to stop at a little salumeria to buy food for our lunch at Ostia Antica tomorrow, which is Sunday, a day no food shops are open. When we close ranks (Joe and I are at the end of the line, both because he is supposed to bring up the rear and because I can’t possibly keep up the pace set by Nicoletta), we find that all the students have crowded into a tiny delicatessen. They are swarming along the shelves and grabbing cookies, crackers, boxes of juice, tubes of mayonnaise, chips, candies, almost everything that’s edible.

The couple who own the place seem astonished; this is apparently just a local neighborhood establishment, it’s quite late on Saturday night, they are just about to close up and suddenly this…invasion of Americans! The wife now must stand at attention to handle the cash register, and the husband hurries behind the counter where the students are yelling orders for him to slice, weigh and wrap meat and olives and cheese: ham, salami, mortadella, prosciutto, mozzarella, gorgonzola, parmesan, ricotta, fontina—whatever is there for their proven prodigious appetites.

The counter area is six deep with our students; there’s no point our adding to the crush of bodies. Joe and I remain outside and wait for the commotion to subside before we do our shopping. I realize I badly need a bathroom; this is no small challenge in Italy, where public bathrooms are never in evidence and private ones can be used only if one is a patron at the establishment. Several of our girls are experiencing this same necessity. I hear two of them talking as they eye a cafe across the street from the delicatessen.

“Just wander in as if you are looking for a table to sit at. Then run as fast as you can to the back and find the john. By the time they notice you, you’re done!”

I am not in a position to mull this over for long; I take their advice. I make a dash for the cafe, am inside the shop and inside the bathroom in the blink of an eye. Deeply relieved, but embarrassed, I pass by the proprietor, head down, on my speedy way out. He says, “Signora?” but I am out the door in a flash. Will he have me arrested? But no—several of our girls now are making the same journey I did, and the owner is generous, he understands. In fact, two of our girls stop to talk with him when they are done taking care of the necessities of nature. When they leave, I see him put two lemons in their hands as a gift, two large, beautiful lemons, each one bright as a sun.

By the time Joe and I get into the salumeria the shelves are bare and the meats and cheeses are all gone! Our students have completely cleaned the store out. The last of them are checking out candy bars and almond biscuits.

We have just begun to look around when someone shouts a warning to us: “Nicoletta wants to get going.”

I peer at the shelves in a kind of panic; what can we buy for tomorrow? Nothing is left but a few dry packaged coffee rolls. There isn’t a bottle of mineral water or a container of juice on the shelves. The meat counter looks as if bloody carnage has taken place on it—a few scraps of skin and strings of fat are left on the cutting board.

Joe, too, is looking around for some morsel we might be able to eat in the Roman ruins tomorrow. He shows me a package of “Italian toast”—those dry crumbly things that are not, by my standards, edible. There’s nothing left to drink but some expensive Chianti wines. Well, why not? We have to drink something. I choose a bottle of wine and pay for it at the cash register. Joe looks crestfallen that we haven’t found food for our picnic at Ostia. Perhaps he imagines we may simply starve tomorrow—and flutter away among the stones like a pair of autumn leaves.

When we find ourselves in the street once more, we are alone. Our students have disappeared. Where have they gone? Which direction? We look to the right and left. Did Nicoletta forget us? In what quarter of the world’s four directions are the Spanish Steps? Joe thinks they went that way, I point the other way. Where is the map? Our map is back at the hotel. What do we do now? The lights go off in the salumeria behind us, the exhausted owners are locking up and going home for the weekend.

“Should we ask someone to direct us to the Spanish Steps” “I ask my husband, knowing better. He is one of those men who doesn’t ask for directions. Failure to get somewhere on his own brainpower is perceived, by him, as a slight to his manhood. I would ask for directions at once: (“Dov’è le scale Espanol?”) but there is no one to ask at this late hour on Saturday night in this neighborhood of locked-up shops. Besides, what do I care where the Spanish Steps are, I do not want in the slightest to go there.

“Let’s just go back to the hotel,” I plead.

Joe is actually considering this suggestion. Could he think it might be a sane choice?

“I guess we could do that. Do you happen to remember the name of the hotel?”

“No. But I’d know it in a minute if I saw that dog.”

“Do you remember the street it’s on? You generally are better with names than I am.”

“No, but we can always ask which hotel in Rome has guests who are electrocuted by the hairdryers in the bathrooms.”

We are standing alone now in a street that is completely dark and deserted. Somewhere our students are frolicking along, swinging their bags of cheese and salami, unaware that they have abandoned us. Nicoletta probably still thinks we are bringing up the rear.

“Okay,” Joe says, “let’s try to find a bus that goes to the train station. Once we’re there, I think we’ll be able to find the hotel.”

“Oh, thank heaven!” The end to this day is actually in sight; I feel my spirits rise. “Where can we get a bus?’

“Let’s walk along. We’ll probably find a bus stop in a minute or two.”

An hour later, we come to an intersection with a bus stop sign. Joe tries to read the hieroglyphics detailing the routes and times and says, finally, “I think we can get a bus to the station here.”

I lean against the wall of a building and look into the lighted globes of oncoming headlights. After I count sixty-two cars, I cry out, “I think a bus is coming.”

We rush to the curb, the bus stops for a few passengers who get on, but it’s not our bus. Well, the next then. Twenty minutes later, there is another. Not ours. Twenty minutes later there is another.

“Maybe the bus that goes to the station doesn’t stop here,” I suggest.

“I think it does. It probably just makes few runs at night.”

We go back to the wall and lean against it, each of us looking away from the other. I take inventory of my body: my heels feel as if spikes have been driven into them, my lower back is weighted by lead anvils, my stomach is convulsing with spasms of hunger, my eyes burning from car and bus exhaust, my head aching. I moan, not softly. Joe is trying to whistle a happy tune.

After six more buses pass us, Joe steps up to the sign and begins reading it again. “There’s supposed to be a bus that goes to the terminal,” he says, as if the written word could not betray us, as if the city of Rome has made a pledge to us that we must expect will be fulfilled.

“I am terminal,” I tell him. “Please believe me. I can’t stand up much longer.”

He seems to be losing strength himself, staggering slightly as he transfers from one hand to another the heavy bottle of wine in the plastic bag.

“Do you want me to hold that for you?”

“That’s okay.”

“Why don’t we open it and drink some?”

“I don’t think that’s the best idea. Let’s wait for one more bus and then if it isn’t ours think of something else.”

“I did just think of something else. Remember that night we waited for a bus in Florence, on the lungarno? That night we finally figured out that the #14 bus ran one route in the day, but not at night? That we were waiting in the wrong place? See if this sign shows that the colors of the bus numbers and the background are reversed. Could that be the case now?”

Joe goes back to the Pledge of Rome and reads the bus schedule again. His head drops. “You’re right,” he says. “According to the sign, the bus to the terminal only runs here in the daytime.”

“How come we didn’t think of this two hours earlier?” What I really mean, by the tone of my voice, is “How could you be so stupid?”

When he has no adequate response I decide, in my impaired mental state, that my primary mistake in life was to marry him. I now decide to tell him this—rather loudly, in fact, adding that if I hadn’t married him (with his stupid interests in history) I would not be in this horrible predicament that will probably kill me and that when I soon fall over dead it will be his fault and I am sorry I ever met him.

He listens to me patiently, and calmly looks around to see if we can get a cab on this street, which apparently we cannot. He gently takes my arm and steers me along, explaining that if we get to the road that runs along the Tiber River we can probably get a cab there.

I walk in a catatonic haze, wherever he pushes, pulls, or guides me, up curbs, down curbs, as he drags me across streets, up steps, down steps. What makes him think he will find the Tiber River? If he does, I will surely drown myself in it. Or him. This marriage has been a mistake from the beginning.

When we find the river (what is a river doing smack in the middle of a busy city?) there are no cabs to be found. (All the cabs are at the terminal, no doubt, which is where we want to be.) As we cross the river I stop to lean over the side of the bridge, watching the lights play on the water and wondering if a boat might come along into which we can jump. At this point, I snatch the bag from my husband and lift out the wine bottle. I will get drunk on the bridge and be arrested; at least in jail I can sit down somewhere and they will offer bread and water. But of course the cork requires a corkscrew, and of course my husband doesn’t at this moment have his Swiss army knife with him. Now we will die because he is never prepared for all contingencies.

Perhaps I could love him again if only he would carry me in his arms, but he hasn’t done that since our wedding day. (And only for thirty seconds then.)

He retrieves the wine bottle, pulls me by the hand across the bridge and on the other side of the river calls my attention to the glorious marble buildings, floodlit, decorated by handsome sculptures and tall columns. They are full of steps, steps everywhere, Italian steps if not Spanish steps, but wonderful steps, long wide steps, steps that begin to resemble beds to my wild eyes. In fact, they are so inviting that I choose a step and lay myself down upon it. Not so bad, actually, if you don’t count the sharp edge in your back.

Joe tugs at my hand.

“Leave me alone, I’m going to sleep a while.”

“I think there may be a bus stop just a block or two away.”

“You think.”

If I were my husband, I would just leave me here forever.

But with tender patience he helps me up and does actually half-carry me along. We pass some chained-off areas, we pass some statues, we turn a corner, and we find ourselves at a large bus terminal. In fact there is some official in uniform there who can be asked a question. Joe asks the question (it must be “Will we live or die?”) and seems to get a satisfactory answer.

“Bus #4 goes to the terminal,” Joe turns to me and announces triumphantly. “And he says it will be here soon!”

I immediately sit down on the curb, and then lie down on the grass. After an interval Joe pulls me up and pushes me aboard a bus. We have no bus tickets, but what does that matter. Arrest has been my goal for some time now, anyway.

A group of Persian men at the back of the bus are sitting among piles of Persian rugs tied with twine. They are soft high piles of rug, perfect for sleeping on. Joe has to restrain me from climbing atop one of these piles and going to sleep. The Persian men, handsome, with big black mustaches, talk in their native language to one another. Now and then one of them catches my eye and smiles at me.

I can hardly believe we are actually on a bus, sitting among human beings, no longer lost in a maze of fountains and statues and churches and priests. We may live after all. I may someday actually see my children and my mother again.

When we get off the bus, Joe drags me like a rag doll to the first trattoria we encounter, seats me in a chair and replenishes my body with minestrone soup and the boiled flesh of chicken. He allows me mineral water (but not wine) and when he deems us adequately restored, he lifts me from my chair and moves me forward into the night again.

We are somewhere near the train station. As we walk along the periphery of it, searching for our hotel, a trio of menacing young men steps out of the shadows to block our way. These hoods are swaggering toward us in postures that indicate definitely unwholesome intentions. I stare them down, personally having recently survived such dangers as they know not of. Let them just try something. Let them dare. I’ll smash them over the head with our wine bottle.

Joe moves me forward at a rapid pace, his hand under my elbow. He would like me to lower my head and hurry on. I am totally aware of what he wants. But I’m so tired and angry, I am thinking that if these boys mug us I will actually murder them. Unusual circumstances bring forth superhuman strength. I’m tired enough and furious enough to take all three of them on at once.

“Is that our hotel?” my husband asks to distract me.

It could be, who knows, one flea bag place looks like another.

“I think it is,” he says.

“It’s too ugly to be a hotel.”

He hurries me inside, away from the tough guys following a few steps behind us. And there before me I suddenly see that beloved, mangy dog sprawled on the dirty floor. I fall to my knees and embrace him. His wet tongue licks my cheek. I am in love with this gorgeous dog and I wish I had married him.

Joe lifts me up and carries me bodily to our room, somehow managing to jam the key in the lock and at the same time carry me over the threshold. He staggers with me across the room to our beds where he dumps me on one of them, loses his balance and falls directly upon my body. How fine and romantic, I think one second before I conk out. Just like newlyweds.