Part V: Sunglasses and sympathy

There are two ways to buy sunglasses in Rome. Let’s skip over the expensive brands, because nine out of ten people you see wearing those brands got them on the street for ten bucks – the ones who actually pay full price are absurd. Instead of rude shopkeepers and ridiculous prices you can visit a little table manned by a North African or South Asian guy who works longer hours and speaks better English. You try on a few pairs and then bargain with the guy, half in English, half in Italian, or all in Italian, or in French, or Berber or Tamil if you happen to have the agility. You tell him you are a New Yorker so ‘non mi rompe le scatole’, get them for 10 Euros or so. Or, if you are nearly broke like many of us, you can go where the men at the little tables shop – the wholesale stores near Piazza Vittorio, and buy the glasses from the numerous shady (that is, out of the sun) storefronts lining the streets. If you want to get them for as cheap as the men at the little tables get them – I suddenly realized – you can fork up the money for about a zillion pairs at 1 Euro each and establish your own little table in front of the Colosseum. They say that necessity is the mother of invention – I was going native already.

Since I was far too drunk and jetlagged to take another Roman bus, or even find a bus in Rome on a Sunday, I staggered of a little trattoria into the blinding sun without paying, the proprietor calling after me meekly, “You can pay me after you get a job, va bene”. Although my spirit longed to head for Piazza Vittorio and start my sunglass enterprise right away, my body instead made a sharp right at the Tiber and, nearly plunging into its murky brown shadows, staggered over the Ponte Sisto toward Trastevere. I was not lost, only subconsciously drawn into another reality – maybe it was the few glasses absenthe I’d had with lunch.

Sweating that horrid sweat that only comes from leaving an empty glass and entering the searing heat, I hovered around, dancing between beautiful people walking small obnoxious dogs, supermodels being slobbered over by teenage and middle-aged boys, and fat American families with lobster–burns lining up for neon–colored ice creams (I imagined they would slather this bright green salve onto their burnt hides). There, just on the brink of Santa Maria in Trastevere, stood an extremely petite Bangladeshi man selling sunglasses that were sitting on top of little black felt bags, and the man burnished a knowing grin; was it the absenthe or had he drawn me here and away from my plight, sapping all the energy of my capitalistic charisma?

Oh, they were belllllllli, this one pair – huge and bug-like and hopelessly bulging with thick pink rims – in Italy, this is the height of fashion for both women and women; you have to smoke big cigarettes and ride haphazardly on a motorino with these. Getting away with wearing them in public is the second greatest thing in Italy besides wearing fishnet stockings to work in an office. Here, this is called ‘fitting in’.

“Dodici. Twelve Euro” answered the bald man, although I had not asked, only drooled. “You want them”. That was it - it was a statement, not a question.
Perhaps he could see the sun gouging out my bloodshot eyes, he had seen it so many times before. One encounters demons in Rome after drinking absenthe on a hot day. Or worse – beer-goggling the locals on this stuff is simply not safe.
“Otto”, I demanded — eight. I had recently visited the Arab world and become empowered in my bargaining capacity.
“Dieci. Ten Euros, no less”. I whimpered and took my beautiful absurdities.
“And!”, the man cheered me in perfect English now, “they come with this great little drawstring carrying case!”

Voguing in a shop window, I looking completely deranged, like some sort of exotic bee. They were wonderful and now I had the whole afternoon free - no job, no money. I suddenly felt exactly like a local. Still drunk, I stumbled on toward the Vatican, that very quarter where I had met some demons on a previous expedition.

It was still the same cast of characters, except more desperate than before on the graffiti-covered streets. And me, living out of a suitcase, without a man. Baby is gone gone gone. He will come back, follow me back – if he forgives me for dragging him through all this – in another couple of weeks. I am supposed to find work and find us a place, then he will come back. Not easy, maybe he’ll be here soon. Till then, I am out to achieve the impossible, living like a bourgeois bum in this whorish city. Walking through the Borgo as the afternoon turned the walls rusty red, there some old guys were playing chess – one looks up, rolls the eyes vaguely at me, murmuring “sei bellissima”, and back down to contemplate his pawns.