Travel Fiction | Rome: The Sea of Sorrow and the White Wave

When I was a kid I loved stories by Hemingway and songs by Neil Sedaka. When I was thirty-three I was a writer staying in the best suite in Hotel Piranesi overlooking the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. My first night there I went out on the balcony with a whiskey soda and I heard Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl” calling out from some bar in the neighborhood. You start the year off fine, indeed. That was the beginning of 2016.

I was leaning over the balcony when an owl swooped down the street. Graceful. Silent.  Out of place in the chaos of Rome. And as my eyes followed it I saw that from the roof across the way another man was smoking and watching the owl too. We nodded and he called out something in Italian I didn’t understand, but I laughed and he laughed then we waved and I went inside. It felt good to close the heavy door, a substantial door, then I went down the stairs into the living room.

As I crossed the living room I heard Marie say something, and I looked into the bedroom and saw that the bed was full of blood. Her voice wasn’t concerned, but I was.

Her voice was weak but unworried. “I’m okay baby. I just don’t feel great.”

That wasn’t even the worst moment. The worst came later in the hospital when she was apologizing for something that I knew wasn’t her fault and I hope she knows wasn’t her fault.

I hadn’t seen Marie in almost two years when I returned to Rome on a book tour and met Ginevra. This time my hotel was on the other side of the river south of the Vatican, but after a night of being dragged around town by Ginevra I ended up at the Spanish Steps, then at Piazza del Popolo, then back in not only the same hotel but the same room. I didn’t even notice it until I went into the bathroom and saw myself in the mirrors that I had once thought so appealing.

When I came out of the bathroom I told her that I wanted to smoke a cigarette first, then went up the stairs to the balcony. I looked out over the piazza and up at the Villa Borghese. This time the owl didn’t fly down the street. No fellow smoker emerged from the apartment across the way. And when I finished my cigarette and opened the heavy door and went down the stairs back into the room she was on the bed, but there wasn’t any blood. And I was terribly sad.