From the Fire Hills

Vandals

7 VANDALS A babel of students crowds the café facing San Francesco, late morning washed in terracotta and European Top 40 from the boom box atop the pastry display. Here, Mina and Dino manage cappuccino for the Brits and Danes, the Japanese girl with green hair and acne, a Parisian couple smacking packs of Marlboros into palms, all on break from language class, packed too tight to open newspapers none of us can read. Instead, we curse the hangover in separate idioms, portion out our ignorance, while the world turns around us, as Mina turns, cramped behind the counter, lip-synching the grotesque pop spasms of a Swedish band in English in her own particular purgatory— part lament for our monstrous Italian, part redemption in our various attempts at ordering, while we Vandals descended each day, ran away the local businessman nicknamed la Pecora—the Sheep— and the Eritrean owner of a disco down the street, who, though diminutive, smacked of royalty untarnished by exile, which Mina must feel as we flock again, open to the façade of a church rebuilt from rubble, until she can’t take it any longer, Basta, uffa, enough with foreigners, but instead cranks the radio 8 and spins like a record behind the counter. And since I am caught in the eternal present of my introductory Italian, I cannot understand the remote past of her joy, so stand there, cloistered in regret, unable to tell her good day in any but the Let’s Go Italy way. But it is good, the sun throwing its conditional all over the church, so I concentrate on the song, its front man in full throes now of his imaginary adolescence, calling for anyone to save him, love him in any language admissible by Nordic socialism. And I almost hear the little motors of his bilingual clichés, in all his talk of rapture and ecstasy, which, in the mouth of a Swede, lip-synched by Mina, in the amber morning of my memory of that fall, hangs in the vaulted interior of the café, at least in the church I have made of it—some minor basilica, destroyed in the fifth century, by Vandals. ...