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VII. NORTH TO BRACCIANO
Darwin has a small, bright-yellow Fiat sports utility vehicle. It’s parked in a nearby brick garage that looks like a relic from Napoleonic times or even earlier, with its rounded arch entrance, cobblestone driveway, and rollup metal gate. Amalthea comes out lugging a few personal items, including the birdcage with the cricket inside. Off you go, as the car roars out, letting the door close automatically. Amalthea screeches to a halt at the sidewalk, sunglasses glinting and lips blowing a pink bubble of gum. You help Darwin into the back seat, where he makes himself as comfortable as he can. He has long legs that stretch across the back, and a huge frame that makes the car rock as he settles into a corner. "My pain moves around," he explains with stoic humor. "One minute it is my liver, the next moment my ribs, then a headache, while my eyes flicker with strange lights. If this is dying, it is a colorful process."
"Don’t talk like that," Amalthea says sharply. She revs the engine, does a split-second dance with the clutch and the stick shift, and you are on your way—where to, you aren’t sure yet. As you pull away, you notice a curtain stirring—the old woman stares down at you from the shadows of a second story window.
Darwin ignores Amalthea’s well-intentioned protest about his attitude. In the daylight, you see that he has short but thick whitish hair and large, tired-looking eyes with dark bags under them. His face has a certain worn aristocratic charm, with its Roman nose and high, narrow cheekbones. He has the thin lips and sharp chin you have seen in busts of Dante. "You will be my second eyes and ears," Darwin tells you as the car rockets out onto the Viale Metronio, to the Via Latina, and thus out of town. "I don’t think I will have the fortitude to remember everything we see, nor the strength to catalog our thoughts and observations. Perhaps, when we return, you and Amalthea can create a website about our experiences."
Amalthea powders her nose at a red light and touches up her light pink lipstick. Her fingernails are immaculately groomed with pale polish, and a faint jasmin-like fragrance surrounds her. You notice an expensive Parisian perfume in the fishnet map-holder under the glove compartment. The light changes. Suddenly, droning Vespas surround your car. On them sit men and women wearing white bubble helmets, jackets, and scarves. All around you hurtle cars, buses, trucks, and the occasional concrete mixer. As in most places in Europe, driving is an act of violence. Even slowing briefly may get you run off the road, or at least honked at by someone feeling the biological imperative to go 140 kilometers per hour in a zone marked for half that speed.
Darwin explains: "We are making a little side trip to Lake Bracciano just north of Rome. We are making some special arrangements. You will understand when we get there, but I can tell you that Amalthea will be wearing the body of a young fellow named Felix. It has to be—they had one of those Mediterranean cultures in which women did not even have their own names, but were named after their fathers or husbands. If you were Marcus, your wife might be Marcia, and your daughter was Marcella, meaning Little Marcia. If you were Julius, your wife was Julia and your daughter might be Juliana or a similar diminutive like, say, Julianula or Iulilla something. Women were supposed to be invisible, though in practice it didn’t always work out that way. You understand, then, why it’s best for me—for any woman—to arrive resembling a man. Don’t worry, the ancient Greek and Roman deities did it all the time, like when gray-eyed Athena appeared to Telemachus as a male warrior in The Odyssey."
At that, Amalthea glares into the rearview mirror at Darwin, blowing a bubble that explodes with a significant little pop.
The car flies along modern roadways, passing by turns ancient basilicas and modern factories. You pass by the typical modern gas stations, movie theaters, and supermarkets, and yet every minute or two there is a fragment of ancient wall or a gate leading to a mysterious garden where a marble faun peers out of foliage.
You cross the Tiber along Lungotevere (Tiber Shore Road) Vaticano. St. Peter’s dome rises a mile or so on your left. On your right is the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian (First Century A.D.) which in recent centuries has been the Pope’s fortress in times of danger (for example, during the Protestant Sack of Rome in 1627) and more recently just another place to hang his petasus—that’s a round-topped, floppy-brimmed hat worn until the early 1900s by Roman Catholic priests, which is borrowed from the typical garb of ancient Latin farmers and pilgrims. Put wings on it and it’s the flying hat of Mercury.
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