at least. It only made me wish I were somewhere more familiar, so that I could make my own needs clear.
Finally, an apron-clad waiter exhaled a string of musical syllables, barely waiting for my reply. Where had my week of language cramming gone?
Prego … grazie … per favore …
Damn that forgotten dictionary, even if I would have looked like a tourist carrying an entire library in my arms. I pointed at a square-shaped pastry on a man’s plate nearby and then jabbed at my own palm and jiggled the change in my pocket, walking away a minute later with a sorry breakfast to eat on the hoof.
Except that I refused to eat on the hoof. I walked on, trying to stir up a breeze, looking for a pleasant bench or a clean step. At 9:20, according to the public clock that was ten minutes fast, I wiped the crumbs from my hands and opened the sketchbook I’d brought, intent on drawing the object in front of me, a dry fountain topped by a statue of two cherubs holding hands. It was not well made, and there are few things more forlorn in a once-great city of aqueducts than a fountain without water—proof enough, I told myself, that Italy had more art and architecture than its citizens could appreciate. But sketching was something to do, and I’d finished half the picture when three children ran loudly up to the cherubs and began climbing up their fat legs and swinging from their chubby, linked arms.
“Get off,” I called to them in German, but they only laughed and scrabbled about, pleased to have an audience for their daring. “Go away.
Haut ab!
” Their laughter turned maniacal, even more so when I jumped to my feet, waving my arms above my head. They were no more afraid of me than the pigeons, which startled into the air and then settled again, bobbing their gray heads as they walked.
I slapped the sketchbook shut and reached in my jacket pocket where I had stored the three postcards I bought at the pensione, all destined for my sister Greta. She had made it a practice, ever since our father had passed away, to write me regularly from her home in Bamberg, two hundred kilometers from Munich, and she expected me to do the same. Her letters always followed a strict protocol: the greeting, the description of the current weather, an inquiry into the recipient’s weather, followed by carefully filtered news, nothing upsetting. I found my pen, set a postcard on top of my journal, and looked up at the sky: blue and cloudless. I greeted her and her husband, skipped a line, and wrote:
It is
…
I paused, thinking that “hot” would sound like a complaint
…
pleasant
.
But I didn’t feel like writing anymore, and I didn’t feel like being a tourist. Until I accomplished at least some part of what I’d been sent here to do, I’d have nothing to report. I did not even want to recite the formulaic pleasantries that would be expected.
I put the card away and pulled out the di Luca guide. I rubbed a hand across the book’s padded green cover, opening it without looking at the now-familiar gift inscription. I tried to immerse myself in the illustrations and old photos I’d studied so often, the lines and shadows I knew by heart. It was a calming exercise, so calming that I soon forgot my irritation, and jumped with surprise when a small leg rubbed against mine—the overheated appendage of a bold child, maybe fiveor six years old, one of the climbers, trying to see into this magical book that had commandeered my attention.
I ignored him, but he kept looking. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his round cheek and the long, black eyelashes batting every few seconds. I could hear the soft, ticking sound as he failed to suppress a swallow. He reached out one finger tentatively, toward the wine-colored ribbon trailing from the bottom of the book, marking a place several pages further on.
“You want to see that page? Well not yet. I’m not done here.” I said it in German, but he did not appear surprised by the
Finally, an apron-clad waiter exhaled a string of musical syllables, barely waiting for my reply. Where had my week of language cramming gone?
Prego … grazie … per favore …
Damn that forgotten dictionary, even if I would have looked like a tourist carrying an entire library in my arms. I pointed at a square-shaped pastry on a man’s plate nearby and then jabbed at my own palm and jiggled the change in my pocket, walking away a minute later with a sorry breakfast to eat on the hoof.
Except that I refused to eat on the hoof. I walked on, trying to stir up a breeze, looking for a pleasant bench or a clean step. At 9:20, according to the public clock that was ten minutes fast, I wiped the crumbs from my hands and opened the sketchbook I’d brought, intent on drawing the object in front of me, a dry fountain topped by a statue of two cherubs holding hands. It was not well made, and there are few things more forlorn in a once-great city of aqueducts than a fountain without water—proof enough, I told myself, that Italy had more art and architecture than its citizens could appreciate. But sketching was something to do, and I’d finished half the picture when three children ran loudly up to the cherubs and began climbing up their fat legs and swinging from their chubby, linked arms.
“Get off,” I called to them in German, but they only laughed and scrabbled about, pleased to have an audience for their daring. “Go away.
Haut ab!
” Their laughter turned maniacal, even more so when I jumped to my feet, waving my arms above my head. They were no more afraid of me than the pigeons, which startled into the air and then settled again, bobbing their gray heads as they walked.
I slapped the sketchbook shut and reached in my jacket pocket where I had stored the three postcards I bought at the pensione, all destined for my sister Greta. She had made it a practice, ever since our father had passed away, to write me regularly from her home in Bamberg, two hundred kilometers from Munich, and she expected me to do the same. Her letters always followed a strict protocol: the greeting, the description of the current weather, an inquiry into the recipient’s weather, followed by carefully filtered news, nothing upsetting. I found my pen, set a postcard on top of my journal, and looked up at the sky: blue and cloudless. I greeted her and her husband, skipped a line, and wrote:
It is
…
I paused, thinking that “hot” would sound like a complaint
…
pleasant
.
But I didn’t feel like writing anymore, and I didn’t feel like being a tourist. Until I accomplished at least some part of what I’d been sent here to do, I’d have nothing to report. I did not even want to recite the formulaic pleasantries that would be expected.
I put the card away and pulled out the di Luca guide. I rubbed a hand across the book’s padded green cover, opening it without looking at the now-familiar gift inscription. I tried to immerse myself in the illustrations and old photos I’d studied so often, the lines and shadows I knew by heart. It was a calming exercise, so calming that I soon forgot my irritation, and jumped with surprise when a small leg rubbed against mine—the overheated appendage of a bold child, maybe fiveor six years old, one of the climbers, trying to see into this magical book that had commandeered my attention.
I ignored him, but he kept looking. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his round cheek and the long, black eyelashes batting every few seconds. I could hear the soft, ticking sound as he failed to suppress a swallow. He reached out one finger tentatively, toward the wine-colored ribbon trailing from the bottom of the book, marking a place several pages further on.
“You want to see that page? Well not yet. I’m not done here.” I said it in German, but he did not appear surprised by the
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