Con la luce di Roma

I eat with my sunglasses on. It's not sunny.

I just want to preserve the distance. 

I am in the corner, looking out the window. The trattoria sits in the shadow of Piazza Margana, but light finds its way in. 

We only arrived yesterday. Cousin Helen, practical as ever, insisted we take the hop-on hop-off bus to the hotel. It was her version of efficiency.

"We’ll see Rome on the way," she said.

My mother and I sit on opposite sides of the bus, the suitcases shifting in the empty space. The only thing still moving between us.

It is nearly summer in Rome. The crowd is building everywhere. Open, exposed, an ancient body endures endless human contact.

Now, we have finally found a quiet spot for lunch. I’m leaning against the exposed brick wall behind me.

There are only four of us, but you wouldn’t know it from the amount of food that keeps arriving. Broad beans with pork, saltimbocca, oxtail, and a pizza for Aunt Berta. Then tiramisu.

"There’s enough chicken in this soup," she says, fishing out large chunks with her spoon. "Finally, someone knows how to cook."

My mother doesn’t speak. Her eyes are steady on the brick wall. Garlic air sits above the table in a thick cloud. 

Outside, the piazza lives without needing anything of us.

A woman with a tiny black poodle on her lap sits with an espresso, eyes closed, facing the sun.

A little girl in a bright red summer dress, gelato all over her face. An old man leans toward her, cleaning her cheeks.

A couple, holding each other, walk past and disappear into a narrow street.

Rome bathes in late spring light.

Melbourne — six months earlier

"I’m such an attractive woman,” Aunt Berta says to her reflection, fixing her straw-like hair.

We are in the same room: Aunt Berta, her twin brother, my dying father, and me.

He is not in pain anymore, not fighting for every breath. He is asleep, somewhere between this room and wherever his mother is.

Now and then, he calls her name.

Rosa.

He has been talking about his mother a lot these past months.

I don’t remember him speaking of her much before. 

But now he keeps returning to the same story — how his mother, a pianist, would take only him, a five-year-old boy, with her to rehearsals and lessons, leaving Berta, his twin, behind.

Berta is wearing a heavy sheepskin coat, wool out. She is one with it.

“There’s never enough chicken in her soup,” she says. 

She means my mother.

“No wonder he’s weak.”

I sit in the corner beside my father.

Berta’s sheepskin makes me think of my own — the winter coat every child seemed to wear.

Mine somehow grew with me. New strips of fur appeared at the cuffs and hem each year until it resembled some strange animal — part tiger, part zebra, entirely Soviet.

I remember falling while ice skating and running to Berta’s apartment nearby, convinced my arm had split in two.

Berta, a nurse, pulled my arm straight out of the thick sleeve and said the coat had protected it.

That night, my arm was set in a cast.

Back in the hospital room, my father’s breathing has become almost impossible to hear.

He dies the next morning.

Rome

I leave the table before dessert arrives.

I don’t wait for the bill or Berta’s opinions on Roman cooking.

Helen shouts after me, asking for my tiramisu.

I slip out, following the light, sunglasses still on — a silent defection.

The heat of Piazza Margana hits me. The smell of old stone, jasmine and coffee. 

I don't need a map. I let the unfolding geometry of the streets decide my turns.

On the grand stairs, along the back terraces, I look up across the rooftops. The sky is that very blue St. Peter’s Basilica was built for. 

The petty friction of the trattoria, the garlic air, Berta's complaints, all slowly dissolve under that shimmering light.   

I find myself near a fountain—not a famous one, just a mascaron dripping into a mossy basin. I sit beside it. 

I take off the sunglasses.

I put my hand into the water. It is shockingly cold. The kind that burns the skin before the mind catches up.

I think of the pianist, my grandmother, taking the five-year-old boy to practice. I never met her. I know she never walked these streets. But I recognise the habit of looking up. My father had it too.

The sun lowers. It doesn't hurt my eyes. Amber light settles on the sun-dried bricks. They look warm enough to touch.

Behind me, somewhere, Berta is still fishing for chicken in her soup.