Rome, Eternal City.

I don’t know whether to write this story in the present tense or past.

Someone I always remember in my prayers and when I light a candle is Joe, known to the Romans as “Giuseppe.”

A fixture of our neighborhood, Joe is now gone, perhaps forever.

A cultured Englishman, he has lived in the most picturesque neighborhoods of Old Rome since the sixties.  For many of these years his home has been the street. This was by choice and not a question of circumstance. He could no longer live confined by four walls, he told someone. Something changed in his life to provoke his decision, but I will never know what.

Originally, Joe lived on the streets around the Campo de’ Fiori. Then there was some sort of incident with a few of the locals and he moved to our neighborhood, where he felt safer.

Unlike so many of our street creatures, Joe never became a drunk. He used to make a living gathering cardboard boxes and paper from the streets, which he would sell to a local recycler. The shop went out of business several years ago, but as long as it lasted you could see Joe slowly dragging bundles of material bound by twine around the neighborhood, depositing them at some quiet corner, then retracing his steps to drag more bundles to that spot, then watching over them until he had accumulated enough to sell. That was his livelihood. The last bundle, the small one, was not for sale. It contained his personal belongings, blankets, extra sweaters and jackets for the chilly season, that was about it. Did he preserve old photographs or keepsakes from his settled years, when life must have been easier for him?

Someone told me Joe had been a professional nurse in England. Someone else told me Joe was part English, part Scot, that his father had been an eminent professor and that Joe had also been a professor.

For as long as I have known him Joe has always been disheveled and dirty and smelled foul. His shoes were often torn. If they weren’t, he wore them unlaced or unbuckled. Even his feet defied confinement. He had been having trouble with them for years.

By the time I met him Joe had lost most of his teeth, but he was always cordial and courteous, quick to say hello, ask how you were, and had you seen the new exhibit at such and such gallery, and if you hadn’t you should see it at once because it was true art.

And had you seen Joe’s buddy Romeo, the stray macho tiger with the huge eyes, the cat who could mesmerize you with his gaze, around? Romeo had been savagely attacked, so savagely that his leg bone stuck out through his lacerated flesh. The local vet cured Romeo’s leg, then it was ciao to the balls, and a kind woman took him in and gave him a home with a rooftop to roam so he would not be totally confined.

The “you” in these conversations was “me” and though I always felt for Joe, deeply enough to remember him in my prayers by name, I never wanted to over engage in conversation. I never wanted to get too close and, I am sure, neither did he.

Despite his appearance and odor, Joe was generally liked and accepted in the neighborhood. He often had his cappuccino and brioche at the counter of the cafe in the piazza, chatting amiably with the manager and the baristas.

Joe never spoke about himself and his past, what he had done in his life, why he lived on the street, how he had come to this point. Joe always exhibited a great, positive spirit and ably hid his darker thoughts, his difficulties, from public scrutiny.

He asked me for change only once; otherwise he never asked me for anything. And he never begged. 

A few months ago I offered Joe one of my canes. The pharmacy sold them as a pair and I only use one. He was surprised by my offer and insisted he didn’t need it. Someone told me a well-to-do Englishwoman in our neighborhood gave him pocket money regularly, but only a little at a time. Living and sleeping on the street made Joe vulnerable to robbery.

For safety’s sake, Joe preferred to sleep during the day in some quiet corner and stay awake in the afternoon and through the night. Recently, in the late afternoons between lunch and dinner, he would sit at one of the empty tables at the famous restaurant in the piazza to pass the time, sometimes watching the world go by, sometimes with a vacant stare. The waiters went about their business setting up and sometimes chatted with him. Joe always knew when it was time to leave. No one had to ask him.

A few years ago during a very cold winter the priests arranged for him to sleep in a warm, clean room on their property and he wisely accepted. He also slept in during the winters that followed.

Joe loved the annual Christmas Day lunch that is held in the nave of the historic church in the piazza. The pew benches where the faithful cry through weddings and funerals are turned into seats around long tables, and volunteers serve a great feast to the poor and the lonely, to the neglected and the rejected, under the richly gilded ceiling with a painting of the Madonna rising to heaven. Much of the neighborhood turns out. Some years the current president or an ex-president of Italy puts in an appearance. The press covers the event every year and many times you could see Joe being interviewed on the evening news praising the feast. He is a handsome man with a face full of character, a face a camera could love.

The day manager of the cafe in the piazza has now informed me that Joe was having serious skin problems in addition to his foot problems and has been taken to England for care.He may never return to Rome, where he has lived most of his life. I can only hope his great, positive and cordial spirit will prevail, that he will adapt to his new environment, even if it is within four walls, and will let his caregivers give to him.

Many expatriates I have known finally leave Rome toward the end, when they want to be cared for on their native soil. Most of these people have been economically privileged.

I can’t say what the future holds for me, but I hope I will never have to leave Rome. I am always an American, but Rome is my native soil.

I offer up a prayer now for Joe and Evaristo, for La Signora and her cats, and for the neglected and the rejected, urbi et orbi, in Rome and in the world.                

Rome, Eternal City.

Then there is Evaristo, an outstanding eccentric in a neighborhood known for its eccentrics and the often excessive tolerance, which may just be a form of resignation, of those who live within the lines. 

An elderly artist, wiry, with long, wispy white hair and most of his teeth gone, Evaristo dresses in a style all his own, with hats or scarves, bracelets or necklaces he may have found in the garbage or fashioned himself. He is an “attaccabottoni” with a passion for engaging anyone and everyone in rambling, if not eternal, conversation. If you let him, he would chew your ear off.

I never cared to converse with Evaristo. Not because he is eccentric (frankly, so am I), but because I never wanted to take the time.

Also, I regarded him as a nuisance. I know no person’s life and character can be summed up in a word, and, I admit, some people over the years regarded me as a nuisance, too. These were people who didn’t know me well and wouldn’t help me realize my aspirations. 

When I lived in my previous flat, across the piazza from his, Evaristo started ringing my bell on Sunday mornings to inquire about his cousins, who lived across the hall from me. I rarely saw and didn’t know these people and, after much insistence on my part, he stopped. Morning, noon or night, Evaristo was always striking up conversations with the young tourists who roam our neighborhood. He spoke Italian and broken English, and they their own language and broken Italian. He had a fondness for pretty girls.

Evaristo was gregarious, but he must have also been lonely with a craving for attention. A few years ago he hung huge permanent displays of colorful puppets, dolls and sundry objects loosely strung together from two of his windows overlooking the piazza. People who passed along the main street toward the hub of our neighborhood seemed to delight in these displays and wondered about the person who lived there. I always thought these creations were an eyesore but, aside from my personal opinion, if they ever fell from the windows they could seriously injure a passerby.

For a time on weekday or Saturday mornings Evaristo got into the habit of turning his powerful stereo up full blast so the whole piazza between his flat and mine could hear the nuns reciting the Holy Rosary on Vatican Radio. Not that he ever struck me as particularly religious, but, then again, I didn’t know much about him. For a time he used to roam the neighborhood streets in the quiet afternoon hours, siesta time, or sometimes late at night with a blaring transistor radio hanging from his wrist. Just in case you wanted to get some sleep, he was the angel who kept you from it.

A few months ago I asked a neighborhood friend, our local “gazette,” about him because I hadn’t seen him in a while. Gazzetta is not a gossip by nature, but she is exceptionally well informed about what’s happening in our little corner of the earth. She told me Evaristo, who lives in the building adjacent to hers and in his more vivacious moments just a few years ago used to throw his smelly garbage straight out the back window into the inner courtyard shared by their two buildings, had grown depressed and wouldn’t come out anymore. He has removed most of the objects from the windows now and his shutters are always closed, but those that remain testify to his presence.

Another friend told me Evaristo often went to the local hospital late at night to scrounge food from the kitchen. If there was anything left, the staff always obliged him.

For years his signed drawings adorned the walls of one of our local chicken and pizza dens. They were filled with color and whimsy and rendered with a deft hand. When the shop remodeled the drawings disappeared. Evaristo would tape small photocopied announcements with his name and phone number on light posts or on building walls, inviting people to see his art. He wasn’t having an exhibit. If you called him, he would arrange to meet you and talk.

Evaristo always wanted to count for something, and as he aged and grew lonelier it must have been difficult for him.

Evaristo was, and is, an artist. Although he has now withdrawn, he was, and is, a piece of our neighborhood that is slowly changing even as it remains the same.

I imagine someone from the parish checks up on him every day and makes sure he eats and is well.

Perhaps Evaristo will end up like my beloved neighbor at Trevi Fountain, Nonna Giulia. When she decided her time had come she took to her bed and died a month later, tired but in apparent good health, tended to by her daughter. At the venerable age of 93 she hadn’t done it all or seen it all, but she had had enough.

I should try to remember Evaristo more often in my prayers and when I light a candle.

Rome, Eternal City.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Jaded Romans love to toss off this nugget of wisdom.

Another, that I have been hearing ever since I settled in Rome, is that 15 or 20 years ago Rome was a much better place to live. ”World weary” Romans who subscribe to this idea may be under the illusion they have “done it all and seen it all.” 

My first landlady, at Trevi Fountain, the Red Countess, who left her spacious flat next to my tiny studio for long stretches of the year to indulge her passion for painting and the country life in Tuscany, always grumbled that Rome had once been better, as did several illustrious filmmakers I met over the years and never had the opportunity to work with.

To my eyes Rome remains eternally beautiful and things change even as they remain the same. When I settled in Rome decades ago I was younger and slimmer and had my whole life before me, along with the dreams I hoped to realize, so, from that perspective, things certainly were better then.

I have not “done it all or seen it all,” nor do I expect to. I have never framed my dreams and aspirations in those terms. Now, in my lovely neighborhood of Old Rome, the glorious scent of jasmine is fading as the first heat of June strikes, and my life’s adventure continues, moment to moment.

People go, life goes on, and one may barely notice their passing.

For years I used to bump into the Signora De Aristocratis around the neighborhood. She was a thin Roman of a certain age with salt and pepper hair pulled back off her lightly wrinkled face, wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, casually elegant in loose fitting slacks and shirt, usually with a cigarette in her hand. Signora De Aristocratis was one of those upper class woman used to commanding others with nothing less than the utmost courtesy, but she was not a woman to be commanded.

She always did her shopping alone but would banter about the state of the neighborhood and other light topics with the shopkeepers. If she was like me, she engaged in long and silly conversations with her feline babies.

Most of the time we crossed paths at the butcher’s, where she bought choice cuts for her circa 30 Norwegians.

La Signora was a chain smoker, and I often wondered what would happen to her precious cats if something happened to her. We never struck up more than a passing acquaintanceship, just a “buongiorno” and a superficial exchange of cat news as the butcher ground her beef to Norwegian cat-palate perfection.

I have precious cats, too, never as many as she had, but mine are all from the street, spayed and neutered.

La Signora was a snob about her cats, a snob about the veterinarians she used, a snob about who she would allow to take care of her cats. A “gattara” like precious Bambi, who works in cat colonies and on the streets saving strays, no matter how expert in handling felines and administering therapy, never crossed the threshold of La Signora’s lovely apartment with enchanting views over the Roman  rooftops. La Signora was afraid a “gattara” might bring in germs on her clothes or shoes that could infect them.

A month or two ago I asked the butcher about her. He informed me she had passed away two years earlier. And her cats? Taken care of by the heir. How? Where? The butcher couldn’t say.

The butcher lost a good customer, and the cats lost their mommy.

I, too, worry about what will happen to my cats if I precede them leaving this life and Rome. 

Now, when I walk to my favorite café in the piazza I look up at the top floor flat La Signora used to inhabit. The roof terrace is still entirely enclosed, sides and top, by the heavy wiring that protected her cats, but no one is there to enjoy the view.

I pray someone is caring for her cats the way she would have wanted.