My Last Trimester in Rome

A Crime Story...

Nicolas will be one month in two days and he is offically off the IV in his head and now just suffers from a very bad haircut. He is weighing in at 4.5 pounds and the best news is that he gets to wear clothes for the first time tomorrow. I am up late washing his clothes. I just got the news today...he is moving into a CRIB!!! It is the best of times...we are still a few weeks away from him being able to eat entirely from bottles...but this is definitely two steps forward...Since Nicolas is doing better and I am on my own here I have becme more adventurous on how I spend my days and I have had a few adventures...one day in particular was very full and so I wanted to tell you all that happened...it involves a CRIME!!!...see attached. I pasted the entry I made of the event from my journal I started....it's a word doc...let me know if you can open it.

** Please note all persons and events are real. No names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Day 31
Didn’t think I could make it this long on my own. I woke up at 7:30a.m. as my cell phone alarm reminds me. It’s going to be a big day. I have to hurry. I put on my hot water for tea. I had to move to tea because my homemade espresso on the stove was scary looking and tasting…and then I make toast in the oven (never used to do that before either.) I get in the shower where I “jimmied” a wire hanger to hang the showerhead because it was busted when I moved into this apartment. I pull my wafer thin shower curtain I purchased at the Eurostore (Italian version of the 99 cents store). I had to buy one because the one in the apartment had mildew on it. Sometimes it feels like camping in my own apartment which reminds me every morning that this is not the Hilton.

I begin to splash water to wet myself quickly before I have to turn the water off to shampoo and lather which is a prophylactic measure I learned…otherwise the hot water will not last.

I head out of my apartment in my new coat just purchased at “Oviesse” (like a Mervyn’s or Kohl’s) around the corner from St. Peter’s for 30 Euro because I was freezing my buns off in the maternity jacket I came with…speaking of which I am out of maternity jeans which is all I brought when I came since I was 7 months pregnant at the time that vacation started which seems like a lifetime ago. Thanks to a sale after Christmas I shed my maternity clothes for some regular stuff.

I get down one block before I think “I see him in there maybe I will try again…maybe 6 times is the charm.” I enter the neighborhood “bar” which here is a coffee and pastry and sandwich bar where you stand and eat. Some of the cheapest and best food you can find. If I didn’t have a lunch date I would stock up and buy 3 half sandwiches with no crust and a large acqua gassata (pelegrino) for the bargain basement price of 2.55 Euro.

But this visit inside right now is for experimental purposes. I walk in. “Bon Giorno. Bon Giorno.” I exchange with the man behind the counter. The man behind the register however says nothing…he is my test. I order “un cappuccino” the counter man gives me the bill for .80 cents. Yep you heard it 80 cents and I spend $2.75 at Starbucks for the same thing.

I slurp down the capp to get warm before my walk to the Appiano train station in my little neighborhood of “Monte Mario” in North east Rome.

Now the test…I go over to the register and say to the old man behind the counter typical short fat godfather type – Bon Giorno I say to him and his eyes get big and he says, “Parli Inglese?” (you speak English) I say Si and he says something in Italian and walks away quickly.

I have been trying to get him to talk to me since I cam came here but I as an American with no Italian (non parlo Italiano.) It is not going to happen. So I pretty much scare him to death and he passes me off to someone else to serve me. Oh well I will try again tomorrow. I heard him ask someone who translated for me that he asked if I had gotten lost and couldn’t find my way back to my tourbus…there are no tourists in this area.

I hop the metropolitano (subway) and head to Piazza Barberrini the center to most tourist locations including the Hard Rock Café and McDonald’s. I get off at the Spagna station near the Spanish steps. The subway is packed body to body. I cannot even turn around and I smell a pack of French tourists and listen to them talk. I notice a bald man…Italian with his two small children, one in a stroller. I noticed a couple of other Italian men next to me along with the rest of the mixed bagged of people I was jammed with in the subway car.

The Spagna stop comes and I hop out and the man and his kids hop out with me and we head to the escalator. The subway doors close and one of the men I saw earlier is banging to get out “Auita, Auita” – Help Help!!! And another man runs past me and two ten year old dark haired girls run up the escalator and are stopped by me and the man with two kids blocking them. The man on the subway runs out and up the escalator right next to me and looks dead at me as he yells for the police and my eyes get big and I start having a “Midnight Express” moment (great 1979 movie) thinking this is where they find Hashish taped to my chest that someone else put there. Instead he reaches just past me to the two small girls and they ask me to hold their bags…I think that is what they said… anyway…and they open them up and find two big KNIVES and 10 wallets fall out…unbelievable. By the time the escalator gets to the top the police were there. I was so excited and so shaken I have never been so close to crime being perpetrated right in front of me!!!... and by the cutest ten year old gypsy girls you ever did see.

As I stood watching this unfold I realized the two girls were so calm. In fact they just stood there watching us overreact. A regular kid would be in tears. As if they knew to show no weakness. As a matter of fact when the police officer asked them just one question…which of course I didn’t understand but the girls’ responses I did. They both pointed to each other and said, “She did it.” Then they were whisked away behind closed doors.

Phew!! A lot of excitement and all before noon. I continued on my way taking the shortcut down the Spanish Steps to get to my next destination the American bookstore and then to my lunch date. I whisked passed hundreds of tourists bumping into them at every step. I stopped to help them take group shots and then I am off down another street. I am clearly not a tourist anymore.

Oh good the Libreria Americano is open today and I rush inside. I ask Gus what is new this week in the store. I call him Gus not because it is but because he looks like one. I buy two books to keep my mind occupied over the next week while waiting at the hospital…I then rush out again back up the Spanish steps. It shaves ten minutes off my walk to the restaurant in the Piazza Barberrini by cutting back up the Steps.

The restaurant is called La Tavernitta. I ate there hours before I went into labor a month ago and have been coming back ever since. It is a small family place just off the beaten path but caters to tourists who find it but has a large local following too. I am now considered a local. I know this because my first time there I and all the other foreigners are given our bill typed/printed and with space for a tip…Now when I go…the two owners see me so much they give me the same bill as the Italian customers, handwritten in Italian and no space for tip.

I come in and exchange “Bona Sera…Bona Sera.” I look around and see Mark in the back. Hard to miss Mark since he is now a priest and living at the Vatican and he rarely is seen not wearing his costume as much as I ask him not to. “Mark…Why aren’t you in your street clothes?” Because I get a better table if I wear this..you know…the collar.” “Not here Mark they already know us here…you nut.”

Mark Spencer is a year older than me and I met him in college at Loyola Marymount in 1991. We majored in Theology together and we both continued on to graduate school. I stayed in LA and he went to Berkeley. He received a fellowship to study at the Vatican toward the end of his grad studies and never came home. He decided to study law and turned his degree into becoming a canon lawyer for the Catholic church…he gets to write a lot of the dogma the rest of us have to listen to that the Church dishes out. He needed to become a priest to be in the Vatican and move up in his job and in order to stay assigned to Rome even though he is a lawyer. So he did. And now he is a big shot over here and he is originally from a town of 3000 in Iowa…go figure.

I, on the other hand, have the exact same religious education and a law degree, just as he did, but somehow ended up at law firm at the Orange Block…not exactly Rome where I could get to speak four languages on a daily basis….but whatever.

I sit down to eat a long and glorious meal with a lot of wine and then some. I tell him my pick pocket story and at some point he says “you are having tea with the Bishop. I set it up again after you flaked….”
“Mark I didn’t flake I went into labor and had to cancel…what do you expect?

Anyway we part and plan to meet after Mass on Sunday at the Vatican for a tour of the residences there and tea with a bishop who is his mentor…

But the best part of my day is yet to come…
I hop the train this time and get off at Gemelli station. I race up the stairs. Put on my blue covers over my shoes…grab a gown and begin to scrub the grime off my hands and wrists and lather on the hand sanitizer and enter through the glass door. I see Feliciano my favorite nurse and the only male one who took care of me on Christmas night…he is holding an object wrapped in a plain white towel on his leg with one arm…and smiles at me and says Bona Sera…Tutto pronto? (all ready)

I say “e’Llore?” (now?) and he says “Si.”
I grab a chair and sit down and he grabs the object off his leg and passes it to me and I flip the towel open and Say “Hi Nicolas…you will never guess what happen to me on the train today and guess where I am going tomorrow…” the perfect end to a strange day….To be continued…next entry…tea with the bishop…who falls asleep and has a lisp!!!

posted by Tonto @ 3:33 PM