Galileo's Hood
C.B. Heinemann
C.B. Heinemann
The first time I performed on the street to avoid starvation was in Padua, Italy. I was travelling around Europe with three friends. Charlie and Terry came over with me, and Pete was a hard-drinking English guy we met at a music festival in France. Pete had a van and was afflicted by an extravagant case of verbal diarrhoea, talking non-stop through France, Germany, and Switzerland. Luckily, that affliction helped get us invited to crash at strangers’ houses, to parties, and to play the occasional gig. We played in pedestrian zones by day and bars by night, making enough money to keep ourselves in wine and gas. Another busker told us that Italy was virgin territory for street performers, so while stuck in a week-long rainstorm in Switzerland watching our money disappear and our stomachs shrink, we studied our maps to plan an escape. Padua was close to Venice, which we figured would be the juiciest busking peach in Italy. Charlie, who two weeks before our trip fell out of a third floor window and left the hospital just in time to make our flight, wanted to see the frescos by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel. Petrarch, Donatello, and Galileo also lived and worked in Padua, and we all know what happened to Galileo. Brimming with the vague sense of purpose we felt when journeying to a place we actually knew something about, we crossed over the Alps from the fastidious, logic-driven Northern World into the inscrutable, laid-back, tradition-soaked Southern World. The architecture ranged from magnificent to dreary, with graceful churches mingling with tacky post-war apartment buildings. Some villages we passed were so venerable that they seemed embedded in the crust of the earth, while our own century’s technological litter of telephone cables, electric lights, and cars poked up like momentary pustules. The autostrade from Milan to Verona was a congested mess of factories, power lines, prefabricated shopping malls, dingy apartment buildings and gritty pollution, with the occasional glimpse of an olive grove or graceful villa. The road was clogged with trucks, and for long stretches, northern Italy was little more than an endless string of Clevelands. By the time we got to Padua it was nearly midnight. European cities are like oysters—pearl- like antique centers surrounded by ugly shells of modernity. We spent an hour buzzing around the city like an insect looking for an opening, but every time we thought we found a street leading to the center, a clever complex of one-way streets spat us back out again. At last we gave up and drove into the countryside to spend the night. The scent of unwashed males made the atmosphere in the van a bit too fruity, so we decided to sleep outside. We found a grassy spot by the creek in a small park, with several willows grouped together, where we couldn’t see the lights from the surrounding buildings. The next morning I opened one eye to see fog hanging over the park and an elderly woman walking her poodle trying to ignore us. The poodle, however, gave us a look that he might give a particularly ripe fire hydrant. We bundled up our damp bags and trudged back to the van while a group of children playing nearby stopped to shout at us and laugh. Our tyres had been slashed and a side window smashed in. It was the work of an instant to ascertain that our communal bag of money was gone. The four of us were stuck thousands of miles from home, penniless in a country we had never before visited and knew nothing about. Standing in that little residential neighborhood staring at each other, we realized that we were literally starving on the streets of a foreign land. I felt a strange, existential sensation. “Bloody bleedin’ ‘ell!” Pete shouted, swiping at the broken window and cutting his palm in the process. “And I was hoping for a bit of a vacation down here. We don’t have any money, or any food. What the bleedin’ ‘ell do we do now?” “Be glad we still have our instruments,” I pointed out in an unappreciated attempt to see the bright side. “Otherwise we’d have to beg, or just lie down and die in the park.” Staggering under the weight of our backpacks and instruments, we picked our way through the swarming roads of Padua to the signs marking the boundaries of the pedestrian zone. We wandered through an area where the sidewalk was torn up, leaving dirt and concrete scattered in small piles, and then down a winding cobblestone alley. The buildings looked far older than any others we had yet seen in Europe. Most were pale ochre in color, with rust stains dripping like streaks of sweat down the sides. Clothes hung overhead from iron balconies and clotheslines strung over the narrow lanes. A sweet aroma of wet stone, cheese, and flowers filled the air. I was dizzy with hunger. The walkway spilled onto the broad Piazza della Erbe, surrounded on all sides by beautiful Renaissance buildings. Each had its own arcaded walkway with elegant arching doorways. The ground floors of many buildings contained shops and cafes. Near the center of the piazza stood dozens of carts piled with fresh produce, while behind them, ruddy-cheeked women chattered full volume in the rapid-fire cadence of Italian. In the center of the square rose a magnificent renaissance structure with a food market on the ground floor. The upper floor looked like it might have housed an art museum. We later learned that it did. The air was dense with the pungency of basil and the sugar of peaches. Water formed grid works of puddles around the worn cobblestones in the square, and hundreds of pigeons stalked with bobbing heads as they searched for bits of food-entire flocks taking off together while others swooped in to replace them. Old men stood reading newspapers or shouting at one another at close range. I eyed the pigeons, many of whom appeared to be quite plump and succulent. We walked under a low archway that led to another piazza, Piazza della Fruitti, where dozens of white plastic tables sat near a row of cafes and restaurants. Exhausted, we decided to busk under the archway because everybody who wanted to go from one piazza to the other had to pass under it. A cramped pizza shop stood behind the nearest grape- laden cart, tucked away in the arcade, and I fixed my eyes on that shop. Charlie started into a reel, The Wise Maid. He played the first part alone, and the singing tones of his flute danced through the echoes of the ancient stones. The second time through, Terry on fiddle, Pete on bodhran, and I, on bouzouki, plunged in, adding our own sounds to that place that saw and heard so much over the centuries. A crowd formed immediately. The women of Padua stood tapping their feet and smiling as they held their bags of produce, the kids watching wide-eyed and clutching their mother’s skirts. Several thousand lire notes appeared in the hat, and the crowd continued to grow. Even a pair of tiny old ladies, whose heads barely came up to Charlie’s belt buckle, stopped to listen. After we played for about ten minutes to a generous crowd, we bolted into the cafe to shove something into our stomachs. We divided up the money with jittering fingers while waiting for the little pizzas to warm, and ended up with more than twelve thousand lire each. “Not bad for a load of bloody derelicts who have to sleep in the park,” Pete said as we relaxed a few minutes later at an outdoor table. “If it weren’t for getting robbed on occasion, we could get rich around here in a few weeks time.” I opened my “Let’s Go” guide to the section on Padua. “Look at this, right here. You won’t believe this.” Charlie looked up from rolling a cigarette. “Some rare insect flattened between the pages?” “There’s a hotel nearby, right over there, where rooms are six thousand lire a night. That’s four dollars.” The proprietor, Silvio, was a small, dark-haired man in his forties wearing a loosened tie, white shirt, and baggy black trousers. After a brief game of charades at his front desk, Silvio showed us to our room at the top of a narrow staircase. Before he left, he jingled the bunch of keys in his pocket and pointed to his watch. “Please, we close, meed-a-night, okay? Meed- a-night.” That afternoon we lounged in our hotel room popping fat grapes into our mouths. Outside, the old buildings glowed in the southern sun. Our beds stood in a line on one wall, with a crucifix over the door. Against the opposite wall leaned an ancient wooden dresser with a cracked marble top, and an aged porcelain sink slumped next to the door. The ceiling was high and the peeling walls were painted deep green decades earlier. To us it was a palace. Our days in Padua drifted by under a scorching Italian sun. We rose early each morning to busk in the piazzas during the daily market, strolled a few blocks to the vast and ancient Basilica del Santo, played for the tourists, then retreated from the midday heat to shower, write letters, or doze. Eventually we’d sleep for a couple of hours, along with everyone else in Italy. At four o'clock every afternoon, the people of Padua roused themselves to pour into the streets and piazzas, dressed in their finest, for passeggiata, or the afternoon stroll. The harsh temperatures of the day sweetened into fresh breezes that carried aromas from the restaurants and take-out shops that opened their doors to entice the crowds. We would go out for a bite to eat and sit on a wooden bench under the arcades to busk and watch the crowds. Girls passed with their dark hair fluffed up and miniskirts hugging their hips. Eyes flashing, a dash of pink on pouting lips, they strolled onto the piazza in laughing groups, casually oblivious to the attention they attracted. Their male counterparts strove to cultivate an attitude of disinterest. The Petrucchi Café, just a few blocks from our hotel, was a famous watering hole for everyone who was anyone in Padua for centuries, and Charlie found himself drawn to that neo-Classical masterpiece for its unobtrusive service, air conditioning, and dirt-cheap whiskey. He spent hours sitting at a corner pretending to be a turn-of-the-century wastrel squandering the family money. Terry started hanging out with a student at the university who sold him pot. Pete and I were determined to rise above our hand-to-mouth predicament, and struggled to maintain a vigorous busking schedule. One implacable wall we rammed into early was the problem of meeting girls. We never had any difficulties north of the Alps, but in Italy, language wasn’t the only barrier. We weren’t Italian. Their families didn’t know our families. We wore jeans and appeared to have lower standards of grooming. The girls we ran into liked our music, found us momentarily entertaining, but ultimately they decided that we were strange and a little scary. Pete formed a theory that their grandmothers remembered how many pregnant Italian girls were left in the wake of the American army during the war, and frightened their granddaughters with tales of our fertility. One Paduan who liked us without reservation was a homeless alcoholic named Frank who staggered up to cheer us on every time we played. “Play your music for the people, Charlie!” he cried out, holding up a half-empty wine bottle. “Charlie, play your flute for the people!” Afterwards he would offer to take our passports to an unspecified location for safekeeping. To his perpetual disappointment, we never took him up on the offer. Pete laughed at him every time he tried. “Your friend Peter is too rough,” Frank would mutter to me. “He is too rough.” A side effect of busking through Europe was that we didn’t see the places we visited through the eyes of tourists—we were always looking to where we could make money. We all but ignored the tourist spots, preferring to go after the tourists themselves. We lived in a nether world between tourists and residents without being either. On the day we finally took the train to Venice, the place was heaving. The sun was hot and unrelenting, and the smell of dead fish from the canals overpowering. We busked for hours in several locations for the hordes, but the only money we made was one nickel grudgingly tossed into our hat by an American nun. One nickel! We couldn’t spend it or even exchange it if we wanted to. As summer eased into autumn, the locals began to view us with a concern that bordered on outright suspicion. The tourists returned home to work and school. Life in Padua resumed its centuries-old rhythm. We read the hints of curiosity everywhere-why were those long- haired English-speakers in their jeans and t-shirts still hanging around, still busking? Don’t they have homes to go back to? Don’t they know summer is over and everyone needs to go back to where they belong? Why won’t they leave? Eventually, those vibes began to get to us. The weather was getting cooler, and up north it would be soon be too cold to busk. We hoped to get gigs in Germany, and after being robbed once, we felt a little nervous being so far from London, where our open tickets allowed us to catch a flight home whenever we finally had to leave. However, when we found out that the big Padua wine festival was about to heave into action, we decided to stick around to pick up a few thousand last lira. Pete walked down to get us a gig on the festival stage, and as he usually did, he talked and talked until the organizer cried “Uncle” and surrendered a twenty minute slot just before midnight. When I got to the Piazza del Santo on the night of the festival, Charlie and Terry were sitting glassy-eyed on a step in front of a wine shop. Pete hurried over with two girls in tow. “Here, I just met these lovely Irish girls,” he said, flinging one arm over the blonde’s shoulder. “This one’s Angie. That’s Marissa. They’re on a work exchange program with a load of other Irish people.” Marisa’s face was framed by walnut curls, and her green eyes were emerald flames. She was short and her body compact. If I saw her passing me on the street, I would have stopped and stared at her until she was out of view, and then mentally savored that image for the rest of the day. She looked me over once before latching onto my arm and leading me into the midst of the festival, peppering me with questions about our journeys. Shadows tumbled across the piazza, where rows of wine stands formed meandering walkways. Groups of revellers stood sampling the wines local vintners brought into town. At one end of the piazza, sound and light engineers rigged a large stage with lights and speakers. Strings of lights dangled from the trees and poles that surrounded the square, while the venerable Basilica glowed like a vast cluster of golden beehives in the sunset. Artificial lights flickered on as we entered the festival area, while people streamed in from capillary lanes feeding the piazza. We sat on the marble step of one of the shops on the square to watch the festival build up momentum. During a lull in our conversation, Marisa suddenly clasped her hands around my neck, pulled down my head, and thrust her tongue into my mouth, nearly choking me as I reeled with astonishment. She rubbed her hands up and down my back, my head, everywhere, her tongue still darting over my teeth and gums, and straining for my uvula. After I recovered from the shock, I responded in kind, and for several minutes we entwined ourselves together in the shadow of the grape shark. Then she broke free, panting hard. “I want to rape you,” she gasped. She fixed me with a look that meant business, and enveloped my ear in her lips while my blood temperature shot up. She slammed the right buttons, and I feverishly searched my mental map of the town for some park, alleyway, or bush we could retire to in order to resolve the situation. I already knew that Silvio wouldn’t let her slip into my room. “Oh God, oh God!” We squeezed and caressed each other in the whirlpool of people. “Marisa, maybe we should go somewhere else.” Marisa clutched me with hot, undulating desire, but the fact that I hardly knew her made the situation feel so comical that I had to laugh. I couldn’t help thinking that, for the first time, I might finally do what friends back home no doubt assumed I was doing all along. She attacked my mouth again with increased vigor, and her hands worked toward my nether regions like serpents inching toward their prey. “Let’s go find a nice bush somewhere.” Passion was overwhelming the humor of the situation. I had had enough, and my hormones demanded serious action. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Come on, mate, we’ve got to play. We need this money. You can carry on with this later.” “Damn!” Throbbing, I reluctantly got up and followed Pete to the stage. Marisa kept one arm around my waist. As we walked, I felt a sore spot at the back of my throat. My sinuses sprang a series of leaks, and my head started to pound. My body felt hot and drained. I knew immediately that I was dealing with a serious flu. Ever since I was small, the symptoms attacked swiftly and without mercy. When I turned to look at that beautiful Irish girl with her dark, tumbling hair and emerald eyes filled with lust, I cursed the cruelty of fate. I’d be lucky to stay conscious for the next half hour. “Marissa, you’d better take some vitamin C.” It was a sorry-looking band that made its way onto the stage of the Padua wine festival- Charlie struggling to put his flute together, Terry with his glazed eyes and stoner grin, Pete with a frown, and me woozy with fever. Swirling spotlights bathed the crowd, and the roar of welcome that rose to greet us echoed and dissipated through all the streets, boulevards and alleyways of the ancient city. I blinked through the lights at the vast horde of Italians that stretched across the square. Then I glanced over at Marisa, who watched offstage shouting good-natured insults. Terry lifted his fiddle to one microphone and flew into an impassioned set of reels. The crowd howled and I jumped back from the noise. Charlie bumbled over the first few notes before getting into a groove. The crowd went crazy, stomping and clapping along with the tunes. People danced in circles, and some in the very front pounded their fists on the stage. Miraculously, we made it through the first number without mishap. Before the applause let up, I launched into a jig. Our confidence renewed, we started to enjoy ourselves. “Go for it, mate!” Pete shouted as he did a little dance of his own. I heard the fiddle droning out of tune. Before I knew what was happening I stumbled backwards and landed hard on my rear end. As if on cue, Pete stopped playing and started swearing at me. The audience clapped, but without much conviction. I felt too weak to get up, but Charlie staggered over to the microphone. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen of this lovely city, where I have been rejected by a beautiful woman. Yes, but it is only what I deserved. So this one is for my lost and only love, who captured my heart, marinated it in vinegar, roasted it over a fire of thorns, stomped all over it with cleated boots, and handed it back to me in a plastic bag without so much as a rubber band to close it properly. Now I require only two things more. Fresh horses and more whiskey!” He tottered forwards, backwards, and collapsed. The moon peered over the domes and towers of the basilica while Pete dragged us off the stage with a string of profanity so ornate and intensely felt that I nearly cried. “These two are useless,” I heard Marisa tell Angie as I tried to stand up. I watched with watering eyes as they disappeared into the crowd, feeling despair and relief at the same time. No discussion was required at that point. We had long outworn our welcome, and after that farewell performance, we couldn’t be out of there fast enough. I started to understand how Galileo must have felt. Silvio stood waiting in his bathrobe at the hotel, his hair dishevelled and his hands on his hips. As we filed despondently in, he tapped at his watch. “I tell you, meed-a-night, meed-a- night! Where you are? We close! Do not you hear?” He calmed down considerably when Pete paid him and the rest of us grabbed our belongings and dragged them downstairs into the lobby. “You leave now, yes? Okay, you leave. Goodbye.” Several hours later we pulled over on the road up to the St. Gotthard Pass to watch the pink fingers of dawn touch the tops of the Alps. The ache of hunger stirred in my stomach. The air was chilly, and we dug deep into our packs to find sweaters and jackets for the long, long road ahead. © C.B. Heinemann All Rights Reserved www.millionstories.net What we like about this story: It takes us across time and space into a familiar, yet unfamiliar place; that time when nothing mattered more than to just be and do, to eat up life and experience! |
| We like this story because: It takes us across time and space into a familiar, yet unfamiliar place; that time when nothing mattered more than to just be and do, to eat up life and experience! |
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