People Go, Life Goes On - Missing Person 3

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.