Bodies flowed across the Piazza della Rotonda in wavelike motion, brilliant in a bewildering array of colours and fashions. They emitted the constant hum of a dozen languages and a hundred conversations – the painted, noisy backdrop of modern Rome, scented by espresso shots and cigarettes, humming in all its vibrant complexity and chaotic normalcy.
Angelina Calla observed them all, as she had so many times before.
Bodies moving like the tide. The thought was automatic, an interior voice that was a familiar rattle in her head, though its words at this moment were too poetic. She reflected, her shoulders sagging, seeking an alternative. Like beetles. Unstoppable beetles. A slight nod, only to herself. It was the right image, and Angelina Calla rejoiced, even as she lamented.
The tourist trade, she had long ago learned, has no down season in Rome. There are high points in the year, there are lows, but there is no moment when calm overtakes the city as eternal in its bustle as in its legend. It was the first lesson Angelina had taken in as she’d been swept into her unwilling role and trade. She’d admired Rome all her life. Loved it. She could recount its history and mythology with the best of them, and perhaps better than most. But it was only when she’d taken to the streets and stepped out into the fray – propelled there rather than wandering the path by choice – that she had learned that ancient Roma was the true definition of a city that never sleeps or slows.
But how I wish it would all slow down, even for just a moment. Just long enough for the world to be set right.
The tourist waves came in undulating cycles. Their movements at first had seemed just as random as the beetles now imaged in Angelina’s mind, just as unpredictable, and only after a season of careful observation did it become clear that there was a pattern to their frenetic behaviour. Apparently aimless bouncing from fountain to church to corners of particular squares concealed a widespread, consistently focused desire: to stand in just the right position before just the right landmarks, to take a selfie – the absurdity of the word! – that would make tourists X, Y and Z look precisely like tourists A, B and C, and every other gawper who’d ever bought summer tickets to the Italian Mecca.
Beetles. Maybe they’re lemmings?
Shit.
She knew she had to foster a different mindset. It’s a necessity, at this point in my life. She ruminated, not without a hint of bitterness, on her reality. There’s no other way.
She drew her white leatherette handbag more squarely on to her lap, the knock-off gold of the cheap Versace Aurora clasp glimmering in the Italian sunlight and reflecting its rays into her brick-red hair. At the same time, she straightened herself to a less deflated posture at the metal coffee table. Beyond, framed into cramped place by surrounding buildings that had gone up over the centuries but no less impressive for it, the round hulk of the Pantheon marked the periphery of her present urban landscape.
For a woman whose livelihood came from the insatiable appetites of those wide-eyed visitors, at least a thousand of whom were currently milling about just beyond her table, filtering in great queues between the columns of the ancient temple to all the gods of Rome, now dedicated to the martyrs of the Christians, their constant presence was tantamount to job security. No tourists, no tours. And for a tour guide, no tours meant no cash, which meant no ability to buy overpriced espresso and sit at an outdoor café lamenting that she hadn’t found a better lot in life.
But it wasn’t easy to accept a reality that went against everything in her bones. Angelina Calla had brought herself up to be a scholar. She’d trained her mind, surrounded herself with wisdom and antiquity and history, certain since her afternoons as a small girl wandering through the cultural history museum in Lanciano that one day she would call those kinds of surroundings her own. Dedicating herself to the study of Classical Akkadian at university – a language tied to a culture that had flourished in Babylon and Mesopotamia almost five millennia before she had been born, long predating the Christians – Angelina had set herself on the knife-edge of a scholarly field undertaken by very few. The language itself had appealed to her linguistic interests: its characteristically angular, rune-like appearance had been one of the features that had attracted her to it when, as a teenage girl, she’d chanced upon a copy of Pritchard’s classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts and found herself entranced in the stories of Gilgamesh’s deluge and the Enuma Elish, of the goddess Astarte and the Code of Hammurabi, all of which had opened up to her in the splendour of ancient wonder and fantasy. Other people had religion and revelled in the myths of Abraham and Noah, but Angelina – conscientious humanist and, by association, convinced atheist – had never scraped after such fables or the faiths that went with them. She had ancient Babylon, the spiritual rush of human history without the burden of religious ideology, and that was more than enough for her.
By the time she’d finished her masters degree in Akkadian language and culture, Angelina was one of only a few people in the world who could consider themselves genuinely proficient in the long-dead script, and her PhD had led her into even narrower circles of expertise. It had been more than simply her academic field or the aim of her future career. It was her passion.
In the end, it had amounted to little else. A hoped-for career had been forcibly relegated to a hobby, Angelina’s dreams of academic loftiness shattered by a scholarly world that just didn’t seem to want her. A long string of unsuccessful job applications and discouraging interviews had left her to take whatever employment she could find – currently, as the most overqualified tour guide in Rome.
‘Is that the place where Caesar got his water?’ Angelina dragged a bent wooden stirrer through her coffee as her general malaise coalesced into concrete memories of the two tours she’d given that morning – stock-in-trade hour-long walks through ‘The Rome of Ancient History’ that were the staple nourishment of her present existence. The bizarre question had come from a particularly inquisitive member of her second group, just before lunch, as the woman had posed in a floral muumuu for a stream of photographs her trigger-happy husband never stopped taking. She’d asked it while pointing to a marble fountain with a massive depiction of the Graeco-Roman god Triton at its centre, whose date of construction, ‘AD 1643’, was clearly carved into its central spire.
‘No, my dear. Close, and a very good guess, but not quite.’ The reply that came out of Angelina’s mildly chapped lips had been gentle, friendly and understanding – characteristics that had come with practice. ‘This is the Fontana del Tritone, and came slightly later than that, as a gift to Pope Urban VIII by one of our most famous Renaissance sculptors and architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who also designed much of St Peter’s Square. Though Julius Caesar did live in this part of the city.’ Twenty centuries before. She’d smiled, which had taken tremendous effort.
The tourist had nodded knowingly, as if this had been what she’d suspected all along. A plastic sun visor protruding from her forehead like a duck’s bill cast a purple glow over her features, through which her expression suggested that it was sheer politeness by which she condescended to be corrected by a tour guide. Angelina could see the computation of her tip decreasing in the other woman’s sour expression.
This was a common phenomenon, to which Angelina had grown accustomed over the past thirteen months of this strange but necessary employment. The average tourist came to Rome ‘knowing’ only two things about the ancient city: that Julius Caesar lived and died here, and that gladiators – who in their minds all spoke with dispassionate, monotone Australian accents and looked unsurprisingly like Russell Crowe – fought their way through the streets on a more or less daily basis. Every spot such people passed was assumed to be the locus of one or the other of these events, until forcibly persuaded otherwise; and then, the corrections were only grudgingly received.
That had been her morning. Just like yesterday. And the day before. Just like tomorrow.
And so there was a sigh, and another espresso, and another interior lamentation, and Angelina’s day proceeded like all the rest.
The weight of her thoughts was almost enough to keep Angelina distracted from the strange movements of the crowds around her. Thoughts can be like an anchor, the more discouraging ones forged of a heavy iron that roots us in our own spot in the sea, oblivious to the swells of the world around us, stuck and immobile, her interior monologue had lamented more than once. But though Angelina’s anchor was heavy at that moment, her ship going nowhere, she could see over the waves just enough to notice that something about the course of the bodies in the ancient square was – unusual.
Yes, many still queued at the pillars of the Pantheon, waiting to stand atop the classical marble floor and gaze up at the square-recessed dome whose bronze and gold had been stripped away in the sixteenth century to be melted down for the artistic decoration of St Peter’s Basilica. And yes, many continued to sit at small tables in front of coffee shops all around the square, just like her.
But there was a motion away from the square that was entirely out of the ordinary. Hordes of bodies pushed to make their way out of its arteries – the picturesque Via della Rotonda to the south and the Salita de’ Crescenzi to the west – as well as the smaller streets that broke away to the north. Normally every avenue of access to the Pantheon was a way in, but at this moment, they all appeared to be exits. All except those directed eastward, which remained almost empty.
A curiosity, Angelina mused. The only direction that doesn’t point towards the river.
Something was drawing them, like a magnet pulling them away from the landmark site.
Because Angelina Calla had nothing better to do, she rose from her table, dropped a few euros into the glass dish she hadn’t used as an ashtray, and followed the crowds towards the water.