Arrival Story (#2)

I’ve been trying for quite some time now to start this story about arriving in Rome, because it’s been hard to get past my arrival in Ciampino airport and my bus ride through the city to the Campo de’ Fiori. I was busy finding the tickets, finding the route, wandering the alleys before I found the Campo. Then I was sitting from then on out, waiting for the office to open so I could get my key to my apartment. I realize now, though, that none of those events matter. I remember Shawn instructing us about writing, telling his story about seeing the city for the first time after stepping out of the train station. I remember his having had to turn around, take a deep breath and collect himself before venturing into the seething mass of Rome. I just walked right out, as strange as if may be that someone was so struck he needed a moment of collection, whereas I was oblivious and unconcerned, so be it. Maybe it was from traveling for five months prior, maybe it was being tired and hungry, maybe I was looking at my feet as usual, but the only part of my arrival in Rome that really impressed me was sitting in the Campo for nine hours that Sunday night.
I’d been traveling too long, slept in too many parks, and had too little cash to be fluffy enough to sleep in a hostel for seven or eight hours before picking up my apartment keys. I was just going to sleep in a park for a few hours and then come back. I’d done it before, it was fine. The problem in Rome, though, is that there are no parks, just tiny scrubby bare patches with drunks already on the benches. So when I got to the Campo, shrugged my bag (18K, exactly) against the Rome Center’s big portone door, I knew it was going to be a long night.
It was all mostly a blur after that moment of arrival. I watched the people mostly, and mostly their pissing against walls, as the Rome Center is a bit recessed and out of site. I do remember noticing, through my sleepy haze, that as the night wore on and the drinkers drank more, they went less and less into the alley. First they walked all the way into the covered alley far in, then, when it was closed, through its wire door. The urinaters then retreated from corner to corner until, around three or three thirty, they just stood in the middle of the alley and splattered their shoes while sighing with relief.
At some point I went for gelato, mostly because I was hungry, but also because everyone says that it’s so damned good in Italy. I ordered biscotto because it was exotic and stracciatella because it wasn’t and walked out of my first gelateria. I licked it mechanically, unthinkingly, and was halfway through my second lick when I stopped in mid-stride in the middle of the alley and sighed, out loud, amidst the late night revelers. Gelato really is that good, that good. The shop was on via Garibaldi, and the Campo is only a three blocks, but I was done before I even saw the caffé that acts as a gate for the people coming in.
I did sleep too, twice for two hours, once hunched up against the portone, once spread out using my pack as a pillow. I can sleep like a rock, and even the Campo didn’t wake me, rather it was on the pulsing pain of sleeping limbs that got me awake. The first time I stood and watched some kids drink from the water fountain nearby. They plugged the tap with their fingers and drank from the thin water stream that arched upward.
When in Rome.
I drank; and it was cool and long and fresh.
Then the cleaners came, the entire army of them, and swept up the glass from the broken bottles that littered the Campo. One man passed along a bottle, and when it was empty, the last man shattered it against the statue of Giordano Bruno that dominates the square, sweeping his glass in with the rest. I watched them sweep and wash and spit and leave. And when they were done, I took Heather McCue’s poem from my pack’s smallest pocket, where I put it six months beforehand. “What He Said,” is a great poem, introduced to me by a poor instructor, and I took it with me all the way to Rome, through 13 countries, two continents, and ten time zones. Two stapled sheets. I walked out onto the Campo for the first time, alone. One is never alone in the Campo de’ Fiori, not even, I would hazard, at 4:30 in the morning, just between the cleaners’ departure and the venders’ arrival, but I was. I stood in front of Bruno, so much younger looking than I imagine him, and I read her poem. I read it for just over three hours until an instructor came out of her apartment and I had my first English words in Rome. I can still repeat that poem.