Don't Fall In Love With Marcus Aurelius

So Emily and Agatha took a short breather. Above them the huge stone Dioskuri pair, Castor and Pollux, guarded the entrance to the Piazza del Campidoglio. Meanwhile Agatha caught sight of the wolf cage in between the blossoming oleanders and broke out into loud lamentations: “Look Emily, those poor poor animals...isn’t that terrible!”

Emily went over to Agatha’s side and, still panting softly from the unfamiliar exertions of climbing the staircase, they both observed with disgust and pity the skinny, shabby-looking wolves, prowling restlessly along the bars of the cage. The sight of captive wild animals, who had to live deprived of their natural habitat and their freedom of movement, was anathema to them.

And in addition Agatha, during her more active years, for around twenty years had been secretary to the Inspector General of the RSPCA: it was her vocation, so to speak, to be rebellious. It was a miracle that she didn’t sit herself straight down on the stone steps of the Capitoline and draw up a blazing protest letter to her former boss. It would probably however have been useless: the arm of the inspector of the RSPCA didn’t extend that far. And what could you really expect from a country in which, despite repeated appeals from Popes and many other sympathetic people, migrating songbirds from North and Central Europe are exterminated repeatedly and across a wide area every spring and autumn, and their small frail bodies - their songs forever silenced - are offered up on the menus of restaurants, to satisfy the thirst for profits of traders and the jaded palates of upmarket diners.

A well turned out, elderly gentleman had stopped next to the English women, and indicated towards the wolves: “Signore, this here is the Roman she-wolf, mother of Romulus and Remus....that was how the history della citta di Roma began.” He bowed slightly and went. But this reference to Rome’s foundation myth offered little comfort to Emily and Agatha.

They climbed the last few steps in silence, passed between the muscular stone calves of the twins Castor and Pollux and entered the splendid self-contained Piazza, whose floor was covered in a great star of wine-red marble. The perfect beauty and harmony of the Capitoline calmed their souls and in raptures they tripped around the equestrian statue of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius with its patina of shimmering green.

Emily planted herself in front of the horse’s nose, tipped her head back and narrowed her myopic eyes. “I can’t quite recognize his face,” she murmured. “That’s a crying shame as we are talking here about the only extant equestrian portrait remaining in Roman sculpture. Perhaps I could climb up on to the pedestal...and then get on the Emperor’s foot.”

Agatha wasn’t listening. She had sunk deep into one of her reveries. The golden light of that Roman morning seeped into her half-closed eyes, favourably tempered by the rays of the marble star at her feet.

A moaning sound summoned her back to reality. She opened her eyes wide in shock and saw Emily, as clumsy as a fat beetle, stuck on Marcus Aurelius’s foot. Her broad face was extremely red and her thick glasses wobbled on her nose:

“Agatha, I can’t get down.” Groaning, she lowered her foot into the void and then, discouraged, pulled it straight back again.

“Oh God, Emily, why did you climb up there in the first place?”

“I wanted to see the Emperor’s face, his actual portrait,” Emily replied meekly.

Enzo Marrone was passing the morning leaning against one of the warm sunlit columns on the edge of the piazza. He had his hands in his trouser pockets, his head leaning back nonchalantly, and his eyes half closed, chewing slowly on a piece of gum and otherwise doing nothing. It was the sort of morning he liked. He had watched idly chewing while this impossible foreigner had scrambled up the monument - Madonna Mia, what a crazy idea! Only tourists could resort to such stupidity and squander energy so pointlessly. He watched with a cold gaze, while Agatha made fruitless attempts to help her stuck friend abseil off the monument. Agatha reached out her hand and frantically grabbed a tuft of bronze horse-hair. At that same moment, the large diamond on her ring flashed in the sunlight, and Enzo stopped chewing. His eyes opened wide, he threw off the morning’s inertia and began thinking. Two wealthy foreign ladies apparently, and English too - that was as much as he needed to hear. One of them had placed her handbag on the statue’s plinth. Enzo sauntered closer. Taking the bag would be easy. But there was the ring flashing again....

An idea, a plan started to stir in Enzo’s mind: Why just slaughter the calf when with a little ingenuity he could have the cow as well?

He took his hands out his pockets, spat out the gum so that it flew in a wide arc down on to the star-adorned square where it stuck to the marble somewhere, and strode zealously across to the Marcus Aurelius memorial: “Permesso!”

He vaulted skillfully on to the plinth, took Emily by the arm, supported her so that she could let go of the Emperor’s foot, jumped down, gave her some support again and with an “Ecco” let her slide unharmed back down on to solid ground, which she had left behind just now so rashly and with such a youthful zeal for art history. “Oh Emily,” Agatha said, “you could have broken an arm or a leg. I was so worried about you. And you know, my rheumatism: I couldn’t have helped you because I have no strength in my arms.”

Emily was still gasping. “Is there anywhere round here where you can get a cup of tea, ” she asked dryly, and managed successfully to maintain her English stiff upper lip. She soon hurried off to the little bar on the edge of the Piazza. Agatha followed her but completely forgot in her usual absent-minded manner the handbag which sat unnoticed at the feet of Marcus Aurelius. Enzo saw the abandoned calf, considered the cow which he still wanted to milk, so picked up the bag and took it back to the ladies.

“Oh thank you, thank you. Emily, this nice young man has brought my bag back. And to think that people told us Rome was full of thieves!” With a gracious smile Emily took her bag back from Enzo‘s hand.

“I also want to thank you, very much,” Emily now said in her deep voice. She extended her hand to Enzo, and looked at him in a firm and admiring way, as she would have done in the past with a well-behaved and satisfactory student:

“Will you have a cup of tea with us? Without your help I might have broken my neck and it would have served me right.” Enzo inclined his head courteously and accepted the invitation.

In that corner, behind the Capitol, where the side steps led up to the Aracoeli Church, stood the vision of a tensed-up little Roman hoodlum called Luigi. On the end of a rope he held a mongrel of undefined origin, which must have been brought into this world by two random strays. It was a mix of rough-, short- and long-haired; of spaniels, poodles and curly-tailed pugs, and those elements of all the different breeds were combined in a most unattractive fashion. It whined softly to itself while pulling hard on its rope.

Luigi tried desperately to restrain it. No way could he let the dog run over to Enzo and spoil the enterprise. For sure, Luigi had no idea why Enzo hadn’t taken the handbag, that beautiful bag that seemed so full of promise: why he hadn’t seeped with it into the very cracks of the square, flitted round the corner with it, or let it be absorbed into the air...in short, why he hadn’t brought the whole undertaking to a reasonable and profitable conclusion. Enzo, however, would have had his reasons.

Enzo was smart, much smarter than Luigi, who had quickly cottoned on to this and who had accepted Enzo’s supremacy humbly and without condition. Things went well for Luigi when he was with Enzo. He was having a better life since he had joined forces with him and since Enzo had started to help him to even out their social differences just a little. He had helped him to a life where he could eat without having to work on a regular basis.

They both possessed an aversion to work. Enzo, son of an English mother and an Italian father, an unintended and unwanted consequence of a holiday flirtation between a British tourist with a predisposition to cheap Italian romance, and a fairly successful Italian beach Romeo...Enzo thus ended up a dark-haired handsome lad with blue eyes and a classical profile. He possessed the demonstrative charm of the Italians, the easy going and almost feline movements of the native Roman and was lean and tall because of his English mother, whose language he had mastered fairly well since early childhood.

You may well have called him handsome, if his eyes hadn’t been so peculiarly slanted. This was apparently inherited from his father, whose ancestors had come from one of those noisy, grimy little towns on the Bay of Naples, from that melting pot of oriental peoples, which had produced such rich results across the millennia.

With those sloping, narrow eyes, which lent his face a somewhat sly and fox-like quality, he couldn’t hope to make a great career in his father’s line of work, and so he made do for the time being with pickpocketing and shoplifting, without ever even entertaining the thought of conventional work. He’d see how it went later....After all, Enzo was good-looking enough that he’d be able to find a wife, who would happily work for him, he was certain of that. And with a bit of luck she’d also not have to do too much either and they would live as one and pretty well on her daddy’s money.

Meanwhile poor old Luigi - still behind the railings of the church steps - gave the whimpering dog a frustrated kick, so that it cowered down and stayed quiet, and he looked intensely and anxiously towards the group sitting round the small table outside the bar.

Enzo sat between the two English ladies and drank his tea with composure and decorum, a concoction that he detested like the plague. But he consoled himself inside that such things were among the perils of his profession.

Agatha fumbled around once again in her roomy handbag – the one which Enzo had so cleverly restored to her - in a quest to find her headscarf, and Emily followed her movements with glances of disapproval. Agatha always had to be searching for something or other! She just got confused so easily; and unfortunately this was getting worse as the years passed. Just watching her made Emily nervous, and with an inaudible sigh she turned to the tea-drinking Enzo:

“We like your home town very much, except that the traffic is much too hectic, but......” At that moment Agatha dropped the open bag on the floor and its copious contents, including passport, cash, cheques, receipts, keys, make-up articles and tickets - everything but the proverbial kitchen sink - sailed out across the beautiful stone floor of the Capitoline Piazza. Enzo’s professional interest sparked into life and he stooped down quickly: He could at least then check out what was waiting for him in the near future, and while with his well-practised fingers he helped gather up all the bits and pieces, his eye fell upon a much leafed-through set of travel documents: Calais-Rome, and, on the next page, Rome-Venice. And then by boat from Venice to Mallorca. So when they leave Venice, they leave Italy....

Enzo straightened up slowly and gave the bewildered and contrite Agatha back her belongings. And as he broke into a radiant smile showing his flawless teeth, his plan was already quite settled in his mind. He turned politely to Emily and picked up the thread of their conversation once again:

“Rome is not my home city, Signora: I am just here for a short holiday. My home is La Serenissima, the city on the lagoon - Venice!”

“No, really? What luck!” cried out Agatha. “ You must see us again, when you are in Venice!”

“The young man will have better things to do in Venice, than visit two old ladies”, said Emily slightly defensively and she looked reprovingly at her friend. Agatha was always so impulsive. Actually, she had changed very little since the time when they had both been at boarding school together more than half a century ago. Agatha then had been a widely acknowledged enfant terrible and the terror of their dormitory.

Enzo then saw his ship sailing away over the horizon, and answered hurriedly: “Oh no, Signora, it would be a real pleasure for me to meet you in Venice! I worked there for years as a guide. Now I only take my friends and acquaintances round the sights. I could show you the city: The Doge’s Palace, the Grand Canal, the Islands..”

Emily, who had been eyeing him closely through her thick glasses, interrupted the flow of his speech: “What job do you do now, Signor......?”

His tea, that disgusting brew, went down his throat the wrong way, and Enzo choked. He bowed slightly, while still sitting. “Enzo - Enzo Marrone!” He had translated his mother’s name into Italian without any pang of conscience. “What work do I do, do you mean?” Enzo put down his tea cup, coughed extravagantly again and continued: “I am a freelancer, doing market research - it’s interesting work actually.” Enzo leaned back. Once again he was pleased with his ability to give a rapid response. He hadn’t actually lied. Was he not in fact researching the market, persistently and thoroughly, with his finger on the pulse of civic life? And you could call his profession freelance, well yes, by God, that would be a very apt description of it: freelance just like any outlaw!

Emily nodded a little uncertainly. She just couldn’t picture it in her own mind and, had Enzo been one of her former students, she would have advised him to go after a profession that was a bit more resilient. However you couldn’t apply British standards anyway to these people from the Continent, and that was even more the case with Italians, who were such a unique, hard to comprehend people, who were always fluctuating between extremes. A person would just make do with the fact that they are not devoting themselves to a too bizarre and extravagant lifestyle.

Meanwhile, after further energetic excavations into the unfathomable depths of her handbag, Agatha brought to light a scrap of paper and a pencil and she scribbled zealously.

“This is the address of our hotel in Rome,” she said, smiling guilelessly, and basically placing the rope into Enzo’s hand, which would then make it much less difficult for him to lead them where he wanted them, like a shepherd and his soft wooly lamb. For her un-English behaviour, and for showing a deplorable lack of reserve, she reaped a disapproving look from her friend and companion Emily.

“It’s getting a little bit hot here, Agatha, don’t you think?” she said in a slightly raised voice and stood up. “I believe we’d be better off now going back to the hotel.” Emily was inclined to get away from the Capitoline, before Agatha, this scatterbrained philanthropist, invited the young Italian man back to their home in England. Agatha was capable of anything.

Agatha took leave of Enzo with gracious respect and made her way quickly to the stone staircase. Even gratitude had its limits.

Enzo waited for a while, still watching as the two English women called for a taxi at the foot of the stairs and were driven away in it, and then he whistled nonchalantly in the direction of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Immediately Luigi and Dante, the dog he was walking, came running across:

“Why didn’t you take the bag? There must have ben a whole pile of money in it! I haven’t eaten anything yet today.” “Shut your mouth and stop annoying me,” Enzo interrupted him brusquely, while he gently ruffled the fur of the leaping, joyfully whining dog. “I have a plan, do you hear, a good plan which is going to lead to great things for both of us.”

“What sort of plan, Enzo, enlighten me...”

“Not yet,” Enzo snarled, “right now I need a Campari. I had to drink tea with them. Tea! Tea makes me sick.” He spat in a wide arc on to the star-decorated Piazza floor and ordered a double Campari without soda. When he saw Luigi’s hungry expression, he grumpily ordered him a Coke. The dog lay down under the small cafe table and promptly went to sleep.

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