“Allo, buongiorno! I’m Flavio. Come this way! ” he instructs and we stand, bleary-eyed and wobbly, while he unloads our bags from the trunk. He takes the heaviest suitcase and we follow behind, wheeled luggage bouncing on cobblestones. It’s two in the afternoon, although it feels like early morning to us, and the bar marked “Bar” is crowded with weathered old men speaking animatedly at the outdoor tables, drinking beer and picking at shared plates of antipasto.
“You like chocolate to drink?” Our host is talking to Coco now.
“Hot chocolate?” I clarify helpfully.
“Si! This is the best here. You have to try.” He gestures at the bar as we round the corner away from it, the volume suddenly turned down a notch.
He stops in front of a glossy dark green door, its details obscured by decades, probably centuries, of repainting. To the left is a shop that rents Vespas and to the left of that is a nondescript doorway with a small handwritten sign reading “Hard Work Tattoo.” Pulling out the sort of skeleton key that I have only seen in cartoon jails and European apartments, Flavio unlocks the door and leads us down a cool dark corridor to another door, a metal gate with a stack of mail stuffed between its bars.
“Second floor,” he says, snapping the suitcase’s handle into place and starting up the smooth marble steps.
I know this means third floor in Europe, but I’m still hoping I’m wrong. As I round the second spiraled level, I’m panting under the weight of the awkward carry-on bouncing against my back and the suitcase I’m holding against my chest like a baby, so narrow is the staircase. I see that he’s only paused for us to catch up and is now headed up to the third level. By the time we reach the apartment’s dark red door with it’s tiny number two the size of a postage stamp, I vow to start exercising once I get home.
The apartment is spacious and flooded with light from its tall double windows with the heavy metal shutters that seem to be required in Europe. Flavio leads us into the living room, where one window is open and a breeze lifts the thin white curtain. Coco and I rush to the window, which looks out over a tiny balcony strung with a faded red clothesline, a cluster of plants in terracotta pots nestled in one corner. The view is straight out of a Fellini film: a tightly-packed row of ancient buildings with the ubiquitous rounded clay roof shingles that have withstood centuries of war and weather. The house that faces ours is pinkish grey at its base, turning to rusty grey at its top. It seems barely wide enough for a single room on each of its three stories and the iron railing of its tiny roof deck is strung with white lights. Each corner of the roof holds a sturdy tree dotted with oranges, the only bright color in the city’s otherwise washed-out palette. Everything is old here. I feel old too.
The last time Coco and I were in Rome was 12 years ago. We spent a month in this neighborhood, but I don’t remember many of the specifics. Like which souvenir shop we visited to purchase the replica statue of Romulus and Remus, the twin babies being suckled by a she-wolf, who are symbolic of the city. Or which restaurant we ate cacio e pepe in, sneaking a blasphemous bottle of Heinz ketchup in my purse for Max, who refused to eat pasta without it. I don’t remember which of the cool, dark churches we walked through, pointing at the frescoed ceilings and gilded altars with hushed voices. I don’t remember which gelato shop we stopped at almost every night to order one of those waffle cones with a double opening that holds two small scoops of deep purple frutti di bosco or chocolate-streaked stracciatella. The city is at once foreign and familiar. The memories of that previous trip have faded and it feels like a movie I saw a long time ago and can’t quite remember the plot to or who starred in it, just that I liked it.
Flavio shows us how to work the TV, which we will never turn on, and the microwave, which we won’t use. He shows us where to dump the miniscule kitchen trash can once it fills, which it will every day, and where to put the recycling. The apartment has a full-size fridge, a rarity in European rentals, and a dishwasher.
“Coffee maker?” I ask, hopefully.
Flavio opens a cupboard and pulls out a tiny metal hourglass-shaped contraption that will produce a shot glass worth of coffee at a time. I sigh. At least I am the only one drinking it on this trip. I pull a Ziploc bag full of pre-ground coffee from my carry-on the second he leaves and try to figure out the stovetop, which requires flipping a switch on the wall to turn on the gas. Three miniature pots of coffee later and the fog of a sleepless night spent crammed in an economy-class airplane seat has dissipated. We venture out.
Coco and I squint as we step out into the late-afternoon sun, tugging the heavy wooden door shut behind us, and she notices the shop next door for the first time.
“Mom, we should get matching tattoos!”
“Hard Work Tattoo” is closed, its windows dark, no hours posted.
“We’ll see,” I demur, which she interprets as a yes.
“I’ve got it picked out,” she says, pulling out her phone to show me an Instagram photo of a simple line drawing. It’s a globe, the outline of a tiny plane encircling the earth with a dotted line.
“We’ll see,” I repeat, and we both know this will happen.
The next time we pass by, the shop is open and we enter, tentatively. The walls are papered in drawings: of stylized naked ladies, straddling guns or dolphins or bound with with thorny rose stems, with mermaid tails and hearts where their nipples should be; there are rosy-cheeked maidens with glossy, rippled hair, framed by lotus flowers or knotted ropes; and there are demons and daggers and beasts with bared teeth, less menacing than beautiful in the way they conjure black and white images of the sailors and burly, bare-chested men of another era.
We are greeted by a handsome 20-something man with dark curly hair and a beard. Coco shows him the image on her phone and he nods. Soon she is in the chair, knee to knee with the tattoo artist, her arm face up, wrist held tightly in his gloved hand. She doesn’t flinch at all when the needle drills into the soft white skin of her forearm as I film her. When it is my turn, I am uneasy. The chair feels too small, the arm position uncomfortable. I look away as the buzzing starts, telling myself that I’ve done this before, that I’ve never been bothered by needles anyway. But soon I feel a prickly sensation, heat rising up my torso. I know the color has drained from my face, but don’t say anything until the buzzing finishes and the tattoo artist is wiping the excess ink from my wrist.
“OK?” he asks, looking concerned.
“I feel a little dizzy,” I manage, worried that I may slump to the floor at any moment. “Maybe some water?”
He rushes to the back room and returns with a big bag of sugar packets, tearing the ends off two at once.
“Eat this, you’ll be ok,” he says with authority.
Coco is mortified.
I down the two sugar packets and accept a cup of water from the tattoo artist’s girlfriend, a green-haired beauty in a skullcap and heavy eyeliner, inked from neck to knuckles.
“Is totally normal,” she says, reassuringly. “Sometimes it’s just the place on the body, where it is, that makes you feel faint.”
I make eye contact with Coco, who rolls her eyes dismissively.
The tattoo artist hands me two more sugar packets and the four of us talk about politics and the similarities between Trump and Berlusconi until the color has returned to my face and I’m able to stand up. We pull back the bandages on our wrists and the girlfriend snaps a picture, Coco’s arm laid over mine, two planes encircling our individual globes, and I hand over 100 euros and say goodbye.
