The Carnival at Bray (24 page)

The butcher handed them menus on stained paper. Maggie had more experience with Italian food than Eoin did, having gone to Taylor Street with her father in those lost early years when he still made the attempt to be a part of their lives. But even she
could only recognize two items on the menu: ravioli and pizza. The butcher's wife, a tiny woman with a large, fleshy nose and men's brogues came over to take their order.

“What's the drinking age here?” Maggie asked Eoin.

“What drinking age?” he laughed. “This is Europe, Maggie.” He pointed at the word
vino.
The old woman nodded pleasantly and brought them a carafe of red table wine. “See?”

They clinked their glasses together.

“To Uncle Kevin,” Eoin said.

“To Uncle Kevin.” The wine was earthy and sweet, the color of rubies.

The butcher's wife came over with their pizza. It looked like anything Maggie had seen back in Chicago, but it was covered in shreds of deep green lettuce and curls of a pale purple meat that looked like it had been shaved off the sides of one of the big pig shanks hanging from the wood beams above them.

“What is that?” Maggie pointed.

“No idea.” Eoin picked up the largest slice of the pie and stuffed it in his mouth. “When in Rome,” he said through a mouthful of food.

It was the best pizza Maggie had ever tasted. The meat was salty and flavorful, the crust charred and crispy, the cheese creamy and mellow. And when the ravioli came, pillowy noodles filled with ricotta and drizzled in melted butter and chopped sage, she and Eoin fell into a prolonged silence so they could give it their full attention.

“This is the best feckin' stuff I've had in my life,” Eoin mumbled, his mouth full.

“This time tomorrow,” Maggie said dreamily, “we'll be standing in front of Kurt Cobain.”

“Maggie, I have to warn you,” he said, forking the last piece of pasta onto his plate, “I'm not into this grunge stuff like you are. Remember, I grew up listening to my mother's music and not much else.”

“It doesn't matter! Great music is great music, no matter if it's Irish or country or grunge or
whatever
.” “I'm just sayin', I might not like it.”

“You don't have to try to like it,” she told him. “You just have to stand there and listen. It will do all the work. It will get you, I promise. I've only been to one concert in my life, and it, like, blew me open.” She'd only had half a glass of the wine, but it was making her feel elastic, profound. “My uncle took me to see the Smashing Pumpkins at this place in Chicago called the Metro. I'll take you there one day, maybe. Even if you don't know much about the band, you'll still love the show, I promise.”

Perhaps the wine made him feel the same way, because he suddenly reached across the table and put a hand on hers.

“I love
this
,” he said quietly. “All of this. The wine. The sage sauce. Italy. You. It's all perfect.”

Maggie blushed. “I love it, too.”

Dessert was a simple pot of custard. It was cloud light and perfectly sweetened. Maggie was quickly realizing that the Italian food she'd eaten back on Taylor Street had really not been Italian food at all.

They were stuffed to the point of sleepiness, but going back to the hotel was not an option. “We're in Rome, for feck's sake!” Eoin pulled out the map and began studying the crisscrossing lines. “We need to see the sights!”

They followed the wide, crooked path of the Via Del Corso, where stylish Italian couples in tailored black coats and smart shoes headed to parties and restaurants, cupping cigarettes and carrying bottles of wine under their arms. The wind snapped their coats, but compared to Chicago in February, it felt like a spring wind, and drier than most Irish days, too. As they searched for the Via Frattria, noses in the folds of their map, the sound of running water cut through the honking horns and scooter motors and stopped them short.

They were standing in front of the most magnificent fountain Maggie had ever seen. It was practically the size of half a city block. The water's mist hung in rainbows on the dark air, and she could taste its stony moss on her lips, feel its coolness on her nose and cheeks. Marble figures of muscular gods and goddesses with upturned eyes seemed to dance in the fountain's flow, and at the surface of the pools, lit up by soft blue floodlights, copper coins winked at the bottom like flashing treasures.

“Trevi Fountain,” Eoin said. “I learned about this in art history class. You're supposed to throw a coin in the water, and it means you'll come back to Rome one day.”

“You got any change?”

He rummaged in his pocket, found a few coins, and together they tossed them. We
will
return to Rome one day, Maggie promised herself silently. She stood and watched their coins plash into the water and sink to the bottom, letting her mind fill with all her hopes for the years ahead, some old and familiar, some newly born to include the boy standing next to her. There was so much to hope for, in fact, that her heart hurt just thinking about all of it.

Back in their sparse little hotel room, Eoin kissed her under the stacks of thin blankets. Maggie could feel the swell of him press against her thighs beneath his jeans. Outside their slatted window, a sleety rain pattered against the shutters.

“Is this too much?” He kissed her neck.

“No.”

He moved his hands down her sweater, tracing the outline of her breasts, and skimmed his fingers over the sheer fabric of her tights. Her knees began to shake.

“We should try to get some sleep, Eoin,” she whispered, because suddenly it all
was
too much—the foggy vineyards in Tuscany, the sage ravioli, the sweet wine, the rain at the window, and his fingers on her thighs; too much goodness and newness to take in over the course of one solitary day.

She closed her knees together and his hands slipped away.

“You're right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologize.” She curled into him and he put an arm around her waist. They fell asleep like that, still dressed in their dinner clothes, to the sound of the wind clattering the old wooden shutters.

In the morning they found a nearby café that served cheap pastries and espresso in tiny ceramic cups. They sat near a window and watched the city come to life. The Norwegians had been right: Nirvana fever had descended on Rome. Gangs of young people milled around, the boys with stringy hair and slouchy flannels, and the girls in Docs and smudged purple eye makeup. There were mohawks and wallet chains and band T-shirts; pierced noses, black lipstick, bleached blondes, and baby doll dresses. Some people hid behind sunglasses, others shouted happily at strangers, still wobbly from the previous night's debauchery. Everyone was smoking.

After breakfast, they went to the church of Domine Quo Vadis and San Sebastian to get Dan Sean his vial of holy water. There they saw pilgrims approaching the imprints of the Lord's feet on their knees, kissing the steps, crying into the dirt. Maggie thought of the monks on Iona, painting the pages of the Book of Kells with painstaking, loving strokes. She put a coin in the metal donation box, lit a votive candle, and genuflected.
I wish you were here to see this, Kev,
she prayed. The candles glowed red with all the tiny prayers of the faithful, filling the corner of the quiet chapel with filigreed, hopeful light.

Back at the hotel, Maggie gave Eoin her Discman so he could listen to
In Utero
while they got ready for the show. He wore his usual attire: Liverpool hoodie and track pants. She loved that he was so stubbornly himself, and that he didn't care about
grunge or Nirvana. She loved that he was here not because he liked the band, but because it meant something to her. She went down the hall to shower and change, and when she came back to the room, dressed in her black dress and tights with Kevin's flannel tied around her waist, she lay down on the bed next to him. As afternoon descended into evening, they sprawled there side by side, loosely holding hands, and listened to the rest of the album together.

At Termini the atmosphere was feverish, festive. Buses were shuttling people out to the Palaghiaccio di Marino for five thousand lire a person. Maggie and Eoin waited in line and boarded the next one that came through where no one, not even the bus driver, was over the age of thirty. Someone had brought a portable boom box and was blasting “Lithium,” while people screamed along and snuck sips from the bottles of Peroni they'd smuggled in under their jackets. There were Italians, Greeks, Germans, and Spaniards. There were Albanians, Armenians, and Turks. People shouted to each other in unrecognizable languages but they all knew the lyrics of the songs. Maggie's life, all that was familiar, had shrunk itself down to the dark-haired boy by her side. They grinned like fools when the Venetian strangers across the aisle tried to make conversation in broken, excited English. When the bus pulled into the massive parking lot and the Palaghiaccio di Marino appeared in a wash of lights, the bus erupted into cheers.

They dissolved into the massive crowd, Eoin holding tightly to Maggie's hand, and lined up at the entrance. Even the uniformed workers tearing tickets at the turnstiles looked excited. They followed the signs to their seats, zigzagging up and up and up the concrete ramps, past vendors selling beer and little bags of anise candy, until they reached the nosebleed level, stepped through the heavy velvet curtains, and were in the main auditorium. Their seats, so high they were nearly flush with the concrete back wall,
were at the crest of a tidal wave of moving bodies, and at the far end of this ocean stood the stage.

“Are you ready?”

Eoin nodded, and the last thing Maggie saw before the lights went black was the liquid whites of his eyes. There was a momentary hush, and then the stage lit up and the Jumbotrons snapped on, displaying the shambling figure of Kurt Cobain, twenty feet high on the screen, and the hush exploded into the deafening chorus of five thousand screams. Maggie's hands fluttered involuntarily to her heart. She felt the way she imagined Dan Sean must feel at Lourdes, at Medjugorje, the way those pilgrims at the church of Domine Quo Vadis felt as they rubbed their fingers through the cool scoop of marble where Jesus Christ, they believed, had dug his heels. She could feel Kevin as a living presence by her side.

The band opened with “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” In the dark, sweaty, cavernous hoard, among thousands of strangers who sang along in their accented English, who lit new cigarettes off the dying embers of old ones, Maggie felt weightless, floating away from all that limited her, her life growing louder and louder—more shaped, more possible—along with the music. She didn't need drugs to find transcendence. She didn't need beer or whiskey or wine. The music was enough. She jumped loosely to it, closing her eyes, opening them, wiping the sweat off her face with the cuff of Kevin's flannel. She screamed and applauded until her voice went hoarse, and then kept screaming, even though all that came out was a joyous gurgling sound. During “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” she grinned over at Eoin, whose eyes shone in the steamy darkness, who had joined the impromptu mosh pit that was forming in their row and growing more and more aggressive, carnal, as the set went on. They were jostled and pushed, tripped and fell onto the sticky floor between the seats, and were lifted up by strangers' hands. All the while, Kurt Cobain sang himself raw. Between songs, Cobain joked with the crowd, sneered a little
at them, at himself, at everything. The Jumbotron was merciless on his pixelated face; he looked haggard, haunted, over it all. He was two days past his twenty-seventh birthday. The band played twenty-three songs before smashing their instruments, their energy peaking and coagulating, deafening, on and on until Maggie touched her wet ears to check for blood. It was only sweat. The lights burst on, and just as quickly as it had started, the band left the stage and it was over. She and Eoin crashed into a soaking hug. They had just witnessed something important.
The anthem of our generation.
The crowd, still trembling and half-deaf, coming down from their visions, their religious encounters, began to pour out of the theater, pushing, shoving, screaming in Italian, tossing half empty cups of warm beer.

Maggie and Eoin followed the chaotic exodus out of the arena and were caught at a bottleneck crush of fans near the exit. Maggie lifted her chin to breathe and clung to Eoin's hand. It had begun to rain again. People stomped, shoved, shouted in Mediterranean languages. Police barked unintelligible orders from megaphones, and finally, there was a great push of bodies, and they stumbled free into the parking lot, which was lit up by the miles of headlights from cars streaming out of the parking lot and back to real life.

“Where do we go for the shuttle?” Eoin shouted over the crowd.

“I don't know!”

The lawn in front of the Palaghiaccio was slick with mud, and people were sliding through it on their bare bellies. They stopped a security guard to ask for help, but he didn't speak English. Neither did anyone else they asked. The buses began to crawl out of the parking lot one by one.