Romanum,” croaked the old man, as he closed his fingers on the note.
Enzo ran to the nearest bus stop. Ultimately he had to keep his expenses as low as possible and he certainly was in no position to fatten up Rome’s taxi drivers. He covered the last part of the journey in one long dash, and he arrived at the Forum breathless. He had to catch his breath behind one of the columns. There they stood in the Temple of Castor and Pollux, looking attentively up into the empty heavens, into whose blueness the roof of the Temple must once have soared a thousand years ago.
In that moment the Forum resembled a rural meadow in the Roman countryside in early summer: Everywhere the red blooms of poppies trembled in the breeze, and that same wave of flowers surged across the rocks and the stumps of columns and proliferated between the stones that formed the outline of the Temple of Vesta.
Agatha had let go of her bag in a dreamy absent-mindedness on the pedestal that supported the three tall columns of the Dioscuri Temple, which rose skyward alone, not yet brought low by time which makes all things vanish and which levels everything. Its richly decorated capital carried a trace of entablature, and a bird’s nest had been constructed in its Corinthian stone leaf-work. Agatha sank into raptures:
“Birds,” she murmured, “you lovely birds! I hope that that perch you have up there is big enough for a nest, because it would be terrible if your eggs fell out....” She looked up fixedly and her gentle heart contracted.
Enzo yawned. The Roman Forum bored him unspeakably every time he was there and he asked himself over and over again what people got from spending hours staring at truncated columns and, what was even more amazing, almost broke their necks admiring imaginary structures reaching high into the air that hadn’t even existed for well over a thousand years. And these fools even paid an entrance fee for all this stuff that wasn’t there, for a pile of dreary stone junk. You could barely comprehend the sheer weight of stupidity in the world. Enzo spat skilfully and in a wide arc past the column. He was still leaning on it so as not to tire himself unnecessarily or prematurely.
He sent a dull glance towards Emily, who was walking enterprisingly up to the Church of Santa Maria Antiqua at the foot of the Palatine Hill. The other one - the skinny one - was still gazing at the columns. Enzo gave a sigh. It had dawned on him by now that this enterprise would require nerves of steel. But it would be worth it, by blessed St Anthony! He just wanted to choose the appropriate time to do it.
She had left her bag standing alone yet again at the foot of the columns! This English woman was so dumb that, for a sporting pickpocket like him, there was almost no fun in stealing from her. A three year old bambino could have taken that thing off her! And now she too was walking away from the columns and was beginning to gather up some of the red, windswept poppy flowers. She was picking flowers - unbelievable! Enzo dug his hands deep in his pockets and tossed his head back with a suppressed groan.
Suddenly his posture tightened and he looked across eagerly towards the pillars of the Temple. If he was not mistaken, another guy had slipped in, in the apparently eager manner of an art lover. Yes yes, this scam was very familiar as it belonged in the professional repertoire of the Roman pickpocket. Enzo observed this other man with professional interest. Yes, quite good, the way he passed by, did no single movement in exactly the same way, went back past, stared at that boring column, yes not bad...But that now, no, that was a bit botched, not so quickly - that stood out. He, Enzo, would have taken longer to take the bag.
The bag! Enzo’s bag! Enzo tore like a panther out of his hiding-place, he sprang in just two steps over the poppy-adorned floor of the Temple of Vesta, ran as fast as he could, and then he had the guy, that damned idiot who dared interfere in Enzo’s business. He tore the bag out of his hand, launched a couple of curses towards the stunned thief, concluded by punching him firmly in the stomach, enough so that - caught unawares - he fell to the ground gasping for breath, and ran back to Agatha with the bag. She lifted up her head in astonishment and immediately returned from the guileless transparent world of the poppies to the unattractive land of reality.
He handed her the bag with a small bow: “This ladro, this mascalzone, this porco and umbriglione tried to rob you, Signora, but luckily I happened to be passing by.”
“Oh, thank you. How extraordinarily valiant and charming of you!” Agatha stammered, as it dawned on her that yet again she hadn’t kept an eye on her bag and had got herself distracted. She hoped that Emily hadn’t noticed. She looked across to the church. But there was Emily, already there, standing behind her. Nothing ever escaped her, despite her shortsightedness.
Emily looked at Enzo thoughtfully. When she was a teacher, she didn’t very often misjudge a student’s character. On the Capitoline this young man seemed to her somewhat dubious, despite his willingness to help. But she had obviously got this one wrong.
These Italians just possessed shifty faces, that’s all, and you probably couldn’t apply British standards to them. It was very nice of the young man to scrap with a thief over Agatha’s bag. Because he had hardly anything to gain from doing it. Should she give him some money? But perhaps that would offend him; after all, he was here in Rome on holiday too, and under these circumstances giving him money would be effectively treating him too much like service personnel. No, she knew better than to do that.
“What a wonderful city,” Emily began, once she had cast a withering look at Agatha - along the lines of “we’ll talk later about this” - “it’s truly magnificent this juxtaposition of antique greatness and pulsating modern urban life!” She smiled at Enzo as she would have done in the past on the last day of school, when the students were marching past her, on the way to their awards presentation. “Have you seen much of The Eternal City yet?”
Enzo thought about it fast and frantically. What the devil was he supposed to say? He didn’t actually know all that much about Rome, or rather he knew all the wrong things. He had hardly ever seen the inside of a church, and he only vaguely remembered, that he had once, when he was at school, been given a guided tour of the Vatican Collections, with a bunch of his worthless and stupid classmates. He had taken a slap round the ear from his teacher in front of the famous Laocoon sculpture, because he had tried to liven up the boring school trip by taking a well-aimed and skilful spit at the priceless work.
Enzo’s mind roamed across Rome and alighted on the dome of St Peter’s. He gave Emily that guileless look that he had inherited off his English mother, and said, “San Pietro, Signora - I always like to go to San Pietro.”
“Yes, with good reason”, Emily concurred, “St Peter’s is inexhaustible and I suppose for you Catholics there’s the added weight of all its religious connotations.”
Enzo lowered his eyes, to mask his confusion. For him the religious connotations of St Peter’s barely weighed anything. In fact, he had always thought of that enormous church as a waste of space which would be ideally suited to a massive garage.
“We have already seen a lot in Rome, but we have an old longing that’s not yet been fulfilled to see the Via Appia Antica. I think we’ll need to hire a car so we can drive ourselves there. The area is a bit isolated and the footpaths are hard for us. One should always be able to get out and hang around a while to get a proper look. Would you be so kind as to come with us? We could stop on the way back at one of those pretty little restaurants near the Trevi Fountain and have dinner together?”
Emily was pleased with herself. The young man seemed pleased about it, and this trip followed by an invitation to dine with them seemed in all likelihood to be a more tasteful reward for rescuing Agatha’s handbag than the painful handing over of cash.
Agatha in her bumbling absentmindedness regularly got them into these tricky situations. Emily threw poor Agatha, who was fumbling self-consciously at her bunch of poppies, one last critical look.
“Perhaps in the next few days you could ring us at our hotel?” she said with a benevolent smile. She then took Agatha by the arm and she stepped away with her towards the arch of Septimus Severus, treading determinedly and gracefully across the ancient pavement.
Half an hour later, Enzo was sitting, in a small tavern in Trastevere with